Hopps: Randomness of a 41er

Greece Trip: Day 9

2011-03-20T22:16:00.000-05:00

Here is the last journal of the Greece Trip. It is probably a little briefer than most of the others.

Mask of Agamemnon

Day 9: March 18, 2011

Column from the Tomb of Agamemnon

Today, our final day, was spent back in Athens seeing several museums. The first one, and biggest, was the National Archeological Museum. It was built in the mid 19^th century in the neoclassical style and houses many of the most precious archeological artifacts of Greece. Inside it is broken into areas based on time period. Prehistoric (17^th century-11^th century BC), Geometric (11^th century-8^th century BC), Archaic (8^th century-6^th century BC), Hellenistic, then Roman period (up through 1^st century or so AD). While there was a lot there, I will just touch on a couple of big pieces. The primary civilization in the prehistoric period was Mycenae. Here is displayed the so called “Mask of Agamemnon.” This was found in a tomb at the fortress of Mycenae that we had previously visited. The man who found it claimed at the time it was the death mask of agamemnon, but it turns out it was made 500 years before he supposedly lived. However, it is still an amazing piece worked from pure gold. All in all, 30lbs of gold items were found in those tombs. Also found there were wall paintings, particularly significant because they displayed everyday life and helps show that this was probably a matriarchal society.

Large pot from Geometric Period

In the geometric period the society has abolished the monarchy and the king is only the head of the religion. Artwork in this period was all geometric shapes, hence the name, and there were seldom left empty spaces in the designs.

Bronze Poseidon from 470BC

The archaic period was when they started to come into contact with other civilizations from the east and egypt which affected their work. Started making life sized statues, but the design was still stylized. The statues were all made of one piece as they didn't yet have the skills to connect different pieces into one. As the archaic period progressed the style became smoother and began to transition to the idealistic form. A famous example is the bronze statue of Poseidon from around 470BC.

Bronze Horse and Jockey from C2 BC

In the Hellenistic period the style transitions from idealistic to more pragmatic, they start showing movement and action and emotion in the faces, i.e. pain or anxiety, etc. A good example is a bronze statue of a horse and jockey from the 2^nd century BC. Once they progressed into the Roman period they moved this realistic, but still more ideal form, into doing portraits of actual people.

After the museum we had a presentation on ancient weapons. Weapon technology can frequently be a deciding factor in a battle. Warfare in ancient Greece was no different. The first armor was made of bronze and started in the bronze age (3000-1100BC). The early form is called dendra armor, it is made of overlapping bronze plates, kind of like the scales of a fish. Armor like this has been found in the the tomb of Agamemnon (12^th century BC). This, and other technologies, developed into the more well known Greek soldier, the Hoplite. This name comes from their armor type. They had a bronze helmet, sometimes with a leather lining), bronze breast and back plate, greaves of bronze covered their shins and forearms. They had a round shield 3-4 ft in diameter made of wood and covered in bronze. These shields protected the body and were very important in the phalanx formation where the soldiers would all stand side by side in close formation and each man's shield overlapped and protected the man on your left. They used spears in this formation to level them forward as part of the charge, these were typically 9ft long, but sometimes were as long as 14ft. They also had a double edge sword for close combat.

Cycladic Statue

The next museum we visited was the Benaki museum. It is a private museum started with the private collect of a man named Benaki, since then they have acquired other pieces. Here there was a selection of statues and art ranging from cycladic art (we went to a museum for this also) and early jewelry to many icon paintings. This museum was interesting in that it had pieces up to the period when Greece was ruled by the Ottoman empire and into the victorian era, it had some clothes and furniture, etc.

Icon from Benaki Museum

To finish out the trip a handful of us went to the Cycladic Art Museum. This museum is dedicated to Cycladic art which is from a ring of islands in the Aegean sea, it is in a circle hence the name Cycladic. They circle around the island where the god Apollo was born. This museum was interesting, particularly because it was so focused on one area of history. It was also fun in that it was optional to go to so the group was much smaller and it was neat having a personal tour guide with such a small group.

Shirt seen while souvenir shopping

After the museum we went out for coffee. I've got to say, that is one aspect of Greece that is pretty awesome. They love their coffee and cafes here, there are cafes everywhere and there are always people in them and sitting outside drinking a coffee drink. When we were driving places in the bus we would usually stop every 2 hours or so at a rest stop of sorts for a bathroom and break and coffee break. Every place we went always had an espresso machine and sold coffee. I've got to say their obsession with coffee is pretty awesome, even if it does cost a lot.

We flew out of Athens Saturday morning. Travel went reasonably well except for an extra 5 hour delay in Newark because of mechanical problems, so we didn't get back to school until 5:20am, a little later than preferred, but it still works and what's flying without some sort of delay.

Final group picture in Athens

Greece Trip: Day 8

2011-03-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

Monument at Thermopile

Day 8: March 17, 2011

Mountains at Thermopile

Today was primarily a travel day driving 540km from Thessaloniki in the north back down to Athens for a couple days before heading back home. While it was mainly driving we stopped at Thermopile on the way. This is the place of the famed stand of the 300 Spartans. We had a presentation on the event while there. It is 480BC and King Xerxes of Persia is in Greece trying to take over. 10 years perviously King Darius of Persia had sent messengers to the city-states of Greece demanding their subservience. Some obeyed, others didn't, including Athens and Sparta. Now Athens simply put the ambassadors on trial but Sparta threw them down a well (like in the movie 300). This angered Kind Darius. While he was unable to subdue them at Marathon at that time he didn't want to forget them so he had a servant remind him daily of the Greeks. So, now King Xerxes is here and is marching south towards Athens. The Greek navy is guarding the straights of artemis to force the army to march south and the only way to travel through the mountains is through the pass of Thermopile. While it is now farther from the sea, it used to be nearly right next to it. However, the Persians came during a Spartan holiday and the Spartans wouldn't go to war during that time. They went to the oracle and Delphi and were told if they delayed the Persians a king of Sparta would die. King Leonidas took a group of 300 Spartans, the royal guard, to thermopile to buy time. They brought with them about 7000 other Greeks. When the Persians arrived the saw the Greeks there simply waiting rather nonchalantly, so they waited 4 days suspicious that something was up. They attacked on the fifth day and fought for 2 days with the Greeks soundly defeating the Persians. Then a traitor told the Persians of a smaller mountain pass that would allow them to get behind the Greeks. Leonidas knew about this and had stationed 1000 men there to guard it but they were caught by surprise and were defeated, though they sent a messenger to Leonidas to warn him. So, he sent away the other Greeks and kept his 300 to buy them time. However, 1100 other Greeks stayed with him to defend the pass. The Persians came and threw themselves upon them suffering huge casualties. Xerxes pulled back his men and used his archers whose many arrows were said to blot out the sun. It is even in the historical account that when a Greek heard that he said, fine, then we'll fight in the shade. In the end all the Greeks were killed. This was a decisive defeat for the Greeks. However, this battle shows two things: that excellent training counts for a lot even when outnumbered 100 to 1 and the effect of patriotism and fighting for one's homeland.

Monument with Inscription "Foreigners, Go to the
Lesadimonians(?) and tell them we stand by here for
our values" where bodies were found.

There is today a monument at a place it is believed there used to be a monument of sorts and bodies have been found. It says “foreigner go to the lesadimonians(?) and tell them we stand by here for our values" because none of them made it out alive. While certainly glorified, this incident is powerful in that it shows a group of men standing by their convictions even unto death. Because of the oracle King Leonidas went into this expecting to die, even before surrounded, yet he still went. His men still went and those 1100 other Greeks stayed knowing they faced certain death because they desired there freedom so much. It is also interesting to note that though 1100 other Greeks stayed, the 300 Spartans got the credit and glory for this story trough history, they are the ones that people know about. It is interesting how history that we commonly know isn't always accurate and sometimes those who deserve to be remembered, or forgotten. All in all, a powerful story. This, and other things on this trip and elsewhere kind of make me wonder why warfare is more or less glorified in basically all cultures throughout time and even most religions. While there are many cultures that don't necessarily enjoy war, those who fight are respected and seen in an honorable, and sometimes glorified, light (though sometimes on and off depending on circumstances). I wonder why this is, if this is part of human nature or natural desires. If it is because of the innate recognition of those standing for and being willing to die for what one believes in and the protection of innocents that it is seen in that light. I'm not sure, but something to think about.

Leonidas and I
(Inscription above says "Come and get them [weapons]"
which he said to the Persians when told to lay them down)

We also had a presentation on slavery in the first century AD today. It was different than slavery as it was in modern times. Back then often nearly 30% of the population would be slaves (or more than 50% in Sparta). They would be in one of the 3 roles, agriculture, mining, or household. They were usually the results of warfare and being prisoners of war and being put to use. They might also be debtors or children of families who sold them for money. They would usually be sold in the agora to the highest bidder, though extra valuable salves might be sold in private. Their price was based on age, origin, physique, intelligence, and education. The agricultural mining slaves were what their name sounds like and household slaves might be in domestic roles or education/”nanny” roles for children, like the pedagogue talked about a few days ago, or even craftsman or assistants and shopkeepers. If a slave was freed, for whatever reasons decided solely by his master, his name would be carved onto a wall in a public place (like at Delphi) to create a record of their freedom.

Tonight we are back in Athens for one more day of seeing museums before leaving. We also spent some time tonight reflecting on what we've learned on this trip and the experience that we've had.

Greece Trip: Day 7

2011-03-17T15:02:00.000-05:00

Day 7: 16-March 2011

Squid appetizer for lunch

Today we traveled east of Thessaloniki to Philip and the port city of Kavala. Kavala used to be called Neaopoli, however that simply means “new city” which many colonies and new cities were called. This is the port where the apostle Paul landed in Greece. Near Kavala is Mt. Athos, it is a holy place to Greek Orthodox monks. There used to be 35000 monks there but are now only about 2500. We did not visit the place because it is not a tourist place, though you can request special permission to spend a few nights in the monastery. They still live the way of the Byzantine period and have many treasures such as gold and precious stone covered Bibles. We ate lunch in Kavala right on the harbor in an open air cafe looking out over the harbor. It was a rather beautiful place and picturesque eating the fish and looking out over the harbor with mountains surrounding us and cats walking around our feet. We had fried calamari, which was neat because they were small whole squid. We also ate a type of codfish from the Mediterranean which is quite large and had slices simply cut out of it. Quite tasty.

River that Lydia was baptized in

A Basilica at Philipi

Fish on a capital at a Basilica in Philipi

Near Kavala is Philipi. Near here is the river where Lydia, the first Christian convert in Europe, was baptized. Philipi is where Paul and Silas traveled through on Paul's second missionary journey. It was originally founded by King Philip II. It was first excavated by Napoleon the 3rd because he identified with King Philip. It is currently being excavated and much of the town has been found including the agora, theater, and three basilicas. One of the basilicas was very interesting in that the capitals on some of the columns had fishes decorating them, the early christian symbol and password. Since Philipi was where Paul and Silas were imprisoned we had a presentation on 1st century prisons. They were a place meant to hold people while waiting for trial and judgement rather than a place of punishment like prisons today. Prisoners were not taken care of then like they are today. In fact they weren't fed or anything, friends were needed to bring food and provisions, etc. Many people died in prison because they were usually beaten first (like Paul and Silas were) and then thrown in there without medical treatment or food. Though, if you were well off enough and a known figure you could have house arrest. Because of the lack of care in prisons this is a big reason why Paul tells in his letters (like Heb 13:3) to visit those in prison. This was also a big deal because it caused them to be associated with those in prison and identified them as Christians, or at least sympathetic to them.

Ignation Road in Philipi

The ancient Ignation road ran through Philipi. The ignation road was an ancient Roman road that Paul traveled on and went through Greece. A portion of the road is still preserved in Philipi today, even the grooves worn in the stone from many years of wagon and chariot traffic. The current day ignation road runs along a similar route, it goes from the port of Igoumenitsa on the eastern coast all the way to the Turkish border. It is interesting to see how geography affects things and doesn't really change over the years. 2000 years ago this route was advantageous for a road, it led from places that were good to live and grow food to other such places and to places of commerce such as the port at Kavala and this was the most efficient route to go then and still is today. The effect of geography is everywhere in the world, whether it is the mountains and valleys in Greece caugin the formation of many independent city-states or the navigable rivers of the central US going through fertile farm land allowing for great prosperity or the lack of navigable rivers in Mexico or Russia preventing easy exploitation of vast natural resources among many different things. It sets up perpetual conflicts and tensions and alliances and really much of geopolitical structures. Once I understand these things as I have begun to over the last few years geography is now far more interesting than it was in high school.

Prison ruins from Philipi

A Theater in Philipi

We had a presentation on monasticism today as well. The idea behind it is in the Gospels and epistles such as 1 John 3:15 where it talks about not loving the world. There are two main categories of monasticism, hermetic and synobiotic (communal). The hermetic was started by St. Anthony of the desert. After he was converted he heard the verses of the rich young ruler being called to sell his riches as being directed at him, so he sold his possessions and went to the desert. He spent 15 years battling demons and desires within himself but he thought he needed even more solitude so around 285AD he moved a mountain and didn't talk to anyone for 15 years. Some people came to join him as they saw that lifestyle attractive. As it got crowded he moved on. As this lifestyle developed it could range from reasonably comfortable living to very harsh living with some monks eating once a weak and living on the edge of starvation in an attempt to be more holy and closer to God. The second type called synbiotic is basically a communal style. It comes from St. Pachomius in the desert of Egypt. He started living as a hermit but had a desire to bring others together and pursue spirituality together. He founded the first monastic compound in 318AD but it didn't work out very well as he was very strict. So he moved on and founded others that worked better, he ended up founding 9 monasteries and 2 nunneries. They were characterized by prayer, work and rest. To get in you had to prove your desire. You would often have to stand outside the gate for several days until the gatekeeper decided to let you in. Then you would be trained in the ways and Christianity and then given a place to live and a job to do. The monasteries were pretty much self sufficient. In the byzantine period there was a boom in interest in monasticism.
While in Kavala we had a presentation on seafaring in the ancient world. Seafaring was important in the mediterranean and particularly Greece because of the mountainous terrain making land travel difficult and slow so there were many port cities such as Kavala or Corinth or Athens, etc. There were two main types of ships, warships and merchant ships. The first warships had only a single row of oars and were rather slow. They grew to the famous trireme which had 3 rows and oars and could go 14-15 knots at battle speed. The ships would attack by ramming the enemy ships and sinking them. They did eventually develop ships with four rows of oars and two men per oar. Merchant ships were very common and needed for trade and they used sails and the wind for their propulsion. This is how Paul traveled on his fourth missionary journey. He sailed from Asia Minor around the southern edge of the Greek islands and Crete until the storm hit and they wrecked on Malta south of Sicily. Throughout ancient history of the mediterranean seafaring was incredibly important and affected the development of nations and the culture greatly, again, as mentioned earlier, this development of seafaring shows the importance of geography because it came out of the geography of where these people lived and created a necessity and advantage for this type of travel.

Greece Trip: Day 6

2011-03-15T17:22:00.000-05:00

Here is today's. Very few pictures because the museums where we for most of the day didn't allow photography.

Day 6: 15-March 2011

Today we drove out from Thessaloniki to the town of Pella. This is the site of the “newer” capital of the Macedonians. This is where King Philip II and Alexander the Great would have lived. Sadly, because of excavation work we weren't able to go out onto the actual ruins, but we were able to see the museum (sorry, no pictures allowed). The town was founded around the 5^th century BC. The macedonians had their origins from southern Greece, they were from Dorian descent. Pella was a rather sophisticated design with running water going through sand filters and a sewage system, it was also laid out in an orderly grid fashion with 2 main roads crossing it with the Agora in the middle and the palace at one end. Pella itself was a very rich city with many musicians and other types drawn to the royal court. Much of its wealth game from the gold mined from Panger Mountain which allowed the financing of King Philips expditions to consolidate Greece under his control and Alexander the Great's military feats in conquering the known world all the way to India with 35000 troops and spreading Hellenistic culture and the Greek language as he went. Greek became the lingua franca of the known world, in fact it was primarily spoken in Egypt for 1000 years, which is why the Old Testament was translated in Greek, the Septuagint, in Egypt and the New Testament was written in it. There are always two sides to every story, while Alexander accomplished amazing feats, he killed a lot of people in the process, he was rather vicious in working to accomplish his goal of an incredibly large empire. However, there is the side that what he did also made Greek the common language and allowed the Bible and Christianity to spread more easily.

At Pella we had a brief presentation on Greek Mythology. The first mention of the gods was from the Mynoan civilization around 2000-1400 BC. They were often used as an explanation of natural phenomenon that the ancients didn't know how to explain, whether it was Zeus controlling the skies or giants causing earthquakes, etc. The Greeks were the first to represent the gods with human attributes, not being perfect. They could fall in love or even lie. They were all told orally until the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Within the stories of the gods there was much confusion and perversion in their relations. The gods were created out of creation. First were the primordial gods, such as Gaeia mother earth. From her and her son came the titans which then fought with the gods over control of the earth and the gods won. Zeus became king of the gods and the sky, Poseidon of the sea and Hades of the underworld. There were 12 different main olympic gods and cityies would pick a patron deity, such as Athens had Athena, etc. Though gods differed around the Hellenic world they all worshiped 4 of them: Demeter, Dionysus, Hestia, and Apollo. Besides gods there were also demigods which were the children of a god and human, Zeus in particular was quite a philanderer and produced many of them, an example of one would be Herakles or Jason.

We then visited the tumulus at Vergina. This was a place where 3 tombs of the macedonians from the 4^th century BC were found. One had been plundered, one is believed to be the son of Alexander and Roxanne, and one is very likely the tomb of King Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. While very little in archeology is completely sure, it is quite likely in that the time and place are right and the style and hastily built style (King Philip was assassinated so there was no time to prepare beforehand) and the fact greaves (armor for the shins) were found that were different lengths (King Philip is known to have had different length legs) lends much credence to the fact it probably was King Philip. It was found undisturbed in excellent condition. It was an underground mausoleum type structure with a Greek temple designed front. The archeologists descended into the tomb from the top, kind of like grave robbers would, to investigate the inside, but they have left the front door unopened and undisturbed. The tomb is now covered inside the museum in excellent condition, much of the painting of the front it still there, though perhaps not as brightly colored as it used to be. This to me was an awe-inspiring sight, simply because this tomb was 2300+ years old and was in excellent condition, nearly undisturbed in front of my eyes. Inside the tomb were a pure golden box containing the bones of King Philip and a golden wreath on top made form 330 pieces of gold leaves and acorns. Also found was a beautiful box with the remains of his 8^th wife (newest when assassinated) and another golden wreath as well as a preserved purple cloth that her bones were wrapped in. This is considered one of the most important archeological finds. The detail and beauty and richness and age of these boxes was nearly overwhelming. They were incredibly beautiful and the workmanship was very detailed and also knowing they have been so well preserved they could have come from a jeweler after 2300 years was amazing.

Bema monument at Berea

The 3 surviving steps at the Bema

"Paul" reciting I Thessalonians

We then went to Berea (Verea in Greek) to see the steps of the Bema where Paul spoke. When we were there it was goofy but also neat in that a tour cruise that was also there had an actor dressed as Paul who recited a large portion of 1 Thessalonians. It was kind of neat in that it gave a little feel for what Paul may have been like. It was a man who stood up and started to speak over the crowd of people milling around spewing out ideas and some people would stop and listen and others simply ignored him. While there we had a presentation on God-Fearers. These were people in ancient times who were gentiles but were attracted to the Jewish faith and lifestyle. They were attracted by the monotheism, as opposed to the many pagan gods, and the ethical standards of the Jews. The Jews would let them worship with them but they weren't quite accepted into their society. There is archeological evidence for the god fearers, at some theaters signs have been found listing seating areas for Jews and god-fearers. While not used by name, they were mentioned in the Bible such as in Luke 7 with the Centurion or Acts with Peter and Cornelius. In Thessaloniki many God-fearers were converted to Christianity and often formed the nucleus of many early churches. They were often Paul's target audience, he would go to synagogues and preach and draw them away which would anger the leaders. That is why so much of Paul's writing talks about or alludes to many aspects of the OT because these God fearers were familiar with the stories of OT and would understand what he was referring to.

Tonight we went downtown Thessaloniki along the water front, the harbor of Thessaloniki. There are many cafes and higher end bars all along the waterfront packed in densely. It seems to be a very popular to place to be, even on a Tuesday night. Again, like elsewhere, many of the people at these cafes were sitting out on the sidewalk at chairs and tables with small heaters overhead. It was nice looking out over the harbor. We stopped at one for awhile and sat outside and had coffee. It was relaxing, then we had to walk maybe a 1 to 1.5 miles back to the hotel.

I talked about this issue of graffiti on Day 2 that I have noticed a lot of and I meant to post pictures, but I forgot to, so here are some. This is just a small sampling of what we've seen in both English and Greek.

In Athens:

On Mars Hill

Greece Trip: Day 5

2011-03-15T17:14:00.000-05:00

Another note, sorry if these are a little rough, I'm simply typing them up each night and posting them without much proofreading.

A Monastery

Day 5: March 14, 2011

Today we were in Kalambaka, in central Greece. We were here to see Meteora (means suspended), the suspended monasteries. These are monasteries started around the 10^th century AD. They are built on top of rock spires sticking up out of the plains, some of them several hundred meters tall. Up until 1922 pilgrims and monks were raised and lowered in baskets, taking as much as 30 minutes one way. Then stairs were built into the rocks to assist in getting up and down. If the clouds are right they can appear suspended in the air, hence their name. There were 24 at one time, now there are 6 monasteries and 4 nunneries. The monks in the eastern world, the Eastern Orthodox Church, became monks to live a separate life devoted to God rather than like many monks of the Roman Catholic tradition that ran hospitals, orphanages, etc. They would spend 1/3 each of their time in praying, work, and rest. It was the Greek church that helped preserve the Greek language and culture throughout the Turkish occupation. You couldn't be a muslim and a Greek culturally. The churches were places where the greek language was spoken and taught and used.

Remains of a former monastery on a spire

Another Monastery

The supply lift at Varlaam where we visited

We visited the Monastery Varlaam. It was built in the 14^th century AD and then abandoned and rebuilt in the 16^th century which is when much of what is left today is from. Standing up in the monastery was a beautiful view looking out over other rock spires and a plain and large snow clad mountains behind them. This monastery has 14-16 monks living there and it has a museum and facilitates tours for part of the day. Sadly we didn't get to go up in the basket but hiked up a path and over a bridge, though they still use the lift (motorized now) for hauling supplies up. In fact, they will occasionally lower and raise a monk by hand, for old times sake. This monastery is particularly famous for its wall paintings. They have survived in their original form very well and better than most. We were able to see them (though no pictures were allowed) and they were quite beautiful and in amazing shape for being 500 years old. It was neat to see all the icons painted and hear about the meaning behind them and the different aspects of the painting. They obviously are not made to look real, but different aspects all have meaning pertaining to the person they represent or the beliefs about them. Icons from that time were painted by professionals who traveled around doing it, but they didn't sign them back then because it was for their religion, not fame. The church also had a holy section that only the priest could go into. This came somewhat from the tradition at the temple in Jerusalem of the Holy of Holies.

A Nunnery

The Greek orthodox (much from a presentation) are one direction Christianity went from the early days. When the Roman empire split the western half developed the Roman Catholic church while the eastern half based in Constantinople developed the eastern/Greek orthodox church. While there are some theological differences between the two, a big difference that cause division was that the catholic church recognized the infallibility of the Pope, while the greek orthodox church didn't, they resolved issues of belief through ecumenical counsels.

After this we traveled up to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, the second largest city in Greece at about 1 million people. The name means victory (Nike) in Thessoloy (the area) and was named after King Phillip won a great victory in this area. It has been continuously inhabited since it was founded in 316BC. We briefly stopped at the Byzantine Museum and saw some artifacts from the byzantine era. In particular we focused on early Christian tombs that have been found. It was interesting it wasn't until the 4^th century that crosses were used in connection with tombs.

