Blood & Treasure

consolidation

Agreed. I think the French paid for Ingrid Betancourt’s release, too. In terms of the fight between the Uribe government and FARC, it’s amusing in a way to see the amount of moral capital thrown at what looks more like a long term attempt to bring the Colombian cocaine business under monopoly control than anything else. Quite sensible in a way: people aren’t going to stop taking the stuff and this way you get less violence. Given French and US support for Uribe’s government we may have here the beginnings of a more sensible approach to the drug trade generally.

Amusing too that the right appear to favour Nationalization here, while elements of the left stick up for Enterprise.

holy assets

I speculated a few days back that there might be some worldly factors behind the Anglican split. Andrew Brown follows the money:

…at one stage, in the early 90s, the Church Commissioners, who manage a considerable fortune, lost around £800m in property speculation that was meant to cover the increasing cost of pensions. The consequence was a reorganisation which meant that the greater part of their assets were devoted to paying pensions, and the costs of running the church and paying clergy salaries, was to be raised from the collection plate.

Not a lot would be needed to do this, but the way that the money is raised makes it seem like a tremendous imposition. Individual churches are "taxed" by their dioceses to pay into a central pool, from which salaries are paid out to all the churches in the diocese. The dioceses in turn have to pay for the central administration of the church, including the synod that meets in York this weekend. The consequence is that people don't feel they are giving to their own church, but to some remote central bureaucracy and for the most part they just don't give. Only five or six of the 43 dioceses in England are actual net contributors to central funds.

…The consequence is that people who go to church find themselves asked not just to pay for their own priest, and their own church, which they might be very willing to do. They are also expected to pay for those heretics down the road, and for their church too. Especially among evangelicals, who believe (without much evidence) that all their churches are growing and all the liberals are dying off, this is a powerful argument for the evils of heresy. Why, they ask - sometimes out loud - should they have to subsidise the very people who are dragging the church down? This is a really hard question, but without a convincing clear answer, the Church of England is doomed.

The C of E also has assets of £5.67 billion under management, including stakes in Bluewater and the MetroCentre up in Tyneside, an extensive property and land portfolio, plus whatever the value is of the Chruch’s taxpayer funded education business. That’s a a lot to be righteous about.

those South Korean brainwashing techniques need a little work

North Korean prisoners of war in a re-education camp perform a square dance with bags over their heads in front of a copy of the Statue of Liberty, sometime in 1952. Or maybe it was the CIA fooling around with LSD again. Anyway, more over here.

truck and barter

Boring news item:

Mining giant BHP Billiton has agreed to iron ore price hikes with Chinese steelmaker Baosteel.

Under the terms of the agreement, Baosteel will pay 144.46 cents per dry metric tonne for fine ore.

Lump ore, meanwhile, will trade for 201.69 cents.

Interesting subtext:

The first Olympic medal ceremony took place Thursday near Tiananmen Square, as the 6,000 gold, silver, and bronze medals were formally presented to organizers of the Beijing games.

Assembled in a mint in Shanghai and a product of Melbourne-based BHP Billiton Ltd., the metals themselves are a story in globalization. The gold and silver medals are comprised of silver from Australia (the gold medals are plated with gold from Chile) while the bronze medals are smelted from Chilean copper. A ring of Chinese jade from the Qinghai province adorns each.

The combined lode cost BHP, the world's largest mining company, over $1 million in raw materials.

That’s what a million dollars worth of Olympic sponsorship buys you: Iron ore at 144.46 cents per dry metric tonne. And given that this is a price rise in basic mineral inputs, it’ll presumably go towards costing the rest of us when recycled into finished goods.

camouflage vestments and other sacred solutions

From here.

Kielce Trade Fairs invites you to participate in the 9th International Exhibition of Church Construction, Church Fittings and Furnishings and Religious Art SACROEXPO, which will be held on 16-18 June, 2008.

Check out the pictures. More here. Really quite remarkable.

Chinese Catatonia Party

Part of our occasional series on snoozing Chinese officials. Here we have a mass meeting of senior cadres from Shaanxi Province. By my reckoning, about 50% of them are unconscious. Go here for an explanation of what got them so excited.

cramped, tattered and rain-stained

Taiwan prepares for tourists from the mainland:

A city health director in southern Taiwan apologised last week after saying authorities would "disinfect the places where Chinese tourists have passed through," local media reported.

On the other hand:

Many Taiwan buildings are cramped, tattered and rain-stained. The Taipei domestic airport has been compared to Pyongyang's.

It’s Britain and America all over again.

Meanwhile, the forces of democracy muster to greet the Chicom hordes.

Mongolian state of emergency

It’s about the gold, possibly. Full spectrum blogging here. Maybe germane: Mongolian neo-nazis.

tacky, but oddly appropriate

Ian Curtis memorabilia on e-bay. Shortly to be joined by this.

I read Touching from a Distance a while back: our hero came across as a kind of existential scally. In fact, nicking Ian Curtis' gravestone is exactly the kind of thing I can imagine Ian Curtis doing.

somebody found a finger

In the mid-1990s, Tibetans started boycotting Muslim restaurants in Lhasa after it was claimed that somebody had found a finger in a bowl of soup, setting off a rumor that Muslims were cannibals. Another rumor had it that Muslim cooks were urinating on food or adding their bathwater to soup, which, it was said, would function as a charm to make Tibetans convert to Islam.

Curious: I never knew that Melanie Phillips had readers in Lhasa.

tactical wall hugging

A military urbanist writes:

Baghdad is starting to remind me a lot of that old wooden board game Labyrinth, I think it was called, or, maybe it was Tilt-A-World. The one you angled two wooden platforms back and forth with rotating knobs to maneuver a little steel marble through a maze of walls without dropping it into a hole. Ultimately, it was a game of delicate touch, floor balance, and tactical wall hugging. Advancing the marble required a strategy of resting it in a sequence of corners, or hold-outs, until you were ready to carefully slope the board again and make a run rolling the it along a fragmented edge hoping to reach another little bunker to pause once more.

But, it’s almost as if Baghdad has been turned into a mortal-sized version of this game since everyone and everything in the city now moves according to a system of blast walls, security barricades, revolving iron gates, military checkpoints, bunkers, IEDs, car bombs, etc. Perhaps, in this case, the American and Iraqi forces have their hands on one of the dials, while the sectarian militia groups collectively have their hands on the other. Wrestling for control of the city, Baghdad is in a constant state of imbalance and instability, subject to ceaseless shifts of power, while its civilians teeter on the edges of sudden death…

Via.

belated greetings

Happy Canada Day.

Anglican geopolitics

Obviously, being an atheist means that I don’t have any opinion on the doctrinal basis of the latest Anglican split: one doesn’t take sides in a row between jibber and jabber. But there’s a fascinating account of the whole thing here and here, as the Telegraph’s religious affairs honcho raises the spectre of an African takeover of the church: even worse, a post colonial African takeover. There follows a comment box meltdown between various rightwingers: the blacks are taking over! But they’re conservative, Christian blacks! The odd non believer also pops up to waggle his ears and smirk, as various others call each other whited sepulchers and make reference to Bishop Nazi-Rally, which personally I thought quite funny. It all gets very heated.

There is a geopolitical issue here. The church leans pretty heavily on its third world dominions; eventually they are going to want to swing the stick on their own behalf rather than just take orders. There are a lot of worldly things at stake here. That’s why the Gafcon crowd in Britain want to “reclaim” the church rather than leave it. If they leave it, they have to get off church property in the widest sense of the word, and as it says in the Bible (Book of Mortgages, 3:16) a religion that loses its property becomes a superstition. It is therefore necessary to drive the apostates from the temple rather than leave and start over from a shed in the back garden.

What makes this more interesting is that Rowan Williams is currently pitching for the Protestant account in China. I say pitching advisedly. The Communist Party officially divides officially recognized Christian churches into two categories: Protestant and Catholic. Naturally, the Vatican is currently in negotiation for the Catholic account. That’s a no-bid process. The Protestants, however, are not organized denominationally but as three-selfers. If the Achbish gets the contract, they will all – without exception – be organized under the Anglican aegis. I say that this is interesting because what the church is pitching for here is essentially a joint venture with the Chinese state to keep its protestant believers pious, patriotic, socially productive and under control: the C of E’s original mission as given by Henry VIII.

The numbers alone make that one hell of an account: and you can also throw in thirteen seminaries jammed to bursting and the world's biggest christian publishing venture. How Rowan Williams deals with the current insurgency may well be instrumental in determining whether he gets it or not

modern proverbial wisdom

There is no anti-terrorism device so stupid that someone won't try it out.

Wengan MGI update: thought work

Original B & T coverage here. The story continues to unfold. We now know that the uncle of the girl who drowned in the Simen river survived, though he was beaten up by unidentified assailants and according to a petition submitted by the family taken away by the cops for “thought work”. The results of that can be seen here. It now also looks likely that Li Shufen may have killed herself, as official sources originally claimed, rather than been raped and murdered by the Children of local CPC cadres. As Jeremiah points out:

Whatever the current status of this case, what is perhaps most interesting is the perception by the people that the local government is sufficiently corrupt so as to make the rumors–as yet unsubstantiated–plausible, plausible enough that when mixed with opportunity and given support by numbers, it can allow the participants to justify to themselves acts of violence in the name of justice.

The picture on the left is of the local Party and government building after the rioters had finished with it. Meanwhile, Roland notes a shift in government information management strategy:

Many of the current crop of central government leaders are technocrats with engineering background. As such, they must understand that public opinion is water that can carry the ship as well as turn it over. The point about hydrological engineering is not to build dams to hold the water back because there will be a catastrophic dam break one day that might bring down the entire system. Instead, the point should be about controlling and redirecting the awesome power of nature in less harmful ways down selected channels.

