5KD = LLLOOOLLLL
I have seen opinions, and heard people talking about how Kuwait has more important things to do than to penalize people who are using their mobile phones. They are outraged! Clean up the highways first, they say, give us better schools, enforce the laws already on the books (but leave our cell phones alone!)
I am sorry. I know I am going to get killed for this opinion, but have you ever followed someone driving while talking on a cell phone? Do you watch them wobble out of their lane, try to steer the car with their knee because they have the phone in one hand and they need to adjust the volume of the radio? In countries where mobile phone use has been monitored and statistics kept, they attribute a huge rise in inattentive driving to cell phone use. They have statistics. They can prove that cell phone use is linked to a rise in accidents.
Brave Qatar brought in a team of experts who interviewed seriously injured accident victims. Every single one of them was on a cell phone when involved in the accident.
My rant is this: a 5KD fine? In Kuwait, that is just laughable. A 5 KD fine (about $20 with the dollar diving into the cellar) is not a deterrent. I want to see a sliding scale: start at 50KD for the first incidence, double it for the second, double it again for the third, etc. Make it hurt.
There are too many drivers for the roads, even with the ongoing improvements. The drivers are ill experienced, and careless. Driving in Kuwait is lethal enough without the additional factor of cell phones. If you need to ask directions, pull over. It’s not that hard, you’re smart, you can figure it out.
Church Blocking the Way
I can’t help being a little cynical and a little sad. I have often wondered how long a very visible church could last in a very visible location. It always made me proud that Kuwait was so tolerant to allow Christian worship to take place side by side with Islam in Kuwait. So now the church is impeding progress, and has to go?
From the Arab Times:
Church, cafe blocking way
KUWAIT CITY, March 17: ‘Minister of Public Works and State Minister for Municipal Affairs Mussa Al-Sarraf is determined to remove all obstacles facing the First Ring Road expansion project,’ Al-Rai daily quoted Assistant Undersecretary for Road Engineering Affairs at the Ministry of Public Works Hussein Al-Mansour as saying. The Minister instructed officials to find solutions to the problems, especially for buildings which block the road’s expansion like the church near Jahra roundabout and a cafe, he added.
According to Al-Mansour, the ministry will not be able to complete the project due to these obstacles and ‘it is likely to cost the ministry a lot of money as the contractor will ask for compensation for the delay.’ He said the ministry is waiting for a temporary location for the church and is trying to find alternate arrangements for the cafŽ to hasten the execution of the project ‘which will help in easing the traffic problems in the country.’
Meat and Fish at the Sultan Center
It doesn’t take long before you live in a country long enough that you don’t see with the same eyes as when you came. Last week, as I was shopping, I was looking for something to fix for dinner. Normally, I just see something and grab and go, but my attention was caught by how expensive everything was, and then again, by the fact that American ground beef was twice as expensive as New Zealand ground beef, and both were really really expensive – it’s ground beef!
I’ve been careful about meat ever since I read Deadly Feasts about ten years ago. The book is a medical mystery, it traces the identification of Mad Cow Disease, and how vulnerable we all are. The human variant takes ten years to develop – all because tainted meat enters our food supply, because meat producers are too greedy to pass up a cow who is stumbling and falling down.
Even those who keep it out of the human food chain often process fallen cows for animal food.
And none of that has anything to do, really, with this post. The point is, for once, instead of rushing by, I was paying attention. When you pay attention, you start to see things (again) (or for the first time.) Here, you see things routinely that you don’t see in the United States:
Lamb’s brains:
Lamb’s heart:
Sheep’s feet:
Fresh Quail:
Kuwaiti Shoom:
Saudi Shrimp (these look big, but Kuwaiti shrimp, in season, are even bigger, and the sweetest shrimp you have ever tasted):
Iranian Squid:
Nuabi (a fish caught locally)
I love Kuwaiti seafood, and this is the one I love the best of all, Kuwaiti Zubaidi:
For those of you in the US, you can multiply the prices by four for an approximate idea of how much the food costs in dollars. The dollar is slipping here, as everywhere else, prices are going up, and we are taking the double whammy.
The seafood is out of this world. Even though expensive, local caught seafood is about what we would pay for seafood in the US. Vegetables IN SEASON can be reasonable. When I want iceburg lettuce, I pay about $3/ head. I have wonderful friends who are sharing their bumper crops of vegetables this year, and oh! they are SO good, so tasty! One of my friends has tried some heirloom tomatoes, and they are doing well!
Pet Import and Export Service
Many people write asking about how we got the Qatteri cat into Kuwait, and I have to tell them that the woman who helped us is no longer here. Recently a friend passed along a card to me – there is a new woman providing the import/export help, and for those of you with people coming to work with your companies who have pets, this woman helps get the paperwork for either bringing a pet into the country or getting your pet out. She knows the bureaucracy and she knows how to get the job done.
She is also well connected with all services involved with animals; as well as import/export, she can arrange grooming and boarding, and will meet you at the airport with the papers necessary for bringing your animal into Kuwait – assuming you have arranged this with her in advance.
