Blood & Treasure

id and the concession economy

This is welcome:

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports. The cards were due to be trialled there - sparking trade union anger.

But:

However, in a statement, the campaign group No2ID said the "humiliating climbdown" was not the end of the scheme. "It's just part of the ongoing attempt by senior Home Office officials to fortify the scheme against cancellation and to bind the hands of a future government," the statement added.

So what we now seem to have is a huge bundle of surveillance pseudo solutions, mainly aimed at funneling money to consortia dependent on government contracts, on the lookout for problems and seeking justification through random insertion into various aspects of policy. This seems relevant:

Is the State being privatised in Britain, or is it taking over the private sector? The answer is that both are true, and neither. What we have is not a new private sector boom, but a growing state-dependent economy of concessions. Companies like Qinetiq and Capita only exist because of the way the state contracts out its services. Government's loss of faith in its own ability to organise production leads to an astonishing abandonment of its authority to chaotic and destructive shell companies...

All the time the established boundary between ‘state' and ‘civil society', between ‘public goods and private benefits', is being redrawn, or broken down altogether. What emerges is neither an enhanced private sector, nor coherent state provision, but rather a hybrid, dependent on public finances to survive, and increasingly operating according to a mixture of political, administrative and business models that makes little sense. Via.

farewell the trumpets, a bit...

A couple of vignettes from the partial US troop withdrawal:

Hours before the pullout four US soldiers were killed in Baghdad in what the US military described as "combat-related activities".

 Didn’t “combat related activities” used to be known as “in the line of duty?” Also, Talabani:

Appearing keen to tone down the rhetoric of Maliki earlier in the week, Talabani said: "While we celebrate this day, we express our thanks and gratitude to our friends in the coalition forces who faced risks and responsibilities and sustained casualties and damage while helping Iraq to get rid of the ugliest dictatorship and during the joint effort to impose security and stability."

Waving or drowning, do we think?

cigarettes and the monopoly of force

Among the cigarette counterfeiters of China:

Accordingly, counterfeiters deploy a number of tricks to dodge authorities. One manufacturer built a factory that masqueraded as a military compound, complete with 20 laborers—dressed in castoff army uniforms—who would conduct faux-military drills and sing the national anthem in the yard every morning. Other cigarette-making machines have been hidden on ships, inside concrete bunkers, and even under a lake.

China’s pretty chaotic at times, but a) I think the Chinese authorities know many military facilities they have and b) they’d be aware of this one, because it’s meant to be seen. What you have here I think is a factory guarded in plain sight by a small private army.

The piece argues that fake fags are a direct threat to an important state revenue service. Maybe so, but since they mainly counterfeit foreign brands they also prevent the domestic tobacco monopoly being undermined by market penetration from foreign companies. It’s a trade off.

notes on the atrocities

10 New Labour moments rounded up here. All good, but I think they missed the best one: namely David Blunkett going to court to force wrongfully imprisoned people to pay for their costs of their imprisonment on the grounds that it has saved them living expenses.

This obviously wasn’t the biggest scandal of the past eleven years, but it seems to me to be the one you point to if you’re asked to point to an action that summarises the essential character, flavour and texture of the government we’ve had: the relentless, flinty mean spirit, the overweening spite, the calculating pettiness, the schoolyard bully’s sidekick approach to the unpopular and vulnerable. As such, it needs to be reclaimed for the historians.

Of course, others will have their own preferences.

general Giap, dissident

…at least in regard to Bauxite policy:

Vietnam’s great war hero, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, has stood up to defend his country once again, this time against what he says would be a huge mistake by the government — a vast mining operation run by a Chinese company.

Now 97, the commander who led his country to victory over both France and the United States has emerged as the most prominent voice in a broad popular protest that is challenging the secretive workings of the country’s Communist leaders.

Via. He’s immune from arrest and forcing the leadership to take him seriously, though I wouldn’t put it past the authorities to sneak into his compound one night and saw his walking stick halfway through.

kicking the sidekick

The UK has demanded the immediate release of Iranian staff at its Tehran embassy who were arrested on Saturday. Iranian media earlier reported that eight local staff at the mission had been detained for their "considerable role" in post-election riots.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband called the arrests "harassment" and dismissed the allegations as baseless.

The apparent Iranian conviction that Britiain is the power behind the protests is almost touching. They must be the only people left who think we have any. Or maybe not. It’s interesting that the detentions came very shortly after Obama said a few kind words about Mousavi. There’s no official US mission in Iran, so it’s hard not to see the Iranian government using Britain as a proxy.

The convenient thing about this is that you can make your opposition to US power clear without actually doing anything to materially antagonise the Americans. So also, perhaps, the detention of British sailors by the IRGC a couple of years back. It’s hard to conceive of the Iranians publicly attacking US naval assets in the same way that it’s hard to believe that Iraq would have been invaded if the people who did it really believed that it had weapons of mass destruction.

