This is a fascinating personal look into the interaction between American foreign policy and terrorism. It’s an excerpt from an article titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” by Mohsin Hamid, in the July 22, 2007 edition of the Washington Post.

[U.S. foreign] policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

When my family moved back to Pakistan, I was given a front-row seat from which to observe one such obscure episode. In 1980, Lahore was a sleepy and rather quiet place. Pakistan’s second-largest city was still safe enough for a 9-year-old to hop on his bicycle and ride around unsupervised.

But that was about to change. Soviet troops had recently rolled into Afghanistan, and the U.S. government, concerned about Afghanistan’s proximity to the oil-rich Persian Gulf and eager to avenge the humiliating debacle of the Vietnam War, decided to respond. Building on President Jimmy Carter’s tough line, President Ronald Reagan offered billions of dollars in economic aid and sophisticated weapons to Pakistan’s dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. In exchange, Zia supported the mujaheddin, the Afghan guerrillas waging a modern-day holy war against the Soviet occupation. With the help of the CIA, jihadist training camps sprung up in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Soon Kalashnikov assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore, setting in motion a crime wave that put an end to my days of pedaling unsupervised through the streets.

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This is an interesting post on the honeybee die-off crisis, a.k.a. colony collapse disorder. From Druid Journal:

The Plight of the Honey Bee

Almost everyone is aware by now that honey bees are having a very, very difficult year. Bee colonies are dying all over the United States, imperiling not only the supply of honey, but also crops that depend on the bee for pollination, such as almonds, strawberries, blueberries, apples, watermelons, cranberries, and soybeans. While there are other pollinators out there, the honey bee is the only domesticated pollinator — it is the only pollinator that can be moved from crop to crop as necessary, and the only pollinator that can be depended on to serve crops that are not native to North America. As such it is essential to the large-scale agribusiness of the United States.

The death of a colony is frightful. First, the older adult worker bees begin to disappear, until only the younger ones are left. The workforce grows smaller gradually, becoming too small to care for the bees’ young. The Queen begins appearing outside the hive more frequently than normal. The bees seem reluctant to eat the food provided by the beekeeper.

Within a week or two, all the workers have disappeared entirely. They have gone away, and do not return. There are very few dead bees found near the hive. Food stores are abandoned uneaten. The babies are left growing in their hexagonal chambers, and they quickly die with no adults to feed them.

BUT WHY?

No one knows. There are terrible rumors flying around about cell phone radiation, pesticides and insecticides, parasites, feed from genetically modified crops… Each of these ideas has evidence for and against it.

The Meditation

Back in April, I did a meditation in which an animated crystalline honey bee made a prominent appearance. When I learned more about the troubles they were undergoing, I decided to try and do a meditation on them, to see if I could establish some connection and find out what was going on.

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There’s a lot of energy moving through and around me right now. I wrote about the prospect of dancing in the hurricane before; now I’m in the midst of it. Taiji master Cheng Man-Ching’s admonition to “invest in loss” is very appropriate in this kind of situation. Relax, sink, surrender, follow the flow — and in so doing, discover a greater strength, a surer path to solidity and victory.

Energy, qi, has become a mainstay of my daily life. I don’t need proof of its existence; it flows in and around me constantly.

This dynamic flow is life, moment to moment. It’s what most attracts me about the work that I’m doing. I find that I start to feel dull-witted when I become too mired in the minutiae of which herb does what, too stuck in the analysis of various diagnostic theories. Those things are important, of course; this school’s emphasis on thorough diagnosis is a big reason I came here.

But the heart of the medicine is qi, and that’s an experience that should be experienced as itself, appreciated in its own right rather than reduced to words, concepts, and theories. From that direct experience of life, a deeper understanding and intuitive sense of restoring balance flows.

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In my third month of clinical practice, I find myself beginning to be a bit bored. Chinese medicine can be really engaging and dynamic, but currently there are a lot of restrictions loaded on me, what with scheduling and being supervised, as well as being limited by my own ignorance and lack of access to a broader variety of instructors (always a risk at a small school). There’s a lot more dead time and busywork than there is genuine creative application of my energy, and that tends to stifle my excitement.

Add to that the fact that a lot of times acupuncture treatments don’t provide immediate feedback, either in the form of instant results or some other indication of a positive response. Hopefully that will change for me, as I’ll soon be taking a course on “instant” pain relief and then, later, I begin extracurricular training in Toyohari, a Japanese form of acupuncture that focuses on sensitivity and assessing treatment results in the moment, using the pulse.

The style of acupuncture that is most popular, as practiced by the modern Chinese, has ironically become divorced from the actual, full experience of qi, except in a very peripheral way. Though of course the concept of qi is one of the foundations of Oriental medical theory, the concept of “de qi” or “obtaining the qi” is that, upon needling a point, the patient gets a qi sensation — aching, distention, perhaps electrical. This is as far as we, and I think many acupuncturists, are generally taught to go with the practical experience of qi.

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