:: A Stranger In A Strange Land ::

:: Monday, March 03, 2003 ::

Administrative Note

The switch is complete and the subdomain name is finally resolving to the right place. My blog is now placed at jeffrey.theutechs.com/blog. Please set your bookmarks and blogrolls accordingly.

I'm not planning on erasing this account, I'm just not going to post over here anymore. I hope to have my archives moved over to my MT blog by next week sometime.
:: Jeffrey Utech 8:19 AM [+] ::
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Friday Five

1. What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)? I don't really have a favorite media per se. We get a ton of magazines ranging from Playboy to National Review and pretty much everything in between. We also read newspapers on the weekend, and I read a ton online. As for what my favoriate genre of book is, I would have to say I really appreciate biographies and non-fiction. I like fiction, but I feel like I learn more and appreciate the material of non-fiction much more.

2. What is your favorite novel? Hm. That's a good question. I really liked The World According To Garp. That's probably my favorite.

3. Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!) *ahem* There once was a man from nantucket...I mean...I don't have a favorite poem.

4. What is one thing you've always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read? My current book backlog is seven long. I have been tearing through books this year, but it's still a long backlog. Once I get through that there is a ton of stuff on Katie's book backlog that I want to read. Maybe then I can consider something new.

5. What are you currently reading? Take On The Street by former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt. Although I'm almost done with that. Once I am I'll probably crack open Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke, which was a happy Friday present from my wonderful wife. I have read a lot of O'Rourke's stuff, I think he's brilliant.
:: Jeffrey Utech 1:17 PM [+] ::
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Clinton To Speak At UI

I have a lot I want to say about the Iraqi agreement to destroy their medium-range missiles, but it's end of month here at the old workplace, which tends to bog me down with work. I will get to it if I have time, but in the meantime I have this thought:

Yesterday the University of Iowa made it official: Bill Clinton will speak at Carver Hawkeye Arena on March 26. He waived a large part of his usual $125,000 honorarium to deliver the speech on Global Security to UI students, faculty and members of the Eastern Iowa society at large. There are 11,000 tickets available, and Katie and I are hoping upon hope to secure two of them.

As regular readers know, I'm pretty conservative. That said, former presidents tend to be some of the most brilliant, well-read, intelligent and engaging people in the world, independent of their political views. Clinton is certainly no exception. His penchant for, er, marital tomfoolery notwithstanding, he is widely written about as having an immense curiosity. People close to him often said his greatest strength as president was his interest in learning about everything possible. He was, and is, an information sponge.

My feeling is that any time you have the opportunity to be in the same room with someone so intelligent and engaging, without an effort to do so, you are failing yourself. Hopefully our effort will bear fruit.
:: Jeffrey Utech 8:52 AM [+] ::
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Afghani Nation Building Cautiously Successful

I know I have been remiss in blogging over the last two days, just dropping in the occasional random thought or philosophical note. Katie and I have been dedicating some of our free time to learning how to use a webserver. Both of us are pretty technologically un-savvy, me more than she, but we're kind of muddling through the whole thing together. For the time being we have a basic splash page up at theutechs.com. It's nothing much and won't be updated for a while. Also, for the time being I have established a blog here. I will post on blogger and MT today and tomorrow, but starting Monday I think i'm going to move completely to my MT site. Please don't set your bookmarks just yet, I may still mess around with the directories before I make everything final. So if you can't find my blog, please check here first.

I recognize that most of what I've been putting up here has been lacking meat, so let me provide this thought:

Yesterday Afghani president Hamid Karzai spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations committee and, despite urging to the contrary, delivered a positive assessment of American nation-building efforts in his country. Specifically, he detailed the rapid improvements being made by the government in the areas of national security and human rights. Many are skeptical, quoting reports from NGOs stating that things are still bad. Mr. Karzai countered by saying that as bad as things may be, they're better than they were.

In today's meeting with President Bush, Mr. Karzai asked that America "do more for us in making the life of the Afghan people better, more stable, more peaceful." He said that things are better than Americans are reading in the papers, but that America can't forget about Afghanistan should it go to war in Iraq. If we do we would be repeating the tragedies of the past, hinting at when America fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 70's and 80's. When the Soviets withdrew the Americans did also, allowing the country to fall to Islamic fundamentalists. We all know what happened after that.

The point is that nation building works. When the Allied forces presided over post-war Germany and post-war Japan, rebuilding the factories and shops and streets destroyed by our bombs a few months earlier, Germany and Japan prospered in the long term, growing to the third and fourth largest economies in the world. Although it's a slow process, it's evidently working in Afghanistan, a nation short on social history and natural resources and long on problems.

