Raging Cow: A Short Tale of Boxing and Bovines

South Korean welterweight champion Kwak Kyung-seok is dog-tired and in a foul mood. He’s exhausted because he’s been training all day for an upcoming titleship bout with a Thai fighter and he’s in a foul mood because I can’t get a rhythm on the mitts and my left hook looks like shit.

“Thwack, thwack-thwack” go the pads and with each final “thwack” his sigh gets louder and language saltier. After trying to correct my footwork for the upteenth time and demonstrating the tightness of the move with his own heavy hands – circular mitts flying like black, sweat-slick UFOs in front of my eyes — the stocky 31-year-old can’t take it anymore:

“For fuck’s sake” he says deliberately in Korean. “Are you a cow?”

I stop, sweat burning my eyes, tired, pissed-off and now completely fucking confused too:

“A cow?”

“Yes, a cow. For fuck’s sake, I said are you a cow?

“Cow?” I try and draw the mental connection: Ponderous? Four-stomachs? Given to excessive mastication? Flatulent? I don’t get it, perhaps I’ve misheard…

“A cow?”

By now his frustration is palpable.

“Yes a fucking cow; you know, steak, burgers, bulgogi… Moo! A cow! Are you a cow? Why aren’t you damn listening to what I say? It’s like reading sutras to a cow!”

I get it suddenly; this must be the Korean equivalent to casting pearls before swine. I’m the swine. Dammit. First I can’t get a basic punch right and now I’m being called a cow. I just want to punch something after a shitty day at the office and now his mumblings have become sutras and I’m a cow.

“Shit!” I finally snap, losing the veneer of detachment cultivated assiduously over the past six months in the decrepit 5th floor boxing gym.

“I’ll just the goddam bags, ok?” I frustratedly bellow  in a no-doubt bovine manner (but perturbed the way a cow could never be) and slam my gloves into the wall in frustration.

My loss of temper raises his spirits no-end.

“Oh come on!” He laughs, tickled at the effect he’s had. “Come oorrnn.”

He makes his way to the old sofa in the admin corner of the room and slumps down, putting on an old fight video with a lazy flick of the remote control, still chuckling to himself.

“Sutras to a fucking cow.”

쇠귀에 경 읽기

Going For Gold in North Korea?

High-kicking: North Korea going for gold?

On October the 22nd, North Korea’s state news agency, the Korea Central News Agency ran a typically terse one paragraph report on the visit of a foreign business delegation to Pyongyang.

Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly, met and had a conversation with the visiting delegation of the Swiss Commodity Holding AG led by Chief Executive Ms. Shanti Sen at the Mansudae Assembly Hall.

The news can have done little to excite news editors globally. It is doubtful any front pages or breaths were held and if anyone even read the report, they must have thought little of it.

But to a handful of football fans halfway across the world as tightly knit and fervently loyal as any group of North Korean cadres, the visit was just the latest installment in a saga involving a former England football manager, the mysterious Swiss company and the octogenarian Mr. Kim.

Notts County Football Club lays claim to the title of oldest professional football league club in the world. Despite its lowly status in the footballing echelons it has a loyal following who have tracked “The Magpies” recent financial travails with fascination.

Not least because they seem to involve, through some twist of fate, promises of gold buried in the mountains of distant North Korea.

Sven: "Show me the money"

Second-tier football team Notts County were initially delighted this summer when the club was taken over by a Middle Eastern consortium called Qadbak. The firm — which claimed to have some £100 billion in assets — expunged its £1m debts, hired former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson as director of football, and promised to propel the club into the Championship within five years.

But doubts didn’t take long to grow and the ownership of the club began to come under the scrutiny of the Football League, which states that all club directors and significant shareholders must pass a ‘fit and proper person’ test: not an easy thing to do given that Qadbak is registered in offshore banking haven the British Virgin Islands and its owners seemed reluctant to come forward.

The interest of sports journalists was piqued and many began to sniff around.

All roads seemed to lead to Swiss Commodity Holdings (SCH). Described as a Zurich-based mining company, it emerged from obscurity when Qadbak was reported to have handed a sizeable stake in it to Sven-Goran Eriksson in return for the former England manager joining Notts County.

All that glitters..?

British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph found that two ambassadors for the miner had approached the investment banks Rothschild and Cazenove for advice about a public listing, claiming to have mining assets worth more than commodity giants BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Rio Tinto and gold reserves of $153bn, more than the current market leader, Barrick Gold, which has $117bn.

