Grave Error

Sorry to have been hiding here for the past few weeks, but I just had a baby and have some obviously more pressing matters to attend to.I’ll to get back up and blogging as soon as possible.

Is blogging dead? Bloggers, including myself, just don’t seem to be writing as much and readers have definitely followed suit by reading less. This is probably due to two factors: over-saturation in the so-called blogosphere and the briefer, less time consuming tweet. As a matter of fact, most of my friends who were big bloggers four or five years ago have almost all abandoned the practice in favor of the lazier tweet.

So now other than the blogs of Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman, there is not much out there that I turn to for news and analysis. Nevertheless, I do have a few friends who are still writing interesting blogs. For example, one of my favorite reads these days is Rice and Coca-Cola by my friend Martina.

Martina recently decided to quit her job and travel around the world, almost entirely on her own. She left a few months ago from her native Sweden and has already covered Algeria, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland, Madagascar, Nepal, and has now just landed in India. She still has South East Asia, Australia, and South America left. While the idea of a trip-around-the-world-blog may seem a touch cliché, Martina has turned out to be a very good writer. Furthermore, I thoroughly enjoy her writing, learn vicariously from her adventures, and eagerly look forward to being updated on her whereabouts. I only wish there were more gratuitous stories of sex, lies, deceit and gnashing of teeth.

Start from the beginning and give Rice and Coca-Cola a try.

It is almost Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and that means the season for me to play Christmas music non-stop for an entire month is just days away.  There is no mystery here that I love Christmas. But, alas, this year we won’t be home for Christmas. It will be the first Christmas ever in my lifetime that I spend away from home.

The good news is that over the past few years I have done everything I can to infect my wife with the joys of Christmas, and just as I have learned to love Ramadan from her, she too is catching on. And while we spent the last couple of Christmases in the U.S. with my family there, this year we get to build our own Merry Little Christmas in Madrid. The bad news, though, the possibly traumatic news goes something like this: (more…)

My favorite dish. With my mother and grandmother on the other side of the ocean, I resort to my own means.

On September 8, 2000, I left Washington, DC and arrived in Madrid, Spain on the following morning. For the next five years or so, I would negotiate with myself, “one more year, one more”, and then later Madrid or Paris, until the next thing I knew, I had already spent an entire decade – all of the 2000s (or however we’ll call this decade in retrospect) – in Spain.

Somehow when I look in the mirror, I keep thinking that I will resemble that same guy who left home a decade ago. And yet so much has happened both in my life and back home. For example, I missed the entire Bush presidency and the post-9/11 years. In Y2000, I didn’t have a cell phone, iTunes, WiFi or a blog even. And during this period, I lost two grandfathers, two great uncles, a great aunt, and a couple of friends. But I gained a nephew, a niece, three first cousins, a goddaughter, and countless friends. And just last year, I was thrice married: each time to the same woman.

Whenever people ask me why I moved to Spain a decade ago, I always give the same answer: I can’t even begin to remember.

It may not be Jif Extra Crunchy, but Peter Pan Creamy will do the trick. The other day, out of sheer coincidence, I came across a nice stash of Peter Pan peanut butter in a local neighborhood shop that I almost never go into. I was so delighted that I gave the shop owner a gratuitous and boring monologue on why I was buying blueberry jelly to go along with the peanut butter. When I got home and ate toast after toast covered with the stuff, I realized that besides its power to transport me to my childhood, the PB&J combination has a quality very similar to the mixture of sweat and salty flavors in Moroccan cuisine. Maybe that is why I horde my mother-in-law’s homemade chebakia (fried cookie dough drenched in honey and covered with sesame seeds) as if they were Nutter Butters.

Some recent favorites from my often tasteless friends at Mi Vieja:

If you have a taste for the absurd and speak Spanish, I recommend you check out the truly original and ingenious MIVIEJA created by two truly original and ingenious friends of mine in Spain. They really crack me up!

