Ding Dong Rummy's Gone!!!

I'm stunned

Shocked!

Awed!

Afraid to be excited. The devil that you know and all that.

Return to Beirut

I'm back in Beirut, one of my favorite cities in the world. In spite of the recent conflict, it is still a beautiful and fun city to visit, although there is a palpable sadness now that wasn't present last year. People talk about the conflict in much the same terms as we do in the States -- wondering how this happened and what Israel was thinking. I haven't run into anyone who is supportive of Hezbollah, but I haven't been to the South yet, where they are currently doing really great work with the reconstruction effort. Regardless of what you think of them, they are doing much more to help those who were affected than anyone else.

Right now, I'm in my hotel room, looking out of my tenth floor window at the Mediterranean. It is winter here, too, and has been raining and cool. Right now, it is overcast and windy, with whitecaps in the water and the curtains billowing ominously.

Yesterday, I found a yarn store! It was a really great place. Perfectly done, great staff, friendly, amazing selection, decent prices, and really nice buttons, notions, and handmade gift items. y.not is in Saifi Village, and is very easy to find if you are in Beirut. I went in just to check it out, and maybe buy a few souvenir yarns, but ended up sitting and knitting with the owners and staff and three young Beiruti girls for about 2 hours. It was lovely. If you are in Beirut and you knit, go there. Tell Samera and Dinah that I said hi.

Off to Lebanon and Turkey

On Monday, I'm going to Beirut again, the first time I will be there after the war. The last time I was in Lebanon, I fell in love with the country. It is a beautiful, multi-faceted, and culturally rich place, where the modern and the ancient, the scars of war and the beauty of reconstruction, come together with an intoxicating grace. Of course there is a dark side to all of that, but, as in every other case, the dark side, the negative space of place, is what makes the beauty of Lebanon so poignant.

While I'm there, I will be writing a proposal, so I probably won't get to do the sitting in cafes writing that I love, but I will get to see my two good friends, who improbably share the same name. There is nothing like a dinner in a restaurant in an exotic city, sharing wine with friends who I haven't seen in a while. I just love the catching-up-sharing-nostalgia that happens.

After Lebanon, I'm making my first trip ever to Turkey. Our regional meeting is in Istanbul. Really, who can argue with that? I have to admit, I'm most excited about the shopping and the food.

End of the Brain Vacation

Yesterday, I was finally feeling a little pensive again. I haven’t felt that way for a while, which is why you haven’t seen any blogs up here for a while. I think that it is fall. Fall makes me feel smart and New-Englandish and philosophical.

A couple of questions came to mind yesterday, along with an overwhelming urge to have an intellectual conversation over beers with the Professor and my friend, E. The first one, inspired by my frustration with the stubborn refusal of so many Americans to think outside of their own little worlds, was, is the voluntary ignorance of a large proportion of the population necessary for the maintenance of a large state such as the US? After trying to think of reasonable comparisons to see if I could test the theory (China, no, India, no, Russia, almost-but-not-quite, Brazil, no), I decided that it wasn’t so. I mused about it for a while, imagining the chaos that would happen if everyone started having an opinion about everything this country’s leadership did, and scaring myself. After actually implementing the intellectual conversation plan at Bertha’s, I brought the question up with E, and she succinctly and confidently (she’s like that) stated that no, large states like the US encourage the development of voluntary ignorance, because it becomes increasingly less important for people to know or care about what happens outside their country. I had to agree – for many people living in the US, the most foreign thing that will ever happen to them in their lives is a shirt made in Indonesia they buy at Walmart or a New Yorker’s car breaking down on I-70 on their way to LA.

The second thing on my mind was how we’ve managed to create this political elite that runs the country with little or no practical experience of life outside politics. I’m not going to go on and on about this now, but basically I was asking myself if it was a good thing or not. It certainly frees everyone else up to do what they really want to do, but it prevents our political leadership from being truly representative, and also from having an understanding of what life outside the political circles is really like. Not sure how I feel about it.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hopefully this means my brain is back from vacation.

Proxy War

I think that this quote, published in the Washington Post today, is really telling. When put in this light, the implications are horrifying.

"It's really a proxy war between the United States and Iran," said David J. Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Running the World," a book on U.S. foreign policy. "When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a different light."

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

Israel killed four Western UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Observers believe that it was deliberate targeting. Somehow I knew that this would happen. Does anyone else need any evidence that this is much more than a routing of Hezbollah? I cannot fathom why Israel would believe that bombing the UN was in its best interest.