Nation building can work in Iraq. Iraq is located in what used to be the "cradle of civilization", Mesopotamia. As such, they have cultural history that dates back thousands of years. Further, they have natural resources, and not just oil. They have water. In the Middle East, that's important. And they have a developed technology infrastructure. All of those things combined set up antebellum Iraq to look much the way that post-war Germany and Japan looked, war-torn but bright for the future. Liberated Iraq has the potential to thrive in the hands of an Allied-nurtured democratic government. So not only is an Iraqi regime change good for the world, it's good for Iraq also.
:: Jeffrey Utech 2:58 PM [+] ::
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Administrative Note

Last weekend Katie and I purchased space on a webserver and registered the name theutechs.com. We are currently working on transferring our blogs to a different URL that will run on MovableType in the hopes that by doing so we can have:

1.) cooler looking blogs
2.) no banner ads at the top of our blogs
3.) comments that aren't fickle, that is, they don't come and go

It looks like we have found all of those things in Movable Type. Anyway, just wanted to announce that we will be moving everything shortly and hope that you join us on our own page. We will provide the URL once the templates meet our personal satisfaction. Stay tuned.....

UPDATE: It looks like Monday is the likely launch date. It depends on just a couple server issues, and on whether or not I can find an acceptable stock template for my blog until I can build my own. But it looks like Monday is the day.
:: Jeffrey Utech 12:10 PM [+] ::
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From The "Vote Early, Vote Often" Department

Last night Richard M. Daley was elected to his fifth term as Mayor of the City of Chicago. Mayor Daley won 78.5% of the total vote, including 94% of the vote among dead people.

That joke just never gets old.
:: Jeffrey Utech 9:40 AM [+] ::
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Friendship Bridges The Gaps Of Disagreement

I got home from work last night and had not stepped twice in my house when my wife announced that "we had friends and those friends have plans for us tonight." Those plans were to watch last night's Iowa victory over Ohio State at Old Chicago with said friends. After the game was over we sat and chatted for a while. The conversation started with a debate over whether or not college athletes should be paid. We all agreed they should not. But in my ever-loving stupidity, I remembered some of the brief research I did for a post I made just last week, and brought up some of the rebutting arguments about the revenue that collegiate athletics generates, and how student-athletes aren't permitted to enjoy any of that.

We still agreed that student-athletes are getting reimbursed for their performance in the form of education that could be worth as much as $150,000 in cash value to the student-athlete, and far more than that in earned income for the student-athlete that doesn't end up going pro. The next topic at hand was parity in collegiate athletics, and whether coaching salaries should be capped to improve parity. That led to the purpose of collegiate athletics to academic institutions and whether the two should even be tied anyway (at my alma mater, they are not, they are run on separate budgets completely).

None of this is germane to the point of my post. It's just background. Regardless, the conversation got heated, I felt that I was being patronized, and feelings were hurt a little bit. My friend apologized for hurting my feelings without apologizing for his views. I can appreciate that, but he was really worried that I our relationship was damaged slightly. This leads me to the point of this post.

Relationships, to me, are independent of time and distance, independent of harsh words or of difficult times. There are a number of friends with whom I may go months and months without talking to, but when we get together nothing has changed. The reason is that the love that is fundamental in those friendships doesn't change. Similarly, there are old friends with whom things have gone sour. We don't talk anymore, we haven't in probably five years. But I don't harbor resentment or anger for those people. Even though I don't keep contact and don't plan to, I pray that there is peace, happiness and prosperity in their lives.

This is an obvious extension of my personal philosophy, much of which I have been posting on in recent weeks. But it's important that my friends, a number of whom read this, understand that even if I haven't seen them in months, or years, I still love them very much. And especially to that friend with whom I argued last night, we've been friends for ten years. Forty minutes of drunk, tired, meaningless arguing can't undermine that.
:: Jeffrey Utech 9:12 AM [+] ::
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Kill Death Anthrax Overthrow Revolution Iraq Osama

I know, I should be careful using all of those words together. Next thing you know, I could find my phone tapped. Like these people did.

There is currently a case being heard in US District Court in Portland over five American Islam converts who were arrested and accused of attempting to travel to Afghanistan to fight against American forces. The first thing which is interesting and noteworthy about the case is that the defendants never actually fought Americans, they never even made it to Afghanistan. They got as far as China and came back to America.

Second, the evidence obtained by the Justice Department includes recordings of phone conversations and other evidence gotten under the USA Patriot Act. The Act is a post-September 11 declaration giving the FBI greater latitude in securing secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on American citizens without probable cause. The case, which is expected to be appealed by the losing side as far as the Supreme Court, will ultimately determine the constitutionality of those warrants and the accompanying wire taps and intelligence gathering as viable tools in the war on terrorism.

