Blood & Treasure

loondom explored

Chris Brooke has an informative history of the currently modish phrase swivel eyed loon. It seems that the phrase swivel eyed was current in the eighties and used against persons on the Left. It was only when it became married to the word loon that the phrase as a whole began to be applied to the Europhobic Right and to John Redwood in particular (whose eyes do, in fact, swivel), and now, thanks to a still unconfirmed personage close to the government, to Conservative Party activists tout court. And of course, Anthony Wells managed to nail the phrase specifically to the kippers with a famous googlebomb in 2004. Chris adds:

As Hegel presumably remarks somewhere, all great Tory crises appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as farce, the second as farce.

I’d say it’s more ‘the first time as farce, the second time as panto’ in the sense that the term  is used to encompass a lot more people these days; enough to fill halls in provincial towns all over Engand. The phrase may even have a Spartacus effect, with people popping up all over the place declaring ‘I am a swivel-eyed loon!’

So its interesting that Lord Feldman, named as the source who dropped the latest loon bomb, is supposed to be considering libel action. It would be a fascinating test case. Do ‘right minded people in society’ in the consideration of a judge, consider the term ‘swivel eyed loons’ to be libellous or fair comment when applied to Conservative Party activists?

worthwhile Canadian headcase

One of the irritating things about Boris Johnson is that you sense under the surface that the buffoonery is just a flinty-eyed career strategy, a little tactical clowning to butter up the punters and enliven the usual prehensile manoeuvres.

 As far as mayoral buffoonery goes, it is to Toronto we must look for the real thing in the person of Rob Ford. The crack smoking will surely be the climax of his career, but my favourite of these escapades is when he had to be restrained by the cops from driving the kids to Florida at five in the morning while drunk. There’s something very country and western about that.

 One must congratulate the people of Toronto for the clever way in which they have protected themselves from an exuberant psychopath by electing him mayor; that way he is surrounded by armed men in public and your chances of running into him in a bar are minimised. Though, clearly, he gets off the reservation sometimes.

better late

May 16 was the 47^th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution and former Red Guards have been taking to the Sinosphere to apologise to their victims.

Another netizen followed suit: “40 more years ago, I was a little Red Guard. I scolded and forced a math teacher to labor work with a club that was used to ‘verbally attack and physically defend.’ Sorry, teacher Zhou.” Netizen  also shared his personal experience: “I have been there, too. I was in 3^rd or 4^th grade and, together with a classmate, reported our class supervisor’s “anti-revolutionary” words to the school authority. Whenever I think of it, I feel ashamed. Teacher Xu Suzhen, how are you doing today? Sorry!”

Sorry, teacher dude. You’re so not a cow demon. I sometimes think that if China does get a reconciliation process over the Cultural Revolution it won’t be about arrests or trials or apologies from senior politicians or people giving solemn testimonies; it’ll be some kind of cable tv extravaganza where victims are reintroduced to their old tormentors and we hear how they both got on since the time when one locked the other in a cowshed. At the end, both will be brought on to stage for tears and a big hug, to thunderous applause from the live studio audience watching this pensioner and this late middle age person make up after all these years. Because, you know, it was just this thing that happened and it was terrible and we’re not like that these days and aren’t things just going great. The old Surprise, Surprise format would do very nicely here.

the sweetest honey

Then during August last year, Xiaoyan caught a bad cold, and Old Shen took her to the hospital and stayed with her there for a day, and next day accompanies her back to her room. But then Xiaoyan would not let him leave. That night, they had sex for the first time. “It was like eating of the sweetest honey”, Old Shen was later to tell the journalist from Contemporary Gold. From then on, Old Shen spent three or four nights a week with Xiaoyan.

This is quite a touching story, but from a helplessly Western perspective it's amazing that, given that people have been leaving their villages in huge numbers in China over the past twenty years, finding partners they like better has only now been recognised as a phenomenon.

embrace skynet

Here’s something disturbing for you: the liberal case for autonomous killer drones.

