Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton
If you missed Saturday Night Live’s spoof of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton (Tina Fey & Amy Poehler), see it now:
Watch it now, before they take it off!
How Can I Forgive?
Today’s Gospel reading touches on a very difficult theme – how do we forgive those who sin against us? It is so much easier to cling to hatred and resentment than to let go.
Note to my Christian friends – did you know that the Gospels (Injil“) are considered one of the five Holy Books of the Qur’an? I didn’t – I learned that from Fahad, a blogger who comments here. Wikipedia says that “Muslim scholars generally dispute that Injil refers to either the entire New Testament or the four Gospels. Others believe the Injil was not a physical book, but simply a set of teachings. The word Injil is used in the Qur’an, the Hadith and early Muslim documents to refer specifically to the revelations made by God to Isa (Jesus), and is used by both Muslims and some Arabic-speaking Christians today.”
I mention this only because it is Ramadan, and a season of contemplating God’s word. My Christian friends might wonder why I quote from our books to my Kuwaiti / Gulf friends, but in truth, I find that we are all wrestling with many of the same moral questions, and we just have more tools in our spiritual tool boxes when we share ideas and approaches. I find my Moslem readers can greatly illuminate my own readings when I ask how their books approach – say the problem of Job / Ayyoub or problems of wealth and poverty, or, as today – forgiveness.
This is yesterday’s reading from Forward Day by Day.
Matthew 18:21-35. Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?
Forgiveness is always a difficult matter. In the Eastern church, the season of Lent begins with “Forgiveness Vespers” in which each member of the church asks forgiveness of the priest and of every other member of the church. When the service is completed the entire church has asked forgiveness. It is a healthy way to begin a season of repentance.
To the question, “How many times?” Christ gives an answer that is the equivalent of “However many times you need to.” Forgiveness is a double-edged sword. The sins of those who need to be forgiven bind them and leave them less than free in their quest for peace. For those who must forgive, refusing to forgive can have the same binding effect. It is as though we are tied to all whom we have anything against.
Finding a way to forgive can be difficult. When someone has offended us unknowingly, going to him to confront him with his behavior can be positively damaging. Instead, I use this simple form in my prayers: “Lord, on the day of judgment, do not hold this sin against him.”
Rapists Arrested
From today’s Arab Times:
2 wanted Bedouns involved in ‘rape’ case held
Kuwait : Personnel from the Law Enforcement Department have arrested two Bedouns who had been sentenced in absentia for life imprisonment with hard labor for their involvement in kidnapping and raping an unidentified expatriate woman, reports Al-Anba daily.
The daily did not give more details.
I don’t know how the system works here, but it is a great step forward when rapists are arrested and jailed. These two have already been convicted, so we can hope they will be off the streets for a while.
“You Read the Policy?”
“You read the policy?” the insurance lady asked, and I could hear the laughter restrained in her voice.
“Yes, I did. It doesn’t cover much! With all the restriction, the flood insurance has to work together with the high wind insurance, and it seems to me I need to put the majority of my coverage there,” I replied.
“I’ve just never had a customer before who actually read through the policy,” she responded, her voice still bordering on laughter.
She and I get along great. She helped me out when a company refused to insure our Florida house, a year after all the insurance agencies had taken a major battering from an onslaught of hurricane losses.
I hate reading policies. Do you ever read through your credit card agreements before you sign them? Do you read through the restrictions on software before you download it? Do you know what your insurance REALLY covers?
Sometimes the cheapest policy isn’t always the best – it depends on how good they are when you need to make a claim. Even if you read the policies, it isn’t always what-you-see-is-what-you-get. You also need to check a company’s reputation for claims adjustments.
So far, we have been very lucky. We’ve never made a claim on our auto insurance; any accident – and there haven’t been many – have had only small damage, usually covered by the other person. The only accident I have had in the Middle East was when another American woman rear-ended me on the little road into our compound. The only claim we ever made on a house (we came home from a trip to discover a water pipe had broken) was wiped out by the deductible we had chosen, so we didn’t make the claim.
