Kosher or Animal Cruelty?

Well, i am afraid I am on the side of the animal cruelty people. Yes, we have spoken about this many times, at end of the day, we are killing the animal so drawing the line on how you kill the animal is hypocrisy, but then the idea is that you do need protein and please do not get me started on the vegetarian argument, but you do not need to needlessly torture or cause pain to the animals. And yes, many animal farms are bad but that’s not what the usual laws state. The law states, in countries like UK and USA and EU and and and that you are not to do cruelty to animals and there is a pretty good state of history and precedent in defining what cruelty is.

See what the Dutch are doing. I quote:

The bill sponsored by the tiny Animal Rights Party, the first such group in Europe to win seats in a national parliament, passed the lower house of parliament and must be approved by the upper house before becoming law. It stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to the Jewish kashrut laws and Muslim halal laws that specify that animals killed for their meat must be unwounded at the time of slaughtering. Stunning damages the nervous system.
“This way of killing causes unnecessary pain to animals. Religious freedom cannot be unlimited,” Marianne Thieme, head of Animal Rights Party, said before the vote. “For us religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.”

So what are the Jews saying?

“Has the freedom of religion already been ritually slaughtered?” wondered a tweeter named ‘Bozoc.’ The Netherlands’ Muslim and Jewish communities – about 1 million and 40,000, respectively, in a total population of 16 million – have condemned the proposed ban as a violation of their religious freedom. But as Jacobs pointed out on Tuesday, “only the most observant Muslims – some 30 percent of the total – are against stunning animals.”

But this isnt a question of freedom of religion. You have the right to practise whatever religion you wish as long as your rights do not interfere with other people’s rights. And as it turns out, animals have a right not to have a cruel death. Mind you, the animals do not have a right to life (that’s an interesting conundrum) but there you go.

Incidentally, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland ban ritual slaughter already. So there is precedent. And yes, male circumcision is as bad as FGM. Let the kid grow up, when he is an adult, he can make the decision to lop off the tip of his todger or to put in a ring.

Incidentally, check this situation out about dogs who get their tails docked.

"MPs have rightly signalled that it is unacceptable in a civilised society to amputate a puppy's tail purely because some people think that it is aesthetically pleasing to disable a dog in this way," he said.

Well said, the idea that for cosmetic or silly sod religions reasons you will go about inflicting cruelty to animals is frankly Neanderthal.

Who is the big cheese then? Surprise – the UK

Hot diggity dog, i would never have thought this. I quote:

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” General Charles de Gaulle famously asked.

But a burst of innovation among Britain’s cheesemakers in the past 15 years means Gordon Brown might now have grounds to ask the question even more plaintively than France’s postwar leader.

A new cadre of artisan cheese producers and a middle-class obsession with the provenance of produce have helped propel Britain to the top of an international league table that measures varieties of cheese produced per head of population.

Britain’s “innovation score” of 11.4 cheese variants for every million people puts it ahead of Switzerland with 9.6 types of cheese per 1m people, and France with 9.2.

Now something else to crow over those damn frogs :). I love my cheese despite it being horrible for my health, lol. Here’s some of the good stuff I have got for the Christmas dinner :)

It has Red Leicester, Cheddar, Cornish Camembert and a fruity cheese. Also in the fridge is a big lump of Bavarian Smoked Cheese. Yummy :)

Egyptian Government doing nutty things

It's obvious that the Muslim governments who got excited about Switzerland’s banning of the minarets (that stupid vote) forgot a few things themselves. This was indeed a democracy, despite the voting being an islamophobic one. Secondly, these Muslim governments are rarely democratic themselves. Take Egypt for example. It's not democratic by any stretch of the imagination. It even diverted its upset populace’s attention by going on and on about the Algerian – Egyptian football match, go figure. Anyway, so what does it do now? I quote:

CAIRO, DECEMBER 9 - The Egyptian parliament will be carrying out a scientific research to prove that mosque minarets, which a recent Swiss referendum okayed their ban, are important to Muslims, MENA reported. The religious affairs committee of the Peoples Assembly has been assigned with the job: to issue a statement to be delivered as a letter to the presidents of the Swiss parliament, the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, protesting the outcome of the poll. Ahmed Fathi Sorour, the speaker of the Peoplés Assembly, said the Swiss government and parliament were against the referendum, whose results came to reflect a growing sense of Islamophobia in the European country.

I started laughing helplessly when I read this. They are important to Muslims? D’oh. Yes they are. They are also important to other people, you doofus. They are also important to the construction industry, the broadcasting industry, the academic industry and and and. And just what scientific research will be carried out? On what basis? What fun, what stupidity, lol. I am firmly of the belief that the greatest danger to Islam is not from the crusaders, zionists or the west, but it is from their own leaders, politicians and religious leaders such as these dorks mentioned above.