I have been very busy lately, preparing a few interesting – though not very lucrative — projects that I will hopefully discuss in the near future, and therefore have been missing in action. Nevertheless, I have still been thinking about many of the issues of the day, such as:

• Obama is not a communist. I repeat, he is not a communist. He is a sell-out, and his health care plan and proposals are nothing more than hand-outs to the status quo. To believe anything else is to have your head in the sand (or in the snow, Mrs. Palin). Nothing that he has done to date has been left of center.
• I don’t care about Tiger Woods. But we treat our athletes, actors and politicians like rock stars. Our culture sexes them up and tells women that these are the desirable men in society. Then the expected happens: these athletes, actors and politicians actually become rock stars, having sex with everything that moves. The press is fully aware of all of this, witness all of the infidelities and sexual escapades, and form a tacit agreement with the celebrities to remain silent (in exchange, the press gets exclusives; the same agreement the White House press corp has with the president). It is only the rare occasion when the celebrity crosses the line – crashing his vehicle or making a public spectacle of himself – when the press then reports on the matter and the celebrity is forced to apologize, teary-eyed. It’s all just too silly for me. Come on! We should just stop pretending anymore. They are all — every one of them — having sex, all the time, and very publicly. Get over it!
• Our enlightened press wants us to believe that White Christians who terrorize are not terrorists. Only Muslims and foreigners can be terrorists.
• Hillary is worried that Iran is becoming a military dictatorship. Look, I am not comfortable with Iran having nuclear weapons either, but Mrs.-We-Can-Obliterate-You’s reasoning doesn’t pass the laugh test: the Iranian military’s increasing relevance in the country’s politics and oil economy. That doesn’t sound at all like the U.S., where our military spending makes up for almost half of the entire U.S. budget, making it the largest military budget in the world, and where generals — not the commander-in-chief — are the ones dictating military policy instead of implementing it. Meanwhile, Iran has the smallest military budget per capita in the entire Middle East (after Dubai). Also, the U.S. would never use its military to promote its economic interests, would it, Haliburton? And of course, Hillary forgot to mention that every ally the U.S. has in the Middle Eastern is a dictatorship. Nice try. She should just admit that Iran is the new Sadam Hussein.
• Talking war when we aren’t winning two other wars is probably not very threatening to anyone. Committing troops to two completely unnecessary wars leaves us exposed before any real potential threats. It is pure national defense negligence.
• Our Justice Department thinks lawyers are scum anyways, so torture memos are kosher.
• Regardless of the facts – the Bush/Cheney White House mirandized and successfully prosecuted and convicted 175 terrorist suspects in civil court and was mostly unsuccessful and ineffective in trying suspects in military tribunals, the press and the Republicans want us to believe that Obama has suddenly changed course. And instead of the rule of law prevailing over how we treat terrorist suspects, it all comes down to what one guy in the Senate – a man named Lindsey – wants.
• Cheney once again on the stay out of jail tour: I disagree with Greenwald that Cheney thinks he is above the law and therefore is flaunting having broken the law. I believe he is scared that he may very well be prosecuted – heck, the British are investigating themselves, someday Americans may also demand a little accountability and transparency from their own government. Thus, Cheney’s only card is to turn breaking his right to break the law without impunity into a political football, not a question of maintaining the rule of law.
• My cousin, Grave Error contrarian par excellence, has started his own blog – Machiavellian. We thoroughly enjoy disagreeing without each other. Now you can join in the fun too. Check out his new blog.
• And more.

In response to my post on the irrelevance of the Tiger Woods marital crisis story, my brother — a public interest attorney in the Bronx — brings up an excellent point about the disparate treatment of the wealthy and the poor in domestic disputes.

For example, I was recently listening to a Leonard Lopate Show podcast about police informants and the example of Jack Abramoff was given. In exchange for his testimony, Abramoff — probably the most corrupt lobbyist in Washington history — got a lighter sentence than would someone found with less than a teaspoon of crack.

Yet we continue to believe that the poor in America get all of the breaks.