I hope that this brings the US and UK to their senses.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

Israel killed four Western UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Observers believe that it was deliberate targeting. Somehow I knew that this would happen. Does anyone else need any evidence that this is much more than a routing of Hezbollah? I cannot fathom why Israel would believe that bombing the UN was in its best interest.

I hope that this brings the US and UK to their senses.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

Israel killed four Western UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Observers believe that it was deliberate targeting. Somehow I knew that this would happen. Does anyone else need any evidence that this is much more than a routing of Hezbollah? I cannot fathom why Israel would believe that bombing the UN was in its best interest.

I hope that this brings the US and UK to their senses.

This makes no sense.

U.S. Appears to Be Waiting to Act on Israeli Airstrikes - New York Times

Someone is going to have to tell me how bombing a Christian neigborhood, Ashrafiyeh, in Beirut has anything to do with dminishing the capacity of Hezbollah. How does the murder of Lebanese civilians hurt Hezbollah? 285 Lebanese have been killed in this campaign by Israelis, and 25 Israelis have been killed by Hezbollah. Am I the only one who thinks that this is complete lunacy?

Furthermore, we are going to let Israel bomb innocent people (because if you really still think that they are just after Hezbollah, you need to be smacked really hard) for another week before we do anything.

I'm at a loss for words at the horror and inhumanity of this entire situation from start to finish.

A colleague today asked whether people were discussing how much Bush's position on this is influenced by his millenial vision of Christianity, or how much his neo-con politics might be influencing his use of religion, and how either way, this is an atrocity. Our sitting out of this and our bullheaded refusal to rein in Israel is a flat out disgrace.

BBC NEWS | Business | Bush lunch chat is caught on tape

BBC NEWS | Business | Bush lunch chat is caught on tape

Why are we supporting Israel on this? They have killed 120 Lebanese civilians in their bombardment, even though it is Hezbollah, without the support of the Lebanese civilians, who is carrying this out. It seems that we should tell Israel to cut it out, and then protect Lebanon against Hezbollah.

Furthermore, everyone needs to start getting honest about this BS -- all of the parties know exactly what is going on. Hamas knew what would happen when they captured the Israeli soldier and started to hurl rockets at Israel. Israel knew what would happen when they retailiated. Hezbollah knew what would happen when they did their own kidnappings and started to bomb Israel. They knew that Lebanon would be drawn in and that it would start a proxy war between Syria/Iran and Israel, fought on the already scarred and punnished streets of Beirut, Saida, and other cities in Lebanon.

This war is not going to go away, and a few hundred or even a few thousand UN peacekeepers in Lebanon are not going to do anything. We need to get tough with Israel, engage the political arm of Hamas, and break the links between Hezbollah and Iran and Syria. The longer the US supports Israel at the expense of Arab civilians, the more anti-US senitment we will generate around the world, and the more insecure we all are.

Random

I know I haven't been writing recently, and yes, I will again soon. But for now, on request from enninej, here is my line:

"Fortunately, larger programs went into effect within two years of the armistice." -- Catholic Relief Services: The Beginning Years, Eileen Egan

1. Pick up any book. 2. Go to page 127. 3. Find third sentence 4. Post it on your blog (plus these instructions) 5. Don't choose the book, just pick up the one closest to you.

Pointless, yes. But amusing.

Global Development: Views from the Center: How Much Aid for Africa? This model won't tell you!

Global Development: Views from the Center: How Much Aid for Africa? This model won't tell you!

Why more money does not more development make. Amen.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Muslims join Da Vinci criticism

BBC NEWS South Asia Muslims join Da Vinci criticism

Fiction. Fiction, fiction, fiction. It is a word that has a long and lovely history in the English language, and words of equal meaning in many, if not all, of the world's languages.

Maybe I should protest the movie Bring It on, since it insults cheerleaders. Or any of the hundreds of movies and books that vilify Americans or women.

IT'S FICTION, PEOPLE.

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

I know that this is seriously off-topic, but in this list of the "Best American Fiction", you have to be kidding me that they couldn't come up with more than two women? And the list of men is limited enough to be a complete joke. How are we supposed to take this seriously?

Panel Faults Pfizer in '96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria

Panel Faults Pfizer in '96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria

For all of you who thought after reading The Constant Gardener that there was no way it could actually happen in real life, please read the above-linked article from the Post.

If this happened in the US, Canada, or Europe, there would be universal outrage. It wouldn't have taken five years or more for this to have gotten to the national press. Pfizer would be the Enron of the pharma industry. But it didn't happen here. It happened in Africa, to poor black children in a country that most American schoolchildren wouldn't be able to find on a map (maybe most adults wouldn't be able to find it, either).

