Vašek and Good Karma

Vašek is this awesome Czech kid who is going to London on Saturday to find work and learn English. Here’s the story:

Jono met Vašek in Austria where Jono was on a snowboarding holiday and Vašek was waiting tables. They chatted together for maybe a total of 20 minutes during the course of one lunch and then agreed to meet in Prague. So 6 weeks later Jono and I went out with Vašek on a Monday night and we drank and chatted together until 3 or 4 in the morning. The conversation was excellent: 3 people, 3 languages. Jono and Vašek spoke German together, Vašek and I spoke Czech, and Jono and I spoke English.

Jono is maternal in his own weird way. When Vašek said he was planning to go to London to learn English, Jono nearly adopted him on the spot. So last night I met Vašek to talk about London, brief him on how to get from the airport to Jono, confirm that he had at least some English money, etc.

At one point, Vašek had said that he was not going to stay with Jono after all, that he didn’t want to trouble him, and that he had arranged some accommodation elsewhere. I was imagining some grim foreign workers’ housing, and quickly talked him out of it. I managed to convince Vašek pretty easily, because it was true, that Jono would be horribly disappointed if he were robbed of the chance to look after him. Vašek looked at my London A-Z (street atlas) and said, “I’ll need to get one of those.” I said, “Jono already has one for you.” Then he talked about a pocket Czech-English dictionary. I said, “Don’t buy one, I’ve got one in my box that’s under Jono’s bed - just take that.” Then I gave him my A-Z just so he will be able to follow where he is on the tube until he meets Jono at South Kensington.

Then Vašek started talking about what a serendipitous accident it had been, meeting Jono in an Austrian ski resort, and that Jono had plans to be in Prague 6 weeks later, and then we managed to meet and now he is going to be taken care of in London. That was the beginning of a very long discussion about karma and people who do things for other people, and that you never really have to return favours directly because you always end up doing something nice for someone else. It’s all about inviting someone you hardly know to stay with you, or taking a weird limey girl from Moscow to a party with you in Prague only because she is a friend of a friend, or sending e-mails advising a total stranger who is going to be visiting the city you live in only because she happened to talk to your big sister’s mother-in-law in a yarn shop in bloody Buffalo, New York. Use whatever cliché you like: “what goes around comes around” or “pay it forward” or whatever. Vašek and I discussed the positive energy that you actually feel amongst people who participate.

Lightness of Being

Upon meeting long-term ex-pats, many Czechs will ask us why we live here. I have learned over the years that no matter how hard you try to explain, most of them are too closed-minded to ever really understand. Tomáš was one of the few people who had ever asked with a really open mind and genuinely wanted to talk about it. During our discussion, I realised that it may come down to the fact that I need to be a foreigner somewhere in order to avoid the pressures that would almost certainly be imposed upon me were I at home.

Both of my sisters are married, own houses, have children, dogs and cars; the older has a career as a geotechnical engineer and the younger has her own business. Most of my school and uni friends are in similar circumstances. That is how the people I know in the US live their lives; that is how they are expected to live and they often do not explore other possibilities. Parents are troubled when you don’t follow the path they had envisaged for you and, frankly, I don’t need the baggage.

Americans leave professional jobs at home to come here and teach English or tend bar. They would have a much harder time doing something similar in the US because their families and friends would not accept it. “Are you crazy? Give up your career? How are you going to pay your rent/mortgage/car loan?” etc. But because we are here, we are able to live a lighter life.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being examines, amongst other things, the dichotomy of the lightness and heaviness of being. The title of the book, however, is misleading and, for some, oxymoronic -- it is in fact the lightness that we desire and the heaviness that we find truly unbearable.

How to Let the Terrorists Win

Yahoo headline this morning: US tells troops to stay out of London after bombs

My name is Max, I am a girly girl, I have never been in the military or learned karate or how to kill with my bare hands, but I was not afraid to be in London last weekend.

We have 12,000 USAF personnel stationed in Great Britain and our military has issued a “battle staff directive” forbidding them from going into London. Put into simpler terms, this is our government telling 12,000 of its own free citizens where they can and cannot go within a country that is lauded as being our best friend and biggest ally.

