What a day! First thing this morning, we had a bomb threat on several buildings in the Education City complex--someone found a typewritten note claiming that there were three bombs each in the senior school, junior school, Cornell, and Texas A&M, and they would all explode before 9 AM. The police evacuated all of the buildings and brought in the bomb squad to conduct a full sweep. We ended up getting the day off, so Khaled, Kendall and I drove out to Abdullah's camel camp. On my previous (first) visit, when Abdullah had helped us find the camel bones, I had promised to come back with my instruments and provide a bit of entertainment for him. It took a bomb threat to get me out there, but hey. I remember having a bomb threat back in high school, but for some reason (maybe the fact that the former president of Chechnya was blown up by a car bomb here in Doha a few weeks ago?) a bomb threat over here in the middle east seems to carry a bit more gravitas.
Before we headed out of town to Abdullah's, though, I had to keep a meeting with our Microsoft support reps (it's easy to forget about meetings after a bomb threat, dontcha know). Since we couldn't meet in the office, they agreed to follow us to Landmark Mall for coffee. As we were leaving Education City, the police were in the process of shutting down the roadway because His Highness the Emir was about to drive through. They block all side roads, exits from parking lots, roundabouts, etcetera, and armed guards are posted at strategic points down the street. It's rather impressive and/or disconcerting, depending on how you look at it. A policeman waved us onto the street just before he blocked our exit--which left us as the only two vehicles on the street, right in front of the gauntlet, apparently travelling the exact route that His Highness was about to cover. We were hurried through the next two roundabouts while traffic from all other directions was blocked, got waved through two red lights, and ended up at Landmark in record time. I wish I had a picture of the looks on the support reps' faces as they emerged from their vehicle. "Wow! What was that all about?" they asked. I replied, "Oh, they do that for me all the time."
Getting to Abdullah's camp takes about an hour...45 minutes on the highway, and about 15 minutes across rolling desert hills, with terrain varying between rock and deep sand. There are some beautiful geologic features, rock and sandstone outcroppings, and one very impressive mesa that's probably one of the highest points in the country. Our GPS unit was in my office, inaccessible due to the bomb threat, so we had to rely on Divine Providence to lead us back to Abdullah's camp. We made it, but unfortunately Abdullah was off visiting in Saudi Arabia--the border is just a few km from his camp--so we spent some time with three of his hired hands: Corban-Ali ("offering of Ali"), a Bengali, Idris ("Enoch"), a Sudanese, and Shams Iddin ("sun of faith"), a Nepalese. I met Corban-Ali last time, and in fact he still had the stuffed camel calf's head that he was working on last time. He started off by giving us a glass of fresh camel milk. Interesting taste. We talked awhile, he gave us some hot sweet tea, we talked awhile longer, and he gave us some karak tea--tea, milk, and sugar, boiled together...one of my favorite Arabic drinks. I had been told by someone else that my first glass of camel's milk would probably make me hurl, but I haven't suffered any such effects. So far, anyway.
The wind was blowing pretty hard when we got out there, and the sand was thick enough in the air that visibility was probably between a quarter and a half mile. Corban-Ali and Idris share an 8x8' tent made of chain-link fence sections covered with tarps and heavy blankets, with a south-facing doorway. The floor is an old piece of carpeting, and each man has a small cot for sleeping and/or sitting. The wind and sand were pretty formidable, but inside the tent it was pretty snug...especially with six of us crammed in there.
Corban-Ali has been in Qatar for ten years, Idris for 18. Shams Iddin seemed to be the youngest of the three, maybe in his late teens or early 20s, and he's been in Qatar for three years. He was a latecomer to our meeting--we saw him appear at a distance, walking toward us out of the sandstorm. He was looking for three lost camels, but he took a break to sit with us. Khaled and Kendall both speak Arabic and English, so I managed to keep up with the conversation, for the most part.
Once I got back to the house (with sand in all my exposed crevices, mind you), the dog was gone. Yes, the dog...some of our friends' kids found a stray dog, a medium-sized retriever mix puppy about 8 months old, in the complex. He was pretty scrawny, covered with fleas, and probably as wormy as the day is long, so of course we took him in. Quarantined in the side patio (we have no yard, it's all brick), we fed him and sprayed him for fleas. He woke me up howling every hour, on the hour, from 4 AM on, two nights in a row. It was annoying, but he was a pretty sweet dog.
I really wanted to keep him, but the fact that we have no yard, coupled with the time constraints that a puppy would entail, convinced me that it would be better to turn him over to the local rescue operation--an American lady who set up a grooming business over here as a "front" for the express purpose of placing homeless dogs. They think he'll be easy to place in a good home, but if for some reason they can't, I may ignore my clearer head and allow my heart to prevail.
The breaking news is that the bomb threat came from a 14-year-old American kid. It must be like Khaled said...they don't get snow over here, which means they don't have "snow days" that close the schools...so they make up for it with "bomb threat days." Stupid kid probably just didn't want to have to take his spelling test. I hope they lock him up for awhile, and maybe give him a stiff lashing for good measure. Heck, give me ten minutes with him and I'll do it myself.
The United States Constitution is our contract with the federal government, defining the areas of our lives where the government is permitted to tread. Over the past several decades, though, an alarming trend has taken root and grown at breakneck pace. The federal judiciary, at every level, is abusing its power by creating--rather than interpreting--laws, and in doing so the courts have begun to alter the very meaning of the Constitution. The government is thus attempting to change the terms of its contract with the people, without the people's involvement or approval!
