Blood & Treasure

to the rescue of an idea

This is one for unspeak Steven, a review by David Miliband of Anthony “Gaddafi is the new Gro Harlem Bruntland” Giddens’ latest waste of trees. It contains a list of things Miliband thinks a Labour government should be doing.

A Labour government should be making nurses and cops feel like entrepreneurs. It should be rescuing the idea of a knowledge based economy. It should be promoting strong community self-government. It should be giving young people a sense of commitment to the country. It should be promoting real engagement with citizens. It should be dissolving the barriers between producers and consumers in public services.

Political success is based on real insight, compelling vision, clear policies, effective administration and distinctive strategy. The clear vision needs to be governed by the commitment to put power as well as wealth and opportunity into the hands of the many (not the few). Towns and cities should be the drivers of national renewal. People should be given more flexibility at work. This all raises profound questions about policy.

The driving ethos of the 21st century is the phrase I can. It empowers people to take decisions by themselves, and with others. This is the basis for a new progressive project.

I long for the days when party messages were just propaganda. Now they sound like manifestos from borderline psychotics, where words pile up according to a rigid internal logic but without reference to any real world objects. Anyway, enough negativism from me: I’m going to saddle up and ride out to the rescue of the idea of the knowledge based economy.

Incidentally, I invented the idea of pro-social behaviour as part of a drive by pisstake on New Labour back in 2004, or so I thought. Now lookee here.

forthcoming attraction

Part of what make non-state armies increasingly successful is a technical evolution in the capabilities of man portable missiles, as shown to advantage by Hezbollah last year. Now hear this:

Portable rocket launchers like the RPG-7 are some of the deadliest, and most common, weapons in the guerrilla arsenal. The Chinese are now producing new warheads that'll make the weapons even more lethal -- capable of knocking down a three-story building from 200 meters away…

…the RPG is already in common use by guerrilla and insurgent forces around the world. They have a lot of experience with RPGs and they like them. This is not a fancy new piece of equipment that takes any new training, it’s simply a new type of ammunition: plug and play.

Via. Two words: platoon houses.

to make the world a better place

From the Guardian profile of the crusty paradise known as Whole Earth, and its founder John Mackey:

He is an intriguing combination of the patriarchal idealist and a hard-headed, growth-pursuing businessman, with strong libertarian views. Deeply anti-union (he is widely quoted as likening unions to "having herpes"), he is criticised for refusing to back what might seem obvious causes, for instance over the rights and pay rates of migrant labour on American farms. But he still has a quest, according to his blog, to reform industrial agriculture, and indeed "to make the world a better place".

He thinks unions are “too adversarial” apparently. I suspect the gripe here reflects Mackey’s self image as a man of ideals. Unions do tend to get in between the fatherly leader and those upon whom he lavishes his loving care. Hands off - they're my people.

By contrast, here’s something you might or might not know. Tesco is the only supermarket chain in the UK with a full union recognition agreement. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know it. It never gets mentioned when the dread name comes up. Given that half of USDAW’s members work at Tesco I doubt it's exactly what you’d call an adversarial relationship. Arguably, it’s a way of getting workers to pay for the company’s personnel functions through their union dues. But it’s also true that Terry Leahy’s evil empire pays at least a bit more respect to the idea of free association than the “libertarian” Whole Earth founder.

now Xi this

White smoke spotted in Shanghai:

Beijing has chosen Xi Jinping to be Shanghai party secretary in a move that should help stabilize the city politically and help it get back to business.

Xi's predecessor Chen Liangyu was fired last fall over charges that he allowed cronies to improperly use proceeds from government social security funds for highway, real estate and other speculative investments.

Xi is close to Zeng Qinghong, the most senior Shanghai gang affiliate remaining in central government, which tends to indicate that the purge against said faction (or the campaign against incidences of corruption that just happen to be carried out by said faction) has been resolved, now that the basic question of who’s in charge has been settled.

Xi has also been tagged as a possible successor to Hu Jintao (see here). It’s not clear to me that the road to the very top leads through Shanghai anymore. But as consolation prizes go, it’s pretty damned good.

A couple of years ago, a commentary in Caijing magazine defined central government policy as “guard against the Right and oppose the Left”. That still seems to be operative.

Victor Shih approves and Shanghaiist notes reactions on the ground:

City residents cheered the decision: “Who the hell is this guy?” “Different guy, same shit.” These were just two of the praises we heard today.

Here’s Xi’s wikipedia entry. Gossips take note: He’s married to Peng Liyuan, who combines the two jobs of being a general in the PLA with being a famous folk singer. You know what they say about women and multitasking.

the George Foreman Grill will change the way we communicate for ever

Blogs? Put ‘em in the cupboard with the skateboard:

Yet the Gartner research firm also concluded that the trend would level off in 2007, with perhaps 100m people still blogging worldwide. Other analysts predict that number will fall to 30m.

“A lot of people have been in and out of [blogging]”, said Daryl Plummer of Gartner. “Everyone thinks they have something to say until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

Via. Well, stuff looks a lot less prepossessing in cold pixels than thrown out in conversation. If opinions are like arseholes because everyone has one, written opinions are like second arseholes. You see one and you think: Jesus, what the hell’s that doing there? Is that mine? Me, I’d like it if people spoke less and wrote more, but that’s always going to be a minority taste.

I’ve toyed with the idea for a while of compiling a list of single entry blogs, especially ones which start with ringing statements of intent. Difficult to do, though: interferes with blogging time for a start

local dimensions

OK, so fifteen Royal Marines have become tourists of the involuntary kind in Iran. Their hosts: The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their boss: el-supremo Ayatollah al-Khamed Seyyad Ali Khamenei. All the IRG forces bypass the secular military and political command structure.

Now two days before the men were seized, the ayatollah had this to say.

Following that same logic, the Supreme Leader made it perfectly clear that, "if the undisputed rights of the Iranian nation are illegally denied, we will have no recourse but to take illegal actions".

Via. Can’t say fairer than that. He was talking in the context of the nuclear issue, which links the abductions directly to the sanctions process, and by extension to the US regime change effort. The abductions came the day before the latest UN sanctions package.

However, it’s important not to ignore the strictly local dimensions. After all, the main reason that Israel knocked out the UN observation post last year in the Lebanon war was because it was doing things it did not want observed. Likewise:

According to Ayatollah Khamenei, part of Washington psy-ops is to influence some of the southern neighbors of Iran. "Those countries have wisely realized the conspiracy but some might be trapped." The Supreme Leader emphasized cooperation among Persian Gulf nations and Iran's enduring friendship with its southern neighbors.

The Ayatollah also expressed Tehran's desire to sign a joint defense agreement with those countries.

Iran to neighbours: The Shatt al-Arab is our lake too. You can’t hide behind the Westerners.

Oh, and can we just stop this crap before it starts properly?

In a dramatic illustration of the different postures adopted by British and US forces working together in Iraq, Lt-Cdr Erik Horner - who has been working alongside the task force to which the 15 captured Britons belonged - said he was "surprised" the British marines and sailors had not been more aggressive.

It’s a remarkably self-undermining article, because it also states:

Vastly outnumbered and out-gunned, the Royal Navy team from HMS Cornwall were seized on Friday after completing a UN-authorised inspection of a merchant dhow in what they insist were clearly Iraqi waters. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy appeared in half a dozen attack speedboats mounted with machine guns.

As opposed to the Marines, who were in a couple of rubber boats with small arms.

death in the family

Mao’s middle son dies:

Yesterday a brief notice in the China News Service recorded the death of Mao Anqing, who survived his father to live on into a new China that the dictator would not have recognised.

Mao Zedong's second child, who died on Friday, lived through civil war, the execution of his mother, street life in Shanghai, and a journey to Paris and to Moscow, where he studied under Stalin's surveillance. Eventually he returned to China, where he was largely ignored by his father.

via.He was schizophrenic, and dealt with in the same way that the Royals handled those two inconvenient members of the Bowes-Lyons family all those years ago, ie parked quietly in a home. None of Mao’s progeny made a bundle in the new China, though a few claiming to be his offspring appear to make a living from the alleged connection. As for the wider Mao clan:

What about the rest of Mao's family? His home village is a curious sight for the lovers of political irony. It's full of people called Mao (four-fifths of this village are members of his clan) hawking Mao badges, statues, icons etc.

