Blood & Treasure

kompromat

Ouch. I have to say it’s well timed: what are the Russians actually saying to Cameron here? Osborne…Deripaska…photos… It’s a bleeding strip of the twitching corpse of the current government torn out to send a message to the next, Getty’s ear in a box.

Harry Hutton writes what should be the Times editorial about this.

gaze tracking

Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader's eyes to show only that one person the correct text. After a 15-second calibration period in which the software essentially "learns" the viewer's gaze patterns, anyone looking over that user's shoulder sees dummy text that randomly and constantly changes.

To tap the broader consumer market, Anderson built a more consumer-friendly version called PrivateEye, which can work with a simple Webcam. The software blurs a user's monitor when he or she turns away. It also detects other faces in the background, and a small video screen pops up to alert the user that someone is looking at the screen.

Via. You can see this going either way. Personally, I think sometimes that I’d give up dentistry if only we could destroy the machines. Not sure about antibiotics, though.

one man MGI watch: Lanzhou

“Within a two hour period on the evening of 9 July, Lanzhou septagenarian Yan Zheng-ping used a brick to vandalize 14 vehicles that drove through the red lights on a pedestrian crossing close to his residence, attracting widespread public attention and discussion.”

“Some people have praised his conduct, believing that drivers who cross red lights are playing games with people’s lives and should be taught a lesson. Other people oppose his excessive conduct, believing that smashing cars is illegal behaviour, and should not be encouraged.”

“Yesterday, the author of the news story interviewed Yan Zheng-ping by phone about the car-smashing incidents.”

“According to the ‘Lanzhou Morning Post’, yesterday, a team of traffic police in Lanzhou’s Qilihe district expanded supervision of cars that do not allow pedestrians to walk across zebra crossings in the area. Almost no vehicles drove through red lights on zebra crossings.”

I’ve argued consistently here that MGIs have been accommodated into the system in China as public verdicts, a semi-legitimate way for the public to influence official behaviour. Here you have it in microcosm. It’s also been big in the Sinosphere, which gives individuals like Mr Yan the opportunity to become Mass Groups all by themselves. Though it should be said that he had quite a group behind him:

Hundreds of local residents applauded him and the two elderly men who helped him. Onlookers provided bricks for the vigilantes.

The three men damaged 14 cars, but none of the drivers stopped after seeing the angry mob.

Yan was stopped only after three hours of doling out his own “justice.”

So maybe it’s another MGI evolution. The locus of opposition here was a bunch of respectable folk in a suburban housing development. What they do have is a grievance. What they don’t have is the un- and underemployed young men to provide the heft and weight to front a proper riot against the Gong An. Instead we have a retired English literature teacher in his seventies. Another version would be the mass strolls we’ve seen in respectable parts of Chinese cities in recent years.

Anyway, here’s the horse’s mouth:

I have discovered that when drivers of small cars encounter surveillance cameras, or crossings where large trucks pass, they become more honest. They fear fines, they fear that other cars will run into them, and they know how to consider their own lives precious. Why, however, can’t they consider the lives of others important?”

Damn right, too, and not just in China.

on coming home

The original tenor of pleas for more helicopters in Afghanistan gave me the impression that the idea – at the political level - was to abandon the roads altogether and just kind of fly about until Obama decided to pull the plug and we could all go home. I stand corrected, though I still think there’s a lot of the politics of the decent interval in this controversy. I don’t think “equip them properly or withdraw them” is a question actually being considered by any serious politician, as seriousness is generally understood in politics. We’re in Afghanistan because the US is there and we’ll go the moment the US goes, or maybe a bit earlier if the situation calms down enough. The issues of casualties and equipment have to be managed in a way that doesn’t threaten the primacy of the Anglo-American relationship by triggering a “premature” withdrawal by British forces. As I think I mentioned earlier discussion of these issues tend to substitute for discussion of the war itself and the political relationships underpinning it.

