(01.31.08) Recommends:

Wifi.

We've always had a sort of willfull ignorance about Middle East politics. We figure that there is so much background information to get straight before any present conflicts can be fully understood. And we feel most of the sources that discuss the issues today either do not put the current issues into any kind of historical context, or they have an agenda that is not explicitly disclosed.

So we meakly throw up our hands and stay out of Discussions About the Middle East Conflict.

But we came across a story yesterday that blew our minds. According to this Salon article, the internet in the Middle East has suffered an outage because a cable carried by a submarine was cut.

W?
T?
F?

Granted, in the U.S., we have awesome politicians like Ted Stevens who sit and lecture us about how the internet is not a dump truck, but rather a series of tubes.

And we sit back and laugh.

But in the Middle East ... they ... what? We do not understand this. Their internet is hooked up by submarine? Do they actually plug their internet cable into the bottom of the ocean, and the submarine just acts as an intermediary? We have no idea what is going on here, but this is as concerete a reason as we've ever seen that the Middle East Issue Will Not, In Fact, Ever Be Solved.