Blood & Treasure

as hairy as they are freezing

So Francois Mitterand went for analysis. Apparently the problem was that he talked like a comedy French President or rather like some inmate of a laughing academy who thinks he’s the French president:

One cannot win against the insular syndrome of an unbridled Englishwoman. Provoke a nuclear war for a few islands inhabited by three sheep as hairy as they are freezing! But it's a good job I gave way. Otherwise, I assure you, the Lady's metallic finger would have hit the button."

France, he insisted, would have the last word. "I'll build a tunnel under the Channel. I'll succeed where Napoleon III failed. And do you know why she'll accept my tunnel? I'll flatter her shopkeeper's spirit. I'll tell her it won't cost the Crown a penny."

Well they might have let him walk around in a sash on Sundays declaiming with a couple of burly chaps with syringes and a butterfly net following on behind discreetly ...but it worked.

not just oil

Two props to the Iraqi economy: military tailoring and vote buying.

In the military neighbourhood of Aziziyah, 60km south-east of Baghdad, Um Malk, an elderly widow, said she had sold her vote in the 2009 provincial elections to a candidate who brought her some blankets and electrical goods.

“That man was from a Shiite party and said if I voted for him, I would get gifts,” she said. “This time I know better and I will not give my vote for so little. I want to sell it, but I need $100 because I have three daughters who will vote as I tell them.”

The calculation here is that if you’re poor the upfront cash value of the votes is of more value than the investment in one political party or other. Vote-brokers, meanwhile, seem to entertain modest, middle class ambitions, like seed capital for small businesses. You could rebrand this as a micro-grant initiative. Also, the votes seem to be going for quite high prices, so maybe Iraqi voters are benefiting from competition between the Iranians and Saudis.

doubling up on change

OK, we’re now in Labour minority government territory. Says Dave:

This is the Conservative party that is offering radical change. I’m doubling up on change. This is very, very clear. I’ve made my choice. It is a modern party. There is no going back. This election is about change and we will be offering change.’

Change is what everybody offers, all the time – that is, when they’re not offering choice, or renewal when in exalted moods. So no change there then. I still think there’s a case for saying the Tories aren’t really up for it. Otherwise, why can’t they come up with a coherent reason why they should have it, not least against this government?

I wonder if that poster hasn’t had an effect. It certainly seemed to change the optics, leading to a kind of mass public exchange of the poor opinions they were entertaining of Cameron, many of which weren’t especially party political, or straightforwardly political at all. Mocking him wasn’t avant garde. It became a kind of national conversation. For a month or so everyone was talking about how he creeped them out in various ways.

That may be a function of the internet, and I also sometimes wonder if the Tories’ intellectual property grab on British political blogging might be doing them less good than they think. Think of some timid liberal flavoured bod of the type Cameron wants to attract immersing him or herself into the comments boxes at Guido’s place to see whether the company there is simpatico. Tory blogging is also, by and large, quite an aggressively masculine environment, and so not perhaps the best showcase for the Tories to regain their traditional lead among women voters.

And I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that Blair’s re-emergence in public view has taken place at around the same time when people started wondering whether they liked his successor better than his heir after all.

Maybe it’s just a wisdom of crowds thing. Most of the electorate doesn’t seem to like any party in particular, and as of right now we seem to be on course for having no particular party in full control. But imagine going down in history as the man who failed to defeat Gordon Brown – as the man to whom people thought that Brown was, on the whole, preferable.

all the democrats

Useful and comprehensive survey of liberal and reformist groups within China, with details of the post 1989 regroupment and the various ways in which activists work. There appear to be lots of horizontal connections but not much sign of a movement emerging from within the wider public, with the possible exceptions of the Christian and environmentally oriented groups.

The author, Feng Chongyi, uses the Charter 08 declaration as a kind of rallying point, which was apparently produced in anticipation of widespread social upheaval in 2009 opening the way for the establishment of constitutional democracy on a three year timetable. This appears to be somewhat behind schedule, though Feng notes that the draconian sentence imposed on the document’s main author Liu Xiaobo has not caused anyone else involved to withdraw their signatures.

a good idea at the time

A kibbutz with historic links to the Israeli security establishment has no idea at all how two of its residents British passports came to be used in the Dubai assassination. Apparently everyone is burgled on a monthly basis but no-one feels the need to do anything about that. I think there’s a strong possibility that they were asked nicely to do something for their country and told that nothing could possibly go wrong.

better and longer

Cabinet minister Ed Miliband has become the latest victim of a new "phishing" scam on Twitter.

