I went to the Ranger game the other night with Taylor, Mitchell, Reed, and Michelle. Rangers pwned the Padres 11-2.

I took a pic of the new Cowboy’s stadium from the top deck of the Ranger’s Ballpark. It looks pretty nice.

I went to the lake with a few friends last weekend. Here’s a random pic.

Mitchell and Reed.

Here’s a song by Camera Obscura. Mark and I went to see them live last week. It was a pretty good show.

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In See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, Robert Baer shares the gripping story of his 20 years as a case officer in the CIA from 1976 to 1997. From running agents in Beirut, Lebanon, to rendezvousing with Russian paratroopers in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Baer’s adventures read like a spy novel, but they are real, austere events drawn out in careful detail from his personal arsenal of notes and journals. The CIA’s Publications Review Board blacked out lines and sometimes entire paragraphs to eliminate classified information that was deemed to be a security objection, which gives the book a unique and mysterious appeal.

See No Evil is chock-full of Washington politics. Baer’s account is an inside look into how careerism in Washington, diplomatic/political correctness, and the overreliance on technology took the CIA out of the business of spying and ultimately endangered our national security. Baer is just one of many in the intelligence community disheartened by the futility of having to track threats while blindfolded with their hands tied behind their back. I came away from this book truly convinced that the gradual trend toward more bureaucratic interference in intelligence gathering operations is a serious problem to our national security.

Rarely do first-person accounts keep my interest from cover to cover regardless of subject, but this book is fast-paced and unpredictable making it a captivating read. My favorite part is when Baer, hungover from a night of drinking vodka with a Russian Colonel, rolls up in the turret of an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) to a crowd of Westerners awaiting evacuation outside the Tajikistan Hotel as the fundamentalists close in on the area. Under protocol, Baer is required to tell the crowd they must agree to reimburse the State Department $10,000 to board the evacuation flight.

I definitely recommend this book as a must-read for anyone interested in the history of intelligence, terrorism, or the United States’ involvement in the Middle East in general.

I drove down to Port Aransas this weekend with Adam and Lucas for our friend Derek’s wedding. Weddings are fun, and it was cool to see some old friends there. I’ve never seen anyone more happy than Derek and Jen were. Congrats!

Lucas, Hans, and Adam.

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This weekend I went hunting and fishing with my friends Mark, Mitchell, and Taylor. Taylor is getting married soon so we had to spend a weekend with the bros. It was a good time all around, and the weather was nice. We caught some bass and pwned some squirrels, turtles, clay pigeons, and some beers. I took some funny pics with my iPhone but decided only to post a few cooler looking ones. I may post more pics later when I upload them all to my laptop.

Mark and Mitchell.

Mark

Here’s a cool song off Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs And Landings. I’ve been listening to their older stuff a lot lately. It’s great.

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Posting from iPhone… cool?

I don’t know what this blog is about, but it will be good I promise.

Lately our attention has settled on the current financial crisis and impending global recession.

Regretfully, little has been mentioned regarding the present water crisis that has been accumulating very real casualties and creating potentially destabilizing conflict across the globe—even in the U.S. where states compete for resources.

Water is the ultimate renewable resource, but the demand for clean water has nearly quadrupled in the last 50 years mostly resulting from overpopulation and human mismanagement. The water crisis is directly responsible for many of the problems facing the world today including poverty, food shortage and disease. However, the solution could lie in a combination of free trade, desalinization and ultraviolet disinfection.

The lack of clean water can be blamed for causing an estimated 1.8 million deaths a year from related diseases. The victims are primarily children in underdeveloped regions, but women suffer as well. Women are tasked to take care of the sick or walk for miles each day in search of water, and many young women are taken out of school and denied an education in order to fulfill these responsibilities. This exacerbates the problem by providing no opportunity to escape the endless cycle of poverty and disease.

Conflict will brew as competition over natural resources like rivers and lakes increases. Disputes have already erupted over who gets what in the case of a shortage among casinos and residents. In Los Angeles, the diminishing water supply isn’t capable of sustaining the city’s extraordinary population growth due to immigration, which alone accounts for two-thirds of U.S. population growth. Texas is at risk due to drought and overpopulation as well. El Paso and San Antonio could run out of water by 2018.

Trade could be a possible solution for distributing clean water to regions where it is needed most, but it is an unpopular idea. Canada, one of the few regions where clean fresh water is plentiful, has recently considered the idea of trading water as a commodity, but public outrage promptly buried the proposal. Trading water as a commodity over the open market needs to gain acceptance in order to alleviate the current crisis.

Desalinization, the process of turning salt water into fresh water, seems the most promising and viable solution. The process, is expensive, but recent technological improvements in wind power and chlorine-tolerant membranes should lower costs. Ultraviolet disinfection provides a major advantage by eliminating the need for storing hazardous chemicals because it is a physical treatment process, not chemical.

We need to invest resources into underdeveloped countries that lack the infrastructure to raise sanitation levels. Poverty might be impossible to destroy, but we should try our best to use our resources to alleviate the problems in both our country and around the world.

SMU Daily Campus