Strangely none of the above companies had ever heard of SCH and it has declined to disclose publicly the location of its claimed $1.9 trillion of reserves. But according to the Telegraph, representatives of the firm told bankers that some of its assets are in Africa and North Korea.

The strange relationship between the firm and Pyongyang became more apparent when the Guardian reported that Sven Goran Eriksson was on the brink of a deal that could see the Swede leaving Notts County on loan to coach the North Korean football team during their World Cup campaign.

Although the coach denied the veracity of the reports and was later said to have turned down the offer, the whole situation seemed increasingly bizarre. A report in the Guardian claimed Eriksson was assured that when the company was floated on the stock market, his stock would be worth millions overnight and that the initial public flotation would take place by July. (The company has yet to be floated and rumours have emerged of Sven leaving the club…)

Then in September Russell King, a senior representative of Qadbak, the offshore company that owns Notts County, has had £1.9m of his assets frozen by the courts in Jersey over an unpaid debt. Things seemed to be unraveling. (Notts County’s takeover has since been approved by the Football League. As the Guardian noted, however:

There is, however, no means test for ownership of English football clubs, nor is there currently any way of knowing whether Notts County’s claims that it is backed by billions of pounds are true. Other public claims made by the club in the past three months have later unravelled.

If Qadbak and SCH were counting on North Korean gold to back their braggadocio, one suspects they were out of their depth. Although foreign interest in North Korea’s natural resources has grown, partly on the back of a South Korean government report issued in early October valuing the North’s mineral reserves at $6,000bn, getting the glittery stuff out is no simple task.

Sanctions slapped on North Korea as a result of its nuclear tests render most North Korean products toxic to players in the international financial system. As British businessman Colin McAskill, chairman of Koryo Asia Ltd., which invests in North Korea through the Chosun Development & Investment Fund told reporter Donald Kirk in 2007.

“The US has been using coercion, innuendo, and sheer force to intimidate banks from dealing with North Korea. We want to get a breakthrough on the six-party talks by getting the sanctions eased or lifted entirely. North Korea wants to move back into legitimate business.” Selling gold on the London market – the world’s largest – “is one way they can prove that,” he adds. “They have a wealth of minerals – gold, silver, zinc, magnesite, copper, uranium, platinum – that needs investment to extract.”

Shanti Sen, who the KCNA reports as leading the SCH delegation to Pyongyang, previously worked for the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, where she headed the Corporate Investment Group and is also listed as a bigwig at City Property Investors, which manages global real estate. Interesting choice of CEO.* (Incidentally Singapore recently signed an Investment Guarantee Agreement (IGA) with the North, under which:

Investors will be accorded non-discriminatory treatment, compensation in the event of expropriation or nationalisation of their investments, and free transfer of capital and returns from investment.

There obviously a real sense in the air among many players that North Korea is there for the taking.  But whether it’s football gold or the genuine article that has led The Magpies (which as everyone knows are attracted to shiny things) to look east for funding, one can only feel for the fans that the future of their club is no longer simply in the hands of  its players but those of State Department sanctions officials, the dictatorial geriatrics of Pyongyang and “$153bn” of North Korea gold that is, for the time being — and despite the best efforts of those in the Mansudae Assembly Hall — going nowhere for the foreseeable future.

*****

*After posting this story I was emailed anonymously by a German offering their “Freundliche Grüsse” and the link to AAH Group Inc., whose board of directors includes the very same Shanti Sen. There is absolutely jack all information on the group on the internet or indeed, their own homepage other than that they are:

“A mining corporation with a focus on the extraction of gold and precious minerals. The group owns various rights in South East Asia and South America. AAH Group, Inc. own one of the largest reserves bases in the public gold sector.”

Their claims sound a lot like SCH’s don’t they? And after a little more digging I found out that Pyongyang has in the past primarily sold  its gold to global buyers via Thailand. According to official Thai Customs Department statistics dug up by reporter Bertil Lintner in a few years back, North Korea shipped 500 kilograms of gold worth 398 million baht (US$11 million) to Thailand in April 2007 alone.

Lintner writes that North Korea’s main gold mine is in Unsan county in North Pyongan province, about 150 kilometers north of Pyongyang.

Consultants from Clough Engineering of Australia in 2001 inspected the same mine under the sponsorship of the United Nations Office for Project Services. They estimated that Unsan held 1,000 tons of gold reserves, which if true would make it one of the world’s major gold mines.