View from on top the monastery

A 12000L wine barrel from the 16th Century

Old lift to bring up supplies

Another view from Varlaam Monastery

Cross from 4th Century Tomb

We then went to a Byzantine basilica, the basilica of Ayios Demetrius. The most important basilica in Thessaloniki. There are no basilicas before the 4^th century AD since Christianity was illegal before then. This basilica is from the 5^th century, so certainly on the older side. Demetrius was a Roman military official who was arrested at a Christian meeting. While detained he blessed another Christian who was to fight a much larger man in a gladiator fight, and he won. This angered the Romans who speared Demetrius to death. His remains are in the basilica built with his name. This basilica has 4 side aisles, and something I didn't know is there are always 3 entrances going into the main church from the Narthex to represent the trinity. This church was made a mosque after 1430AD when the Turks took over. After northern Greece was freed in 1912 it was restored back as a basilica though parts of it were destroyed in a massive city fire in Thessaloniki in 1917. Also in Thessaloniki we briefly saw the remains of the old agora and adium. The adium was like a theater, but was not built on a hill. A city wasn't fit to be called a city unless it had a theater or an adium and the culture that came along with it.

Basilica of St. Demetrius in Thessaloniki

Inside the Basilica of St. Demetrius

Our last bit of the day was a presentation on travel in the ancient world in preparation for seeing roads and places of Paul's travels. Travel has always been important and for much of history has been simply down by foot, that's what one is born with. Prior to classical greece it was all foot travel with only a little on mount animals such as mules or donkeys, or a horse if you were nobility. There were very few roads and the ones that existed were pretty rough and were usually more or less a foot path. Later the paths improved a bit for carrying carts, but they were just two grooves in the dirt or stone for the wheels and there were turnoffs every so often if carts needed to pass each other. The early carts had solid wheels and were quite heavy and pulled by oxen with wooden yokes since they didn't have harnesses and such for donkeys and similar animals. Once the Romans came though, the roads improved greatly, that is one thing they were known for. They even had distance markers every (5000 ft, a Roman mile) and maps have even been found with distances marked on them and services available at cities and stops. Most people could cover about 30-40km a day on foot (though it is said that Alexander the Greats troops could cover 100km in 24 hours providing a great military advantage) Paul did much of his missionary traveling by land which was rather grueling. Though he did travel by sea some which was the most efficient way for long travel and commerce. Traveling on the Roman roads and having to stop in different towns was one way the early church communicated. They would stay with other Christians and this allowed them to pass information and keep up on how different churches in different areas were doing. A lot of Paul's charges about being hospitable really make sense in this context. It is an interesting exercise to read the beginning and end of all of Paul's letters and look at the names and see how many are the same from people moving around and keeping in contact with each other.

That was pretty much all for today, though as I write this I smell cigarette smoke coming through the window and am reminded how popular smoking is here in Greece. It is far more popular than in the US, there is less stigma with it. Though it seems many buildings still don't allow smoking inside, though some do, including this hotel. However, this works well with the Greek desire to be outside a lot, all the cafes all have extensive outside seating and many have propane heaters as well so people can be outside for more of the year.

Greece Trip: Day 4

2011-03-14T16:15:00.001-05:00

Day 4: March 13, 2011

Gulf of Corinth from Delphi

Temple of Athena at Delphi

Temple of Apollo at Delphi

We started the morning in Delphi waking up to a beautiful view at breakfast off the mountain out onto the Gulf of Corinth. This gulf is where many pilgrims came to then traveled the 17km up to Delphi to see the Oracle. Delphi is on Mt. Parnassus (2500m) about 1000m or so up and has a beautiful view overlooking mountain valleys including the valley leading to the Gulf of Corinth with 3 million olive trees. We briefly saw a small temple to Athena around the Delphi area. It is interesting in that it has a Tholos, a round building, one of only a few round buildings in ancient Greek culture. There was also a giant stone laying in the rubble believed to possibly have been from when either the Persians of Gauls attacked and started to demolish Delphi and large rocks came tumbling down and killed a few and so they left thinking the gods were against them. Delphi was a sanctuary for the gods. Maybe 1000 people lived there comprised of the priests and caretakers. Within the sanctuary area only the priests could stay over night and no one could die or be born there. Delphi was a religious, intellectual, cultural, and athletic center of the ancient world. The primary temple was to Apollo, as the story goes Apollo established the oracle there but it originally belonged to Gaeia, mother earth, and he killed a giant python, her son, in the process. So, to purify himself he went north and worked as a servant for 8 years. Apollo was the god of civilization, art, and music. At the time since there was no organized justice, if someone killed someone of something the victim's family would go after him. But, he could go to Delphi and pay a penance, either a fine or exile, etc, and be cleansed of the deed. This led also into the practice later that city-states would meet there to discuss differences or stop wars. There was a group called the Amphicteri (sp?) which was kind of like the UN of the Greek city-states. In the excavation of Delphi an important inscription was found from the Roman emperor Claudius talking about his 26^th acclamation and he references Gaeus the proconsul of Corinth and we know Paul was in Corinth when Gaeus was so it narrows it down to knowing Paul was in Corinth 51-52AD and that s probably where he wrote the book of Romans. People came to Delphi for over 1000 years until the 4^th century AD.

Temple of Apollo at Delphi

There was a presentation on this topic as well. The Oracle at Delphi was a woman who would inhale volcanic vapors form the earth that induced visions that would answer people's questions. People came with all sorts of questions, but the priority of asking them was Military people, athletes, poets, then heads of households. Her visions were usually kind of ambiguous. People would bring sacrifices and votive offerings to the oracle, in fact, if they didn't like the prophecy they got they might give gold to the Oracle and ask for another prophecy. Delphi was considered the center of the world, it was called the navel of the world. At Delphi there were many treasure houses used to store the gifts and offerings, often cities would try to have the nicest treasure house. They were built of local stone with marble decoration. The marble was imported from the islands, it was often done so by hanging it in the water on planks of wood between two ships to make it lighter. A retaining wall built here is interesting in that it is made with irregularly shaped, but well fitting, stones, this was supposed to help it hold up during earthquakes.

Polygon Retaining Wall

A presentation also touched on Greek athletic events. There were athletic games held at Delphi in honor of the god apollo. They occurred every 4 years. It started because Apollo served penance for 8 years but that was too long practically so they did 4 years. In fact these periods of years were called Olympiads and they were used to tell time, i.e. and event happened in the 2^nd year of the 5^th olympiad. However, olympiads were 5 years long since they counted the year at the end and beginning of the the games. Since we know the game started in 776BC, we have a good dating system for many events. The name olympiad comes from another of the 4 panhellenic games of which those at Delphi were a part of. There games at Mt Olympus for Zeus (the oldest games), the Pythynean games were the ones in Delphi, the Isthmian games in Corinth for Poseidon, and the Nemean games also for Zeus. During these games a truce/ceasefire was called in all Greece for the games and travel too and from. This was sometimes used as a time to try to negotiate a peace. For an athlete to win in these games was a very big deal for him and his city. In fact he would have food and shelter the rest of his life, kind of like today in Greece Olympic athletes can be made honorary army officers and given the salary even though they aren't in the military. The most impressive feat was to win at all four panhellenic games, kind of like winning the grand slam in tennis today. There were several different event including running (600 and 1200 ft and 1.5-3 miles), pentathlon, wrestling, and boxing, and chariot racing. The ~600ft running race was run the distance of a stadia which was a distance measurement of 600 human feet so the actual distance varied form place to place around 180-190m.

Sphinx

There is a 5000 person theater at Delphi overlooking the valley and we had a presentation of theaters there. They were used for plays and musical performances and talking. The one at Delphi held 5000 people, but some could hold several times that. They were designed in a semicircle with the seats ideally at 26 degrees to provide excellent acoustics so all could hear, even without microphones. In fact, at the theater at Ephesus the limestone used seems to echo high frequencies and muffle low frequencies to make the voices more clear. The events were usually free to go to as the events were sponsored by a wealthy citizen, as mentioned earlier.

Portion of the Frieze

The Charioteer

Model of Delphi

We then finished by going to the Delphi museum before driving to Kalambaka for the evening. The main attactions at the museum are a very large sphinxe from the 6^th century BC, and the famous frieze of Siphnos that decorated their treasure house. Part of it represented the clash of the gods and giants. It is one of the best preserved reliefs of the period. Finally, the most famous piece is the Charioteer. It is an excellently preserved statue from 470BC. While many statues were made in bronze then, not man have survived because they have been melted down and reused unlike the stone ones. It is a severe style and from the beginning of the classical period. It has great detail, it is a romantic realism. Very real but also idealized in size and proportions, it was about 1.8m tall which is tall for the time. It is considered one of the most important art pieces in the world.

Finally on our way to Kalambaka, we saw part of a 220km long aqueduct, sometimes covered, that brings water from springs to Marathon reservoir, north of Athens.

The Aqueduct

Greece Trip: Day 3

2011-03-14T15:23:00.000-05:00

Day 3: March 12, 2011

Here is the next day with pictures (You can click the pictures for a bigger view).

Picture from Lunch. Can you guess what it is?

We left Athens today and headed west towards Corinth. On the way we passed the straight of Salamis. We had a presentation on the major naval battle that took place there. In 492-490BC King Darius of Persia had tried to invade Greece and had been repelled so his son Xerxes had come back. He had been defeated at Marathon, but by this time he had captured Athens and was sailing to capture the Peloponnese peninsula which is connected by the isthmus of corinth next to the straight of Salamis. Before this the Greeks in Athens had needed some convincing to build several hundred triremes, but the famous Themistocles was able to do so.

So now, the Greeks needed to stop the Persians as a last ditch effort, they had about 300 triremes and the Persians about 350. So, they sent a servant, Themistocles' Pedagogue actually, to the Persian camp to pretend to be a traitor and tell them the Greeks were arguing thinking about splitting up, so the Persians wanted to take advantage of the moment and attacked the next day in the straights. However, because the straights are only 1 mile wide they couldn't use all tehir ships at once thereby negating their advantage in numbers. Also, there was a westerly wind blowing against them making it difficult to maneuver and making them disorganized. Because the Greeks were unexpetadlet ready and with those advantages, the Greeks won sunk half of the Persian ships and only lost 4o. Xerxes then went back to Persia because after the defeat he didn't to lose his important sea supply lines. He left general Mardonius in Greece to finish the job. He took Athens again and caused trouble, but was eventually defeated.

Corinth Canal

As we were going Yoni also briefly talked about the Greek economy which is based on four staples:Merchant Navy (they have the third most ships in the world under their flag and the most in the world are in Greek interests), tourism, agriculture, and light industry.

We then saw the canal at Corinth. We had a presentation here as well. There has been a desire for a canal there for thousands of years because it is only a few miles wide and saves a dangerous 400 mile trip around the peninsula. They didn't initally have the ability to dig a canal so they built a Diakos in the 6^th century BC, which was basically a road of types that they drug smaller ships across. The big merchant ships they unloaded and hauled the cargo and met back up with the ships on the other side. In 307 BC they sarted digging by Egyptian engineers said the sea levels at the two ends were different and would cause flooding so they stopped. Caeser then tried but died first. Caligula also tried but was told the same flooding problem, so he stopped. Nero also tried and got 3.3km done at 40m wide. Heratus Atticus and the Byzantines tried but didn't finish. Then after the Suez canal was finished they decided to try again. It was finally finished in 1893 after 12 years of planning and 12 years of building. It was actually on the same route Nero had mapped out. It is 6.4km long and 24 m wide and is 52m below ground level at the deepest point and has a water depth of 8m at lowest tide. It has a 1.5kmh current running through it. Today it is only used for small boats, much of it tourism, and there is no desire for widening it because of road transport and better sea travel. This canal though is quite impressive to look down its length, and it is unique in that standing in the middle, one can actually see both ends.

Temple of Apollo at Corinth

Ancient Corinth was a huge city, possibly with as many as 1 million people. It was powerful in that in controlled the isthmus of Corinth between the mainland and the Peloponnese peninsula and had a port on both gulfs, Lechaio port and Sencrai port. It was destroyed in 146BC by the Romans as an example and rebuilt in 44BC. There is a temple to Apollo (one of the oldest 7th-6^th century BC) and the old agora and Bema left. The Bema was where speakers addressed the public and where Paul was accused when he was in Corinth. After re-inhabitation under Roman rule it had facets of roman design in good plumbing and water supply and public latrines. They have found old pottery here. They found a piece from the 8^th century BC with alphabet inscriptions which indicates there was an alphabet as early as 1000BC, this is the earliest concrete evidence of an alphabet. It is interesting that at a similar time inscriptions have been found in Israel with Hebrew writing. Here also they have found a stone with an inscription from a Jewish synagogue and a menorah carving. Finally we saw an engraved stone as part of a road that says that Erastus the city treasurer paid for the road at his own expense. It is thought this is the same Erastus that Paul references as being a believer in Romans 16 and Paul is believed to have written the book of Romans from Corinth.

Stray dog that looks like a wolf golden retriever (For Jenn)

The Bema where Paul was accused

Inscription in the road at Corinth

Beautiful view from Mycenae

Fortress at Mycenae

Then we went to Mycenae was the earliest Greek civilization from 17^th to 11^th century BC. While others had been living there they can be considered the first civilization as one might consider people being a civilization once they have time for more than simply subsistence, when they can create art and other nonessentials for living. This was a fortress from that time and is one of the most important archeological sites in all the Mediterranean. Found here were 6 shaft tombs and a beehive tomb. The shaft tombs were simply deep shafts where the body and treasure was placed. The beehive tombs were shaped like massive beehives under a dirt mound. They were 33 layers of stone tall (~1.5ft per layer) and the stone above the entrance weighs 120 tons. While it was filled treasure when someone was buried when someone else in the family died it was dug up and they were buried there. The treasure seems to have been removed/disposed of when this happened so it is thought they believed it was only necessary for the crossing over portion. At the fortress is the famous Lion's gate. It is a huge carving of two lions mounted over the main gate and supported around using the Korval arch method (like the beehive). When the fortress was first discovered with the 6 (first 5, then another was found) shafter tombs a golden mask was also found and it was thought this might be the tomb of Agamemnon, but these were actually from the 17^th to 16^th century BC, not the 12^th century when Agamemnon would have lived. Though, the beehive was from that time so theoretically it could have been there is no hard evidence. It is interesting to not that much of what Homer wrote has been found in real life after subtracting a little exaggeration and story telling. So while Agamemnon was in Homer's stories, he may also have been real, or close to someone real. All this construction was just amazing though using massive stones to build the walls. While they weren't cut perfectly square and fitted like later construction, it was still immensely difficult since they had to place together odd shaped stones into massive well fitting walls. It was weird that the stones here were all made from a natural conglomerate making them almost look like a large aggregate modern concrete.

Finally to finish, we had a presentation on city planning. The first real cities came to Greece in the 9^th to 8^th century BC, it was just villages before that. They were on the coast with the fishing, fertile land, and trade. They had a grid shape and straight lines and they started building walls for defense. A sense of community and identity also formed. Then major aspects developed such as having temples and gymnasia and agora's (central marketplace and place to discuss ideas), and stadia for games. The Romans developed off of this with their style, though they always had a major north/south road and a major east/west road and they had real water and sewage systems unlike the Greeks.

Famous Lion's Gate

On a final note, while here in Greece, we certainly aren't going to starve. Every meal we've had we have ben kept more than full with plenty of past and cheese and mutton and potatoes to keep us quite full. And today I had a delicious fresh squeezed blood orange juice, while a little pricey, it sure was tasty, probably the best orange juice I've ever had. It's a good thing we are walking plenty while we're here though so we can still fit into the same clothes.

Beehive Tomb

Greece Trip: Day 2

2011-03-14T15:00:00.000-05:00

Sorry it has been a bit to get this posted but due to moving hotels lacking decent internet and the timeline of getting these written, here they are and plenty long to chew on.

1896 Olympic Stadium

Today we started by driving to the old Olympic stadium from the first modern Olympics in 1896. On the way , and yesterday as well, I noticed there is a lot of graffiti in Athens. Probably 1/3 of it is in English as well, from what I can read it seems to be a result of the protests, they are usually not flattering of government, police, rich, etc. But it is everywhere, ever Kiosk on the road has it on their doors/covers they put down at night. Many walls and especially corrugated metal doors in the sides of buildings. While maybe not as big a deal to Greeks, but certainly seems to at least to me, many stone and marble surfaces have been tagged. Many marble walls of buildings and even some statues have phrases, etc tagged on them. I suppose it certainly gives some character to the city, but is kind of sad too. On the way, Yonni also made some comments about mass transit in Athens, they have around 60,000 taxis and the subway when built had to be diverted around or sometimes go as deep as 20 meters, he said, in order to not have the vibrations from the trains destroy ancient buildings and structures. The original olympic stadium is the only one in the world built entirely of white marble, seats 70,000 people, and cost 1 million golden pounds. The first olympics were fashioned after a world exhibition in some ways, they lasted for five months.

Trireme Olympia

We then headed down to the cost of the Saronic gulf on the Aegean sea. On the Yonni made some interesting comments on universities. Due to Greek law only the state is allowed to have universities in Greece, though due to the power of European law now other European universities can have branches in Greece, but be solely there. While it seems unfortunate only the state can run universities, they do have an interesting provision that Greek police are not allowed on university campuses, with the original intent of allowing free speech, a kind of asylum for people to say what they want without fear of problems, but of course that rule has been abused. Down at the gulf we saw briefly a couple retired Greek naval ships and a recreated Trireme. It is an accurate recreation of a trireme built from ancient descriptions and sculptures. It was built by Greek and british researchers, partly as a means to test claims that it could go as fast as 14 knots, it can. This was an ancient warship with 3 rows of oars for propulsion and its means of attack was a ram on the front with wich to ram other ships at full speed. These were used solely for fighting, for defensive purposes. While they had 170 rowers and 30-40 other crew members, there was no place for sleeping and eating and living, that would all be done on shore. And in comparison to the Persians, all the rowers were freemen. It was this type of ship that helped the Athenians defeat the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. The Olympius, the recreation was used to help carry the flame for the 2004 Athens Olympics, it is now on display and is cared for by the Navy.

The Parthenon on the Acropolis

The rest of the day was spent at the Acropolis. Athens has been occupied somehow since around 3000B.C. And the first religious buildings and temples were built on the Acropolis around 600B.C., before that it had been a place for kings and rulers. The term Acropolis though simply means the high place in the city, and every Greek city had one. In 480 B.C. the temples were destroyed by the invading Persians. Afterwards in rebuilding the City the effort to build the current acropolis, and in particular the Parthenon, was lead by Themistocles, a leader in Athens.

The Parthenon from below and from the West

Greek architecture was a presentation done while at the Acropolis. The famous aspects of Greek architecture are the column types: Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian. The Ionic style, primarily from Greeks living in Asia minor, is defined by the curls, like scrolls, at the top, on the capitol. The Doric, the oldest and from the Peloponnese, is described by the very plain style over all with simply a large bead for the capitol. Finally the Corinthian was the fanciest with flowers and such for the capitol. When temples were built, they're designs were rather standard, they had an entrance, the Cella, and an inner area for the statue of the god to be. A temple was a pacle or the god to live, not a place to worship in, the sacrifices and worship was done outside, which is why the decorations mostly appear on the outside. In the Doric style if the front (facing east) and back of the temple had N number of columns, the sides would have 2N+1.For example, the Parthenon has 8 columns on the front and back and 17 on the sides. In the corinthian style, if the front had N, the sides had 2N+4. In the center of the temple is where a large statue of the god, for whom the temple was built, would reside. In the cities there would also be theaters and stadiums. The theaters were for plays and speakers while the stadiums were for athletic events. At different time periods of Greece it was done differently, but while at some times the Rich tended to have bigger fancier house, particularly later Greece, older times they would spend their riches on sponsoring events for the city, such as theater or games, etc. A huge part of being a citizen of a Greek city was loyalty and love for one's city, one desired above all else for one's city to do well and be successful and be a great place.

One of many wild dogs around Athens

The acropolis was had many functions. On a part of the hill which is the Acropolis is the Penyx (sp?), this was a place where the citizens would come to discuss and vote on the important issues that weren't dealt with by the parliament/delegates. Citizens were only free men from Athens (in respect to this particular site). It is said if not for this it couldn't function, i.e. if the slaves, etc voted. Part of this is that for a democracy to function, the citizens need to be educated and informed (actually George Nicholas a lawyer and statesman from the late 18^th century in America said something similar "An enlightened people will never suffer what was established for their security to be perverted to an act of tyranny."), this was something the slave and lower class weren't. It was very interesting that in the referendum votes citizens could not abstain or stay neutral, they had to pick a side, they had to say yes or no. While that may put on some pressure, it's not all bad. It could have some advantages if people in the modern democracies had to do that. Sure there could be downsides that those who didn't care would vote for the first guy or the slickest easiest guy, but it might push people to participate more early on. Say, in the primaries, if they knew they had to vote they would work harder to make sure someone who represented their views was in the final running. I think there are ups and downs to both aspects. The delegates that formed their parliament were chosen more or less at random from a pool of screened and eligible (i.e. had to have paid their taxes) candidates, they were only allowed to serve one year, they didn't want professional politicians.In Athens, daily judges were chosen at the Agora (city square and market place) and they made many decisions on daily issues.

On to the acropolis and the parthenon. Much restoration work has been done on it and it is continuing all the time. As pieces are found they try to put them back in their original place. If at least 2/3 of the piece is their they reconstruct the rest; sculpted by hand from the same type of marble, but of a whiter color so that you know what is new and what is old. The parthenon was built by Themistocles and the people of Athens in only 9 years in the second half of the 5^th century BC. Since then there have been turkish homes and harems on the acropolis destroying many other buildings and their materials used for construction, but the Parthenon survived nearly perfectly intact until 1687 when the Turks, while fighting, stored gunpowder in it and it blew up destroying vast amounts of it. The parthenon had a Doric style, with 8 columns wide (30m) and 17 columns (70m) long which follows the 2N+1 method. The aesthetics were very important to the Greeks, that is why they have columns and decorations when walls would work as well. And the top step before reaching the columns is actually curve down at the ends by 15cm that was from a little bit off it looks level, if it truly was level an optical illusion would make it appear not level. Also, the columns were about 2cm wider in the middle to counteract the illusion of being skinnier and they tilted inward a few degrees so they didn't look like they were leaning outward like they would actually straight, the til was slight enough that if they extended upward until they met, it would be 1700m high. The columns were 2m in diameter and 5m apart. It was built at the site where Athena and Poseidon battled to be the deity of the city, as the legend goes. Below the acropolis is the theater of Dionysus, it is the oldest in the world from the 7^th century BC.

Group Picture from the Entrance to the Parthenon

On a hill on the edge of the Acropolis is Mars Hill. This is the place where the Apostle Paul gave his famous talk about the Unknown God in Acts 17:22-31. We had a site presentation here about this. This hill was called the Areopagus by the Greeks first and it was where trials would happen. Ares was the god of war, and mars was the Romans god of war, hence why they called it mars hill rather than area hill The council of areopagus met there and was composed of citizens voted there who had tenure for life and had to have served a public office before then, and there was no size limit. There were two rocks up there, the rock of wrath and rock of shame where the accuser and defendant would stand, respectively. Many scholars and philosophers would gather here and that is who Paul talked to. They had a shrine to the unknown god there to make sure they didn't leave out any deities in their worship, so as Paul was waiting in Athens for Silas and Timothy after leaving Berea he gave this speech there. It was really neat to stand there near where Paul gave this speech, though it looks different than it did back then because of an earthquake in 1651. Because of the old court there, the supreme court of Greece today is called the Areopogus.

