Relocating the Middle East

The Middle East "situation" seems insoluable. I have many acquaintances who study it. The conflict is a historical one. It is so embedded in history it has become cultural instinct. That makes it virtually impossible to solve through rational negotation. On top of all that, a single disaffected person can destroy a carefully-negotiated peace; any peace is quite unstable.

I have a proposal. No, actually it's really just a crazy idea. But I wonder if it might work. And it isn't as crazy an idea as changing their religion, bombing them to submission, or any of the currently fashionable approaches that are doomed to fail.

Here's the idea:

About a decade ago, Disney started making a planned community called Celebration. You could say it's a utopian family-oriented community of safety, cleanliness and high technology, or you could say it's a hideous cultural fascism.

Celebration puts Disney in reality's realm
Welcome to Celebration Florida

Either way, first take $200 billion, which is easily less than what the "free world" spent on the Middle East conflict ourselves in recent years. Use some of it to build a Celebration community for Arab Muslims. They won't be orthodox or fanatic, so you don't have to worry as much about mixing them. The main reason to segregate them is so they feel comfortable with their own community, much like a Chinatown district in a large city. It also won't need to be nearly as nice as Celebration, just a step up for the war torn natives. Maybe it's in New Mexico.

Use the rest of the money to offer relocation to 1 million Arab nuclear families. You have at least $100k to spend on each of them. This will appeal most to the younger Arabs who want a better life and more opportunity for their kids. You aren't trying to entice the Saudi Arabians. But the Iraquis, Iranians, and other war-torn countries may feel this is a good deal.

The community will be a state of the United States. It has some limitations in what laws they can pass. Maybe it works better to make them outside of the US, for reasons of cultural pride. But maybe that will make it less attractive. Essentially you are creating pull to remove the best future prospects away from the region. The farther away they are, the less they will obsess about it. If you give them a comfortable community, ability to relocate entire families, hope for their children, and an ability to direct their own culture, you remove many of the objections to the relocation. Even good medical care may be sufficient to move many of them.

Do the same with Isrealis. There are fewer of them, so it will be less expensive. You may not even have to do it, since it's already happening there as hard liners turn off the moderates who drive their economic growth.

Over time, any such "closed" community will diffuse. It happened to the Chinatowns and the Italian and Irish conclaves before them. It's even happening to the Mormons that dominate Utah. Now it is happening to the newer southeast Asian communities. It may take generations, but that will be faster than any other Middle East solution.

A collateral benefit of the closed community is that it is less likely to take jobs from US citizens in the short term. In the long term, well, I'm sure the AFL/CIO will be in there trying to organize them.

Of course this will merely make the fanatics more fantical and further destabilize the region. But now you may not feel as bad about military containment, without occupation. In fact, the more negative pressure created by containment, the more attractive you make emigration to the closed community.

Ok, it isn't a polished idea. I just thought of it today, although I have long wondered what happens if we give people mobility. My charitable work has shown that you can give all you want to a poor country, but the rich people running it will generally take it all, leaving very little for the poor. The poor are too poor, oppressed, ignorant, and unhealthy to MOVE OUT. What happens if, rather than blowing them up, we give them an escape?

How about we drop a zillion webcams while we're at it, to catch on TV tyrants if they try to prevent their people from leaving. Apparently that gives us sufficient excuse to drop some smart bombs. Certainly more evidence than we had going into Iraq.

It's something to think about: build boats, not bombs.

On Being an Asian Geek, or Me, Part 2

I am genetically Asian, and culturally and geographically American. I guess this would make me Amer-Asian, or Asian-American, although what I remember from youth were the labels "gook" and "chink."

In fact, the childhood rhymes I recall the best were erroneously applied to my ethnic background. One was the prose:

Me Chinese
Me play joke
Me do pee pee in your Coke!

The other was the classic performance art where a kid slants his eyes upwards, downwards, then rubs his knees, and then makes fake breasts to the lines:

Chinese
Japanese
Dirty Knees
Look at these!

