Languages

Looking back over my three years of college, there isn't much that stands out classwise. There have certainly been a few classes I've really enjoyed (History of Globalization, Meaning of America and Civil Liberties, jump to the forefront,) but overall I feel like I've largely forgotten much of what I've learned. Yes, I'm sure much of it there is still buried in the dingy stacks of my mind, and with a certain amount of effort could be recalled, but it's also likely that I won't need much of this information barring an obscure jeopardy question or trivial pursuit game.

The biggest theme to my college academic career is that there is no thematic order in my classes. For example were I a bio or engineering major my classes would logically build on each other, so that instead of having shallow knowledge in many areas I would have extensive knowledge in one area (which is still in itself exceeding broad, (and my knowledge relative to experts in that field, would still be exceeding shallow, but that's a whole other topic.) Now I have no one to blame for this course of events but myself. I like taking diverse classes, that was and is the appeal to college for me; being able to take classes that have nothing to do with each other for the sole reason of their appeal to you. But looking back from a slightly more mature standpoint than I had when I entered this school it occurs to me that I could have been served in creating a more logical academic program for myself, since I can always read about other topics I am interested in. ON the other hand, I do think that I have gained non-tangible benefits from these classes (I have been able to form my thoughts more coherently, I have a less naive worldview, I am able to be more critical and analytical of ideas,) but these can be frustrating when you don't see evidence of these improvements on a daily basis. Whereas if I were an engineering major I could point to a problem I can now solve, which I once could not. However, the one tangible benefit I have gotten out of academic college is the acquisition of languages. Prior to entering college I had been ambivalent about languages. I always loved geography and learning about other cultures, so on that level languages always appealed to me. But Spanish was always hard, I was bad at speaking and listening to it and though I took it all throughout high school I didn't sign up for it in my first semester of college, because I believed I knew it well enough to get by, and that was enough.

Second semester of college I decided I was going to be an IR major, which required 8 semesters of a language. So I manned up, signed up for Spanish 4 and found it, in an extremely surprising first day to be ridiculously easy. Unfortunately, a lot of the time when things are easy for me, my effort starts slacking. So I coasted through Spanish 4, and then Spanish 21 and 22, getting A-/B+, doing the minimum amount of homework possible and cramming and then forgetting vocab. (As a sidenote, the fact that Spanish 4-22 was easy for me should not be surprising, really my AP spanish in high school should have prepared me for 22 at the least, and it was only because I did poorly on the placement test that I started out so low.) I finished 22 at the end of my sophomore year, which is a pretty odd time for self-analysis. You're halfway through your college career, by definition probably haven't accomplished very much, the job threat is too far away for it to be anything, but an abstraction in your mind, and yet at the same time you really have to decide what major you're going to focus on, and what, if anything, you might want to accomplish after college. I had assumed from the start that I was going to go abroad, but none of the Spanish-speaking countries really appealed to me. I wanted to be somewhere that was the center of the action, but at the same time wanted to escape going to Europe, because I wanted to be somewhere that would push me outside my comfort zone a little bit. I had always been interested in the Middle East and while browsing abroad options there, Cairo stood out as a possible destination. Center of the action? Yes. Adventure? Definitely yes. The only problem was that I didn't know any Arabic, but as it happened Tufts was offering a first-time experimental summer course for Arabic 1-2 in 6 weeks.

I made the decision one day in March. I remember it because it was one of the first warm days of the beginning of spring. I had skipped class and walked down to Porter Square Bookstore, in order to buy the Lonely Planet Egypt guide and apply for a job (no dice.) I stopped back at the Powderhouse Park to browse through the guide and kill the hour or so I had before my workout. After thirty minutes of looking through the guide, I had already made up my mind."Fuck it, I'm going," I thought, and that was that. Coincidentally or not, I ran one of the best workouts of my track career that day, which convinced me of the idea that workout and race performance is at least partially tied to life-confidence levels.

Three months later I started Arabic, and I tried harder in the beginning than I have in almost anything else in my life. There are few things more fun than the beginning of learning a new language, before the frustration of the plateau sets in, and every day you can understand exponentially more and more. Of course as the class wore on, I tried less. It's tough to keep up the same enthusiasm you feel in the beginning for something new over a long period of time, and the time constraints of running and working were definitely taking a toll.

