Blood & Treasure

vertically and covertly

Dronewatch:

U.K. authorities expect to begin using much bigger and more powerful UAVs, and in a significantly expanded fashion, in the near future. According to documents obtained byThe Guardian, Britain’s Home Office plans to use military-style UAVs to police the 2012 summer Olympics. In addition, six local U.K. police agencies have joined together for a pilot project to use UAVs for “surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering.” Officials hope UAVs will be installed in “the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies” across the United Kingdom.

Thus far, the Civil Aviation Authority, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the FAA, has resisted the licensing of such aircraft in “normal” airspace due to fears of collisions, but the rapid development of “sense and avoid” technology may lay these worries to rest within a few years. Despite the implications of everyday reliance on UAVs, says Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University, “broader concern about the regulation and control of drone surveillance of British civilian life has been notable by its absence.” Graham worries that the needed regulatory mechanisms are not in place in the United Kingdom to “prevent law enforcement agencies from abusing radical extensions in their powers to vertically and covertly spy on all aspects of civilian life 24 hours a day.”

A question (maybe for Chris Williams). Why is the British securocracy particularly keen on this kind of policing, compared to other countries? We know that there are more CCTV cameras in Britain than anywhere else, and this seems to be envisioned as mobile CCTV.

five and a half years later

Unable to forget what he saw, Owens said he drove to the area, but the tomb and casket were gone and a three-sided fence had been erected around the graveyard. What he discovered about 50 yards beyond the cemetery is what's disturbing. "I see something shining, and I thought it was a refrigerator.. junk that somebody may have thrown out, and as I got closer, I could see it was a silver casket. Sure enough I walked up to it.. the top is off, and it's open."

Leading us to the spot, Owens said, "you can kind of see the water body I was talking about. That's what I was trying to get to." Owens had hoped to find a good spot to launch his kayak in the area, but instead discovered the metal casket, wide open, and rusty. It appeared to be full of debris.

Owens questioned whether the casket came from the nearby cemetery, and if it did, he said he wonders if people are visiting an empty tomb.

Slidell resident Donald Collins, Sr. said Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. "I think it was like 14 feet," said Collins, who explained that the floodwaters ravaged the cemetery. He said, "it was really tore up out here. There was caskets everywhere out in the woods.. up the highway. We have loved ones out here. We had to find theirs (caskets and tombs) and put them back in the right places."

a certain leading cadre is not so clean

Victor Shih has a fascinating account of a land grab traceable to old friends of forthcoming president Xi Jinping, and apparently published now in an attempt to embarrass him and reveal his connections to a wider audience.

The story involves Xi, a property developer from his old stamping ground in Fujian, and the provincial governor of Yunnan, who may have known Xi from his days in a tractor factory – retro touch! - in Yan’an and whose climb up the ladder from there may have been initiated by the Xi family.

Now Xi’s progress will have been facilitated by success in Fujian, which in turn requires hooking up with major local property developers – men who can build him a glorious city. When his friend in his turn requires a favour, Xi turns to the man he helped up the ladder who now occupies a powerful but still subordinate post.

This nexus is powerful enough to ignore the laws supervised by the fairly low ranking Ministry of Land and Resources. However, the Ministry has now been empowered to investigate the deal, and while it can’t grab the land back it can raise a satisfyingly publishable fuss. This is presumably at the prompting of factions opposed to Xi, or at least those that wish to limit his scope for action.

Now, the Ministry of Land, by publicly condemning this project, is clearly under instruction to give Century Golden and its political backers an embarrassing slap on the wrist. To be sure, the project will go ahead because the MLR clearly cannot impose punitive measures on an entity with this much political backing, but everyone now knows that certain leading cadre is not so clean after all.

So the question is, where did the instructions come from?

over here, we just watch it on Sky

Here’s a thing:

Egyptian soccer fans are emerging as one of the most significant forces in four days of protests that have already forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to dismiss his government and are gunning for his ouster.

Prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah, speaking on Al Jazeera, said the uprising’s most effective organizational strength comes, in the words of Paul Woodward of the War in Context blog, from a quarter that has been ignored by most of the media: soccer fans known as ultras. “The ultras — the football fan associations — have played a more significant role than any political group on the ground at this moment,” Alaa said on Al Jazeera. “Maybe we should get the ultras to rule the country,” he joked.

The ultras are fans of Cairo’s storied Al Ahly (The National) Sports Club. They are a key part of the alliance of youth activists, Islamists, and workers rebelling against the Egyptian government because of its failure to alleviate poverty, eradicate corruption and provide jobs as well as its employment of repression and torture to stymie opposition.

And here’s another thing.

The son of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Nicholas Blair, hopes to trade on the family name as a soccer agent for Middle Eastern players at a time that the policies with which his father is identified appear to be crumbling on the streets of Cairo and other Arab capitals.

Who would have thought that the offspring of our former PM would take a job that involves money grubbing, freeloading and gladhanding. I for one am terribly disappointed.

cash for souls

I'm not certain what to make of the recent discovery of bundles of cash in the Karmapa Lama's monastery. On the one hand, there's been rumors for ages about him being a Chinese plant. On the other, dubious accounting practices and a general air of venality are very usual among the Tibetan monastic community, both in China and outside. I was once helping run a Buddhist environmental conference in Mongolia, where the first priority of the Tibetan lamas (Chinese-aligned) was to go to the market and buy up as many endangered species' parts "for men's health" as possible.  And there's certainly a ton of money flowing into Dharamsala from various sources. So it might just be regular old corruption rather than espionage.

The Dalai himself is genuinely saintly, albeit that some of his proclamations get notably tinted for different audiences (such as his position on homosexuality, which is forgiveable given the frequency of abuse of young monks in Tibet). But his court's full of chancers (both Western and Tibetan), and the Tibetan exile community is even more fractured and bitter than most exile communities.

Quite apart from the nationalist disputes (reconcile with China? fight to the death?), Tibetan Buddhism's not particularly united. The Dorje Shugden controversy has been running for ages, for starters, and incarnation disputes are common - there's a whole bundle of minor reincarnees, and a lot of dubious "wills" get discovered related to where the next incarnation will be found/who should look after the money in the meantime. 

what prominent Liberal Democrats are talking about these days

One thing worries me. Slater tells the story of his boyhood and adolescence through the food he and his family ate. He is very good on the sweets of the period, mentioning long-lost chocolate bars like Summit and Aztec that most of my readers will be far too young to remember.

But he also mentions having bought Space Dust in the 1960s - and I have no memory of having eaten it or even heard of it in that decade. Wikipedia appears to back me up: it's disambiguation page for Space Dust redirects you to Pop Rocks - a brand it says was first offered to the public in 1975.

a provisional guess at a temporary endgame

OK. Time for another post/thread on Egypt. The demonstrators are apparently going for a sleepover in Tahrir Square and a lot of the army has shot off towards the presidential palace. So a Tiananmen solution, which I thought was very likely earlier on, doesn’t look on the cards for now. Meanwhile, there are apparently military checkpoints across Cairo and the curfew has been extended. So it’s going to be made more difficult for people to assemble in the first place.

Maybe we can see an endgame emerging. I still don’t think Mubarrak is actually in charge (nor does Issandr El Amrani) but is fronting a seizure of the state by top level securocrats. Against them you have some emerging civil society elements that seem to have pushed El Baradei to the front, primarily I think on grounds of availability. I think that Mubarrak’s ouster will be the substance of the immediate victory that the latter will be allowed.

