"We know something about corruption in Massachusetts"
"We do it well, we produce something"-from a discussion on Inside Washington on PBS, comparing corruption related to Katrina and New Orleans to corruption in the Big Dig in Boston.

yay! my friend CB from grad school is coming to town this weekend. Sure she's coming for her friend's wedding (which i'm not invited to just because i don't know the couple or any of the people other than CB herself :)), but hopefully i'll get to see her before she leaves. Yeah, that probably would involve getting out of the house. We'll see how that one works.

Reading Economics for Dummies. If I still don't get it after this book, I may have to rethink a few career plans...

Ok, first of all, I do hope the kidnapped Israeli soldier is and remains ok. Second, am I completely off-base for thinking this Israeli incursion is a bit of overkill. Now i know that i dont know a lot about the Israeli/Palestinian situation at the moment, and i realize that a lot more than the soldier was considered when authorizing this show of force, but its hard to keep sympathy for Israel when they take such moves, especially as they often seem to take the view that loss of civilian life is acceptable (though i don't know how much that applies to the current operation, but it wouldn't be surprising if civilians are or will be killed in this operation). Again, I dont know too much about the situation, so if anyone who does has comments, please let me know. I like to be educated.

So am i suppose to care about the Star Jones/View breakup and potential feud that is brewing? Somehow I do.

Also, there seems to be some sunshine outside, which is so ruining my excuse for being reclusive. I guess I could always say i was "working on my paper." Yeah, i might stick with that one.

so it looks like it will basically rain all week in the DC area. Which will likely hurt my already shaky chances of leaving the apartment. oh well. perhaps it will help me write this paper i'm supposed to be working on. Hey, anyone know anything about agricultural policies and interest groups in Zambia or other southern African countries? (specifically concerning genetically modified foods). Anyone? Come on, people :)

The billionaires are so upstaging me. First, Bill Gates and all, now Warren Buffet is giving away most of his fortune (mainly to Bill Gates' foundation, particularly). Now i need to make a few billion and then give it away. Anybody want to contribute a few (million) dollars?

Yep, i did in fact make it out twice yesterday. The World Refugee Day thing at National Geographic was good. Makes me feel like I should do something-suggestions are welcomed

This could be a landmark day-i may leave the apartment TWICE. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Also, scholarly articles that include a reprint of a Doonesbury strip are cool.

So it's supposed to storm for about the next 2 days, which may put a bit of a cramp on my plans to get out this weekend. Not that that was ultra-likely to begin with. Alas.

At least I have Barbara Walters and the View (wait, that doesn't come on on the weekends. :( )


Perhaps I'll start working out this weekend, as I am kinda out of shape lately.
Note: "kinda" means extremely, "lately" means all my life.

So Ghana just beat the US 2-1 and eliminated the American team from the World Cup. I have mixed feelings. On one had i was kinda going for the US (in large part because I'd like for soccer to catch on here), but on the other I'm a fan of Africa and Ghana looks like the team with the best shot of doing something in the Cup. On the one foot, the US didn't play very well, so it doesn't feel wrong that they lost, except that on the other foot the winning goal was on a penalty kick for what in replay did not look like a foul. on the (hmm, out of appendages) head, though, even without the goal, the score would have been 1-1, and i don't think a tie would have helped the US, but on the , um, some other body part you can use in soccer, who knows how the game would have gone had that goal not happened. Alas, maybe next time-go Ghana!

So is it unacceptable for me (being a guy and all) to prefer watching "The Tuesday Night Book Club" over the third quarter of potentially the last game of the NBA finals? Just wondering.

Also, I really like PBS' Frontline shows. They actually help me understand stuff a lot better, and teach me things I didn't know. This week's was on Dick Cheney, specifically his moves and influence post-9/11. It was amusingly entitled "The Dark Side" (though this was a reference to a comment he made a few days after the attacks about how the new war would be fought). Perhaps not a neutral news piece, but as usual very well done.

So my dreams often have a stream of consciousness, the end has nothing to do with the beginning kind of thing, but this mornings was a bit much. My dream (or maybe dreams as i'm not sure if it was one or more than one) included superman, the last week of college, a girl i worked with at summer camp, sketchy parties, Stargate SG-1, dodgeballs, a girl from grad school (all in that order i believe) and many other things i can't probably remember now. and then when i woke up and looked at my phone, i thought it was highlighting the number of the girl from camp in my dream (i eventually realized that i don't have that girl's number in my phone, and the one highlighted was actually ANOTHER girl i worked with at camp whith the same (though differently spelled) first name. Weird.

