NBK Shines
We complain about our banks and we write about all the goofs and stupid policies, so it is only fair, when a bank does something right, to share that side of the story, too.
I was invited yesterday to the Mother’s Day celebration benefitting Operation Hope and the Animal Friends League. I used to do fundraising, so I am always interested in just how much of the ticket price will actually benefit the charity.
It was a glorious event, from start to finish. More than 160 gathered to celebrate Motherhood and to support Operation Hope and Animal Friends. During the meal, hostess Sheryl Mairza from Operation Hope announced that because NBK had stepped up to the plate and covered the cost of the breakfast, the entire cost of every ticket would go to benefit the two charities.
WAY TO GO! It is every fundraiser’s dream to find generous corporate sponsors, so that not a penny is wasted and every – oops – fils can go toward the intended charity. Bravo,NBK! I don’t know if banks get tax incentives in Kuwait, as they do in the US. In the US, we know that most major corporations have designated charitable funds and it is our job to encourage them to donate those funds our way. It is by far more difficult to get corporate sponsorship in a country where there may not be such significant tax benefits. Again, Bravo NBK. Thank you for sponsoring Operation Hope and Animal Friends, and for covering the cost of the breakfasts.
Fireboat Practice
Who knew? Who knew the Kuwait Coast Guard – or the Kuwait Fire Department – now has fire boats? These look pretty new, and we are guessing they are having a practice, out in the Gulf on this beautiful Friday:
Fire boats are fairly specialized pieces of equipment. Once you buy them, you have to learn how to operate them. You don’t want them learning when YOUR boat is on fire, you want them to have had some exercises learning how to use their equipment efficiently. Bravo, Kuwait fire department.
Who Will Tell the People?
This was the #5 e-mailed article from this week’s New York Times. It is a hard-hitting warning to Americans in an election year, and it has some analogies to election time in Kuwait.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 4, 2008
Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.
They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.
Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.
We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”
That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.
How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.
And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore … have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”
Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.
Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.
I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”
It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”
Top Colleges Dig Deeper in Wait Lists for Students
Is this a sign of economic times? A demographic portent of things to come? Dipping into the waiting lists is significant enough to show up in The New York Times: Education Good news for the not-quite-first-pick students.
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: May 9, 2008
In what may be a happy surprise for thousands of high school seniors, Harvard plans to offer admission to 150 to 175 students on its waiting list, and Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania each expect to take 90, creating ripples that will send other highly selective colleges deeper into their waiting lists as well.
“This year has been less predictable than any recent year,” said Eric J. Kaplan, interim dean of admissions at Penn, adding that when one college in the top tier goes deep into its wait list, others are affected. “We all need to fill our classes and replace students who have been taken off wait lists at other institutions. The wait-list activity could extend for a significant time.”
Although colleges turn to wait lists to fill out their classes, it is unusual for the most selective to go so deep, college officials say.
For high-school students graduating in an unusually large class and for colleges trying to shape a freshman class, this has been an unusually challenging year, with the changes in early-admissions programs and the broad expansion of financial aid at many elite universities.
Right up until the May 1 deadline for students to respond to admissions offers, colleges have been unsure what to expect.
“Our class is coming in exactly the way we wanted it to, fitting into the plan we had to get to a class of 1,240,” said Janet Rapelye, dean of admission at Princeton, which, like Harvard and the University of Virginia, eliminated early admissions this year.
Ms. Rapelye said that with such a big change in policy, it was difficult to predict results, so “we deliberately aimed to have a slightly smaller group.”
Harvard would not confirm its plans for its wait list. In an e-mail message sent on Thursday to colleagues at dozens of other institutions and passed on to The New York Times, William Fitzsimmons, the Harvard College dean of admissions, said, “Harvard will admit somewhere in the range of 150 to 175 from the waiting list, possibly more depending on late May 1 returns and other waiting list activity.”
AHarvard spokesman said the college had accepted fewer students this year to avoid overcrowding the freshman class.
The Yale dean of admissions, Jeffrey Brenzel, said there would be about 45 wait-list offers this week and probably another round later this month.
Even colleges that had more than filled their freshman classes were wondering how many students would melt away if admitted off waiting lists elsewhere.
“We’re over target right now, so we’re in good shape,” said Rick Shaw, the Stanford dean of admissions. “But I’m keeping a small group on the wait list, because I think there’ll be some impact of wait-list activity at other schools.”
At Dartmouth, Maria Laskaris, the dean of admissions, said although Dartmouth had more than enough accepted students committing, she was “in a holding pattern, because it depends on what other schools do.”
NYT: In Democracy Kuwait Trusts, but Not Much
The New York Times had a full length article on the upcoming Kuwait election yesterday:
KUWAIT — In a vast, high-ceilinged tent, Ali al-Rashed sounded an anguished note as he delivered the first speech of his campaign for Parliament.
“Kuwait used to be No. 1 in the economy, in politics, in sports, in culture, in everything,” he said, his voice floating out in the warm evening air to hundreds of potential voters seated on white damask-lined chairs. “What happened?”
It is a question many people are asking as this tiny, oil-rich nation of 2.6 million people approaches its latest round of elections. And the unlikely answer being whispered around, both here and in neighboring countries on the Persian Gulf: too much democracy.
In a region where autocracy is the rule, Kuwait is a remarkable exception, with a powerful and truculent elected Parliament that sets the emir’s salary and is the nation’s sole source of legislation. Women gained the right to vote and run for office two years ago, and a popular movement won further electoral changes.
Despite those gains, Kuwait has been overshadowed by its dynamic neighbors — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar — where economies are booming under absolute monarchies. Efforts to overhaul Kuwait’s sclerotic welfare state have stalled in its fractious and divided Parliament, and scandals led the emir to dissolve the chamber last month for the second time in less than two years, forcing new elections.
All this has left many Kuwaitis deeply disenchanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy in the region and the continuing chaos in Iraq, just to the north — once heralded as the birthplace of a new democratic model — have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself is one Western import that has not lived up to its advertising.
“People say democracy is just slowing us down, and that we’d be better off if we were more like Dubai,” said Waleed al-Sager, 24, who is advising his father’s campaign for Parliament.
Like many Kuwaitis, Mr. Sager quickly distanced himself from that view. But as the May 17 parliamentary elections approach, with near-constant coverage in a dozen new newspapers and on satellite television stations, candidates refer again and again to a “halat ihbaat” — state of frustration. His father, Mohammed al-Sager, a longtime member of Parliament, delivered his own opening campaign speech shortly after Mr. Rashed two weeks ago, and spent much of it urgently reminding his listeners of the need for an elected assembly.
“Some people have called for a permanent dissolution of Parliament,” he said, his face telecast on an enormous screen to a thick overflow crowd outside the tent. “But everywhere in the world — in Africa, in Palestine, in the old Soviet Union — people have turned to elections to solve their problems, not away from them. Whatever problems we have in our Parliament, we must remember that it is much better than no Parliament at all.”
One source of frustration has been the failure to reform Kuwait’s state-controlled economy. After the 2006 elections, many Kuwaitis were hoping for changes to cumbersome government rules that allow land to be allocated for business projects. Instead, the effort was blocked in Parliament. The slow pace of efforts to privatize the national airline and parts of the oil sector has also caused disappointment.
Many Kuwaitis also complain about government neglect of public hospitals and schools. Problems with the power grid caused brownouts last summer.
Although parts of Kuwait City were rebuilt after the Iraqi invasion of 1990, much of it looks faded and tatty, a striking contrast with the gleaming hyper-modernity of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
The current political malaise is especially striking because most Kuwaitis take pride in their nation’s relatively democratic traditions. The ruling Sabah family acquired its position not through conquest, but with an agreement among the coastal traders of the region in the mid-18th century. After Kuwait gained independence from the British in 1961, the emir approved a written Constitution that sharply limited his power in relation to Parliament.
The article is long – you can read the rest HERE.
Hope in a Bottle
From BBC Health News comes this report on a face cream that really works.
The problem with creams that claim to prevent wrinkles, or to reverse aging, is that they make claims like “visible difference in 7 days.” I buy them, try them, and after seven days, I may not see a visible lessening of wrinkles, but on the other hand, neither do I know what I might have looked like if I didn’t use the cream. Few of these claims are ever tested scientifically.
You tend to think that the more you pay, the better the cream. It isn’t necessarily so.
