weekendviking

[weekendviking]

i appreciate that i saw both of these on my dash within about five posts of each other. we’re gonna need both moods going forward, tbh.

[weekendviking]

Oh, this is good, and gels with how I feel about the advance of the inexorable generative LLM chatbot:

Essentially, the generative AI field is hooked on their own automated cold reading stochastic parrot, and are drinking the cool aid:

[weekendviking]

I'm in the 'Hutt valley. Our daffodils started to come out in in early to mid July this year, we barely had two or three frosts, and it's been _too_warm_ to sleep under our winter weight duvet. Plus the NZ Clematis, which used to flower in October, now flowers in September or even August.

sorry but how are u not cold this winter its fucking freezing

I actually intentionally worked on increasing my cold tolerance for shits and giggles over the past 6 months. did NOT expect it to work so well. dude I'm sleeping shirtless with no heater. I'm sitting outside in a t-shirt on the ferry. I'm eyeing up the ocean hungrily. it kind of backfired because I LIKE BEING COLD.

other reasons: I'm up in tāmaki makaurau so it's relatively mild!! also it GENUINELY IS WEIRDLY WARM. I saw a pōhutukawa in full bloom surrounded by bees the other day. fucked up. they're supposed to flower in DECEMBER

[weekendviking]

A bit boggled that an economic historian would be innocent or unaware that the extensive grazing economy for sheep that was trialed and perfected in England, then got rolled out to Scotland and then went overseas to clearcut and rebuild extensive chunks of the ecologies of entire continents (Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, and to a lesser degree chunks of Canada and the US) in order to produce grass for sheep for wool to feeeed that whole industrial complex.

This morning Dr Glass decided to offer me the opportunity to enjoy some psychic damage and harm. “Are you ready for something that will hurt you a lot?” He asked, linking me to an article in The Telegraph, a right-wing UK newspaper, advertising some content published by an even-more-right-wing think tank.

The Telegraph headline is trying to make it sound like a proper research “report” but it’s just an ad for this guy’s book.

While it’s interesting to remember & reflect on the fact that the transatlantic slave trade enriched individuals, while the majority of British citizens were forced to pay for the military that enforced the colonial violence that protected that wealth, it isn’t exactly a “gotcha” that somehow undoes the logic of reparation. The intended audience just skims headlines and then gets mad, so the rest of the writing is really just a prop to justify the headline.

However, as Dr Glass knew it would, the sheep farming thing took me out at the knees.

Wandering about with a blank stare wondering if British sheep farming - sheep farming! Shaped the ecosystem of a nation! Sheep! Roman Britain! Chalk downland ecosystems! Queen Elizabeth’s mint sauce! The Highland Clearances! Textiles! Industrial Revolution what! help!!! - is something the guy, like. hasn’t heard about. like he just somehow coasted his way into a paid job doing british economic history never hearing about sheep farming, so it can sort of be waved away. “Why get so upset about slavery when it was only as impactful in British economic history as sheep farming, which we NEVER hear about” is such a deranged take that I hang myself up on it like a cartoon character stuck on a tree while falling off a cliff.

. Like I get that this is disingenuous but that deranged little broken part of me, as Dr Glass predicted, is practically frantic wondering if the guy somehow just had Sheep Blindness Syndrome, like he mentally overwrites all instances of encountered sheep as, like, mushrooms or something. I keep explaining to my mind that he is just using cheap&nasty rhetoric with no intention of standing up to scrutiny, but I am also the innocent and passionate child grabbing myself by the collar going ELODIE HOW DID HE MISS THE SHEEP? IS HE OKAY?

Anyway, spreading out the damage amongst you all instead so I can focus on my day .

[weekendviking]

US defaultism is insane yesterday l said on a discord server “it’s winter but I’m not cold. whyyy...” and they responded “dude it’s summer. it’s july” and then proceeded to DOUBLE DOWN when I explained that they were thinking of the wrong hemisphere

[weekendviking]

Selfcare as the days go by

i might have just done something great

[weekendviking]

Ah, right. I hadn't heard that they were monetising it. Sigh.

so fucked up like actually i think they should counter sue

[weekendviking]

“We don’t like how you play with our toys expressly sold for playing with”

Corporate numpties. They shouldn’t be suing, they should be Hiring

so fucked up like actually i think they should counter sue

[weekendviking]

Fearing such hits as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “National Brotherhood Week,” “The Masochism Tango,” “The Element Song,” “Be Prepared,” and “Lobachevsky”

[weekendviking]

I had to get my doctorate of the shelf and check, but really, I used what's probably Turabian style, so I had to answer Chicago.