Ideally, if this is your objective then you make the appropriate preparations. In practice, it seems to mean that you don’t think much at all about what a military deployment actually might involve. John Reid said back before the original Helmand deployment that he anticipated it would go off without a single shot being fired. Since then, there’s been constant combat. Every year, huge Taliban losses are reported , but every year when fighting season rolls around they seem to be able to put more men in the field and also seem to have enough survivors of the last round of combat to have learned to fight more effectively, or at least, in this case, to build bigger roadside bombs.

Question: do we have, after all this time, something approximating to a Taliban order of battle? Did we know before we embarked on the current Helmand deployment how many of them we would be facing, how they were composed and what they were armed with? It doesn’t seem like it. One year, British forces pile in and discover that the Taliban can knock out their vehicles. So the government scrapes around looking for more heavily armoured transport. Next year, those get knocked out and more soldiers die. So it’s discovered that we need more helicopters, like the Americans.

But the US doesn’t have helicopters for Afghanistan. It has them as part of a wide ranging – basically, global - expeditionary capability. We could theoretically do the same on a smaller scale. It would mean more deaths and more combat in places where it’s hard to convince the public that we have any warlike business. It would be vastly expensive, especially when you consider the sheer waste of the procurement process. And we couldn’t do it to the point where we could sustain large scale combat without being part of a wider mission. Since most NATO countries aren’t interested in this, that would mean making a vast human and financial commitment to build forces whose deployment would be effectively decided in the White House, whoever happened to be occupying it at the time.

We’re fighting them in Paraguay so we don’t have to fight them over here. This does not strike me as a popular policy. It might be the thing that actually breaks the Anglo-American relationship. So maybe in the circumstances it just seems, for the government, that it’s better not to ask too many questions on any level, whether about the capabilities of our current antagonists or about what we want the British army to be for. Just make the commitment and keep your fingers crossed about the casualties.

The Tories? I don’t know, but I suspect that, if they thought they could afford it, an open ended, fully equipped sepoy commitment might have a certain appeal. What else does David Cameron have to offer United Statespersons to make them think of him as special? One thing I do believe is that current Tory criticisms are being made in the full knowledge that whatever the casualty levels or equipment shortcomings the government won’t withdraw the troops. The road back from Kabul leads through Washington DC and in the absence of a complete reorientation of British foreign policy neither party will go that route. 

minor sign of the times

Africa’s first Chinese language newspaper, out of Botswana. Via.

Murdoch's internationalism

Via, a sterling defence of the Murdoch media by a notably impartial figure:

Compared to the increasingly isolationist Daily Mail – which has consistently appeased foreign dictators since the 1930s – there is also something bracingly internationalist about News International.

Indeed. Here's how Rupert Murdoch ‘s China outlet reported 9/ll, as described in Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones.

After the attacks, Phoenix Television had cut advertisements and broadcast live for 36 hours. That was the only privately owned Chinese-language news station that broadcast on the mainland and it was also the only network that covered the event so closely. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owned 40% of Phoenix, which was based in Hong Kong but targeted mainland cable subscribers…Phoenix’s access to the Chinese market depended on good relations with the Communist Party and sometimes the private station’s coverage was more nationalistic than that of government stations.

…One of the VCDs I found in Yueqing had been compiled mostly from Phoenix broadcasts. Whereas the government news had avoided any criticism of America, Phoenix’s tone was completely different. In the hours after the attacks the station featured a man named Cao Jingxing, identified only as a “political commentator.”* He said: “Why arenlt other countries hated like the United States of America? Let’s try to think about that. He commented on the hijackings: “Why were the hostages taken so easily? The glory of the Americans was lost in just a few seconds."

The Chinese-language station used Fox news footage of New York and Washington DC..The Fox logo appeared in the corner and the and the images were the same as the ones Americans watched, but here the shots were joined by anti-American commentary in Chinese.

