Blood & Treasure

brief econometric analysis of emergent urban myth

I've been chatting with Mrs Treasure about the rumour that kids in Manchester are wearing Jimmy Savile halloween face masks. I don't think it's true. While the tat moguls of Zhejiang could easily adapt existing generic hag-based designs by adding a bit of extruded plastic meant to represent a cigar - say -  based on something emailed over, there's the fact that their margins would require  huge production volume, and we're not that far into the folk devil cycle yet - though I wouldn't be surprised to see tentative attempts to substitute Mr Savile for his co-religionist Mr Fawkes come bonfire night, these perhaps becoming established pratice as the years go by. An opportunity here for wherever the tat manufacturing trade eventually shifts to, perhaps Laos, perhaps Huddersfield.

There's also the fact that they'd have to dump the masks in a container and get them shipped over to Felixstowe and then get them distributed; and that that the tat people have long since retooled for Xmas.

There is a possibility that local street traders have added value to their existing stock of Halloween masks, by rigging up Savile-like attachments to their existing stocks of hag masks. I shall go to Market Street and investigate these signs of green shoots and innovation at the earliest opportunity.

the locusts have no king

...yet they go forth, all of them together in bands. Cuddly old Grandpa Wen and the huge pile of money his family has accumulated during his rise to the top finally gets the treatment, following similar exposes of Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai.

The essential MO is the same; the man rises, the family fan out and work the connections; the connections bring new connections and opportunities to them, and so it goes, onwards and upwards. China’s leaders really do have actually existing meritocracy perfected.

One interesting takeout here is that Wen’s family made an order of magnitude more money than either Bo’s or Xi’s, and that Xi’s made more money than Bo’s. That’s partly because he’s been around for longer, but there’s also a lesson here about rising quietly and marrying well: well for values of acumen rather than affection (Wen is supposedly not happy with his wife, the gemstone queen and main business brain of the family firm).

Annoyingly, people seem to have stopped following the money in favour of going with the censorship angle. You can see a good assessment of whether and how much the NYT has been blocked in China here. The annoying thing about it is that anyone thinks that ‘China blocks embarrassing story about top official’ is news. On the other hand, you could argue that it might have been difficult to make a large chunk of closely argued financial analysis about Wen Jiabao into global news without the censorship martyr angle. 

the primitive Communist origins of Mitt Romney

“The sooty misery of working-class England,” Turner explains, “had left Young with a lingering belief that capitalism could produce an existence worse than chattel slavery.” Convinced that the Kingdom of Saints was now threatened with moral and economic absorption into a society run by robber barons and stock jobbers, Young launched a Mormon Cultural Revolution: the United Order of Enoch.

Mike Davis delivers. Lovely bit of political archeology there. 

good times, man. Macabre good times (updated)

I know I’ve blogged this before, but I just can’t get enough of the Syrian Arab News Agency’s heroic attempts to persuade us that everything is totally cool in Damascus after dark.

 Aleppo? Never mind, dude. Party on.

UPDATE: In a rather more effective propaganda intervention, here are some Syrian rebels stroking little pussy cats.

child labour exposed

Demand. Supply. That good stuff:

Most volunteers choose to work with Cambodian children, usually by teaching English in orphanages. Be aware, though, that these Cambodian orphanages exist only to cater to foreign tourists. In fact, the vast majority of children who are placed in orphanages in Cambodia are not orphans and have at least one living parent. But demand from foreign tourists to visit Cambodian orphanages and work with Cambodian children is so high that parents are often offered powerful financial incentives to place their children in these so-called orphanages, or are promised that they will be provided with a great education, which is often not the case.

I suppose the best thing you can say about this is that being put in a show home and petted over by dipsticks isn't the worst form of exploitation the children might otherwise have to endure (assuming no visitors surnamed Savile). But how would an economist categorise this? The brainless compassion sector?

original streetfighters

Speaking of Stalingrad, as people were downblog, Brad DeLong has a nice 70 years on retrospective; on the battle and on the Eastern front generally:

The Allies probably would have eventually won World War II even had the Nazis conquered Stalingrad, redistributed their spearhead forces as mobile reserves, repelled the Red Army’s subsequent winter 1942 offensive, and seized the Caucasus oil fields, thus depriving the Red Army of 90% of its motor fuel. But any Allied victory would have required the large-scale use of nuclear weapons, and a death toll in Europe that would most likely have been twice the actual World War II death toll of perhaps 40 million.

May there never be another such battle. May we never need another one.

Any specific claim as to how the war would have gone if the Soviet Union had been knocked out of active participation has to be speculative. However, I only had one relative die as a consequence of World War Two (a maternal great uncle, at Anzio, with the North Staffordshires), and I don't think there's any doubt that I have the Soviets to thank for that, above and beyond the contribution made by other allied nations. Given that five out of every six German combatants killed were killed by the Soviets, it couldn't have been any other way.

con, but not neocon

Updating Chris's post on alleged US neoconservative involvement in the elections for the Lincolnshire Police Commissioner post, it seems that these were simply part of the rich and involving fantasy life of the serial fraudster that candidate Mervyn Barrett took on as his right hand man. And here is Mr Barrett's resignation statement. 

Another case of Gilligan's leap, it seems. But still: kind of a gripping story on its own account.

today in overlapping scandals

So let’s see: Tom Watson MP, prime parliamentary mover behind the hacking enquiry raises questions about high level paedophile rings in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, questions which involve the curious reluctance of the police to work on the available evidence. He notes that he has also been informed that the Met held large quantities of “material suggesting that Jimmy Savile was a predatory paedophile” but did not act on it.

The Sun, a newspaper whose hacks and executives have been arrested on various charges of corruption pertaining to the hacking enquiries, has meanwhile been engaged in gleeful self-interested baiting of the BBC over Savile, which in itys turn has earned it. The Sun of course is notorious for its smearing of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, and today we learn that the cop who boasted about working with media about this has finally had to resign. Bettinson worked with the South Yorkshire force on this, um, project, a force whose mutual collusion in perverting the course of justice over events at the Orgreave mass picket during the miner’s strike of 1984 provided a kind of dress rehearsal for the Hillsborough cover up.

Watson’s evidence for his parliamentary question is reprised, in part, in this article from 1998 by Nick Davies, the man who did most to uncover the hacking scandal. The piece also demonstrates at least one important reason why Jimmy Savile got away with it: because child rapists often do get away with it, especially well connected and powerful child rapists.

All we need now is something connecting Savile to the Daniel Morgan murder. Then we’ll have reached the Octopus moment.

portrait of a patriot

Almost everyone who knows him finds it hard to associate him with the words “illegal”, “crime” and “arrest”. In his security guard job in Shenzhen he worked hard, and in only six months was promoted to team captain. When he finished work he hurried off to do volunteer work, still wearing his uniform.

But in the baodiao [protect-Diaoyu] marches in Shenzhen on September 16 this young man, who often dons the red volunteer’s vest, displayed a violent side when he participated in car-smashing.

Read the whole thing: absolutely classic 'church and king' mob participant.

quiz time

Who is saying this?

Today's global connectivity and its impact on a changing operational environment reinforce that lasting strategic results can only be achieved by effectively influencing people. 

Peek after you've made a guess.