Late Night Laugh: Choice Texas Dining
June 5, 2008
Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s Nose And The Sketch Artist
June 5, 2008
Accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed objected that a courtroom sketch artist had made his nose look too wide on Thursday and sent her back to revise the drawing.
“He didn’t like the nose,” artist Janet Hamlin said.
Mohammed asked Hamlin to obtain a copy of a photo taken shortly after his 2003 capture in Pakistan and redraw the nose to look as it did in that picture, the artist said.
Mohammed and four accused co-conspirators appeared in court at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba for the first time on charges of conspiring with al Qaeda and murdering nearly 3,000 people in the 2001 hijacked plane attacks on the United States.
Cameras are banned in the top-security courtroom so news organizations hired Hamlin to sketch the scene. Military censors review Guantanamo courtroom sketches before they can be released to ensure they do not reveal any national secrets.
But Thursday’s hearing marked the first time defendants themselves were granted the right to approve their likenesses.
“It’s a defence attorney issue,” said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “It’s remarkable the lengths we go to to take their desires into considerations.”
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Japan’s prime minister Thursday that the world will soon not include the United States, Iranian news agency IRNA reported.
“The U.S. domination is on the fall. Iran and Japan as two civilized and influential nations should get ready for a world minus the U.S.,” Ahmadinejad told Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on the sidelines of the U.N. food summit in Rome on Tuesday, IRNA reported.
The hard-line leader called for Japan’s cooperation in finding their historical and true status, IRNA reported.
“No body or power can wipe Iran off the world scene and Iranian nation of course can well manage its affairs under such an atmosphere,” he said.
Also on Thursday, Iran accused the U.S. of pressuring the U.N.’s nuclear agency to base its latest investigation of Tehran’s nuclear activities on fake evidence suggesting that Iran had a secret weapons program.
Ahmadinejad is currently at odds with Iran’s new reformist parliament due to growing social and economic unrest.
In addition, the Iranian president is under fire worldwide for his comments on the destruction of Israel , his “suspicions” of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and his belief that homosexuals deserve to be executed, tortured or both.
How do you revive a failing economy in an Islamic nation?
Pray less, work more so that in the end, you’ll pay less for life’s necessities.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
For Egyptian-born Muslim cleric and television host, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, there is a simple answer to Egypt’s productivity problem — pray less, work more.
“Praying is a good thing … 10 minutes should be enough,” Al-Jazeera television personality Qaradawi says in a religious edict, or fatwa, published on his website.
Praying five times a day is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with the well-known requirements of making a pilgrimage to Mecca and of giving alms to the poor.
Two of each day’s five sessions — the dhuhr (noon) prayer and asr (afternoon) prayer — fall within working hours, bringing work to a standstill at least twice a day in many places.
A prayer generally takes an average of 10 minutes, but it can be extended if a worshipper chooses to recite one of the longer verses of the Koran.
And before the prayers themselves, there is also a mandatory ablution during which worshippers must wash their faces, hands and arms, feet and heads. In large office buildings, the trips to the bathroom can also eat away at valuable work time.
Qaradawi’s plea to reconcile faith and productivity may hit some hurdles as it risks upsetting the deeply entrenched custom of “prayer breaks” at work.
Society’s increased Islamisation over the past 30 years has already silenced some critics of long prayer sessions.
According to an official study, Egypt’s six million government employees are estimated to spend an average of only 27 minutes per day actually working, reflecting a real problem with productivity.
Qaradawi’s fatwa is aimed at removing prayer as a pretext for not producing.
Religious beliefs in Egypt are very overt, from the headscarf covering the majority of women’s heads to the bruise on many a man’s forehead showing how piously and how often he has touched his head to the ground in prostration.
In every large company, factory or public building, there is a formal prayer space. Individual prayer rugs, slumped over the backs of chairs or folded neatly on a desk, are often at hand in public offices, ready to be grabbed once the call to prayer booms out over the public address system.
In downtown Cairo, lies Mugamma, a 13-storey building that is the beating heart of Egypt’s sprawling bureaucracy, where 65 different government services are performed by some 18,000 employees.
Thirty thousand people walk through the doors of the vast Soviet-style building every day, hoping to get a passport or a work permit, or whatever it is they need.