So there we go: not so much internationalism as inter-nationalism. Incidentally, how come both the US and China are worthy of ra-ra patriotism and we get a kind of tabloid extortion racket?

*He was the deputy head of the channel

call the cops

Or rather, don’t:

As British troops moved into the village newly freed from Taliban control, they heard one message from the anxious locals: for God's sake do not bring back the Afghan police.

U.S. and British troops have launched a campaign to seize control of Helmand province, about half of which was in Taliban hands, and restore Afghan government institutions.

…"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

Via. As I understand it, the troops are going to be in the villages for a longer period this time round. But “restoring Afghan govermmnent institutions” eventually means bringing the cops back, in some form. Anyway:

Major Al Steele, commander of Bravo Company of 3 SCOTS, the Black Watch, who met elders in Pankela, acknowledged their concerns but said foreign forces were working on it.

"We have heard a lot of complaints about the ANP, but the Coalition Forces and the ANA are working together well, and the ANP are getting better," he told Gul Mohammad, squatting outside the elder's mud-walled compound.

The elder shrugged and flipped his prayer beads. "Every time we heard that new ANP would come. But the old ANP would come back and it would be just like in the past."

The Taliban hit rate over the last week or so would indicate that they’re getting quite a bit of intelligence from friendly locals. This might go some way to explaining why.

rats board floating ship

Tories win election that counts:

Lobbyists are engaged in a “desperate” scramble to secure people close to David Cameron, as companies shake up their public-relations operations to prepare for a Conservative government. Tory officials are being offered double or triple their salaries to move to the private sector, jumping “from five figures to six figures pay for top people”, say industry insiders.

Companies are waking up to the fact that links cultivated over 12 years of New Labour may be largely redundant after the general election, which must be held by next June.

The result will be confirmed by 300,000 or so electors in marginal seats next year. Anyway, this from the professionals:

Jon McLeod, chairman of UK public affairs at Weber Shandwick, a lobbying company, said the chequebook waving had parallels with the months leading up to the 1997 New Labour landslide. “The ‘bluerush’ in the lobbying industry mirrors 1996, when the third photocopying assistant in the shadow cabinet would be offered silly money,” he said.

Mr McLeod warned that “corporates should take care: lobby firms that trade in their address books are asking for trouble, as we have seen so often in the past. There can be no return to cash for access under Cameron.”

Via. Indeed. What they should be doing is paying Weber Shandwick and letting them do the lobbying. Launder your money before the crime. I wonder what wider effect the lobbying rush back in 96-97 had on new Labour’s time in government, above and beyond what was bought and paid for. All these eager people, their noses pressed against the glass for 18 long years, suddenly flattered and courted. It was always possible to detect a kind of emotional dependency on corporate approval, a sense that the Gods must continue to smile on us. And then they didn’t, and the mandate of heaven ended.

emerging tory military cosmology

Via Alex, this:

The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who chairs the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said the mistake had left the Sawers family "extremely vulnerable". Referring to Miliband's suggestion that the incident was not significant, Mercer said: "If that is the case why has the site being taken down?" He also pointed out that military chiefs had warned that the Taliban get 80% of their intelligence from Twitter and Facebook.

Good god, what are we going to be letting ourselves in for come next year?

I presume this little effusion has its origins in the Murdoch media’s war against Facebook: as is well known, Murdoch owns its rival, MySpace.

We can see an emerging plan: Put the Latvian SS veterans in helicopters and storm Facebook, the Afghan province adjacent to Helmand. It’s got to work.

The right wing don’t seem to have much in the way of intellectual resources when it comes to defence these days, do they? (also via Alex). That thread is also a good illustration of what happens when you let Crazy Mel run amok. She ends up owning your readership.

