Blood & Treasure

at the national party

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government's Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

Oh, but they work so hard, the royals.

money god reverses verdict

Now this is just odd:

The Shanghai stock market fell a bizarre 64.89 points on Monday, the anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, or 6-4-89.

In another twist, the Shanghai Composite Index opened at 2346.98 points on the 23rd anniversary of the killings. The numbers 46.98 could be read as June 4, 1989, backwards.

The odds on this being co-incidence, long as they seem, are shorter than on it being the outcome of a hack or a braoque trading strategy. However, 'Shanghai stock market' has joined the list of banned 'May 35'  terms across the Sinosphere.

 

boss booze brand

Here's a metric for you:

Kweichow Moutai, which trades in Shanghai under the ticker 600519  and has been an outstanding investment play on official corruption and rent-seeking, recently paid the largest dividend in the history of China’s stock markets.

Bill Bishop thinks he had some but isn't so sure. I think I had some when a friend split a bottle with me on my birthday back in the early nineties, back in the days when the real stuff used to dribble out in small quantities, in bottles carefully and clumsily designed to resemble thermos flasks, available only from the top shelves of Chinatown groceries. It was pretty damn good, one of those superficially foul but rapidly convincing and ultimately transcendental playtime occupations (i've had bad baijiu, and it was like waking up poisoned, not just hungover). Anyway, here's a business plan:

Xi Jiu historically has been a mid-tier Baijiu brand, but 2012 may turn out to be Xi Jiu’s year. Xi Jiu has two things going for it, in addition to having a name that is a homonym for 喜酒, or “wedding banquet liquor”. One, it may be more acceptable for bureaucrats to imbibe, if Wen’s crackdown is real. Two, and more important, the character for the “Xi” in “Xi Jiu” is the same character 习 as the surname of Xi Jinping 习近平, China’s presumed next leader.

I first heard about Xijiu last December, when a friend told a few of us that he knew the main Beijing distributor for Xi Jiu and that the company was planning a 400 Million RMB marketing blitz, including ads at the start of the CCTV Evening News, to capitalize on the ascension of Xi Jinping. Part of the marketing pitch was that Chinese gift-givers and their official recipients would be clamoring for Xi Jiu by the 18th Party Congress in late 2012.

a poll of thrones

Telegraph readers are clearly a bunch of historical illiterates, since Alfred the Great didn't even get a single percent of this vote for greatest British monarch. Has Brenda ever defeated a single Dane, I ask you?  It's right there in his name!  She wouldn't even be a good card in the Top Trumps set (ratings: Weight, Height, Wives Executed, Nobles Imprisoned, Foreigners Killed, Parliaments Dissolved, and Miles Per Hour.)

Globally, I think King Sejong would probably top all the polls, not only on merit but because Koreans can swamp online surveys like nobody's business. Partially because of the widespread literacy and love of technological innovation begun by King Sejong, so there you go.

boom boom

I've heard very few good jokes - as opposed to single lines, witty rhymes, etc - in China, and even fewer that weren't reskins of Western or Soviet jokes. But this one was new to me, and rather good.

"A group of local officials and business leaders are meeting in a provincial city to discuss whether some money should be spend on refurbishing an elementary school, or the local prison. The vote is leaning in favor of the elementary school, when one of them says "Gentlemen, let's be serious. Do any of us really expect to go back to school?"

the Queen's Jubilee Diary: guest post by Lyndon LaRouche

9.00am: awaken to usual restorative draught of hot chicken blood, brought by equerry.

9.10am. Chicken blood on the tepid side. Have equerry flayed. William and Harry will be pleased by their new gloves.

9.30 am. Accept mass homage of Bilderberg group. Ritual dirge, abasement, etc. By video link.

10.00am. More teleconferencing. Those global cocaine shipments don’t move themselves you know! Remind minions that though I won’t be round to keep an eye of them over the next few days, I have the ‘thousand eyes of the pineapple’ so think on.

10.40 am. El Chapo Guzman a most enthusiastic fellow, but he should not bring a chainsaw into The Presence, even ‘virtually’.  Will overlook this time.

11.30am. Ceremonials due to begin, but first need equerry to inspect the entrails. Equerry struggles rather, but entrails propitious.

1.00pm (note to self) am tired of Greeks. Their antics no longer amuse. Must have them crushed utterly (arrange w/freemasons)

2.00pm. On royal flotilla. Selecting virgins as gift to Neptune.

2.30 pm. Impressive turnout by subjects. Philip quotes Caligula ‘if only they had one neck’. What an erudite fellow I married!

3.15pm perhaps it is time to change the loyal address to ‘she killed my ma, she killed my pa, but still she is my eternal queen’ I believe something like that worked for the amusing Mr Taylor. Are my subjects ready? Yes. I think so.

3,30 pm. Looking at the assembled crowd, I can’t help wondering what they would do if they really knew what goes into Innocent Smoothies. Usually only tell people at point of death, when tired of playing with them.

4.pm Arrive back at the palace to find a package waiting from President Obama. He has thoughtfully sent me some of his old kill lists. The pictures enclosed have their eyes scratched out by his very own fingernails. I find myself warming to that young man.

5pm. At banquet. Remark to Prime Minister that the supply of orphan’s tears for my martinis is still rather spotty, despite all the effort he says he has been putting in. ‘I want results, David’ I say. Give him that ‘special’ look.

7pm. Mistook catering company chap for envoy from Bilderbergers here to pick up nightly orders. Was most indiscreet. Now will have to kill him, his family, his workmates and everyone he ever knew. What a bother.

8pm. Ask William if he has succeeded in getting Kate to bring her sister over for one of our ‘quiet family evenings’. He says he is working on it.

9pm. And so to bed. Watching equerry bring nightly draught of hot chicken blood. His hands shake a little. He’d better not spill any.

dial M...

My review of Watson and Hickman's Dial M for Murdoch is now up at the National. It was written a little before the most recent twists in the saga, but enjoy anyway.

el jefe Roy

A few weeks back I was stuck in a barber's chair while the perennial local UKIP candidate for the council told me at length why Angela Merkel was a Secret Communist, a fact that had evaded the German counterintelligence service but didn't get by him, oh no. He was there again today so I got revenge by baiting him with a little mild republicanism. Then I struck gold:

"You know what'll happen if we get rid of the monarchy don't you? It'll be President Roy Hattersley!"

Hattersley Klaxon! BUt you can see his point. Hattersley's got the appropriate retired statesman as amiable old doofus persona, and he's written a couple of books so we know he won't be wiping his nose on his sleeve while opening Parliament or meeting his equivalent Grand Whimwhams.

But why is it always Roy Hattersley in these arguments; and why does he feature in them as a kind of he-witch, anxious to hurry the country to final dissolution amidst the flames and the cavorting of council funded lesbians? The 'kippers, like the decents, seem to have a collective demonology in which minor or absurdly inappropriate figures loom ridculously large, weilding ptchforks. Maybe in this case it goes back to the Common Market referendum back in '75.

Anyway, it all gave me a warm feeling for the ancient teddybear of the Labour Right, and I have an urge to obtain a large flag bearing his portrait, against an appropriately scarlet background, perhaps also with some cavorting lesbians in there somewhere, to fly on weekends such as these.

magnificent charlatan

He never quite got America surrounded, but he did his best. Let's make room for the sixteenth anniversary of the death of one of the seminal chancers of the modern age:

At 12:44am on the 31st of May 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary sat bolt upright in bed startling the small group of friends and family who had gathered to keep him company during his final days. He had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer the previous year and it had finally run its course. “Why not?” he asked those keeping vigil. Again, louder, “Why not?” He repeated the question a third time. “Why not?” Then, lying back down, Dr. Leary whispered his final word… “beautiful”… and slipped into death. He was 75 years old.

The late Hitchens major used to go on tour with Jesus people in a manner reminiscent of the old Dr Tim/G Gordon Liddy vaudeville setup. And reality TV, with its origins among Dutch hippy breadheads, always struck me as one of his children, too. Though he would have called it Encounter TV, no doubt.

unpack the weaselometers

Today’s performance by Hunt at Leveson shows why we measure our pols on weaselometers these days. None of them are doing very well:

While around four in ten Britons trust all three leaders, around half do not trust Nick Clegg (51%) and David Cameron (54%) while 46% say Ed Miliband is not trustworthy. This represents David Cameron’s highest “not trustworthy” rating Ipsos MORI has recorded (though his lowest nettrustworthy rating was in August 2007). The current Prime Minister’s trustworthy ratings are very similar to those of Gordon Brown’s in his last month in Number 10, though nowhere near as bad as at the end of Tony Blair’s premiership.  

Miliband: don’t think he’d come round at night and steal your garden gnomes, but you wouldn’t lend him any money.

Cameron. Would steal your garden gnomes and then break them in an act of purple-faced spite.

Clegg. Would steal your garden gnomes, then come round your house pretending to be a concerned neighbour and nick your wallet.

Brown: would steal your children and replace them with garden gnomes.

Blair: a sort of black hole of distrust, where distrust flips over into its opposite in another part if the multiverse and you pay him to take your children away and carry the garden gnomes to the van for him while he lectures you about rights and responsibilities.

Hunt: A kind of obsidian cinder of bad faith. He is tolerated because he is perceived not so much as a human being but as physical evidence of original sin.

not doing invasions seen as popular

There’s an interesting piece here by Johan Lagerkvist on China’s possibly evolving position on foreign intervention:

Some trends are apparent. For China to accept intervention inside the territory of another state, the issue must go through the UN Security Council, and regional organizations must favor the actions.

Moreover, one or several of the following four questions must be answered in the affirmative: First, is there significant risk of military intervention in an area of Chinese economic influence? Second, are the level of Chinese investments and prospects of resource extraction high or promising? Third, are Chinese lives in harm's way? Fourth, will China's image among the community of states and in the court of worldwide public opinion be negatively affected?

In the case of Libya, China accepted intervention due its own commercial interests, the risks posed to Chinese lives, a negative fallout in world opinion and growing pressure from the West and the Arab League.

In Syria only the last and arguably least important factor for China - an image problem – exists.

I’m not sure it does. This polling back in March indicates substantial majorities against taking any military role at all in the Syrian civil war. Obviously, that was before the Houla massacre. But the poll also showed that the Libyan war was not exactly overwhelmingly endorsed by the US public either. And not getting involved in the Iraq or Afghan conflicts hardly presented China with an image problem.

Given the kind of publicity China usually gets for the way it behaves at home, a consistent stance against international intervention is probably one of its best global policy advertisements, at least in a distinctly war-weary West. After all, if the Pew polling still holds good, Beijing is doing a better job of reflecting the will of the American people than Washington.  A reputation as at best a reluctant militarist might  also come in handy if any gunplay actually breaks out in the South China Sea.

Obviously, any credit China gets for its international stance has to be balanced by our knowledge of Beijing’s internal behaviour. So you have a sort of perceptions trade off between all the people who know about the Chen Guangcheng affair on the one hand, and all those who are vaguely aware that China doesn’t do invasions on the other.

But, by and large, not doing invasions does show up in the credit half of the ledger. We don't think of China abroad as armed. We don’t know what Hu Jintao does in the office all day. But we can be pretty sure that he doesn’t sit brooding over kill lists brought to him by his intelligence people, before dispatching flying killer robots to do the necessary. And if he did, he wouldn’t have his people tell the New York Times all about it. That comparison works to China’s advantage.

papa doc and mama liz

From Alex von Tunzelmann’s excellent Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

The State Department was also excercised by the arrival in Port-au-Prince of an Egyptian businessman, Mohammed Fayed, and his apparent acceptance into the Duvalier family circle. A new Fayed-Duvalier oil refinery was announced. There were persistent rumours that Fayed was to marry Duvalier’s favourite daughter, Marie-Denise. ‘While Fayed may say this to all the girls, there remains nevertheless the possibility that he is in earnest re his alleged plans for investment in Haiti and is seeking to strengthen his ties with Duvalier by domestic marriage’ reported Timmons…

 …Fayed’s sojourn in Haiti lasted six months and ended in comedy. He sent a pot of’crude oil’ provided to him by his Haitian contacts to London for analysis. It turned out to be low grade molasses. Fayed’s Hiaitian partners had dug it out of an abandoned French-era sugar plantation. Disgraced, Fayed fled Haiti, while Papa Doc threatened vaguely to have him murdered. Eventually, he ended up in London where, under the name Mohamed al-Fayed, he would achieve considerable fame during his ownership of the department store Harrods.

If Mohammed and Marie-Denise had made a go of it and if a fatal accident hadn’t wrenched Lady Di from the arms of Dodi, the houses of Papa Doc and Mama Liz could have been brought together by marriage. Oh such might have beens…

I recommend the von Tunzelmann, book, by the way: droll without being facetious.

 

Sun reporters abase themselves before statue of Kim il-Sung

Over here. They claim that visitors have to bow before Kim, but I don't believe that's true. They did it for the story. They did it for the good of the organisation. They remain loyal. They didn't 'sneak in' either. They just lied to the tour company, like lots of other punters.

the further adventures of hooligan sparrow

You may remember ‘hooligan sparrow’, Ye Haiyan, the activist I blogged about last January, who spent a day as an unpaid prostitute – not only as part of her advocacy for pound-a-session sex workers but also to highlight the plight of migrant labourers, while doing her best to relieve it in some measure.

Last Friday she was attacked in her office by eight men, who she says were sent by local officials. Here’s what happened next:

Following a heated argument, one of them brandished a knife. The glimmer of the knife stunned me for a moment -- I could not believe they had actually brought a knife with them. Instinctively, I picked up a chair and threw it at him. Other people also distracted him from hacking me with the knife. When I yelled at Wen Dao [Editor's note: A young student visiting the office] to snap a few pictures, the men immediately prepared to flee, but the man wearing a hat lounged towards me.

I yelled at them, "Fuck you! You want to hack me? You want to kill me? Come give it all you've got!" The hat man turned around and threw a bicycle at me. I threw a chair back.

Ms  Ye says modestly that part of the reason she knew they were from the government was because real gangsters wouldn’t have retreated when she resisted. Even so, ovaries of titanium there. ‘Only eight of you? Chew on some fuckin' chair, bastards!’

Some people are wasted on peaceful protest. Ms Ye should gather a band of trusty comrades, find some hills and take to them. You may say that this would be a dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. I reckon she’d be president for life in ten years, and some fellow in the countryside would say to his friends ‘I knew her before she was famous.’ And there would be a dreamy smile on his face...

MGI watch: Rui'an

There's a common scam in China whereby migrants are hired for construction work, with payment due after the job is completed. When people turn up for their money they are confronted by goons hired by the boss, who hand out exemplary beatings to the persistent. This time, it didn't work:

“Around 1,000 migrant workers rushed the government office building, turning over an iron fence gate and damaging over a dozen cars with stones and bricks,” Xinhua’s English language report said.

“Local government sources said the protest was sparked by the death of 19-year-old migrant worker Yang Zhi, allegedly killed by his employer Xu Qiyin during a dispute over salary,” it said.

The protest ended just before midday after the family of the dead man was given 300,000 yuan ($47,300) in compensation, Xinhua said.

A couple of points. It would be nice to think of class  - or at least cross-regional - solidarity coming into play here, but its more likely that boss Xu made the elementary mistake of hiring too many people from the same place. Secondly, note that the lads didnlt try and get Boss Xu direct. Instead, they stromed the local government offices and so leveraged the power of the state. In other words, they acted politically.

my first nightmare

It's hard to tell quite what's wrong with this picture at first. Then you notice the little girl is holding a dead mouse. The baby is vomiting.

I'm actually fairly impressed with this collection of French illustrated children's books: it makes a change from all the wishy-washy-Shirley-Hughesy stuff I remember from our kid's learning to read with the aid of pictures stage. And yes, there is a book called 'my first nightmare' in there.

way it is tonight

Some long, grim reads that recently popped up in the twitter feed:

A roundtable on Tibetan self-immolation, which, after a hiatus, has now reached Lhasa from Tibetan parts of China.

Children of jihad, agency and the state of counter terrorism.

In re Syria: How mass atrocities end: an evidence based counter-narrative.

The information in this article has been available for a while in a piecemeal sort of way. Here it is presented as part of Obama’s election package: the wise, careful, judicious man who signs the death-from-the-sky warrants. The thing is, it’s all in the open now: the old idea of plausible deniability at least acknowledged implicitly that there was a moral issue involved. Now it’s a choice between the Democratic Lucky Luciano, who signs off the deaths thoughtfully, and some presumed Republican Al Capone, who just whacks guys on impulse. And who may actually win in November.

hint of a deal?

Thinking about that notorious Christine Lagarde interview a couple of days back, it occurs to me that it's the first time any big timer has put the issue of tax collection front and central in the Greek austerity debate. Up till now it's all been a combination of supposed unwillingness to work and excessive public spending - things that could be 'cured' by austerity, if you'll forgive the euphemism.

Ordinary Greek taxpayers pay up; at least these days, since taxes have been fed into things like utility prices, they don't have any choice. I also bet that a Syriza government wouldn't have a political problem at all in trying to force the evading classes into paying up; not just because they're left wing but because they're outside the old cozy duopoly.

So despite the insulting nature of Lagarde's demarche, you also have the first hint of common ground between Syriza and what may be its future creditor alliance.

If so , it's about time: it's not as if they're an actual extreme left party. They want to stay in NATO and the EU, which puts them somewhat to the right of Labour in 1983. As I understand it, what they basically want to do is to change the question from 'what are the Greeks prepared to suffer to stay in the Euro' to 'what lengths are the rest of the EU and the relevant organisations prepared to go to keep them there.'  Optimistic I know, but maybe Lagarde's hinting that a deal might be available on these terms. Something like how much extra income can you collect in return for more debt forgiveness/Eurobonds/whatever it takes.

also, they tipped off rambo

(Why, yes, I am experiencing a burst of energy after weeks of being sick, thank you for asking.)

So Bruce Franklin's M.I.A: Mythmaking in America, which is a very good book, has a fascinating but sadly brief mention that in 1979-1980, Chinese intelligence agents in Southeast Asia deliberately spread stories of live US POWs in order to damage US-Vietnamese relations.  Unfortunately the only reference is a Vietnamese govenment pamphlet. So, a) anyone heard any mention of this elsewhere, and b) does it sound credible? It does to me, save that I wonder how the Chinese, hardly the most culturally astute nation at the time, would have picked up on the American POW obsession.

vietnam veteran interview

"I was 18. I joined up to save my little sister. They were still sending people to the countryside at that time, but there was a policy that for every person who joined the army, one of your family members didn't have to go. My sister wasn't very strong, and I didn't want her to have to go.  And I figured there were so many people in the army, the odds of me having to go to fight were low. 

They sent us to Liaoning first of all, for four months' training. It was so remote, there wasn't even a village nearby. Then suddenly they put us in a truck. We couldn't see out, and we had no idea where we were going, and they didn't tell us. They only let us out at night, and we had to piss in the truck. We drove for days, and it was getting hotter and hotter, so we figured we must be going south.  

Then, when they let us out, they gave us guns and put us in the human wave. There were commissars behind us, firing. They fired into the ground, unless you retreated, then they fired at you. We weren't the first troops going in. They all died. Seven out of sixteen of my platoon survived the war. That's much better than the ones who were first in, or the ones who were last out. 

We didn't want to shoot at the Vietnamese at first. We didn't see what quarrel we had with them. Then the sergeant of my platoon was killed, and we learnt to hate them.  When we lost men, we were told to bury them deep or burn them, not to make proper graves. The leaders didn't want the Vietnamese or the West to know how many people we'd lost.  I have a scar on my arm here, look, from the enemy's artillery.

Yes, I'm still a patriot."