Hmm, perhaps i should go out of the house today. I did get out a couple of times this weekend (to the store and Church), but that mainly involved walking to and from the car. After the loooooong MA winter, I should enjoy some of the MD heat.

Should also start my research paper at some point :)

So is it bad that i find myself rooting for the majority black teams in the World Cup. Granted most of them are from Africa, a continent i like to root for in other contexts (or from Trinidad and Tobago, the smallest country represented). Thus there is an underdog factor as well. Nonetheless, if it was an underdog nonblack team, i'm not sure i'd be as excited. Hmm...

(I'm also torn about rooting for Ghana or the US in their upcoming faceoff, since i think at this point at most one of those two can advance).

Saturday morning cartoons just arent' what they used to be. Among other things, they have new versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman, but they seem to lack the depth of story and writing that the older ones (especially Batman) had in their heydays. Instead they substitute more action and flashiness, but i feel us 24 year old viewers are a little shortchanged. Oh well, good thing i don't usually get up this early on Saturdays.

Bill Gates is making me a fan. It looks like he's serious about this whole helping out the world thing (in case you didnt hear, he announced that he'll take more of a backseat at Microsoft to work more on his and his wife's Foundation stuff). Just imagine how many lives he could (and probably has already) save and/or improve. Bill and Melinda and Bono and Jeff Sachs are getting major brownie points with me (which is of course why they're doing it all :)) Regardless of the criticisms put their way (like Bono being self-righteous or annoying or Sachs not producing legitimate scholarship) their hearts and heads seem in the right place, and they seem to be doing major concrete good. That rocks.

So I've been trying to get into the World Cup, watching it on the local spanish language channel (the various ways of yelling "Gol!" after a point is scored is indeed entertaining). I can't say that I've been converted to a soccer fan, though it can be enjoyable if one of the teams interests me (the US for obvious reasons, Brazil because they have so much expectation behind them, various former colonies and small countries because of the underdog factor, etc). Off of that last point, its kind of cool to think of the larger geopolitical implications (yeah, I'm a bit of a political science nerd aren't I) of the matches. Iran playing a game in Nuremburg seemed a bit ironic given all of the stuff with Israel lately. Angola playing its former colonizer Portugal, etc. I also enjoy trying to figure out which team is which when i miss the beginning of games (looking at names if i catch a close-up, trying to guess from the composition of the team, etc. And the Spanish advertisements that unexpectedly include American names (*talking in Spanish* "McDonald's! *more Spanish*); that's fun.

So it was recommended that i look at some online dating sites, which i did, mainly for run. I think most of them are not for me, thogh i did find an interesting one for Christian folk which was interesting, and there appeared to be some interesting people.

I'm still a bit skeptical about the enterprise though. I guess I'm just a bit distrustful of the prospect of trying to start anything with people that i don't really know and who could be misrepresenting themselves (though i'm not sure why they would, but still its a possibility). I think my ideal relationship is still to develop something with someone i've known for a while and consider a good friend (both because i'd be confident that i really know the person and because a large part of what i consider to be an ideal relationship is to have someone who was a really good friend, with the romantic stuff added on).

So i kind of doubt that anything more than browsing will come f rom the websites, but we'll see.

So as a lot of you already know, I was into a certain young lady for a good period of the last school year. I thought we might be a good match. She was quirky (arguably more so than me, which is almost scary).And more importantly, she is an incredibly strong Christian, which was really attractive. Actually that was also one of the things that made me kind of nervous, as i didn't want to be a bad influence.
So i attempted to hang out and get to know her and eventually to indicate my feelings (kinda) but it just didn't work out. I don't know if she just wasn't interested but tried to let me down easy (as best she could) or if she just didn't realize I was interested (i tried to indicate it as strongly as I ever do, but that is still kind of subtle i guess). Either way it didn't work out. I feared I was becoming a bit bitter for a while (it felt like my intentions were being ignored, which may be worse than being rejected-I haven't decided yet), but I'm pretty much over it now i think. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and she is still a great person (which is why i liked her in the first place). Oh well, whatever God intends, he'll bring about.

So i kind of developed some disillusionment with political science over the last year, especially the last semester. Besides my own so so performance with the discipline, a few things have come into question in my mind. One, taking two semesters of statistics has, more than anything else perhaps, left me skeptical of any attempts to use statistics to make a point or prove something. Sure lots of people (myself in the future included probably) use it sloppily, but even the best stuff out there often seems sensitive to assumptions used, specific measurements, etc. I'm just not convinced that it really reveals much.