CITATION STYLES THUNDERDOME

[weekendviking]

I've never worked with Magnetic Resonance Imagers. I have worked with SHRIMP (Super High Resolution Ion Microprobes), which have lesser, but still big, magnets. (And 10 kilovolt ion beams!) The building had big angry notices on the door banning people with any wearable medical devices, specifically pacemakers, but also any other 'keeps specific biology operating on time' devices, from entering the building. We still had to turn some people back because they thought that didn't apply to them. And our magnets were _many_ orders of magnitude weaker than MRI's.

And this keeps happening:

thought too hard about MRI machines today and had this come to me in a vision

[weekendviking]

Over my life, due to both career (Farmboy then field Geologist) and hobbies (Multiple flavours of historical reenactment/interpretation/experimental archaeology) I've actually moved back in shoe technology because of access to cobblers - so I now look for full welted construction boots, second hand or new, it doesn't matter, because I know that my cobbler can resole them and replace the heels and nails such that I get 5 to ten years out of each pair, rather than the six months to two years I get out of off the shelf work and hiking boots. Just now as I'm impacting my '50s, I may need to retrofit modern arch supporting insoles as my feet are getting grumpy, but the ability to have well fitting boots that last significant fractions of decades rather than wear out according to built in obsolescence or mass manufacturing materials shortcuts is stunningly useful.

I started getting my NZ style Skellerup made goodyear welt and full welt type field boots repaired by cobblers in Patagonia during my Doctorate fieldwork there in the mid '90s - Hole in the wall shops serving the local rural Gaucho horsemen for riding boots and saddlery. They are all purpose leatherworkers, producing new saddlery and boots by hand with 1880's to 1960s era equipment (the big black Singer 29K long arm machine was ubiquitous in these establishments, and was my gateway sewing machine, and I have one upstairs right now.)

This sort: (not my example, mine is less well preserved than this one)

These guys would take boots that I'd brutalised by months of field mapping in subalpine and alpine terrane, with water, rock and scree running damage, and repair them in minutes, for less than the price of a cup of coffee. I still have a hand made white tawed leather horsehide bridle and reins made by one of them.

Now my preferred cobbler is from an Indian family that's been in the same location for 80+ years in my current town in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This chap can resole traditional full welt construction work and military boots with leather or rubber, can do stacked leather heels, and iron or modern heel and toe plates. He's familiar with boot construction going back 150 years, and only has some things he can't do because the necessary machine was disposed of years ago due to inavailability of parts and repair. For the specific reenactment boots, his father taught him how to do the stacked leather military soles and hobnailing, as the grandfather of the current guy taught him as a child while doing it for soldiers coming to the same shop in 1940.

Design that allows for repair is an important thing, and is _specifically_ avoided in modern mass produced footwear.

My work boots are the most expensive shoes I’ve ever owned.

Also the most comfortable. I chose them after trying on several different brands and comparing lifespan vs usage vs comfort - I needed them for a physically demanding job, not the weekend hiking trails. I could have easily chosen cheaper boots that would have lasted long enough to be worth their low price, but I know the Sam Vimes Boot Theory and knew weaker, less comfortable boots would make my life harder in the long run.

So when the outside edge of the heel started wearing down after three years of heavy use I went to the shop I got them from and said “hey this is a common problem for me with how I walk but now it’s affecting my ankles and knees and I don’t wanna have to buy a new pair, is there a way to fix this?”

The salesman at this very fancy upscale boot store said “oh yeah, there’s a shoe repair place that can give you some heel guards - it’ll keep the rubber from wearing out.”

So at 8am this morning right after my 9hr shift ends I went to the shoe repair shop and it is the most hole-in-the-wall, is-this-a-real-business-or-a-mafia-front, am-I-gonna-get-shot tiny cinder block cube I’ve ever seen in my life. I grew up plenty poor and love me a good hole-in-the-wall business, but going from upscale store to this cash-only repair shop gave me whiplash. Wasn’t expecting this when a guy who wears three piece suits to sell boots said it’s the best place to go.

The skinny kid behind the counter looks somehow 16 and 25 at the same time, but when I tell him this place was recommended he smiles and says to hand over my boots. I hand him the vaguely warm foot-smelling boots, and stand in my socks in the 3’ square entryway surrounded by every color leather polish you could buy and watch as he turns my boots around in his hands, sizes up a crescent moon bits of plastic, and unceremoniously hammers tiny nails through them before handing them back.