Another three months later school started again. I was taking both Arabic and Spanish, which created some confusions, especially in prepositions (it's odd what the brain will confuse and what it doesn't.) But the more I learned about Arabic the more it enthralled me. There's an elegant logic to the Arabic language that's missing in both English and Spanish. So while it doesn't sound as beautiful as Spanish, at least to my ear, it achieves more beauty in its logical perfection. Almost every word is based off a three letter root. There are 10s or even 100s of patterns which you can perform with a root in order to change the meaning. For example the word qaara means to decide or to settle. But the word istaqara means to decide to settle down in a place because the form ista+root means to seek something. This creates infinite poetic possibilities. Furthermore because of the languages intimate connection with the Koran, words take on a preciseness lacking in English (of course in everyday colloquial language they lose this preciseness.) For example the words raja'a and 'aada both mean to return. Yet technically in the Koran, raja'a means to return to God after death, or in other words returning to your original and ultimate destination, while 'aada means to return to dust after death, or returning to an impermanent destination. So in fusha (formal arabic) raja'a can mean returning back home, or somewhere you will stay, or 'aada means to return to a temporary destination. There's something in this order and preciseness that really appeals to me. The library's closing now, which means I have to go, but I'll finish on this entry (though I forget what exactly I was trying to say when I started writing it) soon hopefully.

Daily Ramblings

1) Extremely interesting Wall Street Journal article today about affluent West coasters moving into Montana and changing the political and economic demographics of that state. The state is now split between the largely rural, libertarian and Republican East and the more affluent, left-leaning West. A Democratic Presidential candidate has a chance to win here for the first time since 1992 (which wasn't even really a win for a Democrat since Ross Perot siphoned away a large proportion of Bush's votes.) The shift in US demographics is really a facinating subject that's being highlighted by this election cycle. Former "cowboy" states like Colorado and Montana (and even to some extent North and South Dakota) are suddenly in play for the Democrats. Similarly, states "colonized" by residents from more liberal areas of the country like Virginia (the DC suburbs) and North Carolina (the research triangle) are also now potential sources of votes for Democrats. Yet at the same time, states like Ohio and West Virginia are beginning to lean more heavily Republican. One theory proposed for this is that state's are dividing into those who have been affected positively by the shift to the information economy and those who have been affected negatively, with the former voting Democrat and the latter voting Republican. This seems to be a little democratic-centric to me. My personal opinion is that our current economy allows people to become much more flexible with where they live. So if liberal software programmers from California, like the man described in the article, wish to move to a place like California or North Carolina there is less standing in their way. So new democratic "enclaves" are springing up throughout the country, wherever large groups of these young (or youngish) urban professionals decide to set up shop. Meanwhile the Republican parties embrace of the religious right's social agenda, has consolidated their support of economically disenfranchised voters in former Democratic strongholds like Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, who vote according to social issues, because neither party well represents their economic agenda (less free trade, etc) because it's worse for the country as a whole. So this trend of what we're seeing in Montana is only the beginning and over the next 10 to 20 years I believe a large part of the traditional post-Southern Strategy political map of the United States will be rewritten.

2) I'm reading David Herbert Donald's biography on Lincoln and I have just gotten to the section on Lincoln's tenure in Congress and his speeches on the Mexican War. Two things stood out for me. First, Lincoln believed that once a President began a war the populace should not criticize the President until after it's completion. He stated "that all those who, because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it, should...as good citizens and patriots, remain silent...at least till the war should be ended." Of course Donald added in a few ellipses there so it's possible he slightly misconstrued Lincoln's meaning. Second, the following quote is an interesting rebuttal to the Bush doctrine of preemption:

"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,...and you allow him to make war at pleasure...[this would] place our President where Kings always stood."

3)You know its going to be a long week when Tuesday feels like a Thursday.