Mar's Hill

The Acropolis Museum

We then went to the Acropolis museum after lunch. This new museum just opened in June 2010. It is built on 96 pillars over and excavated ancient city next to the acropolis. It is a fantastically designed museum with many statues and artifacts found and near the acropolis from the temples before the Parthenon and the Parthenon. On the third floor is a life size layout of the Parthenon and around this is placed the actual recovered pieces of the frieze (continuous stone mural around the top of the inner building of the Parthenon) and the metopes (blocks of sculpted murals around the outside of the Parthenon) and the Pediments the big triangle shaped massive sculpted stories at each end of the Parthenon (East and West, one telling of the birth of Athena, the other the battle between Athena and Poseidon). Nearly half of the frieze is in a museum in London from a long time ago, so replicas are here at this museum. The rest is attempted reconstruction or simply blank sections with names. The information for reconstruction and names comes form ancient myths and descriptions and from a detailed painting done by a frenchman a couple years before the Turks blew it up. Some sections are very full, others empty. The West pediment is reasonably intact while the East pediment is nearly completely destroyed and gone. The friezes are important in the art world and history. They are the first known art to depict movement and life in it, the movement and action of horses and men, a very realistic depiction as well. The Greeks were very much about a realistic depiction in their art, in their horses and perfectly proportioned bodies in their statues, etc. On a side note, it is important to remember all the statues and the Parthenon were all painted brilliant colors when they were made and are the simple white marble because of time other than a few small pieces here and there. To finish the day of learning a presentation was done on Greek education. Education in Greece was more than just school, it was the process of training a man into his real form, of raising up future citizens for the city (like mentioned earlier, welfare of the city was extremely important). They were taken to school by an elderly trusted family slave known as a pedagogue, this person was intended to be a positive moral and character role model in the child's life. They started school at age 7 and focused in 3 equal areas to have a balanced education: letters, music, and gymnastics. The letters were reading and writing and would involve memorization of passages as well. The music, interestingly enough, was not for becoming professional musicians (that was for slaves, etc), but for giving an understanding of harmony and rhythm, and the harmony between man and nature. The gymnastics was to provide physical training for the body. After completing this schooling around 14-16 years of age the poorer students would begin the family trade while richer students would mess around and enjoy life for a coupe years. At 18 they would serve in the military for 2 years before becoming full fledged citizens. While this training was only for men, women were taught in the home. This could be just household duties, but if that father wanted to, he might teach grammar, etc to the women. A side note that was given is that this wasn't a dishonoring of women by the Greeks, their way of honoring women, etc was by defining specific roles for people within a society.

That night after dinner, some of us walked downtown Athens for a few hours. It was about a 25 minute or so walk. When we were down there we got to see the tomb of the unknown solider the the ceremonial guards. It was neat, as we were getting ready to come back all of a sudden several hundred bicycles go riding past down the street blocking traffic for several minutes with lights on and blowing whistles and horns. According to a fellow there it is a weekly ride they do every Friday night for around 6 hours (assuming nothing was lost in translation). Very unexpected, but pretty cool.

Greece Trip: Day 1

2011-03-10T13:22:00.001-06:00

So, I am in Greece over Spring Break with a class trip from school. We are going to be traveling to different parts of Greece to study both the ancient society and the development of the early church. The main cities we'll be in are Athens, Delphi, Kalambaka, and Thessoliniki. I have to write travel journals each day talking about what we did and thoughts about it. So, as time allows, I will be trying to post those journals along with perhaps a few pictures each night (here, GMT +2). I hope you enjoy.

Edit: Sorry I haven't finished my bit on George Friedman's book "The Next Decade." I have been rather busy at school leading up to spring break, but I will hopefully get my last post or so up shortly after Spring Break.

Hopps

Day 1: 10-March 2011

We left Longview at 5am on Wednesday Mar 9 to drive to DFW to fly through Newark to Athens. We arrived with no problems in our travel. As we approached Athens we came from over Europe crossing the eastern Alps and crossing over Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece, etc to get to Athens on the southern side of Greece. We could see many mountains and valleys all covered in snow, it was quite beautiful. Once we landed at Athens International on the outskirts of Athens we started the drive to our Hotel in the center, a about 45 minutes away. On the way our tour guide, Yonni, started giving as some information about Greece and Athens.

Athens has 2 million people and the metro area is about 4 million. They actually had snow yesterday, which only happens every 2-3 years, but it was gone by today and today was in the 40s, so cool, especially in the shade but not too bad. Athens is surrounded by mountains, as are most cities/former city states in Greece, because the mountains divide the country into numerous valleys that are somewhat separated causing them to initially develop rather individually.

The Olympic Center from the 2004 Olympics

The Acropolis

Athens is the capital of Greece and of Attica (kind of the county it is in). Athens is also home to the Athens University, the biggest in the country, with 100,000 students. Because of congestion and to encourage use public transit during the day on Mon-Fri only half the cars are allowed in the city center. This is determined by the last number of your license plate, if it is even or odd. While we were downtown today, while not a lot of cars, there are a ton of little vespa like scooters that dart everywhere, in and our of traffic, hardly paying any attention to where they are as long as it is reasonably paved. Whenever you cross the street you may be sharing the crossing with numerous scooters and even cars. Whenever a stoplight turns green all the scooters that had worked their way to the front in between cars during he light all dash off down the road with taxis and cars right behind them. Rather chaotic looking, but amusing looking. On the note of public transportation, when they made their subway system it took a long time because they kept finding artifacts, over 70,000 in all. In fact, many subway stations actually have museums in them. On the sides of many of the roads in the city are nice looking sour orange trees for decoration, but the oranges aren't really edible, except for making marmalade or something. We drove down one of the main avenues, Queen Sophia Avenue. Along this was the National Garden with over 7000 trees, Embassies, and the House of Parliament (Greece is a parliamentary system, as such their president is merely a figure head). The house of parliament is in the neoclassical design built in the 19^th century (I believe), and this was a popular design style in Greece during this time; it was modern but it still incorporated some ancient Greek elements, such as Ionic or Doric column styles.

Scooters Driving

A Public Inscription

After getting to our Hotel, we put our baggage in our room and started off at the National Inscription Museum. This is more of a scholarly type place where people study remnants found that have inscriptions on them. Here we also learned a little bit about the development of the Greek alphabet. The Egyptians started very early with Hyroglyphs, the Jewish slaves, etc took some of this back and between them and the Phoenicians kind of simultaneously, developed a phonetic alphabet (though the Phoenicians did it first). This then moved to Greece where it developed into their alphabet from their earlier system called “Linear B”, a symbol based writing system. There were two main local variants of the Greek alphabet, Ionic and Halkida from the island of Iubea. The Ionic form developed into the modern Greek alphabet, helped by it becoming the official language of Athens in 403 B.C., but the Halkida form eventually moved to southern Italy and was the foundation of the Latin alphabet. Modern Greeks can understand much of ancient Greek still. About 60% of modern words were around then, most of the new words are technology related. In fact, the grammatical system back then was more complicated then currently. When the modern state of Greece was formed, the older more scholastic form was chosen as the official language over the common language version that was more lax and other stuff mixed in, but in 1980 the common language became the official language of Greece. Many inscriptions at the museum were public inscriptions that told laws or treaties or told of a sponsor of an event; in Ancient Greece rich people didn't have big fancy houses but spent their money to sponsor events such as theater or games, etc.

Looking up towards lunch and the Acropolis

Statue of Perakles

Capuccino

Police Bus

Peaceful Protestors

We then moved into walking around much of the downtown area of Athens. On the way we saw the Athens City Hall with a statue of Perakles, a famed and important ruler of ancient Athens and the one who started the Parthenon. Buildings within a certain distance of the Acropolis can't be more than 8 stories tall so was to preserve the view. We ate lunch at a little cafe on the side of this hill in the shadow of the Acropolis, it felt a little like the movies, which was pretty cool. :-) In the designated old part of the city you can't build new buildings, only preserve what is there which could be anywhere from 100-200 years old to over 1000 years old. Some of the areas we visited to get a general feel for Athens (not spending a lot of time any one place) included: Omonia square, Sindagma square, Kolonaki center square, Monastiraki square where there used to be monastery built 1000 years ago. We also saw reamins of the Library of Hadrian, one of the great libraries of the ancient world. While in Kolonaki square we were able to stop at a cafe called Da Capo and get some delicious cappacino (though not terribly cheap €2.50). A couple people also got some hot chocolate, but it was quite intense, it was a dark chocolate, almost syrup it was so thick. Kind of like melting chocolate chips in the microwave and adding a bit of milk then drinking that. Quite an experience. :-) On our way back to the hotel we had the opportunity to see a group of a few hundred people marching on the streets protesting. They were workers who had been laid off from a telecom company (I think as a result of the recent government austerity measures). They were pretty peaceful, just banners and megaphones, but I was excited to see it, protesting and rioting seems to practically be a national hobby in Greece so it was good to see it firsthand. :-) We had seen police around pretty visible all day. Standing around in groups and police buses waiting on the streets. Apparently this is because of both the protesting and the relatively recent influx of refugees from many places including Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places. Also on our way back, we passed a couple of streets to avoid, they are a center of drug dealing and using, there were people squatting down up those streets, etc, not very pleasant. It was good to get a general feel for the city, in many ways it reminded me more of traveling in San Jose, Costa Rica than say Jerusalem. While it has a mix of old places like Jerusalem, the many shops and kiosks and little scooters, etc seemed to give a more similar feel to San Jose. An enjoyable first day, and I'm surprisingly not as tired now as I thought I would be after all the traveling. Tomorrow we get to hit it strong, including the Acropolis.

I hope you enjoyed, and will enjoy over the next 9 days.

Hopps

Superbowl Commercial: Motorola v. Apple

2011-02-07T09:33:00.000-06:00

While it seems many people thought the commercials were lacking yesterday, this was a pretty clever commercial from the superbowl yesterday.

This video makes the most sense when viewed in the context of Apple's famous superbowl commercial in 1984, playing off the big brother theme from Orwell's book 1984 and advertising its macintosh computer.

Motorola used a similar theme, but everything was white, Apple's theme color, and the girl at the end had white earbuds in, the symbol of the iPod. They took Apple's theme and turned it around on them and said if you don't want to be controlled you shouldn't buy Apple products, but the Xoom. Probably one of the better commercials last night, for those who got it.

Hopps

The Next Decade: Realism and Idealism

2011-02-06T23:18:00.000-06:00

Friedman in his book, The Next Decade, speaks to different prevalent foreign policy philosophies. He breaks the two primary camps espousing their views into Realists and Idealists. Their names are rather self-explanatory.

Realists say the US, as any other nation, should focus on its national interests, even if that means dealing with countries that perhaps don't practice democracy, high levels of human rights, and other American morals and values (across ideologies). Certainly that has been done before, Roosevelt with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Nixon with China (and perhaps, Friedman predicts, with Iran. Or currently, supporting Mubarak in Egypt since he provides a stable anchor for the entire middle east and security of Israel even though he isn't stellar in regards to human rights). They believe that since we live in a dangerous world, focusing on moral goals diverts from the pursuit of our genuine interests, thereby "endangering the very existence of the republic that is the embodiment of American ideals." (36)

Idealists state the US should operate primarily on the moral principles upon which this country was founded and believe it should continue on (again, across ideologies). The believe that the moral compass must be first and foremost in our minds when deciding foreign policy.

Friedman proposes that the divide between the two "fundamentally misstates the problem" (36) He points to several points upon which each side founders. Idealism: Which takes precedence, national self-determination or human rights (two principles upon which the American revolution was built)? If a country decides to revoke human rights through a constitutional process, or countries that don't hold elections like the US but clearly are wanted by the people based on long standing cultures? Realism: It typically thinks that the national interests of the 21st century US, which are extraordinarily complex, are as simple as those of an 18th century small nation (simple survival) were.

He says they are really just different sides of the same coin, power. "Power as an end in itself is a monstrosity that does not achieve anything lasting and will inevitably deform the American regime. Ideals without power are simply words-they can come alive only when reinforced by the capacity to act." (37) Acting for power as an end in itself ends up essentially being thuggish and not worth anything, but in a real world only working with regimes that function and think as you do won't allow you to get anything done. He then goes onto speak about how America can't shun powers that don't behave exactly as we do, that they will often still be useful to fulfilling our primary goal of national self interest, the interest of preserving the American republic which stands for those values. He makes a very interesting statement "The pursuit of moral ends requires a willingness to sup with the devil." (38) He takes a rather utilitarian view of the world, it is hard to say completely from this book, but almost a view that the ends justify the means. However, he ends with a statement concerning the next decade, the President of the US will need to grapple with both ends. "he must choose the uncomfortable synthesis of the two that Machiavelli recommended. The president must focus not only on the accumulation and use of power but on its limits. A good regime backed by power and leaders who understand the virtue both of the regime and of power is what is required." (40)

This brought an interesting question to my mind, as a Christian. God has put government into place as a means to restrain evil in this world, he has given it a sphere of authority.

"Is there any activity or deed necessary for the basic function and survival of a state that is immoral or sinful/wrong for a Christian to do?"

If it was truly pared down, could a Christian do any job or position within a government that is necessary for its survival, without sinning? One side of the issue seems to say yes, if it is truly a job requiring its survival, God created this institution, how could He require it to do something that was wrong (unless perhaps the view is taken that if something is wrong it shouldn't be done and if it is time for the nation to collapse, that was God's plan)? But on the other hand, this is a fallen world and things aren't perfect (though government was instituted after the fall). This is a pertinent question to think about, whether directly involved in politics and foreign policy decisions, or simply voting for politicians making those decisions. Among many things, I think a very visible application of this question is pacifism. If war or violence, in the proper context, is necessary for the survival of the state (which while it could be argued either way, I think a realistic view of human nature would say it is), is it wrong to be involved in the proper act of war? Even if it was necessary for it to be done to survive, should you not be involved in it and let others who have no qualms "do the dirty work" so to speak? Something to ponder.

Hopps

The Next Decade: Terrorism

2011-01-31T10:23:00.001-06:00

Alright, so I've had the chance to read a little bit more of The Next Decade. Friedman has now spent a little time talking about terrorism and the "War on Terrorism" over the past decade, what it has done and what needs to/will change about it. He makes the point that terrorism isn't really an existential threat to the US, while it will occasionally happen and people will die, it can't do enough damage to threaten the existence of America, "terrorism in and of itself cannot destroy the material basis of the American republic" (73). The point of terrorism is to use force multipliers, to focus on the psyche to make the terrorist appear more powerful than he really is. The US has made combating terrorism the central thrust of American global strategy, to the detriment of strategy and issues elsewhere. Terrorism cannot be eliminated, it is impossible. To do so would require wiping out entire people groups, obviously not possible or desirable, and this in turn would probably create other groups who didn't like this and would then take over the job of terrorism; even totalitarian states are unable to completely stop such attacks. This has created an unbalanced foreign policy; while Friedman isn't saying to ignore terrorism, it must be seen in light of the overall national strategy. Certainly a certain amount of resources should be devoted to preventing terrorism, but the nation needs to also not have a singular focus on one area and be aware and able to respond to events of national interest around the world, such as Russia expanding its sphere of influence over the last decade as they've observed the US being tied up in the middle east. Or the fact that taking out Iraq created a vacuum in the balance of power in the middle east; it used to be Iraq and Iran balancing each other in the middle east to prevent either from becoming too powerful, now Iraq is incapable of doing that anymore, which then puts the US in a poor position to negotiate with Iran.

Here is where Friedman takes on a pragmatic view of the Presidency. In response, to say a terrorist attack, a President must soothe the nerves of the public and show his efforts to stop terrorism, but he shouldn't act in a manner that is disproportionate to the effect and shouldn't try the impossible. "He can lie to the public, but he must never lie to himself." (75) What this is saying is Friedman believe at times the President must say one thing to soothe and pacify the public, but in reality knows he can't fully act through on that because the costs are way too high for a negligible benefit and keep in mind the long term interests of the US, and so must in reality act else wise. This has been done in history before, such as Roosevelt calling for vengeance on the Japanese after Pearl Harbor but privately focusing on Germany first, not Japan, because he believed that is what was necessary to win the war. Among other interesting ethical issues presented in this book (and other STRATFOR writings), this is an interesting one, is it ethical for a President to lie to the people when necessary for the "greater good" of the country, knowing he can't tell the full truth, that he must convey a sense of being able to accomplish something even when he knows it can't be done? Is that OK? Like I mentioned above, it has been done before, and perhaps should have been done this decade with regards to terrorism, I don't know, but is it right?

From here his main point concerning the next decade is that the US must not focus singularly on terrorism, but must define its interests in different regions throughout the world and deal with them accordingly and proportionately. To prevent regional hegemons and preserve its balance of power strategy throughout the globe.

I think my next post will touch on his discussion of foreign policy philosophy/paradigm, particularly idealism and realism.

Hopps

The Next Decade

2011-01-28T23:38:00.005-06:00

So, I feel like should post again since it has been nearly a year, I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with this thing.

So, I thought I'd comment briefly on a book I am currently reading (since it's laying on the desk next to me) called "The Next Decade: Where We've Been...and Where We're Going" by George Friedman of STRATFOR. I have posted on topics along this line before. George Friedman is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence and global analysis firm with a lot of interesting things to say about world events happening, and where things could go from here. I read his book "The Next 100 Years" a couple years ago and he had a lot of interesting things to say about the world and where it is probably heading in the next century. He is certainly aware that predicting a century with any detail is impossible, but he does believe overall trends and ideas can be predicted. He made some interesting predictions such as China slowing way down/crashing within the next 20 years and having internal turmoil, despite what many people say. He also thinks we'll have another, albeit less intense, cold war with Russie in the next few decades and that countries such as Turkey and Poland will come onto the world stage. (For more on this see a previous post)

Anyways, this book came out last week and he has narrowed it down to just the next decade. So far he has mainly talked about America and its place in the world and how it affects all of the world in so many ways, regardless of whether you want it to or not (he tries to stay as ideologically agnostic as much as he can and just look at the facts, both a virtue and a vice I think). As I get further into this book, I'll try to share a little more on some of his predictions. The interesting thing about his perspective on Geopolitics is he sees it (especially longer term) as very deterministic. Everything is dependent on geography. What countries will and won't do, and can and can't do comes down very much to geography. Whether you have fertile agricultural land for wealth with a navigable river down it (the US) or no river making it nearly useless (Russia, parts of Europe), or whether you are placed strategically (Poland in the northern European plain between Europe and Russia) in a position that has strategic value essentially always. Shorter term, such as a decade, he believe leaders (particularly the President of the US) individual decisions affect people's lives a lot, but in the long run things will go the way they will nearly regardless of individual decisions by leaders. I think he can see a lot that others can't perhaps, but I think he misses the mark sometimes because he does neglect the human factors (that are so hard to predict) such as society and religion and family and morals and the things that those can affect. He takes a very pragmatic, utilitarian, and often Machiavellian view.

Well, that's enough for now, I'd encourage you to check out the website, they have a lot fo good information; a good free weekly email and a good subscription service that is reasonably priced it you're a student.

Hopps

Israel Trip: Day 10

2010-03-22T22:21:00.004-05:00

Me on top of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea to the North

So, this is the 10th and final ISrael trip update. I hope these updates were interesting and enjoyable, and more or less readable considering how fast I wrote them and put them up.

Jim/Hopps

For our final day in Israel we left the Bedouin camp and drove north along the Dead Sea to just south of En Gedi, the spring near where David fled from Saul, to the mountain fortress of Masada. Masada is a fortress built on top of a butte, a stand alone mountain top separated from near by hills standing far above the Dead Sea Valley, while it is only 50-100 feet above sea level, the Dead sea is nearly 1800 feet below sea level.

Masada from the West with the Roman ramp leading to it (It was wider and higher when used)

It is thought to have been first constructed by Jonathan the brother for Judah the Maccabee, it was especially fortified by Herod the great during the first century AD as a stronghold for him to flee to in case of a Jewish revolt. It is most well known because Jewish rebels took it by surprise from a Roman garrison when the Romans were quelling the Jewish rebellion around 70AD. This was the last Jewish stronghold to fall to the Romans. The Romans surrounded it and built a siege wall and eight encampments around it to ensure no one could get in or out.

The square is the remains of a Roman encampment, in front of it is the siege wall

They then used 30,000 Jewish slaves to build a ramp up the side of the mountain to allow siege equipment up. The Jewish slaves were used for many tasks, about 5,000 of them daily would walk several miles north to the spring at En Gedi to bring water back for the camp. When the Romans had the ramp built and started using siege equipment the Jews built a construction of two layers of wooden beams with sand in between behind the area being battered to act as a shock absorber. So, the Romans fired flaming arrows to burn it, but the wind was blowing the wrong direction and blew it back towards the Romans, the Jews were ecstatic about this change in fortune. However, the wind changed abruptly and burned the defensive structure away. The Jewish leader, playing on the emotions of the moment, spoke to the men and convinced them to not let themselves be captured by the Romans, that the Romans would abuse them and their families, death wasn't the issue, they wanted to die free. So 10 men were picked to kill everyone, and then lots were drawn for one man to kill the rest and then kill himself. This was very much against the Jewish beliefs, there is no stipulation in the Jewish religion for killing other Jews or yourself unless being forcibly made to change your religion. Even on the very important day of atonement, Yom Kippur, fasting is the very important custom, but if a doctor says you need to eat or you might die, then you must eat. When the Romans made their way into Masada the next day they were surprised to find all the Jews dead, they were not expecting that, they acted more like the Romans would have. Masada was rediscovered in 1838 by Edward Robinson though it wasn't excavated until later. Masada is kind of like remember the Alamo was to the Texans, it is a symbol of Israel, it is their saying that Masada shall never fall again, though of course there are many opinions as to how this should be accomplished. This is a place that every single Jewish school kid will visit at some point in his education. As was mentioned when I spoke about the Holocaust museum, for the Jews, if you say you will kill them, they will try to kill you first.

On top of Masada looking South

Cable car for those not wanting to walk

We got to climb Masada, first from the side of the Roman road, and then back down the snake path on the taller Eastern side.

We then went to Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a very important archeological discovery, they are dated from between 150BC-70AD, the oldest previous Biblical manuscripts were form the 6^th century AD. They include at least portions of every old testament book along with Jewish sectarian communal writings and apocryphal books. This is a big deal particularly for Christianity because copies of Isaiah 53 were fond from before the time of Christ. This chapter is a prophecy of the coming of the messiah which for Christians is Jesus, so this disproves previous claims that this was added after the time of Christ as part of the 2^nd portion of Isaiah by Christians wishing to bolster their claims. At Qumran are some ruins from the Jewish sect who lived here, believed to be the Essenes. They were a Jewish sect with strict laws and purification rituals who devoted themselves to the studying of the scriptures. Some say that it is possible Jesus spent some of the time between 13 and 30 at Qumran studying, since he probably was studying somewhere to become and ordained Rabbi and many of teachings are very similar to those of the Essenes, though there is no proof either way.

After Qumran with our academic portion finished we went to a beach on the Dead Sea and went floating. It is quite an odd sensation to float so easily, It is just like floating in an inner tube, minus the inner tube. The mud is supposed to be very exfoliating and soothing from the Dead Sea, I tried rubbing it on myself, it pretty well felt like mud, but it was fun nonetheless. Being in such a heavy salt solution (28%-30% compared to ~7% in the ocean) causes you to know if you have any small cuts or abrasions, thats for sure. Once you get out and walk towards the showers the water dries and leaves a nice salt crust on you. Overall, quite an experience.

Then we drove back to Jerusalem for a farewell dinner at an old Monastery that is also a restaurant now. We had chicken and lamb kabobs, then we headed to the airport. Once at the airport Israel does things a little differently. When you first get there you get in line for a few questions and a possible interview depending on your answers and profiling. Then they scan your checked luggage, and possibly you might take it to a counter to opened and searched. Then you check in and go to passport control and then personal security, with several quick passport checks along the way. Rather intense security, definitely more to leave than to enter the state of Israel. We had two hours to do it and thankfully everyone got through, though it was close. Me and Chuck Kopp heard the flight was overbooked and tried to volunteer to get bumped since we would probably 1^st class back to the states and a free ticket, but apparently, either in Israel or for international flights, you have to volunteer at check in time, so it was too late sadly.