Best of all is the Mao Family Restaurant. A distant relative started it up in the 1980s next door to the family cottage.

It's now a franchise, with a chain of 120 restaurants around China, raking in millions.

The owner says she gives much of the profits to charity, but anyway I asked whether Mao would have approved of her entrepreneurial zeal. She professed to be deeply shocked by this impertinent question, and went around telling anyone who would listen what I had said before answering.

"Mao tells us that every situation is a state of change," she said. "The future of socialism is bright and great, and I am running a great restaurant."

throw the Persian down the well

More 300 stuff: I’d been having similar thoughts myself, but the War Nerd puts them so much better.

Only amateur fascists admire Sparta guys; they're still pissed off because people like me dared to warn them the Iraq war was going to be a disaster. Now the neocons have gone so over the deep end of delusional thinking that they've resorted to fantasizing about Sparta, where nobody ever argued, where everyone yelled and stabbed and otherwise kept their mouths shut.

It's downright hilarious the way this movie punishes every smart character. Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he's evil. Everybody who talks in a normal tone of voice is evil. Snyder shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. And both times, you're supposed to cheer.

Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq. These diehard neocons have gone insane because there's no way they can argue for an invasion of Iran any more. But they still want it, bad. So they've taken a crash course in fascism, jumping all the way to cheering for Sparta and booing for Athens - because Athens stands for brains and flexibility and talking things out. They can't win the argument, so they want to kill anybody who tries to argue. That's why Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy down a well.

It’s kind of interesting that the release of 300 to coincides with the open emergence of the jihad-envy right.

D'Souza does not believe that the cultural left "helped 9/11 happen." He believes that the cultural left made 9/11 happen. D'Souza, again, never speaks of God or his own faith in this book: his causality includes nothing supernatural. In his view, the cultural left "actively fostered" the murder of three thousand Westerners without any indirect assistance from the Almighty. In his words: "Thus when leading figures on the left say, We made them do this to us,' in a sense they are correct. They are not correct that America is to blame. But their statement is true in that their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular."

named and shamed

A bit late with this but I’ve been thogged by Justin and the Septic One, ie named and shamed as a blogger who makes them think – think of puppies and kittens and lovely little baby pandas and heartwarming stuff like that, no doubt. Also, Rochenko wants to know what I was up to on the fateful day four years ago.

And the answer to that is: nothing much. I wasn’t blogging at that time. I did post at StrategyTalk, the Stratfor subscribers BBS, but I wasn’t hugely active when the war itself came. I do recall thinking of this, though: since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Anyway, what about Bloggers Who Make Me Think? I shall focus on foreigners and their devious ways:

China Matters
EastSouthWestNorth
WhirledView
Missing Links

and lastly...

Stop the Spirit of Zossen

I think the boys at the Stiftung may be close to inheriting the title of coolest geopolitics site around, now that John Robb seems to have gone off the boil. An example.

someone has to do the crappy jobs

let's punish them:

Mr Brown therefore boosted incomes for a married couple with a family on around £20,000 to the tune of around £500 a year. The Conservatives argue, of course, that the complex set of income tax changes will penalise single people on lower incomes. But Mr Brown’s allies recognise this – indeed they have no problem with it. In their view, this group can bear a little more of the tax burden.

As one ally puts it: “Nobody aspires to be a single person on £12,000. Everyone in this group wants to get married, have kids, get into a higher paid job. And they know from this budget if they make it, the highest brackets are not hit.”

Via. Actually, I believe you lose out if you’re earning under £17,000 per year. But who cares, loser? Everybody knows that the poor work harder if you tax them more, just as the rich work harder if you tax them less. These are iron laws we’re talking about.

And of course the catch is that a lot of people on low wages get working family tax credits, which automatically decrease as they earn more. These effectively subsidise companies that pay low wages and increase efficiency in these businesses by reducing staff turnover. But while low wage jobs are propped up, the people who earn the low wages are penalized through the tax system, supposedly to stimulate their ambition.

What’s interesting about this more generally is that it makes something explicit: the working poor have no major party now that represents their interests or shapes policy specifically for their benefit. Whatever happened to the idea that even a bad job should get you somewhere near a living wage? Inasmuch as this group matter in politics it’s as an object of policy. Some of what they have can be taken to subsidise the slightly better off.