I’ve (jm) put two new pictures on the site, check them out if you like. We were just walking around at our apartment and happened to see this beautiful sunset. These are fairly common here, which is lovely for looking at but kind of sad when you realize that it’s all the junk in the air that makes them pretty.

Last night’s discussion seemed well received. I again had trouble with the Indonesian, however I enjoyed the experience a lot more than the first time due to our proximity to the air conditioner. We also figured out how to open our little portable waters without having them explode on our pants (like last time). Today we were invited to an official meeting here to discuss the Institute’s web site. I think they’re going to have us review the English version of the material to see if it’s all well written. I checked out the English link on the site though, and nothing at all came up. This is slightly worrisome. To be continued…
(over to TP)

Last night we discussed Francis Fukuyama’s new book The Imperative of State Building. Strong points: it includes a quote from Milton Freedman where he admits that economic privatization makes no sense without proper political institutions, and that he was wrong to suggest otherwise throughout his career. Weak points: Fukuyama, like everyone else, essentially finds a new way to reinvent the wheel first invented in The Federalist Papers and known as Madison’s Dilemma; namely, how do you make a government strong enough to do exactly what it should do, but not strong enough to do the wrong things?

Finally, for all of you people writing dissertations, you need to obtain the Google Desktop Search utility. Now all of your notes have keywords, automatically. Sweet.