The Defining Song: Norway Edition

Every trip abroad has a defining song that everyone there knows but no one back home knows. This is the Europe 2009 song that I hear everywhere. The song is "Fairytale" by Alexander Rybak and was this year's winner of the EuroVision song contest (which launched the careers of ABBA amongst others.) It's actually pretty good, and in English, no less. Norway is very proud.

Germany is Delightful and ...

At this point, deeply confusing. Unlike Steve, my purpose here is not to study the language, rather to prepare some papers and other work for graduate school. One of my German friends told me that I could get by without learning German and I simply do not think this is true! Everyone speaks quickly and, unlike Spanish, I cannot even follow a few words of what they are saying. I usually feel like a kid sitting in a Charlie Brown classroom.

In any case, since I am working, I will often only post photos. See my Germany and Europe 2009 and German Beer photostreams on Flickr, which I will update as often as I can.

Meanwhile, Germany is...

...at times, somewhat cute. This band was playing traditional music and the whole crowd was swinging and waving beer glasses.


...fattening. This was my birthday dinner at a little biergarten near our house. It was, of course, ridiculously delicious. Two kinds of wurst dishes.


...beautiful. Seeing Ode to Joy performed at the Brandenburg Gate on the 60th Anniversary of the German Republic pretty much blew my mind. I wasn't the only one - there were people in the audience with tears in their eyes. Also, the performance, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, was incredible.


Click here for more photos from last Saturday, the 60th Anniversary Festival.

Kaitenzushi Camera

This video is just mesmerizing... It also makes me hungry:

Spending Money in a Recession & Teaching How to Fish

I have to try to avoid preachiness if at all possible, because I recently bought a nice watch (I haven't worn one in at least seven years, as Steve pointed out) and a silly but warm rabbit fur neck warmer. Maybe five years ago I would have bought five rabbit fur neck warmers, but the point remains that I am guilty of buying things I don't really need. Even now.

But if this recession is truly going to be global, it will have a far more detrimental impact on the poorest people in the world. Like, deadly detrimental. So, after my rabbit fur neck warmer splurge, I started to feel guilty and started thinking about better uses of my limited grad student funds.

Then I heard about Kiva, a nonprofit that facilitates micro-lending (very small loans to very poor people to promote entrepreneurship) by breaking these loans into even smaller amounts (like $25) that relatively wealthier lenders can pay with their credit cards, just like at the store. On the other end, they work with established local NGOs which have experience setting up and administering these loans.

I think this is a brilliant business model for many reasons. First, it taps into the power of small amounts of money from many people. Second, it directly connects these lenders to the people who are building their businesses on the other side of the world, with the handy power of the internet. Perhaps best of all, you get your money back! It's a loan, not a donation, and it uses the traditional conservative calls of supply side and lasseiz faire economics for a truly good social purpose. (Take that!)

Anyway, for less than the cost of my neck warmer, I was able to help out a group of women in Zanzibar, Tanzania who are expanding their business in tailoring and painting. I get regular updates and information about the loan and their progress. Of course, my interest in Tanzania is now piqued, too. I wonder if I can visit someday? I wonder what the food is like there? (Usually my main consideration for travel.)

I put a link up to the left on this blog and strongly encourage everyone to take a look - there are many compelling stories and many interesting people from around the world who are working on the capitalist dream.

Khadija Rajab Group (click here to read about their business)

President Obama

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend the inauguration of President Obama in Washington, DC. It was a cold, happy day, and I took many photos which can be seen in my Flickr photoset here:


However, my all-time favorite Obama photo is this:

Ann Arbor -11.2 °F, Santa Monica 47.3 °F

Today is insanely, bitterly cold. This is why I live right downtown, 2 blocks from school. My mad bomber hat and LL Bean coat (both purchased in 1994, mind you) do protect me sufficiently, but any part that is uncovered suffers a little when I go outside.

Actually, 47 degrees in pretty chilly for Santa Monica, too, but it is 6 am there and I am sure it will warm up nicely by midday. When I was home over break, I realized that my relationship with LA had evolved from hate to love/hate. Today, the palm trees, strip malls, weird Bluetooth-headset-and-BMW people, taco trucks, and most of all WARMTH beckon with love.

I have to be at school for a few hours this afternoon, but I plan to stay in my apartment the rest of the day and night.

No more pencils, No more books... Oh Wait

Yes, I am back in school in the cold of Michigan. Which means, barring something really exciting happening in Argentina, my posts here will go way down in tandem with the number of interesting things I have to write about.