4)Interesting link in the Financial Times to a US Obesity Map

5) 14.5 mile long run on Sunday, personal PR and did it at 6:45 pace

Weekly Links (July 22-28)

I'm starting a new thing where I will list the ten best articles that I've read over the past week. I have a lot of time to read articles, since I have like 6 free hours at work, so these came from a bigger pool of about 140. Most of them are from the nytimes and washingtonpost since those are what I read more.

1)This Washington Post article describes how the rise in global food prices affects people at the lower end of the world "food-chain." It focuses on the story of one woman's family from Burkino Faso and the tribulations she is forced to go through to put food on the table and to sustain herself in that strongly sexist society.

2)This Washington Post article describes the transformation that has occurred in Medellin thanks partially to US free trade allowances. The city has gone from having the murder rate of a war zone to a murder rate less than DC. The free trade allowances have been put into a treaty which is currently the subject of debate as its ratification vote approaches in the Senate.

3)This is actually an older Washington Post article from 2006, but it still has extreme relevance today. It describes the failure of the farm subsidy program in the United States to accomplish the goals for which it had supposedly been created. This quote from the article sums it up well-"The farm payments have also altered the landscape and culture of the Farm Belt, pushing up land prices and favoring large, wealthy operators. The system pays farmers a subsidy to protect against low prices even when they sell their crops at higher prices. It makes "emergency disaster payments" for crops that fail even as it provides subsidized insurance to protect against those failures. And it pays people such as Matthews for merely owning land that was once farmed."

4) Another article from the New York Times series on the Public Writers Project of the 1940s. It describes the movement to create the new state of Absaroka out of parts of parts of Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota.

5) An article from the Washington Post describing the blog Kaboom, by a young army lieutenant serving in Iraq. The army forced the lieutenant to take down the blog after he wrote an entry criticizing a superior officer, but the archive of the blog remains online and is extremely engrossing.

6)A Wall Street Journal article about the Primal Quest, a 500+ mile wilderness race in Montana told through the eyes of a mother and daughter team. This quote sums up well what the competitors go through:

"Those who continue battle hallucinations and blackouts from sleep deprivation. Paul Meade, a pharmaceutical sales representative from Seattle, saw a new house for sale. A moment later, it was gone. Others saw grizzly bears morph into tree stumps. During a 45-mile overnight hike, Julie Ardoin, a New Orleans lawyer, saw Elvis Presley and then wandered off the trail. Her teammate tied a nylon rope to her waist and towed her until daybreak. Blain Reeves and his team held fifth place for the first half of the race, but they quit after a teammate fell ill. "It's so hard to walk away," says Mr. Reeves, a 43-year-old lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army's southern command."





7) Very interesting New Yorker article on how the youth in China are Westernized, but also becoming intensely patriotic and turning away from the democracy movements of the early 1990s towards a powerful strain of nationalism.

8)Brezezinski warns in a Financial Times editorial against excessive US involvement in Afghanistan, fearing that we will follow in the footsteps of the Soviets. There are many striking parallels-believing in a small communist elite v. believing in a small democratic elite-escalating military presence-similar types of insurgencies, with even some of the same players

9) Frank Rich editorial about how Obama has stepped into the leadership vacuum left by Bush. He claims that events are starting to conform to Obama's vision of the world.

10) New York Times article on the debate over the value of internet reading. Is it a useful skill and should we be worried that it is replacing reading of hard print books?

My Overriding Theory in Life

I think life is all about rhythm. Running, writing, great conversations, it all comes down to just hitting that rhythm, and letting it flow naturally. It's a stupid thing to try to write about, but it came to my mind today, when I tried to write a blog entry (because I now try to write at least a little something every day in order to stay in practice,) and everything I wrote came out in so way wrong. It was either imprecise, or covered in cliches, or somehow generic. What's odd is that I felt the same way yesterday on my run, when I couldn't get into a rhythm and no matter how fast or slow I went, it just felt out of focus. It's frustrating because there are times I can sit down in front of a keyboard and churn out something excellent, just like there are times I can step up to the line and bust out a run that destroys my previous conceptions of what I can do. But I have no ability to control how and when these things happen, I'm just on my game or I'm not.

