BUENOS DIAS!! JOU HAVE YUST RECEIB A MEHICAN BIRUS!!!!!
SEENCE WE NOT SO TE KNOLOGICALLY ADBANCED IN MEHICO- DIS IS A MANUAL BIRUS. PLEASE DELETE ALL THE FILES ON JOUR HARD DRIVE JOURSELF AND SEND THIS E-MAIL TO EBERYONE JOU KNOW.
TAN JOU POR YELPING ME.
JULIO MANUEL JOSE RODRIGUEZ GARCIA DE LA CRUZ DE INFANTE SALGADO FERNANDEZ. JOU CAN CALL ME CHUWEE.
I AM A 29 YEAR OLD BROWN HAIR, BROWN EYE, 5′9″ MEHICAN HACKER LIVING AT 129-A DELGADO STREET, EAST MONTERREY, TAMAULIPAS, MEHICO…AND I’M LOOKING FOR LOVE WITH A WOMAN NOT TOO FAR FROM THE HOLE IN THE FENCE…BUT DON’T TELL NOBODY, OK?
OK.
Hijab Pageant, Dim Bulbs, Judges And Really Bad Timing
June 12, 2008
The television programme reviewed videos posted online by 46 woman wearing the veil prescribed by Islamic ideals of modesty before choosing 18-year-old Huda Falah.
But there was a furious reaction from some members of the Islamic community which is already antagonised by the Scandanavian nation’s role in a cartoon scandal involving the Prophet Mohammad.
“The whole point of the headscarf is that it’s a symbol of chastity,” said spokeswoman Bettina Meisner. “We don’t wish young women to expose themselves as objects.”
Shoots Classmates at point blank range: ‘I didn’t realize they would die.’
“I honestly believed that if you shoot somebody, that they would get back up,” Ramsey told ABC News in a recent interview at the Arizona prison where he is serving a 210-year sentence. It’s hard to accept, he admits, but Ramsey said his naivete left him unable to grasp that firing a gun in the real world is different from firing one in a video game: “I didn’t realize that you shoot somebody, they die.”
There are idiot criminals. There are also idiot judges.
A closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.
In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate…
Wet weather across British Columbia is threatening profit margins for producers of one of the province’s largest — although illegal — cash crops — outdoor marijuana.
B.C. has endured weeks of unseasonable drizzle and grey skies this spring with temperatures touching record lows in the months of May and June, and growers are worried about mildew killing the seedlings.
Marc Emery, a marijuana advocate whom some media have dubbed the “Prince of Pot,” said growers are worried their annual crop worth up to an estimated billion dollars may be rotting in the ground.
“They’re all very nervous right now,” Emery told the CBC on Tuesday…
…Benjamin Baker, 27, of Princes Highway in Corio, Victoria, pleaded guilty in Geelong Magistrates Court yesterday to stalking and using a telecommunications device to harrass.
Police Prosecutor Seaton Lillas said Baker repeatedly harassed his victim by phone and sent her video of him masturbating.
Unfortunately for Baker, one of his video calls was made while the woman was at her local police station laying a complaint.
“The victim answered the call to find Baker again masturbating himself and she showed the officer taking her statement,” Senior Constable Lillas told the court.
Magistrate Tim McDonald called Baker’s conduct as disturbing and fined him $3000.
Inconspicuous Consumption: ‘The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy—and vice-versa’
June 12, 2008
About seven years ago, University of Chicago economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst were researching the “wealth gap” between black and white Americans when they noticed something striking. African Americans not only had less wealth than whites with similar incomes, they also had significantly more of their assets tied up in cars. The statistic fit a stereotype reinforced by countless bling-filled hip-hop videos: that African Americans spend a lot on cars, clothes, and jewelry—highly visible goods that tell the world the owner has money.
But do they really? And, if so, why?
The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.