Amongst our troops in Britain are special forces, men and women who have been to Afghanistan and/or Iraq, some of them on several tours, and now they are being told that London is too dangerous. Does anyone else see the irony? We will enjoy the freedom you are protecting, but you will not. Thank you for your service to your country.

http://werenotafraid.com

This is Max, reporting from London

I arrived yesterday afternoon. The airport and the Gatwick Express were a little quieter than normal; otherwise it seemed to be business as usual in London. Londoners have said "Up yours" to the terrorists and are just getting on with it.

The emergency services were very well prepared for these attacks because they had been through them over and over again in simulations. When I saw the first pictures on the internet on Thursday, I remember thinking that they looked exactly like the news reports of those exercises. One difference was that the emergency services actually worked faster and more efficiently on Thursday than they had in any of the simulations.

A couple of other interesting facts I have learned:

The bus blew up right outside the British Medical Association offices where some doctors were having a meeting so there were 20 GPs on the scene within seconds.

There was a meeting of air ambulance personnel at the Royal London Hospital that morning, just 400 metres from Aldgate East station so staffed helicopters were right there.

Pleasure boats were ferrying commuters home along the Thames, and overland trains kept running so that Paige did not have to walk home from Canary Wharf, as I had feared she would have to do.

Jono could not go into work yesterday morning because of a suspicious package in a sandwich shop next to his office (and Liverpool Street Station). It turned out to be nothing but Jono took the opportunity to hang out with Kitsch and then go to Jamie Oliver's Fifteen for lunch. Monkey, you should have been here.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Max

London

I have not got much work done today as I have mostly been on the phone, text messaging or e-mailing with friends in London. I have also been the point of contact for friends in Oz and the US who have not been able to get through to London. I am happy to say that so far it seems that my friends in London are all right, and I am still planning on going there tomorrow.

I had lunch today with my colleague Richard. We had a couple of beers, each spent a bit of time on the phone or texting, both waiting to hear from friends, also relatives in his case, and talking about the pathetic state of the world.

I want to make it clear that only the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks are to blame for the attacks. But unfortunately the war in Iraq has increased the likelihood of such attacks. After 9/11, it seemed that there was so much impetus in the international community to unite against terrorism; even Islamic countries were a part of that determination. But not anymore. Young men from “friendly” Islamic countries have been going in great numbers to fight against “the infidel” in Iraq. The government of Saudi Arabia, ostensibly an ally in “the war on terror” distributes pamphlets within the US and elsewhere instructing Muslims to “hate the infidels”, and worse.

I do not know if withdrawing from Iraq would help to end the violence or if the damage is irreversible for the foreseeable future. I am certain, however, that terrorism will continue worldwide for the duration of our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am not saying that we should allow the fear of terrorist attacks to dictate our actions; in fact, I think that we must not. I only know that hatred for the US and “the West” has grown since we invaded Iraq, and I wonder if there is anything at all we can do about that.

Another Blow for Freedom of the Press

We have been through this before: a free and independent press is required to maintain liberty within a democracy. Most courts have upheld the validity of confidentiality agreements between journalists and anonymous sources in order to preserve a free press. Only in times of fear, courts, and even publishers, have been less likely to follow this trend.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) declared that “the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.”

The Constitution of Massachusetts (1780) stated, “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained...”

And, of course, the First Amendment to our Constitution, adopted in 1791, says that no law shall abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press”.

Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to prison yesterday for refusing to divulge an anonymous source as a result of Grand Jury proceedings in connection with the naming of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Miller never wrote a story naming Plame, and it is not known why she has been called upon to name her source, except that it is vaguely connected to the investigation trying to pinpoint the leak.

Miller: “I do not make confidentiality pledges lightly, but when I do I must honour them.”

Yet another blow to our free press.

U Zpěváčků

On one of the chalkboards outside the bar:

In tonight’s presentation of “Unflattering Roles”, all of the actors appear as themselves

A Scottish man who had come in with AG (she’s always picking up weirds and strays) made the mistake of engaging me and kd in a discussion of the role of the US in the world. He got his ass kicked (verbally, of course) by the American birds.

Tim brought out the notes he had made a couple of nights before when he could not get to sleep because a nullifying theory of physics had just suddenly come into his head. We discussed it, Nelson, Tim and I, and its tangent ideas: perpetual exchange of motion from the positive to the negative and the negative to the positive, yin & yang.

Nelson told a story about a baby playing in the mud. When his mother was telling him to stop eating the mud, she made him open his mouth. She looked inside his mouth, gasped and hesitated for a moment, and then said, “You can close your mouth now, my lord Krishna.” Inside the baby’s mouth, Krishna had shown her the entire universe.

Nelson drunkenly played his saxophone – he was fabulous.

Two monks walked into the bar. They weren’t really monks, they were just two stragglers from a Brummie stag party dressed as monks.

The next night at St Nick’s when the waitress came over to take orders for drinks, Monkey asked for 2 grams of coke, some ecstasy, and “Do you have any tar heroin?”

Happy Independence Day, Everyone!!

...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

...He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

...He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

...For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.

...He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us...

...A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Just a few little highlights for you from our Declaration of Independence.

Be careful with your fireworks.

Have a great 4th!

Love
Max

Muslim Big Brother

There is a Muslim concept called velayat-e faqih, which is generally translated as “guardianship of the jurist”. Originally the concept of velayat meant that the clergy would assume responsibility for orphans, the insane and abandoned or untenanted property. In 1970, during the period of his exile in Najaf, Iraq, the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a treatise in which he explained that velayat should be extended to the whole of society. This would mean that a supreme religious authority would be a parent to everyone. Khomeini later claimed the role of faqih (supreme leader) for himself.

I am going back to Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair which made a very big impression on me. There was so much that was inspiring in it that I had a very hard time deciding what to write about, hence this 2^nd post about Iran.

What I found frightening is that while a lot of people in Iran apparently want change, they are afraid to bring it about themselves. Hitchens describes them as living in an “as if” society, i.e. they “live as if they were free, as if they were in the West, as if they had the right to an opinion, or a private life.” But the fact is that they do not have freedom or any of that. And what they lack most of all seems to be the motivation or inspiration to do anything about it.

Two quotes from the article that particularly struck me are as follows:

“Do you suppose that the West will ever come to our aid? Or is it all hypocrisy?” – a man in the city of Mashhad.

“Do you think that the West could come here and remove the rulers but only stay for a week and then leave?” – a woman in the city of Esfahan.

And then Hitchens: “It’s also among the young that one most often hears calls for American troops to arrive and bring goodies with them. Yet, after a while, this repeated note began to strike me as childish also. It’s a confession of powerlessness, an avoidance of responsibility, a demand that change come from somewhere else.”

It seems to me that the Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in creating the ultimate nanny state, one in which everyone feels like a helpless child. Where are the dissidents? Where are the courageous underground leaders? If the US goes into Iran, it will not be to “save” the people, our soldiers will not be handing out “goodies”, we would not leave in a week, and the whole country would descend into chaos. If the people of Iran really want change, they need to rise up and bring it about for themselves.

3 Faces of Iran

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President-Elect of Iran

As a student, Ahmadinejad joined an ultra-conservative radical student group spawned by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and staged (i.e. planned and participated in) the capture of the US Embassy. He was later a revolutionary guard. When he became mayor of Tehran in 2003, he curtailed many of the reforms that had been put in place by the moderates who had run the city before him. Ahmadinejad was the only presidential candidate who talked against future relations with the United States. As an unabashed conservative, he resurrected the fervour of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government."

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, President of Iran 1989-1997

Here is a partial list of crimes committed by the state of Iran while Rafsanjani was president:

- massacre of Iranian Kurds in a restaurant in Berlin, 1992

- bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, 1994

- bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, 1996.

Rafsanjani was billed as the “moderate” in last month’s presidential election. He supported the Ayatollah Khomeini in prolonging the war with Iraq, later convincing him to accept the UN resolution to end it. He preached against the US as the “Great Satan”, then was happy to deal hostages for arms with Satan’s government.

“He’s what our lazy press means when it describes some opportunist torturer and murderer as a 'moderate' or a 'survivor'” – Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair.

Hossein Khomeini, grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini

Khomeini is a “strong supporter” of US intervention in Iraq and he shares the traditional Shia belief that clerics should not have political power. “I stand for the complete separation of religion and the state.”

Hitchens in July’s Vanity Fair: “In terms that would make the heart of a neocon soar like a hawk, [Khomeini] goes on to praise President Bush’s State of the Union speech, to warn that the mullahs cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, and to use the term ‘Free World’ without irony: ‘Only the Free World, led by America, can bring democracy to Iran.’”

Sources: Al Jazeera, BBC News, GlobalSecurity.org, Vanity Fair, Wikipedia.