Month: June 2007

Categories
odds and ends

Bleh

I feel like I’m mostly over my cold. All of my obvious symptoms like the running nose, sore throat, etc. have mostly gone away. Despite that, I feel completely drained, not just physically either. I woke up really late this morning with a wicked sinus headache and didn’t want to do anything, not even sleep. I cancelled class and of corse my headache went away 15 minutes later… I keep thinking that the next day I’ll be reenergized, but it’s just another bleah day. Here’s to hoping I feel better tomorrow…

Categories
Religion

Finished through Job

In my mind, Job is the first book in the Old Testament worth reading. The books before that don’t really engage the (Christian) reader with any sort of religious thought. It’s mostly just history and laws that don’t necessarily apply to you. I will say that Ezra was a relief. Up until that point, the books were written in such a way that God was a tangible, known quantity when He clearly wasn’t. They wrote the books with the idea of, “Look, there’s God and He’s doing X.” Well, if God’s motives and intentions were so transparent, most of what happened in the Old Testament wouldn’t have happened. It’s clear to me that all of the things that happened in Judges, the Samuels, both Kings, and both Chronicles were histories of things that happened and were later ascribed to God’s actions. God may or may not have been involved but it is clear to me that the authors of those books didn’t really have any idea. After all, if God were directly involved with everything that they wrote about you wouldn’t come away from those books with the idea that you better do what God says or else he’ll smite you… eventually. Or maybe the generation after you, or maybe not. In any case everything in those books are really important… if you’re the king of Israel.

Seriously, everything was about the kings, but what about all the people? Yes, they did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, but it sounds like there were entire generations, with their kings, that got away with it. I would hope to see a more consistent doling out of justice… This gets back to my question about the afterlife. All of what happened in those books would have been OK if there were some mention of people getting their just desserts after they died.

So yeah, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the Old Testament so far, but Job is different. Job is troubling, complicated, and I don’t quite understand it. There does seem to be some good information in there though and some really good questions. This was the third time I had read this particular book, and I think I’ll need to read it a few more times… Some of the more interesting tidbits for me are:

1) Satan is named and shown to be a real tormentor, but with God’s cooperation. God gives him permission to do these things to Job. Does that imply that all bad things are done with God’s permission?

2) Job calls out for an intermediary between him and God. This would seem to put the Catholic practice of praying to Mary or any one of the myriad saints into question. After all, no one in the Old Testament was shown to be praying to Abraham or Moses for intervention. Maybe it’s just a time issue, maybe God hadn’t gotten around to implementing that yet. I have a feeling that some people will see this as foretelling the coming of Jesus. The only problem with that is that if Jesus is God, how is He an intermediary?

Anyway, Job made me think and that’s a good thing. I hope there’s more like Job to come!

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Yemen

It was going to happen eventually…

Well, just like I said, I went home from the internet and lied down. I woke up 4 hours later feeling pretty good but really hungry. Hungry as in “If I don’t get food in me I’m going to pass out.” I decided to go down to the Indian place. Took one bus and decided to hike the rest of the way instead of taking another bus.

The houses here are all flat roofed and there are drains at various intervals around the wall of the roof. They use pipes to shoot the water out away from the house. Whenever I dump my laundry water out I always hope that I don’t hit anyone… Well, you guessed it, somebody got me. On the way to the restaurant I got a big splash of “water” right on top of my head and shoulders, it was a perfect hit. God only knows what it actually was, I don’t want to know. All I knew was that it didn’t smell (Il Hamdillila) and I was dying of hunger. I went to the restaurant with a wet head and shoulders. I doubt that it was deliberate, you would have to time things pretty well from behind a wall. In any case, I made sure to scrub myself really well last night…

Categories
odds and ends

Stoned out of my mind…

I took some cold medicine before class to help me get through it. I was a little pissed that it didn’t kick in till the end. Now I’m glad it didn’t. I forgot the typical side effect that cold medicine has on me, getting me high as a kite. Seriously, I’m floating and unable to concentrate on much of anything, maybe I’ll just go home and lie down… Thank God my computer automatically checks my spelling, typing this was a chore…

Categories
Arabic

I was a bit off…

… about the book that I bought. I had thought that it had something to do with Syria and religion. Well, after some quality time with a dictionary, I decided that it was a book about prosecuting the Bahai. Score! This would fit right into my current Old Testament mind frame… I took it to my teacher and he informed me that it was a biography of Slahaldeen. Yes, I got it completely wrong, but to be fair, it was his name that was throwing me off. I’m still not up to speed on Arabic names. I do OK with the “servant of…” names. It’s abd followed by one of the 99 names of God. Abdulla and the like… Many many Arabic names are simply Arabic words. Jameel (or the feminine version Jameela) is a name, it also means “beautiful.” “Justice,” “red,” “flower,” and even “pigeon,” (no I’m not kidding) are both words and names. So when I was translating the title of the book, the first word meant “to judge or prosecute,” the second word (deen) means “religion”, and the third word is very very close, but is not the word for Bahai. When you have two regular words back to back, I don’t anticipate them being names.