This was a very fun and informative trip. I am very happy I went on it, it was nice having the logistics organized for me, and the amount of learning from a trip like this, in comparison to a self trip, is vast. Mishi's incredible knowledge of all these things and the previous research done in preparation for this trip really made it very profitable. On a trip like this there is also a huge building of friendship and community among those who go; I was able to meet new people and get to know people better I only kind of knew. It makes me sad to come home, to break up that community, we had been in close proximity for a long time, for 11 days, and now we are split back up to our respective lives. While life must continue, it is always a little sad and depressing for a few days as that feeling wears off.

Israel Trip: Day 9

2010-03-22T21:39:00.006-05:00

Ok, back in the states now with more predictable internet. Here is Day 9 update.

Jim/Hopps

We started out the day at the Church of Peter Gallicantu. Gallicantu is latin for crowing rooster. This site is in remembrance of the 3 denials of Jesus by Peter. It is built on the location that is thought to be the house of Caiaphas the high priest. It is likely this is the site since it is on the side of Mt. Zion near the Temple Mount, though it is possible his house might have been further up since he would have been quite rich. The current church there was built in the 1950s, but it is built on the ruins of a Byzantine time church. It is unknown what the Byzantine church was called, if it was to commemorate the same thing. Underneath the current church are the ruins of the Byzantine church that can be seen.

First level of Byzantine ruins under the church

In the lowest level is an old cistern that is believed to have been used by Caiaphas as a torture chamber and holding cell and possibly Jesus was kept there over night. From an outlook can be seen a monastery in the Ge Ben Hinon (sp?) valley that is thought to be the plot of land bought by the priests with the 30 pieces of silver that was given to Judas. An interesting though, while we often give Peter a hard time for denying Jesus, he is the only disciple to follow Jesus there, the other 10 disciples disappeared.

A statue of Peter denying Jesus

We then went to the Israeli museum which has a model of Jerusalem as it was in the second temple period, the time of Herod.

Overview of model from the north

It shows the Temple pretty well finished and a wall around the outer suburbs of Jerusalem.

Herod's Temple model

Old City of David

Jerusalem was only in this state for about 5 years from 65AD to 70Ad when the Romans laid siege and destroyed Jerusalem. At the museum is also the shrine of the book, it is a place where some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display. The entrance is a black basalt slab of stone, this represents the son of darkness. One of the scrolls found at Qumran speaks of the battle between the son of light and the son of darkness, similar language to the book of revelation. The main exhibit is underneath a white dome that bears resemblance to the top of the pottery jars the scrolls were found in, there are jets of water pouring onto the roof, these represent the living water.

Dome over the Shrine of the Books

Inside the dome in the middle is a larger than life handle and end of a scroll standing on end with a sample dead sea scroll wrapped around it,I was unable to get photos inside since photography was prohibited inside.

We then had a presentation on the Shepherds Field overlooking Bethlehem. Shepherds at that time basically lived the bedouin lifestyle, nomads who lived off the products of their animals, the wool and milk and meat. They would live in tents or caves. There are several caves with monuments that claim to be the location where the angels appeared to the shepherds on the night of Jesus' birth, but there isn't really any way of knowing since that aren't exactly any markers or remains left from such as visit.

Then a brief presentation on the Temple. The first temple was built by Solomon as a final resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, for place for the spirit of God to reside. It was built in 7 years, though it is interesting to note it Solomon spent 11 years on his own palace and 21 years on the palace complex for his hundreds of wives and concubines. At the temple is where the Levite priests were the intermediaries between man and God. The first temple was destroyed in 586BC by Nebuchadnezzar. A poor temple was then rebuilt 70 years later by Nehemiah when the Jews returned to Israel. Herod rebuilt the temple in a magnificent manner starting in about 20BC.

To finish the day we went to a Bedouin encampment in the northern Negev desert area near the Dead Sea. This is a place for visitors to spend the night and experience and learn about eh Bedouin culture and lifestyle. When we first arrived we had the opportunity to ride camels. It was two people to a camel, one on each side of the center hump.

Riding Camels!

It was an experience, particularly since they are sitting with their legs tucked under when you get on and off and so they have to rise up and then sit back down to get off, they do so by first rising one end of the body and then the other. It was a lot of fun. The bedouins have a lot of culture to their way of living, though very different from ours.

The main eating tent at the Bedouin Camp

Sitting around having tea and learning about the Bedouin lifestyle

When guests are first welcomed they are served a sweet tea, but when the talking and visiting is over the host serves a bitter coffee indicating it is time to wrap things up an go. The bedouin concept of women is also very different, the women do essentially all the work from shepherding to cooking to child bearing while the men more or less sit around and talk. Women are seen as property, a man can have up to 4 wives at a time and can change them out anytime he feels like it. They don't understand our culture, our women dress similar to us and we have them out in the open. However, in a situation in a visitors camp like we were at they deal with it because they are getting paid to show of what they do to live. While we were there we saw no women, even though they would often do the work being demonstrated by the men, they don't want out and about. There has been a lot of conflict between the bedouins and the Israeli government over land. As long as they are moving around in the desert area it hasn't been a big deal with the government, but now that some of them are settling down into more permanent settlement arrangements this is causing more problems. They don't see the land as ownable, kind of like the Native Americans at the founding of America, so they don't see why they can't just move and around and live where they want to. Later that evening after a delicious meal, sitting in groups on cushions eating from a shared platter of rice and lambburger and chicken and vegetables with pita bread, we walked out into the desert. We walked away from the lights and looked at the stars, it was very peaceful but also a little ominous.

Stars at night in the desert. Orion's belt in the Center

While walking out we saw some sort of dog creature lurking outside our flashlight beam, but it was probably a tame dog from the settlement. There was enough light from the moon and stars and distant cities it was pretty easy to see where we were going even without flashlights. It was interesting to think of these being the hills that David fled to when running from Saul, it would be very difficult to find someone out here if they knew what they were doing hiding in the hills and caves in the nearby mountains.

Israel Trip: Day 8

2010-03-19T15:53:00.005-05:00

Here is todays update, it might be a little disjointed, particularly towards the end, but I wanted to get it posted nonetheless because we are moving abodes tomorrow and my internet access will be very limited over the next two days before getting home. So instead of dumping 3 updates once I get back, here is 1 and I will dump the last 2 days once I get back.

Today we started by listening to an Israeli settle talk. He talked a little about the history of the Et Tun (Not sure on spelling) block of 4 settlements. The first was settled in 1929, it went through several periods of destruction and resettlement. There was a massacre at the Et Zion (again, not sure on spelling) settlement where 150 settlers were rounded up and shot by the Jordanians. There was held a memorial each year on independence day for the 69 orphans from that, until 1967 when the West Bank, were Et Zion was located, was regained by the Israelis. He didn't talk much about the whole issue of settlements though, I was a little disappointed. It seems a big reason behind the settlements is that it is the Biblical land of Israel and they want to claim it for the state of Israel. There is much contention about whether to give the West Bank area to the Palestinians, but it si more than just an issue of desiring peace, there is actually quite a desire among many Israelis for peace, but if the Palestinians own the West Bank, they will be within ½ mile of Jerusalem, if they don't get East Jerusalem, which is what they want probably won't be happy without. So, while it seems there is no need to be provocative with building settlements, it is also hard to give it back because of the danger of being so close to the territory and risking attack.
We then went to Yad Vashem. This is the Israeli Holocaust museum. Throughout this museum they try to tell individual stories to better allow the viewer to relate to and grasp the size of the event, it is hard to grasp the fact the 6 million Jews were killed. First we saw the children's memorial, for the 1.5 million children killed. It was sponsored by a couple who's child was killed in the holocaust, but they survived. It starts with rock columns with the tops knocked off and an arch with metal rebar sticking out of it to represent the metal fences and barbed wire of the camps. Then you walk into the memorial itself. There are 5 candles lit in the center with an arrangement of mirrors around them and around the room, which is pitch black but for the candles, and then mirrors reflect the light back and forth approximately 1.5 million times to represent the 1.5 million souls. As you walk through this the name, age, and country of origin of each child killed is recited in English and Hebrew (and also Yiddish?), it takes a year and a half to get through them all. This is one of my favorite memorials I've ever been to. As you walk into the dark room it is slightly disorienting, you can't tell where the walls are or anything, it is just this immense collection of lights, and the children's names are being read off. To me it was awe-inspiring in a sense and also very reflective and sobering, to think of those 1.5 million children who were murdered, what they might have grown up to be and do. I think a well done memorial is an amazing thing, particularly when it is done well and with care, when certain aspects symbolize something to do with the event being memorialized.
Then we went into the main museum, it was interesting to me in that it was rather well lighted, rather than dim as I would have thought. It is basically a long triangular corridor with the displays in rooms to the side and you zig-zag back and forth until you get to the end and it flairs open onto a balcony overlooking a valley, it symbolizes the hope of a new day and the land the Jews now had. We all went through the museum at our own pace. Near the beginning a quote was on a display that jumped out at me, “A country is not just what it does-it is also what it tolerates...”-Kurt Tucholsky, a Jewish writer. This to me is something very applicable to any country at any time for any issue. When I first saw it I thought more of issues morality that might be tolerated, though that is more on a personal level perhaps than a governmental level. But it is certainly applicable to many other issues, this quote and the next one both should give motivation to not just stand idly by when things are happening that you know aren't right, but since they don't directly affect you don't seem worth your time and effort. This quote is more famous than the last, “They came for the communists, and I did not object for I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not object for I was not a socialist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not object for I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to object...”- Martin Niemoller, German Pastor.
This memorial to me wasn't as emotional as perhaps I've been dealing with the holocaust at other times, I think this might have been an issue of factual overload reading all the signs, and maybe an atmosphere as conducive to that, but to me it was still very sobering and heavy. I think memorials like this are excellent, they remind us of many things. In particular they remind us of the event that happened, that it really happened, that real people had their lives effected. It reminds us that since it has happened once, it can happen again. I think this is a cue Americans could take from the Jews; with something such as 9/11, we should always remember, it was real people and a real event and we should be working to stop that from ever happening again, if we forget, it will happen again. For the Israelis their motto is “Never Again.” They have their own state and will never let an atrocity like that happen again. If you say you are going to kill them, they will believe you and try to kill you first; people didn't believe Hitler and he did it anyways.
I think this also shows the utter depravity of mankind, what it is possible to inflict on each other, even in this “modern” age. A question to ask, and one I don't have a an answer to is what the Germans who actually did these acts were thinking. I mean, they were humans, not animals, but it appears they had lost their humanity by the things they did. What was it that caused them to do that, or at least to allow them in their own minds to do that? People also ask the question of why didn't people do anything about it at the time it was happening, whether Germans, or Jews, or anyone else. I don't think most people would be any different now, most people wouldn't do anything about it. It comes somewhat gradually, and then you have to fight against every institution you've ever known, your government and police, that isn't something you do lightly. I think, just like then, it would take a bit to get people to do anything about a situation that has arisen (while a little further away, take other genocides such as Darfur for example).
We also had a site presentation that talked about the effect of the Holocaust on the formation fo the state of Israel. Looking at it as a whole, there was already a Zionist impetus before the Holocaust happened, but the holocaust helped speed things up and put some pressure on other countries to allow the Jews to have a state of their own. So while not causing the formation of the state, it did assist. Some people say the holocaust caused the state of Israel, but it can also be said that if there had been a state of Israel there would have been no holocaust.
Also I presented on the 1948 Israeli war for Independence. Briefly, the British left Palestine on May 14 1948. The same day David Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel and 7 Arab armies; Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sudan invaded Israel. There were numerous UN truces and partition plans spaced throughout the fighting, but the war ended throughout 1949 as separate cease-fires were signed between Israel and the individual Arab countries. It was also during this time that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) was formed. In the end they had 65% of the original British mandate with Gaza controlled by Egypt and the West Bank controlled by Jordn. In this war over 6,000 Israelis were killed, 1% of the population. That is a lot, if that was the US, that would be over 3 million people. After the war the population of Israel climbed from 600,000 to 1.5 million within a short while. This caused a lot of hardship for everyone, but they are remarkably pulled through and are a rather modern country as a whole today.
We also went to the Garden Tomb. This is the other possible location of the death and burial of Jesus. There is some evidence that seems to show the possibility of it, but as was mentioned in the last journal, the Holy Sepulchre church seems the most likely. However, this was a much more peaceful place to reflect on and think about the death of Jesus.

The place Jesus might have been buried.

We then had several presentations after dinner tonight which I will briefly summarize here. First was the importance of the Temple Mount. The temple mount, and Jerusalem as a whole, is important to 3 major religions of the world; Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is only the 3rd holiest city for Islam, but this is where they believe Muhammad ascended to heaven to talk with god before spreading it around the world. For the Jews the Temple used to be here. For Christians this is where Jesus was, his death and resurrection, the birth of their religion.
The Topography of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a city located on a hill, rather two ridges. It isn't built in a valley like many cities to create ease of access and trade, but up high to allow for defense. It wasn't built all the way up though, it was built a little lower down because of access to water without having go outside the city walls. They dug a shaft down to the spring, however, David and his men climbed up this shaft to take the city from the Jebusites. Jerusalem has slowly expanded, Solomon pushed it up the ridge in the construction of the temple and Hezekiah pushed it out to control another ridge and more water. Eventually the city grew suburbs outside its walls which the Romans later tried to enclose with more walls.
The walls of Jerusalem ties into this. The original Jebusite city (though it was probably 3000 yr old at that point) was about 10 acres which David expanded to 15 when he took it. When Hezekiah expanded the walls it grew to contain the western ridge, to protect it from invading Assyrians led by Senacherib. It was then destroyed and the rebuilt by Nehemiah to a size not much larger than David's city. Hasmoneans expanded again and Herod built water storage systems and more walls. While Jerusalem has changed hands many times since then, the wall locations (even if they've been repaired and rebuilt) have pretty much stayed the same. There have been a few large stones as part of a wall at a low level that are 6000 years old, they are from far before the Jebusites, who it was is unknown, though this place was inhabited at least as early as the time of Abraham, this is where Melchizedek resided.
The Mt. Zion presentation also tied into this, Mt. Zion is basically the location of the temple mount. Mt. Zion is where David built his palace and put the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon built the temple further up the ridge, but at a place called Mt Moriah. There was been confusion about what is Mt.Zion. The southwest ridge has been called mount zion, partly because the Romans took over the real mount in thier conquests and Christians were looking for elsewhere to worship. Today the southwest gate is called the Zion gate. But, the southeast ridge is where the original mount Zion was.
Our final presentation was on American religious views of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are many different views depending on ones beliefs, there were even different views within denominations. Jews (though not all do) and evangelical fundamentalist christians tend to support the state of Israel the most. The Christian view comes primarily from the relatively new theology of dispensationalism. This hold there are 7 dispensations, time periods, where God deals with man differently. 5 have already passed, and the 7th is the millennial reign of Jesus and for that to occur it is believed the Jews must be back in Israel. So, the founding of a Jewish state is rather exciting. Some Christians though are more of what is known as liberation theology, it is more of a peace movement, and they tend to be more sympathetic to the palestinians, this primarily includes Catholics and Unitarians, among a few others.b Overall, there is a strong view towards peace and even pressuring Israel to compromise, compared with the hardline/hawkish view. The compromise view in young American Jews is driven a lot because of their lack of baggage from previous wars and influence by liberal thinking on college campuses which tend to be more oriented in that manner.

Israel Trip: Day 7

2010-03-19T11:16:00.004-05:00

We started the day going up to the top of Mount of Olives. From there the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock can be clearly seen; we did this partly because the Temple Mount is currently closed because of the recent demonstrations.

The Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock in the center

The Dome of the Rock has a dome covered with real gold donated by the late King Hussein of Jordan, costing 30 million English pounds. The rest of it is a bluish structure since it is covered in ceramics. The Eastern gate could be seen in the Temple Mount wall.

Eastern Gate is in the Center

The eastern gate is closed and has been since the Byzantine era. In 614AD the Persians came in and destroyed churches and since the population of the area had been decreased the gate was blocked up. Shortly thereafter, the belief started that this will be reopened when the Messiah comes. As an added protection the Muslims have put a cemetery in front of it to bock the messiah since Jewish priests can't walk through a cemetery. However, to be safe, in case they are wrong, since they are so close, those buried there will be the first to be resurrected. It is actually for this reason there are Jewish and Christian cemeterys on Mount Olives very near the Eastern gate. Near the Dome of the Rock is the Al-Aqsa mosque. This is reportedly where Muhammad landed when he made the jump on his wonder horse from Mecca to here, he then dismounted and went and prayed at the rock, under the Dome of the Rock, and ascended to heaven where he spoke with god before coming back and preaching it to the world. Near there is Domitian Abby, this is traditionally where King David is buried and the location of the last supper.

We then started walking down Palm Sunday road, this is where Jesus purportedly came on his entrance to Jerusalem. While probably not exactly, it is likely it is near there because the landscape hasn't changed much since then. Along the way we came to the Church of Dominus Flavus. There we primarily talked about the burial process. Sarcophagi were used by other cultures in this manner, but the Jews would dig a grave in the solid rock for a family, and it would be reused. After several years the bodies would have decomposed to a sufficient level the bones would be placed in a stone box called an ashuary, this would be there permanent place for the remains, the tomb could then be reused.

Tomb entrance in the back with Ashuaries in the front

It is interesting to note by the size of the boxes, they are too short for many modern day people's femur bone to fit in it, so they were smaller people back then. Our walk from there ended at the church at the Garden of Gethsemane from yesterday.

We then got in the bus and headed up to the Lions gate, once we got off the bus and were walking there we noticed on the old walls the star of david decoration. Mishi said that at the time it wasn't the star of david, but simply a geometric design, it evolved over time to the meaning it has today, as did the swastika or pentagram. It started in the middle ages as a derogatory symbol for Jews, but they have embraced it and it is the Jewish symbol known around the world today. The Lions Gate was built by Suliman the Magnificent in 1517AD. According to legend he had a dream about two lions tearing each other (or him?) apart and his seers told him it meant he should rebuild the walls of Jerusalem if he didn't want that to happened to him so he did and he put the lion symbol on the gate. In all reality the Lion is just a symbol of power and royalty, as it is known all around the world. This gate is also called St. Stephens gate, though it doesn't mean much since it was built far after the stoning of Stephen.

From there we entered into the compound of St. Anne's church and saw the remains of the pools of Bethesda. The pools of Bethesda were originally built as a water supply for the vast number of pilgrims coming to Jerusalem several times a year for different holidays, since water is scarce in this region the locals didn't want to give up there personal water supply to these pilgrims. Bethesda was one of three locations built for this purpose. This was the location of the healing of the lame man by Jesus on the Sabbath and riling up the rabbinical establishment over it. This was really very much an internal conflict. This was a young rabbi making decisions about the sabbath and what could be done on it, this was a decision reserved only for the highest rabbis. They were worried about his freedom in teaching that was different from the establishment. On this sight a church was built by the Byzantines as they were looking for any site to build a church on that was connect to Jesus. They built a basilica over the pools, while they weren't functional, they were still accessible.

Pools of Bethesda

Also at this sight is St. Anne's church, it is a crusader structure and is named after the traditional mother of Mary. Here is one of the few sculptures in the world with Mary as the child rather than the mother, though she has an adult's face as Jesus does in the classic iconic work of religious paintings of the virgin Mary and baby Jesus.

Mother of Mary and Mary

It is one of the most impressive crusader structures in the country, and in doors has very neat acoustics with an interesting echo. We had the opportunity to sing in there, which sounded neat. The church is currently run by a French organization called the White Fathers, they also do other work around the world. After visiting there we stepped outside, it was fascinating to hear the singing coming from inside still, but to then hear the muslim midday call to prayer sounding across the city. It was an interesting dichotomy and coexistence.

From there we began the walk of the Via Dolorosa. This is latin for the way of agony/grief/sorrow.

Walking down the beginning of the Via Dolorosa

It is the traditional route that Christ followed from the Praetorium to Golgotha. This path is about 20-30 feet above an old road below it, so except for height much of the path is probably close to what it was, thought the early church didn't attach a lot of significance to it so there isn't much old tradition to follow, the current route was developed by the Franciscans. This route assumes the Jesus was judged at the castle of Antonia on the NW corner of the Temple Mount, though the location of the Praetorium is argued. It could be at the castle of Antonia or Herod's Palace. There is pavement along the castle of Antonia that would have worked, while none has been found near Herod's palace. Though it is also thought Pilate might have liked the spaciousness of Herod's palace since he was used to living at Caeserea Phillipi on the sea.There are 14 stations, or locations, along the way commemorating the events in this walk of Jesus.' This idea of stations originally started in Europe by the Church for those too poor to journey to the Holy Land, it was a way for them to remember and follow along. However, when they did come to the Holy Land they expected these stations to be there, so they were created. There are 9 stations along the route and 5 in the church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The first stop is where Jesus was condemned to death, each station along the road is marked by a discus with a roman numeral indicating the number. The 2^nd station is when Jesus takes up the cross, it is marked by two Fransiscan chapels; the chapel of the condemnation and the chapel of the flagellation. The 3^rd station is when Jesus falls under the cross the first time, this station is more of a devotional type station, it isn't based on an event that is known for sure, but rather an Old Testament passage. It is at a corner in the road near a Polish chapel. The 4^th station again is a devotional type station and is where Jesus meets his mother, there is a small Armenian chapel here. The 5^th station is where Simon the Cyrenian is forced to carry the cross, this is in the Bible. It is marked by a Franciscan oratory before ascending steeply to Golgotha. The 6^th station is another devotional stop where supposedly Veronica wipes the sweat from Jesus' face, there is a small chapel and altar there. The 7^th stop is also a devotional stop where it claims Jesus fell for the second time. There is a Roman column in a Franciscan chapel to mark the spot. The 8^th station is where Jesus consoles the women of Jerusalem. This is in the Bible and is marked by a Latin cross on the wall of a Greek monastery. Again another devotional stop for the 9^th station where it is claimed Jesus fell for the third time. There is a Roman column there to mark the spot. Near is the apse and roof of the the church of the Holy Sepulchre. The 10^th station is the first of the five within the basilica church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is where Jesus is stripped of his garments, though this particular action is based on an old testament passage and is more devotional in nature. To mark it there are stairs leading up to a small chapel. The 11^th station is Jesus being nailed to the cross, there is a shrine here to commemorate this. The 12^th station is where Jesus died on the cross, it is marked by and ornate Greek altar over the place where Jesus cross was. There is also supposed to be a large crack in the bedrock there from the earthquake after he died. The 13^th station is when Jesus is taken down from the cross, is marked by a large stone where Jesus was purportedly laid after his death. Finally is the 14^th station where Jesus was laid in the tomb, it is in its own chapel under the main dome of the church of the Holy Sepulcher, it is really the focus of the entire basilica.

The location of the church of the Holy Sepulcher is primarily here because it is the purported burial place of Jesus. While the Garden of the Tomb is another possible location of his burial site, it is highly likely this is actually where he is buried. It was outside of the city walls at the time of Jesus and was a quarry at the time. Other tombs have also been fond in this area. Services have been held here since before the time the Romans conquered Jerusalem. Also, the Romans built a temple to Jupiter here in an effort to discourage Christian services here. The Christian population wasn't dispersed like the Jews when the Romans took over, so they have been able to be around to keep traditions alive. These facts all strongly point to this being the actual place of his burial. It was during the time of the Byzantines that the church was first built. St. Helena, mother of the current Byzantine ruler, wanted to see the place of Jesus' burial and when she came to this tomb she had workers dig away all the rock from the sides of the tomb and leave the tomb standing as a piece of rock with the tomb inside all by itself. Then the chapel and basilica were built around it.

