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Unbelievable…

A guy in California attempted to make money in the milk market. His tactics were so irresponsible, so reckless that the state had to step in and effectivly shut him down. What did he do? He charged less for milk than the milk cartel did. That’s right, he saved people money by going into direct compitition with the milk cartel. The cartel has plenty of political clout, and it uses it to prevent compitition. You can read the whole story here:

Its All Monopoly Money

A common complaint that people have levied against me is that I am “pro big business”. As a matter of fact I am not, I am pro free market, everyone in compitition with each other (people and businesses). Businesses (especially large ones) fight free market ideas tooth and nail because it exposes them to compitition and lower profits. Of course those lower profits translate directly into lower prices. The milk cartel is one of the most powerful lobbys in the nation. Why? Because of all of the freaking money that they make without compitition. The same goes for sugar and many other agricultural products. The fights against Wal Mart are usually framed as trying to save small businesses. The fact of the matter is that it is other large businesses (Royal Ahold, Safeway, and the Unions… yes, Unions are just other large businesses) that are trying to avoid compitition for their beneifit, forget the consumer… It sickens me to see companies getting away with this, it makes me even angrier that people are so worked up about Wal Mart (which saves people billions of dollars a year) and don’t care and/or don’t know about the many companies that are sticking it to us with the full blessings and enforcement of our government. That’s something to get upset about…

Isaac

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Are you a foreigner?

That’s what he asked me. Honestly I don’t think I could stand out more in my jeans and tee shirt, luminous white skin, and standing a head taller than anyone else there. He’s an American looking to recruit English teachers for his school. Since I’ll be here for a while I figured that I would look into it. He said that they were either offering classes as payment or just paying me by the hour. My gut feeling is that the pay will be a pittance, but we’ll see. If I didn’t have such a good teacher and room now, I might consider switching schools. So I’m sticking with CALES unless the offer is unbelievable…

Got an email from Ian Mackaye (of Fugazi fame) today. I had sent him an email about some things I thought he would like to see (Kill your idols over at forksplit.com), and I was very happy to see his response. I can’t say that I’m surprised though, he and all of his bandmates are generally known as real down to earth, nice guys. Any of you who aren’t familiar with Fugazi and you’re under the age of 35, go out and listen to them now! A real rock group with real people in it, good stuff.

Everyone is leaving soon… Christoph, Luca, and Nollaig will be gone by the middle of next week. It’ll be sad to see them go, they’ve helped me tremendously. I guess I’ll be the old man of the dorm (in more ways than one) soon nd I’ll be showing some newbies the ropes. Hope they’re as cool as my first set of housemates! There are a few people over at the school that will be around next year, and there are a few people at other schools too. I’m trying to find people but it’s so much easier when you live with them:-)

Isaac

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Better today..

Class went well today. We agreed to stick to reading skills nd building vocab for the immediate future. So I struggle through a paragraph, he corrects my pronunciation, and then we go over the new words. I just have to complete the exercises and learn the new words from each exercise… It’s a bit of a chore for me, but I do much better understanding things in context than just on their own. I gotta eat and then hit the books…

BTW, Nollaig told me that there are westerners in Yemen that are reading my blog. Drop me a line, I’m trying to meet up with people that will be here after Christmas. I’ll be gone from Christmas till the 14th of Jan, but I think I’ll be here for an undetermined time after that…

Isaac

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RAIN!!!

It rained for about 45 min. today, with thunder and everything. I was told not to expect any rain until, you know… Febuary so this is kind of exciting. All the guys are hitching up their man dresses (called thobes I believe) to avoid getting them dirty. The men always wear white thobes, I’ve never seen one in any other color. Most of the women wear black hjabs although some of the older women wear multi colored ones. So the pavement is a little slick, but I hope that the dust will be cut down a bit for a while…

My brain is doing much better today. Sat down this morning and learned 7 new verbs (waked, went, did, left, watched, talked, and returned). In Arabic, the simplest form of the verb is the third person masculine in the past tense. They call this the root and everything else is conjugated from there. In English and French, we usually conjugate from the infinitive (to wake, to go, etc..). It’s been a constant battle to not think of the root as the infinitive, but I’m getting better…

Tonight it’s more verbs and then I will learn the 5 different ways to form a negative sentence (a sentence where there is a negation, i.e. I did not study). It gets weird because they make a big distinction in how you say “not” depending on the time frame indicated (indefinate vs definate time frames).

Want some more Arabic grammer? Of course you do! There are two basic sentence types, the verb sentence and the noun sentence. Verb sentences begin with a predicate (not necessairly the same thing as a verb) and are followed by the subject with a definate article (the). A noun sentence begins with a noun and is then followed by a predicate. One of the things that blew my mind was that you do not have to have a verb to make a complete sentence. So “Book on table” is an acceptable sentence in Arabic… Yes I am still trying to get used to it. It’s like an assumed verb. We have assumed subjects in English (Go outside! for example) but an assumed verb makes my head spin. I’m sure it’ll seem natural to me eventually….

Isaac

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Took the day off…

Yesterday it felt as though my brain was leaking out of my ear, I was a bit overwhelmed. SO I figured that today I would concentrate on learning what I was taught yesterday instead of trying to learn more stuff. Tomorrow starts my “weekend”, so I’ve got three days to get up to speed…

We went out to dinner last night. It is the only “Italian” resturant here in Sana’a, and therefore probably in all of Yemen. Imagine my surprise when I opened up the menu and found, along with fried calimari, hot wings and spring rolls… Turns out that they made a variety of stuff, including Indian and Chinese food. The locals that we went out with were completely dumfounded by the choices on the menu, they had total paralysis. It was only 3 or 4 pages long, and that included the appitizers and the drinks. Anyway, we had gone out with a couplke of local bigwigs and they simply ordered a bunch of a lot of stuff for everyone… So no linguinie with pesto for me… Probably just as well, I have seen some other dishes completely mangled by local cooks… So my Italian meal ended up being mostly Indian. It was pretty good actually, and everyone had a bunch of fun. The meal was organized to thank the bigwigs for having a bunch of them over to their house on the red sea. I didn’t get to go on that trip, but everyone else was very impressed. Well, they spoiled my housemates good intentions by paying for everything whithout anyone knowing it. People were being so nice that they almost got into fights:-)

I’ll probably go back to that place just for the pizza, it was pretty good. It’s also the only resturant that anyone can go to that serves alcohol. No pork though… I better get back to studying…

Isaac

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Veggies!

     OK, a man can only eat so much chicken, rice, bread, and lamb. Yesterday i went to the souk and bought a bunch of veggies. Had green beans last night and I made a kind of vegetarian hash (potato, green pepper, onion, salt, olive oil) tonight. For a while I have wondered about my housemates, they cook almost every night. i figured that going out is so cheap, why cook at all? Well, it turns out you cook to get the food you want, not for money purposes. i’m going to the market soon to buy some pasta, can’t get that at the resturants…

     I got a 92 on my test, i have now “graduated” to level two. Of course level two looked a lot like level one today, lots of new words and a spinning head… In any case, I’m happy with my progress. I went from rank beginner to being able to read and write (although not understanding the vast majority of words) in 16 classes, 32 hours for those of you counting. I can also form simple sentences and participate in standard greetings and shopping transactions. I’m hoping for a comparable improvement this next month…

     Oh Jenny, I tried using the “rich text” mode so that I can use the lj cut feature, but surprise! All of the menu items are in Arabic… I’ll look into more options for my longer posts later on. Did you get my other email?

Isaac