Many of the Energy Secretary's 6,664 followers on the micro-blogging website will have been surprised to receive an unusually personal message from him at breakfast time.

"Hhey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here", said the "tweet" alongside a picture of a smiling Mr Miliband

“And so has my brother”, he added. I thankyew.

Sinosphere Friday: own goal edition

The Chinese Football League: not only grossly corrupt, but remarkably incompetent.

At the end of a September 2 match between Qingdao Hailifeng and Sichuan Zhigu, with Hailifeng leading 3 to 0, club president Du Yunqi ordered team captain Du Bin to give up a goal. Apparently, Du was betting on an international gambling site and realized that a closer margin of victory would result in a bigger take.

After receiving orders, player Feng XX forcefully "passes back" a ground ball, which heads straight toward the keeper, who blocks it.

Following the failed first shot, Du Bin has Li X try for another own goal. Li takes a slow shot, which the goalie again blocks.

As time is about to run out, Du Bin gestures for the goalie to leave the penalty box. Then Zhang XX, a young player, takes a chip shot over the goalie's head. It rolls out of bounds.

Why China currently has a labour shortage. More interesting than it sounds. And take a look inside Beijing’s uber think tank |The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

A Chinese wingnut writes to Obama. A pretty straightforward exposition of this particular genre.

Beijing unleashes angry mothers on to the internet.

The politics of golf in China:

The country’s latest moratorium on golf course construction was brought in more than five years ago, and is still technically in place. In China, golf remains a prohibitively expensive, elitist pursuit – inescapably linked to corruption in the minds of many – and, some believe, its expansion runs counter to several of President Hu Jintao’s primary concerns: among them the environment, the plight of farmers and the widening gap between rich and poor. A project that absorbs 20 million acres of open land and directly affects the lives of tens of thousands of poor rural families is bound to create controversy.

After spending years ignoring the Communist Party’s existing code of ethics, cadres now have a new 52 point code to ignore.

China Digital Times has a document from the Yunnan Province Public Security detailing its local informant network. Here’s what the cops are worried about down in the deep south:

violent terrorist activities; mass incidents and appeals to higher levels of government that were sparked by the displacement of reservoir refugees, land takings and building demolitions; mass incidents and appeals to higher levels of government sparked by coal mining, environmental pollution and other problems; situations involving the activities of evil cults such as Falun Gong and Disciples’ Society; organized group appeals to higher levels of government that involve remuneration requests of military personnel and discharged substitute teachers, and inter-regional conflicts; mass incidents and appeals to higher levels of government that were sparked by conflicts involving graveyards, mountains and forests, land, construction, water resources, and compensation for land taken for road construction; situations caused by a person’s extreme acts such as the spreading of threats, the premeditated setting off of explosives, poisoning, arson, suicide, etc.; and situations in which ore is illegally extracted from mines that had been closed.

Given that Yunann is a transshipment zone for Golden Triangle heroin and crystal meth, I’m surprised there’s nothing about drugs.

Elsewhere on the police beat:

"The public security bureau told us that he was healthy while in the detention center. He was healthy while he was interrogated. But after the interrogation, he experienced a sudden stomach ache and then he died."

As a final note, it must be acknowledged that China’s criminal justice system has improved somewhat over the years (NB: extremely graphic, even by my standards)

actually mad people running businesses

Over here. Via.

stabbed in the back by big brother

This is very funny indeed: Toby Young wetting his galoshes about the fact that Obama’s people are just as uninterested in British possession of the Falklands as Reagan’s were. As it happens, Argentina is a Major non-Nato Ally of the US, equivalent in formal status to Israel or Australia. It’s kind of difficult when one’s little friends fall out over obscure bits of real estate and suchlike parochial issues and maybe best to keep out of it or make them both sit on the naughty step.

What I also get from this is a very strong impression that the Petainists at the Telegraph are telling their bloggers to write for the American wingnut market.

It doesn’t look like the Argentine military is capable of another Falklands invasion: which is just as well, as we’re probably not capable of getting them back this time. Maybe we should just be neighbourly and cut them in on the oil.

arrogant reprobates

The eXile gets its memorial:

In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, The Exile’s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate The Exile’s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.

It’s a fair piece, though the war nerd doesn’t get a look in.

As somebody said, if only someone would do a Chinese version. But then it could never get itself published...at least, not in China, though these days I’m not sure that’s necessary.