Michael A. O’Neill

Category: Current Affairs

  • Coming home to an old/new war

    A vacation for me, a true vacation, is more than just getting away from work, playing with my camera, and seeing a new part of the world. A true vacation for me is also a vacation from thinking about the Middle East and any other news of the day. It’s rare when I can resist the temptation to pick up a newspaper, and that temptation is so strong that I will often struggle through a newspaper in Spanish or Arabic if I can’t find one in English. But my trip to Guatemala didn’t involve a single newspaper. I think starting in the disconnected jungles of lowland northern Guatemala helped.

    When I left on 12 July 2006, I believe that two Israeli soldiers had just been kidnapped by Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. When I turned on NPR this morning, I expected to hear Daniel Schorr commenting on Iran’s efforts to evade IAEA inspections on its Bushehr nuclear facility, on sectarian violence in Baghdad, on the further fumblings of the mendacious autocracy of George Bush. I did not expect to hear that for the past 10 days, the Israeli Air Force had been pounding southern Lebanon,  that the IDF was calling up reserves and massing on the border for a potential invasion, that over eighty Lebanese civilians, including children, had already been killed.

    When Ariel Sharon, the man who masterminded the IDF’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, withdrew the last Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon in May of 2000, there was already hope that Lebanon had put behind four decades of intermittent sectarian violence. Beirut had been rebuilding for a decade, and was beginning to reclaim its title of the Switzerland of the Middle East. Lebanon might even have become a symbol of hope for peaceful, democratic and self-realized sectarian reconciliation in other Arab countries that had only tamped down on simmering tensions with violence and repression. Think Syria and Egypt for "successful" examples of this repression. Think Iraq and Algeria (from a few years back) for examples of what happens when that unfortunate safety valve of repression is suddenly removed.

    Is this another full chapter in the Lebanese war? Or just a footnote? Will this rip Lebanon apart again? Could Syria’s minority Alawite government resist the pressure of sectarian violence from both the West and East? Will my friends, the Khalafs, have to flee Beirut again?

    All I know is that there are again coffins for children killed in a war I grew up watching on the evening news, in a country whose refugees started me on a path of studying Arabic and the Middle East, in a land that might have proved an example to the entire Middle East.

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  • Blog: Day to Day in Iraq

    On The New York Times editorial page today, the Gray Lady touted a multi-author blog called Day to Day in Iraq. Simply put, the blog is written by regular Iraqis about daily life. Most of the authors are young men in their twenties. The entry that struck me the most was from Hassan Khuraffa about the daily life of his six-year-old sister.

    I was immediately reminded of stories about a family friend, Ramzi, who spent the first few years of his life in Beirut in the early 1980s, the worst years of Lebanon’s brutal "civil" war. [I put civil in quotes, since two of the major players, Israel and the PLO,  were external actors]. Those stories about Ramzi were the catalyst that sparked my interest in the Middle East.

    I also couldn’t help but realize that Nigel Parry’s plan in 1997 had finally come to fruition, just in Iraq, rather than Palestine. Nigel wanted to create the single source of raw, unfiltered news about day-to-day life in Palestine by equiping one Palestinian student in each major Palestinian city with a laptop, an internet connection, a camera and a slide/negative scanner [digital photography was in its infancy]. He modeled this web site on his own online journal, "A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" and a pilot project called "On the Ground in Ramallah" that he ran with several students to document the shooting war that erupted in the fall of 1996.

    The site never got off the ground, and when Nigel’s house was demolished in May 1998, he left Palestine and the project fell to the wayside.

  • Immigrants Walk Off the Job in Boycott

    Nothing else to report, really.

    There were long lines at the four Oracle cafeterias open today (the other four were closed). Had to walk a bit farther to get my breakfast.

    I was honestly worried about the janitorial staff: Oracle Plaza is densely packed with people, and the custodial staff visit the bathrooms a couple of times per day. I brought extra Kleenex just in case. But the custodial staff is working today, apparently.

    Link: Immigrants Walk Off the Job in Boycott – Yahoo! News.

  • Nationwide Immigrant Rallies Underway

    First two observations of today’s rally.

    First, far fewer bicycles got on Caltrain at San Mateo than normal. That stop seems to be home to a large number of Latinos, and I’ve seen a fair number with paint-spattered work clothes.

    Second, the cafeteria downstairs is closed. Trying to find coffee and breakfast now. One of the cafeterias has to be open… I hope. Or I’m going right home.

    Link: Nationwide Immigrant Rallies Underway – Yahoo! News.

  • NYT: Brouhaha around the role of AIPAC et al

    The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Tony Judt this morning about a paper (abbreviated and full) co-authored by professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard about the role of the so-called "Israel Lobby" in defining US foreign policy that has already sparked news and debate.