The West uses Africa as guinea pig in many ways, not only through pharmaceutical trials. Many development programs are also tests. I'm not sure what it is, what arrogance we have, that makes us think that it is ok to test our theories on the poor of Africa in ways that would never be acceptable here. Their deaths are such common news to us that we think of it as par for the course, and shrug off our part in the disaster.

We should be outraged with the behavior of Pfizer in Nigeria; not because they took advantage of poor, illiterate Africans, as the author of the article states, but because they took advantage of human beings. Of children.

Torture

Warning -- another long one. I wrote this in repsonse to a National Catholic Reporter article my Father-in-law sent asking whether the torturers aren't more of a threat to national security than the whistle-blower.

I think that the American ideal of America and the reality of America in the world are often, often purposefully, at odds. The ideal that this is a country devoted to freedom and the pursuit of dreams and excellence both here and abroad; that this is a country that acts as a benevolent hegemon to the other countries of the world without exacting a price for our benevolence; that we somehow uniquely represent the political, social, and economic apogee of human kind.

On the other hand, however, America is a country in a horrifyingly imperfect world, run by imperfect people with contradictory interests. On the surface, we value peace, prosperity, innovation, education, and diversity, but in practice, Americans elect leaders who are nationalistic, conservative (even the Democrats), unconcerned with poverty, and apt to play up ethnic, social, and religious differences for their own benefit. The American media and American educational system breed citizens with little or no concern for the world outside America, and thus create a hermetic seal around knowledge that even the Internet has been unable to break. I think that one could argue that the Internet has had a larger educational impact on the populations of less free nations than on the US, simply because our media and educational systems are so much more efficient at brainwashing citizens with ideas of inherent American superiority.

This reality of America provides and enabling environment for the atrocities to which you refer. As far as most Americans are concerned, the government can do what it needs to to "protect our way of life" (let's not even get into whether or not they ought to), as long as it doesn't a) interrupt daytime TV; b) contradict parochial pseudo-Christian values; or c) expect common citizens to get their hands dirty by participating in any way. This is the outcome of the media and educational system.

That leaves us with wealthy, well-educated, powerful men and women jockeying for position in a world of politicians and pundits. Of course, many of them are actually patriotic and honest, but even those have a warped view of their role as political leaders. There is no accountability mechanism in place to ensure that they actually help America reach toward the ideal. Who really cares about the ideal, apart from simply being able to hold it in one's head undisturbed? So, our political leaders take themselves and their need for power more and more seriously, and justify it with more and more conviction, using the ideal as cover.

But still, the question remains, how can men and women in the 21st century from a "civilized" country acquiesce to torture? I don't have an answer to that, other than that we aren't living in a civilized country. What civilized country in the world continues to impose the death penalty, even though it has been proven that innocents have been killed and that it might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment? What civilized country in the world consistently fails to come up with a serious plan for universal health coverage? What civilized country in the world blames poverty for the failure of education for the poor?

The torture doesn't surprise me at all, actually. We do not live in a civilized country. The only thing that we have left is a modicum of law and order in most places. Apart from that, the statistics on education, malnutrition, and health alone would make the US a prime candidate for development assistance.

So, is national security jeopardized more by those who torture than by those who shed light on it? Yes, definitely. But it is jeopardized most by those of us who can see the wrongs and don't get angry enough to act for change. Security is more than freedom from war. Peace is more than freedom from war. Peace is freedom from injustice. Those who at all turns threaten the justice of our society threaten national security in a way Saddam never could have.

Four Things

I've definitely got a hankering to post, and not much that I want to post about, so I'll take eninnej up on her "challenge".

Four jobs I've held:
- Short-order cook at the community pool snackbar. I still have pork roll.
- Lifeguard at the pool in the summer
- Student assistant at the U of Richmond computer lab. Learned a lot, did very little.
- Grad-school student librarian (my favorite job ever -- I will be a librarian for real in some future life)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
- The Princess Bride
- The Thomas Crown Affair (new one)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- Any Harry Potter movie

Four places I've lived:
- Aldan, PA
- Richmond, VA
- Cordoba, Argentina
- Nacaome, Honduras

Four TV shows I like:
- Gilmore Girls
- Charmed
- Crossing Jordan
- Scrubs

Four Family Vacations I've been on:
- Many summers at the beach in New Jersey -- they all run together
- Disney world when I was 8 and my brother was 5. We had a blast. I got sick in China at Epcot and my Dad lost his glasses and wallet and hat at Space Mountain even though they tell you before you get on to take them out and put them somewhere safe.
- A trip to Maine to visit my cousins that I don't remember but of which there are pictures, so it must have happened.
- I can't think of another. We were beach people. That was vacation.

