the human province

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"



Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:



But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been appointed elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.