On a separate note, did you know that the chap who is the architect of the Swiss referendum is a Turkish Muslim, I quote:

One of the architects of the controversial Swiss referendum that resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets has a Turkish heritage, daily Milliyet reported on Wednesday. Born in the Aegean province of Izmir to a Turkish father and a Swiss mother, Soli Pardos family moved to Switzerland when he was 5 years old, the daily said. Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on November 29, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population. Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic.
The referendum by the nationalist Swiss Peoplés Party, or SVP, labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. Pardo also said minarets are used as symbols in Europe, but added: I do not have any reactions against Muslims, and I do not accept that there is Islamaphobia in Switzerland.
Pardo, who is the leader of the Geneva Canton for the SVP, said his father was a small-scale industrialist and passed away in 1976 when Pardo was 21. Regarding the referendum, he said: We do not believe that the minarets are linked to worship because no calls to prayer are made from the minarets. We are not against building mosques but against 5- to 6-meter-tall minarets. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5% by some 2.67 million voters.

So here we go, official confirmation from Switzerland, there is no connection between Islam and Muslims and Minarets, lol. So what then is the official position? An interesting op-ed from a Professor in Islamic Art History from Arab News can help. I quote the relevant bits here, but do read the full piece:

Minarets were introduced in the process of conquest such as in the earliest surviving imperial mosque — the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus — in the beginning of the 8th century. Minarets were in this case an appropriation of a Byzantine church’s bell towers.
Slowly minarets became one of the elements asserting the grandeur and influence of big mosques financed by the early Islamic states, notably between the 8th and the 10th centuries. The Damascus Mosque’s minarets seem to have been imitated later in the 10th century when the rulers of Andalusian Cordoba were aspiring to rival the major Islamic eastern caliphates. The helicoidal 9th century minarets in the mosques of the Abbasid city of Samarra, which are the largest mosques in pre-modern history, seem to have been imitated in Egypt in the same century. Yet minarets were not a constant element. In the eastern Islamic lands, especially within the Persian space, minarets seem to play a minor role. At some point in the 14th century minarets in Iran were simply decorative accessories for huge portals with big domes in the background.
It is probably with the Turkic dynasties, culminating with the Ottomans since the 15th century, that minarets would be equated with Islamic images in the Western European imaginaire. It has been widely reported in the European travelogues that one of the first acts of Ottomans after conquering Constantinople in 1453 was the insertion of a minaret at one of the corners of the Byzantine church of Haghia Sophia. In fact, the Ottomans seemed to have used the minaret as one of the elements to visually appropriate conquered Byzantine churches and convert them to mosques. They tended also to build monumental minarets, sometimes four, in their new mosques.
Whatever its meaning in the premodern era, the minaret’s signification seems to have been reshaped starting from the end of the 19th century.

It's curious, and before I finish this, I thought of looking around the OIC and how they react to the presence of other religions. Whether we are talking about Mauritania, Iran, Iraq, Turkey or Egypt etc. etc. they all have much bigger problems with other religions. So it's a spot of major hypocrisy for them to moan about Switzerland. Then again, its Switzerland who should be ashamed of lowering themselves to the abysmal standards that the OIC hold themselves to. Esphoks.

Now McDonald’s is off to Switzerland from UK

The British Tax system is byzantine and frankly no longer top of the heap. A good tax system not only helps fund the public sector but also provides good security and operating framework for firms who operate under its umbrella. For firms such as WPP, Shire, Regus, Henderson, Charter, Beazley, Brit Insurance, UBM, McDonald’s, Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Google, Yahoo etc. etc. are all moving off the UK. Its not just the headquarters that move off, its also the senior management who move off, they take the intangible senior leadership horsepower with them.

 

But then, the current government is a twit. Good heavens. Here, read all about how McDonald’s is off to Switzerland.

The Swiss hosting a nuke station for the Saudi's and Iranians???

Say what?

Saudi Arabia today revealed details of an ambitious offer to Tehran, aimed at defusing the growing crisis over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.

At the heart of the problem is Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Iran insists that enriched uranium will be used purely as fuel for its nuclear reactor at Buhsher. America and other Western nations suspect that the Iranians want to produce highly enriched uranium for use as a warhead in an atomic bomb.

Prince Saud said that to defuse the row, Saudi Arabia and a consortium of Arab Gulf states had invited Iran to produce enriched uranium jointly, where the plant could be properly monitored by international observers.

“We have proposed a solution, which is to create a consortium for all users of enriched uranium to do it in a collective manner that would distribute (nuclear fuel) according to need,” he said. “We hope the Iranians will accept this proposal.”

He said that the proposed plant would be built in a neutral third country, like Switzerland.

Did you even ask them? The Swiss do not like you darkies, did you not know, you brain dead doofus? And what makes you think that they would allow a camel farm much less a Saudi / Iranian designed nuclear plant in their valleys?

Technorati Tags: Switzerland , Saudi Arabia , Iran Nuclear Power , Humour

Switzerland's racist party wins big

Further to my entry about the fact that the Swiss People's Party indulging in racist rhetoric as part of their electioneering, as it turns out after this weekend's voting, the Swiss actually liked their disgusting slogans. They have ended up with being the biggest party in the Swiss Parliament, gathering 28.8% of the votes.

Technorati Tags: Racism , Democracy , Switzerland

SWIFT moves most of its data outside American control

SWIFT announced that they will setup a data centre in Switzerland to make sure that European and Asian messages stay outside the control of USA.

