AdventureMan and I watched No Country for Old Men last night, and oh! it held us on the edge of our chairs. At the end, we ran for the phone to call our son and ask “Whoa! What happened??”
In short, we loved the movie (and I can hardly wait to read the book, although Cormac McCarthy goes a lot darker than I care to go). The Coen brothers also go darker than I care to go, but we find ourselves drawn to their movies because there is so much thought put into them, so many references to other genres, other films, and because the characters are so true to life. We first met them in Fargo, a movie we pull out and watch again from year to year – that’s a rare movie. We love the characters, even the bad guys are so human.
It’s the same in No Country for Old Men. Set in the desolation of West Texas, there are whole minutes when you listen to the wind whistling in the desert as the hero hikes down to a drug-exchange-gone-bad.
There is a good guy, a sherif played by craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones, and an ordinary guy who finds a whole lot of money, and we really want him to get away with it, and then there is a really really bad guy, who is also smart, and . . . well, something inside of him is just bent. He’s not right. The Coen’s have a way of making him both appalling and just a guy doing his job very well. It’s not personal, but we wish he wouldn’t enjoy inflicting harm so much.
What I love about the Coen films is that they can capture the essence of a character so sparely, with just a few words, a few lines. There is a trailer park manager who refuses to give the very very bad guy an address. You hold your breath; she could get blown away, she doesn’t know it. She holds firm. In another scene, an older woman tells a Mexican man who has just helped her “You don’t see too many Mexicans in suits.” So so so politically incorrect, and so ordinarily normal, the plain-spokeness of the elderly. The Coen’s capture the West Texas-ness which permeates the film.
This movie is worth watching again.
This report came out in August of 2007, on WIRED so it is not new news.
What it IS, is something for those who are considering monitoring blogs in Kuwait, to think about.
It isn’t bloggers complaining about roads, or complaining about a do-nothing-but-hold-a-grill-party Parliament, or about laws not being enforced. If bloggers are blogging and comlaining, people are grumbling. Bloggers might be considered a weather-vane, but bloggers are not creating the weather, if you catch my drift.
The US Army was blaming bloggers – until a study showed that it was their own OFFICIAL websites that gave away important information.
I used to ask AdventureMan about things and he would snap “Where did you hear that? It’s classified!” and I would tell him I read it in the New York Times – or in the Stars and Stripes.
We bloggers aren’t your problem. We bloggers are mostly geeks and nerds who love our computers, love thinking about things, and we are not out there rabble raising . . . we are sharing ideas. We don’t all agree. We are not your problem.
For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers’ blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.
The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.
The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
“It’s clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs,” said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It’s a pretty major disparity.” The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.
Front page of the online Arab Times:
They’re buying votes … Do something
KUWAIT CITY : The Ministry of Interior should immediately take the necessary action to curb the widespread vote-buying in some constituencies and prevent incompetent candidates from entering the Parliament, former MPs and 2008 parliamentary election candidates told the Arab Times.
One of the smartest bloggers out there, Touche´, wrote a comment on an earlier election blog entry, and it was SO good, so memorable (this man should be writing and editing for one of the daily English papers and teaching Political Science) on vote buying and how it is implemented that I am going to reprint his comments here to illustrate how the vote buying in Kuwait is accomplished.
Let me indulge you with our rotten political trends.
This is a funny ironic melancholic TRUE story, I have a colleague at work who is “Mutawa” (fresh your old post) who belongs to “Salaf a.k.a. The Islamic Heritage Rejuvenating Society (this is my best translation) and who is has the last name of one of the tribes. Now on the last elections back on 2006 I asked him to whom did you vote, thinking that he must have voted for that group’s candidates, and the shocking news is that he said the week before elections I swore an oath with all the area followers to vote for the Islamic candidates and I quote him “When I went there to vote and tried to vote for the sworn names, the pen would go directly to those candidates who belong to my tribe, I couldn’t do it, so I voted for one of the Islamic candidates and the other vote went to our tribe’s guy”. Now I told him that you’ve sworn on the Quran!! How cold you do that? The answer was simple, “I just couldn’t, it’s in my blood, it’s something beyond your comprehension”
As for your question about votes purchasing, it starts as follows (sorry but I had to put them into steps for clarity purposes:
1. The buyer’s representative (BR) scouts the area for the right voters who are willing to sell their votes for money.
2. BR approaches the voter and persuade him/her and both agree on the price of each vote (female votes are being negotiated with the woman’s brother, father or husband)
3. Once the deal is closed, the voter has to submit his/her national ID to the BR to insure that voter hasn’t closed another deal with another candidate and the documents are held with the BR until elections day (on extreme cases, a trust worthy voter won’t submit the documents and his word is taken as it is considered stronger than oak)
4. All BRs know each other as they are basically residents of the same area and they exchange a list of those voters who sold their votes an cross examine them for duplications to prevent any frauds.
