Poor fella this country

As if Pakistan hasn't enough problems!
The Economist is reporting escalating ethnic warfare in Pakistan’s most populous city, Karachi.  This conflict is so bad that Karachi’s ambulance service now has to send out a driver matching the racial make-up of the destination district to pick up the victims of gang attacks. Otherwise, the district’s gunmen will not let the ambulance through.

Karachi’s ethnic wars have claimed some 1,000 lives this year, with more than 100 in the past week alone. By contrast the Taliban and other religious extremists kill tiny numbers in Karachi.

Read more here

Cognitive dissonance

How can it be that there is so little confidence in Australia at the moment, when most Western countries would be more than happy to be in our  economic shoes?     Does it have anything to do with the way media is busy constructing politics and society as a sort of tv reality show, full of strife and with misery to come?  The preoccupation with gloom and doom seems particularly unreal to one who has seen Australia survive many truly difficult times in the past century and who has just returned from Europe, where there really are considerable economic problems to worry about.

Quip of the month

The future is already here----it’s just not evenly distributed.

William Gibson