New set of photos from the Middle East posted here.

I’m out in the middle of nowhere. Evidence: the site where Stanley said “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” after finding him in the jungle is only a mile away from here.

(Merry Christmas, everyone! Let’s go to the Holy Land for this story…)

It’s only five miles from the Old City of Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and if going by foot was good enough for Joe and Mary, it’s good enough for me. And what better site of a Christmas story than the site of the Christmas Story?

They, of course, went all the way from Nazareth, which, if you consult your map, is a very long way from Bethlehem indeed. In fact, the whole deal seems rather inefficient, from the point of view of the Romans. If Joseph and the rest of the itinerant carpenters - I’m speculating here, but like father, like son - had to return to their ancestral home to be counted and to pay taxes, wouldn’t it have been straightforward to just duck out of Galilee for a few days, never having remitted the taxes and leaving the Nazarene and Bethlehem Revenue Authorities none the wiser? But I digress.

The geography around Jerusalem is striking. First, both the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives disappoint in their lack of mountain-ness. (The Holy Land is not alone in grandiose claims of soaring mounts - Louisiana’s highest point, Driscoll Mountain, is only five hundred feet high!) Second, the native terrain, preserved in a park east of Jerusalem, is so dry and brambly that one wonders how Moses knew he’d left the desert at all. Third, there’s what appears to be a giant wall in the middle of one of the valleys on the road to Bethlehem.

Ah. The Wall. The Security Fence. The Perimeter. Apartheid Two. The West Bank Barrier. Ich bin ein Berliner. Depends on your politics, of course. No matter how you view it, you can’t help but view it, as the wall, thick and double-thick again, concrete extending more than five hundred miles, curls through a nation nowhere near that long. The arguments for and against are straightforward. Proponents rightfully point out that over 700 Israeli citizens were killed by Palestinian bombers in the al-Aqsa intifada before the wall was put up, and that today suicide bombings are essentially unheard of in Israel. Opponents convicingly note that most of the Wall lies in territory which is nominally part of the future Palestinian state, and that besides invoking degrading treatment on Palestinians who are simply traveling to work, the wall appears to be an attempt to establish “facts on the ground” which will allow Israel to grab more land than the 1967 borders when a final peace settlement is negotiated.

For our purposes, let’s just note the existence of the wall, and the fact that would Joseph and Mary have made their trek today, they would have needed to pass through security.

Leaving the Israeli side is straightforward. Arabs show an ID, swipe their finger into a biometric reader, and cross through. With an American passport, I was waved through with nary a question. The concept of the passport, whether domestic or not, is interesting, isn’t it? Everyone worldwide more or less accepts the passport as a given, but historically, the document served only two purposes. First, it identified the holder as being linked to a strong government who would protect their citizens - flip open your modern passport and you’ll still find words to the effect of “grant the bearer safe passage.” Second, and more disturbing, the passport was used by totalitarian and illiberal states to control the flow of their own citizens domestically and overseas. Many of the more disagreeable nations worldwide still restrict passport access to control their peoples’ movement. Even liberal states do this from time to time - some legal scholars remain unconvinced that the US can constitutionally restrict the travel of Americans to states such as Cuba, and certainly I’m unclear what principle of liberality would allow such an prohibition.

The most evident difference between the Palestinian side of the wall and the Israeli side is that the grafitti is much more interesting on the Palestinian side. The Palestinian cause, like the Tibetan cause, is one that draws an international crowd, and the International Crowd tend to like a good piece of wall grafitti. I’ve never figured out why these crowds associate with Palestine and Tibet and Darfur but not with Eastern Congo or Burma or Xinjiang, to choose just three examples of peoples who have suffered at least as much.

Particularly interesting is that the grafitti comes in three flavors. First is the Witty International Art. These are obviously drawn by foreigners - one can’t imagine that Arabs and Jews would draw in English as a first choice - but are generally salient. I enjoyed the giant “Do unto others as it WAS done unto you?” and the herd of rhinos crashing through the wall.

Much worse is the Uninformed International Art. This is by far the most common species, and is populated primarily by airy-fairy quotations from either leftist philosophers or bad musicians. Zach de la Rocha, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein and Mao Zedong appear to be this movement’s leading lights. I would have imagined that Reagan could have gotten a namecheck - “Tear down this wall” and all that - but I fear the graffers in the Uninformed Group may be too young to know who Reagan is, and, to the extend that they know him, completely unwilling to invoke the name of That Guy.

The third group, Obviously Local, is a favorite. I identified this group by selecting all the grafitti that actually featured Arabic. What’s interesting is that this group consisted primarily of advertisements; more Security Billboard that Security Barrier. There were ads for concerts and restaurants and tire stores. For all the talk about the Two State Solution and political reconciliation, I imagine that Palestinians, like people all over the world, simply want the opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their children, and economic status is far more important than political status when it comes to this question. Had Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt become centers of Palestinian prosperity rather than the site of refugee camps with arguably worse conditions than the Israel-controlled West Bank, would not Palestinians be less concerned with 1948?

But the camps outside of Israel are poor, and the Palestinian condition within Israel is poor, and that makes slights like the one I witnessed crossing back from Bethlehem all the more damaging. Directly ahead of me in line was a Palestinian man and his wife. For some reason, she was selected for extra screening, meaning a more invasive search of some kind. When the man was not allowed to accompany her, he went absolutely ballistic, ranting and raving to the point that another Arab in line with me said that even he was a bit scared. The Israeli guards, generally young people doing mandatory service who are unable to speak Arabic, made things no better by yelling back with equal vigor.

If you want some Christmas good news at this juncture, some anecdote about how a moderate Jew or a Palestinian businessman intervened to calm the situation, proving that peace is indeed possible, you’re not going to get it here. The situation in the Middle East is as muddled as ever. Everyone knows that Palestinians will never accept the Orthodox settlements in the West Bank, which now hold half a million Jews. Everyone knows that Israel will never allow full right of return for Palestinians, since this would mean the end of the Jewish state. Everyone has known these things for decades, but Arab and Israeli politicians who acknowledge these truths wind up dead like Sadat and Rabin, and foreign mediators have all been unable to convince the extremist factions on either side to moderate.

When Joseph and Mary left Bethlehem, they went to Egypt for decades to avoid the intransigence of the government in Judea, but at least they could return to peace after the tyrannical incumbent died. Is there even that much hope in Israel and Palestine today?

1.

Risks when traveling overseas are often terribly misunderstood. Most people worry about terrorism, about the mustachioed, kaffiyeh-bandying, rock-throwing, ultra-swarthy young man who eagerly spends his days sipping tea and playing backgammon while hoping, nay dreaming, for an Unwitting Westerner to traipse by the storefront, at which point our Arab or Colombian or Russian or Brownian leaps into action having already selected an appropriately sedate basket, or perhaps platter if our terrorist is a student of the arts, in which to deposit the soon-removed head of the traveler.

But it is really the car that presents the most danger when abroad. Do you know how many people die in car accidents worldwide every year? Go ahead, guess; I’ll wait.

It’s one point two million, according to the WHO. One point two million, every year! And that’s even though broad swaths of the world population still live in villages and slums where autos are near nonexistent. If 9/11 happened every day, there would still be more people dying on the roads than dying at the hands of terrorists. The nations with the worst drivers have death rates per mile that are orders of magnitude higher than the US.

You might find it interesting, then, to combine the two possibilities. Just how dangerous would it be, for instance, to be banging turns at ninety miles per hour while in an Iraqi taxi? Well, since you asked…

2.

