Category: Politics

Why couldn’t this be true?? Vote for Shatner and Hasselhoff! [Link]

Just found a bunch of videos that show the horrifying living conditions of some workers in Kuwait. The video above is of their sleeping quarters, they are ten to a room and it doesn’t look like they have AC. Here is a link to the rest of the videos. [Link]

The guys from Deera Chat have just launched a website dealing with the elections in Kuwait. If you have any feedback just leave them a comment. The website is in Arabic. [Link]

The elections are coming up and it reminded me of this video I shot last year showing the amount of ads in the newspaper. It was ridiculous! I heard this year its not going to be as bad though. [YouTube]

Recently the subject of segregating the private schools has come back into the limelight. I am personally against this because I think its unhealthy for the male and female students not to mingle while they are young. With regards to this subject a reader asked me to share the following message with everyone:

Your support is needed to attend and pass this message on to others: There is an important gathering at the Kuwait Womans Society in Khaldiya on Tuesday at 6pm in which they want owners of foreign schools and Kuwaiti parents and students to attend to contest the segregation law. They also want to invite as many Arabic speaking parents to support this event. Lots of press and MP’s will attend. Try and make it. Thank you.

The egg crisis in Kuwait is a mix of market forces, bird flu, production issues, feed prices and inaction from government forces. The Kuwait egg market is pretty huge; we consume over a billion eggs a year and we just produce around 40% of that. The rest we have to import from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and India.

Production in the gulf has dropped dramatically this year due to the bird flu epidemic. Kuwait was hit first which led to 6 out of the 8 farms to stop production, cutting our production levels to 15%. These farms have just recently started production and will take another 12 months to reach their full levels.

Saudi Arabia has recently been hit by the bird flu virus which has cut their production. This has also led to Kuwait placing an import ban on Saudi eggs in order to protect our local farms and people.

Due to the high demand from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries our other exporters like Jordan and Syria have placed an export ban to keep the remaining eggs in their own country to avoid their own crisis.

The only remaining eggs that we can import are Indian. Indian eggs are considered the cheapest and lowest quality eggs that you can find in the market. They take over a month to arrive from India to Kuwait via container and sometimes not qualified for human consumption. Sadly main supermarkets are marketing them as “fresh eggs”. Fresh eggs are considered by USDA and GCC law as eggs are maximum 3 days old from the farm. Indian eggs are over 30 days old from the farm.

The other factor in the egg crisis is due to feed supply. Since under Kuwaiti law chickens must be fed 100% organic feed without any chemicals, feed additives or meal. This adds up to 70% of the cost of the egg and this year has been a huge increase in feed prices leading the Kuwaiti egg producers to also increase their prices.

They have requested from the government to offer them a subsidy on the feed to reduce their cost, yet the government has not been helpful. Instead the Ministry of Commerce and Kuwait Coop Supermarket Union has been demanding from them to reduce their prices to pre-bird flu and feed increase prices or face being shut out of the supermarkets.

This is of course a guise of “protecting the consumer”, since they are still selling Indian which are over a month old as “fresh” eggs around 1KD when the real cost of Indian eggs is around 400fils. The Coops are making over 250%. Compare this to real fresh Kuwaiti eggs which are just above that price. This is so they can increase their profit margin by cheating the local consumer and leverage the Kuwaiti egg producers to submit to their control.

Other Gulf countries are facing the same shortage in Kuwait, but instead of fighting the local producers they have been offering them support by giving them bigger subsidies and allowing market forces to choose the egg prices.

So support your local egg producer by buying from their official stores in Shuwaik area near the vegetable market. They are offering real fresh eggs and at reasonable prices, and demand for the Coops to bring Kuwaiti eggs back.

– Post by Nibaq
– Picture by Kamal

It’s really gotten to a point where there isn’t much more that can go wrong. I’ve honestly lost count on how many politicians have gotten assassinated in the past couple of years and its depressing and sickening. I am going down to Beirut next Tuesday for a week long shoot and I hope things get back to normal by then. The last time I had a shoot in Lebanon another politician had gotten assassinated, its becoming fucking routine! [News]

I should have posted this awhile back but I totally forgot. This is a documentary by Michael Moore from 1994 when he came to Kuwait. [YouTube]

Thanks RJV!

Some guys in Iraq are taking US movie posters and changing them to send a “chilling message” to US troops stationed there. Most are pretty cheesy but a couple are pretty decent looking like the Land of the Dead one. [Link]

Just found a blog called q8istuff.blogspot.com that has some cool vintage pictures related to Kuwait. I found two posts so far, one of the Free Kuwait demonstrations and meetings in London taken after the Iraqi invasion in 1990, and the second set of pictures are of the Kuwait football team from the late 70’s and early 80’s. The Kuwaiti football ones are extremely fascinating.

Here is the link to the Free Kuwait Pictures. [Link]

Here is the link to the Kuwaiti football team pictures. [Link]

Here is a video divided into two parts of some POW’s arriving to Kuwait in buses after the Gulf War.

Video Part 1
Video Part 2

Thanks RJV

hummer15al uploaded to video clips taken by a Kuwaiti family during the Iraqi invasion. Its divided into two parts and you can check them out on YouTube.

Virgin Megastore is open again and I think this time around they are taking censorship to the extreme. I think thats what I would do if I was them, I would want to show people how ridiculous censorship can be. The CD cover above is of the Buddha-bar CD, they’ve censored the Buddha’s face!

update: I have been told censoring the Buddha is not something new.

Melanie Phillips, a British neoconservative claims the following:

WMDs really were found in Iraq after the invasion, they were located in vast underground bunkers which contained “nuclear, chemical and biological materials”, but the U.S., through negligence, failed to secure those sites and, as a result, the WMDs were stolen by The Terrorists and/or Syrian agents, who now have them and are actively plotting (along with China, Russia and North Korea) to use them against the West, but —

because the Bush administration is so embarrassed by their failure to prevent the theft of all these dastardly weapons, and because Democrats are embarrassed by this discovery because it proves that Saddam really did have WMDs all along, they have all jointly created a vast conspiracy where they conceal the discovery of WMDs in order to cover up for their negligence.

The thing is this other guy called Dave Gaubatz, a civilian agent who worked for The U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations confirms her report. It sounds like an episode of 24 but if it is true and the WMDs are in the hand of terrorists then we better hope there is a real life Jack Bauer somewhere. You can read the full article on Salon. [Link]

via digg

And I thought “the movie” The Pursuit of Happyness was sad.. [YouTube]

via Desperately Wandering