As we've been forced to face, especially since September 11, there exists a balance that Americans must be willing to accept between sacrificed civil liberty and protection from domestic and foreign anti-American threats. It's why I have to open up my suitcases in the middle of O'Hare on a busy Monday morning and why Katie has her bra underwires confirmed by a TSA agent because they set off a metal detector. Some of the sacrifice is silly, some of it is necessary, and determining the difference is the burden we must bear these days. As Aaron Brown says, it's the "new normal".

My opinion: terrorism will happen regardless of precaution. People are still slipping bad stuff onto airplanes. Trucks still drive in front of important buildings (Empire State, Sears Tower, etc.). And if last week's fire on a South Korean subway was any indication, even non-terrorists can strike fear in a country through it's public transportation. So if we recognize the fact that the battle to protect ourselves is relatively futile, we should be certain to err on the side of the foundation of our country, on the side of freedom and repeal the USA Patriot Act.
:: Jeffrey Utech 9:40 AM [+] ::
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Bush Misunderestimated By Hussein

When I told a co-worker about the CBS report of Saddam Hussein wanting to challenge President Bush to a live international television and radio debate, she was waiting for the punchline. Evidently Dan Rather was too, since his response was to ask the Iraqi dictator-cum-president whether he was joking. Hussein's response was, get this:

This is something proposed in earnest, out of my respect for the people of the United States and my respect for the people of Iraq and the people of the world. I call for this because war is not a joke.

Would these be the same people of the United States that are both the "Great Satan" and "pig dogs"? The ones against whom Hussein was prepared to bring "the mother of all battles"? After years and years and years of defiance of the United Nations and outward animosity and hatred for America, the American President and the American people, now he wants to talk directly to us?
:: Jeffrey Utech 8:55 AM [+] ::
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Weekend In Review

I firmly stand by my belief that a really great Friday night will go a long way to making for a great week, even if the rest of the weekend is pretty mundane. That was the case this weekend. Saturday and Sunday we really didn't do much. We watched some basketball, talked to some old friends and some family, did a lot of reading. But it was Friday night that made this weekend a good one.

Friday night we had some friends over that we don't get a chance to see very often. One of them in particular only lives a few miles away but we still avoided haven't seen him since mid-January. We had dinner, then had a few drinks, all with a nice helping of political discussion. Some of it was local, some of it had to do with the State of the Union or hydrogen cars, but eventually our conversation settled on the topic on everyone's mind: the potential for war in Iraq. It even made it's way into last night's Grammy Awards, with Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst commenting onstage about the war ending soon. Sheryl "the best way to avoid war is not to have enemies" Crow managed to avoid overt anti-war sentiment onstage, giving only the backstage quote "I didn't want to pick that particular bone tonight onstage, but I think that we know it's on everyone's mind. No one wants to rush into a war. Peace is what's important."

This weekend detailed clearly that lines have already been drawn, camps already inhabited. The anti-war crowd has already created its arguments and drawn its stereotypical sketches of the pro-war crowd and vice-versa. There is likely to be very little movement from one to the other until the war begins, at which point a number of anti-war folks will support the military but will make a loud distinction between that stance, and a support of the Bush administration or the purpose of the war in general. We're at a political stalemate. Rehashing the reasons for or against war will accomplish little as no one is likely to change sides, so all that's left to do is wait. In the meantime I want to mention a couple other things that have gone unsaid:

First, people who oppose the war because the information the administration has given to the American people is false, aka the "Bush is lying to us" argument, just infuriate me. There is no real way to prove that, nor is there any way to rebut that short of a "no he's not, yes he is" childish exchange. Basing an anti-war argument on the premise that everything the Bush administration has provided us is a series of lies is pretty small-minded.

Second, people who oppose the war because the administration hasn't thought through what the battle will be like are similarly short-sighted. When we first joined our Secretary of State in the public eye, he was one of the more decorated Army officers in history, would rise to the position of Chief of Staff of the Army and later become Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that position he oversaw myriad military crises, including Operation Desert Storm. In short, the administration has someone that has been thinking about it for the last twelve years. They have considered what the battle will be like.

Third, I was trying to avoid drinking Grey Goose this weekend because it's French. Mostly, the notion of boycotting French products is in jest, but my anger with France boils down to the distinction between being opposed to military intervention and refusing permission for anyone else to be for military intervention. France is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and as such hold a veto over any resolution that comes before the United Nations. They have made it clear that they will exercise their veto power on any resolution favoring military intervention on the part of any member state.