The thing with Iraq 2008 is that you’ve really got three countries. Region one is comprised of the highway between Mosul and Baghdad, and its surrounding provinces. Here, they don’t even have the decency to make a video for al-Jazeera of your head in a basket after showing you holding today’s newspaper; they just chop it off straightaway. Region two is the very far south, former home of Thesiger’s Marsh Arabs. It’s reasonably quiet down here; informed opinion suggests that an unarmed tourist could probably walk through the market unscathed here for at least a few days. Region three, though, is home to the Kurds, arcing across the North and Northeast from just north of Mosul to just north of Kirkuk and on over to Iran.

It might be a technicality to consider Kurdistan / Northern Iraq / the Kurdish Administered Region of Iraq (depending on your politics) a part of Iraq at all. They run their own customs from Turkey and Iraq. The Kurdish flag, a red, white and green affair with a joyful sun in the middle, flies everywhere while the Iraqi flag, properly bland and dour with Allahu Akbar written across, makes only rare appearances. Along every road that intersects with the Kurdish region, troops in the employ of the Kurdish parties enforce checkpoints; any Arab-looking fellow who does not speak perfect Kurdish is searched heavily. This isn’t a new state of affairs; the North has been de facto autonomous since the US began enforcing a no-fly zone in the 1990s. As a result, there have only been a handful of isolated, minor bombings in the Kurdish region since 2003.

The North is also different because nearly everybody there supports the 2003 Iraq War. American troops are known to head to the bars of Zakho or Erbil for a spell of R&R. And American tourists? I counted eleven things acquired for free over seven days, among them taxi rides, meals and miniature Iraq flags. I saw more than one person wearing US Army surplus clothing. Kurdistan is, I reckon, slightly more pro-American than an average Rotary Club in Oklahoma on July 4 during a visit from a Wounded Veteran.

Not only that, but Kurdistan is a visa-at-the-border jump away from Eastern Turkey, where I happened to be in late October. So, along with a similarly-inclined English surgeon – I’m sure she could reattach a head if need be - an Iraq trip was in the cards.

3.

The difference between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq shouldn’t be completely overstated, however.

Sulemania is a lovely city, the second largest in the region, located an hour north of Bitterly Divided Kirkuk, more on which to come. The city souq is among the best in the region, and as a souq connoisseur who has visited those wonderfully evocative markets in Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, Dubai, Jerusalem, Muscat, Sana’a and Cairo, I speak with some authority on the matter. The city lies at the edge of a mountain range stretching toward Turkey and Tehran, and is filled with broad boulevards and newly-built mosques. Suly – what the cool kids call it these days – is also booming economically, and is home to a smattering of perfectly decent Italian restaurants, a bowling alley, and the campus of a nascent American University in Iraq.

A pair of Americans, Ryan and Peter, teaching English at the University invited us to class on our last day in the city. AUI is an English-only institution, and inside the campus walls, it looks like nothing but a typical American high school. There are girls in skirts, and guys in ballcaps, and a basketball court behind the classroom building.

Ryan is trying his best to put together a girls’ basketball team. A few weeks ago, he took the girls on a run through a local park during practice. Afterwards, one of the girls told him it would be better if they didn’t go running off the campus again. The men who were yelling in Kurdish out there, she said, weren’t cheering us on.

Interesting fact: Sulemania has something of a reputation as the Honor Killing Capital of the World. It’s not much the town for independent women.

Not long after the basketball was the beginning-of-term party held at the Sulemania Social Club – anyone who’s anyone, darling, and all that. Only half the class made it for a night of buffet, dull speeches, and relatively conservative Kurdish line dancing. One of the fathers had asked whether there would be dancing. Yes, there would be, but just traditional Kurdish dances. But, and surely this must have been said in hush-hush tones, is it not possible that a knee would be exposed in a moment of gamboling hullabaloo? A knee! Well, I suppose its possible, and in that case, she won’t be able to come.

4.

Perhaps, though, the difference between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq is pretty huge.

A traveling English circus that we bumped into in Erbil – and really, these occurrences are so common as to not even be noteworthy, right? - is known in the Middle East for giving shows to the sad sacks all the region over. Palestinian refugee camps are a common haunt, but they also played Baghdad and surrounding in 2004. Indeed, they were on the (re-)opening bill of the National Theatre. What was that trip like?

It went well, I’m told. They played to big crowds, and the kids, especially the refugees, and especially the orphan refugees, really had a good time seeing the clowns and the fire-breathing and the Three Stooges stunts. And further, they were able to help a domestic Iraqi group that brings in young people for a children’s theatre.

One of the British group was kidnapped after the end of the tour, but she was returned safe and sound after not too long. No harm, no foul, innit?

But, oh yeah, the Iraqi children’s theatre. They’d received threatening messages nearly from the start, warning them against performing such non-Islamic entertainment. The missive likely suggested replacing Shakespeare with something like A Verbatim Recitation of Muhammed’s Account of Receiving Messages from the Angel Gabriel: The Musical. Only with no music. In any case, the messages grew more threating, including calls to have the theatre itself blown up.

Luckily, it didn’t get that far. The directors of the theatre were ambushed coming out of a rehearsal and were all killed in 2005.

5.

The taxi drivers may be lunatics at the wheel, but at least they provide interesting conversation. One driver wanted to know how many wives I had. I told him, none, but the standard in the US is just to have the one. He had two wives, and thought that every guy should have at least that many.

Mathematic talent must have fallen in Iraq since the golden era when they were inventing the number zero and al-gibra.

6.

I reckon the Kurds are calm now because they went through too much during the Saddam Era. The end of the Iraq-Iran war, in 1987 and 1988, and the period following the Gulf War in 1991 were particularly bad.

Sulemania has a whole museum devoted to 1991: the Red State Security Museum. The compound used to enclose Saddam’s mukhabarat jail. Following the Gulf War, southern Shi’ites and northern Kurds were tacitly encouraged to rise up against Saddam’s rule. Unfortunately, neither the US nor anyone else assisted. Historians generally believe that Bush was torn over whether to send troops far across the Kuwait border, but was warned by allied Arab governments that it would not look good if the US used troops based in Saudi Arabia to overthrow an Arab leader, no matter how odious. In any case, the uprising failed, and Saddam’s troops retaliated mercilessly against suspected plotters.

Thousands of Kurds were killed. The women and children of political prisoners were brought along to tiny cells along with the accused. The Museum will play you a tape of a torture in the very room where the torture took place – I passed. And to be honest, the worst of what happened in Sulemania can’t really compare to events like the chemical bombing of Halabja in Iraq’s far east, where thousands died in the unbearably painful way that is chemical warfare’s trademark. Spots along the Iraq-Iran border represent the only widespread use of chemical warfare since the trenches of World War I.

7.

Though the US has been involved in Kurdistan since 1991, through the patrol of a no-fly zone, there are very few troops on active duty in this part of Iraq. One guess puts the total at less than four hundred.

And those four hundred are not hard to find. We were walking through the Christian Quarter of Erbil – yes, Kurdistan has many Christians, as well as Yezidis and other minority religions –
when our road was blocked by a concrete car barrier and a guardpost. In the middle of the block stood a large house surrounded by barbed wire. The President of Kurdistan, perhaps? A local drug running billionaire? We asked the heavily-armed guard in a combination of Arabic, Kurdish and Pantomime who lived at the house. He said, No. We waited. He picked up a phone, and waved us in past the concrete barrier. A second guard appeared in front of the house itself, where we waited while he knocked on the outside gate. I suppose they assumed that White Folks Like Us are probably not the terrorist-types they should be looking out for.