After that, I think the offer will be genuine elections and greater political pluralism (puls a whole load of food and fuel subsidies), probably inclusive of the Muslim Brotherhood, with the proviso that defense and foreign policy remains in the hands of the security establishment. By then, presumably, the people will be off the streets and maybe this is not such a bad deal that it would get them back out again. This is why El Baradei’s a useful compromise figure. He can’t tell the army what to do, and also he doesn’t have the public backing or demagogic talents to get people out on the streets. An excellent interim president, then, from the point of view of regional and western sponsors. Cometh the hour, cometh the bassett hound in a suit.

twin plagues

Al-Faisal, who served as an ambassador to the U.S. and is an ex-intelligence service director, responded to a question about whether a push for democracy across the Middle East might be more worrisome than a nuclear-armed Iran.

"I don't know — in Saudi Arabia we have neither nuclear weapons nor democracy," he said.

where are the everyday reactionaries?

Following on from James’ post earlier, there’s a major controversy about the findings of a survey by PR company Edelman, that discovered 88% of people in China had confidence that their government would do the right thing (the UK figure is 43%).

Much of the sinosphere found this figure rather on the high side. I do too, intuitively, but given that the survey was confined to affluent people in China’s three largest cities I don’t find it incredible. The status quo, if not the actual Party, does have a bedrock of support in China and the survey design seems to be zeroed in on the people most likely to be part of that group.

But so far as I can determine, supporters of the status quo do seem to be under-represented online. Roland notes:

What do the Chinese people really think? Well, you wouldn't go to one website and use the comments there to generalize to the whole population. If you went to websites such as KDnet, you get the liberal viewpoints; if you went to websites such as WYZXSX, Strong Nation or Iron Blood, you get the ultra-nationalistic viewpoints.

Neither of these groups are actually supportive of the government. Tha Nationalist forums are hostile to what they perceive as westernization but also think that the CPC are a bunch of softies for not invading Taiwan right now. And like liberal or reformist opinion, nationalist expression is also liable to censorship.

What you don’t seem to get much of is argument from a broadly pro-staus quo perspective, and I wonder if that might be partly down to the wumaodang effect. Anyone whose post to a forum is along the lines of “come off it, it’s not that bad” is likely to get shouted down as a fifty-center. By extension, so is the least critical comment on any one thread. Being critical of the CPC is a means to prove that your opinions are actually your own. Hence, possibly, the outrage over Edelmann’s figures.

But you do wonder what people who, at the very least, think that the CPC is the best government China is likely to get think of the fact that the same government holds their genuine views in such contempt that it makes it hard for them to participate credibly in online discussion.

arise, ye who would not be slaves

There's a hearty little discussion going on in the Sinoblogs at the moment about whether an Egyptian-type uprising could happen in China.  My vote (and most people's) is for not.

The first reason is the obvious one: growth. The North African uprisings are a response to a largely stagnant economy.  China has a lot of external similarities - high population of poor, lots of unemployed college graduates (particularly in the last three years), police corruption, etc - but that's tempered by the reality that living conditions, for a large percentage of the population, genuinely have been getting better for the last three decades. There's an expectation that things will be better tomorrow. The flipside of this is that if the economy ever crashes, or even slows down, that could disappear very fast and be replaced with a bitter anger - the vast majority of the public just isn't used to a non-booming economy at this stage. 

The second is the lack of personality cults, and of criticism of the top leadership. China's done a very, very good job of keeping the foibles of the top leaders out of the public eye, for the most part; gossip about the central leadership and their families is extremely restricted. Without a clear dictator, there's a lack of focus for rage.

The third is size.  China can, and does, regularly manage incidents involving thousands of people and a half-dozen deaths or so without the rest of the country even notice.  Tied to this is that protests tend to focus on local issues rather than express a coherent national agenda.  So the threshold that protests have to cross to spark similar events elsewhere is much, much higher.

The fourth is a highly politicized army that's indoctrinated specifically to see itself as the shield of the Party.  McGregor is good on this in The Party, but we still don't have, to the best of my knowledge, a really comprehensive ground-level study of PLA officers and soldiers and their attitudes. The PLA's a weird beast, not least because so much of it is a business empire, and so few of the officers seem to be involved in actual military work.  (Typical case: the father of one of my exes, an advertising executive, was hired by the PLA, given a major's rank, and now runs their condom factories.)