Face creams under the microscope
An “unprecedented” clinical trial on a high street anti-ageing cream may change the face of the skin care market in this country, dermatologists say.
At present there is a lack of clinical data to prove which creams really do slow down the skin’s ageing process.
Industry is thought to have shied away from major trials in part for fear products, if effective, could then be deemed medicines and tightly regulated.
But the trial on a Boots moisturiser may prove if these fears are founded.
There was a run on the chain’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum after the BBC’s Horizon programme last year suggested it might be one of the more effective creams on the market.
Chris Griffiths, professor of dermatology at the University of Manchester, has just concluded a clinical trial on the lotion, involving 60 volunteers over a period of six months.
The data is now being analysed before being submitted to a scientific journal for peer review – in what is thought to be an unprecedented process for a high street skin care product.
“If it is proven to work – and there is certainly no guarantee that’s what we’ll find – then the debate will start on whether there is a point at which a cream is so effective it becomes a medicine,” he says.
The active ingredients in the cream include white lupin – a flower extract – and retinyl palmitate, on top of a plain moisturising base. The trial will not establish which, if any, is effective, but how the combination works together.
You can read the entire article HERE.
Army Audits: Official Sites, Not Blogs, Breach Security
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.
Rolls Royce and Lamborghini Dumped
From today’s Arab Times:
Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini dumped in a desert
Kuwait : Police found two luxurious cars — a Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini — worth KD 200,000 dumped in a desert area, reports Al-Anba daily. Reportedly, the cars were stolen from a rental office about 20 days ago. Personnel from the Criminal Evidences Department lifted fingerprints to identify the culprits.
Does anyone else find this funny? I mean funny, hahahaha, not funny strange, or weird. I mean it IS weird, it is so weird, but it makes me laugh.
In a little village in Washington State, there was a huge snowstorm a few years ago, and the roofs in the yacht club collapsed from the weight of the snow, collapsed on all those big fine yachts, and the citizens of the little village gathered and laughed. Boat moorage in their own little village had gotten so expensive, they couldn’t afford it, so these were all other people’s boats. And they just laughed.
200,000 KD worth of car in two cars. Just dumped in the desert. Seems kinda wasteful, doesn’t it?
Kuwait Elections: Vote Buying
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?
Turning into a Kuwaiti
We were lingering over the last bites of dessert and coffee in our favorite French restaurant when one phone rang and after a brief conversation, my friend turned to the rest of us and said “We have to get home. That was Anwar saying another storm had rolled in.”
We had all known it was a possibility, but wanted to take the chance to get together anyway. It was one of those rare occasions when our husbands were out of town, we could eat at a restaurant WE liked that they didn’t, we could get together and not worry about when we were getting home. We flurried out, I quickly dropped off my friends and headed home.
The streets were relatively quiet and the traffic relatively slow. I found myself thinking about the evening and how far I have come, living in Kuwait. I’m driving at night, and I don’t even feel a surge of fear-filled adrenalin, I’m driving in a sandstorm going ho-hum, just need to get home, and I’ve just had a great evening with female friends.
And I thought “I’m turning into a Kuwaiti woman.”
The West is so couple oriented. I remember when I was living near my parents in Seattle, and my husband was overseas, I hated Sundays; Sundays seemed like couples’ day to me – couples/families go to church, go to breakfast, go out shopping. Mostly on Sunday I would go to church, go to breakfast with a bunch of church friends and then go home, spend the rest of the day reading the Sunday paper and working on projects. If I were out and about, I would only be reminded how lonely I was, how I was missing a piece, I was incomplete.
In the Gulf, most of the social life is segregated – women go to women’s things, men go to men’s things, families do family things. Things are changing, but there isn’t a lot of “married-people-having-dates-with-their-own-spouses going on. Women go to engagement parties, wedding parties, condolence calls, they go shopping, they meet up at restaurants, they get together in one another’s houses. Men meet up at the diwaniyya, a local shisha cafe, they visit their extended family, they hang out and play cards, they race along the streets. The great circle called men’s social life intersects with the great circle called women’s social life intersect only rarely.
And here I am, meeting up for dinner with my female friends, and driving home alone at night through a sandstorm. Yep. I am definitely turning into a Kuwaiti.
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