inkbluesky

In culture notes: I just thought this was funny, The first Aussie Muslim lifeguards

It’s not just Germany that’s getting creative in trying to integrate its Muslim population. The Australian state of New South Wales has launched a training initiative called “On the Same Wave” designed to integrate Australians of different ethnic backgrounds into its iconic Surf Live Saving program. Seventeen young Muslim men and women have graduated, after a rigorous, eight-week training course, to become Australia’s first Muslim lifeguards.

It is not so much that Muslims becoming lifeguards is funny as much as the “approved”  “burqini” – pictured at the link it covers the entire body including the hair. I’m not sure that its better or worse then American swim wear circa turn of the 20th century.

painted tree. Difficult to see at this size, but there is a tree in the center. The background is a commercial one made by photographer John Foxx (rather expensive, but might be worth it if you’re doing some high quality design work) and the tree brush is from the foliage 2 pack from Designfruit.

Maxed Out’: Serious Matters Of Life and Debt 

This swiftly moving documentary — adroitly edited by Alexis Spraic — sweeps the nation from Las Vegas to Tennessee to New York as Scurlock interviews experts in the credit crisis, from both Harvard and the school of hard knocks. From the real estate boom in Las Vegas — where two-dishwasher kitchens are de rigueur and banks are using the same accounting practices as Enron to finance loans — to the junk mail come-ons we all find in our mailboxes every day, Scurlock demonstrates just how completely the concept of easy credit has seeped into Americans’ lives, juxtaposing that culture with an instructional film from the early 1960s, in which two teenagers learn that credit is based on the “three C’s” of character, capacity and capital.

Sure there is some issues of personal responsibility here where people’s desires blind them or at least temporarily make them near sighted to the consequences of paying a few bucks a month so they can have it now. There also the seller’s side,  the side of corporate America through constant advertising convincing people that they must have whatever “it” is and they must have it now and they have the answer – easy credit. People used to have pings of envy, now Wall Street and their political shills have convinced people that they must keep up with the consumption of their neighbors. Buy it and buy it now at a low low introductory rate that leads to a slow steady bleed. Beware of conservatives and libertarians that claim the virtue of unregulated lending practices, they’re the economic equivalent of the stranger with candy.