James Bond and China

Over at The Spectator Coffee House, I've written about James Bond and China.

A Fun Little HS2 Cartoon

The Chinese Menace Revisited

I woke up this morning and, as I usually do, made it my first job of the day to check the web traffic. The numbers were quite high or, at least, higher than they've been recently, so I smiled and felt better about the world. A wash, a shave, a spot of breakfast later, I checked again and this time cast my eyes down the list of visitors. I began to wish I hadn't bothered to shave. My visitors were from the UK, then Germany, then China, then the US, then China, then China, then China, the US, China, China, Malta, China, China, the UK, the US, China, China, China... About half of the morning's visitors were from China. They've clearly not blocked me, despite my constant support for a free Tibet and taking every opportunity to mock their leadership. How many times must I mention that Xi Jinping likes to wear pink knitted sweaters and ballet pumps?

I don't have a problem with Chinese visitors reading my blog but I know these hits aren't from real Chinese visitors. Actually, now I come to think about it, I *never* get real Chinese visitors. These are Chinese computers hitting my server for reasons unknown and which makes me suspect that these machines up to no good. I've said it before and no doubt I'll say it again: China is already at war with the rest of the world. It's just that the rest of the world haven't been told by their respective governments.

Even as recently as a few years ago, Chinese SPAM was relatively rare. Russia was the main culprit. The last twelve months, though, China seem to have become the most maleficent force on the internet. I'm beginning to wonder if governments shouldn't actively get together and sever China's connection to the rest of the internet. In the meantime, I'm stuck adding blocks of IP addresses to my website's firewall to block further traffic. I know my statistics will plunge and will make me consider, yet again, quite why I bother writing a blog read by so few people, but this can't go on. The Chinese are playing a terribly cruel trick: they're making me think this blog is almost popular. Those evil devils!

No cartoons today. I've drawn three but now I have The Gag Machine working, I've been churning out good ideas and I intend to send a few off this week to see if I can get any of them published. Until they get rejected, they won't appear on the blog.

The Blog Post In Which I Try To Piss Off 1.357 Billion People

Every month there are moments I dread. I don't mean dread as in 'there's yet another picture of Caitlin Moran's mug gurning on the cover The Times' type horror, though those are pretty pant soiling when they take you unawares with 'cargo on the ramp', so to speak. No, I mean moments I know are coming but still depress me when they occur.

One such moment of lurking dread is when I start to run low on bandwidth. Some months, my server emails me the warning message around the 20th and I feel pretty grim in the knowledge that my websites will go dark within days. This might seem odd, even mildly hypocritical, given that I sometimes go weeks without updating this blog, but even in my lapses, I still like to think that The Spine is here disagreeing with 90% of what the rest of world thinks. I also know my blog doesn't load as fast as I'd like (damn you, the other 100+ websites on this shared host) and I've explored options of moving to a cloud server, even a low level VPS, which is a virtual private server providing processor capacity available to load the site quickly for anybody visiting. However, until the prices of those services drop a little more, I'm stuck here sharing web resources with countless cheese appreciation websites, military re-enactment societies, and whatever other freaks of British culture think they need a web presence.

This month's bandwidth message arriving late last night and in the early hours, I found myself examining my monthly stats, which I haven't done in very long time. That's how I came to make the shocking discovery that China is eating up my bandwidth. I don't want to understate the significance of this so let me put it in the following way: I'm under attack from the RED CHINESE!

Damn those hardline communist capitalist types who have already eaten 12.40 GB of my allowance this month and make my site slow to load. But that got me to thinking: why are the Chinese reading my blog?

The only answer that reasonably makes sense is that they're not reading my blog. They're finding my blog, they're loading my blog, and they're doing something with my blog but I'm not sure what or if it's entirely legal. My best theory is that they're to blame for all the spam I receive and I do get spam like it's arriving by freight container straight from Asia. Countless fake comments arrive in my inbox every hour and I get hundreds of spam emails from Chinese companies daily trying to sell me plastic crates. That's right: plastic crates.

For no apparent reason, one particular post, which I titled 'The Great Slag Heap', gets hammered hard by Chinese spammers. There are probably a few hundred comments on that one article alone that I've yet to clear out of my Spam filter and every one will be trying to send you to this garish website which my rudimentary Mandarin tells me either promotes the godfather of plastic crates or the Chinese Graham Norton.



Clearly I need to act but at the moment, I just can't afford to fund a military blockade of China's ports, a ban on their exports, or even a covert hacking program on their IT networks.  So how do I block China?

I've done my research and I've discovered there are low level changes I can make to the htaccess file on my server which would block Chinese IP addresses but, frankly, that seems too much effort and not enough fun. Plus I think my solution is much simpler.

Tibet.