However, I have decided to start a strictly academic blog. I follow a number of blogs in my fields of international relations, security, and quantitative methods (yes, they are all quite interesting.) While this blog originated as a method of keeping my family informed of my whereabouts when traveling in India, it has turned into a more personal general account of whatever I am up to. Which, I admit, is not terribly interesting.

The academic blog is a different endeavor. Its purpose is not personal at all, rather a way for me to test out my developing ideas and force myself to stick to a strict schedule of thoughtful, if brief, academic writing. My friends who have been through grad school have told me that writing for one hour per day should be my goal, and this seems very difficult. My current plan is to have one post per week (my deadline is programmed into my Palm), although the really good blogs post almost daily.

I chose the name Pax Bellona in reference to my field of international security studies. Bellona is the Roman goddess of war, and is intended to be a contradiction to Pax, a reference to commonly-used IR term such as Pax Americana, and a reference to my gender, which is relatively rare in the field of international security. I thought it was pretty clever - Steve seemed less impressed.

If you are interested in following it, here is the link:

http://paxbellona.blogspot.com

Another Installment of Seen in Santa Monica

I am back in Santa Monica for the holidays and once again encountering the usual neighborhood oddities. Steve and I were walking to the grocery store and, when we came back, found an adorable pit bull behind the wheel of an old truck. Go figure, LA is weird in many ways.

Campbell Brown is my New Hero... So is Janet Napolitano

This CNN story by Campbell Brown pretty much captures how I am feeling today. And that feeling is very ticked off. One of my favorite quotes ever from Donald Rumsfeld (yes, him) captures my general sense of frustration well:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

What Campbell is referring to, is, of course, the unknown unknowns subtly implied by the statement that "not having a family" is what makes Governor Napolitano especially well-suited for the job of DHS Secretary. Specifically, would she be such a good choice is she DID have children? Are current Secretary Chertoff's children some sort of hindrance to his job performance? What do the people I work with and for think of me, a married woman of childbearing age, before I even present my work for criticism on its merits? I have no idea. Unknown unknown.

Homeland security is not a field highly populated by women. I have been lucky to have several mentors, both male and female, who have been enormously encouraging of my work at every step of my career to far. So when I see stories like this and start to feel dark, I think of my mentors and a few of my own personal feminist heroes:

Margaret Thatcher: The only female prime minister of England. Ever. She rose through the ranks of the Conservative party while raising twins, who were still in school when she entered office. If anyone ever trots out the lame argument about how leaders from conservative Muslim countries won't deal with a female President, show them this. Brilliant, tough as nails, probably my #1 feminist hero. And she did it in a skirt, also my preferred formal dress.

Queen Elizabeth I: She avoided multiple murder attempts, carried out a long-term defensive foreign policy which helped England prosper during difficult times for Europe, and eventually become one of the most powerful English leaders of all time, despite being declared a bastard after her mother was killed. What else is there to say?

Governor Granholm: The first female Attorney General and Governor of Michigan. Yes, I am biased. But I know firsthand how hard she works. In the first primary campaign, when her support staff was substantially smaller than it is now, she would be on her best game (meetings, photo ops, phone calls, legal work, etc.) for sometimes 12 hours a day, every single day. I was exhausted myself, and, unlike her, didn't have young children to come home to who also needed my attention. She is one of the hardest working and smartest people I have ever met. Because I saw her work personally, she set the standard that I try to hold myself to. It is very high, and I rarely reach it. But it is possible, and stupid assumptions like those pointed out by Campbell's story preclude that possibility. Maybe for me, probably for other women, always to the detriment of the greater good. Exclusion of capable women leaves fewer people left to solve social and scientific problems, and the result will always be inferior. The preference for aggregate inferiority, as indicated in that story, continues to leave me both puzzled and angry.

Tragedy in Mumbai

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for pointing out that you can follow the must current (to the minute) updates on the situation in Mumbai via this Twitter feed.

The ongoing series of attacks in Mumbai is shocking, and I have been watching CNN closely for more news. As the terrorists are apparently targeting locations frequented by Westerners, it is no surprise that we visited a number of places that are or were under attack.