In the case of the Weng'an mass incident, the major portals were deleting the related posts as quickly as possible. At Tianya Forum, it was estimated that a Weng'an-related post has an average lifetime of 15 seconds before being deleted by the administrators. That was supposed to be a record speed. The same thing was happening at Sina.com, Sohu.com, Baidu, etc. So this was building massive dams all over the map which builds up a tremendous pressure. Where was the pressure release point? You may be amazed that it was over at the Xinhua Forum. The webmasters posted the official Xinhua news story on the forum. That does not help in itself because Chinese netizens think that this Xinhua story was vague and misleading. However, the webmasters allowed the comments to run freely. This meant that the Xinhua posts became the meeting points of all those who want to talk about the Weng'an incident but could not do so elsewhere. Although that post did not contain any news information (such as photos and videos), it was a place for people to vent their outrage. As a result, Xinhua got a record-setting number of visitors who were very appreciative. Is this the plan for the future? You'll find out at the next mass incident (and there will be many).

Again, we have the hydrological metaphor. And as Blog for China notes, comments in the forums are being recycled into features run by state media. Meanwhile the Sinosphere is aware of all internet traditions.

deckhands wanted for sinking ship

Obsolescent Blairite snack thought bucket shop Progress is hiring. I'll pass on the e-mail:

Progress is seeking an experienced, politically savvy communications professional to join our small but busy team, getting smaller through being busy sending CVs off in all directions before the whole ship sinks gently beneath the waves. You’ll have lead responsibility for our website, weekly e-bulletin, increasing range of e-publications amd other varieties of active and passive spam. You’ll also assist on our monthly print publication, Progress magazine. Actually, you’ll be holding the fort while the rest of us try and set up bogus consulting businesses. And you’ll take charge of our advertising strategy across our electronic and print publications. Must be able to endure cruel laughter of millionaire ex- Labour donors as they draw on their cigars and sneer: but what use to me are you any more?

You must be committed to furthering the New Labour cause over the very, very, very long term, have a good political knowledge and have writing and editing skills. So why haven’t you fucked off to join Cameron like all the other prehensile little influence monkeys, then, loser?

the gospel of Davis

"This is an erosion of civil liberties and it needs to be opposed from every quarter of society.

"What will be next? 52 days? 62 days? The right not to be imprisoned by state without charge or reason are elements of British freedom dating back to the Magna Carta.

Well there you have it in short form: the Gospel of Davis and fair enough as far as it goes.

Here it goes as far as the Jamia Mosque on Woodlands Road, Cheetham Hill, maybe a quarter mile from where I sit blogging resplendant. The speaker is Imran Rizvi, a local Tory activist, and he was addressing a post Friday prayer protest meeting. Opportunistc? It would be naïve to assume anything else. But his audience weren’t cynical.

His sentiments were echoed by many in the crowd, including Mohamed Siddiq, 67, also of Lansdowne Rd, who said: "This law is wrong. This is a country that values democracy and the rights of the people, and we are proud of it on that score, but unfortunately this law infringes on individual freedom and liberty."

Meanwhile, Mohamed Harif, 54, of St Kilda's Drive, Cheetham Hill postulated that the bill was passed simply to make the government appear to be acting on terrorism.

"I think they have done this because of pressure" he said. "Passing the law to try and show that they're doing something about terrorism, but there isn't any real need for it".

Actually, maybe they were being cynical. It’s easy to doughnut the guy from the local happy shopper paper with activists. But then we have the fact that the Tories now seem to have the activists to do it: the Tory vote in this ward went up by two or three hundred at the last local election. There are various reasons for this, I think, and it was obviously before 42 days was rammed through parliament. But everyone knows that this is the latest measure in a legislative architecture designed to target some before others. Here’s the local MP’s reaction:

Blackley MP Graham Stringer, who voted in favour of the bill said: "I thought long and hard before voting because I wasn't very enamoured with it, but ultimately it's a reserve power. I doubt it will ever be used.”

This is quite apologetic in a way: Stringer doesn’t need the votes, and a lot of them will be going over to the new Broughton constituency. But he used to be leader of the local council, and like any good city boss he knows where the votes are and why they do what they do. As a Labour man, he votes the party way. But also as a Labour man, he mourns a local instance of the general disintegration of the coalition that put him and his party in office. You can probably track it equally well in other places with other demographics.

Stringer was the first to call for Brown to go, incidentally – or maybe not.

rouba, mas faz*

Happy 87th birthday, Communist Party of China, a sickly baby that came mewling to official life on this day in the French concession in Shanghai. It’s the late Lady Di’s birthday too, as I’m sure those Diana folk who still occasionally populate the comments box here are aware.

*Brazilian Portuguese. It means “on the take but gets things done”, with the implication that a lot of the things are non-too pleasant. To be spoken with a shrug and weary sigh.

War plc

An interview with Stephen Armstrong, author of the above mentioned, below the fold. It appears in this week's Big Issue in the North.

aside from everything else

2003 rewound:

It was about the oil and he’s a poodle.

It wasn’t about the oil and he’s not a poodle.

It’s about the nukes and he is a poodle.