Right now in Iraq, most of the wheeling and dealing with local leaders is done by Army and Marine commanders in whatever they are assigned to. While such negotiations are good, they mainly deal with what they are concerned about. Primarily, the security situation of an area and how to improve it.

But what about the big picture? What about the diplomatic effort to achieve region-wide goals? It seems that our very best and brightest diplomats should be courageously pressing their intended message within the Middle East.

Well, maybe not:
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/iraq/2007/11/03/welcome-drop-in-violence-but-what-will-come-of-it.html

The above article, which has an extremely short mention of the status of our diplomats, is enough to show a gaping hole in our larger political strategy. Jack Croddy of the State Department is basically saying that they should not commit their very best diplomats over there, only the ones that volunteer.

Let me say that there are tens of thousands of soldiers over there right now who would love to be back stateside. But they have a sense of duty to their country which puts the welfare of the many above their own selves, a sense that apparently isn’t ubiquitous within other Federal organizations.

The diplomatic process is integral to any major conflict. A unified message presented by outstanding diplomats would allow Middle Eastern communities to understand the goals, purpose, and rationale of the United States within Iraq. Without that message being present, the military present in Iraq won’t represent much more than foreigners driving around and shooting whoever shoots at them. With a strong diplomatic message, they may look more like true allies who should be respected and defended.

Posting my thoughts and ideas to this page hasn’t exactly been in my index of habits as of late. The new habits are the entirely worthless time-wasting habits as opposed to doing stuff like this, where I’m wasting my time, but it just doesn’t feel like it.

I wanted to talk about something odd, but still near and dear to me. This something has to do this the syntax, or structure, of sentences in the English language. This is about the conjunction “and” and how to list more than two items using “and” and commas. One way drops the comma before the last “and”. For instance, some will say, “I really want to chow down on some macaroni and cheese, pizza and pastrami.” Whereas some will include the comma, like so, “I really want to chow down on some macaroni and cheese, pizza, and pastrami.” I hope you see the problem with the first method of using commas. When you include a couple of grouped words in the list (macaroni and cheese) and then have no comma before the final “and” (pizza and pastrami), how do you clearly differentiate between that and the first set of words if there were no clear context to infer from? Anyways, there are two standards out there, some journalists still use the first standard I’ve presented, and repeatedly seeing such folly has goaded me into writing about this topic right here.

Next week I’ll go over why the two spaces after a period is a practice which should have exited the scene along with typewriters, and how the QWERTY keyboard layout should have done the same, although I haven’t yet tried the alternate Dvorak standard since that’s just a little too ostentatious, even for me.

The Chinese middle class likes to invest Vegas style. But instead of horseshoes and rabbit feet, they like to acquire luck through the use of numerology. In particular, they like seeing the number 8, which sounds similar in both Mandarin and Cantonese to their word for wealth. Such widespread superstition gives me curious ideas in how to get wealthy. Does anybody out there know how a US company would go about getting listed on their stock exchange?

Finally!

After a good year and three months after I started working on my Private Pilot’s license, I decided to put in enough time and effort to finish it off. As of today, I passed the final check-ride and am now a real pilot.

Of course, I’m still restricted to the tiny two-seated C-152 until I put more time and effort in maybe upgrading my licensure to a C-172, but I’m glad I’ve finished up none-the-less.

So, Homestar Runner is known for its campy humor, but a new short of theirs takes the cake.

I got back at about 6:30pm yesterday from going a marathon (the Bataan Death March Memorial) at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. I say going because my knee started to have twinges of pain in my knee at around mile 10 or 11, and since I figured I was going to be messed up enough after 26.2 miles, I started walking at a fast pace after that point when a knee rap and Motrin didn’t put me in a better place. So, I ended up coming in at 6 hours 8 minutes. Regardless, it was a trying experience, and I hope to run another marathon sans the knee pain I’ve been having.

After a long day’s hard and very voluntary work, I’m finally almost finished with the revitalized Accounting Club homepage. One thing infuriated me above all else – Internet Explorer and Firefox don’t space out tables the same way. After trying to nibble at bits of code (the paragraph function was an absolute no-go and Dreamweaver insisted on depositing it everywhere), I was finally able to obtain relatively strong congruency between the different browsers. Yet the pages still look different when viewed side-by-side. I don’t even want to think about trying to view it in Opera.

I’ve got to give a hand to the Democrats: some of their first political moves haven’t been to shabby or reactionary. They’ve just recently passed an ethics bill disallowing politicians from receiving gifts or private flights from lobbyists. And two of the next issues on line are curtailing the growth of earmarks and introducing ways to balance the deficit. Tackling these issues is a great way to start building up public trust in this post-Abramoff/Cunningham era before transitioning to the larger reforms that they have in mind.

So, after looking at the various paths I could take at the Army’s Branch Orientation website, I’ve narrowed down what I want to do to either Signal or Field Artillery or, if there is an opportunity to do so, Military Intelligence. If anyone has input, please leave a comment.

The semester here at Saint Cloud State University is almost over. I don’t exactly know how to express my joy. If I could, I would take Christmas break out for a romantic, candlelit dinner.

The number of all-nighters I pulled this semester by far exceeded all of my previous semesters. By my count, that number is somewhere around 8 sleepless nights.

I think I’m going to go and prep a hot bath which I can fall asleep in, only to wake up when the water has turned cold.