A confused Asian-American came out.

“Err, Hello?”

Hey, man. What’s goin’ on? We were just wondering, is this like the Iraq President’s house or somethin’?

“Umm, no.” Another guy walks out of the house. I thought he was Iraqi, but he was named Jose and talked with Asian Guy in an American accent. Iraqis and Mexicans are easily confused by their similar taste in walrus mustaches.

So what do you guys do here?

“Well, I’m not really allowed to say.”

Could I take a picture of the house, asks my surgeon friend.

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

Well, OK, bye, guys!

Down at the end of the street, we popped into a convenience store, and asked them what the deal was with all the security on the street. Oh yeah, they said – the US Army live there. They weren’t the most inconspicuous guys in the world. Except for Jose, of course.

8.

But once more with the taxis.

Kurdistan isn’t so much a country as a region sliced off from the rest of Iraq. Because of that, the main, tarmac roads don’t confine themselves to the Kurdish perimeter. The main road from Turkey to Erbil, Kurdistan’s largest city, passes an ominous “Mosul – 24km” sign before veering hard to the left. Mosul! Twenty four kilometers!

The route from Sulemania to Erbil is even worse, as it actually passes through the northern suburbs of Kirkuk. This is no problem for the Kurds – they think of Kirkuk as part of their territory. Unfortunately, the Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs disagree, having their own native populations and their own claims on Kirkuk’s massive oil fields.

If you knew nothing about Kirkuk - and make no mistake, it’s not the type of city you should stroll around for fun – then you would immediately assume it was a crazy place if your taxi pulled in late in the evening. Instead of glass and steel skyscrapers alight in your first glimpse of the distant metropolis, there are giant, black-smoke and blue-fire flames soaring into the sky as if foreshadowing the violent conflict that Kirkuk’s oilfield has caused and will cause.

So when the shared taxi driver and our two fellow passengers wanted to stop for dinner – stop for dinner on a two and a half hour ride! - on the outskirts of Kirkuk – the outskirts of Kirkuk! - we were less than enthused. Driving down the safe roads in these taxis is dangerous enough, right?

It’s not that there are no stories, just that there is no wi-fi here in the wilds of Mozambique.  Did you know that, to go to Lichinga in Niassa Province from the nearest international hub involves a 7 hour bus from Johannesburg to Maputo, an all-day cramped bus ride to Inchope, another all-day (17 hour) ride to Nampula the next day (including a ferry across the bridgeless Zambezi), a 12-hour train ride to Cuamba, and a 5 hour minibus ride to Lichinga.  To get from here to the camp I wanted to go to involves another 3 hour minibus ride and a 50km walk.  Oh, and it’s 90 degrees out, very humid, and they stuff 30 people into each minivan, seemingly defying the physical rule that says two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same spot, and further there’s certainly no A/C in the minivan.  Now that’s the middle of nowhere!

In any case, once I get wi-fi, I’ve got three new stories and a bunch of photos…

Over the last three months, I’ve asked a lot of foreigners their opinion on the U.S. election. The results were emphatic: one hundred percent of the people I talked to supported Obama. Lest you think that I drew an odd sample, pollsters themselves asked non-Americans to choose between our valiant candidates. Here, perhaps, McCain can satisfy himself with a small victory in Israel and perhaps in Georgia as well. Should you consider the pollsters themselves biased, perhaps the two hundred thousand-strong crowd that stood in Berlin for an Obama speech ought be contrasted with the non-event that represented McCain’s own European tour. In any case, it’s clear that a huge majority of the world was rooting for Obama.

And why? It’s interesting, though not surprising, that foreigners care about America’s foreign policy. What is often less understood is that American citizens, like citizens of any country, care more about domestic policy, that they care more about the mundane details of taxes, jobs, health care, and schools than about habeas corpus for enemy combatants or the details of the Palestinian negotiations or whether the President has signed this or that international treaty. I don’t wish to break the hearts of the idealistic young Europeans who believe that US voters were primarily signaling their disapproval with Bush’s foreign (mis)adventures, but both exit interviews and common sense suggest that voters were much more interested in signaling their disapproval with their mortgages and their pension plans.

Nonetheless, much of the world, or certainly the bits of the world to which I’ve recently been, believes that Americans elected Obama because we like his foreign policy more than the other guy’s foreign policy, and this belief isn’t a bad thing. There was a strange period in 2003 where members of the Bush administration – I remember Rumsfeld in particular – made the claim (accepted by much of the public) that the US should do “the right thing” no matter the opinion of the rest of the world, and further that it didn’t matter if the rest of the world disliked our actions. Clause Number One is pretty hard to refute; one of the odd-named Mathers, perhaps Cotton or Instance or Liberty, declared the soon-to-be US a “city on a hill” who ought stand for right even if she must stand alone, and I know of no ethical system under which “but everyone else says yes” implies morality.

But Clause Number Two, that this disagreement doesn’t matter, is flabbergasting. You don’t need to be traveling overseas to appreciate the wrongness of the statement, but it doesn’t hurt. It is, needless to say, a great benefit to me when abroad if other people think highly of my country.

Here an example, courtesy of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. In 1946, when the US was at the height of its soft power, the USS Missouri paid a visit to Istanbul. In honor of this visit, the Turks opened all of the city’s brothels for free to Americans: all of the brothels for free! Even if they don’t bring about the imposition of discount Red Light Districts, changes in US foreign policy under Obama seem certain to improve the standing of the nation nearly everywhere.

But, and there’s always a but, what am I to think of the people of Tirana, Albania, who have named their main boulevard George W. Bush Street? What of the Syrian English student I met in Aleppo who, despite the obvious presence of Mukhabarat – Arabic for “snitch”, incidentally - in that country, told me how much he hated his President and how much he liked the US leaders? What of the Kurds who, having freed their Iraqi contingent from Saddam’s reign, often gave me free meals when I encountered them throughout the Middle East? And how about this story: a Turk in Istanbul told me he visited Tehran right at the start of the Iraq War in 2003. A group of Iranian student friends he was talking to that evening told him, much to his surprise, that they hoped the US would come to Iran next and kick out the ayatollahs.

Remember the brothels in Istanbul? They weren’t opened in 1946 because the Istanbullus respected America’s isolationist stance during the Second World War.

I worry that the US might, after an Iraq War that has been disastrous in hindsight, neglect its role as the world’s defender of individual rights from tyrannical governments. It seems obvious that, aside from a few cases where countries have strong post-colonial relationships (e.g., France in West Africa), the US is the only major power willing to act to halt civil wars and ruthless dictators. It seems obvious, if one looks at death tolls, that the American failure to dampen, in concert with our allies, the civil conflicts in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur is a much greater failure than our mistake in Iraq.

To the extent that Europe and Japan and Russia and China were too respecting of the “national sovereignty” argument for ignoring civil wars and internal repression, the last eight years have only shifted those countries further away from acting on that great burden of great powers. I hope that Americans don’t forget that World War II and our later defenses (of varying magnitudes) against tyranny in Eastern Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Liberia, and many others are the greatest hours in our nation’s history, the foreign policy equivalent of the American Dream, built upon the belief that every individual deserves life and liberty and the chance to improve themselves. Only when we retreat into isolationism, a choice available to America alone, will America’s strength disappear.

I have high hopes for our new president, but also worry that Americans will forget what causes our country to be hated, and what causes it to be loved.

New images from Montenegro through to Eastern Turkey uploaded:

Two new stories coming soon - the internet speed is very bad here in the Middle East, so I’m a bit behind, I’m afraid.

1.

