Sounds Familiar?

Ever heard of Nauru? It is a tiny island nation in the Pacific Ocean. This island relied on a natural resource: phosphates that was formed by many years of seagull-dropping on coral. Foreign companies came to mine and money started rolling in to the islanders making the island briefly in the 70s one of the world’s richest in terms of income per head.

The story continues as described in an article in The Economist:

As the money rolled in many islanders chose to remain unemployed, cashing the royalty cheques while foreign workers dug out the deposits. Nauruans literally grew fat on their earnings; rates of obesity and diabetes soared. But strip mining has left the island a barren, jagged wasteland. The wealth it generated was squandered in a number of disastrous investments, as Nauru tried its hand as an early sovereign-wealth fund, and got its fingers burnt. It tried to reinvent itself as an offshore tax haven, and took to hosting all manner of shady banking nameplates.

The story does not end there. The island does not have a functioning government and becomes host to detention center for people seeking asylum in Australia. Australia is now closing the detention center and taking away an important source of income for the island.

As I read the story I could not help reflecting on our situation.. This sounds too familiar and I hope we manage to reach a better outcome.

Our Mess and Their Mess

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

Who Will Tell the People? - Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times.

Things go wrong even in the world’s supposedly most advanced place. Look at the current state of leadership in the US. Thanks to W the US is in a mess domestically and abroad. I guess we don’t have to feel that bad after all about our own mess. Even the source of this mess is not that different, as explained by Thomas L. Friedman:

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

Lesbos or Mytilini

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian".

BBC NEWS | Europe | Lesbos islanders dispute gay name.

Funny story! Inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos are trying to prevent the use of the word “lesbian” that implies sexual preference. The government embarrassed by the name is trying to rename the island after its capital Mytilini (which sounds awfully close to the Arabic word for homosexuals)! I guess one way or another the islanders are screwed (no punt intended).

Buying Insurance

Today's dangers are different. Saddam is gone. But the Gulf states are threatened by the chaotic politics in Iraq and by the rivalry between America and Iran for influence in the region. In their volatile part of the planet, the sheikhs cannot buy perfect security. But they might consider investing a bit more of their windfall in stabilising Iraq and the broader Middle East, not just in their fabulous pleasure domes.

Gulf economies | The rise of the Gulf | Economist.com.

The Economist published a very interesting report in it’s latest issue on the Gulf economies and the effects of the oil boom. In it a reminder not to lose sight of the environment around us. No matter how unpopular, putting money and effort to insure stability in the region is essential. Without it our own stability would be threatened.

Chew on This!

M&M's candy maker Mars Inc has teamed up with billionaire Warren Buffett to buy No. 1 chewing gum manufacturer Wm Wrigley Jr Co (WWY.N) for $23 billion, creating the world's largest confectionery company.

Mars and Buffett to buy Wrigley for $23 billion - Yahoo! News.

$23 billion for a gum company. This is a little over KD 6 billion. Unless I got the math wrong, it is a whisker over the market cap of KFH, the highest in the Kuwaiti market. Keep chewing!

Structured Life

I knew a man who lived a lovely bohemian artist life into his 50s, embracing poverty in the interest of freedom, and then was offered a nine-to-five job by his brother-in-law and took it and found it liberating to have at last some structure in his life.

This is true. Freedom is hard work, and art is lonely: You sit at an easel by yourself and await inspiration and time can get very heavy. He found it a huge relief to put on clean clothes every morning and be at an office by nine and complete a string of tasks and feel part of a team.

The joys of a structured life - International Herald Tribune.

Think of this before you quit your day job!

Prime Performance

After a slow start for the year, Federer captures his first title in Estoril Open. Lately I have learned that achieving peak performance is not exactly a good thing, cause there is only one way to go from there: down. Better yet is to achieve prime performance which is consistently performing at high level. Best wishes for a prime season Roger!

How to Defeat Extremism

“Syria has a long history as a cosmopolitan and commercial place; its traditions are tolerant and diverse,” he said. “This is what prevented the victory of the Islamists in the 1980s.”

The violence of that period eroded those traditions, he said, tincturing the whole society with intolerance and brutality. “We haven’t had a setback like this in 1,000 years,” he added. And though the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that led the armed rebellion in the 80s, is banned, Islamic fundamentalism “has grown and penetrated our society, especially among the young.”

“All this has harmed Syrian society so much,” he said sadly. “If what happened in the 1980s were to happen again, I think the Islamists would win.”

A Bloody Era of Syrias History Informs a Writers Banned Novel - New York Times.

Those were the words of Syrian author Khaled Khalifa. His latest novel “In Praise of Hatred” is a finalist for International Prize for Arabic Fiction, even though banned in Syria. His comments above show that the path to defeat extremism is not brute force, but tolerance and diversity. This explains why extremists wish to turn back the clock and impose an intolerant and single minded society.