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.

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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

A literary delight

This week I had the pleasure of attending  the Annual Lecture of the Hamilton Literary Society, the oldest continuing literary society in Australia. In accordance with tradition the current president is the wife of the Governor of Tasmania, Mrs Frances Underwood.  Mrs Underwood  invited members and guests to Government House to celebrate the 122nd anniversary of the society by holding the Annual Lecture there.  Ms Heather Rose, a respected, award-winning Tasmanian author, gave a stimulating and engaging lecture on Anna Karenina.  Heather wove together insights into the themes and characterisation of Tolstoy's novel with perceptive comments on the pleasures and transforming power of the act of reading.

It was an interlude of civil discourse in another of Tasmania's gems (Government House) and a sad contrast with the current state of shrill, partisan, opinionising that too often passes for public debate in today's Australia. 

Robert Shrimsley has painted a light-hearted picture of the News Corp debacle in


The Financial Times :


With somewhat overheated rhetoric, a number of commentators are talking of the “British spring” – the moment when the political class followed the example of the Arab revolts and threw off the old order; turning against the aged dictator Rupert “Hosni” Muburdoch. The FT was there to witness the scenes from freedom’s latest front line.


They came after elevenses and vowed to stay all day. For years they had been warned to stay silent but suddenly it seemed they were no longer afraid. Out of the House of Commons they streamed and made for Parliament Square, now renamed “Freedom Square”, sticking tulips in the rolled-up papers of the Muburdoch press. Others moved to occupy the main TV positions on the green opposite the House of Lords. Inside the Commons, we heard remarkable reports of politician after politician daring to denounce the ageing and feared media dictator.


They knew the risks. Muburdoch’s secret police were known to hack phones and private records; they bribed police officers and ran smear campaigns to destroy anyone identified as an enemy. The MPs’ courage outshone even the Arab revolts. In Syria dissenters faced only tanks and bullets, but in Britain they knew that Muburdoch’s feared redtops might run a picture of them in their underpants or dig up dirt on their love life.


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Botanico

               Deep in this green world visitors wander

                          listening to ancient lays,

                          that the birds have been singing here

                          for hundreds of years.  

                          Lilting notes that float gently down
                          from the tracery of trees and drift
                          through the stillness till they finally fade.
                         A silence of memories prevails.

                         Centuries of history rest in this soil

                         memories of passion and dreams

                         from the first sod turned, the first seeds sown,

                         when more than a garden was made.

                         Plantings were trialled here and theories tested,

                         collections preserved and described in new ways,

                         shared with the world and their lineages argued.

                         A science of plants was begun.

                        When the birds fall silent, their eulogy finished,   

                        the visitors leave, but the garden lives on,

                        its green world has fashioned a union still flourishing

                        where nature and culture are one.

                       500 years later the garden's enticing

                       for botanists to savour and scholars to probe,

                       but the greatest delight of this special place

                       ---its survival for us to embrace.

Carbon tax

Rod Burgess believes we have three positions on tackling climate change :

     Labor's hybrid 50/50 capitalist-socialist scheme, 

     the rationalist-socialist policy offered by the Coalition, 

     and the romantic-socialist position of the Greens. 

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