The heels are perfectly level again. I can walk without almost rolling my ankles. They don’t clack loudly on the pavement or feel different. This is gonna fix my knee pain. It cost $10.

This kid had every tool he needed within arms reach, worked fast and smoothly, I was in and out the door in less than 8 minutes, and it only cost $10.

I didn’t think anything could cost only $10 anymore. I’m so used to hyperinflation prices I was spiritually thrown back to the 1400’s visiting the cobbler in town square. This kid might have been that cobbler and just decided to never die.

I’m still reeling from the whiplash, and gobsmacked at the price, and thrilled I didn’t have to go buy new, worse work boots (cuz I don’t have that kind of money for a second pair, I’m expecting these ones to last a decade) and it feels like I just experienced one of the rare little chunks of magic that floats around our world.

[weekendviking]

If you ever wonder why the right wing grifters setting up in your nation really resemble the US grifters, that's because they're running exactly the same multi level marketing scams.

Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift? Like Alex Jones – that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):

https://theweek.com/speedreads/709232/how-goop-infowars-are-selling-exact-same-wellness-products

I think that ideologically, conservatism contains elements that groom its followers to get rooked by scammers like Paltrow and Jones. First, of course, is the hierarchical nature of conservatism. Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind seeks to find a common thread running through the many different strands of "conservative" thought. "Conservatives" include libertarians; monarchists; Christian Dominionists; white nationalists; Hindu nationalists; Zionist genocidiers; eugenicists; Men's Rights Activists; etc:

https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/

Robin says the thing that all these groups share is a belief that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and that the world is best when the born leaders are on top, and that social movements that seek to elevate inferior people over their social betters commit civilizational suicide (think of the reflex to blame everything from tanker ships colliding with bridges to Boeing jets falling out of the sky on "DEI"). Different conservative factions disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

The belief that some people are simply better than others makes conservatives easy marks for arguments from authority (think of Trump's insistence that "I alone can fix America"). It also presents an irresistible temptation to the people at the top: if you know your followers believe you are better (smarter, more righteous) than they are, then you can be pretty sure that they'll buy the things you sell them, from a "prayer cloth" to "miracle water":

https://dustoffthebible.com/Blog-archive/2012/07/25/the-worst-tbn-product-scams-of-all-time/

The conservative's mantra is "incentives matter." When you're surrounded by marks, there's a hell of a temptation to rook 'em.

But this is just the background condition for conservative vulnerability to hucksters. A key aspect of conservative ideology is hyper-individualism, and the rejection of systemic explanations for one's problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

Poverty, unwanted pregnancy, abusive workplace situations and worse can all be blamed on "bad choices" – not systemic factors. Likewise, the MAHA movement blames chronic illnesses and contagious diseases on personal failings, such as the failure to "eat clean" and exercise regularly. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, there's a short, greased slide from this belief to a eugenic, let 'er rip response to pandemics ("Why should I shut down my yoga studio just because you didn't take care of your immune system?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

People who are steeped in this belief are easy marks for supplements, fad diets and quack exercise gadgets like the Thighmaster and the Abflex, which promise to "spot reduce" fat (what better expression of the rejection of systemic explanations than the belief that you can reduce the fat in one part of your body?).

It's a double whammy. If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science ("If you don't want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment") in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.

Rejecting systemic explanations also primes you to believe in conspiracy theories. This is why antisemitism is called "the socialism of fools": rather than fighting against the system of primacy of extractive finance capital over the productive economy, you spend all your time locked in a one-sided battle with an imaginary cabal of evil Jewish bankers.

Conspiratorial beliefs make you especially vulnerable to a grifter's sales pitch that goes like this: "Of course they don't want you to drink raw milk, otherwise you'd be as powerful as they are." Variations on this theme include "buy the miracle anti-aging cure that only billionaires are privy to" and "buy a bump stock before the conspiracy to take away your right to self-defense makes them illegal."

And indeed, when you look into right-wing movements, you inevitably find someone on the grift, from Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson hawking ripoff "cash for gold" schemes (and ripoff "gold for cash" schemes); to Donald Trump with his fake watches, fake phones, and Made in China MAGA stuff:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/687574/trump-mobile-plan-bad-deal

This isn't new. The far right has always relied on the direct mail industry, which used the heavily federally subsidized US Post Office to send anti-government spending sales pitches to gullible, easily frightened people:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2n4w5r7

These direct mail houses primarily serve two types of customers: people hawking scams, and right wing fundraisers. The Venn diagram of these two groups is an almost perfect circle.