What's frustrating is when you lose your rhythm, and are stuck churning out letters that don't turn into words, and words that don't turn into sentences, both literally and metaphorically. The key to succeeding therefore is finding and maintaining this "rhythm" for lack of a better word to call it. How this occurs is, of course, still beyond me

The Same Sea

Just finished The Same Sea by Amos Oz. This book is a delicately beautiful mix of poetry and prose. The simple version of the plot tells the story of the aftermath of the death of Nadia Danon. Her son, Rico, has left for Tibet, leaving his accountant father Albert to deal with his loneliness with the company of Rico's ex-girlfriend, his widow friend, Binnette, and the various characters who come in and out of their lives, including the author.

I first read an Amos Oz book, when I received the Tale of Love and Darkness as a gift. I remember being blown away by the power of the prose, especially in the early sections describing pre-independence Israel. However that was years ago, and I never ended up reading any more of his work, until when browsing through the fiction selection at work, I found this book. It surpassed The Tale of Love and Darkness in my mind, and is one of the best works of fiction I have read in a while.

The idea of telling a story in poems is of course not new, but Oz accomplishes it such a way that the book skips from novel to anthology and back again, but these transitions do not seem jarring, but are instead welcome. The varieties of styles and jumps in point of view highlight the book's larger theme of the impermanence of interconnectedness. He explores skillfully the complexity of the bonds we form with one another, while highlighting that in the end, we, like Nadia will die alone, and eventually all our achievements and tangible reminders will be turned to dust. Depressing, yes, but also beautiful. I have included below a few of my favorite lines.

"A Shadow"
...You too, with your traveling,
your obsession to go further and further away and hoard more
and more experiencs, are carting your own cage around with you
to the outer edge of the zoo. Everyone has their own captivity. The bars
separate everyone from everyone else. If that solitary snowman really exists,
without sex or parter, without birth or progeny or death,
roaming these mountains for a thousand years,
light and naked, how it must laugh as it moves among the cages.


"In the evening, at a quarter to eleven, Bettine phones the Narrator"
..."Do you happen to have read Troyat's
book about Chekhov? It brings me, right here in Bat Yam, a sense of fallen
leaves in the snow, a sense of vast gardens abandoned to the autumn wind. It's
all quite hopeless really, but at the same time quite diverting. It turns out that
something that never was and never will be is all that we have. We are woken
suddenly at night, every time a dog barks or a gate creaks, but the barking sub-
sides to a whimper, the gate stops creaking, and all is quiet again...



"In between"
Like a sooty engine at the end of its journey the lit half
of the earth drags wearily toward the shadow
while the dark half gropes at the first line of light.

A Presidential Speech

I came across this speech by Al Gore today. He speaks with the freedom of a man who is no longer forced to pander to the American people or Special Interests in order to maintain his political position. Gore first lambastes the current state of American society. After cataloging our problems as a society, he divides them into three categories: economic, environmental and national security. Rather than tracing small, incremental solutions which may partially fix each individual problem, Gore identifies the recurring problem threading all of the problems together, an addiction to carbon-energy. Gore then challenges our current politicans to break away from the current mode of politics which he describes as "[tending] toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness." Gore proposes a ten year plan, in which our country aims to be completely powered by renewable sources. Gore recognizes the boldness of his challenge, but believes that the technology and capital is there, if the government is only willing to take the necessary political steps.

This is a speech a Presidential candidate should be making. Obviously it would take considerably more courage for Barack Obama or John McCain to propose something like this because they have much more to lose. Gore has no voters to alienate and no donors to lose, so he's free to state his views without repercussions. And it just further illustrates the sad state of our national polity today, that the two men with the greatest audiences feel they can't speak freely, for fear of scaring them. Yet, America needs to be scared. I agree with Gore; what we are facing now at the nexus of our economic, national security, and environment troubles is the biggest threat this nation has faced since the Great Depression. The rising gas prices, rising food prices, creeping inflation and unemployment, are not a mere cyclical downturn. They are symptoms of cheap energy, one of the foundations of our economic boom, being chipped away from underneath us.
We're fighting a war without the typical sacrifices, we're spending while ignoring mounting debt, and we're taking tax cuts as our infrastructure and public safety net systems are decaying around us. While making the transition to renewable energy is not a cureall for all of these problems, it certainly would be an auspicious start.