A UN Resolution does not imply that all member states must be involved in military action. It doesn't even imply that all member states support military action. All it implies is that more UN member states support military action than don't, which is the truth of the matter. France's veto keeps the world from recognizing that fact, perpetuating anti-war sentiment. If they would merely abstain and let the rest of the security council take up the matter, the world would find that the UN really is behind this military action and would support it themselves. But France won't just abstain and let the rest of the world handle it. That, my friends, is why we're making the ultimate sacrifice with the boycott of Grey Goose.

Let the rhetorical pause continue.
:: Jeffrey Utech 9:48 AM [+] ::
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Friday Morning Thought

This is a thought that surfaces from time to time, but maybe never when it should. I just wanted to share it with y'all. Please feel free to tell me I'm full of crap when I'm done, as I probably am.

Last weekend we were in Chicago. We had dinner at Haray Caray's (which is decent Italian, contrary to popular presupposition) and were planning to go to Howl At The Moon, a local piano bar. However, at about 10:30 a half-block long line had already formed out in front, so we stood at the end. Did I mention we were in Chicago? In February? Yeah, it was about twelve degrees out with the Windy City moniker being justly earned. It's probably a lot of the reason I tried cayenne pepper and water this week. Anyway, we abandoned Howl At The Moon and ended up in a pub at around State and Wacker.

On our walk down, we crossed the Chicago River using the State Street Bridge; it pretty much sits at the bottom of the Marina Towers, and down river from the Wrigley Building and other major Chicago landmarks. I looked upriver (towards the lake, since the river flows from Lake Michigan towards the Gulf of Mexico) at all the buildings in the night sky, shrugged and walked on.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's indicative of a tendency I notice in myself, specifically the tendency to be underwhelmed by places I've been and things I've seen. I should mention that I haven't seen or done much in my life. I haven't been to Washington, or to Philadelphia or San Francisco or Seattle. I haven't been to Graceland or New Orleans either. But I've done a few things in my life, and even those things I've built up in my mind to be fabulous and breathtaking, when they occur, just haven't been.

Times Square was really impressive, all bright and flashy, but I wasn't stunned like I thought I'd be. Same thing with the Vegas Strip. Or the Atlantic Ocean or the Intercoastal in Miami. Impressive, but not breathtaking. Even Rocky Mountain National Park, from my childhood, was really beautiful, but not so amazing that I was stupified [in the "I was made momentarily senseless and numb by the beauty of the moment" way, not in the "I was rendered mentally inferior" way. The latter is available for debate --ed.]

In the happiest, most beautiful moment of my life, my wedding, I shed a single tear of joy. When my grandmother died, I was the only grandchild at the funeral that didn't cry. I wonder if sometimes I allow the gravity of specific places, moments and experiences to pass me by. Hm. Just a thought....

UPDATE: Upon further thought I remembered I was driving to work this morning, listening to Yo-Yo Ma, thinking about the fact that I would likely see some very close friends this weekend. That thought made me think about other close friends and family and how many people there are in my life that I am surrounded by that make me feel loved, and important, and valid. My heart swelled and I filled with happiness.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that true happiness and emotion in life derives not from single experiences, not from sights or sounds, nor births nor deaths, but rather from perpetual relationships and the way in which you fill your heart with them. It's not found at the Grand Canyon, or at a baptism, but rather when you hold your spouse's hand while sitting in traffic on the Ike or hug your brother when you see him for the first time in months. Hm.

Sorry, was that too deep for this early in the morning?
:: Jeffrey Utech 11:11 AM [+] ::
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Friday Five

1. What is your most prized material possession? I don't really have one. I really treasure my relationships with my friends and family, as for material possessions, I don't think there is anything I own that is absolutely irreplaceable. Maybe pictures?

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest? Good question. I don't really know. I don't think there is anything that I use daily that I have had since childhood. I do have a "memory box" in our storage area that has a lot of little memory things from childhood, that's probably it.

3. Are you a packrat? Not really. Katie is more than I am.

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum? I like our house to be clean and free of clutter. It rarely is, however, because regardless of how much time we spend cleaning, we spend more time uncleaning.

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there? I think the only rooms that are without a theme are the kitchen and our upstairs bathroom. For anyone who knows my wife they're not surprised by the fact that our entire downstairs is an American theme. Our family room, bathroom and guest room all feature little red, white and blue knick-knacks, pictures, posters, and The Big Red Wall (tm). Upstairs our living room/dining room has a nautical theme in pale blue and yellow, our bedroom has kind of an ivy/earth tones theme, and our office is our Iowa Hawkeyes room.
:: Jeffrey Utech 8:17 AM [+] ::
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