From the 1^st Century AD, the center of the Christian world was Rome, home of Peter and the Popes. With the decline of the Western Roman Empire around the time of Constantine, though, the Council of Chalcedon established a church hierarchy with local metropolitan powers, or Patriarchates, in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. Over the next seven centuries, the decline of Christendom in the Middle East and the shift of power in Europe from Rome to Byzantine left only two powerful Patriarchates, those astride the Bosporus and the Tiber.

A number of minor liturgical differences between the two Patriarchates emerged during the Middle Ages, most famously the Latin addition of the Filioque – does the Son proceed from the Father or not? - into the Nicene Creed. These differences led to a Schism between the Eastern, or Orthodox, Church and the Western, or Catholic, Church. Though this Schism is traditionally dated to 1054, modern scholars generally see the split as having occurred over a period of centuries after that date, with relations growing most acrimonious after the sacking of Constantinople by Catholic Crusaders in the 13^th century. The dividing line between the two churches crossed somewhere through the Balkans, with modern Slovenia and Croatia traditionally being Catholic areas, and Greece and Serbia lying in the Orthodox axis.

And if two religions, peoples, empires were not enough, there was Gazi Osman, Gazi the Bone Breaker. In the disarray following the 13^th century Mongol Invasion, Gazi’s modest Turkic state was able to expand across Western Anatolia and, within 150 years, to topple the last remnants of Byzantine rule. This new empire, the Ottomans, swept through Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans during the 15^th and 16^th centuries, and was knocking on the gates of Vienna in 1683 before the Habsburgs finally repulsed the siege.

With the Orthodox church secure in Slavic Russia, the Catholics in control of Italy and Spain, and the Muslims ensconced in modern Turkey, the Balkan region in between swayed mercilessly among the three. The decline of Ottoman power, the rise of independent Greece, the two World Wars, population movement in Titoist Yugoslavia and the two Balkan Wars of the 1990s all shifted the final boundary of these three great Civilizations.

But there is now, as there must long have been, a single point where all three Civilizations meet, a Corner among corners, where one can walk through Papism, Orthodoxy and Muhammadanism in a single day, a corner which arguably is located on a dusty road just west of Trebinje, Bosnia, a point which should be visited if one wishes to witness a Samuelsonian Clash of Civilizations, a dark premonition of where the greater world ought not travel.

And so visit that point is what we set out to do.

2.

Along Croatia’s Adriatic coastline, the Dinaric Alps rise sharply, forming the nation’s renowned islands but also hiding any countryside more than a few kilometers from the sea. This is particularly the case in Dubrovnik, the Southern Croatian city whose walled Old Town is Croatia’s most popular tourism site. These mountains conceal the region’s history from today’s day trippers and cruise shippers.

Above Dubrovnik’s Old Town lies the main Croatian coastal highway. Four kilometers beyond this road, across two small mountains, lies a lonely border border post, the edge of Bosnia. Ten kilometers from this post lies a sign welcoming, in Cyrillic, the visitor to Republika Srpska, on which more will be said later, noting for pronunciation’s sake that the “r” in Serbo-Croatian is often used as a sort of vowel, similar to the English “er”. A further fifteen kilometers from the Srpska border lies the Bosnian Serb town of Trebinje.

Along this road is a stretch of twenty-five kilometers with no sign of human habitation. Oh, there are bombed out buildings, of that there is no doubt. And on either side of the road signs warning MINE, pronounced Mee-nay in Serbo-Croatian but with a meaning that requires no translation. And fences that look modern enough, but with no livestock enclosed.

Only a few hours’ walk from the cruise ships and the Waffle breakfasts and the International Herald Tribunes lies a wasteland. It was as if, only thirteen years ago, war had been waged.

3.

So, Kevin, what are you up to today.

Well, it’s early, and the sun is shining, so I think I’ll walk over to Bosnia.

See, I told he was crazy, replies the Chorus. Trebinje, it is too far, and they are Serbs. Bad People, intones our Croat Host. And isn’t it a nice day just to visit the beach?

Breakfast empties until only two of us remain. Are you really going to walk over to Bosnia? Mmm. But how far is it? Ah, that’s doable. Mmm. Yeah, OK, I’ll come, can you wait twenty minutes? Mmm. She returns, having recruited a second girl. Our troop – perhaps the proper word given the route – tallies up as myself, Kiwi Girl and Australian Girl. Kiwi Girl is traveling with three friends, though not the adventurous type. We tell the friends, jokingly, perhaps, to call the embassy if we’ve not returned by nightfall.

I’ll admit I’m a bit skeptical of their fortitude. Trebinje is five hours away, on an unfriendly mountain road, the exact nature of which is a complete mystery. Nonetheless, I’m excited for the company; it is rare indeed to find new friends whose definition of a fun day so parallels my own. In any case, onward, and backward into history.

4.

In 1991, the Yugoslav – meaning Southern Slav – Confederation of Slovenes, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs began to disintegrate. First was wealthy, already semi-autonomous, quite peripheral Slovenia. They were lucky to escape with only a ten day war against Belgrade because Franco Tudjman and his Croat Nationalist Party declared independence soon after Slovenia. Unlike Slovenia, Croatia held a large Serb minority, nominally protected by Belgrade, and this Serb minority likewise declared independence from their new Croat master. As fighting began between Serb irregulars and the new Croatian state, the Milosevic regime intervened militarily. The Serbian consciousness is, rightfully, wary of Croat nationalism, as a great number of Serbs were slaughtered in Croatia the last time that entity had declared independence, under the Nazi-supporting Ante Pavelic during World War II.

Just east of Croatia, a combined Muslim-Croat government declared independence in Bosnia, a region which also holds a large Serb minority. In 1992, these Bosnian Serbs, with explicit help from Belgrade, set up a second Bosnian capital and began a sequence of ethnic cleansing of their own, intending to establish a de facto Serb majority area in Northern and Eastern Bosnia. By 1995, the war was even more convoluted, with Belgrade and Zagreb having secretly agreed to divide Bosnia among the Croats and Serbs – leaving the Muslims out in the cold – while the Bosnian Serb irregulars continued to, in the words of Richard Holbrooke, “rain artillery and racist rhetoric down upon the Muslims and Croats from their mountain capital of Pale.” Among other positions, the Bosnian Serbs controlled the mountain road from Dubrovnik to Trebinje, an area which they filled with land mines. To the shock of historians, the irregulars shelled the Old City of Dubrovnik quite heavily, despite the site being of essentially no military importance.

The Bosnian War indeed attracted the type of people who desired nothing more than that Clash of Civilizations which has threatened since the Great Schism. On the Catholic Croatian side, a number of Neo-nazis and mob figures arrived from across Europe. The Orthodox Serb irregulars drew in their own bunch of Greek and Russian outcasts and criminals. Perhaps most famously, the Muslim Bosniaks attracted Mujahideen, representing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and al-Qaeda, among others, from across the Islamic World.

In September 1995, NATO, driven by the United States, bombed Bosnian Serb positions for two weeks, forcing Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. Clinton’s Dayton Agreement split Bosnia into two semi-autonomous regions, the Muslim/Croat Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska containing 49% of the country. Though a series of moderate politicians on both sides have led to ebbing passions within Bosnia itself, tensions are still such that it is still almost unheard of for Croats to visit Srpska or Bosnian Serbs to visit Croatia.

5.

As noted, we did not know the nature of the road to Trebinje. Croats we asked for directions responded in the following ways. The first simply drove off. The second said, no, you cannot go there, and then drove off. The third looked up at the hills along the border, and warned that we ought not cross because it was still filled with land mines. The fourth pointed toward the one and only road across the border, but nonetheless expressed his dislike for Serbs.