There is gold in them thar hills! No wonder businesses with distinctly opaque structures are popping up left right and centre, claiming to have the rights to half the world’s gold. I’d speculate (wildly) that given Sen’s background in Singapore and the city state’s recent MOU with the Norks that AAH Inc. and SCH may be aiming to sell gold via Singapore…

Formulary For A New Urbanism

A Korean street, late 1800s: credit unknown

Seoul apartments, 2008. by Flickr user "bhophoto"

The likely view 100 years earlier: credit unknown

Seoul apartments. Credit as above.

***

Le Corbusier’s style [is] suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style.

His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

***

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action. Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

Formulary for a New Urbanism: Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953.

Somehow I don’t think Chtcheglov — who tried to blow up the Eiffel tower because its light was shining in his bedroom window and keeping him awake –would like Seoul, circa 2009, very much, even if it (caught at the right moment) has it’s own beauty (see picture no. 4)…

I, too, want a house mounted on tracks that can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening. I do not, however, want to end up in a mental institution having electro-shock treatment like the author of this classic Situationist essay.

(The pictures and the essay need some comment; good material for a discussion about the future of the city, eco-architecture, traditional Korean houses, global urbanisation, psychogeography, the Situationists, etc. Sadly, your blogger is suffering from mental block brought on by too much screen-gazing and a lunch of ramen and can only offer the above as pointer for your own meanderings. Bon Dérive and Voyage)

Classroom as Parliament and the Death of the Adult

"The Secret School". By Nikolaos Gyzis, 1886.

Online journal/magazine Spiked is a strange beast; sometimes acerbic, sometimes glib, sometimes borderline reactionary in tone; dedicated to often counter-intuitive rabble-rousing and always fiercely libertarian in editorial position.

I don’t always agree with what I read in its pages, but for a site that describes itself as “dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms” it can hardly be accused of doing anything other than what it says on the tin.

René Magritte: The Schoolmaster

Amid a strange and increasingly palpable (if the papers are any guide) disquiet in England about parenting, education and childhood that seems to be weaving itself more and more firmly into the very fabric of social life, Spiked’s series of articles (or more properly, book reviews) on authority in the family and pedagogical spheres has been great reading.

A recent review of Frank Furedi’s “Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating” is a case in point. Furedi, a professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and former chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, is not concerned with anything as trite as the endless griping about media studies vs. English literature or modern vs. traditional teaching methods that dominate much such discourse, but something at the core of a wider cultural malaise. The death of adult authority.

Not the best forum for political debate?

Classroom as Parliament:

To Furedi, the classroom has become a site in which debates that should rightly be taking place in the adult world are being conducted, while adults are simultaneously infantilised by the state’s manipulation of “pre-political relations of authority”. As he puts it:

How well any teaching method works depends on the recognition that education is an intergenerational dynamic, which relies on the assumption of adult authority. Today, we have an inability to give meaning to education because we struggle to give meaning to adulthood.

…One result of the devaluation of adult authority is that the proper relationship between education and society has been turned upside down and education is used as the site where the unresolved issues of public life can be pursued.

As children are treated as mini-grown-ups whose opinion must be heard on everything from the content of the curriculum to the attributes of their teachers, education becomes viewed as a place where political debates can and should take place:

‘In public life, politicians and policymakers play it safe and tend to avoid substantive issues and serious debate. But often problems that are avoided in the domain of politics appear as a subject for the school curriculum. So the problem of political apathy and disengagement is accepted as a fact of life in public life only to reappear in the form of citizenship education in schools. Solving problems and changing attitudes is assigned to the institutions of education.’

Agree or disagree with his analysis, it comes as both education and the relationship between children and adults in the UK can safely be said to be in a state of crisis.

All in all, you're just another hoody on a wall, to the tune of Pink Floyd

A shitty place to be a kid?

Just a few of the issues that plague L’Angleterre with regard to its treatment of children include the following, as the country’s four children’s commissioners (for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) reported to the UN in 2008:

· A punitive juvenile justice system;
. Public attitudes that demonise teenagers;
· Lack of protection against physical punishment in the home;
· One of the highest levels of child poverty in Europe.

Street scene in Poplar. Cyril Arapoff

Those alone would be quite ample cause for generalised concern about the state of the nation, but it is schooling itself that has become the locus for most discussion about issues.

The government’s response last week to the biggest inquiry into primary education in 40 years — published after a three-year process which produced 31 interim reports, 28 surveys thousands of submissions and resulted in a 600-page document — gave little cause for hope of systematic change.