itAnd of course, the entire multi-level marketing (MLM) industry is grounded in far-right movements and cults. The Heritage Foundation was founded with money from the DeVoses and van Andels, who made their riches off of Amway. MLMs are a conspiracy: virtually no one ever buys any MLM products, except for the "distributors" who are told they are entrepreneurs and are convinced that they are the only ones secretly making quota by buying up merch on their own credit cards and filling their garages and sewing-rooms with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The guys at the top know this, which is why they alone among all product manufacturers report on their industry's "sales" by adding up how much merchandise their distributors have ordered, not how much of all that merch has been sold to people who actually use it. The secret fact that there is no market for MLM junk allows MLM bosses to victimize their marks for a second time. Each victim believes that they alone are failing to sell the MLM's crap, which means that they can be duped into paying for expensive, useless "courses" on how to be better at selling.

This one-two punch (rip someone off, then rip them off again) is a familiar pattern among con-artists. Every successful con ends with a "blow-off," that is supposed to leave the mark uncertain about whether they were really scammed (a three-card monte gang might use a fake cop who breaks up the game, who sends everyone running). Sometimes, con artists seek out the same mark after the fact and hit them again (sometimes through a confederate). After all, a mark who falls for a scam has already demonstrated that they are the type of mark that falls for scams.

Digital con artists do this, too: you've probably gotten an email from a scammer pretending to be a cop of some kind, claiming that they are investigating a scammer gang. These people indiscriminately spam the internet with these "I can help you recover your money/jail your victimizer" messages as a way of attracting people who have already been scammed and thus demonstrated their vulnerability to scammers like them.

This is another place where direct mail, MLM and conservative con artists overlap. Right-wing scammers sell each other mailing lists of frightened, easily victimized people who can be pitched with gold bars, supplements, and fundraisers to help imaginary Christians being targeted for extermination in Africa. MLMs pitch themselves to MLM victims: "Did you get scammed by Amway? Come sell Nu-Skin, we're the Amway that's not a scam!"

These scammers know their audience and they have an unerring instict for an opportunity to fleece them again. Take the Dorrs, a multigenerational clan of far-right grifters who've been rooking easily frightened conservatives since the Goldwater campaign. The Dorrs run a bunch of "charities" whose IRS filings reveal that they are pocketing 90%+ of the money they raise. Five years ago, the Dorrs hit on a great scam: fundraising for anti-mask-mandate and "re-open" anti-lockdown groups (and keeping the money):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers

They were succeeded by waves of covid grifters, like the con artists peddling ivermectin and chloriquine. Incentives matter.

At the time, I called the Dorrs the Flu Klux Klan, but what I didn't know then was that the Klan is also a MLM scam.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/hatred_and_profits_under_the_hood_of_the_ku_klux_klan.pdf

The Klan's second incarnation, in the 1920s, was designed the Southern Publicity Association, a PR firm that had sold both the Salvation Army and Prohibition. They conceived of an MLM-like structure that was wildly successful: Klansmen who brought in new members got to keep $4 of their $10 membership fee (more than $50 in today's money); the remaining funds were shared between top Klan boss William Simmons and various regional bosses, who served as uplines to the recruiters.

Over time, this system developed into a true pyramid scheme, with a bewildering series of tiers: Kleagles, King Kleagles and Imperial Kleagles, as well as Great Goblins, Grand Dragons, and Imperial Wizards, each of whom got a piece of the action from their complex downlines. Klansmen didn't just pay the membership fee, either: they had to buy robes, life-insurance, special Bibles, helmets, candles, swords, and even special robe dry-cleaning services (they also paid annual membership dues). All of this money filtered up through the pyramid's levels, a vast sum of money funneled from frightened, angry working class rubes to the grifters who made millions off of them.

Many people have observed that one of the reasons conservatives govern so badly is that they campaign on the idea that "governments are wasteful and inefficient," which means that if they run the government in a wasteful and inefficient fashion, they only prove their point. In the same fashion: right-wing grifters who pitch you on the idea an evil cabal has rigged the game, and then take your money and rip you off, are demonstrating the correctness of their pitch.

