And that’s no exaggeration, trust us. Here’s the “straight dope”, direct from the “fuzz”, “man”.

Seems Mokbel was arrested in Athens as part of an operation named “Magnum”. Did you know that in Beijing, Magnums cost AUD$0.50? Deal with that, shadowy Melbourne underworld! Or alternatively try dealing in that: might result in shorter sentences.

By the way, in Beijing, where we are currently enjoying ice-cream at prices only dreamed about in Australia, a fella can’t use Wikipedia. So we have no idea if that link to the Magnum article works. We also have no idea why Chinese people really like to use the English word “apple” for personal names, newspapers, joint-venture enterprises, etc.

Friends, this arguably defamatory strip owes its existence to the fact that the “artist” (a generally cowardly and risk-averse man) has analysed the litigiousness of Alan Jones and come up with the following inequation:

Where the set of “litigiousness” can be defined as

L: {Easy Target …Target Makes You Regret That You Were Ever Born}

Then we can describe Alan Jone’s position on the “litigiousness” continuum thusly

Pedophiles < Alan Jones < Lee Kuan Yew

This, combined with the fact that Chris Master’s boots apparently still contain Chris Masters, as opposed to wafting plumes of smoke, suggests that Jones is unwilling to carry out threats to sue over a publication as long as it carries some defensible resemblance to reality. What we are saying is that, in real life, Alan Jones beats up talking wolf envoys of the Prime Minister. So sue us.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

This week’s Wolves + Sheep features a reference to “Annex Foxtrot” - a ten page document drafted by Captain Ron Wildemuth of the U.S. Navy and completed on August 14, 1990. It’s an important document because it was the first major redefinition of miltary press policy post-Vietnam and major elements of it were still hampering press coverage of U.S. military operations in the 2003. Escorted press pools, “embedded” reporters, censorship of copy, privileged access to small-town newspapers, rehearsed press briefings, screening of reporters (c.f. Nixon’s White House, which authorised a press pass for Hunter S. Thompson without demurring), all confidently enacted as policy on the understanding (backed by contemporary opinion polls) that the public was happy to go along with an optimistic, stats-tech heavy interpretation of progressive warfare.

We should make it absolutely clear that Tony Jones is something of a hero to us - by far the most erudite, quick-thinking and subtle of the news magazine chair-warmers currently on offer. So if you think we were harsh here, just imagine what we could have done to Naomi Robson.

Enjoy. Or alternatively, excoriate us with your vicious barbs in the comments section.

Gentle Readers,

Our Department of Visual Disfigurement announces the unveiling of a cartoon serial, to be given an experimental 3-week run. To be updated every Wednesday morning. It begins here: Strip the First.

Warning: Grey wash content of cartoon is high to very high.

HPS was a little bit sorry about the fact that we’d let the opportunity slip to post about the third (and now seemingly annual) big pro-democracy march in Hong Kong, which took place on December 4 last year, a little more than a month ago.

But strangely enough, the opportunity has come up again. Some extremely interesting developments have arisen in the fallout from the recent WTO ministerial conference, which took place December 13 - 18 in Hong Kong; about a fortnight after that pro-democracy march. In a nutshell, Korean rice farmers who jump into the sea may have a critical bearing on the future course of political protest in HK.

The conference itself predictably failed to resurrect the hopes of the Doha round, but we’ll leave that analysis to the experts. What was interesting to us were the confrontations between the anti-globalisation protesters and the Hong Kong riot police, the subsequent arrest of of about 1,001 people, the later release of all but 14 of them and the charge of unlawful assembly that was brought against these remaining individuals under Hong Kong’s Public Order ordinance.

If you belive the upstanding HK cops, on the night of the 17th the demonstrators began whaling on them with metal bars and bamboo rods after breaking through a cordon in Wan Chai near the jetsons-inspired conference centre where the talks had been taking place. If you believe the peacable protestors, the police responded with disproportionate force and fired rubber bullets into the crowd. We’re willing to take a little from column A and a little from column B, but the interesting part for us was when we realised that the charged protesters - 11 of whom were from the boisterous and large Korean contingent sent over by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions - hadn’t been charged with assaulting a police officer, or even possessing an offensive weapon in a public place, but with unlawful assembly.

Which brings us back to Hong Kong’s home grown protests, namely the pro-democracy marches of 2003, 2004, and 2005. The political momentum of these marches owes a lot to the fear that the mainland model of repressive legal instruments will be imposed on the territory before time (HK’s “previous capitalist system and way of life” has been officially guaranteed for 50 under article 5 of the Basic Law, the ersatz constitution). Despite this the British-y legal system and judicial independence actually seems to be holding fairly well - most want it to stay that way, at least until the gig is officially up in 2046. But what most people don’t discuss much the fact is that the system that the democratic movement is so intent on protecting was inherited from a colonial government - the British Empire, people - and has its own problems. Although it is far more desirable compared to what the federales are running in the mainland, it has its own capacity for cracking down: hence the Public Order ordinance, which was first introduced in 1967 to deal with a spate of labour disputes and a Maoist bombing campaign. Our basic worry here at HPS is that the democracy movement in HK needs to pay more attention the potential of the existing system to be used repressively. What we say next may seem incongruous, but the most dangerous aspects of the ordinance in the current situation are the very checks and limitations that make it comparitively attractive. Because this law doesn’t have any teeth until protests get violent.

The Hong Kong government hasn’t dared to crack out the riot gear for the democracy demos yet - Hong Kongers had an especially traumatic response to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and we think that any pro-democratic confrontation with the state on home turf with even a drop of spilt blood would send the society in paroxysms of panic and instantly make the territory harder to govern. In any case, the government never had to call in the mounties: the democracy marches have been huge, but overwhelmingly peaceful, orderly and all the more expressive for it.

However, the WTO affair may have changed things. The case of the Korean protestors (plus the Taiwanese dude, the Chinese dude and the Japanese dude who made up the rest of the 14 charged) became something of a cause celebre back in Korea. The Korean Vice Foreign Minister went and made a polite case, the minority Democratic Labour Party sent a some delegates over to HK to ask for clemency, and various pop/film stars have also weighed in. The Korean Federation of Trade Unions was a little less subtle, promising to fly in 1,000 guys for a second wave of protests if they felt the 11 weren’t getting ‘fair treatment’.

But more importantly for this post, the case got a fair bit of publicity and support from some of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists. The grey eminence of the democratic movement in HK, Martin Lee, elected to be the protesters’ defence counsel, a Catholic bishop by the name of Joseph Zen has apparently employed God in the service of punishing the police for their decision to make the arrests, the Hong Kong People’s Alliance on the WTO have an identified their activism with that of the protestors.

And on Wednesday, stunningly, the charges against all three of the protestors were dropped. So now we have a situation where the democratic movement in Hong Kong have identified with a group of demonstrators who have used violence and have seemingly stared down the legal consequences. We also have an administration that publicly seems to back down from a firm line on public order prosecutions, as the Secretary for Justice did. Our sincere worry is that, at a time when the pro-democratic movement’s leaders are becoming more confident, and the mass support behind them seems to be holding steady, the temptation could arise to adopt more confrontational tactics, that could in turn be used as a pretext by the government to activate those colonial anti-riot laws and break the back of dissent, simultaneously avoiding the claim that the bosses in Beijing have changed anything in order to do it.

Hong Kong hasn’t seen Big Trouble since 1967. For the next 2 years, though, we’ll be holding our breath.

Any comments, especially from resident Hong Kongers, will be greatly appreciated.