Blood & Treasure

mind how you go

So earlier today the US delivers death by drone to that Awlaki fellow, under a law which allows the President to authorise the assassination of American citizens he considers worthy of the honour, and then, if he chooses keep, the killing and the reasons for it secret for reasons of state.

To recap, Awlaki was al-Qaeda’s English language agitprop maestro, in which capacity he inspired the Fort Hood shootings, the underpants plane bomber and that woman who stabbed the Labour MP. He was also the presiding genius behind Inspire, the al-Qaeda Take a Break, which should now perhaps be called Expire.

So me and Mrs Treasure are sitting in a living room in Manchester and I ask her if she’s ever seen Inspire, and she says you want to be careful about reading stuff like that and I don’t say ‘I’ll read whatever I want, thanks very much’ I say no it’s OK I didn’t go to a jihadi site to see it, there were pdfs all over the place (I think I saw it at Danger Room, as I recall.) And we both had a laugh about ‘making a bomb in the kitchen of your mom’  We’re sat here keeping our noses clean and the killer robots are flying overhead. Not yet, exactly, but half-boiled frogs or what? Has anyone else had conversations like that?

on failure

Per Justin’s book project on success and its evils, someone’s already been there, sort of.

I read it a couple of years back. It’s OK, without being compelling; it’s broadly an account of how success became an ideology in the US through the biographies of various unsuccessful entrepreneurs. The best bit is a side discourse on the early history of ratings agencies, which were founded, usually by ex-journalists, to grade the creditworthiness of traders from the sticks who came to New York. This grading consisted of making a quick trip to the fellow’s home town and picking up the gossip about him.

Some of it was germane, such as whether he’d met all his bills on time. Some had a certain relevance; such as checking with the local postmaster/mistress as to the volume of mail he sent and received as way of assessing the extent of his business. Other stuff was pure gossip: whether he attended church frequently, what the pastor thought of his morals, his ranking and status within local fraternal orders, whether his wife ordered racy dresses from suspect foreign countries and his daughter acted the flippertigibbet and so on. The eventual assessment included all these things in a merger of the moral and economic notions of credit. Being rated a bad risk, it was generally understood, also meant that you were bad man at least according to the collective prejudices of your home town.

tiny scale battles

Cracking bit of Chinese wingnuttery over at Global Times, as an op ed calls for China to declare war on Vietnam and the Philippines. But not all out war, you'll be relieved to hear:

For those who infringe upon our sovereignty to steal the oil, we need to warn them politely, and then take action if they don’t respond.

 We shouldn’t waste the opportunity to launch some tiny-scale battles that could deter provocateurs from going further.

This was originally written for the Chinese version of GT, along with a reader poll which showed no less than 25,000 frothing loons eager to wipe Southeast Asia from the face of the planet. This is turn has led to murmurings on twitter that it got translated because "somebody" wanted the world to see it. James might be able to confirm this, but I suspect that somebody was just the editor, Hu Xijin, who seems to be developing a nose for a good wind-up.

 

drive, he said

Well, what would an upcoming Tory conference be without an announcement that the government is going to aid “the motorist” in his – and I think motorists, as opposed to people who drive cars from place to place are always he – war against everyone else.

Somewhere in On Roads, Joe Moran talks about the contrast between the promise of freedom inherent in motoring and the fact that roads are, of necessity, probably the most tightly regulated public spaces we have. Part of that is down to the fact that great herds of individuals descend on them every day, each in their lethal machine, all determined to get where they, in particular, want to go. Regulation - state intervention – extends precisely in order to reconcile this notion of freedom with keeping casualties down and getting everyone to their destination. It’s a perfect illustration of the inescapability of the state.

And then there’s the fact that even if you leave the regulatory aspect behind, driving is a hugely physically constrained activity. You’re stuck in your car and your car is stuck on a narrow tarmac ribbon pointing straight ahead. A pedestrian can wander this way or that on impulse, suddenly turn around or stop dead in the street. A driver, by contrast, is an utterly regimented creature. I suppose it’s the psychological shock of this that turns men into ‘motorists’ and ‘motorists’ into the sort of men the Tories have on tap. But I’m not actually sure, when you come right down to it, that there are really all that many ‘motorists’ about. It’s strange politics when you think about it: a core interest group that doesn’t identify itself by income, profession or ideology but by how it gets from place to place, almost as though this is the point of its existence.

 

seeing it their way

Beijing, and Xinhua in particular, has been holding a World Media Summit. A number of interesting people have shown up:

This vision of a new world order closely echoes Beijing’s often-voiced obsession with soft power. China wants a “right to be heard”; it is misunderstood; and the Western media describe the country in a biased way, Chinese officials complain frequently.

The astonishing thing is that some of the most powerful men of global media have agreed to sit down and be used as props in Beijing’s show.

Eleven heavyweight media executives including New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, BBC director-general Mark Thompson and AP president Tom Curley attended the summit and discussed things such as the protection of intellectual property rights, journalists’ safety, the media’s role in disasters and media cooperation in the new media era. That, at least, was the agenda according to Xinhua, which not only hosts and heads the World Media Summit’s secretariat and its website but also seems to have produced all media coverage there is about the event. Requests by foreign journalists based in Beijing for accreditation were politely declined (by Xinhua).

