Blood & Treasure

labourers wanted for yellow brick road maintenance

Alex makes some points on definition:

I especially like the distinction between a “social enterprise” – a Blairite upsexing of what used to be called a charity and then became an NGO – and a “social purpose” company, which appears to mean a company whose social purpose is to buy its directors a very big house in the country.

I would suggest that A4E is our most prominent SRC: Socially Rapacious Corporation. This is really just a variant of the old cat and rat farm hoax.

Elsewhere in the same piece, I find myself fascinated by the phenomenon of hidden jobs: vacancies whose possessors don’t want them made known, jobs stacked up in secret warehouses with Gaddafi’s manpads, jobs that are simply too good to have anyone do or indeed know about. Jobs that need to be hunted down; and whose pursuit requires endless contracts with A4E…

As providers of Instant Underclass Solutions to HMG, the company are also behind the adopt a troublesome family initiative, which is supposed to involve members of the government, no less. I anticipate something like this.

education by immersion

Going back to the pronouncements of the all-seeing eye, I went to school with a bunch of guys who became computer programmers, and at least one who became an online entrepeneur.  (First time I ever went online was in his house, in fact.)

Now, our school didn't have any programming classes. Our IT instruction was blunderingly useless, in fact, and the teachers' only solution to any problem was to re-install Windows. But what we did have was fairly large and (for the time) moderately well-equipped computer labs, and a fairly lax policy about letting anyone who was interested wander in and use them.  (I played a lot of Moria.)  I see, in fact, that it's apparently a "Technology College" nowadays.

This seems to me to be a better way of producing people interested in computers than making kids type in BASIC programs in class, in the same way that having a large library with generous opening hours is a better way of getting kids interested in books than the "literacy hour."  (Both are also good places to be if your home life is shit.) 

megacities

Beijing's really small, as a capital city.  Obviously, this isn't true in absolute terms, but Beijing represents ... let's say 20 million people out of a (lowballed) population of 1.3 billion.  That's 1.5% of the population. 

But there's a persistent media habit - not among long-term China journos, but in the usual "Oooh, China!" stories  - to treat Beijing as it were some way representative. I think, apart from laziness, this is created by our perception of other capital cities, especially Asian ones.  Seoul and Taipei each hold about 40% of their country's population. Tokyo is about 30%.   Manila, about 20%.  Even Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City are 10-15%.  And Beijing looks like those cities, so people try to fit in into that mode.  But even if you add together Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, you're still only seeing 5% of the Chinese population. 

Peter rabbit, panzerschreck

"And what do you think the two naughty young rabbits saw when they peeped out?"

"Mr McGregor in a Mk II Tiger Tank with a traversable 88 mm howitzer and two forward mounted 7.62 mm machine guns!"

 

scaffolder comments on sistine chapel ceiling

The head of Google is disturbed by the fact that others fail to share his educational tastes. Deity called on in support:

Schmidt's comments echoed sentiments expressed by Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed he was stepping down this week. "The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists," Jobs once told the New York Times.

I suppose this is why all the art, music, poetry and history that gets put on the net, along with everything else, is  referred to indiscriminately as 'content', as though it basically exists to validate the programming. 

not sure what i'm feeling, but it sure ain't love

Oh lordy, my adopted city. The marketing and development junta are reclaiming territory today with an "Official We Heart Manchester Day.

I genuinely think that the real offense the rioters committed in the eyes of the local official class was a kind of treachery against marketing. And now they're all giving each other a big fancy rubdown with whoever happens to be in the city centre draped in appropriate branding.

The late Frank Sidebottom would have had something to say about this shenanigans; something quite nasal probably.

house to house, room to room

Brutal account of storming a Gaddafi holdout neighbourhood in Tripoli; plus a bit of epuration sauvage.

About two dozen bodies - some with their hands bound by plastic ties and with bullet wounds to the head - lay scattered on grassy lots in an area where Gadhafi sympathizers had camped out for months.

The identities of the dead were unclear, but they were in all likelihood activists who had set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Gadhafi in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign.

Five or six bodies were in a tent erected on a roundabout that had served as a field clinic. One of the dead still had an IV in his arm, and another body was completely charred, its legs missing. The body of a doctor, in his green hospital gown, was found dumped in the canal.

Elsewhere:

Rebels say one of their key targets now is Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Tripoli, but capturing that city would not be easy because Gadhafi's fellow tribesmen were expected to put up a fierce fight.

Opposition leaders have said they were trying to negotiate a peaceful surrender of the city. The rebels said the supply lines to Sirte would be too long and they are short of funds and supplies.

Since the source of funds are frozen Libyan assets, this means that NATO has the power to insist that Sirte be surrendered peacefully. In fact, that course of action is mandated if the responsibility to protect doctrine is being taken in any way seriously. It's not as if there's any prosepct of Gaddafi coming back.

maybe it's time for naughty cadre watch

According to some, the motive may have to do with the upcoming government/party transition moves as people jockey for position.

Oh, wow. Cadres stitching each other up – complete with photos - across the Sinosphere in advance of the general musical chairs around the leadership transition next year. This could be fun to keep an eye on.

yachts and things

The handbag crap of tyranny:

In an office area in the villa, reporters saw large piles of catalogues for yachts and cars. A catalog by the firm Benetti had a yellow handwritten post-it note attached listing the price for a 30-meter-long yacht as 7 million euros. A DVD with gay porn entitled “Boyz Tracks” slipped out of the stack of documents.

Business cards were scattered on the floor for a firm called “Natural Selection” that listed al-Saadi as partner and executive producer with an address on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The looters left behind a black cloth, apparently the back of a “director’s chair,” that read, in green: “Executive Producer al-Saadi Gadhafi.”

ritual domination incident

Great piece from Robbie Barnett on Xi Jinping’s visit to Tibet, illustrating why the development argument makes no difference to the proximate causes of local antagonism to China:

The ceremony included speeches by three other Chinese leaders and one Tibetan, a local village chief, as well as a parade of marching students, militia and the military. It lasted for at least 147 minutes, according to the television footage, during which time everyone applauded on cue, at the end of each section of each speech. It must have been quite hot or tiring because some Tibetans in the square can be seen holding their heads in their hands and being comforted by other members of the audience. Occasionally one or two people get up and move, but for the most part, no one leaves his or her assigned spot. At the back of the crowd one can even see synchronized displays—words spelled out by rows of people holding up different characters that form huge slogans saying “We thank the Chinese People” and “Tibet’s Future Will be Better.” One could be forgiven at times for thinking that Lhasa had been taken over not by Beijing but by Pyongyang.

...Everyone can understand why China is proud of improving Tibetan infrastructure and wants to maintain its rule over Tibet, but it is not clear why its leaders, or even ordinary Chinese, expect forcing Tibetans to stage rituals of mass gratitude to Xi Jinping and the Chinese government not to fuel resentment.

I think it might be a legitimation thing. What Xi appears to be doing here is following in Hu Jintao’s footsteps: Hu was famously talent spotted by Deng Xiaoping as Party Secretary in Tibet while wearing a tin hat and threatening dire consequences to rebellious Tibetans in the uprising of March 1989, which he duly delivered. A lot of Hu’s close political circle seems to have come up with or via a stints in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Xi, by contrast, has no roots in the CYL faction, is a princeling and rose through using those connections to deliver results in central and Eastern provinces. He is, in short, a bit of a soft lad, who has never been out on the frontiers showing a firm hand to the ethnics and making the desert bloom. Hence maybe the necessity of some mass ritual domination in Tibet to set the stage for his accession to Hu’s position.