Adonis Diaries

Archive for June 1st, 2016

Rachel’s Sixth Sense (Nov. 2002)

I used to swim at a Navy complex in Bethesda from 1993 to 1998.

I patronized this affordable facility at least three times a week, mostly around 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

She was a beauty by any standard.

I think she was a cadet in the Navy, following swimming training and evaluation.

I wanted to get to know her, but could not talk to her during her busy schedule.

I wrote her a song and kept a copy with me for the next time I see her.

 

Here is the song:

Beautiful girls sense me.  They know for sure,

Exactly, what I’m up to.

They sense me in a split-second and get busy.

She swims with energy, non-stop.

She swims fine, back strokes, crawl, in laps.

I do all that too, leisurely.

She swims constantly and does not breathe.

I have strong senses too:

She is not taking a break.  Not Today.

I decide for a note, dropped on her towel.

It should say: “I think you are beautiful”.

Everything I see in you is beautiful”.

I feel more at ease and then, hope takes the extra step.

She must take a short break, any second now.

My brain is boiling and I am editing.

My sentence should be reduced to the bare essentials.

“I think you are beautiful, everything I see in you is beautiful” is too long:

No time for her to hear me out.

Just “Beautiful!” will not do: I know that by now.

“You are beautiful!” is about right.

I am swimming leisurely.  There is no movement around me.

There is no towel.  She vanished.

Hang it all.  I’ll write about that swim.

The next time I saw her in the swimming pool I made sure that she saw me drop a piece of paper on her towel.

And I left.

A week later, I asked her: “What’s your name?”  She simply said: “It’s Rachel and I’m dating”.

That was all that was said between us.

Not even a thank you or an allusion to the note.

History repeats its cycle.

Rachel’s girl friends in the swimming team noticed me intently, every time I was there,

Swimming, and swimming.

Saudi Kingdom: The evil empire and the West’s real enemy

Active at every level of the terror chain: planners to financiers, cadres to foot soldiers, ideologists to cheerleaders

Iran is seriously mistrusted by Israel and America. North Korea protects its nuclear secrets and is ruled by an erratic, vicious man.

Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions alarm democratic nations.

The newest peril, Isis, the wild child of Islamists, has shocked the whole world.

But top of this list should be Saudi Arabia – degenerate, malignant, pitiless, powerful and as dangerous as any of those listed above.

The state systematically transmits its sick form of Wahhabi Islam across the globe, instigates and funds hatreds, while crushing human freedoms and aspiration. But the West genuflects to its rulers. Last week Saudi Arabia was appointed chair of the UN Human Rights Council, a choice welcomed by Washington.

Mark Toner, a spokesperson for the State Department, said: “We talk about human rights concerns with them. As to this leadership role, we hope that it is an occasion for them to look into human rights around the world and also within their own borders.”

By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.  27 September 2015
Marj Henningsen shared this link

The jaw simply drops. Saudi Arabia executes one person every two days.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr is soon to be beheaded then crucified for taking part in pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring (He was executed and generated countless violent reactions). He was a teenager then.

Raif Badawi, a blogger who dared to call for democracy, was sentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes. Last week, 769 faithful Muslim believers were killed in Mecca where they had gone on the Hajj. Initially, the rulers said it was “God’s will” and then they blamed the dead. Mecca was once a place of simplicity and spirituality.

Today the avaricious Saudis have bulldozed historical sites and turned it into the Las Vegas of Islam – with hotels, skyscrapers and malls to spend, spend, spend.

The poor can no longer afford to go there. Numbers should be controlled to ensure safety – but that would be ruinous for profits.

Ziauddin Sardar’s poignant book Mecca: The Sacred City, describes the desecration of Islam’s holiest site.

Even more seriously, the pernicious Saudi influence is spreading fast and freely. King Salman has offered to build 200 mosques in Germany for recently arrived refugees, many of whom are Muslims.

This King offered no money for resettlement or basic needs, but Wahhabi mosques, the Trojan horses of the secret Saudi crusade. Several Islamic schools are also sites of Wahhabism, now a global brand. It makes hearts and minds small and suspicious, turns Muslim against Muslim, and undermines modernists.