Chapel in the Basilica with the tomb remains inside

It was destroyed in 1009 and the rebuilt be the crusaders in 1099. It was later destroyed again and then rebuilt by the Franciscans in 1555. It is today controlled by 3 sects of Christianity; Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox. Sadly they are rather contentious with each other, they each have their own portion of the church to use and times for services and worship, but there is a lot of tension between them. In fact, a Muslim holds the key to the church so they don't have to figure which one of them gets to. The family of the key holder passes down the job within the family from father to son.

The Muslim Keeper of the Church Key(Right)

There is a classic story of this tension, one of the monks saw a broken tile and told his assistant to get it fixed, when it got fixed the other two sects were angry for not being consulted. It went all the way to the Israeli government who told them to take out the fix and put the old one in. However, once they had all been consulted later and agreed together, it was again fixed. Another story, there is a ladder above the entrance that has been there for 150 years. The ledge it is on is owned by one, the window by another, and the ladder by the third. The other two wouldn't let the third use their property to get it. Though now with this in particular, it seems as though it isn't a big deal now, but is left anyways, this is partly because in a recent issue of Biblical Archeology Review (BAR), there is a picture of it moved to a window next to the original one, then moved back to its original window. The division among the 3 sects is rather sad. Certainly there is merit in understanding and debating theological issues that aren't essential to salvation, and those things should be sought out with all effort, but having such division within essentially the same claimed religion with similar basic beliefs is sad.

Entrance to the Holy Sepulcher Church with Ladder on Upper Righthand Window

The pilgrims that come here often come for a very religious experience. When we went into the church it was interesting to see people getting down and rubbing the rock while praying where Jesus' was purportedly laid, or burning incense. They are coming for this religious high or trying to take years off purgatory, it was an interesting feeling. Coming from a protestant background it is a little different for me in that we place little importance on icons and locations, but for me this was just a historic place to see in awe for the age and historicity and engineering of the place, and also thinking that is very close to where Jesus walked and died probably, but it wasn't a religious experience so much. I know that God is the same and accessible anywhere in the world, the location is irrelevant. It has been very interesting going to these religious sites on this trip; I find them fascinating because of their age and history behind them, but not in a particularly religious way, religion isn't about emotions.

We went back down to Ben Yahudda street, I somehow was put in co-charge with Colin, which worked out alright. We got everyone down and back safely. While walking down there we talked for awhile with a security guard in front of the Mount Zion Hotel restaurant. It was interesting, he emigrated from Washington state to Israel about 10 years ago. He lived for a few years in College Station, so he kind of knew where Tyler, TX was which was neat. We then did some shopping and found some Texas A&M Keepas and then had coffee at the same coffee shop, quite enjoyable.

A lot of Pita Bread going down the street

Israel Trip: Day 6

2010-03-18T16:32:00.000-05:00

OK, so here is yesterdays actually, and again no pictures at the moment because I'm just trying to get it up and the internet here is rather flaky. Hopefully pictures in the future.

Jim/Hopps

Today we started at the Western Wall area. This is directly to the west of the Temple Mount. There is an old wall we went through dividing the old city (though it is more appropriately the walled city, since the oldest parts are outside of those walls)from the new city, it was the dividing line of Israeli-Jordanian control from 1948-1967 when Israel retook the old city in the 6-day war. There were skirmishes here and there are still bullet holes in this 500 year old wall.

Then we to the Western Wall, where we could also see the temple mount and Dome of the Rock. The temple mount has been rebuilt many times, Solomon's temple was the 1^st Israelite temple, once it was destroyed in 586BC by Nebuchadnezzar, Nehemiah rebuilt a temple in 516BC, though it was far less impressive. King Herod realized a larger temple was a need in his kingdom to help keep the population happy and under control. The temple he built is known as the 2^nd temple period. This is when the Temple Mount was built, it is a large flat area for the platform that enlarged the current mount using retaining walls, that is where the western wall came from, it is a portion of the western edge of the retaining wall. Of course, this temple was destroyed in 70AD by the Romans, a mere 90 years after being started. The western wall, also known by some non-Jewish as the wailing wall, is a holy place to pray. It was called the wailing wall because of the earnestness of many of the petitions brought there. While we were in the western wall tunnel and the western wall, all the men had to have a head covering on. The prayer area is also separated into mens and women sections.

Near the western wall is the western wall tunnel. It is a tunnel that has been, and is being, excavated that is under and near the western wall. Most of the tunnel goes through a series of arches that were part of a mameluke construction placed up against the western wall hundreds of years later, but excavating underneath it, under the city (muslim quarter), allows much of the western wall to be exposed and seen. The western wall is an amazing feat of engineering, one of the blocks we saw was about 3m deep, 1.5-4m tall, and maybe 20m long, all dry fitted very well. The ability to do this is still amazing today. When we were down there we saw an area where many Jews were praying, and some youngsters were singing. This area is special to pray in because it is as close as possible to where the Holy of Holies was. The excavation in this area is trying to go deep to discover items from the 1^st temple period, since when subsequent temples were built they would have cleared the site, rather than building on top like a Tel, the debris might have been thrown to the side, which is where this excavation is, so they hope to find such artifacts.

As we were driving to the Mount of Olives we passed a graveyard of British soldiers from before WWI to WWII, of many ethnicities and religions. It is still run by the British today.

We then came to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. It isn't a garden actually, as it was an Olive Grove. The name in Hebrew means Olive Grove of Olive Press. There are still olive trees here, one of which is nearly 1700 years old. It is kind of interesting, here is a place that makes olive oil which is used for anointing people, Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one, and he is praying here.

There is a church here that was built about 100 years ago, it is built on the remains of an old Byzantine church, it was funded by many different countries and each dome in it is dedicated to each country, some of which don't exist anymore. The USA is represented there with the seal of the United States.

The Mount of Olives is East of Jerusalem and overlooks the Temple Mount. It belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. IN about the 12^th AD century it became a popular place of prayer, there are many churches built on it today, including the church at the Garden of Gethsemane at the bottom of the mount. There was also a large Jewish graveyard there, which sadly was desecrated when it was under Jordanian control from 1948-67, though there have been efforts to restore them. There is also the tomb of the prophets on the mount, traditionally this was where Malachi, and several other prophets were buried, though there is no proof of that. It is also thought Mary might have been buried on the Mount of Olives. It is also where the Lord will return according to Zechariah.

The City of David is the original location of Jerusalem when David first took it over, it is far smaller than the current Jerusalem. There are many remains here, some 6000 years old, from before David even. Here is where the old Jerusalem water system is, including the famous hezekiahs tunnel. The spring in the Kidron valley is what fed the city, using a shaft and tunnel system it was made accessible to the city without going out of the walls. Hezekiah's tunnel was built in 701BC to aid in protection from sieges. It is 533m long and winding, it is thought it was built in the winding manner to follow some sort of natural fault or dissolution. It used gravity to allow water to flow into the city into Hezekiah's pool. The workers started at two separate ends and met in the middle, it took probably 6-7 months to build. It is approximately 6ft high most of the way, with some variation, numerous false starts and imperfections can be seen along the tunnel. We were able to walk through the tunnel in water ranging from mid shin to knee depth. It was a lot of fun to do that, though it made me think about the workers who built the tunnel. That is not something I would have wanted to do, a lot of work to dig through solid rock, and haul it back out as it was being dug.

The end of the tunnel is near the pool of Siloam. This is from the time of Herod, not Hezekiah (whose pool hasn't been found yet). Originally a newer Byzantine pool was the pool of Siloam, but within the last few years a new pool has been found that shows differently, it is more consistent with the style of Herod's time. This is where Jesus healed the blind man by rubbing mud on his eyes and telling him to wash. Sadly, only part of the pool has been unearthed, as the rest lies under gardens controlled by the Greek Orthodox church and they haven't given permission to dig there. Hezekiah built a large wall extension to include another ridge, the western ridge, into the city. All 3 projects were necessary to be done together, the wall enclosed the pool location and the pool needed the tunnel, they were all interdependent. The task of Hezekiah to build the tunnel, the pool, and the city wall expansion of his time was amazing, both from an engineering and leadership aspect.

We finished the evening by going down to Ben Yahudda (spelling?) street in Jerusalem after dinner. We shopped around a little bit and then had some coffee in a nice little cafe and relaxe a bit.

Israel Trip: Day 5

2010-03-17T10:36:00.003-05:00

So, here is what happened yesterday, hopefully I'll get todays uploaded later tonight, we'll see though.

First we started at Megiddo, this tel is the location of nearly 20 ancient cities built at one time or another on top of each other. The location it is built on overlooks the Jezreel valley, it is in a place that is very difficult to defend and commands an overlook of the entire valley. It is at the foot of the Carmel mountains. This is also thought by some to be the location of the final battle of Armageddon mentioned in the book of Revelation. This was a strategic location to guard because it was on the Via Maris, a primary trade commercial rout along the sea from Egypt up into the Mesopotamia area. While a city was there for several thousand years, its importance went away when Alexander the Great came along and brought the Greek empire to combine all of the Israeli area and Egypt. Megiddo was now just a fort in the middle of a kingdom, rather than being a major watchtower on the edge of a kingdom guarding against the incursion form other kingdoms. When it was first discovered an infamous archeologist by the name of Schleman started the excavation, unfortunately he didn't care about being careful and just peeled off the layrs destroying evidence and not keeping records. Thankfully, he ran out of money when he was only through the hellenistic remains on the very top, and a team from the Chicago University was able to take over the excavation site and do a more careful, thorough job.

A model of Tel Megiddo

An impressive feature of Megiddo is its water supply, the spring was outside the city and so going out to get water was rather dangerous if it was under siege, so a shaft was cut downward and over to the entrance of the springs and the old entrance walled up and camouflaged. Cutting that far down and over and hitting the proper water level is impressive, and it remains unknown today quite how it was done. This is similar to the more well known Hezekiah's tunnel in Jerusalem.

Descending into the shaft to access the spring

Another interesting aspect of its design was the pedestrian entrance, it was a set of steps that turned at right angles several times to allow soldiers posted there to see if people coming into the city had weapons, basically a security checkpoint kind of thing.

This was a C-130 that flew overhead at Megiddo

We then jumped ahead in time to the holding camp of Atlit. This is on the coast north of Tel Aviv.

Barracks at the Atlit Museum

After WWII there were many displaced persons, many of them Jews. They either couldn't, or wouldn't return to their homes. They were kept in displaced persons (DP) camps in europe while it was figured out what to do with them. Many of the Jews wanted to migrate to the US or Palestine, this put pressure on the British, who were in charge of the Palestine mandate at the time, to let more Jews immigrate there. However, they didn't want to because this increased tensions with the Arabs. So, Jews would try to smuggle themselves into Palestine, a way used to get large numbers through was by means of boats. When the British caught them they would put them in a holding camp such as Atlit, or at later dates in camps on Cypress. Atlit would have been rather terrifying since it resembles a concentration camp in many ways in appearance, though they were treated nicer. Going from one camp to another, in their own land, would have been quite traumatic. The Atlit museum is a portion of the camp dedicated to remembering this time and struggles the Jews coming to settle Palestine had to endure. It is also a way through which people can find and connect with family members that might have been separated at that time. While Jews were being kept at Atlit the Palmach, an Israeli paramilitary group, worked to rescue some of them The biggest of the rescues they snuck several Palmach fighters in posing as Hebrew teachers to warn the refugees fo the impending rescue and sabotage the sentries weapons. They broke out 200+ refugees and while they were escaping they were going slowly because of the refugees and the British had started chasing them, when they got near to Haiffa the entire Jewish population had turned out and essentially absorbed the refugees preventing the British form finding them and returning them. Another major incident regarding the return of Jews was the incident of the Exodus, a ship overloaded with refugees attempting to get past the British, but it was caught and returned. This was seen in the media around the world and helped put pressure on the British to let more Jews in to Palestine. The camp museum has several reconstructed barracks and a restored, but original, disinfectant building.

Something I noticed while there is the group before us, it looked like some IDF people in it. One girl had a weapon slung over her back, while she had uniform pants on, she had just some sort of long sleeve shirt, I assume she was on duty, but I haven't had a chance to ask Mishi if that is normal to be on duty without full normal uniform.

The IDF Soldier with the weapon in apparently not full uniform

Bet Shemesh is near Jerusalem, it is a tel of 7 acres and its name is suggestive of pagan gods worshiped there. It is on the edge of Philistine territory and Judea. It was here that the ark of the covenant was returned after the Philistines captured it, but when it gave them problems, they put it on a cat and let the oxen go, this is where they brought it back to the Israelites. Current day Bet Shemesh is not on the location of the original tel.

Finally, we stopped briefly in the valley of Elah, this is where David and Goliath fought. Our primary purpose for coming was to see a new excavation, about 2 years old, of a city named Shar Arin.

Shar Arin in the Elah Valley

It is a fortified city, again near the edge of the Judea, Philistine border, and it is dated back to the time of David. It's significance at this point appears to be that it might help validate David as more than either a small tribal chief or non-existent character, but as the important figure he is portrayed as in the Bible.

We also talked about Jerusalem a bit because we are heading there for most of the rest of the week. In Old Testament times it was different from other major capitals in that it wasn't on any major trade routes or waterways. It didn't mean much until David took it from the Jebusites to be his capital, one without an specific tribal ties. Jerusalem was far smaller at that time, about 10 acres. In the New Testament time it was near 400 acres in size with 50,000 people living there. A large part of its economy was from pilgrimages there for the high holidays.

Now, this evening we have made the ascent to Jerusalem where we will be as our base of operations for the next several days.

Israel Trip: Day 4

2010-03-15T15:14:00.012-05:00

So, since this might be rather long for many of you since this is practically my entire daily journal for school, so here is a brief summary. Today we went Tabgha (Feeding of the multitude), Zippori/Sepphoris (A place near Nazareth), Gideon Springs, bet Shean (Where Saul was killed), and the Jordan River. Now, here are the details, with hopefully a few more pictures today.

Today we started by going to Tabgha, this is where the feeding of the multitude is believed to have happened. From the time of the 7^th century AD this was the traditional place of the feeding of the 5000, though it probably isn't where it actually happened. The first basilica built here was in the 4^th century and then a byzantine church was built in the 5^th century. The current church is a reconstruction from the 80s overtop the 5^th century church, this is one of the best reconstructions of a byzantine church anywhere.

The inside of the reconstructed Byzantine church.

An interesting thing I noticed today and this week is that many of the tour groups here are more than just interest or academic trips, for many it is a pilgrimage. Some of the groups are led by people in “monk robes” and some have kind of religious things draped around their neck. At the monastery at the sermon on the mount many people crossed themselves with a dip from the holy water . At tabgha, people were kneeling and praying there and lighting little candles. While I guess it could be neat to pray in a place like that certainly there is a religious aspect to a visit to the holy land, I'm not sure how I feel about the religiosity these people attribute to it; it seems to focused on the works aspect of things, the pilgrimage. While perhaps they don't all think this, and maybe some are just doing it because that seems to be the thing to do, it was something that has crossed my mind.

From there we went Zippora/Sepphoris, near Nazareth. Current day Nazareth is not quite where the old town of Nazareth was, today, Nazareth is a largely muslim town. Zippora is probably a town that Joseph would have done work in since Nazareth was a rather small town. While the translation of Joseph's job is a carpenter, he was probably more of a stone worker since there isn't a lot fo wood to work with in Israel, certainyl he might have had to make frames and such out of wood, but most structures and even furniture was made from stone. Mishi made an interesting point, Jesus probably came to work with his father when he was young, and if he wasn't working with him he might have spent time listening to and talking with the large number of Rabbis there. This could have given him some experience which allowed him to speak with authority at the temple in Jerusalem as a boy, besides the supernatural element. Also in Zippora are the extremely well preserved remains of a floor mosaic in an eating room of a well off house. When it was first discovered it was removed by rolling onto sticky sheets around large drums and taking to Jerusalem to be cleaned and reassembled and brought back to the site. It consists of 1.5 million stone pieces from 23 different colors.

The incredibly preserved mosaic.

This eating room from the same time as Jesus presents a different picture of the last supper than Leonardo Da Vinci in his last supper painting. Rather than being along a single large table they would have been sitting on couches on three sides around the outside of a rectangle with their feet sticking outward. This would have allowed Jesus better access to wash their feet rather than under a table. Also, they wouldn't have had plates and silverware, but bread and food on a little low stone table every few seats. This mosaic here though does have the “Mona Lisa” of mosaics in that there is a figure of a lady with a slight smile and eyes that seems to follow form any direction. All together this was a work of art. We saw the rest of the town, we went to a building that had a different mosaic design for every floor's room. It was likely the house of a mosaic artist and used each room for living, but also for demonstrating the different designs that he could do. This was a neat place to see because of the old roads and building remains, it felt rather majestic in a way. It was rather impressive, on one of the main roads you could see ruts worn in the stones from chariots and wagons using them so much.

Ruts in the stone rode from Chariots and Wagons

We stopped briefly at the Gideon Springs where God narrowed down Gideon's 32,000 men to 300. Specifically, how they drank from the water, whether lapping from their hands and paying attention, the 300, or bending down and drinking straight from the stream. While it may not have been exactly 300, perhaps more of a symbolic number, it still wasn't very many for going against 135,000 mideonites (the modern bedouins). One of the first training bases for the Palmach, an Israeli paramilitary fighting group before the formation of the state of Israel, was also located here.

Cave beginning of the springs, the spring is much smaller than it used to be.

Then to Bet Shean, this is a well preserved and excavated city south of the Galilee area. In Bible terms, this is where the headless, naked, bodies of Saul and his sons were hung on the walls after being defeated and killed in a battle with the Philistines. This was a rather large city, and most of the walls and large buildings have been found. There was an amphitheater, hippodrome, and 7500 person theater.

An overview of Bet Shean, we started basically in the center near the theater.

The hill at the center is where the temple was located, there are remains of 15 cities there and items from Roman, Greek, and Egyptian influenced temples.

Looking out over the main buildings of the city and the center hill where the temples would be

Also in this city were Roman public baths and latrines. The latrines were interesting in that it was a whole line of stone toilet seats right next to each other over some running water, no privacy at all. There was then a small stream of water running in fton of the seats for cleaning oneself. It's interesting that this didn't phase the Romans, I guess it is part of their rather decadent culture.

The public toilets being demonstrated.

The toilets were really quite comfortable, as I tried them out. :-D

Trying out the "toilets." Surprisingly ergonomic. :-)

An earthquake destroyed most of Bet Shean as we see it today, the collapsed pillars and buildings. This was also very interesting to see, the majesty of the former roman city and road running through it with pillars and columns collapsed along the side.

Collapsed pillars in Bet Shean

Finally, we went to the Jordan river, the place commemorating the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. It isn't the actual place since it happened on the lower Jordan, but rather a place remembering it and for tourists. We were able wade in the river as well.

Me in the Jordan River

In the evening we had a brief presentation of the different faces of Judaism. It is hard to characterize a Jew by ethnicity or religion. Many different categories of Jews from different areas; main divisions are the Sephoric from the Spain area, and the Ashkenazim from Europe. Other areas came from remains after the Babylonian captivity or having moved to Africa or other regions. As for religion, there are those who are orthodox, or more relaxed (conservative and reformed/liberal), and secular Jews (those who don't care about the religious aspect, but perhaps attend synagogue on high holidays). Secular Jews make up over 50% of Jews worldwide and in Israel. Typically, one is considered a Jew if ones mother was one. As for the law of return t o allow Jewish immigrants back to Israel, they ironically follow rules similar to the Nazis, if your grandfather was a Jew you are counted as one, this is partly because if you could suffer for being a Jew under the Nazis you were welcome in Israel.

Jim/Hopps

Israel Trip: Day 3

2010-03-14T13:45:00.013-05:00

In advance, I apologize for misspellings and occasional unintelligible sentences, these are written in the evening after a full day and rarely read over much before uploading for the sake of time.

Day 3

March 14, 2010

Today we stayed right near the Galilee area. A word on breakfast. Breakfast here is quite good, but it is primarily some form of eggs, cheese/yogurt, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Different ways of preparation, though always a big bowl of cucumbers and a bowl of tomatoes. On our way to our first stop, a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee (Yam Kineret), I notice and IDF soldier at a bus stop (you see a fair number of them around town) and noticed he had facial hair. Apparently in the IDF you can have facial hair, a cultural thing I guess, how much you can have though I'm not sure. Our boat ride on Galilee wasn't specifically connected to an even in particular but more the fishing aspect of things. A presentation was given on it with some geographical details and what miracles were performed there. It was in this area that Jesus' ministry focused, more specifically around Capernaum. Around the sea of Galilee is a lot of agriculture and it used to have a large fishing industry in Bible times, but isn't commercially fished now because that would fish it dry. It is noted for having sudden violent storms as cold fronts off the Golan Heights sweep over the lake and interact with the warm air there.

A boat like the one we rode on

Next we drove to the Mount of the Beatitudes, there is a Italian Franciscan monastery there as a place of dedication and remembrance of the sermon on the mount. It is unlikely that is the place it actually occurred, but there isn't enough detail to know where other than the Northern show of Galilee, though that is OK, they have created a place there to remember and reflect on the sermon on the mount. It was ironically enough funded by Mussolini in the time before WWII. It is a nice place with a beautiful garden to relax and reflect in. Something of note is the word “blessed” is translated from the Hebrew word that means more than that, it can mean joyful, happy, rectified, and/or approved.

The main church where there is a shrine/monument to the Sermon on the Mount/Beattitudes

From there we went to a dig about 4-5 miles from Galilee where Geshur and Bethsaida (claimed) are found. Geshur is dated to the time of David, it is where Absalom's mother was from and where he fled to. So it is around 3000 years old. There is another town there that is claimed to be Bethsaida, but it is unlikely. Bethsaida was a fishing village, it is where Peter was from. But, this location is 4-5 miles from the shore, a little odd for a fishing village. Some claim sediment build up and earthquakes have changed things in 2000 years, but on the other side of the lake near the shore currently is a village dating to the same time. This explanation doesn't hold up very well. In the ruins here there were also modern Syrian fortifications, bunkers and trenches, from when they still held it. It is an interesting mix of time, but rather sad because the site was damaged when they did so.

One of the Syrian bunkers at the ruin at Geshur

Then we went to Capernaum, this is where Jesus lived with his disciples in Peter's mother-in-law's home as the base of Jesus' ministry. There are two synagogues there; the synagogue was first introduced by the Jews after their return from Babylon after the 1^st temple period. Since the temple was destroyed they created local places of worship, though God still resided in the only Temple in Jerusalem on Mt Moriah. It is thought that a large amount of traffic to Jesus in capernuam was because of his healing. There were hot springs in nearby Tiberias that had supposed healing powers, but when people went there and they weren't working, they would hear about this Jesus fellow down the road and go visit him, then they would hear his teaching and stay and listen. Jesus role in Capernuam is rather interesting, he was kind of their Rabbi. They didn't have the money for a full time rabbi there, and Jesus, kind of like the young man out of seminary doing the low paid job of youth ministry trying to gain experience, offered his service to Capernuam. They really couldn't say no since he was an “ordained” Rabbi and was offering his services for free. Since he wasn't charging he was able to have the time still to do his other ministry away from Capernaum.

Finally we went to the Kibbutz Ginosaur on the lake of Galilee. Here also is a famous ancient boat. It is a remarkably well preserved fishing boat from the time of Jesus. It is dated by carbon-14 dating on the boat and artifacts found in it. It is a similar type boat as would have been used by the fishermen disciples and what they would have been in when on Galilee and Jesus was sleeping and a storm came up. It was discovered in the 80s during a drought and was excavated in 11 days. It had to be kept in water to keep the water-logged wood from drying out and being destroyed. After being cleaned up they submerged it in a warm water/wax solution for 8 years to replace the water in the wood with wax so it is now on display for people to see and won't be destroyed.