Here is her e-mail address – please share it with your HR departments for their resources:
petpassage@yahoo.com
A Case of Two Cities with Inspector Chen: Qiu Xiaolong
When my sister Sparkle recommends a book, I have learned to listen. I think I ordered this book about six months ago, but never cared enough to actually read it. After reading a recent Donna Leon (like dessert, I use it as a reward for reading something more challenging) I decided it was time to tackle Qiu Xiaolong.
I believe A Case of Two Cities is the first in the series; I tried very hard to make sure it was. When I first started reading it, it was difficult, but it didn’t take long to adjust. When you read a detective story written in a foreign culture, you have to park your old way of thinking, and quickly adapt to a new way of thinking. First, you have to learn what that new way of thinking is. They don’t just tell you at the beginning of the book “Here are the differences in values – you will notice . . .” no, but Qiu Xiaolong is courteous enough to take us by the hand and lead us gently into the Chinese way of thinking, the Chinese way of getting things done, and the technicalities of Chinese detective work.
As we meet Inspector Chen, a published poet, and a detective, ten pages into the book, a new anti-corruption campaign is starting in Shanghai, and Inspector Chen has been given a special assignment – a qinchai dacheng – as “Emperor’s Special Envoy with an Imperial Sword.” Even though imperial days are long gone, this warrant gives him emergency powers to search and arrest without reporting to anyone – and without a warrant. He is to seek and find Xing, a corrupt businessman who has caused huge loss to the national economy and is in danger of tarnishing the Chinese national image, and Xing’s associates.
Just as in the Donna Leon books about Commissario Guido Brunetti, and the Bowen books about Gabriel duPre, and James Lee Burke’s books about New Orleans, and Cara Black’s books about Aimee LeDuc, the detectives and investigators have to walk a fine line between going after the criminal and overstepping their warrant – stepping on the toes of those also engaged in corruption so entrenched that it has become a way of life. Each of these detectives has to maneuver that treacherously fine line – who determines when corruption has become too much? It usually puts their own lives in danger at some point, as those manipulating the system and making a fortune out of it do not want to be caught, do not want to be exposed, and will go to great lengths to protect their ill-gotten gains.
And just as in the above books, the book is more about the actual process than the crime itself. Inspector Chen must go about his task indirectly, having chats here and there, gathering threads of information with which he tries to weave a plausible tapestry of events.
As I was reading A Case of Two Cities, I kept making AdventureMan take me out for Chinese food! The meetings are often held over food, and the descriptions are mouth-watering.
Best of all, when you read these books, you get a tiny little glimpse into another way of thinking, another way of doing business. We are all human, we all have the same needs, and we differ in how we go about getting those needs met. We differ in the way we think. It helps to enter another way of living, another way of thinking, it helps to visit through these books so that we can increase our own understanding that our way of doing things is not the only way, maybe (gasp!) not even the “right” way! Maybe (crunching those brain cells really hard to output this thought) there is more than one “right” way?
Corruption at the Morgue
Where is the Kuwaiti detective novel? I follow Guido Brunetti in Donna Leon’s series on Venice, Dave Robicheaux, the James Lee Burke detective in a small town just outside New Orleans, and now, Investigator Chen, who is a chief investigator in China, but where, oh where is the Kuwait detective / mystery? It is just waiting to be written.
In yesterday’s Kuwait Times is an article I would love to link you to, but it isn’t there, not even when I search “female coroner” from the headline on page 3. Did you know Kuwait had a female coroner, a la Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpatta? As you read the article, it makes sense, as the bodies are kept semi-segregated in the morgue, and women work on women (some of the time) and men on men.
I’m impressed. Any time a woman takes on a traditionally men’s job, it takes a whole lot of courage. I imagine the requirements to be a coroner here are similar to other countries – you have to have a medical degree (be a doctor) and then have advanced training in forensics. So when Nawal Boshehri speaks out, I listen. She’s got my attention.
Nawal Boshehri says conditions in the morgue are awful. From a personal point of view, she has been sexually molested by her superior and frozen in her position over false accusations that she has not been going to work or signing in or out. She has asked the minister of interior to look into her complaints.
As an institution, she reports serious issues – labs that lack necessary equipment, to do tests, such as those that measure drugs and alcohol in the bloodstream, outdated machinery, rusty machinery, lack of ventilation (in a morgue! horrors!) and she states they are constantly in fear of getting infections.
She claims that reports have sometimes been manipulated and twisted to give prosecutors the wrong technical information that would sometimes end up setting a guilty person free, and that one time they certified a murder had been insane without him ever having been examined by any mental health professionals. She was once asked to provide a report that made one citizen swap places with the assaulted expatriate, so that the assaulted expatriate would appear to be the guilty party.
She adds that she fears for her life. She says “a senior coroner at the department falsified reports, namely those related to detainees, who underwent police brutality during interrogations. He usually did this as favors to his colleagues to help them get promoted instead of being punished for their brutality.” She added that because she has reported these things, she fears for her own life.