Urumqi: MGI rewatched

I think it’s clear by now that my original assessment of the Urumqi MGI was wrong: instead of being a police massacre of demonstrators it was, broadly, a pogrom against the Han and non-Uighur population. Or at least that’s how it started. Pictures of the dead released by the Chinese cops show Han Chinese beaten and stabbed to death whereas quite a few Uighurs look as if they’ve been shot, which indicates the cops playing catch up.

Where I’d got this wrong was in configuring the protest as a classic police/demonstrator showdown, from which perspective the initial claims regarding Han Chinese casualties seemed absurd. What actually seems to have happened was that under the cover of the standoff between police and demonstrators groups of Uighurs targeted the civil population, mainly Han but also others including Hui Muslims and Mongolians.

None of this justifies Chinese policies in Xinjiang, and if you want to see a policy in action almost calculated to produce indiscriminate rage, try this. Nor does it give you any reason to think that the government will respond with any sense of proportion or justice or admit the social and “national” basis of the underlying grievance, though as yet there’s no visible sign that the authorities are permitting revenge attacks to take place. The entire security effort in Urumqi seems to revolve around enforcing segregation.

Perhaps part of the aim behind the riot was to provoke an indiscriminate response.It may also have been done with the deliberate intention to spark a Han exodus, in which it may have been partially successful. It may have just been a revenge attack following the attack on Uighur migrant workers at a factory in Shaogan, Guangdong Province. The Guardian has a detailed background analysis here. One thing missing from this is the structural absurdity of China’s internal market. Xinjiang has the highest wages in China outside the Southeast, but the local government still think it best to ship out local Uighurs to the opposite end of the country to get jobs. That in itself shows you where the benefits of economic growth in Xinjiang are actually going.

The owner of the toy factory where the Shaogan riot took place has reportedly admitted that he took on the Uighurs because he could pay them less than either local workers or internal Han migrants. This is against a background where labour disputes and union organization in Southeast China are growing in scope and intensity. Hiring from different cultural and linguistic groups in the hope that it may disrupt attempts to organise the workforce is not a new technique: it was against this background that the Wobblies organized the Lawrence and Paterson strikes in the US in 1912 and 1913.

Of course, that alone couldn’t have caused the violence in Urumqi last Sunday. And there’s always a temptation in these circumstances to try and downplay what actually happened because it’s seen as somehow letting the Chinese government off the hook. But the reverse is the case. In terms of both economic development and colonial management, judged in the Chinese government's own terms, Xinjiang should be a success story. Yet it’s at precisely this time that local youths took to random ethnic murder. Acknowledging this is necessary to take the measure of how badly things have gone wrong.

strategizing

This seems a timely read: Gilles Dorronsoro on Taliban strategy.

In Dorronoso’s reading, the Taliban are at stage two in a classic Maoist style insurgency strategy, controlling territory and imposing their ideology. He seems to imply that the’ve gamed the coalition into a kind of rope a dope strategy in Helmand and Kandahar while they further infilitrate more lightly defended northern provinces, preparatory to tightening the ring around Kabul. In the South, meanwhile, allied military gains are likely to slip away once the fighting’s done, due to the lack of Afghan institutions capable of sustaining them and resisting further Taliban/ACM incursions.

That would seem to be borne out by this BBC report of Taliban incursion into Kunduz province, at pretty much the opposite end of Afghanistan to Helmand, just as the first coffins started rolling in from there through Brize Norton. In Britain meanwhile we have the usual repetition of official talking points, amid the occasional shout of HELICOPTERS.

blogger interrupted

For reasons I could never quite get to the bottom of but which I'm putting down to "Ye Olde Curse of ye Customers of Branson" I've had no internet access at all for the last couple of days. The fault seems to have mysteriously righted itself, which is lucky because they couldn't have got an enginner out to me till Tuesday night, five days after the outage occured.

the power of names, redux

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a territory in western China, accounts for one-sixth of China's land and is home to about 20 million people from thirteen major ethnic groups. The largest of these groups is the Uighurs [PRON: WEE-gurs], a predominantly Muslim community with ties to Central Asia.