On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)
Of course, different ethnic groups could simply have different tastes. Maybe blacks just enjoy jewelry more than whites do. Maybe they buy costlier clothes to deter slights from racist salesclerks. Maybe they spend more on cars for historical reasons, because of the freedom auto travel gave African Americans during the days of segregated trains and buses. Maybe they just aren’t that interested in private colleges or big-screen TVs. Or maybe not. Economists hate unfalsifiable tautologies about differing tastes. They want stories that could apply to anyone.
So the researchers went back to Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption. Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. “The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote. Along these lines, the economists hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.
To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.
The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.
So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today—and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor. Veblen was right.
But he was also wrong. Or at least his theory is out of date. Given that the richer your group, the less flashy spending you’ll do, conspicuous consumption isn’t a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase. It declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer. “Bling rules in emerging economies still eager to travel the status-through-product consumption road,” the market-research group Euromonitor recently noted, but luxury businesses “are becoming aware that bling isn’t enough for growing numbers of consumers in developed economies.” At some point, luxury becomes less a tool of public status competition and more a means to private pleasure.
In Veblen’s day, the less affluent scrimped on their homes in order to keep up appearances in public. “The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers,” Veblen wrote, noting that people therefore “habitually screen their private life from observation.” By contrast, consider David Brooks’s observation in Bobos in Paradise that, for today’s educated elites,
it’s virtuous to spend $25,000 on your bathroom, but it’s vulgar to spend $15,000 on a sound system and a wide-screen TV. It’s decadent to spend $10,000 on an outdoor Jacuzzi, but if you’re not spending twice that on an oversized slate shower stall, it’s a sign that you probably haven’t learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life.Virtuous or vulgar, what all these items have in common is that they’re invisible to strangers. Only your friends and family see them. Any status they confer applies only within the small group you invite to your home. And the snob appeal Brooks pokes fun at corresponds to the size of the audience. Many friends may see your Jacuzzi or media room, but unless you’re on HGTV, only intimates will tour your master bathroom. A slate shower stall may make you feel rich, but it won’t tell the world that you are. As peer groups get richer, the balance between private pleasure and publicly visible consumption shifts.
Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff describe a similar pattern in their book, The Middle-Class Millionaire, which analyzes the spending habits of the 8.4million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations. They focus less on impressing strangers and more on family- and self-improvement. Even when they invest in traditional luxuries like second homes, jets, or yachts, they prefer fractional ownership. “They’re looking for ownership to be converted into a relationship rather than an asset they have to take care of,” says Schiff. Their primary luxuries are time and attention.
The shift away from conspicuous consumption—from goods to services and experiences—can also make luxury more exclusive. Anyone with $6,000 can buy a limited-edition Bottega Veneta bag, an elaborately beaded Roberto Cavalli minidress, or a Cartier watch. Or, for the same sum, you can register for the TED conference. That $6,000 ticket entitles you to spend four days in California hearing short talks by brainy innovators, famous (Frank Gehry, Amy Tan, Brian Greene) and not-so-known. You get to mingle with smart, curious people, all of whom have $6,000 to spare. But to go to TED, you need more than cash. The conference directors have to deem you interesting enough to merit one of the 1,450 spots. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a velvet rope.
As for goods, forget showing off. “If you want to live like a billionaire, buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine. You can’t park a mattress in your driveway, but it will last for decades and you can enjoy it every night.
Death By Drowning: More Multicultural Failure
June 12, 2008
What happens when the incentive to remain apart drowns cultural integration and assimilation?
Dr Farhan Nizami, director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies:
“Immigrant communities have to do more to get integrated, particularly on issues of language and education. Education is the biggest challenge for the Muslim community in Britain. There has to be emphasis on young Muslim men and women being educated in the best institutions so that you can raise their aspirations. Then they can recognise that they can play a part in the mainstream and don’t have to set up their own little shops.”
At first glance, this is a breath of fresh Islamic air, whose simplicity has the strength of a wind to sweep away all the distracting talk of how Governments should do more, how some minority faiths receive more attention than others, how this is a “Christian country” and if only the Church of England had the strength if its convictions it would stand up to alien creeds.