Iraq 1920 and Today

In the post below I wrote about The Peace to End All Peace, but I thought the Iraq section of the book deserved a separate post. The book was written in 1989, so before either Iraqi War, but the language Fromkin uses to describe the British troubles could just as easily be used by a journalist today. I'm just going to list a few quotes below:



"A fundamental problem, as Wilson saw it, was that the almost two million Shi'ite Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Muslims community, yet 'no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.'"

"Battlefield professionals and dedicated opponents of Britain, they could have been expected to constitute a more serious potential threat to British plans than did the politicians and orators of Damascus or Jerusalem. At first the British administration in the Mesopotamian Provinces did not see it that way. Tensions between the diverse populations of the area seemed to pose greater problems, and the lawlessness of groups such as the Kurds and the Bedouin tribes seemed to pose greater threats. Incoherence, communal strife, and habitual disorder--rather than organized nationalism--were perceived as the challenge."

"In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know "how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?"



Again, if the Bush administration had read a little history before this war, it could have gone a long way towards avoiding our present situation.

The Peace to End All Peace

I just finished reading The Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. It was a pretty engaging book, but I've been grinding through it for a while, because I haven't had that much time to read besides 20-30 page spurts at work. The book describes the creation of the "modern Middle East" in the years during and directly following World War I. These are my thoughts on the most important/interesting themes:

1) The Use of Peoples as Pawns: Considering the British Empire was prominently involved this is not exactly a shocker, but what was interesting to me was the corollary to the rhetoric of today. The British defended its land grab in the Middle East, through the rhetoric of "Arab Independence," which of course in British eyes meant a nominally independent Arab state completely under British control. Of course the obvious parallel is to Iraq and Afghanistan today, where the United States entered with a mantra of "bringing democracy to the Iraqi/Afghan people" when in reality they only wanted a "democracy" that was receptive to US influence and interests. Yet, the United States, despite lacking a long history of direct imperialism, has treated almost every third world foreign policy encounter in the same way, lofty language disguising pure self-interest. So despite the disappearance in the last 50 years of the ideologies of colonialism, imperialism and western superiority as a proper basis for a foreign policy, the underlying mechanisms behind these discredited systems of belief still remains.

2) The Balfour Declaration: The motives behind the supporters of the Balfour Declaration were extremely diverse, which contributed to the later confusion over what exactly the Declaration promised. Fromkin identifies four main reasons for supporting the Zionist movement among the British political class: First, was the religious conviction that creating a Jewish State in Israel was a prerequisite for the Messiah to come. This was an especially large influence on Lloyd George, since he had a strong Protestant background. The vision of Zionism as a Christian religious destiny by evangelical Christians is still an important part of Israel's allure in the United States today. Second was the hope that a British-supported Zionist state would evolve into a mutually beneficial relationship, in which the Jews would bring economic and political stability to Palestine while the British would gain the vital last link on their land road between India and Egypt. Also prevalent in the British ruling class was the idea that there existed a global Jewish conspiracy (involving Bolsheviks, Germans , and Turks.) Many who believed strongly in the existence of the conspiracy believed that they could "buy" the Jews over on their side, thereby tipping the scales in the First World War by supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Finally there were those (albeit a very small number) who genuinely had sympathy for the plight of the Jews and believed that creating a homeland in Palestine was the best solution (of course it can also be argued that this sympathy was misguided and created more trouble than already existed.)

Now today, 50 years after the State of Israel was founded, almost the exact same rationales with small variations are used to justify support to Israel today (minus the whole Jewish conspiracy thing.) Evangelical Christians support Israel in large numbers (82% say they have a "biblical and moral obligation" according to a Jerusalem Post article,) because of biblical prophesy. The US government supports Israel because it is the only true Middle Eastern democracy (I know debatable) and because many of our foreign policy and intelligence interests coincide. While the idea of a Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy is no longer taken seriously by any mainstream decisionmakers, the need to win over the Jewish Vote, especially in swing states like Florida, has led to support of Israel becoming a priority of many lawmakers. Now I'm not against supporting Israel, (though I do have a problem with the often unconditional support the United States gives, and its pretty biased approach to the Israeli-Palestinian question, but that's a whole other blog post) but I do find it interesting that so little has changed in the way the Great Powers approach Israel/Palestine, even after 80 years of almost constantly violent history.

