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https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529272/us-designer-s-electrifying-high-vis-creation-tops-the-2024-world-of-wearable-art-awards
Grace DuVal has taken out the Supreme WOW Award with Curves Ahead – a garment made from reflective construction signs and a striking road-cone headpiece.
DuVal says her inspiration for Curves Ahead was witnessing the strength and resilience of the rebuild efforts following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquakes on a road trip around Aotearoa several years ago.
So appropriate for the up to the minute design in Kiwiland NOW! (Not being sarcastic. I think what a great idea though being usa she probably doesn’t realise the depth, width and long-lasting grip of our roading culture with its pointy jester hats sitting in lines down our streets.)
Gwynne Dyer journalist has interesting heading that sounds relevant to us. Saw Sept.28/24.
CHEERS AND JEERS: Jeers to Transport Canada for repeated ferry failures
SaltWire Staff | Posted: 17 hours ago | Updated: 17 hours ago | 7 Min Read
You can sort out the gateway to it if interested. It might cast light on our frequent contretemps.
This by Gwynne Dyer Canadian journalist now in London. It seems that regular rational and balanced journalism like this must be paid for. We will have to see about this.
I feel the Sri Lankan story resonating in what is going on here. Are we going to proceed in the same way?
https://gwynnedyer.com/2024/who-ruined-sri-lanka/
Timeline :
1958 Buddhist extremists of the majority Sinhalese population v Tamil
1971 and 1987-1989 Marxist insurrectionists
1983 start of 26 year civil war largely against Tamils with input from government backed fighters
2009 massacres of Tamils and end of civil war
Entry of Rajapaksas family long supported by various groups who looted the economy
2019-2022 economic collapse that made even food and medicines unavailable to much of the population.
The Rajapaksas were ousted and then –
2022-2024 when a more or less non-political government negotiated loans from the International Monetary Fund and made deals with its biggest creditors.
The austerity weighed heavily on an impoverished and disillusioned population, and in last Sunday’s election they voted a Marxist party into power. It’s the same Marxist party that launched the terrorist insurgencies of 1971 and 1987, although the current leader and new president of Sri Lanka, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, swears it will be different this time…
That usually means low taxes, subsidies for the poor (practically everybody in Sri Lanka at the moment) and strong state intervention in the market. Dissanayake’s manifesto calls for slashing taxes and renegotiating terms for $25 billion of debt, and it understandably alarms the creditors.
Nobody knows the future, but here’s how this is likely to play out over the next couple of years. Dissanayake will not get better terms on Sri Lanka’s debt while he is simultaneously cutting taxes and raising welfare payments. He will probably have to start printing money again (inflation is currently under control) to cover even half his promises.
The only way he won power this time is because a despairing and disillusioned electorate was willing to bet on any party that had not already failed. (The JVP got only 3% of the votes in the previous election in 2019, but 46% this time.) If Dissanayake cannot keep his promises, which is all too likely, the anger and the violence may return.
But why is Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history so angry and violent? None of the five major successor states to the British empire in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka) has an entirely peaceful past, but none compares with Sri Lanka for sustained, large-scale violence across five decades…
But this is really an inadequate explanation for the mass murders of Tamils by Sinhalese mobs, police or soldiers are a recurrent feature of post-independence Sri Lankan history.
The likelier answer is that Buddhist communities in south and southeast Asia feel besieged even when they are in the majority, and lash out against communities of other faiths that really pose no threat to them.
It’s not just Sri Lanka. Consider the brutal behaviour of Burma’s Buddhist majority towards the country’s 4% Muslim minority, the Rohingyas. Most of the survivors now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh.
When some pattern of behaviour seems inexplicable, the real reason is often history. Buddhism rose to dominate India and most of south and southeast Asia in 500 BC-500 AD, but was then reduced to a tiny minority of believers in the next thousand years by a revival of the old religion of Hinduism and the arrival of the new religion of Islam.
Such a huge defeat can leave lasting scars. It may have left a conviction deeper than words in the few remaining Buddhist countries that they are forever at risk of being somehow replaced by the ‘enemy’ in their midst. Get the minority before they become the majority.
I don’t like this hypothesis, but I suspect it may be true.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529371/passenger-on-dramatic-wellington-flight-describes-moment-plane-hit-runway
The pilots and AirNZ must be praised at handling this unexpected occurence so well. The pilots yes and also the management and training being sufficient to enable them to contain the problem and have systems to follow so that the matter was minimised with the least bad result.