Citizenship test

Yesterday I went for my US citizenship interview - another 450 mile round trip to Grand Junction.

I studied quite a bit of American government and history at University. How much? Well, for example, I've read every volume of President Woodrow Wilson's memoirs. What a mama's boy. Not my favourite president. But I digress from my main point, which is that I didn't expect to have any trouble with the test.

Nevertheless I was disappointed at how easy it was, consisting of the following four very easy questions:

• What do the stripes on the flag represent?
• What is the White House?
• What are changes to the Constitution called?
• What is the highest court in the land?

I was at least hoping for a question about the Declaration of Independence so I could quote one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

But fortunately I wasn't asked if I like baseball. I would definitely have given the wrong answer!

If only they'd read this...

I was searching for a quote from Winston Churchill to use in a presentation when I came across this gem:

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

If only George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had read this before they created the mess in Mesopotamia.

Beirut churches

This morning my wife went to Mass in her old village. Despite the fact than most of the former Christian population have now moved elsewhere many still return every Sunday to the church which has been restored after being badly damaged during the 1975-90 civil war.


Actually there's three churches in the village of which one other has also been restored. The largest church is still a work in progress. Look closely at the column on the left. Yes, those are bullet holes.


And the local Muslim population quite happily send their kids to the local convent school. My wife thinks these are signs of hope. I see them as evidence that people of different races and faiths can live together only until cynical and evil leaders exploit these differences for their own ends - which unfortunately happens all too easily.

Beirut

Last night we flew from London to Beirut where we're visiting Marie's relatives.

The drive from the airport to my father-in-law's house provided a personal snapshot of Lebanon's troubled history since it passes through the 'village' (suburb) of Mreijeh in west Beirut where my wife lived as a child.

During the 1975-90 civil war west Beirut became the Muslim sector and Christian families like my wife's were almost entirely driven out in fear of their lives. To make sure they didn't come back the houses were usually destroyed. This is what happened to my wife's home which had been moved by my wife's grandfather stone by stone from its original site a few kilometres away when Beirut airport was built in the 1950's. I saw the ruins of the house on my first trip to Beirut in 1993. My father-in-law still owns the land but it's now a petrol station.


So I really hope that there's a special place in hell for people responsible for ethnic cleansing.

My father-in-law was elected mayor of the village in 1967 and remained so by default until 1998 (since the Lebanese were too busy killing each other to hold elections). Interestingly he was re-elected in 1998 by a population which by then was overwhelmingly Shiite! He retired in 2005 only to be replaced by his former deputy who of course is also Christian. Who said Lebanese politics is confusing?

After a quick nap this morning (the flight last night was too short to get much sleep) my wife's youngest sister showed us her new apartment which at the moment is a construction site, but it should be fantastic once it's finished. As you can see from the photos, it's in one of the older neighbourhoods of Beirut.



In the afternoon we visited one of Lebanon's most famous Christian shrines at Harissa (Our Lady of Lebanon). I was surprised to discover a significant number of Muslim visitors. I discovered that they were there because Mary is also venerated in Islam which I didn't know.

The shrine is located at the top of a steep hillside overlooking Jounieh bay north of Beirut. This area became a stronghold of Lebanon’s Christian community during the civil war as they were driven out of mixed communities like the one my wife grew up in.

As this shot shows, the mountains rise quite steeply from the sea which is a key part of Lebanon’s natural beauty.


Beirut like most cities in developing countries is not so nice (lots of traffic, smog and general grime), but the suburbs and villages in the mountains are quite lovely.

Hong Kong after ten years

I arrived in Hong Kong last night just in time to catch the very large and impressive fireworks display on Victoria Harbour celebrating the tenth anniversary of the transfer of Hong Kong from British rule back to China.

Whilst there have been occasional concerns about China respecting the agreement to preserve Hong Kong's system of government for 50 years, things have generally worked out much better than most people expected. I know quite a few Hong Kongers who moved to Australia and Canada in the mid-90's in case things went bad, but have all subsequently moved back. As an outsider, albeit one who has spent a lot of time here over the past seven years, Hong Kong is still a fundamentally different place to mainland China.

It's a holiday today in Hong Kong but I'm in the office with my colleagues preparing for a presentation to a potential customer tomorrow. Here's the view from the office. If you look carefully you can see the remnants of the old airport in the middle right.


Fortunately I managed to find a flight to Hong Kong which arrived in the evening, which meant I could go straight to bed after arriving. I find that much less tiring than overnight flights which arrive early in the morning, which is unfortunately the case with all the flights between the US and Australia. So I'm feeling quite rested this morning despite having a 4 am start on Saturday and spending about 28 hours getting here.

I managed to download some good content for my Zune to listen to on the trip, including some podcasts and also video (in a compatible format) of The Chaser's War on Everything (which will be familiar to my Australia readers). I also watched a couple of movies including Bridge to Terabithia which turned out to be a very warm, charming and moving film.