3. The Soviet's Sell-out: I'm not an expert on Soviet history so there may have been many other instances before this of the new Soviet government trading their beliefs for political advantage, but in its dealings with the postwar Middle East, it becomes abundantly clear that despite whatever new creeds their leaders are preaching, the Soviet Unions foreign policy is alarmingly conventional. The Soviets make a deal with Kemalist Turkey, a strongly anti-communist force, (and a deal which actually allows Kemal to crush Turkey's burgeoning Communist movement) and grabs much of Central Asia for itself, despite its constant lecturing on anti-Imperialism. Here we can also see clearly the switch from Lenin to Stalin, as Fromkin succintly shows how Lenin supported Bolsheviks vs non-Bolsheviks in Central Asia and the rest of the Middle East, while Stalin supported Russians vs non-Russians. While there was no practical difference in these policies for the time being, the ramifications of the different principles would have important consequences over the next 80 years.

4. Unintended Consequences: This is really a lesson from almost every history book, since human events work on such a large scale that it is almost impossibly to tweak them in the direction one wishes, without bringing on a deluge of other unexpected and often unwanted results. For example, as Fromkin states in his conclusion "British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed." The British attempts to shape the Middle East into the shape they desired left the region radically altered, but not in the way that they wished. The US should take strong note of this as it progresses in Iraq, Afghanistan and any other countries the Bush administration decides to invade before January 20, 2009.

Arrested Development

So far this blog has been on mostly serious topics, but now I'm going to talk about my 2nd favorite tv show of all time (after Seinfeld)...Arrested Development. The genius and "under-appreciatedness" of the show has been talked about ad-nauseum since its cancellation so I'm not going to go into a long diatribe about either of those topics. I'm actually sort of happy it was cancelled, since it stopped it from going on too long and wrecking everything that was originally good about show (like 90% of successful tv shows over the past 15 years.) Instead I'm going to countdown my top 5 favorite (and also available on youtube) moments in Arrested Development history.

If you haven't seen the show, Wikipedia gives a good synopsis. The premises and characters really sound much less funny in print than they are on the air.

Today #5) "It Ain't Easy Being White, It Ain't Easy Being Brown," -In this scene GOB introduces a new "puppet," Franklin to freshen up his act. Here is GOB and Franklin's best musical effort...

Skygardens

This article was in the New York Times today. While I'm a little skeptical about the feasability of this project (real estate costs would seem to make it unprofitable) I always enjoy reading about ideas like this if for no other reason than their ability to push the mind past accepted conventions. Just as we never notice the changes in loved ones until a long absence, so we can never really notice the changes in our world because repeated daily exposure to it makes everything seem vaguely familiar. Yet just as the generation who came of age in the 1980s couldn't conceive of the blackberry toting, ipod listening, wikipedia-using lifestyle of today, so there will much in the next twenty years that we can't even imagine, and yet when it occurs will feel utterly ordinary. While the 2020s might not bring skygardens, it will bring changes of equally stunning magnitude when considered from a distance of 15 or 20 years in the past, and visionaries who consider these changes are always a welcome escape from the conventionality of the present.

This is a video of Dr. Despommier on CNN:

Pakistan

Pakistan Marble Helps Taliban Stay in Business

I read this article in the New York Times this morning. It just reinforces the idea I've had for several months that Pakistan is the true next test in the "War on Terror."* The Pakistani Taliban has taken on governmental roles throughout Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and into this base are flowing both domestic and international insurgents. The Pakistani government has no practical way of dealing with the situation because an all-out attack would most-likely undermine the already unstable government. The government now seems to be giving tacit support to the Taliban regime, while mounting occasional "token" attacks to show its Allies in the West that it's serious in the War on Terror. The West (read: the US) is now either stuck with an ostensibly pro-Western government, but an area of anarchy which feeds both the Afghan insurgency and the global Al-Qaeda network, or a destablized Pakistani government with an arsenal of nuclear weapons which could potentially fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.