For grifters who prey on angry, bitter rubes, stealing from the rubes only makes them angrier and more bitter – and thus easier to fleece. That's why the postmortems on the right's greatest everyday heroes turn out to be a litany of instances in which they were scammed. That's the story of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 insurrectionist who was killed while trying to penetrate the Speaker's lobby:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset

Babbitt was first rooked by an Army recruiter, who got her sent to Iraq – a war cooked up by right-wing scammers – eight times. After her deployments, she tried to run a small pool supply company, which was driven out of business by a monopoly called Pool Supply, which routinely breaks the law to drive competitors out of business, bragging about its lawbreaking even after getting fined by the FTC:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/b2icontent.irpass.cc/603/181440.pdf

Then Babbitt went to a loan shark, a "merchant cash advance" company called EBF Partners, who bailed her out with a loan at 169%, but didn't call it a loan, in order to avoid lending regulations, which is why she wasn't able to sue them when they drove her to default:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2021-01-07/san-diego-woman-killed-in-capitol-siege-was-iraq-war-veteran

That's when she ended up in Qanon, a cult full of easy marks getting suckered for everything they had, who are told that their problems are the result of evil individuals, not a rigged system. Then, she got shot dead while trying to overthrow the US government.

Babbitt was a serial victim of con artists. These are exactly the kind of ripoff creeps that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC and the DOJ spent the Biden years fighting with a vigor not seen in generations. Trump has shut them all down and wiped out nearly all of their good work, including the most basic, common-sense shit imaginable, like bans on junk fees, and the "click to cancel" rule (which says that services need to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for it):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

In the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of cheating in his business dealings. Trump didn't deny it. He replied, "That makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Trump was elected by the people who rip off the frightened and angry: cryptocurrency hustlers ("the dollar is gonna collapse!"), sports gambling moguls, and anti-DEI peddlers ("lesser people have been elevated to power by social justice warriors and they'll kill us all"). No wonder he's shut down every agency and rule aimed at preventing ripoff artists from preying on everyday Americans:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-incredible

It's a movement powered and funded by scammers who've discovered the ultimate can't-lose proposition: perfect a pitch that preys on the angry and scared; rip them off (making them more angry and scared); and repeat.

I've lost a dear friend to MAGA. When I reflect on her life, I see the same pattern. Both she and her mother were abused by her mother's boyfriends when she was growing up. She married a terrible guy who cheated on her, who then used threats to take away her kids to keep her from demanding child support or half the house. She was pressured into an affair with her married boss, who then fired her.

Today, she believes in conspiracies, and disbelieves in medicine. She supports Trump, concentration camps and immigration crackdowns (despite being the child of a refugee and a former undocumented immigrant).

This person is deeply unhappy, and faces severe financial strain with no end in sight. What's more, the things she supports – not getting vaccinated, voting for Trump, terrorizing migrants – will not solve any of her problems. Supporting these things can only make things worse, which will make her more frightened, more angry, and more precarious, and thus an easier mark for the next right-wing grifter.

Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

[weekendviking]

Murderbot + Onion Headlines [1/?]

[weekendviking]

There's this thing about the Just World fallacy, wherein random shit that disables us, hurts us, etc, is thought to be our fault, we must have done something wrong, because admitting otherwise would mean that they have to understand that these disabilities could also happen to them. This, then, means that people think that once you have fought for and gained accommodations, and those accommodations allow you to improve your work, health, living situation, etc, that it means that the reason you needed the accommodation is now FIXED, and thus it's ok and Just to remove the accommodations now, because you must be fine, because you clearly don't need them any more...

they even think this when the accommodation is for _missing_ Limbs_and_organs_, even aside from invisible disabilities of bodies or minds that also need accommodations. It sucks. I still, twenty years after the fact, have people asking when I can stop wearing my eyepatch, as though a ruptured and damaged retina and iris will miraculously go away somehow.

So yeah, it's Wild. And I hope that it gets sorted out, because that's completely unacceptable behaviour from the admin.

Bf called his uni to renew his accommodations (extra time on tests bc dyslexia) and the guy on the phone from the uni!! Said!!! You did well last year so you're not getting extra time this year. ?!?!?!??!?!?!! What the hell. That's not how that works right like 😂 he can get good grades because he works his ass off studying and he needs the extra time to complete his tests. Just because he's a good student doesn't make him not dyslexic. He's not gonna be able to finish his tests without extra time?

I'm sure he'll get it figured out but WILD statement from the accommodation department basically. Your grades are too good so now we will not let you finish your exams. As if that extra time gives him a significant benefit compared to students without accommodations.... what the hell

[weekendviking]

Everyone shut up and look at this carving of a whale from the 1200-600 CE Chumash culture

[weekendviking]

Martini Enfield carbine, I think. Martini action with .303 calibre barrel. You can se the fore-end fitted with the stud for the 1888 pattern bayonet just by the palm of the boy's hand.

Standing with a Martini-Henry rifle. 1934, Jubail (Al Jubayl), Saudi Arabia. Mountain, Joseph D.