In a nutshell the idea is that machine intelligence can be geared to judge more effectively than humans what is and is not a legitimate target, and therefore going over to drone autonomy will result in fewer civilian casualties.

Leaving aside the matter of what metrics are incorporated into the initial programming, then if this is true it also follows that war itself should be liberated from human control: just plug in a suitable matrix of threats, interests, principles and red lines and away we go. One assumes text messages and email alerts will be sent to all the stakeholders. Except in drone territory. Those guys will get another type of message.

mass incident watch: Kunming

Starting at 10 am Thursday local time, a second protest against plans to expand a local petrochemical plant took place in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province and a city roughly the size of London. See the whole thing liveblogged at the SCMP.

This was a follow up to the demonstration which took place on May 4 and which the authorities tolerated. That didn’t stop them using a full range of methods to try and abort today’s protests, ranging from straightforward PR to various forms of indirect intimidation:

Word is also circulating on Weixin that all taxi companies in Kunming have forced their drivers to sign a statement promising to not go on strike on the day of the next protest and not to take customers to the designated protest site.

This clearly didn’t stop the demo, though it may have had some effects on the numbers. The SCMP reports that a contingent from the local university failed to turn up as expected. The number of demonstrators overall seems to have been in the 1-2000 range; obviously very small given the overall population of the city, but a brave effort which culminated in the mayor himself coming out to take questions from the crowd. Bear in mind here that the mayor is only the second most powerful figure in Kunming politics, after the Party Secretary. A number of demonstrators were willing to leave their contact details with the mayor to arrange further dialogue. Let’s see how that works out. Interestingly, a lot of the pre-event organizing/propaganda was conducted in English, which would both enable the organizers to avoid censorship while limiting their ability to agitate among the general population.

The plan was for demonstrators to assemble and march down Kunming’s main drag to city hall. This was successfully achieved, despite attempts by the local cops, who seem to have behaved well, by and large, to corral them at various points along the line of march. There was also a lot of self-policing going on: people picking up litter, restraining bottle throwers, keeping road lanes open etc. This conforms to the ‘rules of the game’ we’ve seen emerging in other environmental protests over the years.

There has been no move by the city authorities to cancel the planned PX plant. What’s more there’s a strategic dimension here: the plant is designed to process oil funnelled down a pipeline through Myanmar to the Bay of Bengal, thus reducing China’s reliance on shipping for its energy supplies. Given this, it’s hard to see the local authorities acceding to the protestors demands even if they were so minded. This sensitivity may also have contributed to the relatively soft way in which the demonstrations have been handled. I have no idea whether that will continue if people take to the streets for a third time.

never mind the impact, feel the bounce

Dan Snow marks the Dambuster raid anniversary:

The fact that a titanic effort was made to repair this damage shows how high a priority the dams were, and it meant resources were shifted from elsewhere. Nowhere was this costlier to the Third Reich than on the beaches of Normandy.

Hitler had ordered the construction of a massive network of defences against an Allied invasion. Now thousands of workers who should have been toiling in France were redirected to the Ruhr to repair the dams. A year later allied troops would have faced far more significant defences had it not been for the Dambusters raid.

Mmm. Bit of a stretch there I think. If we're arguing from opportunity costs, the raid was arguably worth doing because there wasn't anything more effective the bomber crews would have been otherwise doing, but I think the claim that raid was directly responsible for an acute shortage of slave labour on the French coast needs a little more work, to say the least.

He sort of admits this in the last para, which is bizarre until you realise it means 'anyway, who cares - it was incredibly cool.' Which indeed it was, casualties aside.

enter the celestials

Here's a thing: Taiwanese gangsters make a mass attempt to break into the marketplace of ideas:

The pro-independence party's offices in second- and third-tier cities were each suddenly overwhelmed by hundreds of membership applications filed by reputed gangsters belonging to the Celestial Alliance gang, one of Taiwan's most notorious crime syndicates. 

If no one had blown the whistle, the DPP would have by now been infiltrated by thousands of criminal elements well trained in violent intimidation, extortion and the covert pulling of strings in economic life.

Some within the DPP are blaming Beijing for what they say is an attempt to orchestrate the destruction of Taiwan's main pro-independence party. Maybe. But Taiwanese politics has always been mobbed up, from the days when Chiang Kai-shek used the United Bamboo triad as enforcers and fundraisers. And its not the first time the Celestial Alliance has made its presence felt in local politics:

A self-admitted spiritual leader of the Celestial Alliance is former independent lawmaker Lo Fu-chu, who, as the US news wire Global Post impressively described, "infamously attacked a female legislator during a live TV broadcast and allegedly had another lawmaker abducted, blindfolded, stripped naked, locked in a dog cage and dumped on the side of a road".

Historically, the point of difference between the Celestials and other Taiwanese gangsters is that they are native Taiwanese, rather than people from the mainland who blew in with Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s. In fact, the alliance was formed by gangsters jailed in a selective crackdown on organsied crime under Chiang's dictatorship. So it follows that they would be attracted to the party that actively proclaims a distinctively Taiwanese identity. Perhaps the parallel here is the identification of the mafia with the SIcilian autonomists in the days before it went over to the Christian Democrats.

On the other hand, the idea of a power play from Beijing vibes quite well. The current KMT administration, while it takes care to maintain good relations with the mainland, basically favours the status quo, as does, broadly, the population. If Beijing can destroy the credibility of the at least formally pro-independence DPP, then the eklectorate is deprived of choice and it is free to try and manipulate the KMT in a positively pro-reunification direction.

 

tiger stalking

So China’s top energy bureaucrat is under investigation, officially for ‘grave discipline violations’, unofficially for bribery, facilitating fraud and making death threats to his ex-mistress. All of which are certainly grave discipline violations.

How this happened offers clues to the balance of power in the new dispensation. The allegations were first made by Ms Xu, the mistress in question to financial journalist Luo Changping, who published them online in December. Since then:

They lingered there, despite a denial by a spokesman for Mr. Liu and the power of censors to erase the postings, which fanned a public uproar.

Interesting period of equipoise there. The allegations were first made in the big wave of mistress exposes that provided the gaudy mood music to XJP’s formal accession to power, amid vows to crack down ‘on both tigers and flies.’

It seems that the months the allegations were left hanging demonstrates the difference between a tiger and a fly. Personally I find it hard to believe that serious allegations against a very senior central government official weren’t run past some section of the apparat before being published. Mr Luo was then left twisting in the wind for four months while CDIC tried to get the initial goods, and Liu’s fiefdom/network tried to stall them. On the one hand, his allegations remained in public view. On the other, they would be evidence against him if the relevant organs decided in favour of one of their own.

 “I had felt panicky before because nothing was happening, but I’ve breathed a sigh of relief now that this has happened,” he said, referring to the inquiry.

I’ll bet he was panicky. I get the impression here that CDIC is willing to go through cutouts to get its man, but if they fail to do that then the cutout is on his own. The general deal under Xi seems to be that officially registered media have more latitude while genuinely independent criticism faces worse suppression. But even if you're on the inside, you're on the inside of a shark tank.

big question

A breathless nation can breathe once more. The in-out question is out:

“Do you think that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union?”

Do you think doesn't exactly convey urgency. I can see a strategy here of a pub conversation unfolding via a series of annual referenda. Next year:

What do you mean ‘depends’? ‘Depends’ on what?

 And the next year, the following question will be put:

 Oh, ok. So why d’you think that, then?

 And this will be followed by:

 Well which bits do you like?

 And the next year

 So do you like those bits more than you dislike the bits you don’t like, or the other way round?

 And the year after that

 Come on, make your minds up. Football's on at 10.

At this point, Nigel Farage dons a union flag headband, downs a gallon of Old Very Peculier, and drunkenly pilots his light aircraft into a meeting of the 1922 committee, and that’s the end of that.

numbers game

So Japan’s Prime Minister goes to fly the flag at an air base. And just so happens to pose inside a plane whose unit number is 731:

The number 731 reminds people of Unit 731, which was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

It may just so happen that the man who thinks that what Japan did in China and the rest of Asia before and during World War 2 did not necessarily constitute aggression forgot the significance of 731, but it’s difficult to believe that none of his aides or protocol people did.

This diplomatic cockpunch might have something to do with last week’s attempt by a couple of Chinese scholars to reintroduce Okinawan autonomism to the East Asian sovereignty debate by declaring that Japan’s control over the Ryukyu islands was historically questionable. The Daioyu/Senkaku isklands are currently administered from Okinawa prefecture and Okinawa, of course, is the site of the main US military base in Japan.

statistichurnalism

Generally fascinating ( well it's MInistry of Truth so long, but not tl;dr) account of a PR company running voodoo polls on behalf of clients to provide news hooks for press releases recycled unquestioningly by various media, which in turn bleed into politics in both the direct and general social priority setting sense. Not exactly full service manufactured reality, but certainly a pretty accomplished boutique operation. Now I see the point of appointing an SEO spiv like Grant Shapps as chair of the governing Party. 

Funny thing is we tend to see augmented or distorted forms of reality as Philip K Dick-ish, and they turn out to be Plain Old Dick-ish.

season collapses in heap

To mark the end of a dismal season for Stoke fans, Antonio Gramsci compares football to scopone, an Italian card game:

Games of Scopone have been known to end up with corpses on the floor, fractured skulls. One certainly never reads about games of football ending that way.

This is what happens when you live in a time before Tony Pulis is available to inform your analysis.

What Gramsci actually got wrong here was his linking football with open, democratic capitalism and the spirit of fair competition and scopone with a state of affairs where “the characteristic forms of civic life are ...the cults of incompetence and career-mongering, with corresponding payoffs and favours…” This is actually the difference between football and  FIFA.

Like I say, a dismal season. I didn’t want us to get relegated or anything, but by god it was ugly. 

it passes the time

"Hey Dave!"

...snores.

"Hey Dave. Wake Up!"

urghmph. ergh. (Yawns). Wassup??

"I'm Bored."

"Uh. Yeah"

"Why don't we both put our keys in the locks, shut our eyes and see if we can turn them at the same time?"

"Hey, yeah!"

The other thing is that if all these missiles are still prepped, that means that they're still pointed somewhere. Are these the same somewheres they were pointed at during the cold war or have the lads been amusing themselves by putting the destinations on shuffle?

car crashes, icons, heroes of the republic

One minor mystery exercising the Pyongyangosphere this week is the mysterious award of  Hero of the Republic, the DPRK’s top gong, to Ms Ri Kyong-sim, a no doubt diligent but decidedly humble Pyongyang traffic cop.

The fact she was one of Pyongyang’s famous traffic ladies reminded people that mysterious car accidents are supposed to be the preferred means of assassinating inconvenient senior regime figures. Could Ms Ri have successfully intervened in an attempt to run fatty Kim off the road for good? Andrei Lankov makes a pretty convincing case here that the whole story is a myth, or at any rate that giving drunken power mad geriatrics the freedom of the roads is in itself sufficient explanation for the remarkably high death rates in traffic accidents among senior KWP cadre: no bumping off by bumper cars necessary.

Both Lankov and the folks at exile site New Focus International converge on an alternative explanation:

But according to our North Korea correspondents and sources in Pyongyang, Ri Kyong-Sim received the award for putting out a fire that broke out near a propaganda poster.

One New Focus correspondent in North Korea told us, “A fire broke out opposite the cross-roads traffic-post where Ri Kyong-Sim was on duty. When the propaganda poster with Kim Jong Un’s name caught on fire, Ri went to put it out.” He continued, “The action had already been recognized at various Party speeches. This latest award is being conferred at Kim Jong Un’s explicit orders.”

In other words, she was honoured not for saving Kim, but for saving an icon of him. Both NFI and Lankov note that this isn’t the first time someone saving the image of the Kims was so rewarded. Lankov notes that a chap who saved a portrait of Kim Il-sung from flooding whole allowing his own children to drown was similarly honoured in 2008. The difference this time is that the reason for Ms Ri’s award was not publicly given.