The Cambridge review of primary education was a damning indictment of the primary curriculum and strongly suggested that schools replace formal teaching with play-based learning until a child turns six (in line with other European states). An obsessive emphasis on children gaining academic skills early limits children’s enjoyment of school and risks severely compromising their natural curiosity, imagination and love of learning, the report said. (As Steiner schools have been arguing forever.)

Ed Balls. No surname jokes, but...

It received enthusiastic backing from every teaching union, agency and school support group: and was hence — of course — unceremoniously rejected by Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. (Do families need a fucking government department to oversee them these days? What is wrong with just Department for Schools?)

But I digress somewhat (or do I?) One key consequence, Furedi argues, of the discrediting of political authority is that those who seek to manage society increasingly do so by “attempting to manipulate pre-political relations of authority: those that exist within education, and the family”. (This would explain the name of Ball’s department…)

As Jennie Bristow, reviewing Furedi’s book writes:

This is a dangerous process because all forms of authority in society draw upon the basic relationship between adults and children. The authority of parents has historically been considered paramount, not because politicians of the past had a particularly elevated view of parents or respect for their autonomy, but because childrearing was understood as the one area of life where natural necessity forces adults to protect children.

So while established relations of authority have historically been contested in the name of democracy, freedom or science, and these have had largely progressive consequences, pre-political forms of authority were generally perceived as areas in which reformers meddled at their peril.

Today, says Furedi, ‘society has become as uncomfortable with the authority of parents and teachers as it was with the absolute monarch of the eighteenth century’. But unlike rebellion against inherited privilege, there is no positive or democratising outcome to our present-day discomfort with the authority of adults.

*I’ve run out of time and space to carry on rambling interminably in this post. Just a few thoughts sparked by the Watford playground thing anyway…

Ways Around Internet Censorship

“To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”
Claude Adrien Helvetius

Censorship is nobody’s friend, but sadly gatecrashes far too many parties.  All praises to places like Wired then for providing the digital cattle prod with which to chuck the fucker out. (Hey, let anthropomorphism be your friend…) “How to circumvent internet censorship.” Read it and use it: from proxy servers to port forwarding, it’s all interesting and functional stuff… Even if you do just use it to check Facebook at work.

The Sky Falling

“The Celtic chiefs told him they feared only one thing, that the sky should fall.” Arrian. The Expedition of Alexander.

A joke, perhaps? They still
do it, solemnly meeting
the earnest foreigner’s enquiry.
Because there could have been,
surely, no terror

For the lime-rinsed and technicolour-
shirted, head-hungry, henpecked
louts who so irritated
dry Caesar in the promise of an end
so brisk and flat

And messy, like flies squashed
between the pages as the book
claps shut; dying of the applause
of heaven and earth when they
join hands

At the show’s end. Or maybe,
after all, serious. Think of them
lurching out of the doorway
to breathe, pee, vomit,
packed with booze

Kebabs and mutual admiration,
into the cold; the snow just starting
and the sky slips gently
and piecemeal into the gras
and vanishes,

Fragments of brief intricacy,
like the bard’s lovely, hot,
cossetting songs indoors,
the words that freeze great doings
(rapes, wars)

In symmetries and stars; and going
nowhere. The stories sink
into the grass at night,
and the earth sits there,
not applauding,

Spreading an empty palm;
swallowing the sparks of damp
and formal brilliance. Very
quiet.
No joke.

Unexpectedly irreligious and peppery verse courtesy of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. From his collected poems, published by Perpetua Press in 2002.

Childhood, Bio-Political Tattooing and the State

A child is fingerprinted by a U.S. Search and Rescue officer

In January 2004, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben did what very few people who pontificate for a living do and put his money where his mouth was.

The professor at the University of Venice had been invited to teach a course in New York, but learned that all visitors to the U.S., irrespective of their visa status, would now have to undergo fingerprinting at the border.

Refusing in advance to undergo the procedure, he promptly cancelled the course and tore up his tickets. The move puzzled many: was this the petulant fit of some professorial ego not wanting to submit to a process formerly reserved for criminals, they wondered?

Giorgio Agamben

In an essay for French daily Le Monde, Agamben set about explaining his decision, claiming it was not only necessary and “without appeal”, but that he hoped it would be shared by others.

It was not, he wrote, the immediate and superficial reaction some had suggested it was to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants.

“If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.”

The essence, Agamben wrote, does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and “simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.”

The decision, he wrote,  was taken in the light of attempts over the last few years

To convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.