It’s no good is it? I saw the BBC announcers last night looking at the audience very seriously while straining to pronounce the name. The WEE-gurs just aren’t going to get any love, on top of which they come from some place beginning with X. That just about kills it. The kind of people who would support them would also be terminally embarrassed about pronouncing the place wrong. Best just to let it go by. Apart from Xinjiang being a Chinese name, I bet this is why activists are so keen on replacing it with East Turkestan. If they can get people to do that in the West then they might get some traction.

Consider Tibet, by contrast. T vowel b vowel t. It works in any combination. Tubit, Tabot, it’s all fluffy. It’s euphonious, pleasing to get your mouth round and it evokes Hobbits – and that’s without all the Shangrila stuff as a bonus. How can you not like Tibetans? They’re basically human pandas, as has been pointed out. The Chinese name - Xizang - would be a mouth stopper but it's far to late to get that imposed now.

Cronenberg in the principality

I’d go for this:

Two hundred patients are being sought for a trial looking at how efficient maggots are at wound cleaning.

Cardiff University is teaming up with Bridgend-based ZooBiotic, the UK's only commercial producer of medicinal-quality larvae for the 12-month trial.

You see, they’re using medicinal quality larvae, each with its little kite mark, not any old grub. Problem is that they want people with open, festering wounds and I don’t have one right now. But think of the liveblogging potential:

Day one: Curious to think of a host of wriggling, writhing creatures wallowing about in my diseased flesh. Still, all in the name of science!

Day two: getting very itchy.

Day three: getting really itchy now. The little fellows seem to be straying a bit too.

Day four: AAAAARGH! They’re in My BRAIN! They’re dropping out of my NOSE!

The BBC adds:

"Wales is leading the way by conducting this trial,”

Perhaps a bard could do something on the theme for the next Eisteddfod.

power of names

From a fascinating article on naming military operations originally published by the US army war college in 1995.

From names that stress an operation's humanitarian focus, like Operation Provide Comfort in Turkey, to ones that stress an operation's restoration of democratic authority, like Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, it is evident that the military has begun to recognize the power of names in waging a public relations campaign, and the significance of winning that campaign to the overall effort.

Maybe the Taliban have been doing a little reading too:

Afghanistan's insurgent Taliban movement said Monday they had launched a guerrilla operation to thwart a major assault by newly deployed US Marines on their Helmand strongholds.

Operation Foladi Jal, Pashtu for "iron net", would teach the Marines "a lesson". Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone from an unknown location.

About 4,000 Marines poured into the southern province on the border with Pakistan on Thursday in an operation called Khanjar (dagger) that is the first test of a beefed-up US strategy to tackle extremist militants in the region.

"In response to Operation Khanjar by the invading forces, we have launched Operation Foladi Jal," Ahmadi said.

"Their Khanjar will get stuck in our Foladi Jal," the rebel spokesman said.

via. “Iron Net”. Not bad, actually, for a defensive operation. And there does seem to be some planning involved:

The operation would include improvised bomb explosions and "hit-and-run guerrilla attacks", Ahmadi said.

"We will not engage them in front battles. We would rather hit them by mines and guerrilla attacks," he said.

This seems to be the actual strategy in the British sector, adopted to some effect. The US is apparently not facing much opposition.

globalization of reactionary argument

“The problem with these people is that we’ve been treating them too well” is a traditional complaint by the colonisers about the colonised. There seems to be an emerging tendency in China to blame the Xinjiang disturbances on affirmative action policies supposedly favouring the Uighurs.

Perhaps returning the compliment, US Republicans now seem to be reliable transmitters of the Chinese Communist Party line on Uighur activism.

at the wake

Been watching the Michael Jackson post mortem lollapalooza. Within a cavernous arena, everyone is gathered around a solid silver coffin, wailing and throwing dust on their heads: pixie dust, naturally. Apparently they were going to have a solid gold coffin, but that was vetoed on the grounds that it would be too vulgar. Even so, the refection off Stevie Wonder’s bonce glittered and burned like the gates of hell.