Four of my favorite fast food dishes:
- Hoagies and cheese steaks from Phil and Jim's in Chester and PAT'S in South Philly (not Gino's, never Gino's)
- PB&J and chicken noodle soup at Panera
- kabobs
- Wafflee House waffles

Four sites I visit daily:
- Bloglines
- Slate.com
- Washington Post Crossword
- BBC News

Four places I would rather be right now:
- A clean, sparsely-populated beach with my knitting, music, and a book.
- Costa Rica
- Home in bed
Only three.

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off

I'm a little worried about this effort. On the surface, and from a Western perspective, this seems like a good solution to the digital divide. However, if you look at similar past programs, they have become seriously problematic. I'm thinking in particular of the early drive to bring mechanized agriculture to smallholders, resulting in rusting tractor carcases strewn about the developing world or sold on the black market; of the mosquito net distribution issue that resulted in black market use of the nets rather than home use to prevent malaria. Of course, having people purchase the computers will avert some of the potential value problems, but even at $50, they will be far out of the reach of those at the 'bottom of the pyramid'. Furthermore, who is going to service all those computers? I'm sure that Negroponte doesn't expect teachers and aid workers to become the help desk for all these devices, and they will break, many of them the first time they are used.

It seems to me that all this money would be better spent improving teaching skills and educational materials and infrastructure and access to education, especially for girls, rather than on a device of questionable value.

Can’t Get Ahead: a review of Barrett and Carter’s Article

On the whole, this article brings up very important points about the current climate in the development industry. The shift from development assistance to emergency relief is real. Inappropriate or ineffective targeting of beneficiaries is real. Structural poverty is real. However, Barrett and Carter miss a great opportunity to take this discussion to the next level.

It is certainly true that there is a cycle of poverty, vulnerability, and disaster that keeps people from improving their living conditions. This is evidenced by anecdotal evidence from the field, which notes that sometime we work with the exact same beneficiaries for more than a decade, with little discernable change in their quality of life, in spite of numerous small changes in behaviors or environment. This fact alone, however, does not mean that there is not enough money going to development assistance; given the fact that Barrett and Carter also criticize targeting for being ineffective, perhaps we should consider more efficient uses of the development funding that exists before investing more money into a system that demonstrably fails the poorest of the poor.

The authors state that there has been an overall shift from development assistance to emergency relief. They do not present much data to support this, but it is well-supported by both anecdotal evidence and shifting priorities with donors such as Food For Peace. However, food aid is not the only type of assistance, and it is the highest-value assistance. Other types of assistance have been changing, but not necessarily towards emergency relief. We have seen a move toward more high-value contracts, away from medium and small grants. We have also seen a move away from traditional development sectors (education, health, agriculture) toward democracy and governance, civil society, and economic development. This reflects reductions in funding at major USG donor agencies as well as disillusionment with traditional development interventions at the donor agencies. It is not clear whether this has resulted in improved or worsened return on investment, but it does not show a clear movement of cash resources toward emergencies.

There most certainly has not been a serious enough long-term investment in the development industry to determine whether or not development assistance makes a significant impact on global welfare. The decreasing amount of funding available for long-term development makes it increasingly less likely that we will be able to tell if interventions are working on a global scale. Just because an intervention appears to work at the local level within the period of measurement does not mean that it contributes to overall long term improvements in the human condition. If we want to know whether or not development assistance works, then we need to make a serious investment in it, and in honest and long-term monitoring and evaluation that reaches beyond the direct scope of the interventions in question to the indirect by-products, positive and negative.

On the other hand, the money that has gone to development work to date has not always been well-used. Empirical data, anecdotal evidence, and personal experience show that there are a number of inefficiencies in the development industry that would not be tolerated in the corporate world. Regulations on the use of US shippers and transportation for international shipping and travel raise the costs of getting food aid and human resources to developing countries unnecessarily. A lack of systematized organizational learning prevents development organizations from internalizing and implementing improvements to interventions, resulting in less effective programming being repeated.