The boundaries even the most tolerant of intrusion would consider close to home were being transgressed by the state, he claimed, and this was a breach not just simply of generally accepted buffers between private and public life but symptomatic of something more disturbing.

A man's right eye as shown in a retinal scan. Pic by Flickr user Hobbs Luton.

As he wrote:

It wouldn’t be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques.

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold…

…What is at stake here is nothing less than the new normal bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body s biological life.

These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it s humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

These were prescient words in 2004, for just five years later the transgressions by the state into other regions of the individual’s life have become more prominent, more unapologetic and more oppressive and humanity as “dangerous class” looks increasingly like becoming the norm.

Playground or prison?

I thought of Agamben’s essay while reading that a local council in London had banned parents from play areas, fencing them off with six foot high steel and wooden fences. Only council-vetted “play rangers” will be allowed inside the perimeter.

Council mayor Dorothy Thornhill was unapologetic in defense of the move.

“Sadly, in today’s climate, you can’t have adults walking around unchecked in a children’s playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults. We have reviewed our procedures, so although previously some parents have stayed with their children at the discretion of our play workers, this is not something we can continue to do.”

Let me repeat this for you slowly: a council mayor thinks she has the right to keep parents and their children seperated by a steel fence in a public playground!  Bear in mind that this is not a private school play area, but space provided by a democratically elected body for the public good.

Her comment is worth deconstructing step-by-step:

1: “In today’s climate” And what climate would that be? One of paranoia in which every adult in contact with a child, (even their own!) is suspected of harbouring paedophiliac impulses. Does building a cage around playgrounds not exacerbate this climate of suspicion?

2: “You can’t have adults walking around unchecked in a children’s playground.” But surely the safety of children is the responsibility of the adult accompanying them, not that of the state? Or does the state not trust parents to ensure appropriate supervision and feel it is necessary to supersede the traditional role of the family?

3: “The adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults.” Why shouldn’t parents strike up friendships where their kids are playing? It has been happening since time immemorial…

4: “Although previously some parents have stayed with their children at the discretion of our play workers, this is not something we can continue to do.” A mayor thinks they can impose, in a blasé manner, physical boundaries between parents and their own children in a public place? Is this not obscene?

Never has so much garbage been uttered in less than 50 words by one petty official.

The criminalisation of parenthood, intrusion into the natural relationship and proximity of parent and child and substitution of “risky” mums and dads for “safe” and “vetted” council play-guides epitomise the reconstitution of citizen/state relationship as sketched by Agamben (and presents them in terms that would do Orwell’s Oceania proud).

I mentioned Jenny Bristow’s book “Standing up to Super Nanny” before and her call for child-rearing to be reclaimed from those who seek to ‘professionalise parenting’. The key to this, she emphasises, is to insist on the privacy of family life – and to push back against the state’s attempts to insinuate itself into family life: as she writes, parents are not and should not be mere partners of a government in the project of childrearing.

So tear down those fences, parents of Watford! The state has no right to separate you from your children in while they play. It’s a fucking disgrace and people’s passivity in the face of such creeping oppression has gone on too long: “Aux swings, slides and barricades!”

Corporatism and Korean Baseball

Hanwha Eagles

I don’t like baseball. It’s probably just lack of familiarity; the sport is hardly followed in England, let alone played much. But like American football, the high-fiving, steroid-pumped, gum-chewing crotch-grabbing bullshit just doesn’t quite sit right.

When I first arrived in South Korea I was mildly surprised to find baseball is everywhere and a major national pastime. My father-in-law, for example, spends most evenings in front of his giant TV muttering in rapid-fire Korean at some bat-swinging twerp with a testosterone overload and an ego clearly bigger than the stadium.

Now I don’t like TV much to start with either. It kills conversation, numbs the brain, feeds you bullshit and is an entirely one-way medium: it batters you over the head with superficial crap, hype and adverts; you sit there and take it like a sucker. And when it’s showing baseball, I like it even less.

Cheerleaders at a baseball game in Seoul: "working for the man".

Not content to just gripe though, I’ve been thinking (superficially) about Korean baseball and why I find it quite so irritating and have discovered something: it perfectly exemplifies the corporate capture of South Korean cultural life. Allow me to explain:

The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) has eight teams. They are named as follows:  Doosan Bears; Hanhwa Eagles; Kia Tigers; Lotte Giants; LG Twins; Samsung Lions; SK Wyverns; Woori Heroes.