The simple honesty of Dr Nizami cuts through all that: if parents simply took greater responsibility for their children’s upbringing and education, the opportunity to be perverted by militant extremism would not arise.
The simple honesty of Dr Nizami cuts through all that: if parents simply took greater responsibility for their children’s upbringing and education, the opportunity to be perverted by militant extremism would not arise.
Related:
Muslim Forced Marriage Crisis:
Britain’s Muslim community is facing a “crisis” because hundreds of forced marriages go unreported and unnoticed, a legal group has said.
According to the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT), more than 70% of marriages in the Muslim community which involve a foreign spouse have some element of coercion or force.
In its Liberation From Forced Marriage report, the organisation also claims young Muslims in Britain are “under siege” from older generations and alienated from mosques.
The MAT claims that while there are currently 300 reported cases of forced marriages brought to the attention of the police and government authorities, the true figure is in the thousands.
The report says: “These figures reflect the crisis that has loomed within the Muslim community without being noticed or dealt with for the past two decades.
“The figures that are reported to the authorities are only the tip of the iceberg.”
According to the report, forced marriages are a reality for many young Muslims in the UK.
“Journalists Are Pimps For War, My Friends…”
June 12, 2008
Imagine a country where Americans are beloved, mini-mansions are springing up, and oil bubbles forth unaided. Denis Johnson reports from the new wheeler-dealer capital of the Middle East and asks, Is this the future of Iraq or just a desert mirage?…
They call it “The Other Iraq,” and all of them—the Kurdish representative Qubad Talabany in Washington; Kurdish Regional Government president Masoud Barzani and his nephew, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani; head of Foreign Relations Falah Mustafa Bakir; oil minister Ashti Hawrami; the man in a shop who won’t accept money from Americans in exchange for a kilo of apricots—want the news out: This is what Cheney-Bush wanted. That’s the news from here. This is free enterprise blooming—not “booming,” our driver Hameed insists carefully—in the mountains and desert of northern Iraq…
“It’s safe here, you can go anywhere”—by which they mean wherever you find yourself in this region the size of Maryland, you’ll be safe. But whether you can actually get through the checkpoints without papers from the Ministry of Security, that’s quite another matter. With its zealous and largely successful antiterrorist measures and its capitalist fever and as-yet-incomplete system of laws, the country serves up a blend of Orwellian, penitentiary-style security and Wild West laissez-faire: no speed limits, no driver’s insurance, no D.U.I. traps—there’s very little drinking and apparently zero drug abuse—loose regulations for firearms, and homesteaders’ rights to rural land; also—at least while the parliament wrestles with the question of government revenue—no taxes. Of any kind. But to board a plane leaving Erbil, passengers must pass two vehicle checkpoints, four electronic screenings and pat-downs, and a final bag-and-body search planeside. Among the ads on the airport terminal’s walls:
Khanzad American Village
“Welcome to Luxury”
American Village
The Most Exclusive Villas in KurdistanAnd the Kurds love Americans. Love, love. Investors swarm in from all over the globe, and foreigners are common in Erbil, but if you mention tentatively and apologetically that you’re American, a shopkeeper or café owner is likely to take you aside and grip your arm and address you with the passionate sincerity of a drunken uncle: “I speak not just for me but all of Kurdish people. Please bring your United States Army here forever. You are welcome, welcome. No, I will not accept your money today, please take these goods as my gift to America…”
It’s a land definitely on its way, but to what? “Basically,’’ Rambo says “the model is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates: oil-rich, almost entirely dependent on imported expertise, imported goods, imported workers. I wish I had a hand clicker to count the number of times each day I heard someone mention that place. That’s all you hear about. Dubai, Dubai, Dubai…’’