I had a sudden thought. Where’s Berlusconi? He had no connection to Michael Jackson that I know of, but somehow the whole event was so him. He could have brought along some of his charming young ladies. The old cruise ship crooner could have given us a number too, elbowing aside Smokey Robinson, shoving Aretha Franklin over, pulling her up by the hairs in her armpits and then spitting in her mouth when she opened it to protest. I mean, that's how he's always done politics.

Whatever did happen to Claudio Gentile, by the way?

actually insane public policy

Bouncers in Norwich's notorious nightclub district have been given the power to issue on-the-spot fines without consultation with judges or magistrates.

via. Oh how we laughed when Blair burbled about letting the cops march drunks to cashpoints,  not realising that this was just the prototype...

Urumqi MGI update (updated)

A couple more things on Xinjiang:

During the Tibetan rioting last year, China Central television lead heavily on the fact that Han Chinese civilians had been targeted by Tibetans and some killed. This was acknowledged by foreigners who happened to be on the scene, but was generally excluded from the overall Western media narrative of the events and their significance. That in turn fed into the whole anti-CNN, April Youth phenomena in China last year. Likewise, CCTV is leading heavily on Han Chinese victims of the riots in Urumqi. The difference this time is that this narrative seems to have been accommodated to a much greater extent than it was in Tibet last year, perhaps aided by the presence of armed Han counter-demonstrations in Urumqi yesterday and today. Perhaps significantly, the authorities have been far more accommodating to foreign journalists than last year in Tibet.

OK, as I said yesterday it’s just about possible that a crowd of 3000 armed Uighur demonstrators were allowed to run amok for an extended period of time in Urumqi under the noses of the Chinese police and paramilitary forces. But I still think it far more likely that a one in three casualty rate, including what is now acknowledged as 158 deaths, is the result of a police massacre. Of course, this may have been a wildly disproportionate response to a genuine outbreak of violence. But I’m still going with colonial panic on this one.

Dave writes here that economic growth in China hasn’t spread outside the coastal provinces. This isn’t quite right, but it does remind us of the proximate cause of the original Uighur demonstration: the death of two Uighurs in a riot in a toy factory in Guangdong. That was caused after a rumour was spread that a gang of Uighuirs had kidnapped and gang rapaed two women workers in the factory. It later emerged that this rumour was groundless and was spread by a man who had lost his job to UIghur workers who were hired and shipped southwards because they were cheaper. That was the original catalyst behind the chain of events.

UPDATE: James writes:

I think you're wrong on this one, Jamie. I'm getting first-hand accounts of massive anti-Han violence from people I trust, who spoke to witnesses directly in turn. I'll put some of up tomorrow, after I see what I can run in the newspaper (working for the English edition of Global Times now).

Thinking on, I have some idea of where I may have gone wrong here, but it's probably time to shut up for now.

flying cattle trucks

Thanks to Chris downblog, it seems that Ryanair are indeed looking at having standing areas on planes as predicted here last Friday:

Ryanair Holdings may offer free flights to passengers willing to stand up during flights of less than 90 minutes, Sky News reported, citing chief executive Michael O'Leary.

Ryanair is asking Boeing about converting planes or delivering a new fleet with a section of “vertical seating”' that would allow passengers to stand or to sit on bar stools similar to those in trains' dining cars, Sky reported Mr O'Leary as saying in an interview.

Mr O'Leary said he got the idea from a similar concept that China's Spring Airlines is reportedly looking at, Sky News said, adding that the airline said any move would have to be approved by the Irish Aviation Authority.

I mean, assuming this isn’t some sort of stunt or anything. I wouldn’t get too excited about that ‘free’ thing, btw. That’ll only last until they get permission to strap people to the wings.