It occurs to me that one of the very best features of this forum is the amazing knowledge of the members. Members can provide fascinating information about just about everything.

But it can get really irritating when you only have a few minutes to catch up and must wade through pages of interesting but not useful at the moment information. Naturally, I am self-centred enough to consider my threadjacks fascinating to all (who isn't all agog about cats and handbag hehehe) but they can be counter-productive especially when we want others to use us as a source of birther information.

But threadjack or hijack has such a negative connotation! Perhaps we could call it what it really is... A fascinating tangent thread. I want to share in all the cool stuff the smarter kids know...just not when I want to read about birthers.

Yes, I know. Pollyanna Maru is at it again.

I actually enjoy our little threadjacks.

I love Pollyanna Maru

Here is a random tangent....Jordis Unga is supposed to be on The Voice this season! I haven't seen her in the first two episodes so she had to be coming up on the next one.

Uncle spike, would you please quit looking at me with those bedroom eyes? It's unnerving and extremely distracting.

Ok, fine...

In the mid-late 1970s a friend of mine was working for a US based multi-national company in Seremban, Malaysia. His boss, the managing director, was a US expat who had two grown children back in the US. He had gotten re-married in Malaysia, and since his new wife's family was Muslim, he had converted to Islam (pretty much in name only, which is a lot more common than many realize).

The MD and his family (wife and daughter) were returning from home leave in the US when their plane crashed during descent into Kuala Lumpur. There were a number of fatalities and also a number of survivors. My friend and another manager were waiting at the KL airport to meet the MD when they learned of the crash. They spent two days running around to various makeshift morgues and triage centres, and finally found that the wife and daughter had survived, but the MD had been killed. They got in touch with their company's regional HQ office in Hong Kong, and the company started the process of getting the body shipped back to the US. My friend and the other manager then went back to the morgue to let the people in charge know what was going on.

When they got there they were told that they had better leave. Now. My friend said, "No, we need to make sure that the body gets shipped back to the US properly." They were then told that they were being charged with stealing a Muslim body and that the religious (Sharia) police were on their way to arrest them. They hightailed it out of the morgue and drove straight to the US Embassy in KL. They arrived literally a few minutes ahead of the police, who demanded they be produced so they could be taken into custody. The Ambassador intervened, and finally got the police allow the body to be returned to the US on the condition that it be given a proper Muslim burial.

My random tangent... Jordis and I are Facebook friends. At least we were for a while. Haven't seen an update lately. Maybe she defriended me. Quel horreur.

Random tangent 2. I have a bad cold. And can't take anything for it due to some drug interaction issues. I bet the hospital ICU has less high maintenance patients than me right now.

Okay, so maybe I meant DON'T stop looking at me with those bedroom eyes.

Dang, that's a hair-raising story to be sure.

And not to divert too much from the observations on the extent to which Sharia Law pervades many countries (heh, this is a digression-free zone, right?), stories like this often trigger my anti-anti-government sentiments.

We're always hearing grumbling about wasting money on "foreign aid". In truth, the U.S. spends a pittance on foreign aid but this false conception of "foreign aid" is too often conflated with the State Deparment's larger presence overseas. By far the bulk of the resources are spent protecting American interests and Americans individually. Can you imagine the howling that would have ensued had we cut funding levels to the point that the U.S. had no effective diplomatic presence in KL and these unfortunate folks had been left to rot in prison?

It's the same folks who scream "cut something" who also cry "do something" when there's a problem. I'm off my soapbox. 'Nuff said.

Well if she did, hopefully it was because she realized I'm the only one she truly wants and since she knows we are also FB friends she thought the secret might get out.



I'm sorry to hear that. If it's the same cold bug that's been going around my work it's a bad one.
Try this: Take half a lemon, half a lime, scoop it all out and throw it all (rinds, juice and all) into some water, cover it and boil it for about 30 min, then drink it as hot as you can. It's an old Jamaican cold remedy that works wonders when you can't take anything. And for the high maintenance part, but some honey in it

I don't do that much cooking when I'm well.

PIPA quotes a Knowledge Networks poll that asked respondents to estimate how much of the U.S. Federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median estimate was 25%. A median "appropriate" percentage was 10%. The world would be a different place if 10% of the U.S. budget went to foreign aid.

In general, the American public cannot answer factual questions about the budget, the national debt, the trade deficit, or any other matters that require factual knowledge (such as the order of magnitude of the number of acres under Federal control). The younger generation will whip out a phone or tablet and get the answer in seconds, which is comforting provided that they can discern good sources from bad sources.

We have known for decades that we cannot expect anything remotely like reasonable answers to such questions, much less accurate answers. Daniel Yankelovich has been writing for years about ways to elicit better-informed public judgments. Most pollsters blithely go on as if such questions can be asked in routine polls and will elicit meaningful results. This is hazardous to our health when policy makers pay attention to such polls.

As a British expat who has spent most of the last 35 years living in islamic counries in The Middle East I would have a shedload of stories to tell about the islamic justice system including two spells of imprisonment (in Jeddah and one in Abu Dhabi).

While I have no doubt that the crux of the story is absolutely true I very much doubt that what they were actually being threatend being charged with with was 'stealing a muslim body'. There are often language difficulties and police are frequently unable to articulate exactly what they mean.

If the wife was still alive it would be her decision to make as regards what happened to the body, not his friends or his company. The above account isn't clear about what her role was, if any. If his wife was incapacitated and couldn't make the decision, islamic law would normally dictate that his father had the decision, if the father was not alive then his eldest brother, then his eldest son and so on. It sounds more like an error in the friends/company completing the correct procedures than anything else though obviously the authorities may have made noises about an islmic funeral for the sake of saving face, while knowing full well that they had no control over that once the body left their possession.

This is likely the case. At the time, English wasn't as widely spoken in Malaysia and my friend's Bahasa was non-existant. It was also his first expat assignment, and as a person who had lived his entire life in a small US town he was very much a stranger in a strange land.



Perhaps, although as a US citizen I would expect that the US Embassy might have also given his will, or any other instructions he'd left, higher weight.



That's true. I'll have to ask my friend about this next time we have a beer together (and with the six nations going on now, that'll likely be this weekend )



That's a good observation. While the company had plants in many countries around Asia, I believe this was their first foray into an Islamic country. Their regional headquarters was in Hong Kong, and it's possible (likely even) that they were relatively ignorant of how to properly handle an expat death in Malaysia.



Yeah, that was the impression he got too.

Thanks for the insights!

You're welcome Somerset. Your marrying of the two sets of information you now have and your conclusions make sense to me.

On reading my own words again I think I should perhaps just clarify that I wasn't engaged in any criminal activity. My own imprisonment (45 days in Jeddah in 1981) and 23 days (in Abu Dhabi in 1998) were both in relation to traffic incidents. The first in Jeddah involved 42 of the 45 locked up days being AFTER the police report was issued stating that I was 100% free of any blame for the accident (in which a pedestrian died), simply waiting for the 'system' to run its convoluted course for my release.

The second in Abu Dhabi (where I've now lived and worked most of each year for 21 years) involved drink driving, which the UAE police normally tend to have little interest in pursuing when there is no accident involved. However a road rage (on his part) incident with a muslim Pakistani nationality taxi driver in Abu Dhabi led to him making a formal complaint in which he included several blatant lies and which required the police to make a routine blood alcohol test of me. At the end of the day, the reality is that, however nasty his action was, the truth is that I had been drinking. I knew the law about driving after drinking and I knew the potential punishments so I've no real complaint. One good thing about the harshness of the sentencing for your first drink driving offence and the 'dungeon' nature of the jails is that just about nobody engages in law breaking and why nobody who does and who is sentenced ever re-offends (re any type of law breaking), including me!

Harsh drug laws ensure there are virtually no crackheads etc desperate for funding of their habit. That is one reason why there are virtually no incidences of crimes such as theft, housebreaking, car theft, mugging etc. I haven't had to lock my house or car doors in Abu Dhabi for 20 years. There are no fights in the bars and clubs. The inflexible laws are a trade off for a degree of peace of mind that I'm happy to make.

I was curious about the holidays, if any, Georgia would be celebrating between now and March 6 (i.e., whether the courts would be closed). Lookie:

Overlooking that November 25 is a Sunday, the citizens of Georgia get to celebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday on the day after Thanksgiving, and Washington's birthday on Christmas Eve. How lucky for them.

Going off on a tangent a bit (well, it is the name of the thread ), that's similar to the situation here in Singapore. I'm not in favor of draconian drug laws, but there's little question that draconian punishments do tend to lower crime rates. There was a lively discussion a while back on a Singapore expat board about Oliver Fricker, a Swiss national who painted some really creative graffiti on a couple of MRT cars. He was caught, and pled guilty. The minimum penalty for this type of vandalism is three months in jail and three strokes of the cane, and he was sentenced to five months and three strokes. A lot of people were going on about how caning is barbaric (it is), how Singapore wants to "improve Brand Singapore" and would do away with this punishment in such a high profile case. I argued that the two things most people know about Singapore, besides Singapore Air flight attendants, is caning and the chewing gum ban, so forgoing the punishment wouldn't do anything to improve the brand. They also argued that caning wasn't an effective deterrent against graffiti, to which I countered, "so show me all the graffiti around here." It's all but non-existant, which is pretty strong evidence that the draconian punishment does work as a deterrent.

In the end, Fricker appealed against the sentence, mainly because of the five months in jail. On appeal his sentence was increased to seven months. And he was caned.

So, when I need a new walking stick I'll fly to the Little Red Dot, call it that, and get caned. How thoughtful of them.

They only cane males under 50.

