Her Majesty Queen Rania’s video on stereotypes currently stands at 1.13 Million page views, That’s 110 thousands views a day since the date its been added on March 30th, with 34 Honors, 20 Video responses and 3716 comments, Now thats impressive!

Setting that aside, it is clear that what Queen Rania is doing is remarkable, not only on a domestic level, but internationally as well. very rarely do we see world leaders or high profile people reach out to the public in such a manner. What Her Majesty is doing is invaluable, and her aim is to bridge and link people and communities together, something we desperately need these days in light of the onslaught of the western media against the Arab world.

The problem with with our Media is that it is targeted towards ourselves and not the other, In order to get your point across and make your voice be heard you need to address the other directly through channels that are sure to reach their people, those who matter. I doubt it that any significant part of the American or European public concern themselves with watching Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya or any of the other various Arabic news networks That broadcast mainly domestically and aimed primarily at the people of the region. This kind of approach is pointless. Thankfully in this time and age the Internet has provided a much better way of communication that is sure to attract attention and deliver the message directly without any interference or distortion, Which is exactly what Her Majesty has done and used wisely through her youtube channel.

There is no denying that Her Majesty is not only a Queen by title but also by right, she is indeed a Queen of what she does, her efforts both locally and Internationally testify to that, she is renowned for her philanthropic work. She has pushed for education reform, fighting for better school facilities and mandatory English language training. She is also an enthusiastic supporter of the micro-fund movement which provides financial assistance to would-be entrepreneurs. In 2003, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims, She has traveled to a great number of countries in representation of Jordan and to contribute to worldwide causes. Some of these are the United States, India, Kuwait, France, South Africa, Greece, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Morocco, Italy, The Vatican. She is involved with many local and international organizations such as:
- Arab Women’s Summit
- Jordan Cancer Society
- National Team for Family Safety
- Dar Al Aman Child Safety Center (center for abused and neglected children, the first of its kind in the Middle East)
- World Economic Forum (Foundation Board member) In 2004, Queen Rania chaired the nomination committee for the newly-founded Forum of Young Global Leaders, associated with the World Economic Forum.
- United Nations Foundation
- UN Children’s Fund (particularly the Global Leadership Initiative)
- The Vaccine Fund (board member since 2002)
- International Youth Foundation
And Many others.

And most recently of course, her newly created youtube channel, some might argue that Her Majesty surely can’t hope to change the world with a couple of videos. but it is never the less a step in the right direction, and an initiative that is highly effective, and the numbers prove it. Using the web as a Medium of communication as opposed to directed Media, be it TV, Radio or the Newspapers has proved its worth and success. even though putting oneself on the line and in direct contact with the public can sometimes be difficult to manage, it does show courage and wisdom and an approach that is efficient and consistent with this new digital age.

So Yesternight I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and I wish I could say that things went smoothly, but I can’t, because they didn’t. not entirely.

The Ugly:
See, I ran into a few of problems, some of my own fault, and some not. my main and first problem with my upgrading was the Theme, since the design of my site is based on the Excellent k2 Theme, And for some strange reasons, K2 based themes were getting messed up under WordPress 2.5 on IE.

I knew of this glitch before hand, and since I have Apache and MySQL installed at home and I have a local version of WordPress running on my local machine, I always test things out on my local machine before doing anything on the live website. and Surely enough when I upgraded my local test site to WP 2.5 I noticed that error, It seemed to work fine on FireFox but not IE. and K2 being the complex SOB that it is, I made a decision not to fix my current theme to make it WP 2.5 compatible, but to build a new theme entirely. which took a good amount of time, I’ve tried to make the new theme look as close as possible to the old one, and if you’re a regular reader of Bakkouz.net you will notice the slight difference, or you may not. either way, there are still some small details here and there that need fixing and hopefully they’ll be fixed, but for the major part of it, the theme bit is done and over with and the outcome is satisfactory :)

But, alas, I wish that was all. naturally, I had to run into further trouble. I tested out my new theme on my Local installation and everything seems good, but, there was something I missed testing thoroughly, The Plugins. I had not tested all the running plugins on my web site Locally, and after I uploaded the new theme to Bakkouz.net and Upgraded WordPress to 2.5 That is when The real issues starting popping up. Some plugins refused to work under WP 2.5 simply because they were not compatible, some plugins were conflicting with others, and some just gave random fatal errors. it was a mess. I had to look for alternate plugins for the essential ones that I really needed, which thankfully I was able to find. I was able to get most of them up and working again and I was left with a couple of stubborn plugins that just refused to work. So that still needs to be addressed.

The Bad:
After getting the theme and the plugins working for the most part, and being left with some minor tweaks here and there, I decided to look further into WP 2.5 and get a better impression of its working. It would seem that WP 2.5 is somewhat slower than 2.3+ in terms of reacting to changing the settings, logging in into the dashboard and navigation inside the dashboard.

Everything is mixed and shuffled and its an entirely new look which can get a bit confusing at first and needs a little bit of time adjusting to. When I worked with WP for the very first time it took me about 20 seconds to figure out the Write Post page and where everything was and what everything did, on WP 2.5 though, it just doesn’t feel the same, somehow everything looks out of place. for of habit maybe but still I think the older version was more comfortable to with with visually and practically. This is true not only for the Write page, but for everything within the dashboard, since its an entirely new design.

The Good:
The new dashboard is sleek and clean, perhaps a bit too 2.0′ish but thats not too bad. many security problems and bugs were fixed. The color scheme is nice and easy on the eye, and just feels pretty, and hey its always nice to have something new :)

Important Conclusion:
If you are not in a hurry and don’t feel the need to upgrade, don’t just yet. not until you make sure everything on your current installation will work fine under WP 2.5.

Oh, and If you do notice anything out of order or not working, please do let me know :)

This is Hilarious. From the book “Safe Baby Handling Tips” by David and kelly Sopp:

Simply because He has the seal of approval from those who really matter, not the American public, but The War Mongers, the weapons manufacturers, the Oil companies and most importantly, Israel.

McCain: I Would Have Started Iraq War Regardless Of WMD:

Oh, and by the way, Al Quaeda Doesn’t Exist:

Well then, its time to get a little bit personal. haven’t wrote one of these posts in quite a while now.

Allow me to begin this by explaining the reason that drove me to write this jibba-jabba. I have noticed that the recent comments I left on the blog of Mohamad Shawash were not approved, which I found strange, So I emailed him asking WTF is up with that? to which he replied with: “If my blog is really bothering you, I’d rather not approve the comments.” aww poor little Moey. did I hurt your feelings?

Oh yes, you see the comments I left on his blog were not particularly positive, In one of his posts he complained (as he always does) about the new design of the 5 Dollar Bill being ugly, to which i left a comments saying something along the lines of: What do you care if its ugly or shmugly, its not like you live in the states, and its not like you have a career built on dealing with dollars and the such. in another post he complained (naturally) about the Rip off of Beat FM’s logo and how they’re ignoring his requests to get him in touch with the designer so that he may complain about it (oh are we seeing a patter here?) to which i left a comment stating something along the lines of: what business is it of yours to contact Beat FM or the Logo designer? its not like they ripped off *your* design, if you want to complain to someone talk to the original designer and let *him* deal with it.

These ladies and gentlemen are the comments that the kid saw unfit to approve. how pitiful.

..And then bakkouz said: Let there be ranting!

First off, Let it be clear that I have no grudges against the poor kid for not approving my comments, that is his right. and this is most definitely not some kind of retaliatory post, On the contrary, I pitty the Kid, I really do, and this post even though is mainly about him and his style of blogging, applies also to other people out there. You see, When Moey blogs, he blogs for three reasons:
1- To complain and nag about something.
2- To show off his awesome unmatched design talents.
3- To ramble about how stupid and/or idiotic other people are.

People like that generally suffer from low self esteem and they need other people to agree with them, so naturally when that old mean bakkouz guy disagrees and comes along and gives a piece of his mind and speaks that awful distasteful thing called the truth, they tend to get defensive so that they may try to protect themselves and hide behind what little control they have of oppressing the other opinion by any means they have, in this case comment moderation, since they have no confidence in themselves what so ever to engage in a productive intellectual conversation in fear of exposing their failures.