“But when it comes to prayer time, and there are many, there is no hope of anything getting done for an unknown length of time,” says Ahmed Ghani, whose company has tasked him with scouring the labyrinth for official stamps.
The 90s Egyptian cult film comedy “Terrorism and Kebab” (Al-Irhab wal Kabab) recounts the tribulation of a middle class man’s adventure in the Mugamma with the lead role played by Egyptian screen giant Adel Imam.
Frustrated by the bureaucracy and repeatedly being told to wait for a government employee to finish his prayer, Imam’s character ends up in a tussle with a security guard and is mistaken for a terrorist.
Qaradawi has a few ideas of his own to help shorten the prayer time: Muslims can do the mandatory pre-prayer wash at home before reaching the office, instead of in the office toilets during working hours.
“To save some time, they can also just put some water over their socks, instead of taking (socks) off to wash the feet,” Qaradawi says in his fatwa.
While it may be too early to judge the effects of the popular sheikh’s fatwa on productivity in the work place, Egyptian clerics, in a rare show of unity, have largely agreed with the Qatar-based cleric.
“He’s right. I cannot say the contrary. One must not waste time at work and use prayer as the pretext,” Sheikh Fawzi al-Zifzaf, of the centre of Islamic studies at Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s main seat of learning, told AFP.
As for Mohammed al-Shahhat al-Gendi, secretary general of the Council of Supreme Islamic affairs, “10 minutes are absolutely suitable for one prayer.”
“Improving productivity is not at all contrary to Islam,” he told AFP.
They both also agree with Qaradawi when he says: “Praying is of course compulsory, and if everyone were to pray, it shows that society is on the right track.”
Yesterday, we wrote Obama And The Middle Class He Pretends To Care About, in which we examined the ethereal realities that define the MIddle Class.
For some, Middle Class is defined as the college educated manager/teacher/engineer types. Most doctors, lawyers and accountants see themselves as ‘Middle Class.’ Others see the ‘real’ Middle Class as the small business people who employed others in small offices, factories or retail shops. Still others see the Middle Class populated with skilled tradespeople or unionized factory workers, Still others see the real Middle Class as the highly motivated group of people with pickup trucks who place classified ads stating they will do anything, anytime, anywhere and have enough skills to get the job done. Others clean 2 houses a day, 5 days a week for $150 a day, cash ($1500 a week, tax free- not too shabby)…
What do these Middle Class groups have in common? Absolutely nothing. They don’t mingle socially, culturally or even politically. This begs a question: To whom is Barack Obama (and others) talking? The answer is simple and unadorned. Obama, et al, are talking to the Middle Class consumers in all of us. What unites the disparate Middle Class is consumerism. We want the same fashions and the same cookware and the same replacement windows. We buy the same greeting cards and we root for the same team and mascot and listen to and buy the same music.
To be sure, determined and frenzied consumerism is a disease, brought on by a virus that attacks a community with little or no common culture or values. Despite the decades of efforts of well meaning social engineering projects that dwarf the Hoover and Aswan dams, what divides the Middle Class is as deeply entrenched as ever…
All too often and by design, the great democracies distinguish class by economic standing, as if that were the only measure of class status, when in truth. In fact, economic standing plays only a part (and a small one at that) in determining class. Western democracies and progressives in particular insist that class disparity can be narrowed by the redistribution of wealth, i.e., the redistribution of consumer spending.
This is what Barack Obama believes, that social disparities are mostly rooted in an inherently flawed economic dynamic. What Mr Obama and others (including Hillary Clinton, albeit less sos) refuse to acknowledge is that social disparities exist because our economic dynamic is nothing more than a mirror that reflects the current social realities- not the least of which is that we are not all the same.
Very often, the working class and lower class are lumped together as a single demographic. Academics and politicians can be counted on to lump the working class and lower class together. More often than not, that kind of treatment only serves to alienate people from the political process and they certainly regard academia as far removed from their realities.
The reason is simple. Members of the working class want to work and will do just about any kind of work to remain employed and as independent as possible. Members of the lower class simply don’t want to work (the outrage at President Clinton’s welfare reform programs made that painfully evident). Members of the working class see their entry into the Middle Class a job or an opportunity away. Members of the lower class see themselves entitled to the spoils of Middle Class success by way of income redistribution. Barack Obama shares the views of the lower classes. [emp-SC&A].