    Put aside for the moment the actual discussions of the US’s role in the Middle-East; whether there is a monolithic "Israel Lobby" as opposed to a variety of lobbies in co-opetition with each other; and if that Lobby has, or those lobbies have, undue influence on US policy or, do they exist because US policy is so pro-Israel. This is the subject for another post. Besides, I haven’t had a chance to read the Mearsheimer/Walt paper yet, although my gut tells me the two are vastly overstating the influence of the lobbyist in question.

    What struck me was the ad hominem, reductio ad absurdum attacks on the authors. The NYT quoted Prof. Mearsheimer as saying, "We certainly wanted to provoke a debate, and this has happened. But we hoped to provoke a rational debate, not a food fight in which people accuse us of being anti-Semites."

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  • Your call may be recorded for quality assurance

    MoveOn.org recently sent out an email to collect donations to help CommonCause promote the development of electronic voting machines with a verifiable paper trail.

    I’m absolutely fascinated by the issue of paper trails because, well… have you wondered about the line "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." Now, as The New York Times pointed out in an 11-Jan-05 article entitled "Your Call (and Rants on Hold) Will Be Monitored," there is an awful lot behind recording customer service calls.

    But the birth of recorded calls in call centers, at least as I understand it, was part of a database backup strategy. Think about it: your database administrator screws up and somehow turns off the database’s transaction log (for those of you unfamiliar with this, all modern relational database management systems keep a log of every individual change in data, and this log is written before the database is actually updated). Later that evening–before backups of your database are created–a power surge from a major storm toasts your database server. You attempt to reapply those logs to the database (logs are typically backed up more frequently than the actual database, and are stored on a different physical server). But you don’t have any logs because your DBA messed up.

    Your only hope is to pull the physical tape of every single call, and have your call center employees re-enter all those orders.

    This is Database Management 101–for critical systems, always have a backup that isn’t a database or transaction log, something physical like paper or audio tape that you can go back to if your computers completely fail.

  • Kadima and the Wall

    Kadima’s recent "victory" (meaning barely 25% of seats, the largest bloc in the deeply fractious Knesset) combined with the discussion of 1990s crime perception in the US in Freakonomics, has reminded me of one of my most uncomfortable political agreements with the right-wing in Israel: the need for a wall.

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  • Freakonomics

    A friend, Heather, recommended a book called Freakonomics–she suggested it focused on incentives, agency conflicts, game theory, etc., which is the part of economics that really interests me. The human behavior part, rather than market forces or industrial organization.

    A surprisingly fast read–I started and finished it on the three-hour flight to Dallas. Good, light reading. Also surprisingly old news to me, at least some of it. The crack-dealer salary study I had read about a while back in The New York Times. Same for the abortion-crime relationship–I remember the controversy when the research first came out.

    On the other hand, I hadn’t heard about the ineffectiveness of Head Start, though it made sense just with just the salary data. The broader regression analysis was the nail in the coffin. Having some data to attack school vouchers is nice: fix the existing schools. Parents who would elect to use the vouchers already provide enough motivation for their children that they will succeed. The better school doesn’t make a difference statistically speaking.

    But two bits are near and dear to my heart: online dating and children’s names. Names are, w/o a doubt, a status/fashion phenomenon. But the author predicted that the names Finnegan and Ella–which are only popular with the over-educated at present–will become very popular in ten years. (My nephew and niece have those names).

    As to online dating–as a participant in online dating on-and-off for three years now, I’m personally familiar with the hyperbole: women weigh twenty lbs less, men are four inches taller, and everyone is beautiful. I am absolutely fascinated with the incentives and economics of this sector of the internet economy. I’m sure I’ll expound on this topic ad nauseum at some future point, but it just makes me wonder if I should lie on my profile? Add two inches to my height?

    Nah.

  • Hunting with Scalia

    My friend, Mike S., made a hilarious comment to me over drinks at Casanova this evening.

    I think everybody has forgotten the story of Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia going on a duck hunting trip together in Louisiana just a few weeks before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments regarding the Vice President’s handling of the Bush administration’s energy task force.

    Oh Dick, please? Maybe invite Justices Thomas, Roberts and Alito while you’re at it?

  • Profile of Edward Glaeser

    Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had, to me, a
    fascinating profile by Jon Gertner     about the economist Edward Glaeser and his
    views about urban development, real estate prices, and zoning restrictions.

    Gertner wrote that Glaeser recently completed a study on the Boston metro residential real estate market between 1980 in 2000, and that he considered two
    potential theories. The first was build-out: that there was no more land left
    to build housing on, so the increase in real estate prices was due entirely
    demand exceeding supply. The second was that building permits were scarce, not
    land, suggesting that supply was being restricted by legislation.

    Glaeser concluded it was the second: that governments had actually created the supply problem.

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