House insurance freaks me out. The power of almighty God is in a hurricane; a beautiful house can be nothing but shards and embers in no time at all. If you own a Florida house, you have to have separate policies for fire, for liability, for high wind (hurricane) and for flood. The total cost of all those insurances is about equal to one house payment. The fact that all my coverages come due during hurricane season works to my agent’s advantage.
You can track any hurricane/tripical storm in the world at Weather Underground.
Daddy’s Little Girl’s Car
When we saw this car, AdventureMan and I both just about died laughing. Look at that color! It is Barbie Doll pink! I don’t know if you can see, but it SPARKLES! Oh, look at those fabulous matching wheels!
Only two doors, but some carrying space in the back . . . only a Daddy or a doting Sugar Daddy would buy a car like this for his little girl!
Streaky Sunrise
Circumstances had me up and about just before the sun was rising this morning, but I was filled with despair – how can I shoot the sunrise through these streaky windows? The men will be coming soon to wash the outside – more than 200 square feet of glass in our living room – the windows make up almost an entire wall.
The humidity of the last week made them damp and sticky, and then the sand storm blew in. The results are a disaster for my windows, now caked with burned on dust and grit, all streaked as the windows shed the day’s humidity.
This is what the windows look like:
This is what the sunrise looked like at 0h-dark-thirty this morning, through my streaky windows:
Here is what is going to happen. The men will come and wash my windows – but not until the day before the next humid day followed upon by another sandstorm. I will have about six hours to enjoy my beautiful diamond-sparkling-clear windows before they streak again. 😦
There is not a cloud in the sky. Weather Underground: Kuwait forecasts that today will reach 111°F / 44° C this afternoon. For my non-Moslem friends, try eating breakfast while it is still dark, early in the day, and then trying to get through a day like today without eating, drinking, smoking or coffee. God willing, there will be no humidity, which just saps the energy right out of everyone. God willing, because it is Saturday, most people will be able to stay at home and off the roads while they are fasting.
I had a man almost drift right into me yesterday in downtown Kuwait; I think he fell asleep as he was driving. Of course when I tapped my horn lightly to let him know he was drifting, he woke up and was all embarrassed and drove off with a roar, maybe to show me he hadn’t been sleeping, I don’t know, LOL. Mostly I try to stay off the roads myself.
Keeps Me Humble
The very few people who know that I blog sometimes ask me “How do you get such high statistics?”
The simple truth is, my very highest attracting post, even one year later, gets the most hits. It isn’t about the content, it’s about the birthday cake photo. How humbling is that?
WordPress allows us to look at our posts in terms of the last seven days, the last 30 days, the last quarter, the last year and all time. Because I love statistics and trends, and what numbers can tell us and how they can mislead us, I love it that WordPress has added all these features. (They have also added technical features that outstrip my abilities and my desire. I want to keep it simple – just writing on some days can be hard enough for me.)
So here is a look at my all time high scoring articles:
Romance and Money Matters
I found this article in today’s New York Times Business. So here is my question to you – is it different in Kuwait than in the USA? I remember when we wanted a joint checking account here ( Adventures in Banking), one man looked at my husband in disbelief and said “Why? Just give her some money!” We never did get a joint account; it isn’t possible, but I was given a PAO on the account. It seemed bizarre to me, but it makes perfect sense if couples keep their moneys separately.
What do you think? Does this article apply to marriage in Kuwait?
The Key to Wedded Bliss? Money Matters
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Published: September 10, 2008
IF you ask married people why their marriage works, they are probably not going to say it’s because they found their financial soul mate.
But if they are lucky, they have. Marrying a person who shares your attitudes about money might just be the smartest financial decision you will ever make. In fact, when it comes to finances, your marriage is likely to be your most valuable asset — or your largest liability.
Marrying for love is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries, marriages were arranged affairs, aligning families for economic or political purposes or simply pooling the resources of those scraping by.
