Prince MBS as Ozymandias. And a woman entrepreneur from Sudbury, Ontario.
August 8 2022, Volume 3 # 8
The Evil Prince of Saudi Arabia
A man who beats his wife so badly she needs medical help. A man who has a temper tantrum in his mother’s house and fires off a machine gun into the ceiling. He then locks her up. And a man who had a journalist killed and sawed into pieces.
The man is Muhammad bin Salman al Saud, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and effectively the ruler of the super-rich petrostate. The Economist has a summer edition with a long essay on MBS — he is known by his initials— by its middle east correspondent, Nicolas Pelham. You can link to it below.
It describes MBS’s unlikely rise to power. The right people died. And it goes into detail about how he brought the princes of the Saudi Royal family to heel, along with the super rich of the kingdom, by imprisoning them in the Ritz. MBS wants to be the world’s first trillionaire; he has seized a lot of his relatives’ money. There are 15,000 princes in the extended Saudi family.
At the end of piece Pelham describes an MBS failure, a modern city he wants to build in the desert called Neom: “Eventually, I found a retired Saudi air-force technician who offered to drive me around the city for $600. He took me to a sculpture standing in the desert with the words, “I ❤ Neom”. A short way farther on we found a new stretch of tarmac, said to mark the edge of the dream city. Beyond it, the lone and level sands stretched far away.”
The last line is from the poem, Ozymandias, written by a man who died 200 years ago.
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley- 1792-1822
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Shelly drowned in a storm off Italy in the summer of 1822. He achieved a lot in 29 years. It’s depressing to think that when Shelly was my age he had been dead for 46 years. (With a nod to satirist Tom Lehrer for the idea.)
World Habits: Languages spoken, Beer drunk, Bitcoin mining and Wheat production.
Fog in Channel, continent cut of
Not a surprise that the British idea of a foreign language is to speak slower and louder. The Dutch, the Swedes and the Baltic rimmers know no one else is going to speak their language so they learn English.
Cheers
Who drinks how much beer. The Czech Republic drinks the most beer per capita. The Chinese drink one pint in five of world beer consumption but then there are a lot of them to bring up the average. The Americans are no slouches, considering their population is is a quarter the size of China’s. I haven’t had a beer in 29 years which is why I weigh so much less than I did back then.
An expensive ponzi scheme
Mining a bitcoin is a b-s phrase. It takes a ton of energy to create a bitcoin. There are a couple of bitcoin `farms’ near me. They hold banks of computers that suck electricity. It baffles me, but here is the definition that goes with that chart:
“When someone mines for bitcoin, what they’re really doing is adding and verifying a new transaction record to the blockchain—the decentralized bank ledger where bitcoin is traded and distributed. To create this new record, crypto miners need to crack a complex equation that’s been generated by the blockchain system.”
They add that it takes 1,449 kilowatt hours of energy to mine a single bitcoin. That’s the amount of electricity the average American household consumes in 13 years. I read this past week that cloud computing banks suck so much electricity in Britain that there isn’t enough to supply new houses, so they don’t get built. Where are the Greenies when you need them?
The cost of mining a bitcoin depends on the cost electricity. Kuwait is the cheapest country for bitcoin miners— cheap electricity from oil; Venezuela the most expensive— runaway inflation and a messed up economy.
Wheat production before Russia invaded Ukraine
Being a homer, I would have thought Canada produced a bigger share of the world wheat market. Western Canada was settled by a lot of Ukrainian immigrants who knew how to grow grain and handle the cold winters.
Essay of the Week
This is a chapter from a book I wrote on the Dellelce family in Sudbury, Ontario. The two most remarkable people in the family were the matriarch, Rachelina Dellelce, and her son, Nick. This is Rachelina’s story.
Chapter 5
Rachelina Dellelce
Rachelina “Lina” Dellelce was a remarkable woman, whose drive and ambition contributed to the success of her children and grandchildren. She was born Rachela Masciangelo in the small town of Fossacesia in Abruzzi in 1912. She left Italy in 1916 with her mother, Ginevra, and her grandfather, after her father, Enrico, had sent for his family to join him in Canada.
They settled, at first, in Copper Cliff, the town with the largest concentration of Italians in the Sudbury area. They then moved to a small farm in Markstay, about forty-five kilometres outside of Sudbury. Once Enrico accumulated enough money, he bought a boarding house in Sudbury and that became the family business. That boarding house eventually became the International Hotel.
“My grandfather [Enrico] was a tough old guy,” says Lina’s nephew, Ronnie Masciangelo. “He opened up the first gravel pit and cement block plant in Sudbury. He opened it in Garson. My father worked with him, and they had trucks. I remember we used to go out there, and he brought a lot of people over from Italy. He built a big apartment building on Kathleen Street, and that’s where we all lived, all on the same floor. He would help the people come from Italy, he’d pay their way, and they would work for him. Then, one by one, all those people in the Donovan got to build their own homes.”