What do these wild beasts of the stadia have in common? Each is owned by and named for a major South Korean conglomerate, or chaebol. People are essentially cheering for one wing of a corporation….

Picture, if you will, a premier league football match between Pizza Hut Cows and the Dunkin Donut Sparrows. And a stadium full of supporters wildly shouting “Glory, Glory Dunkin Doooonuts!” “Pizza Hut, are the champions, of the world!”. It’s fodder for an Aldous Huxley novel.

Now lest I be accused of some expat bitterness or the like, allow me to acknowledge the following facts: yes, I know that major sports teams the world over are business in themselves, usually sponsored and owned by various corporate giants, and such ownership is clearly marked on their uniforms; they treat their players like commodities and flog crap merchandise willy-nilly.

But… But… But… they have a certain culture and genuine identity. Take Manchester United: the team was born in 1878 as the works team of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway depot at Newton Heath.  They played on a small, dilapidated field for fifteen years. In 1892 they became an independent company, appointed a club secretary, and after various financial travails they officially came into existence as Manchester United on 26 April 1902.

Until recently Man United were owned by a motley crew of shareholder including two Irish racehorse owners. It’s since been bought by an American tycoon, Malcolm Glazer. (Note that he hasn’t seen fit to change the club’s name to The Malcolm Glazers). The team is far from the representative face of a corporation. And any attempt by a new owner to make it such would fail spectacularly.

By contrast, the first game under the aegis of the Korea Baseball Organization was played on March 27, 1982 between Samsung Lions and the MBC Chungyong (now the LG Twins) in Dongdaemun Stadium, Seoul.

Then-president Chun Doo-hwan — a murderous goon who would be in prison if he hadn’t been pardoned by the exceedingly generous Nobel Peace prize laureate Kim Dae-jung in 1997 — threw the first pitch.

So what you had basically was two toy things of  major conglomerates facing off, with the first ball being thrown by a man best known for sending special forces in to rape and murder his own citizens in the city of Kwangju. Hardly an auspicious start for a sporting body. But we cannot deny history (or the South Korean people their baseball games) so lets leave that there…

But really… Take Hanwha. It has 26 subsidiaries, tentacles throughout the whole economy. It sells weapons to dubious regimes. Its chairman personally took a crowbar to some bar workers who beat up his son.  Can you really stand there chanting “Go Hanwha!” at a sports event and feel good about yourself? It ain’t right… By all means, buy these company’s products if you need them, but don’t emotionally affiliate yourself with what is just one wing of a conglomerate whose corruption is legion. Please. At least Seoul FC has the decency to name itself after a city.

So the Premier League ain't perfect either... Image via Schnews

Afghan Corruption, U.S. Complicity

Afghan border policemen view confiscated opium in Herat province. Pic by Fraidoon Pooyaa

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years claims the New York Times today, quoting “current and former American officials”.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home…

…The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists.

On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

That sounds very stabilising doesn’t it? An opium-selling family member of the president backed by the CIA with his very own death squad: brilliant, just what Afghanistan needs, clearly. Here’s to nation building!

France Finds Church of Scientology Guilty of Fraud

Curtain closing on the intergalactic space opera?

Attention Tom Cruise and Scientologist fruit loops globally: the fundamental pillars upon which your supposed church are based have been found to constitute fraud by a French court. As Wired reports:

“The original charges were filed by two former members who said they felt coerced into spending tens of thousands of dollars on training, vitamins, personality tests and other things the church provides.”

Which is basically the Raison d’être of Scientology, along with making loads of money. (Proof? This nice quote from founder Ron Hubbard: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion!”

The church was ordered to pay fines of €600,000 ($900,000) and the Scientology Library was fined €200,000. The church and the library were also ordered to prepare and issue, at their own cost, press releases containing the judgements in their own publications, the French press, and international press outlets. Ka-pow!

Unlikely such a thing could happen in England, not least  because the Thetan space opera nutters have been assiduously wooing the police, as the Guardian reported a couple of years back.  (Worth a read).

The church has a history of infiltrating govermental bodies. In a 1970’s operation by the organisation termed “Operation Snow White“, Scientologists conducted a series of infiltrations and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology.

The operation was carried out by Church members in more than 30 countries; the single largest infiltration of the United States government in history with up to 5,000 covert agents. Germany has for this reason, among others, attempted to ban the group outright, terming it’s activities in breach of the nation’s constitution.

For an entertaining tale of how the cult attempts to recruit people, Ray has a tale to tell:

Of fraud...