Today, while most of us marry for romantic reasons, marriage at its core is still a financial union. So much of what we want — or don’t want — out of life boils down to dollars and cents, whether it’s how hard we choose to work, how much we consume or how much we save. For some people, it’s working 80-hour weeks to finance a third home and country club membership; for others, it means cutting back on office hours to spend more time with the family.
“A lot of the debates people have about money are code for how we want to live our lives,” said Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who researches the economics of marriage and divorce. “A lot of the choices we make in how we want to live our lives involve how we spend our money.”
Making those choices as a team is one of the most important ways to preserve your marital assets, and your union, experts say. But it’s that much easier when you already share similar outlooks on money matters — or when you can, at the very least, find some middle ground.
The economies achieved by pairing up are fairly obvious. However, the costs of divorce can be financially devastating, especially when children are involved. And, not surprisingly, money manages to force a wide wedge between many couples.
“Most people think people break up over sex issues and children issues — and those are issues — but money is a huge factor in breaking up marriages,” said Susan Reach Winters, a divorce lawyer in Short Hills, N.J.
Not everyone is married to a financial twin, and that’s not necessarily a problem. There are several ways that you and your significant other can become more compatible, and ultimately more prosperous, when it comes to money.
These guidelines are compiled from the successfully married and from experts on psychology, divorce and finance:
TALK AND SHARE GOALS Before walking down the aisle, couples should have a talk about their financial health and goals. They should ask each other tough questions: Do we want children? When? Who will care for them? Will they go to public or private school? What kind of life do we want? When will we retire?
This is a fascinating article – read the rest of it HERE.
9/11 Conspiracy Theories Live
When most Americans hear these theories, they just laugh – it never occurs to them that anyone could take them seriously. The New York Times does an article on 9/11 conspiracy theories just as that tragic anniversary approaches:
9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom
Justin Lane for The New York Times
CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.
Many in Cairo see the attacks as part of an anti-Muslim plot.
This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.
“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”
It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.
“The United States should be concerned because in order to tell people that there is a real evil, they too have to believe it in order to help you,” said Mushairy al-Thaidy, a columnist in the Saudi-owned regional newspaper Asharq al Awsat. “Otherwise, it will diminish your ability to fight terrorism. It is not the kind of battle you can fight on your own; it is a collective battle.”
There were many reasons people here said they believed that the attacks of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy against Muslims. Some had nothing to do with Western actions, and some had everything to do with Western policies.
Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.
“Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.”
You can read the entire article at The New York Times.
Moroccan Blogger Jailed
You can read the entire story, which appeared today, on BBC News Africa:
A Moroccan blogger has been jailed for two years for showing disrespect to the monarchy, say the man’s family.
Mohammed Erraji, 29, was convicted after writing an article claiming King Mohammed VI’s charitable habits were encouraging a culture of dependency.
There has been no official comment on the case, but rights groups claim Erraji did not have a fair trial.
A BBC reporter says criticising the king is an offence in Morocco and the royal family remains a taboo subject.
Morocco has previously caused international outrage with its treatment of internet users.
Earlier this year, Fouad Mortada was sentenced to three years in prison for creating a false profile on the internet site Facebook using the identity of the king’s brother.
He received a royal pardon following protests from internet users around the world.
‘Disastrous’
Erraji claimed in an internet article that the king’s charity towards Moroccans was stifling development by encouraging people to be lazy.
“This has made the Moroccans a people without dignity, who live by donations and gifts,” he wrote.
The BBC’s James Copnall in the capital, Rabat, says he was particularly critical of the practice known as grima – giving lucrative licences to run taxis and other transport in exchange for begging letters.
Erraji said this did not happen in developed countries, where hard work rather than begging is rewarded.
He was arrested by the authorities last Friday and accused of “lacking the respect due to the king”.
In court on Monday, he was given a two-year prison sentence and fined 5,000 Dirham ($630:£356).
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