Rachelina was always known as Lina; the shortened version of her name even appears on the birth certificates of her children. As a child, Lina had a hard life. Her father was of the old school, and ruled the household like a tyrant, according to Theresa Olivier, Lina’s youngest daughter.
“She was treated badly from the age of three until eighteen, as I understand. She worked in the boarding house, she didn’t even graduate grade eight, and her father pulled her out of school. Stories were, that he used to hit her on the head with a pail, an abusive type. She could read and write, and he couldn’t,” says Theresa.
Her life changed in 1929, when she married Tom Dellelce. He was eighteen years older, and settled, with a job as a railway fireman for Inco. Tom was a much kinder man than her father. They had three children in the 1930s: Nicholas, Thomas Jr. and Genevieve, and then, what was like a second family, many years later, Peter in 1947, and Theresa in 1950—when Rachelina was thirty-eight years old.
Rachelina may have been born poor, but she had no intention of staying poor. She and Tom bought a truck, and they operated a small business on the side. At first, it was a “dump truck,” hauling gravel and other material, mostly to the mines. Then they branched out into other vehicles. Ronnie Masciangelo, Rachelina’s nephew, says his father helped Tom and Rachelina buy that first truck..
Tom worked double shifts, driving the trucks after his job at the railway ended for the day. There was a lot of work for independent truckers then, from carrying ore to carting gravel. Soon, the family had moved to Levack, another mining town in the Sudbury basin, as Tom graduated from fireman to locomotive engineer, shuttling trains between various mine sites in the Sudbury basin. That was in 1947, the year Peter Dellelce was born.
Rachelina Dellelce, the hard-working matriarch of the Dellelce family, with her two youngest children, Theresa and Peter, as toddlers.
About this time, too, Tom Jr. and Nick Dellelce started working for their parents. “Tommy was driving trucks full-time first, waiting for Nicky to graduate from high school,” remembers Peter Dellelce. The business expanded and soon daughter Gen was doing the books, as she would for so many of the family businesses all her life.
In the Italian tradition, Lina invested the extra money she made; not in the stock market or in bonds, but in property. She started buying houses, even developing small subdivisions in the Sudbury area. Her biggest real estate deals, the Sorrento Hotel in Sudbury and various operations in Naples, Florida, are detailed elsewhere. These real estate investments would make her a rich woman. Her grandson, Perry Dellelce, points out, though, that if the family had managed its assets properly, the Dellelces would have been even richer.
“There’s a great business lesson here: we were a typical family business that didn’t survive the second generation. It’s sad, because the opportunities were there. Paul Desmarais and Nick Dellelce and Robert Campeau along with Cliff Fielding, they were all Sudbury-based businessmen at the same time,” says Perry.
“They all did different things, but my family had as many, if not more, opportunities as Paul Desmarais did, in Sudbury and beyond. However, to survive for generations in a family business, you have to bring in third-party professional management, and he [Paul Desmarais] let go of some control. The Dellelce family didn’t. Things like that matter.”
By the mid-1950s, Tom and Rachelina Dellelce were more than comfortable. Though they were savers, they did splash out on small luxuries, such as trips to Mexico during the harsh Sudbury winter
The prosperous tourists from Sudbury. Lina and Tom Dellelce on vacation in Acapulco, Mexico, on March 3, 1957.
Along with working hard at her businesses, Lina Dellelce was deeply involved in the local community. For many years, she volunteered for the St. John Ambulance, and she was a founding life member of the Caruso Club Ladies’ Auxiliary.
The child Rachelina pushed hardest was her first-born son, Nicholas, known inside the family as Nick, or Nicky. She must have spotted in him the spark of her own drive to succeed.
“My mother’s favourite, let’s start with that,” said Theresa, in a friendly way, without a hint of jealousy. “Don’t forget she had him when she was eighteen. He was more her partner in life than my dad was. Whenever she had to talk about things, and decide on things, he was her go-to guy. She was very close to Nicky.”
Theresa, as the youngest, was very close to her father. By the 1960s, while Rachelina was out working, Tom Dellelce, now an older, sick man, was at home with his daughter, Theresa.
This is not to say that Tom Dellelce was not a hard worker. Though his wife Rachelina is often given credit for being the entrepreneur of the Dellelce clan, many family members point out that Tom Sr. worked two jobs at the start: train engineer during his regular shifts, and towing truck operator in his off hours.
Though Rachelina was a religious Catholic, her husband Tom was not. Rachelina made a couple of trips to Italy, one with her two youngest children, around 1960. It was kind of a religious pilgrimage organized by a priest from Sudbury, and they visited Lourdes and Rome, among other places. Peter Dellelce says he served mass, with some other boys, for Pope John XXIII, the great reformer who brought in Vatican II and is now a saint.