Lake Burley Griffin

I took a walk after work today (I'm trying hard to lose some weight) around Lake Burley Griffen in Canberra. Since they're heading in to winter here the days are getting quite short so it wasn't all that late but already the sun was setting. It's a lovely time of the year to be here.

The lake is named after Walter Burley Griffen, the American architect who won the competition to design Canberra in 1912 and was part of his original design, although the river wasn't dammed to make the lake until 1963 (so it's as old as I am.)

The photos are not the best quality, but my camera phone isn't really equal to the task of landscape shots at sunset.

Road trip - day 5

The highlight of our road trip so far was today's visit to Mesa Verde National Park located in southwest Colorado.

It's amazing to look at these places and wonder what on earth drove the inhabitants to build them in the first place (they'd lived for the previous 600 years on top of the mesa) and then abandon them completely within two or three generations?

We only spent a few hours today but we loved it so much that we are planning to come back for two or three days some time to really see it properly.

The only part open to visit at this time of year is "Spruce Tree House". I'd read about Mesa Verde and even seen pictures, but this view that greets you as you begin the walk down to the site just blew me away.

It's even better as you get closer.


And just awesome right up close.


While you can't visit the other sites at the moment, you can see them from the road. This is the Cliff Palace which is the largest and most famous of them.


I included that distant shot so you could see where it is in relation to the mesa top and the canyon. Here's a close up.


We started the day in Santa Fe and are spending the night in Durango. You can see our route for today on the map below.

Private property?

I was in the Australian capital of Canberra last week and got to thinking about the implications of their approach to land ownership for compulsory acquisition ('eminent domain' as it is called in the US, an issue which has been in the news there lately).

All land in the Australian Capital Territory is owned by the Federal Government and is only available for private uses (including housing) on 99 year leases. This decision was made when Canberra was first established in the early 1900's, partly reflecting the prevailing socialist Utopian philosophies of the time and partly for the practical reason that you don't want to sell land freehold thereby making it harder to acquire it back over the next seventy five years as you build your capital city from scratch (the place was literally nothing but a sheep farm).

Actually this is an object lesson for those who believe in the prescience of government planners. Canberra is the most planned city in the world. If government planners always get it right, then they could have just come up with a plan to begin with, stuck to it and this would never have been a problem, would it?

As you can see from this Bill, in 1997 the Government found it necessary to extend leases from 99 years to 999 years. Why? Well, by that time some of the older suburbs in Canberra had been settled for nearly 75 years and these home owners were finding it difficult to sell their houses because prospective buyers couldn't get 30 year mortgages on properties with less than that period remaining on their leases.

Now lawyers may be able to argue until the cows come home about the differences between freehold and a 999 year lease, but I can guarantee you that in the mind of any average person, and especially someone who owns a home sitting on that land, they are indistinguishable. And that means politically they are indistinguishable. The political reaction to any compulsory acquisition will be absolutely the same regardless of whether the land is held freehold or leasehold. If there is enough political backlash the government will back off and if there isn't they will go ahead, whatever the legal, economic and social merits of their plans.

Nevertheless, I find that there's something disturbingly socialist and totalitarian about a place where you can't own land.

Sadly, history does repeat itself

It's bad enough that the legislature in Hawaii is dumb enough to think that price caps are a sensible response to high gas prices, but now it seems politicians in California and other states and considering the same folly.

I just love this quote from the LA Times story:

Hawaii embarks this week on a radical experiment to cap gasoline prices, a move being keenly watched nationwide by legislators and consumer groups.

I wonder what the hell they think is going to happen? That somehow this time the laws of economics won't apply? That simply because that's how they'd like it to be, some other less efficient allocation mechanism like queuing or the black market or influence peddling won't kick in when prices are regulated and can't do the job?

What conceivable reason is there to believe it won't be just like the last time this was tried in the 1970's? And if that's not enough evidence for you, the Soviets spent seventy years trying this experiment on a national scale in every corner of their economy and were willing to sacrifice tens of millions of lives to their vision of a planned economy, but still it always turned out the same way - scarcity amidst waste and waste amidst scarcity and everywhere, absolutely everywhere, queues.

Given that we won the cold war because the Soviet economy imploded, how willfully ignorant do you have to be not to have learnt that the market is the only sustainable mechanism for allocating resources and creating wealth? But it seems in politics that it's impossible to resist the temptation to tell the public once again that government can somehow make water flow uphill, turn lead into gold, and yes, magically make gas prices lower. And way too many voters are stupid enough to believe it.

Lee Kwan Yew on the rise of China

Here's a link to a brilliant interview with Lee Kwan Yew, former Singapore Prime Minister and current elder statesman, on the implications of China's economic and military rise.

Having lived in Singapore, I have enormous admiration for this man. He demonstrated the difference that the right leadership makes to the future of a country. In 1960 Singapore and the Philippines (where I have also lived) were at a similar level of development. Though the Philippines was the country with the natural resources, half a century later it is Singapore that has joined the first world while the Philippines languishes in corruption, poverty and disorder. Lovely people but a completely disfunctional country.

Mr Lee differs fundamentally from the standard politician in that he tells his people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. That approach has served his country extremely well.