The preserved 2000 year old boat from Galilee

Then we visited around the kibbutz there. A kibbutz is a volunteer oriented communal living arrangement. It started as the palestine area was being settled, it is a socialist mindset in that everyone works according to their ability and gets according to their needs. However, it is considered communitarianism rather than communism because it is all volunteer based rather than forced, the only reason it has worked as well as it has. It was a good support system for those immigrating to Israel after surviving the holocaust. They were also founded as outposts, stronger as a whole, often settled by members of the Palmach, a sub group of the paramilitary group the Haganah, before the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) was formed. They are often largely agriculture based, but will have factories as well and the one we visited ran a 5-star hotel quite successfully, along with some tourism business. Since they were formed most kibbutz have slowly progressed to a more prvatized system. While still communal, there can be multiple streams of income from standard living stipend and also an extra from the work you do either inside or outside the kibbutz. To join one you apply and if they accept you you work for 1-2 years probation and then are voted in, you must have >50% of the vote, though more is preferable if you actually want to live there. You don't have to be of a particular Jewish sect or religion to live on the kibbutz, there are even Christians and such living Kibbutzim, it isn't a big deal now. The idea of a kibbutz may be wonderful, but even though it is volunteer based, it is hard to realize in real life. Just like communism/socialism it is a rather idealistic outlook on human nature. In real life humans don't have that pure altruistic outlook of the betterment of the whole over the individual, there is far more concern for the self and survival.

An additional thought. It seems to me, whenever I travel outside the country with other people and they are sitting around discussing the trip, it seems inevitable that a "Home Bashing" session seems to occur, to one extent or another. I am by no means saying America is perfect, and I think traveling to other countries and cultures absolutely gives one another perspective on life and one's own country, including failures and successes, and that's good, it can be a time to learn and improve. However, it seems to me people just get a feel good moment out of saying how they wish America was just like the country we're in, one way or another. Often times, they make comparisons that aren't valid, they get excited/emotional about it because it is something they experienced that day, and it's fresh in their mind and they haven't thought it through. Anyways, enough on that for now.

Off to another day of seeing stuff!

Have a good day yourselves, and feel free to comment.

Jim/Hopps

Israel Trip: Days 1 and 2

2010-03-13T14:34:00.013-06:00

So, I have to write travel journals each day as part of my class for the trip to Israel, so I am going to try to post those along with a few pictures every day or so for those who care to read.

Since the internet where we are currently staying in Tiberias (Near the Sea of Galilee) is kind of slow, the number of pictures will probably be limited. Once we get to Jerusalem perhaps things will be better. If not, then I will put some up on facebook once I get back.

Jim/Hopps

Day 1

12-March 2010

We left Longview at 1:30AM on Thursday and drove to DFW, we encountered no problems getting on our flight and getting to Newark, NJ. We then had a layover until 4pm before leaving for Tel Aviv. It was interesting, at Newark we had to pass through another special temporary security check point that apparently the Israelis setup for each international flight going into Israel. It wasn't as strict as I thought it might be though, they checked your passport and did an individual bag search and body scan with a metal detecting wand. From getting into Newark to leaving the airport at Tel Aviv we had our passports checked nearly a half dozen times. On the flight to Tel Aviv there quite a number of observant Jews. There was a range from those who just wore a Yarmulke to those wearing the earlocks and tassels. It hadn't occurred to me before, but when it came time to serve dinner the flight attendants had to serve kosher meals as well for the large Jewish population typically on the flight. Early Friday morning many of the more observant Jews got up and put on their prayer shawls and read the Torah while standing and I notice at least one put the little box with the scriptures in it on his head (name?).

Once we landed in Israel we got our bags and passed through surprisingly little customs security, no bag scan, just a passport/visa check. We then got on the bus and headed to Caesarea on the Sea, which is north of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. While on the way Mishi, our tour guide, gave some basic background. It is important to remember Israel has always been fought over because it is the land bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa. While one can transit by sea, large scale caravans and troop movements are far more feasible on land.

The Theater at Caeserea Phillipi

Caesarea by the sea was a city built largely by Herod the Great, he made a deep water port, using breakwaters, that competed with the great port of Alexandria for Roman-Far East trade. It became an important city in the Roman empire. It was here that Peter traveled to visit the centurion Cornelius after having a vision that the gospel could, and should, be shared with the gentiles. It was also here that Paul made his defense against charges brought against him in Acts 23ff. This is when Paul requested to be brought before Caesar, this appears to somewhat be Paul taking this opportunity to spread the Gospel to Rome and Caesar. There was a great aquaduct that served it and theater and hippodrome (for horse/chariot races). The Hippodrome is unique in that it sits on the coast with seats on one side, but not the other so that mock sea battles could be seen from the stands. Caesarea was fought over by the Byzantines, Crusaders, and Muslims until being destroyed in the 12^th Century. It remained so until the Turks moved some muslims there from Bosnia at the end of the 19^th century.

The aquaduct that brought water from the Carmel mountains to Caeserea Phillipi

We then visited the Carmelite Monastery. Mt. Carmel is where Elijah and the Baal prophets had a showdown, ending with the Baal prophets all being slaughtered. It is highly likely this is where it happened, near the monastery a natural theater shape in the hills can be seen and it is thought it occurred there. Also a vast plain can be seen stretching along the Carmel mountains to Megiddo and around. This is thought to be where the battle of Armageddon in Revelation will take place. If one controls the high places, such as around Meggido, one can control the battlefield.

View from Mt. Carmel. The showdown was probably in this little valley/natural theater or one directly to the right.

For lunch we stopped at a restaurant in the hills and had falafel. It was delicious, there was table with a lot of different types of vegetable toppings to put on it. We ate outside and relaxed in the shade. It was interesting as we were waiting to go in, there was a cat wondering around, in and out of the restaurant. The bathrooms there were also something to take note of, the mens and womens were kind of combined. On one side were stalls for men, and the other side, stalls for women. There was a common sink area in between, kind of confusing at first.

Finally we went to Nazareth where Mary was met by the archangel to be told of her bearing the baby Jesus. It likely was near the stream of Nazareth.

We then went to our hotel in Tiberias and checked in. It is a nice clean hotel, though the rooms are quite small andit wouldn't be considered a 5 star hotel by any means, but a very nice place to stay and feels less “separated” from the culture. It was rather interesting that there was a guy walking around the front lobby keeping an eye on things with a pistol on his belt. Israel is very modern, and at times it seems rather different from what one usually thinks of, just the old time Bible Israel. But, there is cell phone signal everywhere, modern roads, WiFi, etc. At times it hardly feels like another country, but when I was sitting in my room with the patio door open I could hear voices outside talking, and it definitely wasn't in English, except for the word “ready.” Now to sleep to rest from 50+ hours of not being in a bed.

Day 2

13-March 2010

We started by going to the Golan Heights. We stopped at a place called the Gadot Observation point. It overlooks much of the valley below the Golan heights. Much of the dispute here, as elswhere, is control of water since springs flowing out of the Golan feed the Jordan river, about 30% of Israel's water supply. At this place there is a memorial to the units that were stationed there and those who died. On the flat plaque are many small rocks placed there, this is from the old practice of putting a pile of rocks over a grave to keep wild animals from digging up the bodies, and when one went to visit a grave one would add another rock to the pile, kind of like putting flowers on a grave. It also has bunkers and tank traps remaining from the fighting.

One of the remaining bunkers. There are bunkers and and slit trenches all throughout the N Israel left over form previous conflict, but left in case they are needed again.

Throughout the Golan height area there are still mine fields from the Syrians that haven't been cleared, often for cost reasons, and so they are restricted areas. I thought it was interesting, and I'm not sure why, but there was quite a bit of trash lying around the memorial area. To me, that seems rather disrespectful for such a place. I like the point Mishi made that he wanted people to remember, those people on the plaque at the memorial were real people and freedom and democracy has a price, sometimes a very serious one. From the observation point the Syrian border was a “distant” 2 miles to the north. Mishi sees the solution to the Golans is to give it back to Syria but sign a contract to keep living and farming there for 99 years, that way children grow up not hating each other. Establish good relations with Syria, and at the end of the time either leave or live in Syria as a minority in a friendly country. This seems a rather good solution, sadly most on both sides don't see it that way.

We then went up close to the border and saw a UN compound in the buffer zone area and saw into Syria. We also saw the valley that was the road to Damascus that Saul/Paul had his revelation on. This area has also been used for ancient armies to pass through, it is rather a natural passageway. Nimrod castle was seen going north towards the Lebanon border, it was a castle built by Moslems and used by them and crusaders to defend the area surrounding it and Baneas.

At Baneas(Caeserea Phillipi) was ruins of a place dedicated primarily to the god Pan, but was also used for numerous other gods; Roman, Egyptian, and Greek. One reason for this location was that the Greek mythology was that you had to cross the river Styx to get to Hades upon dying, so the fact this is a spring that feeds the Jordan was for them indicative of a place a dirty could reside. There was a shrine of the sacred goats there as well. The goats in that area stand on their back legs to eat the bottoms of trees, but they can be trained to do that when hearing certain music, it gives the appearance of dancing, which they had a platform area for. They were somehow woven into their worship. It was near this area that Jesus asked Peter if he loved Him. He probably didn't go into Caeserea Phillipi because it was so associated with the pagan gods.

Next was Tel Dan which is now surrounded by a nature preserve. Israelis often go there to see the river and trees and enjoy themselves. Tel Dan is where one of the golden calves was setup by Jeroboam after the death of Solomon and Israel split into Judea and Israel. Something Mishi mentioned that really caused it to be an abomination was that they were using worship and sacrifice methods described for the Temple in service of another god. Here also was found a rock with an inscription describing the Assyrian king defeating and slaughtering the house of David. This is important because it is the oldest mention of the house of David and gives verification his existence. Also, the dating of Tel Dan is pretty accurate by identifying the stone construction style, C10-9BC. A this site is a basic metal reconstruction attempt at what the altar might have looked like. There is little to go off of, and it is likely wrong since their vision is too tall to be able to reach the horns and Dan was a refuge city where someone who accidentally killed a man could run to for safety, but he had to grab the altar horns for it to become effective, so being unreachable is unlikely. At Tel Dan the gift shop had some amusing shirts; such as "America, Don't worry. Israel is behind you" with some pictures of a tank and helicopter. Also "JerUSAlem" Israel with an American flag and Israeli flag. They were interesting in that to an extent they show how Israel feels about America, as well as a little bit of pandering perhaps to the large American tourist population (though that is by now means the only visitors they get there, there are even numerous Israelis who go through there). Also in Tel Dan off the nature trail were old bunkers and slit trenches left over from previous fighting, but they are there in case they are needed again.

Tel Hazor is one of the oldest tels found, 3 and half to 4 thousand years old. It consists of 10-11 cities and has “Solomon's Gate” there. It is a gate with 4 actual gates and 3 gate rooms in between. It is a little later design, the gate seen at Tel Dan was only 3 gates with 2 gate rooms in between for added protection. Hazor in its time was one of the most important cities in the middle east, artifacts have been found there from all across Africa and the far reaches of the middle east as so much went through that area. Both here and at Tel Dan I found it fascinating to look at the construction of the walls, the large rocks, either laid rough or cut quite cleanly. It is interesting to me the skill and incredible amount of work it took to make these things. Or with the Nimrod castle; it is on top of a large hill, the effort it took to get all those rocks up there and assemble them is enormous, all done by brute force alone. And the end to day two we went downtown Tiberias and saw some peddlers and bakeries and coffee shops. Fun seeing things around and trying to buy stuff from people who speak another language. :-)

Digital Electronics Final Project: Electronic Vault

2009-06-13T02:02:00.023-05:00

Team Tesoro Casella: Josh, Rena, Caleb, Tim, Jim (Me) (Left to Right)

Over the last month I have been working on a five member team to construct an electronic locking system vault for my Digital Electronics class at school. We were given several requirement that we had to fulfill:

-Use a CPLD(Complex Programmable Logic Device) and program in VHDL

-Have a four digit LED display.

-Be able to enter a four digit code that will unlock the safe if it is correct.

-If the code is wrong sound a whooping-siren, false an alarm LED, and lock the keypad for 5 seconds.

-Have a button inside the vault that when pressed displays the current correct code and if held down a user can enter and reset to a new code of choice.

-Give a presentation and demonstration and turn in a report documenting the project

So, we got to work on building this device and spent ~100 man hours building, programming, assembling, and testing this device.

We needed to design a circuit to power the whooping/undulating siren and LED, a system clock, and control circuit to activate our solenoid lock.

An issue we had to work with in designing our circuit was the different power circuits needed. Our CPLD was designed to run at 3.3V while most Logic chips run at 5V. However, after testing we found most of the basic logic chips we were going to use, a 7-Segment LED decoder and NOT gate still ran reliably at 3.3V. Our 555 timers however did not, so we purchased 3.3V LVTTL(Low Voltage Transistor-Transistor Logic) chips to use and they worked well. However we still had to have a 5V power circuit isolated from the rest of the circuit to power our keypad which was a PS/2 computer keypad that was spec’d to run at 5V and in testing we could only get it to run reliably down to around 4.3-4.5V. That was all run from a single 9V battery running through two different transistor based voltage regulators. We then had 2 separate 9V batteries connected in a + voltage and a - voltage configuration to operate an Op-Amp that would boost a 3.3V signal output from the CPLD to 12V to power our solenoid lock and also provide nearly perfect isolation to prevent current surges from coursing back through our circuit and burning up our CPLD when the solenoid was turned off.

Our clock was going to be primarily running our display which would cycle through each of the four digits one at a time so we needed a clock that could display at a minimum 60Hz per digit, for a total of at least 240Hz. We ended up making a clock that ran at 400Hz because that assisted in the clock division inside the CPLD to produce a 5 second timer in code. To make the clock we used a LVTTL 555 timer with 2x 12K Ohm resistors and a .1 microF capacitor. The 555 timer does not put out a perfect square wave and so we were getting double triggers on each pulse, so we investigated using a schmitt trigger to clean it up, but we ended up just running it through a plain old NOT gate and that worked well.

An Oscilloscope Readout of Our Clock Signal

For the Siren circuit I used a modified version of a circuit I found on the internet. I changed some values, 47K to 10K, and removed a wire between pin 6 and 5 of the two timers. One of the timers produces a ~72Hz signal that makes the high pitched tone and the other produces a ~1Hz signal that causes the volume undulation of the other signal giving the siren sound. While it worked, it tended to be a rather finicky setup. It also interfered with our clock when it was on producing a low frequency beat on the clock signal and a high frequency interference on each square-wave pulse. We worked to remove this by investigating a ferrite bead, though we ended up being at too low of frequencies to use it, a voltage follower which removed the low frequency beat, and a capacitor to ground off the Vcc input line of the clock. This helped some, but not real well. Thankfully it ended up not mattering, as when the siren was on while the CPLD was counting the clock signals and dividing them down, in the scale of 5 seconds a few missed or double triggered pulses out of 400 didn’t make a noticeable difference. In the long run it would have been nice to just have used a dedicated external crystal oscillator for our clock so as to not have these problems.

Final Circuit Schematic

Our final circuit ended up being made on a solder less breadboard, but we had wanted to mill a PCB to solder all of the components on to for a far more finished look and to remove the worry of wires coming out at the last minute and not knowing where they need to go. One of our team members entered our circuit design into NI Ultiboard and was going to mill it. However, this to was foiled because of time constraints. We made some last minute hardware revisions, and more importantly we were not able to get our hands on a drill bit to finish our board in time to still be able to solder it up and have it ready to be presented since we were the second of six teams to present. Ideally, we would have had enough time to send our design off to have it laser etched which creates a far nicer board than a milling machine. Still, it was good experience to learn how this is done even if we only got it partly finished.

Our Circuit During Testing

Our Essentially Completed Circuit Breadboard

For our keypad we used a PS/2 interface like from a computer keyboard. All the other teams used a matrix type keypad where the computer tested a matrix of connections to see where they were made and so what key is pressed. The keypad we used, while not looking as nice, was a little cheaper and used only two I/O pins on the CPLD rather than the 7-8 which initially we thought was going to be an issue. The PS/2 protocol uses a single data line and a single clock line to send synchronous data. The lines float high and when a key is pressed the clock is activated sending packets of 11 clock pulses with a data bit on each pulse. These 11 bits consist of a start bit(0), 8 data bits, an odd parity bit, and a stop bit(1). We hooked a keyboard up to a digital oscilloscope and looked at the data being sent to get a feel for what we needed to do and understand it better.

An Oscilloscope output of a packet being sent.

The protocol has certain make and break codes specified for each key. A make code is sent when the key is pressed and the break codes are sent when the key is released. Most keys have 1 make and 2 breaks for a total of 33 bits per key. However, some special keys, such as the keypad enter, use 2 makes and 3 breaks for 55 bits total which was a contingency we had to program for. The data is sent at ~12KHz. Once we had the protocol specified we just had a comparison table in the code to determine what button was pressed, and it turns out when dealing with only the keypad we only needed to inspect the first 4 data bits after the start bit to tell what key was being pressed which helped save on macrocells, program storage, in our code.

In terms of programming, which I was not in charge of, our two biggest challenges were learning VHDL and not being able to fit our I/O and logic on one chip. We continually ran out of macrocells, essentially the storage, and were unable to fit everything on one chip so we ended up using 2 CPLD chips and facilitating data communication between the two. This was a problem every team ran into. The other teams either used two CPLDs or just didn’t have full functionality with only one team being able to fit all essential functionality on one chip. A lab assistant at school who is quite proficient in VHDL also didn’t seem to think it was possible to fit everything onto one chip, of course this was the first semester this project has been done with this particular chip. In the end we ended up with ~450 lines of code, which with more time and VHDL experience probably could have been slimmed down a little.

Our box design we made out of wood instead of steel because of time constraints, and partly because of cost. Since it was wood we decided to make it kind of classy looking with a nice wood and a stained exterior. We did have a few hitches such as the hinges were on the outside of the door, unfortunately another side effect of time constraints and our mechanical engineer who was in charge of it was also involved in 3 other large projects in other classes over a similar time frame, but otherwise a very nice box.

Here is our completed vault and a video of it functioning. This was quite a large project for a sophomore level 3-hour class, but I guess that is Dr. Kim’s way and pleasantly when we presented our box and demonstrated it it worked quite well, something that seems to rarely happen on projects, praise the Lord.

It's Finally Done!

The Electronics Compartment at the Top of the Vault

A Demonstration of our Vault

Hopps

2009-04-21T00:42:00.002-05:00

I must thank my friend Copernicus for reminding me of MuteMath’s recent release of their new music video for Spotlight off their Spotlight EP. It was release last week and is a marvelous video for marvelous music. I personally love how MuteMath in their videos like to do things that kind of mess with the flow of time, their videos are simple and not too fancy but very entertaining and make you wonder how they did it. They also don’t detract from the fantastic music. I would highly recommend all their music to you, as Copernicus would put it, their style is “electro-synth-jam-improv-soundscape rock” and is amazing, as are their live shows which are incredibly energetic and well done! Check them out.

MUTEMATH - Spotlight

Here is their first music video for their song “Typical,” it to is a wonderful song and music video.

This is a sweet video about the making of Typical.

Enjoy,

Hopps

Tea Party!

2009-04-15T00:24:00.005-05:00

Today, April 15th, is the dreaded day of the year on which you must have sent in your income tax returns or have filed for an extension. However, on this day in 2009 there will also be a large number of “Tea Parties” across the nation that have been organized to protest the rampant spending and taxing by the Federal Government.

The idea of a Tea Party and what sort of kickstarted this all is the rant by Rick Santelli on the Chicago trading floor in February live on CNBC. He was talking of the Feds using the bailouts to rewards bad decisions and greed and he mentioned teh original Boston Tea Party that was a protest of the British taxing shipping and Tea in the colonies, partly to help the foundering East India Company. He said we need to have another Tea Party, more or less figuratively, but the idea took off and there were numerous “Tea Parties” around the shortly thereafter where people gathered and often dumped tea into rivers and had peaceful protests.

A large effort has been made to combine efforts and “Tea Parties” all aroudn the nation on April 15th, Tax day. This is largely being headed up by the AFA and their Taxed Enough Aready(TEA) Party initiative. They are currently scheduled to happen in over 2,000 cities today around noon. The actual parties though are all grassroots organizers.

ACORN, the infamous community group that is under scrutiny for massive voter fraud in the last elections, is also helping organize rallies on the same day in support of President Obama’s budget; they deny that they are going to try to interrupt the Tea Parties. Most Tea Party organizers aren’t worried though. Story

Anyways, I would encourage you to check it out. If you are interested you can find one in your area by going to http://www.teapartyday.com/. If you believe in it, even if you think it won’t be hardly noticed or make any difference, still attend! If you are only talking about it you will make even less difference! Remember though, this is a peaceful protest, as citizens have the right to have their voice heard, but they don’t need to be violent and disruptive.

I must say it would be pretty neat if this ended up being really big! :-D

Hopps

Somali Pirate Incident

2009-04-14T11:07:00.003-05:00

As you are probably aware if you have been following the news at all there was an American ship off the Eastern coast of Africa that was attacked by Somali pirates last week. The pirates boarded and then the crew fought them off for awhile. Eventually the Captain gave himself up as a hostage so crew could go free. The captain was held hostage in a lifeboat surrounded by the US Navy for nearly 5 days before being rescued when his life was deemed in immediate danger and Navy snipers took out 3 of the pirates while one had already surrundered earlier for medical treatment after his hand, which had been wounded inthe inital vessel capture, had become infected. The goal was not to kill the pirates, but to capture them unharmed as was made abundantly clear numerous times. However, if Captain Phillip’s life was in danger they were authorized, by President Obama, to use lethal force. The pirates were being very threatening to Phillips, one of them pointing their weapon at him and they were talking very aggressively so the order was given to the SEAL snipers to shoot the pirates. They made 3 shots that were quite precise taking all 3 out.

A couple comments:

Though I overall I disagree with a great many of President Obama’s policies and ideals, I think he made the right decision in this instance and I applaude him for that. I personally was afraid he might pull a Carter and sort of commit, but not really, and cause a huge gaff. However, he made a firm decision to use force to protect an American citizen and American shipping interests, interstingly the last time America attacked maritime maruaders was when Thomas Jefferson ordered the Marines to attack the Barbary Pirates at Tripoli in the early 19th century(Which ended up turning out well).
I also am happy that, at least apparently, the way things were done the Navy was given authorization and allowed to make their own decision without to much meddling from “higher-ups”.
There tend to be fewer ships flying an American flag, even if crewed by Americans and owned by an American company, than many other countries because of a large number, possibly excessive though I am not well versed in these things, of regulations and such that are costly and take a lot fo time. This however is one very good reason to be flying an American flag, you have the United States Navy far more readily available and likely to help when things go wrong.
This alone is by no means going to stop the pirate action along the Somali coast, that would require a mixture of more forces and a stable government in Somlia to crack down on the land that has been lawless for two decades and to allow for legitimate business operations so the people can support themselves.
While it may not stop all pirating and attacks, I think this is very important to show that America means business and will fight to protect her shipping interests and citizens and that you don’t mess with America if you want to live. It is that respect that has helped America in her wealth over the years. This is also an extremely heavy factor in why the U.S. Dollar is the international currency that people and nations invest in when they want something that is incredibly stable and safe(or at least has been in the past). The military might(and willingness) along with a stable economy and stable government are things that have made the U.S. Dollar accepted worldwide for years, hopefully that might continue though I fear that may not be the case.
I think this ties in very closely with the War on Terror. It was absolutely necessary to do something after 9/11 to show that you can’t blatantly attack America and get away with it, unfortunately through many things from many sides, that I will by no means attempt to discuss here, it has drug on for a long time and will probably still take some time to finish out in Iraq and Afghanistan satisfactorily.
There is now talk of possible plans for more military action in the region, possibly helping the current Somali government. While the violence there is bad, and might need military ships guarding things, I think any sort of broad military operation would not be good right now. Besides the fact the military can’t handle it since they are stretched thin over Afghanistan and Iraq, partly because of huge budget cuts in the 90s, I don’t think the American public would like it, and it would turn into a long term commitment to help stabilize and rebuild the government that we honestly don’t need more of right at this time.

