A Different Drummer

"Australia will not be the same if the nation elects a Labor-union government.

We must all be mindful that there are some dark economic clouds on the horizon with the credit squeeze and a possible downturn in the US economy. For Australia, this global uncertainty will require extremely careful economic management. Otherwise, inflation will rise and this could mean interest rates rise too.

Only a Coalition Government can successfully navigate our $1.1 trillion economy through these uncertain times. One wrong move by inexperienced amateurs could lead to an inflation breakout and inevitably a significant lift in interest rates. This would directly affect every Australian household."

"PRIME Minister John Howard's re-election campaign has been dealt a devastating blow two days before polling day by a hoax pamphlet distributed by Liberals in a marginal Sydney electorate...

...the address was overshadowed by the pamphlet, dreamt up over a few beers by the husbands of outgoing Liberal MP Jackie Kelly and the woman who wants to replace her, Liberal candidate Karen Chijoff.

Gary Clark and Greg Chijoff designed and distributed the flyer, which purports to be from the fictional Islamic Australia Federation and says the ALP wants the Bali bombers forgiven and backs construction of a mosque in western Sydney."

"NO ONE goes hungry at Dollywood. The cake stands at Dolly Parton's theme park in Tennessee sell slices of apple pie that weigh three pounds each, and that's before you bury them in ice cream. The mixed appetisers at the best restaurant consist of a heap of battered and deep-fried cauliflower florets, a mound of deep-fried cheese sticks and a pile of potatoes slathered in melted cheese. The next course might be a vast platter of southern-fried chicken. Only a real man still has room for apple pie after such a feast, but there are plenty of real men at Dollywood. And real women, too. [....]

...the folks at Dollywood like to celebrate their own folk culture and music. Parts of the park looks like a 19th-century Appalachian town. You can watch real artisans blowing glass, making lye soap and carving chairs the old-fashioned way. Some have developed a country sales banter. “No cameras,” says Tom, who makes wooden wagons. “The law in Mississippi's still looking for me.”

Indigenous music is everywhere. In one corner is the Smoky Mountain String Band—three guys in blue dungarees with a banjo, fiddle and upright bass. In another is a bluegrass band called Naomi and the Wood Brothers. In Europe, exhibitions of traditional music and crafts tend to be subsidised and unpopular. At Dollywood, they are neither."

"The European parliament's far-right bloc faces collapse after Romanian MEPs said they would quit over an Italian colleague's "xenophobic" remarks.

Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini, the grand-daughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, reportedly described Romanians as "habitual law-breakers".....

The newspaper also quoted Ms Mussolini as saying Italians saw little difference between Romanian immigrants and Roma (Gypsies).

The Greater Romania party has itself campaigned on a fiercely nationalistic, anti-Roma platform." (BBC)

Heh. Possibly the only time that racism can be fun is when a Romanian racist who hates the filthy Gypsies gets railed on by an Italian facist colleague who hates the filthy Romanians. In theory, therefore, wouldn't putting all the crazy right-wing nationalist leaders in the world together in the same room put an end to crazy right-wing nationalism?

I love this piece on Japan by William Gibson, mostly because I know basically nothing about the place myself. But loving insight is instantly recognizable, and this lucid, fun, sprawling piece strolls effortlessly from A-bombs to Robotic Sushi to Japanese slackers in Vancouver in a way that only something written by an outsider truly engaged with a very, very foreign culture can. I hope that one day I'll be able to write about my adopted corner of the world even 1% as well...

"The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to England. These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvellous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances. Set it all up and yanked the lever to full on. Went mad. Hallucinated. Babbled wildly. Ran in circles. Were destroyed. Were reborn.

Were reborn, in fact, as the first industrialised nation in Asia. Which got them, not too many decades later, into empire-building expansionist mode, which eventually got them two of their larger cities vaporised, blown away by an enemy wielding a technology that might as well have come from a distant galaxy.

And then that enemy, their conquerors, the Americans, turned up in person, smilingly intent on an astonishingly ambitious programme of cultural re-engineering. The Americans, bent on restructuring the national psyche from the roots up, inadvertently plunged the Japanese several clicks further along the time line. And then left, their grand project hanging fire, and went off to fight Communism instead.

The result of this stupendous triple-whammy (catastrophic industrialisation, the war, the American occupation) is the Japan that delights, disturbs and fascinates us today: a mirror world, an alien planet we can actually do business with, a future."

"BANGALORE, India (AP) - An extensive operation on a 2-year-old girl born with four arms and four legs went ``wonderfully well'' doctors said Wednesday as they announced that she was safe and stable after more than 24 hours of surgery...

The girl, named Lakshmi, had been revered by some in her village as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess....

Children born with deformities in deeply traditional rural parts of India, like the remote village in the northern state of Bihar that Lakshmi hails from, are often viewed as reincarnated gods. The young girl is no different - she is named after the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth.

'Everybody considers her a goddess at our village,' said her father, Shambhu." (the Guardian)