It's hard to get all that worked up about the caning issue. There are certainly worse things in the world. It strikes me that the humiliation of it is probably worse than the temporary pain. I suppose if you're talking something like 50 whacks, that's pretty bad, but three whacks? It can't be fun, but it just doesn't seem all that barbaric to me. Don't go to Singapore and vandalize things, and if someone does do that, I'd just as soon not hear them whining about getting caned. It's probably not as bad as the ass-kicking someone would administer if they caught someone vandalizing their new car over here.

No. It's a lot worse than that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore



It ain't trivial.

ZekeB wrote:



Just a quibble here although the O'rly logic is main point and typical of the connections she makes which are often filled with incorrect data and assumptions.

Legumes do not produce nitrogen; they have nodules in their roots that contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria that take nitrogen from the air (very high percentage of the air we breathe) and convert it to a nitrogen compound that can be taken up by plants as one one the compounds necessary for growth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation

Nitrogen fixation is a vital process in farming and food production. I didn't realize until recently that the real reason the population of the world exploded the way it did was largely a result of the work German chemist Fritz Haber in the early 20th Century. Haber came up with a way to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia compounds which could be used for fertilizers.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

I am sure medical discoveries played a part as well in allowing people to live longer. But they would not benefit from those advances if there was not enough food to eat.

Off on the tangent of population and not having enough food to feed all those additional mouths, we come back to the basic questions of the haves and have-nots. The Green Revolution has not kept up with the increase in hunger.

http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/20 ... enrev.html

This is an interesting tangent, because I just heard of Fritz Haber a few days ago on a podcast. It was on RadioLab - http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/ - the second of 3 stories in the episode.

The essence of it ... Fritz Haber's development of ammonia-based fertilizer was largely the thing that kept Malthus' predictions of global famine from becoming true (yet), and his Nobel Prize for that was well earned.

But as a very patriotic (Jewish) German, he also threw himself into the war effort and introduced chlorine gas to t he battlefront. His (first) wife, also a chemist, was strongly opposed to his work with poison gas and committed suicide in protest. And then ...

Haber had left Germany for England, and then was on the way to Palestine to work with Chaim Weizmann when he died of heart failure in 1934 -- too soon to see what the Nazis did with his technology.

That is not quite the full story. The population had started its rapid expansion before Haber's discovery.

That expansion followed a previous but much smaller expansion that is generally attributed to metallurgy and the invention of the iron plow. It was not the result of improved medicine; the 18th century and the early 19th century was an age when the best physicians still believed in vapors as the cause of disease and discounted the newfangled theories about germs. (More than half of our Civil War fatalities were directly due to disease, not wounds.) The cause of population increase was a decrease in mortality, principally due to improvements in public health, in which better methods of controlling sewage were most important, closely followed by better methods for supplying clean water. But even those measures were not fully effective; check out The Ghost Map about Dr. John Snow and the London cholera epidemic of 1854.

Most scientists and social scientists put more emphasis on the work of Norman Borlaug than on that of Prof. Haber. Gates Foundation Jan. 24, 2012 The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger. Also. The Green Revolution crops depended upon Haber's artificial fertilizer -- but also upon pesticides, herbicides, and irrigation. Without the Green Revolution crops, humanity would have entered Malthus' Gate decades ago.

The reason that some one billion go to bed hungry each night is not that enough food is not being produced. It is being produced in abundance, some of it left to rot in the fields or around grain silos. The problem is poverty at both the level of the individual family and the nation-state (some of which have enough money to solve the problem if they did not choose to purchase weapons first). Poverty of the nation-state leads to inadequate storage facilities. Rats may consume 20% of the world's food supply, starting in the fields and continuing into storage facilities. Insects take their toll throughout the chain. Then poor nation-states have inadequate or non-existent means for transportation of food to needy areas. They cannot invest in irrigation and reservoir systems.

Unless the food is free, poor families are unlikely to be able to purchase adequate nutrition. If the food is free, that factor is likely to drive local producers out of business, further aggravating the situation. Traditional crops such as millet may not be grown, even though it is better adapted to the ecosystem and preferred by the people; imported wheat and corn displace it. Food aid is a precursor of starvation.

The poverty of individual families is strongly connected to family size. When parents cannot count on their children surviving to be helpmates on the farm and in their "old" age (their 50's), they have to have many children. Six to seven is still the norm in the highest-fertility countries.

The best way to reduce world poverty is to decrease infant and child mortality. That eventually will lead to the option to have smaller families, which will require that effective contraception be available and cheap. Having control of their fertility will empower women, and the world's poorest countries will lower their high rates of natural increase, making it possible for other anti-poverty measures to have an effect. Without those changes, some countries will continue to have declining economies. The goal of reducing infant and child mortality is attainable.

Unless, of course, one is Félix Houphouët-Boigny and chooses to incur great debt and use foreign aid to build a memorial to oneself in the bush of the Ivory Coast in the form of the world's largest Christian church: