Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

… because they deserve it!

It's not often that we Addicks have felt proud of our club. We may 'only' be leaving the third tier of English football but, hey, we've done it style. Hopefully the party atmosphere at the Valley this evening, my local time, will not stop the lads ending the season with a storming win, a goalfest, against Hartlepool United.

There is one fly in the ointment, however: Nike will be providing the kit for the next four seasons.

Given Charlton's admirable record within the community, it appears short-sighted that the management of the club should tarnish the club's reputation by aligning themselves with a company which only pays lip-service to upholding the rights of the workers who produce such expensive sports apparel – which they cannot ever afford to buy, let alone wear.

(Mind you, it's already proving unpopular with Addicks back home.)

… twice before going nuclear!”

That’s the strong message from Japanese experts Heizo Takenaka, a former internal affairs and communications minister and Yoichi Funabashi, who led an independent investigation team “the double whammy” of last year’s tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown that followed.

Their arguments are familiar to readers of this blog and, indeed, anyone who’s taken the slightest interest in the issue, so I’m not going to rehash all their arguments: Ring of Fire, radiation, costs of management, security, capital expenditure, maintenance, etcetera, etceter, etcet, etc, et, e, ….. 

Oh, and the storage of radioactive waste for the next couple of hundred thousand years.

In the UK, a report issued last month says that up to 1,000 sites could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are.

In other words, in a mere 70 years or so of using radio-active materials in X-ray machines, radium painted on dials of military planes to make them visible in the dark, etcetera, etceter, etcet, etc, et, e, …..  the Ministry of Defence doesn’t actually have a clear idea of where they’ve dumped the stuff.

This is the country which cannot stop folk littering or industries polluting rivers, so does anyone have faith that radioactive waste would be disposed of with no risk to residents and visitors?

Note
This week it is reported that wreckage from Japan’s tsunami is now reaching the shores of the USA and Canada. Do you remember the reach of the 2004 Aceh tsunami?

May Day (May 1st, today) is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and a public holiday in over 80 countries. Indonesia is not one of those.

For some 100 years, May 1st has been celebrated as International Workers’ (also Labour) Day. Indonesia now recognises the rights of workers to organise demonstrations to celebrate this. Since 2007, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has regularly celebrated May Day with the workers, usually be saying what wonderful progress the government is making to benefit them.

For example, this year, in what Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar called,  ‘a gift’ to the country’s workers, this International Labor Day, the government will raise the threshold on non-taxable income (PTKP) to Rp.24 million (c.$214 per month), from the current Rp.15.8 million per year.

Muhaimin admitted ‘the gift’ was aimed at easing today’s planned mass rallies.

Yes, the government is worried about the disorder that an estimated 100,000 (or 60,000?) workers would create, so the Jakarta Police are deploying more than 16,000 officers to secure in this chaotic city.

Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi was optimistic that the May Day rallies would pass off peacefully as no issue remained that could raise the ire of workers. “Do you see any major issues concerning workers these days?” he asked.

Well, actually yes I do Minister, as you would too if you read the local or international press, or this blog.   

A report was published yesterday by the Fair Labor Association into the practices at PT. Glostar Indonesia (Glostar) located in Sukabumi, Indonesia. The factory, owned and operated by Pou Chen Group, supplied Converse (a Nike, Inc. affiliate brand), as well as Adidas and VF Corporation. Internal monitoring by Nike Inc., confirmed by internal monitoring by adidas, had found noncompliances in the area of harassment or abuse, among others.

Here is a synopsis of what the Fair Labor Association found in their investigation:
- Violations of Indonesian law with regard to hiring practices.
- Violations of Indonesian law with regard to the transport of workers.
- Violations of Indonesian law with regard to health and safety issues.
- Violations of Nike’s Code of Conduct with regard to grievance procedures or lack thereof.

- Workers forced to pay bribes for employment.
- Workers subjected to having shoe parts thrown at them.
- Workers subjected to foul language from the management.
- Workers are not given chairs with backs at their workstations
- Workers subjected to sexual harassment, including inappropriate touching and language.

- A worker being kicked by a supervisor for asking a question.
- A worker who was six months pregnant being berated and having a walkie-talkie thrown at her face because she took a moment to rest her head during her shift.

- Smoke detectors are not functioning.
- There are not proper worker evacuations plans in place.
- Factory chemicals are not properly labeled and stored at the factory.
- Proper risk assessments for health and safety in the embroidery, rubber, molding, punching and engineering areas were not done.

Jim Keady of Team Sweat has been campaigning for 14 years+ against such practices. That’s surely long enough for Indonesia’s government to understand the need to be pro-active in safeguarding the rights of its citizens.

The Eyes Have It
Prager’s new work furthers her exploration of subversive narratives through the construction of “scenes” inspired by tragedies depicted in the media and paired with emotive close-ups of eyes.  The eyes, whether interpreted as belonging to the viewer or the subject, operate as a mode of investigation — an aid to decoding the scenes and implicating the viewer by provoking an emotional response.
 
Alex Prager's exhibition, Compulsion, is showing simultaneously in London, Los Angeles and New York until.26th May.

I'm not really a moody guy and, difficult though it sometimes is and as one of my old pin badges stated, I remain an unashamed idealist. However, my biorhythms seem to be out of kilter today. There could be any number of causes: the change in seasons from hot and humid to …er… hot and humid, something I ate, or something I dreamt.

Whether it's the weather or not, reading the Jakarta Post this morning didn't enliven my mood. That's because what I read seemed to confirm something I heard someone saying recently.

A voice of reason, Zatni Arbi, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia and long time writer on IT matters for the Jakarta Post, died earlier this week. I corresponded with him a few times around the time I started Jakartass, but mainly regarding the tools of content, the software rather than the hardware which was his particular interest.

Harry Bhaskara has written a tribute to him in the Post.

"Zatni seemed to have consigned the prejudices attached to one's place of origin, race, religion or ethnicity to the dustbin. As a devout Muslim, he was married to a Catholic Chinese-Indonesian. He often accompanied his wife to a Sunday mass, a big no-no in a country with the biggest Muslim population in the world.

"The songs and the choir group were awesome," he would say after attending mass. He would often add that the sermon was great, as if he were a Catholic."

I'd put Zatni in a category of Pluralist Thinkers (PT). He was definitely not a non-thinking Religious Bigot (RB).

Now for a couple more folk who aren't bigots, and several who are..

1. PT – Vice President Boediono has criticized the volume of loudspeakers that are used to broadcast the call for Muslim prayers – popularly known as adzan.

"I feel, and perhaps other people feel the same thing that adzan with lower volumes and heard from long distances will touch our hearts more than the hard, loud ones."

I'm completely with the VP on this. My favourite time of the day in Jakartass Towers is dusk. I like to sit out on my terrace and as all else goes quiet, there's the sound of several mosques drifting through the evening airwaves.

Quite pleasant, unless one, just one, decides that the call to prayer is a competition.
 
—RB – Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) chairman Amidan said that he disagreed with Boediono's statement, saying that Indonesians were known for their "signature" sound of adzan.

"The fierce and loud voices of Indonesians adzan have always been our characteristic. Besides, what is the point of using a sound system if the voice for adzan must be lowered?"

There is little worse than distorted broadcasts. It's not the "voice" that needs to be lowered but the setting of the amplifiers' volume!

2. More RB.
The East Java provincial administration may issue a bylaw on the spread of religion regarded as capable of causing sectarian strife and disturbing public order.

Responding to demands from Sunni clerics in Madura and the East Java Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) yesterday, East Java Deputy Governor Saifullah said: "It doesn't mean that the government bans a person from embracing a religion, but we will ban the spread of faiths that are capable of disrupting peace and order within the community,"

This means that the Sunni majority wants to ban Shia activities because they are viewed as deviating from mainstream Islamic teachings and that, presumably, the majority Sunnis would feel compelled to disturb public order.

Why are the majority feeling so insecure? Is there no strength in numbers?
.
3. PT. An inspiring story about a free school, Kampoeng Kidz, appears in the Post's Weekender magazine this month. The school is based in Batu, near Malang in East Java.

In essence, it is a tale of a capitalist giving back to society through offering disadvantaged high school students from across the country who have hit hurdles and can't fund further schooling a chance to turn around their lives.

Kampoeng Kidz has "a heavy Christian revival theme", a reflection of the faith of Julianto Eka Putra, the school's founder and financial facilitator. Inevitably [RB] rumours circulated that they were 'Christianising' Muslim students.

Julianto said that last year an Education Department inquiry cleared the school. Then the allegation changed to communist indoctrination; the reality is that it's pushing capitalism, albeit with a benign nature.

"I accept that some will never become entrepreneurs," Julianto said. "That's not their talent. The objective is to train people so they reflect on their lives and realize their potential."

He offers a humbling contrast to that greedy bastard Putera Sampoerna.

Last week. I outlined my concerns about how governments are making efforts to gather every bit/byte of personal information we commit to the internet. That much of it can be open to misinterpretation should be obvious to anyone aware of innocent folk being falsely imprisoned, often while obviously guilty parties offer smug grins.

What can be done to protect the basic right to privacy?

Governments are but one concern; there are also the major dot.coms which keep personal data with the ultimate aim of monetising this information by using algorithms to aim specific advertisements at us.

Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon, including other dot.coms such as Instagram and YouTube (which have been bought for ridiculous amounts of make-believe money by Facebook and Google respectively), are all known to collect and store your data. Amazon, which I often link to for their reviews, has also been known to sell that information to other content providers. This is but one reason why I don't have an account with them.

I do have a Facebook account, but that is essentially to access family photographs, and I don't post anything on anyone else's 'wall'. I also have a Twitter account, but that is used primarily on matchdays to follow the official Charlton Athletic feed, because it is far faster and more informative than any other live text feeds.

This is part of Google's policy statement on privacy: We use the information we collect from all of our services ……… to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

Unfortunately, I have often found that what I have in mind when I look for something via the Google search engine is not what they anticipate I'm looking for. (A search for a music review may show up as a torrent, and vice versa.)

How I limit what faceless corporations know about me.
For specific sport and music interests, I have email subscriptions to a couple of Google and Yahoo groups; they are free to use that information as these are hardly subversive activities. Besides, my email programme has a blocker on pictures which may contain hidden codes designed to be embedded in my operating system.

For added protection, I use the following free programmes: IO Malware Fighter and Avast Free Antivirus which can quickly scan downloads and offer automated updates of just a few kilobytes. These two programmes are backed up with the Personal Comodo Firewall.

Search engines
Every time you use a major search engine they capture your IP address – the number provided by your internet service provider, and use tracking cookies – files they store on your hard drive, anonymous identifiers – random character strings to identify you if they can't use cookies, and web bugs – invisible pixels on web pages),  to make a record of your search terms, the time of your visit, and the links you choose. That information is then stored in a giant database.

Those searches reveal a shocking amount of personal information about you, such as your interests, family circumstances, political leanings, medical conditions, and more. This information is modern-day gold for marketers, government officials, hackers and criminals – all of whom would love to get their hands on your private search data.

Prevention is better than cure
Reformatting a hard drive takes a long time and, if you have not backed up your data on another drive recently, is incredibly frustrating and a pain in the derriere.

I use the following addons to my browser of choice, Firefox. You'll have to check whether they, or similar addons, are available for your browser.

Startpage.com is a search engine which uses Google data but does NOT record your IP address! For added protection, but slightly slower loading, they also have a proxy option – Ixquick – which hides your IP address.
(Whisper it quietly Indonesians, but this gets round the Twittering Simplefool's filter of pawn and other sites.)

Both can be used with the following browsers: Internet Explorer 7.0+, SeaMonkey 1.1.16+, Icecat/Iceweasel 2.0+, and Firefox 2.0+. Trying to avoid Google's data trawl and using Google Chrome would seem to be somewhat perverse, but Startpage does have a version for it.

NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice.
Beef Taco sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioural advertising by 100+ different networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies. In Firefox, this addon requires you to 'View Cookies' from 'Tools' in the task bar.
Ghostery identifies and allows you to block the 3rd parties (web bugs, ad networks, behavioural data collectors and web analytics providers) that are hidden on the current page you are visiting.
AdBlock Plus – does as its name suggests.
RequestPolicy allows you to Deny or Allow referral to other sites from, e.g. tiny URLs.

Read the Guardian's seven day series Battle For The Internet for a wealth of information about this issue.

Footnotes
1. Here in Indonesia, there has been a dramatic growth in e-shopping over the past year. Marketing analyst Rhenald Kasali said that online business in Indonesia was worth US$4.18 billion a year. He added that this sector would grow up to 30 percent this year as more middle-class consumers spent their money online via websites.

This has proved a boon to courier companies, but a legitimate concern must be that through e-commerce websites these "middle-class consumers" are now open to unwanted spam and malware, much of which can be spread to others in their 'social networks'.

2. StartPage have written to tell me that "there are currently no plans for bhs. Indonesia, but that might be an idea for the future…"