Also present were senior execs from News Corp and Al Jazeera. David Bandurski has much more on the messaging strategy behind the summit here.

The problem here is that news executives are being duped into participating in an institutional framework that is ostensibly “non-governmental [and] non-profit” but which is backed and funded by the Chinese state via its official news agency, and which clearly has agendas beyond simple business exchange that overlap with those of the Chinese leadership.

These media executives are representing themselves — or allowing themselves to be represented — as governing members of an organization that states publicly on an official website apparently managed by Xinhua News Agency itself, bearing an all-rights-reserved Xinhua copyright, that it plans to “set a code of conduct binding for all” in order to “tackle challenges and problems confronting all.” Li Congjun, the former deputy propaganda chief who runs Xinhua and is now the Summit’s president apparently proposed “establishing a WMS [World Media Summit] mechanism outlining a common code of conduct.”

I don’t think this will change external coverage of China. What the summit does do is allow Beijing to tell people in China that its own news management practices are endorsed by major global news organizations and conform to international standards. That tends to make life more difficult for reporters in China trying to push back news management boundaries.

Newspapers like Southern Metropolis Daily justify their investigative journalism in part as a means of developing the professionalisation of media in China, a formulation which conforms to stated government policy and gives them room to print material that the government and Party would normally prefer not to see. It's important for media in this position to be able to say that aggressive reporting  which does not respect vested interests is in fact the international professional standard. Having a bunch of big shots from global media apparently endorse the Xinhua approach to news cuts this ground from under their feet.

department of alarming hints

So I'm a North Korean Workers Party cadre and I'm having a look at Rodong Sinmun, trying to read the runes coming out from party central. And what do I find?

What the officials in the DPRK desire most at present is to work in such a manner as to be remembered by leader Kim Jong Il. They should work so devotedly that they may be always remembered by him even after their death.

Via Adam Cathcart. Ah right. So a sixty eight year old man with chronic kidney failure who came out of a serious stroke a few years back is going to outlive me. The thing is, I'd already be expecting some kind of purge/reshuffle attendant on the succession of Kim Jong-un, but maybe not a casual hint that I wouldn't be around to see it. I suppose I could interpret it as a kind of ritual statment of loyalty. But then again, perhaps not.

the cobra delivers

China figures out this democracy thing:

“What is weird is that I got two pay slips,” Mwaba tells the Monitor. “It looks like the Chinese had prepared for any outcome of the election by printing two pay slips for us for the month of September. If the incumbent Movement for Multi party Democracy MMD had won the presidential election, we would have been paid old meager salaries. But we got almost double the money because the opposition Patriotic Front led by Michael Sata won the election.”

As the largest copper producing country in Africa – some $2 billion worth by the end of 2010 – Zambia is more than just another landlocked African country to the People’s Republic of China, a country whose ongoing economic expansion have made it the world’s largest copper consumer. Sata’s victory has been seen by many as a sign of growing disaffection among Zambian voters who felt that Zambia was not getting a fair share of the mineral deals signed by previous Zambian governments. Some business leaders here fretted that Sata’s rhetoric might scare off foreign investment. But for now, the general mood is one of rapprochement, with Sata voicing moderation and Chinese investors promising good corporate behavior.

That's really good news. I never supported the argument that China in Africa was a matter of neo-imperialism on the grounds that African governments have a huge amount of agency in relation to the rewards Chinese investment offers their peoples. The bottom linbe is that China needs the copper and has to accept the terms on which it gets it.

And credit to Beijing. It didn't buy both sides. It didn't offer military support to the incumbent government to promote a 'stable business environment'. It didn't threaten or bluster. It respected the decision of the Zambian people. And its companies took the hit, though I'm sure they'll be passing it on.

inflammable commodities

Interesting interview with the fellow in Pakistan who sells the flags they burn on demonstrations:

In Pakistan, the flags of the US and Israel tend to be most flammable. But when SM hit upon the idea of selling flags to political parties in 2006, every political party wanted to protest the publication of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in a Danish newspaper but there weren’t any Danish flags to be found.

“I was also very angry about the Danish cartoons but I wouldn’t have gone out on the streets myself. Instead I decided to get Danish flags printed,” says SM. He adds that he had always been a supporter of the Jamaat-e-Islami and so had the contacts to sell them Danish flags. “I charged Rs500 per flag so I was able to make a nice profit out of it.” He adds, “Word spread and soon I was getting more orders for Danish flags than I could get printed.”

Since then, SM has kept up a steady business in flag-selling, with the US and Israel flags being his most consistent sellers. For bulk orders of 100 flags or more he offers a discounted rate of Rs300 per flag.

He's now thinking of getting into the effigy market.

 

roboslut

From one of our more excitably nationalist reporters, describing a translator robot at a Japanese trade fair - "And she leered at me through her heavy-lidded, lascivious Japanese eyes."  Judge for yourself!  Apparently she was dressed as the Queen, or a close approximation.

Armenian Americans disturbed by Labour Party leader

Damian Thompson tells us that strangers in a strange land are agog with disapproval at Ed's Terrible Speech. He personally tells us he was present at this event. Worldwide gloom at remote prospect of Miliband ascendancy threatened.

UPDATE: Joke, he says now.