5. Now the interesting tactics, on election day, a candidate may choose not to give the national ID to the voter if the he feels that he has secured his win and thus eliminating any chances of any frauds by voter to shift his votes to opponents.
6. If the candidate needs the vote, the corresponding BR calls up the voter and walks him to the election classroom signaling another same candidate’s BR who sits in that classroom to observe the integrity of the processes, now that guy knows that the voter isn’t a supporter and has been paid based on the signal thus he keeps a hawk eye on him trying to see how many ticks were placed on the voting form and does the tick fits the area on the form where candidate’s name is printed (it’s merely an approximate observation).
P.S.
a. The timing of the purchased votes isn’t random and are chosen specifically by the candidate’s campaign and usually the purchased voted are being herded as sheep in groups either at the early morning or an hour before the closing time.
b. The paid amount is %50 before voting and the remaining %50 when the inside BR sms the voter’s delivery BR that the vote has been verified based on his observation and thus the full payment is due.
c. The vote’s price depends on the nature of the vote itself (solo/dual for the old election ways). Solos are the highest paid and the ones which BRs aim for.
d. Buying votes isn’t to insure number of votes, the key element of the whole process is to target those votes which are considered as opponents insured votes, by keeping those national ID (voting ID for this election) the candidate uses a term called “Votes Burning” where he holds back those IDs and never giving them to voters until election boxes are sealed to eliminate opponents’ insured votes.
Blogger Chirp reports being offered KD 4000 (that’s about $16,000) for her vote. Imagine the temptation! Chirp has character and integrity, and turned it down, but imagine how tempting that might be to a young person who wants education, or a new car, or to pay off debts, or who has a wedding coming up. That’s a LOT of money for just one vote; imagine the deep pockets who can afford to buy that many votes?
We are all so interconnected. I knew rice prices here in Kuwait had gone sky high, so high that imported American rice is now a relative bargain. I always bought Indian rice, in an effort to buy more (relatively) locally, and I knew India had restricted rice exports, but I didn’t know that the long drought in Australia was also contributing to the short supply.
You can read the entire article at this New York Times link.
THE FOOD CHAIN
A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: April 17, 2008
. . . . . .
The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.
The drought’s effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production.
It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to long-term climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.
Read the rest of this article, and related articles, by clicking HERE.
Just as the Qatteri Cat monitors traffic in front of our place, I monitor my blog traffic – a lot like Qatteri Cat, sort of lazily, desultory.
Yesterday, I got the most hits – a lot – on MOC bans Porno Film Sites, a post I wrote almost a year ago.
80 hits. That’s a lot for a post almost a year old. Why so much interest? Are there new movements afoot in the Ministry of Communication to ban undesirable content? Are there new technologies available that make that possible?
I knew exactly the kind of photo I wanted to include here, so I googled “saudi censorship image” and found this wonderful blog: Your World Today. I really like his blog.
From The New York Times:
DUBLIN — The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices swooning from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even parts of northern India.
This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic growth worldwide, affecting not just homes but jobs as well.
In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the last decade are falling back to earth. Property analysts predict that some countries, like this one, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.
To some extent, the world’s problems are a result of American contagion. As home financing and credit tightens in response to the crisis that began in the subprime mortgage market, analysts worry that other countries could suffer the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have afflicted California, Florida and other states.
Citing the reverberations of the American housing bust and credit squeeze, the International Monetary Fund last Wednesday cut its forecast for global economic growth this year and warned that the malaise could extend into 2009.
“The problems in the U.S. are being transmitted to Europe,” said Michael Ball, professor of urban and property economics at the University of Reading in Britain, who studies housing prices. “What’s happening now is an awful lot more grief than we expected.”
You can read the entire story HERE
Yes, some banks made loans to a few people who really couldn’t afford the housing, and yes, a small percentage have been foreclosed. Is the entire downturn in the housing market caused by the sub-prime loan debacle?
In the USA, there is a HUGE demographic, the baby boomers, who have already started retiring. As they retire, many are downsizing, looking for a simpler way of life. Could it be that there is more than one factor acting here? Could housing demand be dropping? Wasn’t there a similar post World War II baby boom in Europe? How will the boomers’ retirement effect the US economy?