The border crossing was empty when we arrived – we had to knock on the window in order to get a guard out to process our paperwork. The two guards, as it happens, were engrossed in a subtitled episode of Beverly Hills 90210. This is the second time I’ve witnessed a developing-world border guard engrossed by decade-old American television – at the South Africa-Lesotho post a couple years ago, the staff were caught up in a tense battle between Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

So Bosnia reached, confirming that the best way to cross borders is by foot. There’s something reminiscent of the time when crossing a border meant, at most, presenting a letter from your Home Office to the first soldier you came across. Passports still contain a bit of this language; open yours up and take a look at the request the government is supposedly making in your name for passage “without delay or hindrance” and with whatever aid and assistance may be required.

We saw the land mine warnings soon after, and they started popping up with alarming frequency. Luckily there was very little traffic, because all three of us began – unconsciously? - walking closer to the center of the asphalt!

The air was still, and silent, and the landscape was beautiful in all but one way. There were essentially no cars, no factories, no buildings, no farms, no walls, but rather just one road, winding its way around hill after hill. In late September, the foliage was beginning to turn on distant peaks, with blue sky touching orange and crimson. But at our altitude, there were few trees, and none of any size, none of more than a decade’s growth: nature’s reminder of the war.

We passed the occasional bombed-out building, or collection of buildings. An old village, perhaps? Were these stones part of a farmhouse wall? We took pictures of one of the bigger ruins – this seems the right word – but hid the cameras when a car was heard in the distance. These buildings may have been abandoned since World War II, for all that we knew, but if they did represent those Latest Troubles, better not to arouse any suspicion that we’d come to see these sites as tourists, mentally or aesthetically profiting on recent suffering.

Midway to Trebinje, the sun fled, its brightness made refugee by dark clouds, and rain began to fall, gently at first, but growing stronger at an almost imperceptible gradient. We were no longer in idle conversation, walking astride, but rather trudging single file along the shoulder. Three kilometers from our destination, a very old, very dirty pickup pulled over, and waved us in. There were already five people in the small truck, and all but the driver somehow squeezed in to the back row. The two girls sardined themselves into the passenger seat, and I stood crouching in that spot just behind the shifter.

This was a gruff group of guys. I’m lucky that English already has a single word to describe their condition: ruddy. They all had faces smeared with a grime that indicates a full day’s work in the kind of factory one expects to find in the ex-Communist world. The odor of cigarettes was permanently attached, I imagine, not just to every surface of the truck interior, but to all five of the men themselves. But no matter, the cabin was warm and dry, and luckily, having just spent a couple weeks of miserable attempts at speaking the local language, I could understand enough to answer questions like “Where are you going to?” while also knowing too little to answer “And why, Intruder from the West, did Your President, and by implication You, bomb my Bosnian Serb Brothers who only wished to Protect The Homeland from the Devious Croats and Terrorist Bosnians?” Our makeshift taxi drivers were, in reality, quite friendly – in the jolly lumberjack sense of the word – but I like to imagine that the preceding was what was really on their mind.

We sat down in the first cafe we came across, on the outskirts of Trebinje. Everyone in the place stopped talking and looked over at us. I suppose they don’t get too many tourists in these parts. After ten minutes, a young man in his mid-thirties finally came and talked to us, in shaky but passable English. I don’t remember his name – those Serb names are quite tricky – so let’s call him Radovan, after the head of the Bosnian Serb militia during the war.

Radovan had, in fact, fought in the war. As a kid, he often went to Dubrovnik; it’s only twenty-five kilometers away, after all. But he’s not been there since the problems with the Croats began in the late 80s. Bad People, intones our Serbian host. We began walking with Radovan to the historic town center. The Croats, they are bad – he and Croatia are not on speaking terms, but should he and Croatia come across each other at a luncheon in, say, Las Vegas, they would merely walk past each other with eyes cast aside rather than begin to fight right then and there – but the Muslims! The Muslims! You know what they’re like? He makes a slitting motion with his finger. In English, I don’t know, but here, they…the slitting motion again. We still don’t understand. Like in Iraq, he says, but to us Serbs. Like al-Qaeda. He adds more pantomime. Ah, got it. The Bosniak irregulars had a thing, a passion if you like, for decapitating the Serbs they captured. Yes, he says, like to my Uncle.

How are you supposed to respond to that revelation?

Sir, I understand your frustration, but the typical Muhammedan is a perfect decent and moral being, whereas your expansion of a limited, though tragic, experience to a condemnation of an entire group is, in point of fact, bigotry, and is contrary to the values of individual agency and justice which stand at the basis of classical liberal thought.

But instead I just nodded. I am sure that one of us - perhaps it was me – said “Oh.”

We stop to watch a historic drama that is being filmed for the Serbian theaters. The setting is the 18^th century, when presumably the Corner, the Point, the Clash was located somewhere else, when the Croats and Serbs and Muslims all lived in relative peace in what was then a quiet small-c corner of the Austrian Empire. In between takes, Radovan is discussing, in even more broken English, what appears to be a dossier of Croats and Muslims that he and his friends fought against, and presumably killed, during the war. Now that’s not a story you’re going to be told if you spend the day lazing on some Dubrovnik beach.

EPILOGUE

The return home was a good time, so some words should be spent on it. With dusk arriving, we took a taxi to a kilometer from the Croatia border, still eight kilometers from Dubrovnik. It was getting chilly, and Australian Girl suggested we jog for a bit. We did so, until Kiwi Girl pointed out that, given that we’re in sight of the border post, it might not be a good idea to be seen running full speed toward the border between two countries that fought recently enough for land mines to remain uncleared. We slowed to a walk.

The Bosnian guards, though, were the same lazy, happy-go-lucky guys we’d seen earlier in the day. There were five hundred meters of no man’s land before the Croatian border, and since the Bosnians now knew who we were, we figured future stories would be better if we literally ran from the border as soon as they gave us our passports. And so we did, and I note it here. I can tell you that running from a border at dusk is quite a bit of fun.

Once back in Croatia, night had officially fallen. The problem is that the two roads we needed to take to get back to our hotel were both cut into a cliff, and therefore had very small shoulders, by which I mean no shoulder whatsoever. Whenever a car was seen to be coming – we rotated who was on “headlight lookout” - we all scrambled onto the twelve inches of scrabble above the curb, flattening ourselves against the cliff wall. During my shift, I liked giving the girls a jump by waiting until the cars were only two or three seconds away before yelling “CAR IN TWO!” On some occasions, you only had two or three seconds whether your wanted more or not, since drivers in the Balkans are absolutely nuts, and think nothing of passing at sixty on the blind corner of a mountain road.

Halfway home, Australian Girl mentioned that she now knew what the von Trapp family felt like as they fled the Nazis.

EPILOGUE TWO

Don’t worry, we made it home without a problem, though Kiwi Girl’s unadventurous friends were not amused when we strolled in well past ten, having stopped for dinner. Australian Girl mentioned the next morning that I’d made a good guide. I countered that “my guests compared the trip to the von Trapp family fleeing the Nazis” might not be what I’d want to put on my Abercrombie & Kent application cover letter.

