Something Fishy

“Isn’t it ridiculous that fishermen are required to buy fish from other fishermen, in another country?”

Abu Nidal

The full story: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100128/FOREIGN/701279930/1186/enewsletter



(Image: credit)

Mensa Words

Guys.. I received this list via e-mail not so long ago. It really made me laugh. It's also quite sophisticated, so my simple mind did not understand every single word. However, I hope you'll find it fun and interesting.

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.


Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7.. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon : It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.



The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. (I presume you get this "Oy" reference.)

15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Muslims in Mecca

I read this article and it made me sad, and made me think:

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100120/BUSINESS/701209871/1186/enewsletter

They are opening a brand new luxury hotel in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and the VIPs from the hotel's management cannot attend the ceremony since they are not Muslims. Perhaps they should consider temporary conversion, just like some Muslims use temporary marriage to justify sex with prostitutes. Both are frowned upon obviously, and I'm sure that the former is punishable by some pretty painful stuff in Sharia law.

Anyway, the point of this post is why does Mecca exclude non-Muslims from visiting? It even gives Iranians a lot of difficulty because they are Shia Muslims and considered almost from a different faith.

Why does Saudi Arabia have the right to apply this rule? Isn't Mecca (and Madina) Muslim cities for all the Muslims? Why shouldn't Muslims have a say about this, and I don't mean only those in the Saudi Government? I am sure that moderates in Iran, Morocco, the UAE, and Egypt would allow non-Muslims. After all, the big mosques in those countries are all open to non-Muslims.

What does this say about Muslims and Islam? We have something to hide? Of course so! I've been to the Vatican and La Sagrada Famiglia and probably a hundred churches and a few synagogues too. They don't ask for your faith, but for your respect. Most mosques actively welcome non-Muslims, but again, they ask for your respect.


(Image taken by BuJ, Barcelona, Catalan, Espana 2007)

I'm sure that the Prophet (PBUH) would support this, because he never actually banned peaceful non-Muslims from Mecca or Madina. In fact he actively traded with Jews and respected Christians (who respected him back). Jews and Christians are considered "people of the book" and should be protected in Islam. All of Judaism's and Christianity's prophets are revered in Islam.

Perhaps it's time for Saudi Arabia to wisen up, and open up.

Lane Dis-cipline

The subject here is obvious. It's the lack of lane discipline in this country, the UAE. We have amazing roads, really world-class, but completely shite drivers. When you have more than one lane, you need to observe lane discipline. I'm not going to explain or define what that is, because most people should know it (if you have a driving license) and because the name is self-explanatory.



We have two kinds of morons on our roads. First is the type that use the 2nd fastest lane (they usually have light trucks or mini-busses, painted white) and they drive 40% slower than people on either side of them. This is very unsafe since it creates an island, and drivers have to overtake from either side. Obviously under-taking is illegal, but when the road is busy, many drivers do it. Sometimes you have no choice. My friend was once penalised (fine + points) for undertaking in the UAE because the car in front of him in the fastest lane would not move. Seriously, Police, you should fine the people who do not understand the concept of land discipline. We need to educate people, starting with the Police. You cannot apply a rule without understanding it first, no?

Anyway, back to the first type of morons. What happens when you have an island of traffic in the middle of the road is that it just confuses everyone and is a huge hazard. The Police recently published some publicity about honouring drivers who have not had a single penalty in the last 50 years. Have you seen the roads in the 1980s and before? Not a single radar. Not a single traffic jam. No wonder, there are no fines. Then these folk are probably too old to drive now and yet have a driving license (there is no maximum age law in the UAE), and most do not pass driving/eyesight tests to drive. Anyway, I criticise the Police, they need to look at all aspects of driving and not just focus on speeding or the use of a seatbelt. Oh yeah, the demographic of this first group of morons are the ever-popular Indian Subcon people, as demonstrated in the picture above taken from India (image credit: Picasa)

The second type of Moron is he who drives in the fastest lane and yet is the slowest driver. I won't waste much time on this, because it's obvious how dangerous that is. Sadly, as mentioned above, the Police do not penalise them and penalise those who overtake from the wrong side (undertaking) to move forward. These people usually become non-responsive if you use your high-beam to indicate your need to overtake, or your horn. They usually have stickers written in Arabic on the back of the car, and they are usually Emarati with a driving IQ between that of a goat and a 13-year old dog.


(image credit: here)

Note that we have minimum speed laws on the motorways here, but no one is aware of them, especially the Police. If they are reading (doubt many of their types can read English), then please note and take action. We're a laughing stock to the world, we have the best roads and the worst drivers and a lack of smart policing.