Kuwait has one long continuous baby boom – seems to me the housing prices here continue to go up!
SAN FRANCISCO — The Olympic torch arrived at the airport here from Paris in the wee hours Tuesday morning, exited out a side door and was escorted by motorcade to a downtown hotel. There it took a well-deserved break in a room complete with cable TV, room service and views of the city’s popular Union Square shopping district.
“It has very comfortable accommodations,” said Mike McCarron, an airport spokesman, who said the flame — ensconced in a handsome brass lantern and accompanied by several backup flames — was “treated similar to a head of state.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the flame will be under no such bushel as it makes its only appearance in the United States on an increasingly tense international tour en route to Beijing. It will star in a two-and-a-half-hour relay along this city’s waterfront, involving six miles of pavement, 79 runners and untold scores of law enforcement officials.
The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China’s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet. Mayor Gavin Newsom met with police and relay officials amid concerns that disruptions in London and Paris this week not be repeated here.
“I can only confirm that the route is dynamic,” said Nathan Ballard, a city spokesman.
Whoda thunk?
I am (almost) speechless!
Can this be a turning point in Kuwait? Are we going to have laws that might actually be meant to be followed? Wooo Hoooo, traffic police, Woooo Hoooooo, court of law!
From The Arab Times: Kuwait Crime:
‘Deport motorist’ – Driving on E-lane
KUWAIT CITY : Assistant Undersecretary for Traffic Affairs, Major-General Thabet Al-Muhanna has ordered the deportation of an Arab man who was caught driving at 140 km/h along the Fifth Ring Motorway, reports Al-Seyassah daily.
According to a security source Al-Muhanna saw the motorist driving along the emergency lane and ordered his immediate arrest.
After his arrest the man admitted to committing the offence. He apologized and said he was in a hurry. However, the man will be administratively deported, say sources.
Questions and Comments: Woo Hooo, al-Muhanna!
Suggestion: With the great advent of tiny, easily carried cameras and cell phone cameras, photographic evidence is easy to provide. How about the Ministry of Interior setting up a website where we can send them photos of people WE see in flagrant violation of the laws?
I wish he wouldn’t say things like that. Robert Mueller told BBC News that he thinks we will see the end of Al Qaeda in three years.
To me, that is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. It’s a dare. I wish he would just go about defeating Al Qaeda in three years, and not talk about it until it’s done. Maybe it is superstitious; I prefer action to talk. When you talk about defeating someone, you might just be setting yourself up to eat humble pie.
The head of the FBI has said he believes the West can achieve victory over al-Qaeda within three-and-a-half years.
Robert Mueller described how his organisation is working closely with British intelligence to confront ever-more-complex plots.
Flanked by broad-shouldered security men with tell-tale bulges beneath their suits, the director of the FBI gave a rare public address in London.
As head of one of 16 US intelligence agencies, Mr Mueller is at the forefront of preventing a repeat of the September 11 attacks.
It was a task, he said, which could not be done without strategic partnerships with allies like Britain.
You can read the entire article HERE.
When I was young, I never would have thought that I would join a bible study on the life of Moses that took a whole year. When I was young, I was a believer, but never dreamed I would really STUDY the word. One day a person invited me in, and I found myself learning things I never would have dreamed.
I remember learning this segment, from Exodus, which is part of the readings for day. Moses listened to his father-in-law, and he had to learn to delegate, so he wouldn’t be worn out:
Exodus 18:13-27
13 The next day Moses sat as judge for the people, while the people stood around him from morning until evening. 14When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, ‘What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, while all the people stand around you from morning until evening?’ 15Moses said to his father-in-law, ‘Because the people come to me to inquire of God. 16When they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make known to them the statutes and instructions of God.’ 17Moses” father-in-law said to him, ‘What you are doing is not good. 18You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone. 19Now listen to me. I will give you counsel, and God be with you! You should represent the people before God, and you should bring their cases before God; 20teach them the statutes and instructions and make known to them the way they are to go and the things they are to do. 21You should also look for able men among all the people, men who fear God, are trustworthy, and hate dishonest gain; set such men over them as officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. 22Let them sit as judges for the people at all times; let them bring every important case to you, but decide every minor case themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. 23If you do this, and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure, and all these people will go to their home in peace.’
24 So Moses listened to his father-in-law and did all that he had said. 25Moses chose able men from all Israel and appointed them as heads over the people, as officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. 26And they judged the people at all times; hard cases they brought to Moses, but any minor case they decided themselves. 27Then Moses let his father-in-law depart, and he went off to his own country.
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Here There and Everywhere 