(I’ve gotten a lot of email about the financial crisis back home, so I’ll take a quick break to write up what’s going on, as far as I see it, in layman’s terms. It strikes me that a lot of the newspaper stories about the crisis and the bailout have been ridiculously wrong. New actual travel story to be posted shortly…)

1.
Here’s a completely true personal story. In Massachusetts, they once did, and may still, offer a daily four-number lottery. You buy a ticket for a dollar, picking your four numbers (each from 1 to 9), and the next morning every paper in the Commonwealth reports the results and the payoffs. It looks something like this:

PICK FOUR, June 29, 1996
2 – 2 – 4 – 1
Four: $2123
Three: $84
Two: $5
One: $1

I was a precocious kid when it came to the arithmetic. I could divide by age three, knew how to take square roots by kindergarten, and used to run through those page-long sets of times tables before the teacher finished passing them out. Now mathematicians generally see arithmetic merely a simple and basic computational tool, whereas real math involves series of propositions, syllogisms, transformations, equivalences, distributions. Many people, on the other hand, are very bad at arithmetic; everyone has seen the kid at the cash register who needs a calculator to know the change from $2 on a $1.62 bill.

Because many people are bad at arithmetic, precocity in that area is different from, say, a prodigious vocabulary. A mop-haired young man who peppers his speech with ten-dollar words that his friends don’t understand comes across as a pompous jerk. But quickly computing big numbers - let’s call them ten-dollar equations – is instead a source of awe. Mathematics is either right, or it is wrong, and those who know it right are modern Delphic oracles whose proclamations on all related subjects are trusted.

Even when the logic is completely wrong.

But back to the lotto. There are 9^4, or 6,561 possible four digit numbers if you disallow numbers that contain a zero. One of those is a string of repeated ones, “1-1-1-1”. It turns out that there are thirty-two potential winning numbers having exactly three “1”s, three hundred and eighty four containing exactly two “1”s, and two thousand and forty eight containing exactly one “1”. Given the payoff table above, buying “1-1-1-1” will return $2123 every 6,561 days, on average, $84 roughly every two hundred and five days, $8 every seventeen days, and $1 every third day.

Consider a strategy whereby every day, gamblers – let’s call them traders – buy nine tickets with the numbers “1-1-1-1”, “2-2-2-2”, “3-3-3-3” and so on. Every possible single, double, triple and quadruple is now covered. Nine times out of 6,561, the trader will hit it big, winning $2123 on a $9 bet. Two hundred and eighty eight – that is, thirty two times nine – times out of 6,561, the trader will win $84 plus $1 on the same bet, winning one triple and one single. 3,024 times out of 6,561, the trader will hit a double and two singles, winning $7, while 216 times out of 6,561, the trader will hit two doubles, winning $10. Finally, on 3,024 occasions, the trader will have four singles, winning $4. Multiplying each probability times its payoff gives an expected value on any given day of just under twelve dollars on a bet of nine dollars.

Now this is a bit strange – lotteries typically have an expected value smaller than the cost of the bet. Indeed, they would not make money were this not the case. But every day, the payoffs reported in the morning paper suggested that, in essence, the state was giving away free money. Simply buy the recommended nine tickets, and over time, increase your money by twenty-five percent per day.

When I was perhaps eleven years old, I pointed out this fortunate coincidence, and some relatives promptly went out and bought stacks of lotto tickets on the basis of these calculations. They were disappointed the next day to learn that, though the math was perfectly correct, the lotto worked in a completely different way from that supposed above. In fact, a bet was on either a quadruple, or a triple, or doubles, or singles, not on all at the same time. Recalculating the payoff under these rules gives an expected payoff of less than one on a bet of one dollar, and order is restored again to the world.

You should understand just how crazy the decision to buy the stacks of lotto tickets was. Why would anyone risk hard-earned money on the computations of a kid whose total understanding of how the system worked was based on four lines of a payoff table shuttled in between “Family Circus” and “Calvin and Hobbes”? Not only that! The decision is even crazier when you realize that these computations – really nothing more than the type of math than millions of people can do in their heads – was suggesting a fatal flaw in the entire state lottery system which somehow had gone unnoticed by everybody else!

If you understand the psychology behind the unfortunate relatives’ decision, if you can see how mathematics and hubris can occasionally bludgeon common sense, then you are one step closer to understanding the financial mess we find ourselves in.

2.
Let’s discuss how the world of finance works. In the distant past, there were only banks. These banks took your money – deposits – paying a low interest rate for the privilege. They then lent out the money to firms or potential homeowners or whomever at a higher interest rate. The higher rate was, on the one hand, justified by the fact that the borrower might default, or not pay back the loan. But once losses from default are accounted for, the rest of the vigorish makes up a bank’s profits.

Banks, of course, are obligated to give their depositors back their money on demand. For this reason, they only lend out a portion of their deposits – ninety-six percent, for instance – holding four percent in case depositors show up asking for money. A run on the bank occurs when a great number of depositors all request their money at once, perhaps out of fear that the bank will go out of business; the classic example on film is at the Savings & Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life. Since a bank run will cause a bank to run of funds to lend, the run can cause bank failure to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. in the 19th and early 20th century, bank runs were a serious and common problem, and often a cause of deep recessions like the one that struck in 1907.

And it’s worse. Even if a run doesn’t occur, the possibility that depositors will begin asking for more of their money that they used to – for instance, if they need to draw down their savings because they fear future hard economic times – will cause a bank to stop issuing as many loans in order to have more reserves on hand. This so-called tightening of credit harms a number of non-financial businesses who use credit to purchase inventory or invest in new factories.

We know how to solve both of these problems. In this first case, the federal government guarantees bank deposits through the FDIC. Though deposit insurance causes other problems – it makes banks more likely to take risky behavior – it essentially means that modern bank runs don’t exist. In the second case, a central bank like the Federal Reserve can “flood the market with dollars”, or increase the money supply such that liquidity for loans once again improves. This is essentially what happens when the Fed, in the parlance of the press, “cuts interest rates.”

And these techniques have been successful indeed. Since the 1970s, there has been a massive reduction in the variability of unemployment and inflation, called the Great Moderation. There are no longer, one hopes, the types of disastrous recessions that characterized the 19th century.

However, over the past two decades in particular, a so-called “shadow banking” system has emerged, centered on investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. First, many firms, particularly large firms, have begun to finance themselves by auctioning off short-term loans called Commercial Paper rather than by taking loans from a bank. Second, banks themselves have begun securitizing their own loans, or packaging similar loans together and selling them to investors. Both of these things are sensible in practice. If a small town bank is the only lender to the Town Factory, or the only holder of mortgage loans in the Factory Town, then an economic problem at the factory is likely to bring down the bank as well. Securitization allows local risks to be spread out across investors from all over the economy.

Further, a number of so-called derivatives can be used to reduce risk – by spreading it across many investors and firms - even more. For instance, an investment bank can sell the local bank a guarantee, a Default Swap, that the factory won’t default on its loans. If the investment bank has sold contracts like this for many firms whose odds of default are uncorrelated, then the risk to both the investment bank itself and to the Factory Town bank is limited. Note that these derivatives are often simply contracts between two companies, and therefore the involvement of any one company in the derivatives market is not necessarily easy to parse.

So what happened to bring this sensible system to a crashing halt?

3.
In real terms, the value of housing in the United States doubled from 2000 to 2006. The US was not alone in its housing bubble; it was even worse in much of Europe. Historically, the median house price has tended to be simply a multiple of the median household income. For the same reason that the unfortunate relatives believed that the lotto system could be beaten, many people believed that the house price-income rule would not hold in that future, and that therefore enormous profits could be had from housing investment.