Dubai assassination is latest of Mossad’s miscalculations

Dubai assassination is latest of Mossad’s miscalculations

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100219/OPINION/702189968/1080/foreign

Alan Philps

* Last Updated: February 19. 2010 12:29AM UAE / February 18. 2010 8:29PM GMT

It is said that the perfect spy is someone who cannot attract a waiter’s attention in a restaurant. This seems to be true of the hit team which murdered the Hamas military leader, Mahmoud al Mabhouh, in Dubai last month. The individuals revealed by the Dubai police are no Sean Connerys or Mata Haris, rather the type of people you would not remember if you bumped into them on the street.

The unforgiving camera angles of closed circuit TV footage and the dorky disguises they used only accentuate their grim ordinariness. Surely the ranks of young men and women wanting to join the world’s security services – many of them addicts of the BBC’s Spooks and similar glossy intelligence dramas – will now fall off.

The painstaking work of the Dubai police has proved one thing. The all-seeing surveillance camera has killed off the notion that a forgettable face, a wig and a moustache are enough to make a good sleuth. To the surprise and embarrassment of the Israelis, the Dubai police have been able to combine their surveillance footage with visual intelligence from different hotels, the airport and passport control, as well as cell phone information, to put together a timeline of the operation and a compelling movie, complete with cast list – an Ocean’s 11 stripped of glamour.

As the Israeli investigative journalist and expert on the Mossad, Ronen Bergman, has concluded: “This is the end of an era, the end of the assassination that leaves no trace, where you could perform such an operation with no marks. In the modern age it leaves a lot of marks, whatever way you perform it.”

Apart from that, there is much that remains murky in the operation. Reaction in Israel, initially quietly jubilant, is now tempered with unease over the political and diplomatic fallout. The standard Israeli government response to any accusation of assassination on foreign territory, the challenge of “Prove it!”, is pitifully threadbare in this case. The fact that the passports of British citizens who live in Israel were cloned to provide false papers points the finger unerringly at Mossad and makes the organisation look cavalier with the security of its own citizens.

According to security sources quoted by the BBC yesterday, the cloning of the passports was done to a very high degree of sophistication, beyond the capability of most intelligence services. This is further evidence of Israeli involvement, as Israel has a long record of faking British passports.

In the 1980s Israel promised to stop this practice after a courier taking a consignment of eight blank British passports to the Israeli embassy in Bonn – then the capital of West Germany – left them in a phone booth. The passports were picked up by the German police, and eventually traced to Israel.

The passport issue, as well as the revelation that the Israeli embassy in London was funding a Palestinian double agent who was hiding a big arms cache in the city of Hull, caused the British government to order a freeze in relations with Mossad and the expulsion of three operatives. The Mossad station in London was effectively closed down – but not for long. By 1998 there were five operatives back working in the London embassy, according to a standard history of the organisation.

The summoning of the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, to the foreign office yesterday to explain the use of fake British passports should be seen in this light. While politics demands that the Israelis be reprimanded when they are caught out, normal co-operation between western intelligence services and Mossad tends to be restored fairly quickly. The key fact is that the Israelis are never caught cloning American documents. That would get the organisation into real trouble, whereas the wrath of European countries can be dismissed, or so it has proved in the past.

There are calls in the Israeli press for the current Mossad director general Meir Dagan to quit. But it seems unlikely he will go. He has a reputation for daring which pleases the Israeli public. He would have known that a murder in a five-star hotel would yield some embarrassing surveillance footage, but it was clearly considered a risk worth taking.

Israel wants the world to be repeatedly reminded that its arm is long. Mr Dagan is generally credited with the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the military commander of Hizbollah, in Damascus in 2008 – though there is always the possibility of several forces being involved together. With al Mabhouh, the aim would be to remove the stain of failure dating from the failed assassination by poisoning of the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman in 1997.

Vengeance and doing what makes the spooks feel good is not a policy, however. It is hard to think of any strategic gains that Israel has acquired from its long history of assassinations. When dealing with broad-based movements such as the Palestinians, no man is irreplaceable. Indeed, the dead man is replaced in time by someone usually more ruthless, and sometimes more competent.

In 1988 Israeli commandos killed Abu Jihad, the Fatah military commander, in front of his wife in Tunis. If such a respected figure as Abu Jihad had been alive, it would surely have been easier for Israel to make a historic accommodation with the Palestinians over the past 15 years.

The tactical lesson of the impossibility of carrying out a clean murder in a five-star hotel with security cameras in every corridor has been learnt. The real question is: what strategic goal does Israel achieve by carrying out assassinations? Certainly not its proclaimed goal of peace.

aphilps@thenational.ae