The article cites the change in the percentage of PL480 resources that goes to emergencies and development projects, and claims that this contributes to the “vicious cycle in which reactive relief efforts further undermine already-fragile market and social institutions”. I agree that a too-heavy focus on emergency response relative to development activities with long-term security-enhancing results exacerbates poverty. However, the change in the proportions of PL480 can’t be evaluated without first asking whether food aid is even an effective means of doing development. There are enough good arguments against food aid as a tool for development that it merits further research. One problem, though probably not one of the greatest, that I see with emergency assistance is that you have Emergency People who work on Emergencies, and Development People who work on Development, and the two groups have more in conflict than in common. I think that we need to see our way to a more integrated, holistic approach to all poverty interventions, so that there is a smoothing of the transition to development.

The article states that the tying of aid to geo-political goals exacerbates the problems associated with an increased proportion of aid going to emergencies. It is true that the political aspects of development aid make it inherently less effective than it would be in a perfect world. However, the question remains, why should countries give development assistance if not to achieve geopolitical goals? Our shared constructs of nation, state, and government do not include motivation for or a mandate fro philanthropy or poverty alleviation abroad: if it is not demonstrably in the interest of the socially-constructed political entity, there is no motivation to do it. The only argument for nations engaging in international poverty reduction is that it is morally good. However, in the context of nations that have poverty and justice issues of their own internally, it is a hard sell to convince people that spending money abroad for a moral good is more important than spending it at home to make citizens better off. We can’t even prove that aid reduces anti-Americanism, thus improving national security, since many of the countries that have received the most assistance from us are the most intransigently anti-American.

Barrett and Carter state that “there is little evidence that [linking relief and development] works.” (36). This is supported by anecdotal evidence, but again, some of this is due to the disconnect between the planners of relief and development responses. It is true that the success of interventions, particularly emergency interventions, depends on a sound institutional and policy environment in recipient nations. However, on the other hand, nations with truly sound institutional and policy environments rarely are the largest recipients of emergency and development aid. Instead, the places where poverty is deepest are countries where corruption reigns, violence is endemic, and the separation between the rich and the poor is huge.

I agree with the authors that aid has not reached the intended beneficiaries effectively, and that there are better ways of doing things. However, under the current political climate and funding structure, it is very difficult to see how we could make the necessary changes in implementation. Implementing organizations know that people-centered holistic community development projects that work with and through successful local social entrepreneurs are the most successful. However, USAID and the other large donors fund large, multi-year, single-sector projects that do not take into consideration the collateral damage of the trendy intervention of the day, and frequently insist on out-dated and ineffective implementation strategies rather than innovative and responsive strategies. As long as governments are giving aid, it will be political. As long as it is political, it will be a market ruled by oligopsony, with USAID, WB, and the EU providing all the meaningful funding, and thus determining the type of product available.

My favorite point in the paper was that “The common denominator to these examples is that poor people respond to insecurity today in ways that compromise their capacity to build a better life tomorrow. Such behavior is rational.” This is 100% true, and if we do not incorporate a more refined sensibility about both transforming negative coping strategies and a fundamental respect for the rationale of people’s choices, we will continue to be a part of the problem. If people are engaging in negative coping strategies, then we need to ask them what they need to switch to positive coping strategies. We can’t just assume that they are only doing these things because they are stupid or don’t know better. Often, there is a lack of access or availability of information or resources that prevents them from coping in positive ways.

Expertise

I've been tagged by eninnej with the 5 resources meme. The mistress of procrastination and gender is asking me to 'fess up and choose an expertise, and then state which five resources, online or otherwise, I would give someone to introduce them to my field of expertise.

Well, I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, but more than anything else, my field of expertise is International Development Theory and Policy. So, without further ado, here are the recommended resources:

1. Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen. This book is a good introduction to modern thinking about poverty and development, written by a brilliant Indian economist. I don't agree with everything that he says, but I think that it is a good start to getting your mind around the key issues.

2. Food Aid after Fifty Years, Christopher Barrett and Daniel Maxwell. This book is a great introduction to food aid, including a relatively honest assessment of its pros and cons.

3. www.usaid.gov, the US Agency for International Development website. This is a good way to get an idea of how the US government does business in the development industry, and to learn what types of activities are supported in various regions.

4. Paul Krugman and his other site: My favorite economist. Well, second favorite after my father-in-law. This isn't technically International Development-related, but he does write about it once in a while, and his ideas are broadly applicable.

5. The Center for Global Development: a great website for learning about the issues facing the development industry today. You can learn about specific regions, policy issues, or technical progress. My personal favorite is the section on Aid Effectiveness.

So there -- it is done. Now I will tag two people: Grampa and Brother-in-law. I'd tag The Professor, but his blog is all serious and work-related.