This turns out to be wrong. Housing has fallen nearly twenty-five percent in real terms, and looks to have quite a bit further to fall before hitting returning to its historical norm. As housing prices fall, default rates go up, particularly among subprime borrowers who held very little equity in their houses due to low, or even zero, down payments. If you owe $200,000 on a house worth $180,000, the sensible thing to do is to send the keys back to your bank and go back to being a renter.

For the investors that owned your mortgage – remember, the banks had securitized the mortgages and sold them off – this means that the value of the mortgage package has fallen since many of them will not be repaid. In order to cover their losses, investment banks began lending less money and buying fewer assets such as commercial paper. That is, the “shadow banking” system had a liquidity crisis.

Late last year, this had become clear to policymakers, and the proper policy response was also clear – increase liquidity to investment banks in the same way that liquidity is increased to standard banks in the traditional model. This was done, and the markets were calmed. Wall Street gave out record bonuses in 2007, and the stock market seemed to be soaring. But the calm was only brief.

The critical thing to note is that liquidity is useful when a belief about future poor economic performance causes banks to pull back lending in order to cover potential future losses. The drop in housing values was not causing potential losses. It was causing actual losses. The investment banks were not worried about losing money, but rather they were actually losing money. And enormous sums at that. But the failure of a financial institution should just mean that the shareholders of that firm are wiped out, and nothing more, right?

Not right. Beyond a liquidity crisis, we now have a confidence crisis as well. Remember how a bank run works. In the days before deposit insurance, if people fear that a bank may fail, they all rush in to withdraw their money, which actually does cause the bank to fail. Likewise, if Goldman and Morgan fear that Bear Stearns will fail, they stop doing deals – serving as the counterparty – with Bear, and the lack of short-term loans and lending actually will cause Bear to fail. There is no equivalent to deposit insurance in this case.

At first, the confidence crisis only affected firms like Bear and Lehman whose balance sheets were known to be filled with mortgage securities known to be worth very little. But remember the default swaps. If Bear is in trouble, and Goldman has sold default swaps to Bear’s counterparties, then Bear’s problems are now Goldman’s problems. And if Morgan has sold default swaps to Goldman’s counterparties, then Bear’s problems are now Goldman’s problems are now Morgan’s problems as well. In the case of major, “safe” firms such as AIG and Goldman Sachs, where default was essentially considered an impossibility, enormous quantities of default protection were sold very cheaply – it is as if fifty different people had sold fire insurance on your house. Now a fire in your house affects not only you as the owner, but also everyone who sold the insurance. What’s worse, since default swaps are just contracts between two firms, and since the value of these and other derivatives are tremendously difficult to compute, the major financial firms are all quite unsure who is in trouble and who is not. Therefore, lending between them has frozen up. Therefore, lending between financial firms and firms in the non-financial sector – the Factories and Offices and State Governments of the world – has frozen up. Since no one knows who is in trouble for liquidity reasons, and who is in trouble because their balance sheet is now filled with worthless assets, simply increasing liquidity by cutting rates at the Federal Reserve – the Fed Funds rate – is not working.

This should have been foreseeable. But the calculations used by the mathematician types who wrote the original derivative contracts were flawed – the assumption about the probability of a major, quick drop in housing values was too low. The math was correct, but the rules of the lottery were poorly understood.

4.
What can be done, then? First, realize that the derivatives owned by the major financial companies still have some underlying value, even if the market for these derivatives is essentially not functioning right now. There are two plans being bandied about by government, both included in the supposed $700 billion bailout.

First, the government could simply buy all the “troubled assets”. If financial firms are sure that other firms don’t have any hard-to-calculate assets on their balance sheets, they will begin to lend to each other again, and thus begin lending to the broader economy as well. Over the next year, finance types would begin to untangle what the true underlying values of the troubled assets are, and the government could resell these assets. If the government is smart about how much they pay for these assets, then, they presumably will make a profit and taxpayer will have paid nothing for the “bailout”.

A second related plan, considered better by some economists, is that the US government should take an equity share in the investment banks who they help. Therefore, if the economy improves rapidly, the government will share in the upside, and again, taxpayers will make money, not lose money. This is what Sweden did in the early 1990s when they suffered a major financial crisis.

Will either plan work? Both seem reasonable if you believe we know the reasons for the current crisis. And the main actors in this financial drama - Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, Treasury Head Hank Paulson, ECB Chief Jean-Claude Trichet – are generally considered very competent and disinterested parties. I see - and be wary of predictions from economists – very little risk of a Great Depression Redux. Indeed, by a standard measure called the price-to-earnings ratio, stocks look incredibly cheap right now. Market turbulence need not be bad for you, personally.

The danger so evident now is not a result of mathematics – indeed, very smart quants like Nassim Taleb, author of the now-indispensable “The Black Swan” that you really ought read, have been promoting the idea that Wall Street underestimates the probability of rare and disastrous events for many years. What’s critical in the future is to ensure that banks and investors get the assumptions in the models right, and the incentives for their traders right. Firms are likely to do this even without any government intervention. For all the talk of Wall Street bailouts, the shareholders of Bear Stearns were essentially wiped out. As were the shareholders of Lehman. And shareholders of Washington Mutual. Surely, self-interested shareholders will have much more incentive to exact a skeptical eye on mathematical machinations than some future Washington bureaucrat.

(Certainly ask whatever questions you have in the comments – I may, or should say likely, will not know the answer, but perhaps I can point you in the right direction to research it yourself.)

Update under “Images” with Italy, Slovenia and Croatia pictures. Also, Reading and Finances have been updated under “Details.”

And strangest moment of the trip so far: I was in Kosovo, as people are these days, and therefore decided to go out for Mexican food, as people do in these situations. Well, actually, I had an excuse: the capital of Kosovo is filled with foreign aid workers and military, meaning good foreign food, and all the local restaurants were closed for a major Muslim holiday. In any case, I was the only one eating, but a two-man mariachi band had been hired for the night, and it seemed a shame not to use them. They were both older gents, dressed in stereotypical Mexican peasant garb down to the woolen blanket over the shoulders. Something was amiss when they starting playing (quite well) and singing (quite well also), as the Spanish was nearly incomprehensible. What part of Mexico could these guys be from to have such a terrible accent?

The Albanian part. They’d never even been to Mexico.

When I told them after their song that I was American - Muslim Kosovars love America so much that they have a 30 foot tall portrait of Bill Clinton staring down at you as you enter the capital - they broke into an equally accented version of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday.”

The Mexican food was decent, however.

Medieval artists loved the triptych, a painting of related scenes done on three connected panels. The Papal State, one imagines, must have felt that if the Common People did not see threes everywhere, they might begin to forget about the Holy Ghost, whose part in the religion is quite important for Papal legitimacy but lacks the drama of “Let there be light” and “He rose again”. A more mundane reason for the popularity of the triptych may have been that some scenes may not have been substantial enough to carry an entire canvas, whereas three small, related scenes could fill a Medici hallway or Venetian parlor quite nicely. And likewise, perhaps you’ll accept these three loosely related stories as bound in an illusory wooden frame, and composing a greater whole.

THE FIRST
Constructed at the end of the 1st century AD, the Roman Colosseum was, at its time, the most impressive stadium in the world, and home to what remains the most interesting sports ever held inside such a building. This is not a light claim – man has been inventing bizarre competitions since pre-history. The Aztecs played a game similar to basketball that appears to have involved death by sacrifice for the winner. The Afghans still play a form of polo where the ball, if it can be called that, is the severed head of a goat. But the Romans, usurpers of the intellectual legacy of Athens and Syracuse, structured their games to answer questions at the forefront of the leading male minds both in their day and in ours. For instance, would it be possible for a lightly armed slave recovered from a far-flung province particularly adept at fighting – Scythia, perhaps – to defeat a hippopotamus in combat? Or could - and since Through the Emperor, All Things are Possible, this need not be strictly hypothetical – a group of four young men, unarmed, conquer two panthers, a crocodile, and a lion? Depending on their prowess, a gladiator exited after the fight through one of two gates, Sanivivaria for the living, and Libitina for the dead.