If you recall, there was a huge argument some time back when the US Government requested SWIFT to present huge amounts of data to check terrorism related financial transactions. This made the European leaders go up in smoke such as here and here. Poor SWIFT was caught in the middle.

I am not sure that this will be sufficient as the Americans have shown very clearly that if they wish to have data related to terrorism, they will get it. Even if SWIFT move the data to Switzerland, they will have to release it if asked for it. Will just take a bit longer as it will have to go through the Swiss authorities. But the Swiss move very fast as well when criminal evidence is presented. They do not want the squeaky clean privacy / secrecy oriented banking image sullied either.

Technorati Tags: anti Money Laundering , counter-terrorism , terrorism , financial institutions , Switzerland

The Swiss are now climbing on the racism, islamophobic bandwagon!

The NYTimes has a full article on how the Swiss are working themselves up on foreigner hatred, racism and Islamophobia. Again, I am very worried indeed. This is not good. I quote:

“Our political enemies think the poster is racist, but it just gives a simple message,” Bruno Walliser, a local chimney sweep running for Parliament on the party ticket, said at the rally, held on a Schwerzenbach farm outside Zurich. “The black sheep is not any black sheep that doesn’t fit into the family. It’s the foreign criminal who doesn’t belong here, the one that doesn’t obey Swiss law. We don’t want him.”
More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss.
Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes.
For Nelly Schneider, a 49-year-old secretary, the party’s approach is “a little bit crass,” but appealing nevertheless. “These foreigners abuse the system,” she said after Mr. Walliser’s presentation. “They don’t speak any German. They go to prostitution and do drugs and drive fancy cars and work on the black market. They don’t want to work.”

While going on welfare, asking to be treated differently, refusing to treat women when you are a doctor, or refusing to sell contraceptive pills is disgusting. That's not what you signed up for when you became a citizen or continue to be a citizen. See here for my comments to Tariq Ramadan, the author of what it means to be an European Muslim.

But that's on the citizen's side. On the other side, we have seen so many times as to how Europeans lead inexorably towards genocide and killings. This is simply another step towards it. Perhaps the Council of Europe can take up this matter? I think that's the only body in Europe who can conceivably make a difference in this frankly extremely dangerous matter. I know Muslims think the worst of the Jews for complaining about the Genocide and Holocaust, but remember this, what happened to them can and will happen to the Muslims as well.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Balancing Hi-Tech with Hi-Touch in Customer Relationships

A frequent question for almost all bankers, specially in financial services, is how to balance the cost income ratio. Clients want a high touch relationship while high touch relationships are invariably costly. Which throws the efficiency ratio completely off-kilter.

The usual way to try to address this is by off-shoring, out-sourcing, process improvements etc. all wrapped up in high technology frameworks. But again, if the only contact you have with a bank is the ATM machine, then customer stickiness, additional product sales, leveraging spend patterns, relationship banking, etc. is more challenging as the relationship matures.

Just saw a report on this topic where the authors review two case studies (UBS and Swiss Re, reflecting the author's background and location!) and suggest an automation model based upon two approaches, an intimacy-driven and a personality driven approach. They also discuss key success factors that have to be considered
for the implementation of these strategies.

Here' is a nice pictorial view of their model.

 

Their key success factors are quite common sense but quite important to review.

1. Involve Your Business Partners End-to-end.
2. Don’t Persuade Your Customers – convince them.
3. See Self-service as a Supplement, not as a Replacement.
4. Start with Your Customers’ Processes, not with
   yours.

I think the last point is the most important. Time after time, I have seen people miss out on this basic, core requirement. Go hit the client, talk to them, do not stick behind your desk and let the client come to you.

In a previous job, I used to insist that my team of business and solution development managers spend 75% of their time at their clients. They would be evaluated on that basis. Too many times, I find product development, technology development, solution development that is done on the basis of what somebody might want to purchase.

Many times investment is done in financial products or technology solely on the basis of gut feel (oh!, we invested because it sounded good / interesting / exciting....). But where's the conversation with the client? where is the money?

So before hitting the client with yet another vendor driven automation product/process, do speak to the client. They absolutely love it.

Harald Salomann, Malte Dous, Lutz Kolbe and Walter Brenner, Self-service Revisited:: How to Balance High-tech and High-touch in Customer Relationships, European Management Journal, Volume 25, Issue 4, August 2007, Pages 310-319.

(

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V9T-4PDTFHT-4/2/41f25180694be1d6c170a46d3084a61e)

Abstract: In recent years, many companies have infused more and more self-service technology into their customer relationships. As a result the balance between high-tech and high-touch has become a key challenge of today's customer relationship management initiatives. In this paper, we present a cross-case analysis of two companies that we identified as "good practices" in achieving this balance. From the case studies' findings we derive two possible strategies for service automation: an intimacy-driven and a personality driven approach. We also discuss key success factors that have to be considered for the implementation of these strategies.

Keywords: Customer relationship management; Self-service; Self-service technology; service automation

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt

Technorati Tags: Financial Institutions , Technology