Not surprisingly, Barack Obama also sees himself as privileged. There is a direct correlation between the lower classes and the upper classes. Members of those classes see themselves as ‘entitled’- the upper class by way of pedigree or station in life and the lower classes by reason of entitlement. These groups validate themselves by virtue of identity only. Obama reminds voters of his identity as a black candidate, in either direct or indirect terms at every opportunity, as if he wants to remind voters his ’special’ class and therefore entitlement. His identity is central to his campaign. While HIllary Clinton points that it is ‘time that a woman’ had an opportunity for the White House, she is not running on her identity. She is running on her record, achievements and experience (whatever that might be).
Conversely, the working class and entrepreneurial class see themselves very differently. They want to be recognized for the status they have earned.
The only time class distinctions between the Middle, Working and Lower classes were blurred was during war and the post war eras. In America and in Europe, the great conflicts and common effort to fight tyranny united those nations in their shared values and common goals, irrespective of class. In the postwar era, the political divides represented the ‘how to do it’ and not the ‘what to do.’ After witnessing first hand the cost of tyranny, class distinctions began to narrow and in some cases, even dissipate. In the postwar era, education was meant to provide equal opportunities for every citizen. The great push for outstanding public education for all was never meant to provide for equal outcomes for all.
With a bit of clarity, we can see that progressives today have more in common with the societies and cultures that deprive people of opportunity than the cultures and societies that provide people the opportunity to succeed- and thus redefine their class and status for themselves. It is only when people are able to redefine class structure for themselves that cultures and societies really succeed. In the post war era, the working class may have been poor but the notion of the ‘dignity of work’ also came into our conscienceless. The working class were no longer invisible and their hopes dreams and aspirations were to fuel an economic, technological and social boom that was to change society forever.
It is that change that progressives want to reverse, because a successful culture and society that offers equal economic opportunity for all, will always self correct the excesses to benefit society as a whole. Barack Obama represents the kind of thinking that is uncomfortable with providing everyone real equal opprtunity.
An email from Shrinkwrapped highlighted that reality. In response to our previous post, he points to Barack Obama, ‘the man behind the curtain’:
Don’t forget, Obama belonged for 20 years to a church that explicitly rejected “middle classness” in favor of racial solidarity. He is dangerously empty of everything except conventional leftist ideology.
A BINGO! observation. For Obama and other progressives, identity- be it racial, economic or victim status entitles one to equal social or economic status. The higher social status is reserved for a special few- those who deny anyone the right to excel, exceed and determine their own destiny. Taken to it’s logical conclusion, progressives want a few to work, take their earnings and cut everyone a check in equal amounts.
What Obama also refuses to acknowledge is the truth that despite ‘progressive’ notions of moral relatavism and silly dreams of a classless society, we really are all very different.
The upper classes see their identity in terms of dynasty. Portarits of ancestors on the wall as as important to their sense of identity as the apostles are to Christians or the Prophets are to Jews.
The solidly Middle Class take comfort in their pensions, savings and the estate they will leave behind to make the lives of their children and grandchildren easier and to take advantage of every opportunity available.
The working class struggle. They will not leave much for their children, other than the lessons and examples of their lives. They have helped their children as best they could and dream that the efforts of their children will bring them easier and more comfortable lives. The working class mark occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas with gifts bought with savings accumulated over the year. The working class very often define their success and wealth with close knit family ties.
The lower class is interested only in the here and now and instant gratification. The arrival of the monthly support checks is often met with the joy and greed of Christmas morning.
No matter where on the environmental tree you might have come from, a healthy society allows you to climb higher. An unhealthy society (read:progressive) wants you to stay where you are- they will come to you and address your every need and desire- even if that means bringing down others (an idea that pleases many in the lower classes).
What is ignored or decried by the progressive community that Barack Obama belongs is that when all is said and done, we are all determine our own class by virtue of what we choose to accomplish and work for. It is our character and not our environment that has the greatest effect on our place in society.
Tomorrow, we will discuss how we can all share the same values and be proudly individual.
Part Three of Obama And The Middle Class He Pretends To Care About.