So those are some thoughts on this recent International incident that has so far ended happily and hopefully will not cause a large escalation in violence in that region.

For more information regarding the Somali pirate incident you can Google it or here are a few articles I found real quick:

Somali Pirate article from the LA Times.

Additional force in the area.

Hopps

World of Goo

2009-04-13T22:40:00.003-05:00

Over the past few months I have been kind of participating in an online game of sorts calledMacHeist. It is a website that has different puzzles and missions that allow you to win free software. At the end they have a bundle deal for $39 that has a ton of software worth like $900. Anyways, I bought it and have been playing a game that came with it called World of Goo. It is quite a fun and rather addicting game where your goal is to assemble structures out of the balls of goo that stick together to get to a pipe at the end of the puzzle where you have to have a certain number left over to get sucked in. Here are a few screenshots of that game.

Granted it does look a little crazy, but it is a lot of fun. The guy who made this started with the website ExperimentalGameplay which has a lot of free basic games that are fun to play. Each was made in one week by one person, it started as a project for a graduate level computer science class at Carnegie Mellon University.

Another application that I got in the MacHeist bundle is called KineMac. It is essentially a smaller version of Apple's Motion software, a 2D/3D animated graphics application. I don't have much time right now, but I'm hoping this summer when I am just working a job that I can get some time to play around with it and post some stuff.

This may not have been a very exciting post, but I wanted to post something and I couldn't think of much. So this is what I posted.

Hopps

Music Blog-Copernicus

2009-04-07T23:54:00.003-05:00

Music is an interesting and fascinating part of life. It is something very unique to humans and is truly amazing in the way it can affect and touch the human soul and emotion. There are so many different types and styles of music, some good, some bad, some different, some unique. I personally have many different tastes and preferences concerning music, I try to have a broad taste in music, but keep it narrowed to good music.

The reason I am mentioning this is a friend, Copernicus, has started a very nice music blog called Copernicus the Music Connoisseur. He typically posts a song of the week covering different varieties and tastes of music, but always "good music." He will also occasionally post other things and information he feels is pertinent. He is far more skilled in the world of music than I am so I would encourage you to check it out. He is also in my site list on my blog sidebar.

Hopps

The Next 100 Years

2009-01-22T21:24:00.005-06:00

Yes, I know I need to eventually write something of my own up here, but for now here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the #1 best selling non-fiction book on Amazon. I have not personally read this book, but I thought the first chapter was quite intriguing and the author, George Friedman, founded Stratfor, from whom I have posted articles before. This book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, discusses some general ideas and forecasts concerning world politics over the next century, I thought many of his ideas quite interesting, and not what many people would expect. So enjoy this and I will try to post something of my own sometime soon.

Hopps
41

OVERTURE
An Introduction to the American Age

Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible—and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning—because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world.

Imagine yourself now in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened—an army that came and then just as quickly left. Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain—the peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon reemerge.

Imagine the summer of 1940. Germany had not only reemerged but conquered France and dominated Europe. Communism had survived and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the point of view of most reasonable people, the war was over. If there was not to be a thousand-year Reich, then certainly Europe’s fate had been decided for a century. Germany would dominate Europe and inherit its empire.

Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany had been crushed in the war, defeated less than five years later. Europe was occupied, split down the middle by the United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires were collapsing, and the United States and Soviet Union were competing over who would be their heir. The United States had the Soviet Union
surrounded and, with an overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, could annihilate it in hours. The United States had emerged as the global superpower. It dominated all of the world’s oceans, and with its nuclear force could dictate terms to anyone in the world. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for—unless the Soviets invaded Germany and conquered Europe. That was the war everyone was preparing for. And in the back of everyone’s mind, the Maoist Chinese, seen as fanatical, were the other danger.

Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven-year war—not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. The nation was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China—the American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing. Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet Union, which appeared to be surging.

Imagine now the summer of 2000. The Soviet Union had completely collapsed. China was still communist in name but had become capitalist in practice. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union. The world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that geopolitical considerations had become secondary to economic considerations, and the only problems were regional ones in basket cases like Haiti or Kosovo.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again. At a certain level, when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure of is that common sense will be wrong. There is no magic twenty-year cycle; there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given moment in history can change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. In international relations, the way the world looks right now is not at all how it will look in twenty years . . . or even less. The fall of the Soviet Union was hard to imagine, and that is exactly the point. Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long- term shifts taking place in full
view of the world.

If we were at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would be impossible to forecast the particular events I’ve just listed. But there are some things that could have been—and, in fact, were—forecast. For example, it was obvious that Germany, having united in 1871, was a major power in an insecure position (trapped between Russia and France) and wanted to redefine the European and global systems. Most of the conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century were about Germany’s status in Europe. While the times and places of wars couldn’t be forecast, the probability that there would be a war could be and was forecast by many Europeans.

The harder part of this equation would be forecasting that the wars would be so devastating and that after the first and second world wars were over, Europe would lose its empire. But there were those, particularly after the invention of dynamite, who predicted that war would now be catastrophic. If the forecasting on technology had been combined with the forecasting
on geopolitics, the shattering of Europe might well have been predicted. Certainly the rise of the United States and Russia was predicted in the nineteenth century. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche forecast the preeminence of these two countries. So, standing at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would have been possible to forecast
its general outlines, with discipline and some luck.

the twenty-first century
Standing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we need to identify the single pivotal event for this century, the equivalent of German unification for the twentieth century. After the debris of the European empire is cleared away, as well as what’s left of the Soviet Union, one power remains standing and overwhelmingly powerful. That power is the United States. Certainly, as is usually the case, the United States currently appears to be making a mess of things around the world. But it’s important not to be confused by the passing chaos. The United States is economically, militarily, and politically the most powerful country in the world, and there is no real challenger to that power. Like the Spanish-American War, a hundred years from now the war between the United States and the radical Islamists will be little remembered regardless of the prevailing sentiment of this time.

Ever since the Civil War, the United States has been on an extraordinary economic surge. It has turned from a marginal developing nation into an economy bigger than the next four countries combined. Militarily, it has gone from being an insignificant force to dominating the globe. Politically, the United States touches virtually everything, sometimes intentionally and sometimes simply because of its presence. As you read this book, it will seem that it is America- centric, written from an American point of view. That may be true, but the argument I’m making is that the world does, in fact, pivot around the United States.

This is not only due to American power. It also has to do with a fundamental shift in the way the world works. For the past five hundred years, Europe was the center of the international system, its empires creating a single global system for the first time in human history. The main highway to Europe was the North Atlantic. Whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled access to Europe—and Europe’s access to the world. The basic geography of global politics was locked into place.

Then, in the early 1980s, something remarkable happened. For the first time in history, transpacific trade equaled transatlantic trade. With Europe reduced to a collection of secondary powers after World War II, and the shift in trade patterns, the North Atlantic was no longer the single key to anything. Now whatever country controlled both the North Atlantic and the Pacific could control, if it wished, the world’s trading system, and therefore the global economy. In the twenty-first century, any nation located on both oceans has a tremendous advantage.

Given the cost of building naval power and the huge cost of deploying it around the world, the power native to both oceans became the preeminent actor in the international system for the same reason that Britain dominated the nineteenth century: it lived on the sea it had to control. In this way, North America has replaced Europe as the center of gravity in the world, and whoever dominates North America is virtually assured of being the dominant global power. For the twenty-first century at least, that will be the United States.

The inherent power of the United States coupled with its geographic position makes the United States the pivotal actor of the twenty-first century. That certainly doesn’t make it loved. On the contrary, its power makes it feared. The history of the twenty-first century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles. One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming.

If we view the beginning of the twenty-first century as the dawn of the American Age (superseding the European Age), we see that it began with a group of Muslims seeking to re- create the Caliphate—the great Islamic empire that once ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Inevitably, they had to strike at the United States in an attempt to draw the world’s primary power into war, trying to demonstrate its weakness in order to trigger an Islamic uprising. The United States responded by invading the Islamic world. But its goal wasn’t victory. It wasn’t even clear what victory would mean. Its goal was simply to disrupt the Islamic world and set it against itself, so that an Islamic empire could not emerge.

The United States doesn’t need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can’t build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level, the twenty-first century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and the United States’ mounting military operations to disrupt them. The twenty-first century will see even more war than the twentieth century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic, because of both technological changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge.

As we’ve seen, the changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected, and the first twenty years of this new century will be no exception. The U.S.–Islamist war is already ending and the next conflict is in sight. Russia is re-creating its old sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence will inevitably challenge the United States. The Russians will be moving westward on the great northern European plain. As Russia reconstructs its power, it will encounter the U.S.-dominated NATO in the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as in Poland. There will be other points of friction in the early twenty-first century, but this new cold war will supply the flash points after the U.S.–Islamist war dies down.

The Russians can’t avoid trying to reassert power, and the United States can’t avoid trying to resist. But in the end Russia can’t win. Its deep internal problems, massively declining population, and poor infrastructure ultimately make Russia’s long- term survival prospects bleak. And the second cold war, less frightening and much less global than the first, will end as the first did, with the collapse of Russia.

There are many who predict that China is the next challenger to the United States, not Russia. I don’t agree with that view for three reasons. First, when you look at a map of China closely, you see that it is really a very isolated country physically. With Siberia in the north, the Himalayas and jungles to the south, and most of China’s population in the eastern part of the country, the Chinese aren’t going to easily expand. Second, China has not been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy requires a long time not only to build ships but to create well-trained and experienced sailors.

Third, there is a deeper reason for not worrying about China. China is inherently unstable. Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior remain impoverished. This leads to tension, conflict, and instability. It also leads to economic decisions made for political reasons, resulting in inefficiency and corruption. This is not the first time that China has opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it becomes unstable as a result. Nor will it be the last time that a figure like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the wealth—or poverty—and begin the cycle anew. There are some who believe that the trends of the last thirty years will continue indefinitely. I believe the Chinese cycle will move to its next and inevitable phase in the coming decade. Far from being a challenger, China is a country the United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not translate into long-term success.

In the middle of the century, other powers will emerge, countries that aren’t thought of as great powers today, but that I expect will become more powerful and assertive over the next few decades. Three stand out in particular. The first is Japan. It’s the second- largest economy in the world and the most vulnerable, being highly dependent on the importation of raw materials, since it has almost none of its own. With a history of militarism, Japan will not remain the marginal pacifistic power it has been. It cannot. Its own deep population problems and abhorrence of large- scale immigration will force it to look for new workers in other countries. Japan’s vulnerabilities, which I’ve written about in the past and which the Japanese have managed better than I’ve expected up until this point, in the end will force a shift in policy.

Then there is Turkey, currently the seventeenth-largest economy in the world. Historically, when a major Islamic empire has emerged, it has been dominated by the Turks. The Ottomans collapsed at the end of World War I, leaving modern Turkey in its wake. But Turkey is a stable platform in the midst of chaos. The Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Arab world to the south are all unstable. As Turkey’s power grows—and its economy and military are already the most powerful in the region—so will Turkish influence.

Finally there is Poland. Poland hasn’t been a great power since the sixteenth century. But it once was—and, I think, will be again. Two factors make this possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next fifty years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won’t have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support. Wars—when your country isn’t destroyed—stimulate economic growth, and Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians.

Japan, Turkey, and Poland will each be facing a United States even more confident than it was after the second fall of the Soviet Union. That will be an explosive situation. As we will see during the course of this book, the relationships among these four countries will greatly affect the twenty-first century, leading, ultimately, to the next global war. This war will be fought differently from any in history—with weapons that are today in the realm of science fiction. But as I will try to outline, this mid-twenty-first century conflict will grow out of the dynamic forces born in the early part of the new century.

Tremendous technical advances will come out of this war, as they did out of World War II, and one of them will be especially critical. All sides will be looking for new forms of energy to substitute for hydrocarbons, for many obvious reasons. Solar power is theoretically the most efficient energy source on earth, but solar power requires massive arrays of receivers. Those receivers take up a lot of space on the earth’s surface and have many negative environmental impacts—not to mention being subject to the disruptive cycles of night and day. During the coming global war, however, concepts developed prior to the war for space- based electrical generation, beamed to earth in the form of microwave radiation, will be rapidly translated from prototype to reality. Getting a free ride on the back of military space launch capability, the new energy source will be underwritten in much the same way as the Internet or the railroads were, by government support. And that will kick off a massive economic boom.

But underlying all of this will be the single most important fact of the twenty-first century: the end of the population explosion. By 2050, advanced industrial countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate. By 2100, even the most underdeveloped countries will have reached birthrates that will stabilize their populations. The entire global system has been built since 1750 on the expectation of continually expanding populations. More workers, more consumers, more soldiers—this was always the expectation. In the twenty-first century, however, that will cease to be true. The entire system of production will shift. The shift will force the world into a greater dependence on technology—particularly robots that will substitute for human labor, and intensified genetic research (not so much for the purpose of extending life but to make people productive longer).

What will be the more immediate result of a shrinking world population? Quite simply, in the first half of the century, the population bust will create a major labor shortage in advanced industrial countries. Today, developed countries see the problem as keeping immigrants out. Later in the first half of the twenty-first century, the problem will be persuading them to come. Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.

These changes will lead to the final crisis of the twenty-first century. Mexico currently is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world. As the Europeans slip out, the Mexicans, like the Turks, will rise in the rankings until by the late twenty-first century they will be one of the major economic powers in the world. During the great migration north encouraged by the United States, the population balance in the old Mexican Cession (that is, the areas of the United States taken from Mexico in the nineteenth century) will shift dramatically until much of the region is predominantly Mexican.

The social reality will be viewed by the Mexican government simply as rectification of historical defeats. By 2080 I expect there to be a serious confrontation between the United States and an increasingly powerful and assertive Mexico. That confrontation may well have unforeseen consequences for the United States, and will likely not end by 2100.

Much of what I’ve said here may seem pretty hard to fathom. The idea that the twenty-first century will culminate in a confrontation between Mexico and the United States is certainly hard to imagine in 2009, as is a powerful Turkey or Poland. But go back to the beginning of this chapter, when I described how the world looked at twenty-year intervals during the
twentieth century, and you can see what I’m driving at: common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong. Obviously, the more granular the description, the less reliable it gets. It is impossible to forecast precise details of a coming century—apart from the fact that I’ll be long dead by then and won’t know what mistakes I made.

But it’s my contention that it is indeed possible to see the broad outlines of what is going to happen, and to try to give it some definition, however speculative that definition might be. That’s what this book is about.

forecasting a hundred years ahead
Before I delve into any details of global wars, population trends, or technological shifts, it is important that I address my method—that is, precisely how I can forecast what I do. I don’t intend to be taken seriously on the details of the war in 2050 that I forecast. But I do want to be taken seriously in terms of how wars will be fought then, about the centrality of American power, about the likelihood of other countries challenging that power, and about some of the countries I think will—and won’t—challenge that power.

And doing that takes some justification. The idea of a U.S.–Mexican confrontation and even war will leave most reasonable people dubious, but I would like to demonstrate why and how these assertions can be made. One point I’ve already made is that reasonable people are incapable of anticipating the future. The old New Left slogan “Be Practical, Demand the Impossible” needs to be changed: “Be Practical, Expect the Impossible.” This idea is at the heart of my method. From another, more substantial perspective, this is called geopolitics.

Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying “international relations.” It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith called “the wealth of nations.” Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and, therefore, the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system.

Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly. Think of a chess game. On the surface, it appears that each player has twenty potential opening moves. In fact, there are many fewer because most of these moves are so bad that they quickly lead to defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options, and the fewer moves there actually are available. The better the player, the more predictable the moves. The grandmaster plays with absolute predictable precision—until that one brilliant, unexpected stroke.

Nations behave the same way. The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational. Climbing to the top of millions of people is not something fools often do. Leaders understand their menu of next moves and execute them, if not flawlessly, then at least pretty well. An occasional master will come along with a stunningly unexpected and successful move, but for the most part, the act of governance is simply executing the necessary and logical next step. When politicians run a country’s foreign policy, they operate the same way. If a leader dies and is replaced, another emerges and more likely than not continues what the first one was doing.

I am not arguing that political leaders are geniuses, scholars, or even gentlemen and ladies. Simply, political leaders know how to be leaders or they wouldn’t have emerged as such. It is the delight of all societies to belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes. But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid. More likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to believe that we— or our favorite candidate—would never have acted so stupidly. It is rarely true. Geopolitics therefore does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously. Both are players who know how to manage a process but are not free to break the very rigid rules of their professions.

Politicians are therefore rarely free actors. Their actions are determined by circumstances, and public policy is a response to reality. Within narrow margins, political decisions can matter. But the most brilliant leader of Iceland will never turn it into a world power, while the stupidest leader of Rome at its height could not undermine Rome’s fundamental power. Geopolitics is not about the right and wrong of things, it is not about the virtues or vices of politicians, and it is not about foreign policy debates. Geopolitics is about broad impersonal forces that constrain nations and human beings and compel them to act in certain ways.

The key to understanding economics is accepting that there are always unintended consequences. Actions people take for their own good reasons have results they don’t envision or intend. The same is true with geopolitics. It is doubtful that the village of Rome, when it started its expansion in the seventh century BC, had a master plan for conquering the Mediterranean world five hundred years later. But the first action its inhabitants took against neighboring villages set in motion a process that was both constrained by reality and filled with unintended consequences. Rome wasn’t planned, and neither did it just happen.

Geopolitical forecasting, therefore, doesn’t assume that everything is predetermined. It does mean that what people think they are doing, what they hope to achieve, and what the final outcome is are not the same things. Nations and politicians pursue their immediate ends, as constrained by reality as a grandmaster is constrained by the chessboard, the pieces, and the rules. Sometimes they increase the power of the nation. Sometimes they lead the nation to catastrophe. It is rare that the final outcome will be what they initially intended to achieve.

Geopolitics assumes two things. First, it assumes that humans organize themselves into units larger than families, and that by doing this, they must engage in politics. It also assumes that humans have a natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a city, or a nation is natural to people. In our time, national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationship between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means that war is ubiquitous. Second, geopolitics assumes that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. We use the term geography broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. In antiquity, the difference between Sparta and Athens was the difference between a landlocked city and a maritime empire. Athens was wealthy and cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial, and very tough. A Spartan was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics.

If you understand those assumptions, then it is possible to think about large numbers of human beings, linked together through natural human bonds, constrained by geography, acting in certain ways. The United States is the United States and therefore must behave in a certain way. The same goes for Japan or Turkey or Mexico. When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.

The twenty-first century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats. There will be tragedy and good luck. People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in love, and come to hate. That is the one thing that is not cyclical. It is the permanent human condition. But the twenty-first century will be extraordinary in two senses: it will be the beginning of a new age, and it will see a new global power astride the world. That doesn’t happen very often. We are now in an America-centric age. To understand this age, we must understand the United States, not only because it is so powerful but because its culture will permeate the world and define it. Just as French culture and British culture were definitive during their times of power, so American culture, as young and barbaric as it is, will define the way the world thinks and lives. So studying the twenty-first century means studying the United States.

If there were only one argument I could make about the twenty-first century, it would be that the European Age has ended and that the North American Age has begun, and that North America will be dominated by the United States for the next hundred years. The events of the twenty-first century will pivot around the United States. That doesn’t guarantee that the United States is necessarily a just or moral regime. It certainly does not mean that America has yet developed a mature civilization. It does mean that in many ways the history of the United States will be the history of the twenty-first century.

The Islamists Cast Their Ballot In Mumbai

2008-12-01T18:26:00.004-06:00

This is an interesting article published by Stratfor, a private open source intelligence and analysis company. This article talks about the recent attacks in Mumbai, India by what appears to be radical Islamists from Pakistan. This is very interesting as it is happening on the verge of a power change in the U.S. and this will certainly have an effect on our strategy in Afghanistan. Basically India has to do something to repsond to these attacks since their government is already extremly weak and if not response is shown they will almost certainly fall and be replaced by a far more nationalist government. However, any type of confrontation with Pakistan isn't particularly desirable with Pakistan being a large nation which would be hard to control and they have nuclear weapons. The U.S. will have something to say as they might attempt to mediate again as they did in the 2001-2002 crisis, but the U.S. needs some sort of cooperation from Pakistan in order to facilitate success in the Petraeus and Obama plans for Afghanistan. Anyways, that is a brief summary and this will be very interesting to see it unfold over the enxt several days or so. As a side note Stratfor is a very god website for international analysis.

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By George Friedman

An End to New Delhi’s Restraint

The most striking aspect of the Mumbai attack is the challenge it presents to the Indian government — a challenge almost impossible for New Delhi to ignore. A December 2001 Islamist attack on the Indian parliament triggered an intense confrontation between India and Pakistan. Since then, New Delhi has not responded in a dramatic fashion to numerous Islamist attacks against India that were traceable to Pakistan. The Mumbai attack, by contrast, aimed to force a response from New Delhi by being so grievous that any Indian government showing only a muted reaction to it would fall.

India’s restrained response to Islamist attacks (even those originating in Pakistan) in recent years has come about because New Delhi has understood that, for a host of reasons, Islamabad has been unable to control radical Pakistani Islamist groups. India did not want war with Pakistan; it felt it had more important issues to deal with. New Delhi therefore accepted Islamabad’s assurances that Pakistan would do its best to curb terror attacks, and after suitable posturing, allowed tensions originating from Islamist attacks to pass.

This time, however, the attackers struck in such a way that New Delhi couldn’t allow the incident to pass. As one might expect, public opinion in India is shifting from stunned to furious. India’s Congress party-led government is politically weak and nearing the end of its life span. It lacks the political power to ignore the attack, even if it were inclined to do so. If it ignored the attack, it would fall, and a more intensely nationalist government would take its place. It is therefore very difficult to imagine circumstances under which the Indians could respond to this attack in the same manner they have to recent Islamist attacks.

What the Indians actually will do is not clear. In 2001-2002, New Delhi responded to the attack on the Indian parliament by moving forces close to the Pakistani border and the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, engaging in artillery duels along the front, and bringing its nuclear forces to a high level of alert. The Pakistanis made a similar response. Whether India ever actually intended to attack Pakistan remains unclear, but either way, New Delhi created an intense crisis in Pakistan.

The U.S. and the Indo-Pakistani Crisis

The United States used this crisis for its own ends. Having just completed the first phase of its campaign in Afghanistan, Washington was intensely pressuring Pakistan’s then-Musharraf government to expand cooperation with the United States; purge its intelligence organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of radical Islamists; and crack down on al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had been reluctant to cooperate with Washington, as doing so inevitably would spark a massive domestic backlash against his government.

The crisis with India produced an opening for the United States. Eager to get India to stand down from the crisis, the Pakistanis looked to the Americans to mediate. And the price for U.S. mediation was increased cooperation from Pakistan with the United States. The Indians, not eager for war, backed down from the crisis after guarantees that Islamabad would impose stronger controls on Islamist groups in Kashmir.

In 2001-2002, the Indo-Pakistani crisis played into American hands. In 2008, the new Indo-Pakistani crisis might play differently. The United States recently has demanded increased Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border. Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has stated his intention to focus on Afghanistan and pressure the Pakistanis.

Therefore, one of Islamabad’s first responses to the new Indo-Pakistani crisis was to announce that if the Indians increased their forces along Pakistan’s eastern border, Pakistan would be forced to withdraw 100,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan. In other words, threats from India would cause Pakistan to dramatically reduce its cooperation with the United States in the Afghan war. The Indian foreign minister is flying to the United States to meet with Obama; obviously, this matter will be discussed among others.

We expect the United States to pressure India not to create a crisis, in order to avoid this outcome. As we have said, the problem is that it is unclear whether politically the Indians can afford restraint. At the very least, New Delhi must demand that the Pakistani government take steps to make the ISI and Pakistan’s other internal security apparatus more effective. Even if the Indians concede that there was no ISI involvement in the attack, they will argue that the ISI is incapable of stopping such attacks. They will demand a purge and reform of the ISI as a sign of Pakistani commitment. Barring that, New Delhi will move troops to the Indo-Pakistani frontier to intimidate Pakistan and placate Indian public opinion.

