Blood & Treasure

airbridges to everywhere

It looks like the fallout from the most recent military deaths in Afghanistan has lapsed into the usual debate about equipment:

The Government has been accused of providing too few transport helicopters, forcing soldiers to travel by road, the main target of Taleban attacks.

There were also charges that Viking armoured vehicles — the vehicle in which Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe was travelling when he was killed — do not have adequate protection against Taleban roadside bombs and mines.

The emerging argument here seems to be that you should concede the roads to the Taliban/ACM in order to avoid casualties and since they already have the freedom of the countryside surrounding the roads, that means conceding them the entire battlespace under contention. Apart from the air, of course: that’s ours.

Actual equipment shortages aside, we now seem to have reached the stage where debate about them seems to substitute for debate about the war itself, perhaps not surprisingly since it's consistently unpopular. The Defence Secretary sort of puts the case for counterinsurgency, but can’t bring himself to say that this involves exposing your side to casualties in order to secure control of the population. That might demand an explanation of why this is worth doing. For the Tories, Liam Fox seems to think that Brown should have produced an entire air cavalry regiment from his magic arse while he was Chancellor. This constitutes being a loyal opposition.

legacy fascism

I remember reading Martin Pugh’s Hurrah for the Blackshirts and noticing that the areas where the Blackashirts campaigned most heavily in the 1930’s are also mainly the areas they target today. Likewise, motor racing was always Hitler and Mussolini’s idea of a sport, and now we have Bernie Ecclestone:

“In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done.”

Also admires Thatcher. But these guys always leave out Stalin, which seems unfair if getting things done is your criteria.

If you’re thinking in terms of legacy fascism, it’s not the fact that Max Mosley is the son of Oswald that shoukd make you a bit suspicious, but that he’s the son of Oswald who went into Formula 1.

an imagined community of peasants

Ah, red Toryism. Apparently it goes like this:

Sell the banks back to the private sector at a presumed profit of 5% of the money invested. Spend that money on those in receipt of undefined ‘welfare’, a presumed amount of £50 billion. Except that you don’t give them that in money, just vouchers which can only realize a return when invested in businesses. For reasons not fully specified most of these will be “social enterprises” which will not only turn a profit but bind the community together. Oh, and local shops, which will presumably all be converted into share issuing enterprises.

This is meta-Blairism in the sense that it follows the New Labour technique of giving people shiny things to play with - remember communitarianism? - while the future government gets on with its real business of rewarding friends and punishing enemies It’s marginally interesting in that the proposal is essentially a return to peasant proprietorship. One sees vistas of stout yeomans luxuriating in income streams from allotments and corner grocers, drinking the health of King-Shaman Charles in foaming pots of locally produced micro-brewed ale – a specifically Tory daydream for the forthcoming dispensation.

more drunk nunblogging

"Sr. Denise Marie is coming but to do what?"

virgin mary with laser

A trickle of nuns are still getting through.

paranoid torts

Former business partner blasting your mind with electromagnetic radiation? Take him to court!

Late last year, James Walbert went to court, to stop his former business associate from blasting him with mind-altering electromagnetic radiation. Walbert told the Sedgwick County, Kansas panel that Jeremiah Redford threatened him with “jolts of radiation” after a disagreement over a business deal. Later, Walbert, said, he began feeling electric shock sensations, hearing electronically generated tones, and getting popping and ringing sounds in his ears. On December 30th, the court decided in Walbert’s favor, and issued a first-of-its-kind order of protection, banning Redford from using “electronic means” to further harass Walbert.

...Walbert’s cause is supported by Jim Guest, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives. He’s working on proposed legislation to addresses electronic harassment, including a bill against the forced implantation of RFID chips.

Ah, the Republican Party. Apparently, the RFID chips are implanted by the people who come round to take the census.

gangster political economy

The problem with Martin Jacques and his works is basically this.

If you ever find yourself arguing on China’s side of any given question you generally end up making a point to the effect that, OK, the Corleones are in charge, but it’s Michael, not Sunny. They’re smart people. They’re rational. They’re up for a deal and will deliver their end of it. They'll kick back some of the money. They’re not conspicuously aggressive internationally and at home they don’t kill any more people than they have to: just like that counterinsurgency we’re all so fond of these days. Anyway, if you bought all that crap about Starbucks leading the charge towards democracy in China it’s far too late to be bitching about it now.

And then along comes Martin: “Corleoneism –it’s a traditional philosophy and yet at the same time it’s a whole new way of looking at the world! And it’s taking over! Whaddaya think of that, Yankees? Jefferson! Washington! Madison! We're giving you guys a hell of a beating! Woo-hooo, look at me!”

The thing is I’m not sure that this will do Martin much credit with his new insect masters if only for the reason that the guy in the pulpit normally doesn’t like people preaching from the choir.

gangster economics

Matt Taibbi’s examination of Goldman Sachs and its role in this and other crises (in Rolling Stone: reprinted here) is probably the best account of an organisation of this type since Norman Lewis published the Honoured Society.

Sinosphere Friday

The ninteenth, I believe. Onwards:

Chinese airline to create standing category of passenger. Ryanair next…

Candid assessment of the reasons for the Shishou MGI by a local official. A highly revealing account from the inside of how these incidents are handled: lions and tigers talking about the day job, to quote Luc Sante in another context.

 A Chinese migrant worker blogs.

We have chick lit, China has “officialdom novels.”

Most novels read the same: A protagonist with a conscience is posed against a group of corrupt officials in a powerful network; the fight between good and evil is spiced with attractive women, and good always wins.

The leading novelist in the field was formerly the secretary of a Mayor of Shenyang who was executed on corruption charges in 2001. So he knows whereof…

Green Dam censorship system indefinitely postponed. Roundup of possible consequences here.

Insidious Chicom propaganda in your supermarket.

I have no idea what the truth is in this case:

In March, police picked up two elementary school-aged girls on suspicion of prostitution, and beat up their parents who were brought to the station for questioning. The two girls were tested at a hospital and found to be virgins. The police apologized, but the father, Liu Shihua, demanded 200,000 yuan in compensation for the abuse his family had suffered.

A few days later, that story was contradicted by reports that claimed that Liu had misled police into carrying off his two younger daughters (actually foster daughters) to protect his biological daughter who was the real prostitute. And the two girls' mother, Zhang Anfen, was accused of misleading the hospital into issuing fake test results, as well.

Obama endorses Chinese Blockberry. They tried to get in touch with the comoany behind the fake BlackBerry, but it turned out to be a fake company.

ESWN has a rundown of the annual July 1 March held around the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China.

This is kind of old school: students in Beijing forced into compulsory drill sessions in advance of the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule.

Zheng said he did not dare resist when teachers insisted he and his classmates sign a "volunteer" sheet committing him to at least two-and-a-half hours practice a day for two months.

I getcha. Voluntary in the Alan Johnson sense.

ordinary decent criminals

Dave wonders why the man who let Pinochet slip from his grasp on grounds of ill health is so determined to keep his paws on the equally unwell Ronnie Biggs.

It’s a good parallel. As I recall it, the arguments of Pinochet’s defenders seemed to run along the lines that he only hurt people who had it coming for taking diabolical bleeding liberties and that he was basically just protecting the locals and keeping order in his own manor because someone’s got to be in charge. You had that fucking toerag Allende thinking he could just walk in and rob your dear old granny because he was elected or something? That's right out of order and no mistake guv.

It's amazing how low rent cockney gangster discourse reflects justifications for fascism.

the terrorists can't beat my pussy

The late Molly Sugden speaks out on international affairs:

“We initially did it as a pilot to start with. We just did the one, and we all thought that was the end of that. But I don't know if you remember during the Munich Olympic games when the Israeli's were killed, of course there was a tremendous gap because all that television time had been left open and they had nothing to fill it with. Consequently they shoved in all these pilots one after another which nobody knew about and we got no audience figures. Of course we thought that was the end of that, and what a pity, and yet by some fluke the BBC decided to take it up.

Via. And so it was that Are You Being Served was commissioned for its first regular series. Take that, Black September.

no, you open yours

Lots of album covers from the Soviet Union over here.

black cat down

Just saw a programme about some man-boy from Top Gear going for a spin in a U2 spy plane, which reminds me of this rather wonderful piece about how the Chinese PLAAF managed to shoot down five of the buggers during the cold war.

my irrevocable resignation

Black and White Cat has the resignation letter supposedly written by Jose Manuel Zelaya, formerly of the Presidential Palace, Tegucigalpa, lately transported to Costa Rica in his pyjamas:

Due to the polarizing political situation in the country, which has provoked a national conflict that is eroding my political support, and due to my uncureable health problems that have impeded me from concentrating on my fundamental duties in the government, I am handing in my irrevocable resignation as President of the Republic, together with my Cabinet members, effective as of today.

Written three whole days before the coup. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?

This is good, by the way.

Malcolm and the paradoxes

I find it very difficult to understand why anyone would pay to go and see snack thought maestro Malcolm Gladwell strut his stuff. Perhaps it’s the bit where he bites the head off a live paradox onstage. A feeble paradox. A paradox not worth mentioning. But live nonetheless, and Malcolm crunches its furry little head between his manly, contrarian jaws while the ladies scream and the men look on in envy.

history not written by the victors after all

"The greatest of all crimes," Francesca Beauman insists, "is dullness." For her, the secret to making history compelling is to pick quirky subjects. "Two years into my degree when it came to picking subjects for our dissertations, everyone else was choosing to write about something sensible like 'The New Deal 1933-1939' but it seemed more fun to become the world's expert in something nobody else knew about, hence, pineapples, the subject of my first book."

...these days, it’s apparently written by the wankers.

To be fair, this piece on our wonderful new historians and how they don’t make you think about anything at all seems to be driven by the publishers PR department. Some of the books written about seem to be concocted by them as well, before being fronted to airheads. Fucking pineapples. However, I read Ben Wilson’s The Age of Cant recently and thought it pretty good. It’s a history of public morality at the turn of the 19th century as affected by and in turn affecting economic and social change. No it’s not! It’s a wonderful story about how people hundreds of years ago used to swear a lot and then they stopped, because it was like gay and everything.

i never knew that about the oil

Perhaps naively, I never realized that you actually had to pay oil companies to do what they profit from in the course of their business:

The bidding process was being closely watched for signs as to how the new Iraq is likely to go about developing its vast oil reserves, the world's third-largest after Saudi Arabia and Iran. But as the bids by representatives of the world's top oil companies were unsealed, it quickly emerged that there was a wide gulf between the maximum price the Iraqi government was prepared to pay investors to develop the oil fields, and the minimum price oil companies were prepared to accept.

A consortium led by U.S. oil giant ConocoPhillips sought five times more in remuneration than the Iraqi government offered to develop the Bai Hassan field in northern Iraq. Other bids were almost as far from the prices set by the Iraqi government.

I suppose I can understand why a company might want some money up front to develop fields whose proven reserves are unknown and which bear political risk. But it’s still odd to characterize the Iraqi unwillingness to pay oil companies to develop oilfields from which oil companies later profit as a “failure to attract investment”.

Oh well. There’s always China. Incidentally, China’s also buying into Nigerian oilfields, MEND notwithstanding, which makes at least two places where Chinese third country investments are protected by expeditionary forces of the US military.

on a certain celebrity's career development

Well I don’t mean to keep harping on about the Jackson case, but it does occur to me that it’s special in that everything about it is positively squalid: the drugs, the money grubbing, the buzzing of minor celebs around the corpse. Now they’re going to show off his carcass to weeping inadequates. Couldn’t they ceremonially eat him or something, just to have done? Or maybe cut up his body for relics and sell it over e-bay?

Or maybe a quick phone call to Teutonic corpsemeister Gunther Hagen. Yes, Michael will go on tour…for ever, much to the satisfaction of his creditors.

id and the concession economy

This is welcome:

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports. The cards were due to be trialled there - sparking trade union anger.

But:

However, in a statement, the campaign group No2ID said the "humiliating climbdown" was not the end of the scheme. "It's just part of the ongoing attempt by senior Home Office officials to fortify the scheme against cancellation and to bind the hands of a future government," the statement added.

So what we now seem to have is a huge bundle of surveillance pseudo solutions, mainly aimed at funneling money to consortia dependent on government contracts, on the lookout for problems and seeking justification through random insertion into various aspects of policy. This seems relevant:

Is the State being privatised in Britain, or is it taking over the private sector? The answer is that both are true, and neither. What we have is not a new private sector boom, but a growing state-dependent economy of concessions. Companies like Qinetiq and Capita only exist because of the way the state contracts out its services. Government's loss of faith in its own ability to organise production leads to an astonishing abandonment of its authority to chaotic and destructive shell companies...

All the time the established boundary between ‘state' and ‘civil society', between ‘public goods and private benefits', is being redrawn, or broken down altogether. What emerges is neither an enhanced private sector, nor coherent state provision, but rather a hybrid, dependent on public finances to survive, and increasingly operating according to a mixture of political, administrative and business models that makes little sense. Via.

farewell the trumpets, a bit...

A couple of vignettes from the partial US troop withdrawal:

Hours before the pullout four US soldiers were killed in Baghdad in what the US military described as "combat-related activities".

 Didn’t “combat related activities” used to be known as “in the line of duty?” Also, Talabani:

Appearing keen to tone down the rhetoric of Maliki earlier in the week, Talabani said: "While we celebrate this day, we express our thanks and gratitude to our friends in the coalition forces who faced risks and responsibilities and sustained casualties and damage while helping Iraq to get rid of the ugliest dictatorship and during the joint effort to impose security and stability."

Waving or drowning, do we think?