At the time we visited, there was some vague terrorist threat against Goa, which we discounted because we stayed in the remote and unpopulated south instead of the luxurious, hotel-studded north. We never felt in danger during our visit. But it did strike me as a vulnerable place for a number of reasons. First, ethnic and political tensions are still very strong, fundamentally related to the 1947 partitioning of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Terrorist attacks still occur throughout the country, although they are less frequently reported in the Western press. Second, Mumbai is densely populated, almost to the point where it is impossible to police the entire city. Perhaps the attackers prepared, unnoticed, somewhere in the massive slums which are all over. Third, India strikes me as a fundamentally unsecure country, as I noted in 2006. When my plane first landed in Delhi, I found it somewhat unsettling that numerous people dressed in civilian clothes with no noticeable identification were present on the tarmac. It was not clear what they were doing (I would guess scavenging), and when our plane stopped, they appeared to try to hide what they were doing. Despite the presence of armed soldiers inside the airport facilities, I felt that both the domestic and international air systems were vulnerable for this reason.

Mumbai bookended our trip, and at the beginning we went to Cafe Leopold's.

Near the end, we had a beautiful formal tea in the Taj Hotel, one of the two hotels where tourists were taken hostage. (Justin's photo.)



Of course, I hope to go back to India. The country is huge and we only had time to visit the north. The south is also supposed to be amazing, with more wildlife and potentially fantastic food (so I hear.) But, with Pakistan already being fingered as a suspect, I fear that, in the short term, things will get worse for the people in both countries.

A complete list of attack sites

Not for the Squeamish

The weekend before last was one of my favorite of the year: the opening of firearms season for deer in Minnesota, better known as "Deer Weekend." While the idea of deer hunting (paying hundreds of dollars to silently sit alone and motionless in a tree in potentially freezing weather) holds no appeal for me, I love the coming together of friends and family which has been occurring around this event for my entire life. In fact, the males in my paternal family have been hunting in this same area of Minnesota for approximately 125 years. This is a photo of my grandfather taken almost 70 years ago probably not more than 30 miles from our current place. My father was back last weekend and said that the deer were almost nowhere to be found. This may have something to do with the five timberwolves observed across the river. Five timberwolves! I really want to go back...








Yes, he's dead


High-tech: Game cameras and gut piles


Somebody's warming up inside


Calvin in Cali's chair

"No Duh" CNN Headline of the Day

Americans OK with Democrats in charge, poll suggests

Obviously. Must be a slow news day.

Happy Veteran’s Day

I didn’t used to give much thought to Veteran’s Day before I started working at the National Guard, and I didn’t realize until today that this is a commemoration of the end of WWI. How sad. My great-grandfather was one of many people who was overwhelmed with anguish about the suffering caused by the Great War, which partially contributed to his untimely death. I guess I never knew why.

One of the unexpected components of my political science training has been learning much more about WWI. For some reason, this was not a large part of my public education. As I sheepishly explained to another professor, what I learned was basically, “Franz Ferdinand was shot, things were bad in Europe, and our boys went over there to save the day.” As I finally learn about this defining event in Western civilization, I feel I might understand a little more of what drove my great-grandfather to despair. Over 20 million people were killed. Russia alone lost 1.7 million soldiers. The scale of death was simply beyond comprehension.

My academic interests are in the field of international security studies, or more generally, the study of violent conflict. I try to remain objective and agnostic about these things. Academia is a particularly good place to take this approach, consumed as we are with theories, proofs and data. For example, I just drafted a short paper hypothesizing that countries which sign Prisoner of War treaties may be unexpectedly more likely to go to war with each other. There exists an interesting dataset which, with some modification, might answer this question. I don't know the answer, it could be either way or inconclusive. For better or worse, I am able to ask these questions with relative detachment.

I made sure today to think of my grandfathers (two of whom are now deceased) who served in WWII. I took down the US flag which sits atop of my bookshelf, and reread the 2003 letter tucked inside from a Marine serving in Iraq to whom I had sent a care package. In addition to the flag, which was flown over Iraq, he also sent me a CD of his photos, a few of which you see here.

Today, I will try to express my gratitude to my teacher, family, former colleagues and friends who have served or are serving in the Armed Forces. It is not easy to say thank you without echoing the superficial platitudes of politicians or television ads. But I think it is much more difficult to give up your daily freedoms and possibly your life to serve in uniform, whether or not you ever see combat. I have never done it, but I am grateful to those who do.

Thank you.

This is why I read Haaretz

I have a whole page in my RSS reader dedicated to international newspapers and try to peek at it every day. Even a quick scan of the headlines provides insight into what us considered important in the rest of the world. Of course, I am perpetually interested in news from Colombia, Argentina, Spain and Japan. But, in the interest of a broader international view, I also read up on Russia, Hong Kong, England, and India, among others.

And Israel, which is where I found this gem. For some reason, this comment did not make the morning news in Michigan.

"Joe the Plumber: A vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel"