Checkpoint the Malaysian side was 45min plus. Made it late for the Muthu brekkie: no pongal, no uppuma, rawa dosai or masala. Rice, rice the waiter offered. Briyani—which was basmati—was only chicken; no vegetarian. Sorry. GROAN. But then the Mussies were fasting, so put up & shut up. An ordeal as usual the run, excepting the breeze ride from Queen Street, over before it began. (Correct phonetic BAS on the other side entering raised a smirk.) Was it Ramadan responsible for the queues in the hall, or Orlando? A more serious sin again such a shocking crime committed during the holy month of Ramadan. The commentators would be onto that immediately, the moderate, co-opted in the diaspora. Expect no mention even a week later of the mayhem playing on all the minds of those watching the Mid-East from afar, from their impossibly contradictory safe vantage. (A Yugo-stalgic knows well.) Mahathir summed up the position the other day in an interview on the campaign trail against his former party. (Hand it to the old fellow.) Collapse of oil prices, renewables, LNP & CSG alternatives alone will not change the equation up there. One hundred years of policy cannot be turned around in a trice. Netanyahu and Sisi ousted, the Sauds finally overthrown, the catastrophe of Syria resolved ? This side able to absorb sporadic terrors into the foreseeable future. Hardship and horror all sides—mostly theirs. Continuing into the distant future. Bracing for the familiar rhetoric: We must not let the terrorists win. Party-on. Our precious way of life. (Howard down in Oz has been enlisted for the current campaign there, which reminds of his gambit during the early days of the Arab Spring, when he claimed the democratic flowering in those parts stemmed from the intervention. Muppet politics.)
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