And the crumbling facade of this stadium is still standing, in the center of a Roman rotary, on the day I walk down to the front ticket gate. A police motorcycle – wheeee-oooooo – flies past, followed by another half dozen Roman police cars. They skid to a quick stop a dozen yards in front of me. Within thirty seconds, the formerly pedestrianized area is filled with thirty or forty police cars, motorcycles, and unmarked black sedans with burly, earpiece-wearing, security types.

“Scusi,” Italian cop number one says. “Scusi, back please, back please.” A tunnel is cut between the crowd, leaving me in the front row. An entourage steps out of the leading two sedans, and the Italians begin to chatter inquisitively.

“Madonna?” one suggests. She is in town for a concert tonight. “Ah, Madonna!” Heads crane, but the mysterious guests look a bit older.

The entourage passes a few yards in front of me. In the center, a bald, portly, elderly man with a distinctive scowl.

“Madonna?” an Italian asks the cop in front of us. “No-a, Vee-che Presidente di Stati Uniti.” Dick Cheney, indeed, making a rare public appearance.

I wait outside the Colosseum with an Australian couple, hoping to catch the reverse exodus when Cheney leaves. They ask whether the security is Italian, or whether we bring our own. I tell them that we even bring our own security cars in the hold of the official planes.

Cheney exits a half hour later, his leave announced by the rapid, quick-braking return of The Security. A new group of Italians form a crowd. One asks me, “Madonna?” I forget to check whether the Italians led him out through Libitina or Sanivivaria.

THE SECOND
The Venice Biannale, a months-long festival of architecture and design, comes to the City of Canals every two years, bringing with it sold out hotels and a proliferation of skinny jeans, obscure architectural philosophy and international rich and famous hoping to maintain their culture credibility. I’m a sucker for crazy contemporary design, but the Biannale wasn’t due to open to the public until three days after I’d planned to leave Venice.

However, my final day in Venice was opening day for press and VIPs. It turns out that a young guy walking around near the fair venue wearing a screen-printed T and running kicks, while carrying a book-filled over-the-shoulder tote bag, appears to the careless eye as a slovenly, graphic design type. Though the venue itself had an ID check, people outside the entrance itself kept giving me guides and program listings and Official Statements. This gave me an idea.

Late in the afternoon, a tremendous storm brewed. The sky behind the city, viewed from the Adriatic, was almost black, while over the sea it was still blue and sunny. Though it only lasted an hour, the rains that eventually arrived dropped the temperature thirty degrees – it had been in the nineties – and came with building-shaking thunder. I sought respite in a building that happened to be housing the Singapore Pavilion from the Biannale. It was fairly crowded, and no one was checking the official IDs as they ran around securing the displays still outside. A staffer brought me a beer and a program. I dropped some design lingo and tried to carry my shoulder bag confidently. This confirmed my earlier idea.

That night, in many of the old, prosperous villas of the city, opening night receptions were being thrown by the various nations’ representatives. I had replaced my own bag with an official canvas tote from the Singapore display, and had ruffled my hair to give a suitably artistic look. Down a side alley – though nearly every street in Venice is a side alley – was the Irish reception. I walked in. The waiters brought over drinks and hors d’oeuvre. The art wasn’t good, but nonetheless, event successfully infiltrated.

At the France exhibition, the curator made sure to ask whether I’d sampled the champagne. Why, indeed, I had not. No problem, sir, it’s in the next room and feel free to have as much as you’d like. The Luxembourg reception wasn’t too far away, and I’m sure you, gentle reader, are now thinking, but Kevin, you didn’t have the gall to snack on the caviar pate which was so generously brought to you by a white-gloved waiter. Well, I say that I did have the gall, and a fine caviar it was. Outside a villa hosting the Italian reception – and by this point I had such a suitable collection of Official Exhibition Books to have no fear of being called out as an impostor – a young lady representing a Spanish architecture magazine mentioned that their commissioned yacht would be having an open-bar event that night, and here is a ticket if you’d like to go. And this boat, it turns out, had subwoofers of an appropriate size as to sway the deck from side to side even though the waters of the Venetian Lagoon are placid.

At that point, with an early train the next morning, I called it a night. Next time, I’ll be better prepared, however. A pair of low-slung Pumas, some black glasses with square frames, and perhaps a T-shirt making an ironic typography joke – with that, I might have even snuck into the main event itself.

THE THIRD
Slovenia, the richest part of the ex-communist world both then and now, is a small country of nearly two million lying between Italy, Croatia, Hungary and Austria. No one has heard of it, and half of those that have are confusing the country with nearby Slovakia or the Croatian region of Slavonia. This is unfortunate – Slovenia may be the most pleasant nation in Europe.

I arrived in the country by walking across the border – such that there is one in the new EU – to a small train station in the town of Nova Gorica. The scene was suitably Eastern European. An old, steam-driven, Pullmanesque locomotive was rolling away, the station itself was empty and dark, and only a couple of people, smoking and dressed in drab clothing, were waiting on the platform for a train to the mountain town of Bled. A storm had come in the night before, pushing the temperature down from 90 to near 60, and my train – only two cars long – arrived an hour before dusk.

From Nova Gorica to Bled is a three hour journey passing through nothing larger than a small village. The rail generally follows the arc of the Soca River, a glacier-fed river that, for near its whole length, is an impossibly turquoise color. This corner of Slovenia contains the foothills of the Julian Alps, rising to nearly 10000 feet at the top of Mt Triglav, and every village was therefore backed by steep, completely green mountains.

An hour after dark, with a good rain falling, and a good mist shrouding, and a good cold biting, I arrived at Bled station, in a barren hinterland a few kilometers from the main town. Bled town lies at the bottom of a verdant valley, and surrounds a small lake guarded from above by a 1000 year-old castle. During Marshal Tito’s reign, it was the most popular meeting spot for foreign dignitaries. On arrival, however, I knew nothing of the lay of the land, but rather was simply following equally trudging locals through the dark and rain to the only set of lights we could see off in the distance.

I’ve thought before that traveling in the pre-automobile era would have been particularly nice, with warm taverns and caravanserai located at intervals less than a day’s walk, and warm drinks – perhaps a blueberry liqueur – served to arriving pilgrims before they were sent up to a comfortable bed one floor above the bar. The first open building I passed on the way to Bled turned out to be just such a place, with cheap but pleasant beds for rent on the top floor, and cheap but pleasant drinks for sale on the bottom, and indeed, among the local specialties was blueberry liqueur. Walking thirty minutes through the rain to a warm and hospitable inn strikes me as a much more satisfying arrival than taxiing to a hotel in a city center.

And neither did the rest of the country disappoint. In daytime, the area around Bled is nothing but raging rivers through gorges, well-appointed horse farms, and picturesque, walkable villages. The national capital, Ljubljana, is not only fun to pronounce, but is also nothing more than a university town with a car-free center and hip districts like Metelkova, where squatter artists took over a couple blocks of ex-military barracks and instead built dive bars, video installations and a jazz club. And when the interior is too cold, a sliver of the nation caresses the Adriatic, with alley-filled towns like Piran proving that the whole of the Adriatic coast was once ruled from Venice. Not a bad place at all.