I also took two formal modeling/game theory courses. While I actually liked game theory, I sometimes wonder about its contributions to a lot of the works where it is used. It is nice to formalize logic and identify assumptions, etc, explicitly, but at the same time it really just seems like taking what you have elsewhere said in words (or what you should have said in words but didn't) and saying it in math instead. This may make the logic clearer for some, especially the mathematically inclined, but i'm not sure it really adds that much to a lot of papers. Plus, I feel like people use it to "prove" things, which i don't think is necessarily legitimate, as the results you get seem totally dependent on the assumptions you put in. I mean as long as this is acknowledged that's fine, and useful insights can still be drawn (for instance by showing that certain results follow from a range of plausible specifications of a model), but I feel like people are often not upfront about the limitations, whether intentionally or not.

In general, I think that political science thinks of itself a lot like economics, trying to find rules that generally explain behavior/actions. In economics though, there are often a lot of actors such that even if some deviate, they balance out and do behave in predictable ways. I feel like in political science however, there are often too few actors for this to be valid, especially if the unit of analysis is country. Then a few actors (controlled in many instances by a few people) have much power to change results, and it is hard to model processes that depend on the whims or choices of a few people (often in complicated or uncertain situations). There may be some topics of political science (voting behavior perhaps) where these arguments/techniques are valid, but for comparative government/international relations i fear they're not.

All this being said, my game theory and stats professors were obviously very very brilliant people, as were other profs i have had. Concerning the former two sets, I assume that if they are so smart they must also see a greater importance/usefulness to their disciplines, so i am somewhat willing to take them at their word, so to speak. With a lot of the people who do more substantive stuff, however, I feel that often the thing that impresses me about them is not their use of quantitative or formal methods (even when they themselves believe in them and employ them often) but just their knowlege of history, organizations, political actors, etc. I sometimes wonder if i should just focus on learning a lot of particulars about the places/topics i want to study instead of focusing so much on the techniques, but i know i'm expected to know the techniques, and they may actually be useful down the road (plus they are paying me, even if rather modestly, to learn them, so i should probably give it a shot). Perhaps some time off and/or independent study (though i don't know how long I will keep up the latter) will give me a new (hopefully more positive?) perspective-we shall see.

So we had to move out of our apartment by June 1st. It was fun being there. Should have cleaned more (sorry about that). Also should have spent more time with the folk. Might have been my last time to live with J and 'gito :( so i should have taken more atvantage of that. Plus i didn't get to know the other roommates as well as I would have liked. We had some good times though (surprisingly many while watching "Grey's Anatomy" which seemed to bring us all together). Some close friends who weren't roommates (most notably JB, who of course was my roommate for four years) also will be gone-sadness. Get to live with Kubes next year though, which will be cool. And some of the folk will still be around, so all is not lost.

So as mentioned yesterday, I've finished up my first year of grad school. Academically, it was kind of, meh. I think my grades will be ok (though perhaps i shouldnt speak too soon) due in large part to some kind game theory professors (most awesome academic couple ever!). Still need to do that research paper for my International Political Economy (IPE) class. In general though, i realized that i really need to improve my study habits. The procrastination and all-nighters/last minute cramming don't work nearly as well in grad school as they did in undergrad. Especially second semester, I found myself not completing assignments or being woefully unprepared for an exam. Oh well. I also became somewhat disillusionsed with several aspects of political science as a discipline, but I can get into those later. I'm trying to get ahead with some stuff this summer in hopes that it will help me come school in the fall.

So one year of grad school is down and...well, it wasn't bad. I really liked my classmates; as usual the people were the best part of school for me. The GGGs (the Gorgeous Girls of Government, as i named them) were really cool, though we didnt all hang out as a group that much as the year went on. Maybe I will try to get us all together in the fall, though that would take effort and me organizing things, both of which rarely happen. JDawg is in DC this summer, so i'm glad I'll have her to hang out with here. I may visit/stay with CBear in Cambridge at some point (i have some loose ends to take care of there at some point). And (hmm, havent thought of a nickname for this person yet that she would find acceptable-you know who you are :)) and I will likely IM until the wee hours of the morning like we usually do (she's been an amazing friend by the way-who would have thought that I would find someone who was both so much like me and an attractive girl-go figure). So yeah, friends, cool.

next time...my first year of grad school: academics (not quite as cool, but oh well)

Hey all-I'm Back!!!
So I've been a bit busy/lazy and not updating for a long time, but hopefully that will change now (esp. since I really have nothing to do at the moment). So there are lots of stuff that I should (and will soon, barring unusual circumstances) talk about, like: my love life, or lack thereof, particularly w/ relations to a certain girl who it didn't work out with (sigh); my year in school, goals for next year, disillusionment (is that a word?) with political science; being in Maryland; etc.

But for right now, I'll just say how happy I am that I finally have internet access at home now!