Jedi Fun

Shopping for lightsabers? Enjoy.

Saudi humor

I've always seen the ability to laugh at one's self as sign of sanity and good nature, so this article from ArabNews.com really made me laugh...

LOCAL PRESS: Thefts impossible on Saudia flights

By MUHAMMAD SULEIMAN AL-AHIDIB | OKAZ

Published: Jul 26, 2010 23:22 Updated: Jul 26, 2010 23:22

NEWS agencies, newspapers and satellite channels have all carried the story of an Air France flight attendant who had been stealing from passengers while they slept, especially on long haul flights such as those between Paris and Tokyo.

The reports noted that Japanese passengers usually carry with them large amounts of cash as well as valuable mobile phones, and that the air hostess was caught after it was discovered that most of the thefts happened on flights she was on.

This woman would not have been able to steal if she were working for Saudi Arabian Airlines. First, she could easily find a job with Saudia because our people do not thoroughly scrutinize résumés. However, I do not say she would not be able to steal because she would have lost the tact for stealing but because of the special features and characteristics of the Kingdom’s national carrier.

Saudia passengers are unable to sleep on flights because they usually get enough sleep at airports while waiting for their flights due to delays. They usually sleep well enough and do not need to sleep during the flight no matter how long it may be.

The second reason why this woman will not be able to steal on board a Saudia aircraft is that the bell that passengers press to summon flight attendants never stops ringing.

This is not because passengers are demanding but because flight attendants simply ignore them. The continuous ringing of the bell would scare any thief and make him or her hesitant to steal. She will know that all passengers who have called will be waiting for her.

A third reason is that air hostesses on board our flights sleep more than passengers during long haul flights. As soon as air hostesses finish serving food, they go to sleep because they are certain that the management on the ground will ignore passenger complaints.

The management does not follow up on flights. An example of this was seen recently when an Abha to Riyadh flight was delayed by about 11 hours because the crew did not show up. It is little wonder since this coincided with a World Cup match in South Africa.

A fourth reason why this woman cannot steal on Saudia flights is that our airlines only employ young air hostesses who have little need to steal while airlines such as Air France employ much older and experienced hostesses who have financial obligations toward their family that cannot be met by their salaries.

World Cup Fever

Every four years, the world gets together for the biggest party in the planet: the World Cup. What used to be a European and South American club, is now truly global, with North America, Asia, and now Africa having hosted the event. The last World Cup final was watched by 725 million people -and that number grows with every event. Here in Uruguay, every match is televised, and you can pretty much tune-in to a World Cup-related show 24/7. When Uruguay plays, an eerie calm befalls and it suddenly feels like a ghost town -at work, in school, at home or at restaurants, every last soul is in front of a TV.
World Cup fever is here.

Southern Fall

Montevideo is a city full of trees. They line most streets in abundance. Yet the species chosen don't produce the full spectrum of red and gold leaves come fall, as do most trees in North America; just a few shades of dull brown and yellow. I miss the symphony of color.

House Passes Health Care Reform

The health insurance industry is very powerful and so is their lobby. They have almost limitless resources, and have used them to apply enormous pressure to congress and to conduct a missinformation campaign of legendary proportions in order to maintain the status quo. They don't want to give up the golden egg goose -everything else is inconsequential. This is of course, predictable. Why give up the such an enviable situation?

The truly remarkable fact is that the current administration managed to break the status quo.

Altruism over self-interest. Truth over deception.

History will rememeber this day as a good day for the US.

Chinese Democracy

Some snapshots from the Guns 'n Roses concert I attended last Thursday... No bad, but it started 90 minutes late, at 10:30 PM, and it ended around 4 AM... GNR started playing around 1:30 AM, and people were starting to fall asleep... there were rumors that Axl Rose got there really late, so we had to put up with Sebastian Bach a bit too long.

In spite of it all, it was an awesome concert.

Avatar

In case you haven't heard enough about this film, it's a visually stunning, very well executed epic about a technologically primitive but environmentally advanced people living in harmony with their home, Pandora, a moon orbiting a gas giant in a distant star system.

Their only sin was to stand between belicose, technically savy, and environmentally primitive humans, and the object of their greed: a valuable substance with the comically foreshadowing name of "unobtanium". The story has been told before: western/transnational powers steamrolling the innocent natives for King or quarterly reports. Watching this film, I found myself wishing I could live a simple and full life in this beautiful quasi-magical land among these free-spiritited people and their tropical paradise, in perfect synergy with their surroundings, free of materialistic concerns, lacking nothing.

Then I realized they lacked a very important something: the keys to the Universe.

It is true that the natives of Pandora, like many native peoples on Earth, have an enviable lifestyle, a harmonious, compassionate society. But the "greed" that causes more developed cultures to do evil deeds is just one side of the coin. On the other side there is the drive to know more, to do more, to be more. Devastating weapons and environmental tragedies, but also medicine, and starships, and new frontiers. This drive is what will enable us someday to be both masters, and nurturing stewards of our biosphere(s).

The people of Pandora are happy with what they have and want nothing more; but we do, we always want more -and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Why do people vote against their own interests?

I often find myself doumfounded by how often policies that are in the best interest of the majority -that are aimed at fixing major problems- are met with strong antagonism by large sectors of the the public. Helth care reform in the US is an obvious example. I have a hard time living with the fact that significant percentages of the population can be so easily manipulated, regardless of how much money special interests throw at maintaining the status quo. I'm not sure what upsets me the most: that politicians will play to the tune of special interests against the people they are supposed to serve, or that people will actually fall for it. The article below goes a long way to explain why this happens, so I decided to copy the whole thing into my posting. Enjoy.

The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Anger

Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called "the paranoid style" of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.

Stories not facts

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."

Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

"I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

"Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him."

Reverse revolution

Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen.

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

"It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted.

This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.

And when the politicians say to the people protesting: 'But we're doing this for you', that just makes it worse. In fact, that seems to be what makes them angriest of all.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8474611.stm

Published: 2010/01/30 00:57:43 GMT

© BBC MMX

Southern Summer

No winter for me...
:-)

Architecture as Art

How to drink "mate"

Pour. Sip. Look cool

Mate is a traditional caffeinated tea-like drink from southern South America. Unlike tea or coffee, the filtration process happens while drinking, not before: a special metal straw has a closed end whith tiny holes in it that allows in the infusion but keeps out the herb.
A special "cup" or gourd is filled with "Yerba Mate" once, and then hot water, usually from a thermos, is poured into the gourd. Lastly, the straw goes into the gourd and the infusion sipped via the metal straw.

You can read all about it here.
The habit of drinking Yerba Mate is so common in Uruguay that you can often see young and old drinking it on the streets.