In the 14 years that have followed 9/11, the Saudis have become more aggressive, more determined to win the culture wars.

They pour money into Islamist organisations and operations, promote punishing doctrines that subjugate women and children, and damn liberal values and democracy. They are pursuing a cruel bombing campaign in Yemen that has left thousands of civilians dead and many more in dire straits.

In pictures: Hajj stampede

So, what does our ruling establishment do to stop the invisible hand of this Satan? Zilch.

The Royal Family, successive governments, parliamentarians, a good number of institutions and people with clout collectively suck up to the Saudi ruling clan. I have not seen any incisive TV investigation of this regime.

We know it is up to no good, but evidence is suppressed.

Some writers have tried to break this conspiracy of obsequiousness. Craig Unger’s book, House of Bush, House of Saud was published in 2004. It established beyond reasonable doubt that Saudi Arabia was the nerve-centre of international terrorism. And that the Bush family was unduly close to the regime.

Many of us believed the revelations were even more explosive than those by the journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who exposed the lies told by Richard Nixon.

This deadly enemy will not be cowed or stopped by Trident. Our leaders know what is going on. So what do they do? They pick on the small people.

The Government’s Prevent programme now imposes a duty on educators to watch out for young “radicals” and nip them in the bud. Older dissenters, too.

To date, 4,000 young Muslims have been referred for reprogramming. One was three years old. In May, a young Muslim schoolboy talked about “eco-terrorists” and was taken away to be interrogated about whether he supported Isis.

Academics, lawyers, doctors and nurses are also expected to become the nation’s spies. Mohammed Umar Farooq, a student at Staffordshire University, was accused last week of being a terrorist because he was reading a book entitled Terrorism Studies in the library.

In the US, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested because he took a home-made clock to school. (Richard Dawkins, these days a manic tweet preacher, questioned whether the clock was part of a “hoax” designed to get Mohamed arrested, before backtracking.) The West, it seems, is free only for some. And to be a Muslim is a crime.

Extremism is a serious problem. Westernised, liberal Muslims do try to influence feverish, hostile young Muslim minds, but we are largely powerless. Our leaders will not confront Saudi Arabia, the source of Islamist brainwashing and infection. They won’t because of oil and the profits made by arms sales.

Political cowards and immoral profiteers are the traitors, the real threat to national security, patriotism and cohesion. How do they answer the charge?

Note: Until the thousands of Wahhabi Islamic Madrassat working around the world are transformed into secular public schools, Extremist Islamic sects will be around for hundreds of years.
The USA, China and Europe must find the necessary funds and training to all States ready to close down or reform these Saudi Kingdom funded Madrassat in the last 3 decades

The Goldilocks Conundrum:
The ‘Just Right’ Conditions for Design to Achieve Impact in Public and Third Sector Projects
Joyce S. R. Yee, and Hazel White

Abstract

What are the most important conditions necessary for a design-led approach to innovation or transformation to flourish in an organization?
This paper introduces and discusses three ‘just right’ conditions for design to achieve the desired impact in the context of public and third sector projects, where third sector refers to a broad range of community and volunteer groups.
The paper draws on a six-month Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, aimed at identifying and mapping the impact and value of design in public and third sector organizations.
Our research insights are derived from six case studies that were co-created with the project participants of service innovation projects. The case studies were selected based on three criteria:
1) an acknowledged value that design-led approaches have brought to the project;
2) access to a triangulated base of stakeholders: service users, service commissioners and service designers;
3) projects that cover a range of sectors from healthcare, mental well-being, youth services and social care across England, Scotland and Australia.
In total 18 conditions were identified and the ten most important conditions were selected and ranked by the research participants through a workshop validation session. We further clustered these into three overarching themes: community building, capacity, and leadership based on the authors’ previous experiences with public service innovation projects.
This research suggests that community building is valued above leadership and capacity as the most important condition for design to have the greatest impact in innovation and transformation projects.

Full Text: PDF HTML


adonis49

adonis49

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