North Korean defector Park Ji-chul* offered a suggestion for this anomaly: “Information flow across the Sino-North Korean border is much freer than it was a few years ago. Perhaps the North Korean state has chosen to remain silent on why it has conferred its latest title of ‘Hero of the Republic’ because it realizes how silly this would look on the international stage.”

unwilling to sustain the true faith

If I were a Tory I'd be annoyed that Cameron never got a majority in 2010, but mollified by what he's done since then - give the punters Toryism good and hard, on the grounds that the only chance of a majority in 2015 is that they might get to like it, or at least get battered into submission. I'd even feel tempted to rally round the ham-faced messiah in his time of woe. There's a good long argument here about why it hasn't happened. Here's the inflection point:

For Tory neo-liberals and Euro-sceptics a potent ‘stab in the back’ myth was created, in which a failure of nerve by cowardly Westminster elites unwilling to sustain the true faith brought about her downfall. For the Tory right the historical lesson drawn was the need for an increasingly virulent anti-Europeanism and a recommitment to anti-statism – welfare cuts, privatization and ‘light touch’ non-regulation in financial markets. These policies could not fit easily with the historical integrative role of the Conservative party, as the feuding under the Major government demonstrated.

And the current crisis within the Tories really seems to be a revival of those feuds, this time with a vehicle to accomodate them. This in turn makes the Lib Dems a haven for those Tories who can't stand the crazification any longer. And in reference to what the author says about the Tories traditional integralist function, One Nation Labour, though a thing all breathing people should be at some level ashamed of, shows that Killer Ed is indeed a capable strategist.

violins of autumn

Fascinating stuff on how South Korea communicates with its agents in the North, via cold war type numbers stations:

But between the international broadcasters and static, there are other signals attracting a much smaller audience.

The most mysterious of these is only on the air for a few minutes each time, and the broadcasts come just a few times each night. If that’s not enough, the content of the programming is even stranger.

After a North Korean popular song, an announcer comes on and broadcasts a string of numbers. And then it shuts down.

“Attention number 521, attention number 521, Please receive a telegram.”

And then a string of numbers is read out.

No mention of how the agents communicate back or if they stay in touch at all. Nothing so melancholy as a stream of cryptic signs directed at someone liquidated or otherwise absent or inoperative.

atrocious masterpiece

Hey, go read James over in That's Beijing on banqueting, boozing and great moments in diplomatic history:

One of the problems is that rarity is valued far more highly than taste. That’s why the bland shark’s fin has continued to grace tables for centuries, despite having all the culinary value of dental floss. The penchant for the elaborate-yet-disgusting centerpiece was actually a small factor in the Sino-Soviet split. On one of Khrushchev’s visits to Mao, the Chinese side held a banquet at which a dish known as ‘Dragon Fighting the Tiger’ was unveiled with a flourish. It consisted of a python swallowing a skinned cat. Two of the Russian secretaries threw up and the entire Moscow delegation refused to touch the thing, causing grave offense to their Chinese hosts, who had labored long and hard to produce this atrocious masterpiece.

zombie time

Missed this from last night:

Six months after the Conservative whip was suspended from Nadine Dorries following her stint on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, it has finally been reinstated.

And back she comes inside the tent so she can piss inside the tent more conveniently. I'm taking this as the 'it's over' moment. If you need the biggest waste of space in parliament for any reason at all that doesn't involve, for instance, cavity wall insulation, then your government is dead. It's just a question of what damage they do before the time comes to lever them out of the bunker.

you always remember your first

May 9 is a good day to head over to I remember.

I remember how I killed my first fascist. Together with my partner Zina Vershinina we occupied our sniping positions. While observing enemy positions, I spotted a machinegunner. I aimed and shot. It was unclear whether I hit him or not. But when I returned to the detachment, everyone already knew I’d killed an enemy. An artillery observer reported this. He saw it in his periscope, how the enemy machine gunner was killed. Everyone was joyous, they hurries to congratulate me. And I wept, for I had to kill a man…