How much oil? Depending on who’s counting, Iraq as a whole has anywhere from 115 billion barrels of “proven” reserves down to half that much, which would indicate nothing’s really proven. A fifth of that or more lies in the Kurdish region. That puts Kurdistan’s reserves well ahead of the U.S.’s total reserves and equal to all of Asia’s. George Yacu, a Chaldean Christian Kurd who served as a technical adviser for Iraq’s national oil company for nearly 30 years, seems to find the question “how much” technically interesting but scientifically unanswerable, beyond his saying, “But nobody knows until they drill…”
We’ve been involved in the Middle East since 1945, exclusively because it’s where the oil is. Although the rhetoric, starting with Truman’s in 1946 down to Bush’s in today’s paper, has been rendered in apocalyptic terms—war between good and evil, the clash of civilizations—if the oil were to move miraculously someday to another point on the globe, so would our involvement. But the oil’s under Iraq, and according to George Yacu, 38 percent of it lies in the Kurdish region in natural reservoirs less than 3,000 meters below the surface, some as shallow as 600 meters down—easy to get to and easy to refine, compared with, say, the recent strike off the Brazilian coastline, which is under a mile of ocean and another mile of rock, or most of Canada’s reserves, which are mixed with sand…
And I’m thinking, Yes, this is the climax of the piece right here, affluent Kurds clowning around, the magazine’s going to love this entertaining stuff, so why does that make me feel like a pimp in a burgundy velvet suit? Who are these people who keep Al Qaeda from infiltrating their homeland while the U.S. Army scratches its head and watches the rest of Iraq fall to pieces? And why haven’t the New York Times and CNN taken notice? Here’s a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that’s the news from here.
What isn’t being taught in schools.
Below is a chart of arms sales to Iraq. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) .
See also “Yeah, Well America Influenced Saddam And Middle East Policy.”
Portions of this post have been previously published.
| Year | Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact |
France | China (PRC) | United States |
Egypt | Others | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | 1,321 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,326 |
| 1974 | 1,471 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,476 |
| 1975 | 1,087 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,122 |
| 1976 | 1,161 | 119 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,280 |
| 1977 | 1,062 | 106 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1,168 |
| 1978 | 1,827 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 1,873 |
| 1979 | 1,108 | 78 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 17 | 1,203 |
| 1973-79 | 9,037 | 374 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 37 | 9,448 |
| 1973-79 | 95.7% | 4.0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.4% | 100% |
| 1980 | 1,665 | 241 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 114 | 2,032 |
| 1981 | 1,780 | 731 | 0 | 0 | 46 | 182 | 2,739 |
| 1982 | 2,023 | 673 | 217 | 0 | 71 | 227 | 3,211 |
| 1980-82 | 5,468 | 1,645 | 217 | 0 | 129 | 523 | 7,982 |
| 1980-82 | 68.5% | 20.6% | 2.7% | 0 | 1.6% | 6.6% | 100% |
| 1983 | 1,898 | 779 | 745 | 21 | 58 | 773 | 4,274 |
| 1984 | 2,857 | 883 | 1,065 | 6 | 0 | 116 | 4,927 |
| 1985 | 2,601 | 700 | 1,036 | 9 | 32 | 116 | 4,494 |
| 1986 | 2,663 | 251 | 918 | 9 | 70 | 86 | 3,997 |
| 1987 | 2,719 | 214 | 887 | 30 | 114 | 157 | 4,121 |
| 1988 | 1,202 | 355 | 301 | 125 | 118 | 196 | 2,297 |
| 1983-88 | 13,940 | 3,182 | 4,952 | 200 | 392 | 1,444 | 24,110 |
| 1983-88 | 57.8% | 13.2% | 20.5% | 0.8 | 1.6% | 6.0% | 100% |
| 1989 | 1,319 | 113 | 23 | 0 | 47 | 67 | 1569 |
| 1990 | 537 | 281 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 33 | 851 |
| Total $’s | 30,301 | 5,595 | 5,192 | 200 | 568 | 2,104 | 43,960 |
| Total %’s | 68.9% | 12.7% | 11.8% | 0.5% | 1.3% | 4.8% | 100% |