Absolute comment moderation, ie: having the blog owner moderate every single comment before it appears on the blog is fine, I can understand why some people may resort to this method, its a fairly good method to combat spam and to shut out any comments the blog owner might deem as inappropriate. that is all fine and dandy, But…

“If my blog is really bothering you, I’d rather not approve the comments“. Now this is just pathetic. I replied with this:
“suit yourself. I didn’t know you had no confidence in yourself what so ever and such a low self esteem. its ok though. i understand. and your blog doesn’t bother me, the superficiality and continues whining and “oh look at what i can do and how other people are idiots” attitude bother me. That is all. Cya.”

Which as you can see is the much shorter version of this rant.

So why did I feel the need to post this? Simply because I can. sometimes one must practice some tough love if you will, As i said i have nothing against the kid, I do not know him, never met him, and he could be the sweetest person in the world for all I know, and maybe he’s not. I don’t know. but I felt that an awakening was in order. Sure, his blog is his own, he can babble all he likes about whatever he likes, I have no problem with that what so ever, But The truth need be said. not about his blog as an entity but about the attitude. And being the asshole I am I thought it was only appropriate to call things by their name. So I say, Sorry I hurt your tender feelings kid, you’re probably better off without my comments anyway, enjoy living in your own little fantasy land ^_^

And there was ranting, and bakkouz saw that it was good.

Shit that was long, but fun wasn’t it? And now for something completely different; Behold the coolest optical illusion you’re going to see in the next… 45 minutes:

This is not CGI, it’s a classical optical illusion called the Ames room - cool, yes…?

Do you guys know that the American dollar is worthless? that is has no value what so ever, in fact the u.s dollar is only as valuable as the price of ink and paper used to manufacture it. that is because the American government is printing money out of thin air where as in reality there is nothing to back up that amount of money being printed. do you seriously beleive there is enough gold in fort knox to cover the hundreds of billions of American paper money being circulated around the globe? do you even believe there is enough gold to cover the amount of bills being printed in the U.S yearly? in fact there are people who question if there is any gold left in fort knox to begin with. It is true.

Now you might say that this is a far fetched scenario, and the good old American government would never let this happen. Surely they have taken very well thought out measures to prevent this from happening, surely there is Gold in fort knox and the value of the dollar is well protected. Well, you see, what you don’t know is that the American Government does not control the Gold and it does not control the Federal Reserve System, but in fact it is controlled by numerous private bankers. These private banks and bankers are the ones that control the backbone of the financial system, which in turn operates the whole economical system. these banks just like the central bank is required to be able to have a reserve of gold to cover their transactions, however this gold does not exist but they rely on the central bank and the federal reserve to ensure that their word is good and they are indeed able to back up the money they’re circulate. so you see its all an endless loop of fraud based on something that does not exist.

The Dollar has no value. you see a bank note, a 100 dollar bill for example is simply an I.O.U, it means that when you deal with paper money you’re basically buying off somebody else’s debt or selling it to someone else. and if you collect all these debts, ie; bank notes you should be able to claim them for their original real value in gold from the source that issued it, ie: the banks, naturally, this is impossible since there is no gold to begin with, not in the vaults of the banks nor in fort knox, in fact there are those who claim that fort knox was no longer the main storage place for the federal reserve rather it was stored at the vaults under the world trade center. Bottom line is: There is little to no Gold in fort knox, rendering the almighty dollar worthless. don’t believe me? Well how about this: The Wall Street Journal Claims gold reserves held at depositories such as Fort Knox and West Point may have been seriously depleted.. The gold reserves of the United States have not been independently audited for half a century, and GATA (Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) accuses the Federal Reserve of gold-price manipulation. and of Stealing Iraqi Oil Revenues.

What does this exactly mean? The dollar is losing its value, as we can see right now that dollar is at its all time low against the euro, and its going getting worse, since countries and governments are moving away from the dollar and embracing the euro as their currency of choice for international trade and finance. this decline in the value of the dollar and eventually its collapse will only lead to depression and inflation of massive proportions, and we all know what that means don’t we? a total collapse of the economical and financial systems. It’s as simple as that, this decline is on going and happening, though it might take some time for its full effects to hit hard, but when it does, it will mark the downfall of the United States.