So, what ‘s the message? We’re still here. We’re still running the place. We’re still your antagonist. But we’re not going to do anything really crazy. Back to normal, really.

Interesting, meanwhile, that it’s the EU first to speak up on behalf of the detained British diplomats. I wonder if they’ll bother when Cameron’s in charge and taking the march past of the veterans of the Latvian SS.*

*sorry, veterans of the "Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht"

Shishou MGI update

How a crowd of 50,000 was cleared from the streets outside the Yongling Hitel:

That afternoon, a large number of procuratorate workers and plainclothes police officers joined the crowd and used mobile phone cameras and digital cameras and videocameras to gather information on members of the crowd. Some citizens recognized them and quickly stayed away from them. At around 4am on June 21, the government loudspeaker trucks traversed the city streets and claimed that a "settlement" has been reached with the family of the deceased. Therefore, the spectators should leave quickly or else face the consequences.

Ah, new media for the purposes of intelligence and low level intimidation: quite familiar.

…An hour later at 5am on June 21, there came the thundering sound of marching footsteps. Someone shouted, "They are really coming." The crowd then saw more than 10,000 policemen and soldiers coming down three streets and applying pressure on the crowd. The policemen and soldiers were arrayed in rows and moved forward together.

After blocking off the streets, the soldiers took charge of the streets. Their formation consists four rows of soldiers in each wave, with the waves about 20 meters apart from each other. The soldiers were armed with batons and shields, and they chanted slogans at the crowd. The crowd was gradually pushed inwards. Panic caused the crowd to flee into the side streets and buildings. Whenever the soldiers take over a street segment, they set up a police line and prevented people from entering or exiting. Therefore, the crowd had to flee towards the side streets that were even further away.

At the same time, all mobile phone signals in the area were gone. Someone recognized a government signal interference truck there. At around 6am, the soldiers cleared out the streets…

You couldn’t do this in London: the street layout is too chaotic. But Chinese cities tend to be laid out Hausmann style, with long boulevards interspersed with side streets at acute angles. I believe the Basij did something similar in Tehran, although there they occupied intersections to prevent the crowd attaining critical mass.

Incidentally, I understand that the rules governing responses to MGIs have changed. Previously, the fact that an MGI took place would be sufficient to damage the careers of the relevant cadres and office holders. Now that supposedly depends on whether they restore order effectively.

mysterious white fluff

Yeah, we’d wondered about this:

A MYSTERIOUS white fluff has been falling like snow across Greater Manchester. People in Prestwich, Altrincham and Longsight have been left baffled by the appearance of the white substance as temperatures soar. After the fluff was spotted in Prestwich, the M.E.N. launched an investigation to discover what it was.

It’s remarkably like snowfall until you see the stuff close up:

Experts have now determined it is seeds from certain female poplar trees, rarely planted because their huge seed pods can spread across several metres.

Well I suppose that rules out the alternative I had in mind: making some weird shit up and writing to the Fortean Times about it. Mind you there is something a bit bodysnatchers about those huge seed pods. If things round here get a bit pedestrian and generally blah, then you know why.

And I once saw a plague of flying ants in Walthamstow…

naming consultants apparently not consulted

Gazprom and the Nigerian state petroleum company have a new joint venture. Via.

Sinosphere Saturday

Since we're already late, let's crack on...

Epic civil engineering fail

There’s an extensive campaign going on against Google in China, on the pretext of a porn clampdown. Black and White Cat has the details. Reading between the lines my guess is that this is intended that punters in China can only access porn through its local, and very well connected, rival Baidu.

You’ll remember the famous “no dogs and Chinese” sign outside a park in Shanghai during colonial times. A shopping centre in Changchun is now disgraced with a “no dogs and peasants” sign.

Zhang confessed that Noberts had brought the drugs into China to supply lower-tier drug dealers. According to the report, this is the first case in Dongguan in which a foreigner was sentenced to death.

 

I sailed with a Chinese pirate queen

Excellent, tonight I will drink! Some Chinese responses to the death of you know who.

MGI reported in Guangkou town, Guangzhou province. Some photos, no details yet.

A quick trip round a temple in Lhasa:

...they maximize the number of batches a day by herding the visitors like sheep. In front every Buddha or bone-pagoda is not a lama but a fellow wearing a wide-brim hat, who shouts non-stop "Hurry, move! Don't pause!" And the crowds follow the order obediently as if in a spell; whether you are old or young, whether you are a foreigner or Chinese, you must move with a speed that can't even be called "looking at flowers on a running horse." In less than an hour, you finish a tour that would normally need the better part of day.

And finally, smut sells in Singapore:

This is not the first time that a Burger King ad was cited for its use of sexual themes. There was the square butts ad to promote kiddie meals, an ad urging the customer to “pleasure yourself“, a shirtless BK King, and an ad naming a product after a slang term for a photo of a vagina.