Dilemmas for Islamabad, New Delhi and Washington

At that point, Islamabad will have a serious problem. The Pakistani government is even weaker than the Indian government. Pakistan’s civilian regime does not control the Pakistani military, and therefore does not control the ISI. The civilians can’t decide to transform Pakistani security, and the military is not inclined to make this transformation. (Pakistan’s military has had ample opportunity to do so if it wished.)

Pakistan faces the challenge, just one among many, that its civilian and even military leadership lack the ability to reach deep into the ISI and security services to transform them. In some ways, these agencies operate under their own rules. Add to this the reality that the ISI and security forces — even if they are acting more assertively, as Islamabad claims — are demonstrably incapable of controlling radical Islamists in Pakistan. If they were capable, the attack on Mumbai would have been thwarted in Pakistan. The simple reality is that in Pakistan’s case, the will to make this transformation does not seem to be present, and even if it were, the ability to suppress terror attacks isn’t there.

The United States might well want to limit New Delhi’s response. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her way to India to discuss just this. But the politics of India’s situation make it unlikely that the Indians can do anything more than listen. It is more than simply a political issue for New Delhi; the Indians have no reason to believe that the Mumbai operation was one of a kind. Further operations like the Mumbai attack might well be planned. Unless the Pakistanis shift their posture inside Pakistan, India has no way of knowing whether other such attacks can be stymied. The Indians will be sympathetic to Washington’s plight in Afghanistan and the need to keep Pakistani troops at the Afghan border. But New Delhi will need something that the Americans — and in fact the Pakistanis — can’t deliver: a guarantee that there will be no more attacks like this one.

The Indian government cannot chance inaction. It probably would fall if it did. Moreover, in the event of inactivity and another attack, Indian public opinion probably will swing to an uncontrollable extreme. If an attack takes place but India has moved toward crisis posture with Pakistan, at least no one can argue that the Indian government remained passive in the face of threats to national security. Therefore, India is likely to refuse American requests for restraint.

It is possible that New Delhi will make a radical proposal to Rice, however. Given that the Pakistani government is incapable of exercising control in its own country, and given that Pakistan now represents a threat to both U.S. and Indian national security, the Indians might suggest a joint operation with the Americans against Pakistan.

What that joint operation might entail is uncertain, but regardless, this is something that Rice would reject out of hand and that Obama would reject in January 2009. Pakistan has a huge population and nuclear weapons, and the last thing Bush or Obama wants is to practice nation-building in Pakistan. The Indians, of course, will anticipate this response. The truth is that New Delhi itself does not want to engage deep in Pakistan to strike at militant training camps and other Islamist sites. That would be a nightmare. But if Rice shows up with a request for Indian restraint and no concrete proposal — or willingness to entertain a proposal — for solving the Pakistani problem, India will be able to refuse on the grounds that the Americans are asking India to absorb a risk (more Mumbai-style attacks) without the United States’ willingness to share in the risk.

Setting the Stage for a New Indo-Pakistani Confrontation

That will set the stage for another Indo-Pakistani confrontation. India will push forces forward all along the Indo-Pakistani frontier, move its nuclear forces to an alert level, begin shelling Pakistan, and perhaps — given the seriousness of the situation — attack short distances into Pakistan and even carry out airstrikes deep in Pakistan. India will demand greater transparency for New Delhi in Pakistani intelligence operations. The Indians will not want to occupy Pakistan; they will want to occupy Pakistan’s security apparatus.

Naturally, the Pakistanis will refuse that. There is no way they can give India, their main adversary, insight into Pakistani intelligence operations. But without that access, India has no reason to trust Pakistan. This will leave the Indians in an odd position: They will be in a near-war posture, but will have made no demands of Pakistan that Islamabad can reasonably deliver and that would benefit India. In one sense, India will be gesturing. In another sense, India will be trapped by making a gesture on which Pakistan cannot deliver. The situation thus could get out of hand.

In the meantime, the Pakistanis certainly will withdraw forces from western Pakistan and deploy them in eastern Pakistan. That will mean that one leg of the Petraeus and Obama plans would collapse. Washington’s expectation of greater Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border will disappear along with the troops. This will free the Taliban from whatever limits the Pakistani army had placed on it. The Taliban’s ability to fight would increase, while the motivation for any of the Taliban to enter talks — as Afghan President Hamid Karzai has suggested — would decline. U.S. forces, already stretched to the limit, would face an increasingly difficult situation, while pressure on al Qaeda in the tribal areas would decrease.

Now, step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created. First, the Indian government faces an internal political crisis driving it toward a confrontation it didn’t plan on. Second, the minimum Pakistani response to a renewed Indo-Pakistani crisis will be withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, thereby strengthening the Taliban and securing al Qaeda. Third, sufficient pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government could cause it to collapse, opening the door to a military-Islamist government — or it could see Pakistan collapse into chaos, giving Islamists security in various regions and an opportunity to reshape Pakistan. Finally, the United States’ situation in Afghanistan has now become enormously more complex.

By staging an attack the Indian government can’t ignore, the Mumbai attackers have set in motion an existential crisis for Pakistan. The reality of Pakistan cannot be transformed, trapped as the country is between the United States and India. Almost every evolution from this point forward benefits Islamists. Strategically, the attack on Mumbai was a precise blow struck to achieve uncertain but favorable political outcomes for the Islamists.

Rice’s trip to India now becomes the crucial next step. She wants Indian restraint. She does not want the western Pakistani border to collapse. But she cannot guarantee what India must have: assurance of no further terror attacks on India originating in Pakistan. Without that, India must do something. No Indian government could survive without some kind of action. So it is up to Rice, in one of her last acts as secretary of state, to come up with a miraculous solution to head off a final, catastrophic crisis for the Bush administration — and a defining first crisis for the new Obama administration. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said that the enemy gets a vote. The Islamists cast their ballot in Mumbai.

Posted with permission and attribution to Stratfor.

Another Language Cont.

2008-07-14T16:07:00.002-05:00

Here is a neat article responding to Barack Obama's comments about American students not really being educated unless they know several languages. I would re-post it here except I can't because of copyright restrictions, however I would highly encourage you to head over and read it. It is only four short paragraphs and is quite interesting.

Barack Obama, language, and academic arrogance

Gary Loftis

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Another Language

2008-07-09T17:52:00.004-05:00

Well, I thought I would do a quick post online that doesn't require much thinking or typing since I had my wisdom teeth removed this morning. So this is in about a video of Mr. Obama that was mentioned on Rush Limbaugh and Hot Air.

He is talking about our kids learning foreign languages, which there is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but what he is saying is that it is more important for Americans to learn Spanish than for immigrants learn English.

Also while in Georgia he made these comments at a later townhall.
"Addressing a mostly African American crowd outside Atlanta, Obama joked, "You can’t find a job unless you are a really, really good basketball player. Which most of you brothers are not. I know you think you are. But you’re not. You are overrated in your own mind. You will not play in the NBA. You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Little Wayne, but probably not. In which case you need to stay in school.”

On a roll, Obama then said they’d be much more employable if they know a foreign language, and said we should be emphasizing foreign language study in classrooms. “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.”"

Here is the video.

Rush Limbaugh made this comment about it.
" Rather than urging people in our country to speak English, Lord Obama wants us all to speak Spanish. (He can't.) Urging Americans to speak foreign languages is perfectly fine, but in context of his other views, this is an indication of where his head is. He would prefer to be running for president of a Western European country. He's embarrassed by America."
"Obama wants our kids to learn Spanish. Fine and dandy. Let's teach them some other languages first: English, terrorism, Capitalism, and Marxist Socialism for starters."

I would recommend reading the article on hotair.com about it. Elitism is an interesting thing. Enjoy

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Quartz Composer Fun

2008-06-27T16:32:00.003-05:00

I have recently been playing with a sweet little program that comes with Macs called Quartz Composer. It is a program for making live visual effects and Motion like graphics.

I have modified a basic example that came with it. It is something that could be projected onto the wall at say, a 41/G2 party. :-) It's obviously pretty basic, but I have just been playing with it today, and hopefully will be able to do more later.

Here is a screen shot of the visual code:

And, here is a video of it.

Have a good one.

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Supreme Court Upholds Right to Bear Arms

2008-06-26T11:14:00.004-05:00

Just today the US Supreme Court has made a historical 5-4 ruling setting a precedent concerning the 2nd Amendment which has not been conclusively interpreted since its ratification in 1791. For those of you who don't know, this case, District of Columbia v. Heller, was because of Washington D.C.'s gun law, which has now been nullified by this ruling. It was among the strictest in the nation. Passed in 1976 it
"bar[ed] residents from owning handguns unless they had one before the law took effect. Shotguns and rifles may be kept in homes, if they are registered, kept unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks."
FoxNews said "The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia."
But, it was determined it is an individual's right to keep and bear arms.
"There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in the court's decision. (Yahoo! News)
This will have far reaching impacts as Sen Cornyn from Tx says, "The nation's top court made the correct decision by reaffirming one of our founding principles, the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. This historic ruling has implications far beyond the District of Columbia." — Sen. John Cornyn R-Texas.
This law does not however provide for unlimited access to weapons. It won't cast doubt on most current guns laws, such as those that prevent convicted felons and mentally ill from owning one. The same with gun registration laws.

It is interesting to note some of the reactions to this ruling. :-)
There were positive reactions from both sides of the aisle:
"This opinion should usher in a new era in which the constitutionality of government regulations of firearms are reviewed against the backdrop of this important right." —Sen. Patrick Leahy D-Vt.

"The right to bear arms is a fundamental right we enjoy as citizens of the United States. From individuals being able to protect their family and their home to sportsmen venturing into the outdoors, this is an important and historic day for all citizens of this great country." —Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn.

"Today's ruling is a major victory for the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their families. The Supreme Court sent a clear message to local, state, and federal governments that this individual right cannot be unreasonably infringed." — Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

"I think this is a long overdue decision; I don't think the precedent has been seriously reaffirmed in decades." — Sen. Russel Feingold, D-Wis.

And then there was also the typical left wing remarks:
"I am profoundly disappointed in Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, both of whom assured us of their respect for precedent. With this decision, 70 years of precedent has gone out the window. And I believe the people of this great country will be less safe because of it." — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

And this one particularly made me smile. One interesting thing to note is this ruling wasn't strictly "party lines." There are only 4 "conservative Justices" on the court and it was made in favor 5-4.
"Today, President Bush's radical Supreme Court justices put rigid ideology ahead of the safety of communities in New Jersey and across the country. This decision illustrates why I have strongly opposed extremist judicial nominees and will continue to do so in the future." — Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.

I am glad the court was willing to strictly interpret the US Constitution, and I hope they will continue to make this a practice in the future more than they have in the recent past.

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Why Are We Copying Europe?

2008-06-25T17:47:00.004-05:00

For those of you who may not have heard. Today the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling in Louisiana that gave the death penalty to two men convicted of raping children. They declared the law unconstitutional. The ruling was 5-4 with the liberal "Europe Loving" Justices ruling for it, and the conservative Judges ruling against it. Quoted from Yahoo! news:

"Rape and other crimes "may be as devastating in their harm, as here, but 'in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public,' they cannot be compared to murder in their 'severity and irrevocability,'" Kennedy said, quoting from earlier decisions."

Unfortunately this is all turning into "...more like an out-of-control legislative debate than a constitutional analysis," says Bobby Jindal, and I would heartily agree.

The thing I find most interesting about this, and other rulings is the desire of these judges and others to copy what Europe does. Why should we just coy Europe because Europe is doing it? Because it is chic to be like Europe? Why don't we actually look at the results they have achieved with their policies and make our decisions based on that?
Here is an excellent article I was reading today from an Investor's Business Daily editorial. It talks about just this, and was I thought quite well done. I would highly recommend you read it.

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Israeli Training Exercise

2008-06-23T15:25:00.006-05:00

As you may have heard if you have been listening to the news recently, the Israelis have done a relatively long distance training mission involving a large number of F-15 and F-16 warplanes. At first this has been reported as a warning and practice towards an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. This is an article that I thought was very interesting regarding this, and why that doesn't make sense. It is from Stratfor, an independent intelligence analyst company. This is reproduced with permission.

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Mediterranean Flyover: Telegraphing an Israeli Punch?

June 23, 2008

By George Friedman

On June 20, The New York Times published a report saying that more than 100 Israeli aircraft carried out an exercise in early June over the eastern Mediterranean Sea and Greece. The article pointed out that the distances covered were roughly the distances from Israel to Iranian nuclear sites and that the exercise was a trial run for a large-scale air strike against Iran. On June 21, the British newspaper The Times quoted Israeli military sources as saying that the exercise was a dress rehearsal for an attack on Iran. The Jerusalem Post, in covering these events, pointedly referred to an article it had published in May saying that Israeli intelligence had changed its forecast for Iran passing a nuclear threshold — whether this was simply the ability to cause an explosion under controlled conditions or the ability to produce an actual weapon was unclear — to 2008 rather than 2009.

The New York Times article, positioned on the front page, captured the attention of everyone from oil traders to Iran, which claimed that this was entirely psychological warfare on the part of the Israelis and that Israel could not carry out such an attack. It was not clear why the Iranians thought an attack was impossible, but they were surely right in saying that the exercise was psychological warfare. The Israelis did everything they could to publicize the exercise, and American officials, who obviously knew about the exercise but had not publicized it, backed them up. What is important to note is that the fact that this was psychological warfare — and fairly effective, given the Iranian response — does not mean that Israel is not going to attack. One has nothing to do with the other. So the question of whether there is going to be an attack must be analyzed carefully.

The first issue, of course, is what might be called the “red line.” It has always been expected that once the Iranians came close to a line at which they would become a capable nuclear power, the Americans or the Israelis would act to stop them, neither being prepared to tolerate a nuclear Iran. What has never been clear is what constitutes that red line. It could simply be having produced sufficient fissionable material to build a bomb, having achieved a nuclear explosion under test conditions in Iran or having approached the point of producing a deliverable nuclear weapon.

Early this month, reports circulated that A.Q. Khan, the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear program who is accused of selling nuclear technology to such countries as Libya, North Korea and Iran, had also possessed detailed design specifications and blueprints for constructing a nuclear weapon small enough to be mounted on missiles available to North Korea and Iran. The blueprints were found on a computer owned by a Swiss businessman, but the reports pointedly said that it was not known whether these documents had been transferred to Iran or any other country. It was interesting that the existence of the blueprints in Switzerland was known to the United States — and, we assume, Israel — in 2006 but that, at this point, there was no claim that they had been transferred.

Clearly, the existence of these documents — if Iran had a copy of them — would have helped the Iranians clear some hurdles. However, as we have pointed out, there is a huge gap between having enriched uranium and having a deliverable weapon, the creation of which requires technologies totally unrelated to each other. Ruggedizing and miniaturizing a nuclear device requires specializations from materials science to advanced electronics. Therefore, having enriched uranium or even triggering an underground nuclear device still leaves you a long way from having a weapon.

That’s why the leak on the nuclear blueprints is so important. From the Israeli and American point of view, those blueprints give the Iranians the knowledge of precisely how to ruggedize and miniaturize a nuclear device. But there are two problems here. First, if we were given blueprints for building a bridge, they would bring us no closer to building one. We would need experts in multiple disciplines just to understand the blueprints and thousands of trained engineers and workers to actually build the bridge. Second, the Israelis and Americans have known about the blueprints for two years. Even if they were certain that they had gotten to the Iranians — which the Israelis or Americans would certainly have announced in order to show the increased pressure at least one of them would be under to justify an attack — it is unclear how much help the blueprints would have been to the Iranians. The Jerusalem Post story implied that the Iranians were supposed to be c rossing an undefined line in 2009. It is hard to imagine that they were speeded up to 2008 by a document delivered in 2006, and that the Israelis only just noticed.

In the end, the Israelis may have intelligence indicating that the blueprints did speed things up, and that the Iranians might acquire nuclear weapons in 2008. We doubt that. But given the statements Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made over the years, the Israelis have to be planning based on worst-case scenarios. What the sum total of their leaks adds up to is an attempt to communicate widely that there is an increased urgency in dealing with Iran, based on intelligence that the Iranian program is farther along than previously thought.

The problem is the fact that the Israelis are communicating. In fact, they are going out of their way to communicate. That is extremely odd. If the Israelis were intending to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, they would want to be absolutely certain that as much of the equipment in the facilities was destroyed as possible. But the hard truth is that the heart of Iran’s capability, such as it is, does not reside in its facilities but in its scientists, engineers and technicians who collectively constitute the knowledge base of Iran’s nuclear program. Facilities can be replaced. It would take at least a generation to replace what we already regard as an insufficient cadre of expertise.

Therefore, if Israel wanted not simply to take out current facilities but to take Iran out of the nuclear game for a very long time, killing these people would have to be a major strategic goal. The Israelis would want to strike in the middle of the workday, without any warning whatever. If they strike Iran, they will be condemned widely for their actions. The additional criticism that would come from killing the workforce would not be a large price to pay for really destroying the Iranian capabilities. Unlike the Iraqi reactor strike in 1981, when the Israelis struck at night to minimize casualties, this strike against a more sophisticated program could not afford to be squeamish.

There are obviously parts of Iran’s nuclear capability that cannot be moved. There is other equipment that can be, with enough warning and with more or less difficulty, moved to unknown locations. But nothing would be easier to disperse than the heart of the program — the people. They could be moved out of harm’s way with only an hour’s notice. Therefore, providing warning that an attack was coming makes very little sense. It runs counter to basic principles of warfare. The Israelis struck the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 with not the slightest hint of the attack’s imminence. That was one of the reasons it was successful. Telegraphing your punch is not very smart in these circumstances.

The Israelis have done more than raise the possibility that an attack might be launched in 2008. They have publicized how they plan to do it. Based on the number and type of aircraft involved in the exercise — more than 100 F-15 and F-16 fighter jets — one Israeli attack scenario could involve a third of Israel’s inventory of fourth-generation strike aircraft, including most of its latest-model F-15I Ra’am and F-16I Sufa fighter bombers. If Greece were the target in this exercise, then the equivalent distance would mean that the Israelis are planning to cross Jordanian airspace, transit through Iraq and strike Iran from that direction. A strike through Turkey — and there is no indication that the Turks would permit it — would take much longer.

The most complex part of the operation’s logistics would be the refueling of aircraft. They would have to be orbiting in Iraqi airspace. One of the points discussed about the Mediterranean exercise was the role of Israeli helicopters in rescuing downed flyers. Rescue helicopters would be involved, but we doubt very much they would be entering Iranian airspace from Israel. They are a lot slower than the jets, and they would have to be moving hours ahead of time. The Iranians might not spot them but the Russians would, and there is no guarantee that they wouldn’t pass it on to the Iranians. That means that the Israeli helicopters would have to move quietly into Iraq and be based there.

And that means that this would have to be a joint American-Israeli operation. The United States controls Iraqi airspace, meaning that the Americans would have to permit Israeli tankers to orbit in Iraqi airspace. The search-and-rescue helicopters would have to be based there. And we strongly suspect that rescued pilots would not be ferried back to Israel by helicopter but would either be sent to U.S. hospitals in Iraq or transferred to Israeli aircraft in Iraq.

The point here is that, given the exercise the Israelis carried out and the distances involved, there is no way Israel could do this without the direct cooperation of the United States. From a political standpoint in the region, it is actually easier for the United States to take out Iran’s facilities than for it to help the Israelis do so. There are many Sunni states that might formally protest but be quite pleased to see the United States do the job. But if the Israelis were to do it, Sunni states would have to be much more serious in their protestations. In having the United States play the role of handmaiden in the Israeli operation, it would appear that the basic charge against the United States — that it is the handmaiden of the Israelis — is quite true. If the Americans are going to be involved in a strike against Iran’s nuclear program, they are far better off doing it themselves than playing a supporting role to Israel.

There is something not quite right in this whole story. The sudden urgency — replete with tales of complete blueprints that might be in Iranian hands — doesn’t make sense. We may be wrong, but we have no indication that Iran is that close to producing nuclear weapons. Second, the extreme publicity given the exercise in the Mediterranean, coming from both Israel and the United States, runs counter to the logic of the mission. Third, an attack on Iran through Iraqi airspace would create a political nightmare for the United States. If this is the Israeli attack plan, the Americans would appear to be far better off doing it themselves.

There are a number of possible explanations. On the question of urgency, the Israelis might have two things in mind. One is the rumored transfer of S-300 surface-to-air missiles from Russia to Iran. This transfer has been rumored for quite a while, but by all accounts has yet to happen. The S-300 is a very capable system, depending on the variety (and it is unclear which variety is being transferred), and it would increase the cost and complexity of any airstrike against Iran. Israel may have heard that the Russians are planning to begin transferring the missiles sometime in 2008.

Second, there is obviously the U.S. presidential election. George W. Bush will be out of office in early 2009, and it is possible that Barack Obama will be replacing him. The Israelis have made no secret of their discomfort with an Obama presidency. Obviously, Israel cannot attack Iran without U.S. cooperation. The Israelis’ timetable may be moved up because they are not certain that Obama will permit an attack later on. [Blog Author's note: Here is another article regarding that.]

There are also explanations for the extreme publicity surrounding the exercise. The first might be that the Israelis have absolutely no intention of trying to stage long-range attacks but are planning some other type of attack altogether. The possibilities range from commando raids to cruise missiles fired from Israeli submarines in the Arabian Sea — or something else entirely. The Mediterranean exercise might have been designed to divert attention.

Alternatively, the Israelis could be engaged in exhausting Iranian defenders. During the first Gulf War, U.S. aircraft rushed toward the Iraqi border night after night for weeks, pulling away and landing each time. The purpose was to get the Iraqis to see these feints as routine and slow down their reactions when U.S. aircraft finally attacked. The Israelis could be engaged in a version of this, tiring out the Iranians with a series of “emergencies” so they are less responsive in the event of a real strike.

Finally, the Israelis and Americans might not be intending an attack at all. Rather, they are — as the Iranians have said — engaged in psychological warfare for political reasons. The Iranians appear to be split now between those who think that Ahmadinejad has led Iran into an extremely dangerous situation and those who think Ahmadinejad has done a fine job. The prospect of an imminent and massive attack on Iran could give his opponents ammunition against him. This would explain the Iranian government response to the reports of a possible attack — which was that such an attack was just psychological warfare and could not happen. That clearly was directed more for internal consumption than it was for the Israelis or Americans.

We tend toward this latter theory. Frankly, the Bush administration has been talking about an attack on Iran for years. It is hard for us to see that the situation has changed materially over the past months. But if it has, then either Israel or the United States would have attacked — and not with front-page spreads in The New York Times before the attack was launched. In the end, we tend toward the view that this is psychological warfare for the simple reason that you don’t launch a surprise attack of the kind necessary to take out Iran’s nuclear program with a media blitz beforehand. It just doesn’t work that way.

A Ride In A D-25

2008-06-20T12:30:00.018-05:00

On Wednesday I went with my family to see the Barnstormers Tour. Basically they have a lot of vintage biplanes from the 1920s that they have restored and now fly around the country touring and giving rides. I had the opportunity to purchase a ride on one. Here are a few pictures.

Here is the plane (that isn't my family). This is a New Standard D-25 Bi-Plane.

Getting ready to take off.

Climbing into the sky!

Jack Trice Stadium. The football stadium at Iowa State University.

Old dorms at Iowa State. My dad stayed in one of those (There used to be 4, but 2 have been demolished).

Looking at farm fields out over the wing.

More farm fields looking through the prop.

I thought this was a cool picture looking at the plane's shadow on the ground.

Another Bi-Plane giving rides, as seen from the air.

Coming into land. It was cool since they landed on the grass so as to limit wear on their tires.

Well, that was a fun ride.

Hopps
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