Anyway, the first sentence, roughly translated is, “Praise be to God Who brings (brought?) peace upon us and guides (guided?) us with His right hand to the best way (or method literally). That’s as far as I got when I brought it home. I was going to do some more last night, but the power went out. I’m too tired tonight to do any more Arabic. It reads in what I have come to believe is the typical formal Arab style. It’s really stuffy and I think a bit full of itself. There is what any typical English speaker would consider a lot of redundency. “John he was in love with her Sarah,” is typical. Pronouns are stuck in every which way. Usually, they aren’t mandatory, but they do lend emphasis. Sometimes some sort of grammar rule dictates that a pronoun has to be there, and pronouns are put in some places as well due to grammar rules even when they don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence. This is one of the reasons I think that translated Arabic sounds so haughty. It’s partly because it is, but the grammar forces you to write in a certain style. I find it redundant and a bit opaque at times. For example, today in class I read a sentence that literally translated says, “You will not find the people that pollute there.” I thought that the meaning was pretty straightforward, there is pollution but you won’t find the people that did it. I was told that it actually means that there is no pollution. I asked why the words “find the ones who pollute” was negated and not finding pollution, but I never got a good answer. I gave him a few other ways of making the sentence clearer, at least to me. He agreed that they said the same thing. I said, no, they don’t, I negate the pollution, not the finding the people that did it. He wasn’t convinced, and since he’s the native speaker I guess I should defer to his judgement, but the style hides meaning I think. Unfortunately, it’s the style that I’ve got to work with….

Turns out I have a cold, that’s why I’m so tired. I don’t feel too bad, but my nose is running like crazy and I’m really tired. Class was a chore today. The only reason I went was because I went to bed early and felt decent this morning. I went downhill pretty fast during class and was having trouble remembering anything. I’ll try to learn what we went over today tomorrow morning, mostly vocab. With any luck I will have shaken this thing by tomorrow…

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Religion

Doing a little internet research

There were a few terms I kept running into during my reading of the Old Testament that I wanted to know more about. First up was Baal. Turns out there were a bunch of Baals, it was also a term for “father,” “lord,” or “master.” He was your typical fertility, crop, good weather god for the most part. Some people worked in human sacrifice, probably from the cult of Molech. How’s this for creepy, there was a huge bronze statue of Molech that was hollow. They would keep a fire burning in it, making the statue glow a dull red. People would place their first born son or daughter in its hands and through an ingenious mechanism, the hands would move up and drop the child into its mouth where the baby would drop inside and burn to death… The priests would dance around and cut themselves while this was going on and there would be musicians playing flutes, harps, and tambourines to drown out the screams. Can’t say as I’m sorry to see that cult fade away…

I made the mistake of looking up “temple prostitutes” on the web. I had seen this term a couple of times and didn’t really know what it meant. Well, it turns out that various cults used sex as part of their services. It was to call the divine power, bring good luck, etc. There were both male and female shrine prostitutes and there is little or no evidence that they had sex with the same sex. Well, this has caused considerable outrage among the more wacko, gays are evil incarnate crowd. Apparently, the term shrine or temple prostitute replaced “sodomite” that was used in the original King James version of the Bible. People are outraged that any reference that paints gays in a negative light be changed, accuracy be damned. Granted, I don’t have the background to argue this from first hand sources, but from what I can tell, the term shrine prostitute is a more accurate translation and it is MUCH more specific as to what is being disallowed. The anti-gay folks should just relax, there are still plenty of references of man on man sex as being forbidden and/or shown in a negative light. The whole incident with Lot and the angels in Sodom, God’s judgement on Sodom and Gomorra, there’s a part in Leviticus that explicitly states that sex between men is forbidden (or is anathema to the Lord or some other language like that). If there really was a plot to make homosexuality look “more acceptable” in the Bible, those last things would be the things getting revised, not a correction of sloppy translation of a vague term.

i really get a kick out of people getting all in a lather because a verse in a Bible is not how they learned it, inevitably from the King James version. They say you can’t alter the “word of God” and that it is blasphemy. How can people be so thick to miss the fact that they are reading a translation? And the texts that the translators are working from aren’t from anywhere near the time of those things happening. Especially when it comes to the Old Testament, who knows how many times those books were revised, edited, or just “neatened up” in order to clarify things. There is no way to know what was originally written. To me, this is a good thing. How can anyone, with a straight face, tell me that God’s will can be explicitly stated with something as clumsy as language, especially through so many translations. Anything, yes anything, that God “says” will be considerably simplified and yes, mangled when put into one of our languages. We can only receive or understand a small portion of “The Truth.” Get over it people…

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Yemen

Power outage and global warming

Yemen has a shortage of electricity generation. People demand more power than can be generated by the current facilities. So we have blackouts, seemingly more common these days. How’s this for a laugh, the government wants to pursue nuclear power plants in order to take care of the problem! OMG, even I am scared about that. One look at the infrastructure around the country should be all that it takes to rule that out. There is no way that I would trust this government’s ability to protect against a catastrophic failure… It doesn’t matter, no one world wide will want this to happen and Yemen doesn’t have the wherewithal to fight like Iran is doing. I’m pretty sure that they’ll manage to extort some money out of donor nations as an alternative to nuclear.