The impossibility of the United States' position in Pakistan just highlights the general inevitability of defeat in the "War on Terror" itself. Throughout the Islamic world, the United States is stuck with a decision between supporting tyrannical, but officially pro-Western regimes, or supporting democratic reforms and whatever government the people choose. However speaking from personal conversations in Egypt, and from various articles I have read the general consensus seems to be that any general election is going to result in the ascension of Islamic, anti-Western parties (Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, etc.) I believe what the United States is facing has broad popular support, not necessarily for the methods used (suicide bombings, innocent deaths, etc,) but as a means for countering a self-centered foreign policy which for years has ignored the needs of the people in the countries in which it intervened direct or indirectly, and instead pursued completely and unwaveringly its own interests. Any attempt to support democracy without changing our other long-term goals in the region will simply create more resentment (i.e. Iraq, where the US's priorities were abundantly clear in what we did and did not defend in the early anarchic days of Baghdad. )

Pakistan currently has a population around 170 million, with 36% of its people under the age of 15. Up until now, the United States has treated Pakistan unevenly, often favoring India (as illustrated by the new Indo-US nuclear pact. In the 2007 fiscal year, the United States gave $1.62 Billion in aid to Pakistan. However 68.5% of this aid was in security-related services. Although the remaining $506 million in economic aid is a significant and generous gesture by the United States, it pales beneath the vast amount of military aid, which further damages the United States' image in the country and negates any gains made by the economic aid. (A full breakdown of US Aid from 2002-2007 is here.) What the leaders in Washington seem to not yet grasp is that this "War on Terror" is a war that will not be won primarily through military means. Not only is the United States and its Allies at an incredibly miliatary disadvantage fighting in the rough terrain of the Northwest Fronteir Province and its Afghan counterpart, but the continued fighting only attracts more insurgents to the scene. Instead the United States must win this war in (a cliche so overused its painful to type) "the hearts and minds of the people." It must show that 1) it has more than its own blind self-interest at heart when it deals with Pakistan and 2) create situations to positively engage the energy of the younger Pakistani generation so it does not succomb to feelings of hopelessness and stagnation that have afflicted youths in so many opportunity-devoid locations throughout the globe.

*I use "War on Terror" here to refer to the combination of economic, miliatary and propaganda attempts by the United States to defeat Islamic terror groups

Edit: Nicholas Kristoff has an excellent article which sums of some of the points I was trying to make. He ends with this:
"“I am convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general, and Afghanistan specifically, is education,” Lt. Col. Christopher Kolenda, who works on the Afghan front lines, said in an e-mail in which he raved about Mr. Mortenson’s work. “The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books. ... The thirst for education here is palpable.”

Military force is essential in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban. But over time, in Pakistan and Afghanistan alike, the best tonic against militant fundamentalism will be education and economic opportunity.

So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.""

Books and Movies

To help pass the time at works I'm going to write about some of my favorite books and movies over the next few weeks. This will be in addition to any other random comments/ideas I have.

Working

This is just going to be a pretty standard recording of my random thoughts on things I read or see, or on life in general.

Working: I've worked a variety of jobs, none of them particularly taxing. But regardless, I've never enjoyed any of them. My father has averaged working over 80 hours a week for as long as I can remember. He rarely takes days off, and even then never strays far from an internet connection. Since I've lived my whole life without really being able to throw my whole energy into anything, I've had many discussions with him about this. In his view, what he's doing isn't work in the conventional sense. Just as basketball players seem to be paid for having fun on the court, my dad feels that he's being paid for something he enjoys equally as much. I think it's very possible that living under this type of influence has severely hurt my ability to work happily. I now look for perfection in every potential career choice; some perfect combination of fulfillment, salary and utility to society. But this outcome does not exist, except for a few lucky people. And fulfillment in life can be found outside of one's working hours. While I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea that my "NBA career" still exists somewhere in this world, each subsequent job brings me closer to the realization that I may have to look at a job in a completely different manner from that of my father; as a means to an end of pursuing my unique place in this world, even if that occurs after working hours only.