Checkpoint the Malaysian side was 45min plus. Made it late for the brekkie menu at Muthu: no pongal, no uppuma, rawa dosai or masala dosai. 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 with it and shut up. An ordeal as usual the visa run, excepting the breeze-bus from Queen Street, over before it began more or less. (Correct phonetic BAS sign on the other side entering the rat-run raised a smirk.) Was it Ramadan responsible for the queues in the full 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 Muslims throughout the diaspora. Expect almost no mention even a week later of the underlying mayhem that is playing on all the minds of those watching the ancestral Mid-East homeland from afar, from their impossibly contradictory safe vantage. (A Yugo-stalgic knows very well.) Mahathir summed up the position succinctly the other day in an interview out on the campaign trail against his former party. (Hand it to the old fellow.) Collapse of oil prices, renewables, LNP and CSG alternatives alone will not change the equation up there. One hundred years of devilish policy cannot be turned around in a trice. Netanyahu and Sisi ousted, the Sauds finally overthrown, the catastrophe of Syria resolved ? This side likely able to absorb continuing sporadic terrors into the foreseeable future. Hardship and horror on all sides—mostly theirs—continuing. Bracing for the familiar rhetoric now: We must not let the terrorists win. Party-on. Our precious way of life. (One sees John Howard down in Oz has also been enlisted for the current campaign in the south, which returns to mind his gambit during the early days of the Arab Spring when he claimed the democratic flowering in that part of the world stemmed from the intervention.)
Monday, June 13, 2016
The Long Queue (Orlando)
Checkpoint the Malaysian side was 45min plus. Made it late for the brekkie menu at Muthu: no pongal, no uppuma, rawa dosai or masala dosai. 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 with it and shut up. An ordeal as usual the visa run, excepting the breeze-bus from Queen Street, over before it began more or less. (Correct phonetic BAS sign on the other side entering the rat-run raised a smirk.) Was it Ramadan responsible for the queues in the full 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 Muslims throughout the diaspora. Expect almost no mention even a week later of the underlying mayhem that is playing on all the minds of those watching the ancestral Mid-East homeland from afar, from their impossibly contradictory safe vantage. (A Yugo-stalgic knows very well.) Mahathir summed up the position succinctly the other day in an interview out on the campaign trail against his former party. (Hand it to the old fellow.) Collapse of oil prices, renewables, LNP and CSG alternatives alone will not change the equation up there. One hundred years of devilish policy cannot be turned around in a trice. Netanyahu and Sisi ousted, the Sauds finally overthrown, the catastrophe of Syria resolved ? This side likely able to absorb continuing sporadic terrors into the foreseeable future. Hardship and horror on all sides—mostly theirs—continuing. Bracing for the familiar rhetoric now: We must not let the terrorists win. Party-on. Our precious way of life. (One sees John Howard down in Oz has also been enlisted for the current campaign in the south, which returns to mind his gambit during the early days of the Arab Spring when he claimed the democratic flowering in that part of the world stemmed from the intervention.)
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