This brings up another point. People that want to “fight” global warming need to come up with some sort of alternative energy source. Nuclear would certainly solve the CO2 issue, but there are other complications, especially with governments and situations like Yemen’s. Yemen will most likely install several new oil burning power plants. other nations might go with coal instead. In either case, more CO2 is the result. What is the alternative to these power sources for developing countries? I don’t actually know what the alternatives are, but something will have to come up if these places are to keep improving AND for CO2 emissions to drop. One thing is for sure, these places need electricity, and more of it in the future…

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Arabic

Well, I guess I’ll go to bed

I had planned on doing some reading tonight. Either some more in the Bible, or my new Arabic book. The book in Arabic is a kid’s book, and it has something to do with religion in Syria… I think. I have decided that I need an independent reading project. Hopefully it will be interesting as well as useful to my Arabic. The first sentence is “God be praised.” Should be interesting, one way or the other.. I took a quick look at the first page to judge the level. I think it’ll be all right, I recognized 6 or 7 words out of 10. I either knew them or used to know them… I don’t think the grammar will be too much of a problem, but we’ll see. Like I said, I was planning on reading from one or both of those books tonight, but the power has gone out. Guess I’ll put sheets on the bed and go to sleep, nothing else to do…

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Yemen

Just to give you an idea…

… of how visitors are treated here, something interesting happened to me tonight. I went to a juice stand to get some chips and a strawberry juice. The clerk was distracted, with this back to me. I said, “Slaam aly koom” to him rather loudly, but he didn’t notice. Another man in the place started yelling at the clerk and really gave him hell. The literal meaning of the greeting “Salaam aly koom” is peace be upon you. The response is, “wa ally koom salaam” which is and peace upon you. It’s an automatic thing, when you say one, the other person says the other. Well, if you don’t give the appropriate response it is considered quite an insult. This other guy was quite upset that the clerk had “done” this to me and gave the clerk an earful. The kid looked pretty sheepish as he apologized to me… Anyway, people take hospitality quite seriously here…

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Economics

More on inflation in Yemen

There was recently a meeting (seems like all they do here is have meetings) discussing the rising prices here in Yemen, especially food. The government took a lot of heat, but they managed to sidestep the main things that the government is doing. As Milton Freidman once famously said, “Inflation everywhere is always a monetary phenomena.” What this means is that if everything goes up by 20% (to pick a number), it is because more money was added to the national money supply. The central bank does this through open market operations (in the US this is done by the fed buying and selling Tbills, This also affects the bond market and interest rates as well. I don’t know if there is an equivalent vehicle in Yemen.) Typically, the devaluation of the currency (i.e. inflation)in a big way is done to engage in seniorage. That is the act of deflating the currency deliberately in order to pay back debts. If the government takes out a loan of a million dollars in the form of Tbills, it is very tempting to inflate everything in order to pay for it. In simple terms, the government just prints enough money to pay for it. Of course the more money that is in the system, the less any particular dollar is worth. Some people accuse China of doing this in order to keep their goods “cheap” on the international scene. If they are it is quite misguided. Devaluing your currency has some pretty bad effects on the people living in that country, living with inflation is never a good thing…

There is general inflation going on in Yemen, and the central bank is to blame. Nobody seems to have mentioned that though. Most of the criticism came in the great, “Why doesn’t the government do something?” The government is doing something… it just isn’t what you like. If this keeps up, I expect jobs to start offering to pay in US dollars, UAE dirhams, or Euros instead of Riayls.

Most of the clamor is over food prices. People claim that food has risen faster than the general level of inflation. People were clamoring for the government to keep watch on the private sector who is pricing things at supposedly unconscionable rates knowing that Yemenis will pay “whatever the cost” for food. That last part is forgivable but still makes me shake my head. If people are willing to pay anything, why aren’t kabobs 1,000,000 dollars a piece? People aren’t willing to pay anything, but they are willing to pay the prices that are currently offered. Participants in the meeting claim that the private sector is what needs to be watched since, and this is a quote, “There are only a handful of people that control the importation of food and they control the prices.” AHA! I was right! There are only a handful of possible reasons for this. The first is that the companies are charging the competitive rate and prices will not fall unless the price of the supply drops. No one thinks that this is the case. Another possibility is that there is some sort of barrier to companies that want to compete in this market. Competition, especially from a foreign company, would cause prices to fall. The barrier would have to be made by the government. There isn’t a business out there that can stop a competitor from opening unless they have bought protection from the government. If these companies have indeed raised their prices faster than the rate of inflation (and thereby boosting their bottom line), that is a very good business opportunity for someone else. Something is preventing those competitors from coming in and the government has it’s fingerprints all over it. I do wish that basic econ was taught in schools…

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