The courts have taken the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and twisted it to support pornography and condemn organized political speech. The First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom has been turned into an outright ban of all things spiritual in the public sphere. The Second Amendment's guarantee of our right to keep and bear arms has largely been ignored, and remains in a precarious state. The Fourth Amendment's protection of personal privacy has, on one hand, been thrown out the window in favor of nationalization of finances, medical care, retirement savings, etc. ad nauseam, while on the other hand being extended and twisted to the extreme as a justification for denying children their unalienable right to life based on their physical location--in utero.
If anyone has any doubt regarding the extent of the Judiciary's usurpation of power, one need only observe the ferocity of the politics surrounding the confirmation process for nominees to the federal bench. The reason our parties have "litmus tests" for federal judges--that is, they want to know each nominee's personal feelings about abortion, gun control, free speech, etc.--is precisely because they know that federal judges no longer base their rulings on the law as prescribed by the Constitution, but exactly the opposite: the law is now based upon their rulings. Thus, conservative leaders attempt to nominate "constructionist" judges, who accept the clear "original intent" of the Constitution--what the document actually states--as its meaning, rather than those who believe that the words of the Constitution are open to reinterpretation at a judge's whim.
In our attempts to correct this problem, we can propose constitutional amendments to address specific issues as they arise: for example, homosexual "marriage," slavery, abortion, prohibition. But what use are such amendments, if the Judiciary can change their meaning at its will?
The Constitution grants the sole power of impeachment to the Legislature, so the Congress does in fact have the ability to remove unruly justices from the bench; however, history has proven that this is simply not going to happen. The basic problem is that the original language in the Constitution pertaining to impeachment is broad and vague, the Founders' (obviously incorrect) assumption being that the Legislature would always be populated with self-governed people capable of discerning when impeachment was appropriate and necessary. The tenure of judges is based on "good behaviour," and considering the behavior of many in the Legislature, one must wonder just what a justice could possibly do to offend that body--and, even if they managed to do so, whether it would matter, given the Legislature's unwillingness to expend the "political capital" of the impeachment process.
What has become painfully necessary is a constitutional amendment that would force the judiciary to be bound by the clearly expressed language of the Constitution, or face impeachment. Such an amendment would specifically require the Legislature to impeach any justice who attempted to legislate from the bench (in effect, amending the Constitution without due process), thus removing any doubt as to what We The People demand of our elected and appointed officials. This simple change would effectively halt the onslaught of judicial activism that currently threatens to destroy our society.
With these things in mind, I encourage you to read about the proposed Enumerated Powers Amendment and, if it makes as much sense to you as it does to me, sign the petition of support:
It is an amendment whose time has come, and it deserves the full support of every American citizen who still cares about liberty and freedom.
"The original error [was in] establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend, and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will." (Thomas Jefferson)
For the record, when an Arab says, "Tomorrow," he doesn't mean, "24 hours from now." He means, "Sometime after today." So, for example, if you're waiting for a package, or for the vehicle you shipped over to clear customs, or for someone to come to your house to measure the stairs for carpeting, and you call to find out when it will happen, you will probably be told, "Tomorrow." As long as you understand what "tomorrow" really means, you won't be disillusioned or disappointed.
Also for the record, when the Qatar government talks about "religious freedom," what they're actually talking about is a limited right for non-Muslims to practice their religion, as long as they don't get too serious about it and they keep quiet about it. Muslims are allowed to practice their religion as loudly as they wish, including but not limited to broadcasting the daily calls to prayer over loudspeakers (with multiple mosques blaring a call simultaneously, the cacophony is rather impressive), and leaving the loudspeakers on--in fact, turning the volume up a notch or two--to deliver a sermon (in Arabic) at any hour of the day. Preferably very early in the morning, when things are quiet and rational human beings are still asleep. Check the "Mosque Noise" video at our Qatar Pics website to hear a couple of examples.
They actually have a radio station over here that broadcasts silence all day, except during the calls to prayer, when a professional singer delivers the call. This service is used in many public places, like shopping malls, where they want an easy way to deliver calls to prayer that are as pleasing to the ear as possible.
We finally took delivery of our car, after three months of waiting! I dropped it off in Houston just before we left at the beginning of December, and they handed me the keys on March 2. There was a delay on the front end when Triways missed the boat (literally), and a delay on the back-end while our sponsor hassled with the customs and inspection folks. Customs wanted to go through all of the boxes etc. that we had packed in the vehicle, and the inspections folks didn't like the dark factory window tinting. They wanted me to scrape it off. I told them it couldn't be scraped off, because it was factory-tinted glass, so they came up with a form letter (in Arabic) for me to sign that said--so I am told--something to the effect that I would do something about the tinted windows. Apparently I don't actually have to do anything about them, I just had to sign the letter. Go figure.
I need to go back out to the desert to visit Abdullah, the bedouin who was so hospitable and led us to the camel bones. I told him I'd come back sometime ("tomorrow," maybe?) with the camel bones and play some music in his tent. I find that there are many opportunities for service within the local fellowship, but the deeper needs tend to lie outside of those walls--and take much more time and effort to address. Keep those needs, and our ability to address them, in your prayers for us.