But then again, I suppose my French classmates remember Frere Jacques really well.

Interestingly, I was the most popular boy in my class with the girls. Well, ok, up through second grade. Although I was basically the only Asian in my school until high school, I found that the girls didn't notice this until about third or fourth grade. And I paid attention to girls, unlike the rest of the members of my cootie-fearing gender.

The sad fact is that I got more female attention when I was 7 then when I was 15.

I did myself no favors in adolescence by being a geek. Being a geek attracted girls like a Dairy Queen attracts Eskimos; you just blend into the background and yet seem vaguely bad for the health.

But being a geek is like investing and holding big cap stocks. You may look bad against those sexy day traders in the short run, but over the long haul, you get to eat.

The most fun I had being a geek was going to my high school reunion. All the top jocks and popular kids showed up to recapture the glory they had lost when they peaked at high school. They got to talk about their dead end sales jobs and their vacations at the local theme park, and show off their highschool sweethearts who hung around the house and added on a lot of weight after their fifth kid. I got to show up with a stunning girlfriend working on her masters degree and a tan from our vacation in a Tuscan villa, and talk about how I puttered around the house and added on an extra garage to hold my fifth sports car. And hearing the former cheerleader sigh, "If only I knew how cool geeks can be." Time is the ultimate revenge for geeks.

Ok, ok, I admit that I basically rented that girlfriend, and the rent was steep: a charter flight and vacation to Italy. And she had to pick my clothes. And in many other ways my life is pathetic since it's all work. But I'll write more about THAT later.

Me, Part 1

It occurs to me that I should start out with a self description. I caution you that any self-descriptive editorializing from me should be regarded with the same trust you would invest in, say, the New York Times.

How to start... hmm... let's try this:

Yet to shuffle off this mortal coil, I yet remain a wound up spring, under constant tension but very flexible. My main-motto is "work hard and play not at all" and it resides at the office. My otto-man is Roche Bobois and it resides in the living room.

Ouch. That might have been too, uh, forced. Well, hell, it's MY blog.

I live alone.

I used live in the classic "Three's Company" scenario. Through a variety of misfortunes I came to own a living space which I furnished but INfrequent. Serendipidy being the tool of the devil, I happened upon two young coeds who needed a place to live. I initially came to know them through my sister, and later biblically came and knew them through Jack Daniels. They were and are young and blonde and my having descended from millions of generations of successful sexual conjugations made it difficult for me to be mounting resistance against unresisted mounting...

Sometimes I would suspect I would find my abode converted into a pillar of salt, but what could I expect when I combine an ACID wit with BASE desires?

But that's in the past. I dwell there often. ;-)

Anyhow, if Fortune is a wheel, I'm really going to hate the journey down. I am a successful entrepreneur and have been rewarded amply in plutocratic wealth. I was raised a good liberal with a penchant to distrust money and power, but at some point I had to face up to the man in the mirror and, well, I just couldn't live with hating myself. Like many rich liberals, I'm only liberal because I can afford to be, and only remain liberal as far as my wealth will take me. Although I romanticize the "good old days" when I had so little money that I had to budget the days I would have breakfast, I strangely have declined to give away all my material possessions to reclaim that state of historical nirvana. Just gave away most of them, enough to serve as a balm for my soul.

I say all this tongue firmly in cheek. In fact I don't know as much about my tendencies any more. This is because I am morally alone, a subject I will write about and revisit later, I am sure.

Meanwhile, I work hard, then work harder, then work even harder. When I take the time to poke my head up, I look for my shadow. If I fail to see it, I turn on a light and go get some dinner.

Everything Must Have a Beginning

One challenge in writing a BLOG is trying to balance the old ideas with the new. On one hand, this is a new medium for me, so I could fill it with thoughts I have had before. Or it could be more like a diary of thoughts as they occur to me.

I suppose only time will tell which works out better. I hope the (imaginary) reader will bear with me as I experiment with this.