Every nation has corruption. Corruption is chaotic, and when you get serious about rule of law, you still have corruption, but you do your best to root it out. You report it when it happens. I think that Nawal Boshehri has enough confidence in Kuwait’s institutions to go public with her allegations. While it may appear dirty laundry, that she CAN go public is a very positive sign. I can imagine she fears for her life, and yet, she seems to be fighting to retain her job. That’s very brave.
That the Kuwait Times will publish the article on page three, in three columns, that is also very brave, and speaks well of the increasing confidence in a free press.
Wouldn’t this make a great detective novel?
Cell Phone or Drunk?
From AOL News:
Using Cell Phone While Driving Akin to Driving Drunk, Say Researchers
Posted Mar 7th 2008 11:24AM by Evan Shamoon
According to a new study, talking on your cell phone while driving could be as dangerous as being under the influence of alcohol. Carnegie-Mellon University researchers used brain imaging to show how mobile phone use alone reduces 37 percent of brain activity engaged in driving. The findings were published in the latest gotta-have-it issue of the journal ‘Brain Research,’ and also suggest that using a hands-free headset doesn’t make much of a difference.
Basically, the study found that drivers who spoke on their phones while driving tended to make many of the same driving mistakes as those who just got finished speaking to the bottle.
So to speak.
Comment: I always thought using a headset solved the problem – guess I was wrong. 😦 The Kuwait Ministry of Traffic is currently considering a law against using cell phones while driving in Kuwait. If enforced, it’s going to make a big difference in the lives of a lot of people in Kuwait. I wonder if it will mean fewer pedestrians killed?
Al Ahmadi Minaret
I see a lot of new mosques going up in Kuwait, and I see a lot of renovations. I just wish someone would spruce up this beautiful old minaret in Al Ahmadi. Looks to me like it is well-built, just needs a new coat of paint. And then I start to wonder, do mosques have committees, like churches do? We have the committee for the church grounds, the committee to take care of the altar, the committee to welcome new members, the committee to work with church school programs for the children . . . it goes on and on!
Do mosques have citizens committees?
Segregation – Integration – Choice
A fascinating new and very long article from The New York Times Magazine section discusses a school where boys and girls have a choice of integrated or segregated classrooms – in the same school.
I would have hated going to an all-girl school, and at the same time, I think it is far for people to have a choice in how they want to learn. What was right for me is not right for everyone else, and maybe not for YOU – or your children.
Here is a quote from deep in the article, about how things are succeeding at one same-sex school. I wonder how this technique would fly in Kuwait 😉
If a child arrives at 7:31 a.m., his parents will receive a call at 5:45 the next morning to make sure that boy will be at school on time.
By ELIZABETH WEIL
Published: March 2, 2008
On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.
How Good People Turn Evil
This is a subject that fascinates me – how even “good” people can do very very bad things . . . The article and interview is from Wired.com science/discoveries and you can read the entire article and view a videotape by clicking on the blue type.
TED 2008: How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib
By Kim Zetter 02.28.08 | 12:00 AM
MONTEREY, California — Psychologist Philip Zimbardo has seen good people turn evil, and he thinks he knows why. Zimbardo will speak Thursday afternoon at the TED conference, where he plans to illustrate his points by showing a three-minute video, obtained by Wired.com, that features many previously unseen photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (disturbing content).
In March 2006, Salon.com published 279 photos and 19 videos from Abu Ghraib, one of the most extensive documentations to date of abuse in the notorious prison. Zimbardo claims, however, that many images in his video — which he obtained while serving as an expert witness for an Abu Ghraib defendant — have never before been published.
The Abu Ghraib prison made international headlines in 2004 when photographs of military personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners were published around the world. Seven soldiers were convicted in courts martial and two, including Specialist Lynndie England, were sentenced to prison.
Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.
His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, explores how a “perfect storm” of conditions can make ordinary people commit horrendous acts.
He spoke with Wired.com about what Abu Ghraib and his prison study can teach us about evil and why heroes are, by nature, social deviants.
Wired: Your work suggests that we all have the capacity for evil, and that it’s simply environmental influences that tip the balance from good to bad. Doesn’t that absolve people from taking responsibility for their choices?
Philip Zimbardo: No. People are always personally accountable for their behavior. If they kill, they are accountable. However, what I’m saying is that if the killing can be shown to be a product of the influence of a powerful situation within a powerful system, then it’s as if they are experiencing diminished capacity and have lost their free will or their full reasoning capacity.
Situations can be sufficiently powerful to undercut empathy, altruism, morality and to get ordinary people, even good people, to be seduced into doing really bad things — but only in that situation.
Understanding the reason for someone’s behavior is not the same as excusing it. Understanding why somebody did something — where that why has to do with situational influences — leads to a totally different way of dealing with evil. It leads to developing prevention strategies to change those evil-generating situations, rather than the current strategy, which is to change the person.
You can read the rest of the article and view the video HERE.
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