You know Tibet? Snow. Yeti. Strange wooden rollers you spin whilst chanting 'The Krankies are evil' under your breath...

You might also know that China has a terrible human rights record, especially towards the peace loving people of Tibet.  The Dali Llama is always bending Prince Charles's ears about it (hard work, they're big ears) and then Charles begins to do that thing he does with his mouth and name drops Richard Gere before jetting across the world to tell Bono that everybody should stop jetting across the world and start riding Yaks to work.

'Freedom for Tibet' is what I often hear myself chanting around the 20th of the month and I'd like to take a page out of the book of Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, and dance Gungham style in opposition to Chinese authorities in Beijing who clearly support their plastic crate industry's spamming operation.

Tibet. Tibet. Tibet.

Free speech. Liberty. Hong Kong protests. Jackie Chan's films aren't as good as they used to be.

Cheap Chinese radios. Poor working conditions inside Chinese factories. I don't like iPads. Pot Noodles are horrible. I particularly hate the curry flavoured Pot Noodles. Not sure curry is Chinese. I think it's Indian, or something we British brought over from India and then made our own. Not that I have a problem with Indians visiting my blog. They don't nick 12Gb of bandwidth in order to sell me plastic crates.

Bad Chinese stereotypes. You can't beat 'em! The Li Kee Shipyard in that Pink Panther movie? I can't remember the title but it was the one where he dresses up as a gangster and somebody breaks wind in a lift. Hong Kong Phooey wasn't Chinese but at least he didn't make Buddhist monks set themselves on fire.

China. Human Rights. China. Human Rights. Hey guys! Let's riot in Hong Kong!

Taiwan is an independent nation. It's not part of China even if we do tend to say 'cheap Chinese rubbish' whenever we spot 'Made in Taiwan' on the handle of the frying pan that just melted when we put it on the stove. Is that racist? Can you be racist towards a plastic frying pan? I don't know but eating dogs it pretty horrible but nowhere near as bad as eating spitting cobra soup or the penis hacked from the corpse of a frozen Norwegian you mistakenly thought was a polar bear.

Oh, they can try to stifle free speech with their so called Great Internet Wall of China, which prevents the good and honourable people of China from accessing foreign websites that promote FREEDOM FOR TIBET but we won't be silenced, even if that means my website being added to the blacklist that would make it impossible to access from within China. Oh, I won't be silenced even if that means I'll regain 12Gb of bandwidth I'm paying for each and every month and the Chinese are STEALING FROM ME. Not when something as important as freedom for the Chinese people is concerned.

Did I mention Tiananmen Square? I think I should.

There. That should do it. At the time of my writing this, my website is accessible from within China. Here's the proof (or you can check yourself, here).



I'll be monitoring the Chinese situation over the coming days. Hopefully, the automatic Chinese censor will step in and ban my domain.  If the hits from mainland China stop, this website might make it through to the end of the month without my feeling guilty that I've not coughed up more money to keep it live so the Chinese can spam me some more.

Meanwhile, if for any reason, you suddenly can't read this blog in the coming days, it means that my bandwidth has run out until it resets on the 1st November. Either that or you're in China, in which case, you and 1.357 billion other people are entirely on your own. Xhù ni hao yùn!

The Monday Carton

‘Dear friend! Lovely day! Glad to hear that you're in the market for cartons…’

This was the first email in my inbox this morning and it made from grim reading. Needless to say, I’m not in the market for cartons. I’ve never been in the market for cartons. For some inexplicable reason, cartons don’t excite me on a Monday morning.  Oh, you could say that I’m just a carton denier or perhaps I’ve never been with the right carton. You could even argue that I must have some deep latent love for cartons that I’d want to blog about it. Perhaps this email exposes the great carton lie I tell myself every single day.

‘Damn it, man!’ you should cry, while grabbing my lapels and slapping me around my face. Yes, you would need at least three hands to do that but you’re gifted and you like to make your important points impressively. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a man expressing his love for cartons. Some of the greatest men in history have been secretly in the market for cartons. What about Gladstone, Ghandi, Ulysses S. Grant? Nobody looks on them differently because they enjoyed the company of slatternly cartons. There’s nothing wrong with expressing your love for a good carton once in while.’

And indeed there is not. And perhaps if the circumstances were right, I would be in the mood for cartons. Perhaps dressed seductively, their pouting cardboard lips irresistible, they would be irresistible and I would succumb, possibly up to three times a night and sometimes even rinsing them out. And frankly, given my recent luck, I might have a better chance if I was I’d gone in for some carton competitions, rather than cartoons.

But alas, for the carton producers of China's Hebei province, this will have to remain my secret. Perhaps one day the world will be ready for a man to express openly his love for a carton but until that happy day, these emails will have to be stored in a safe place, such as the trash folder.

Bob Dylan Plays China

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