Two days and counting 'till a verdict on the show trial of the moment and the world readies again for another series of condemnations, doubtless futile unless they were to come from the regime's Chinese patrons. Still, there hasn't been much empirical evidence to suggest a corking of the flow of contracts, migrants and/or tiny pieces of jade between China's southern Yunnan Province and Upper Burma.

But a wise friend in Rangoon, a scholar with high-level contacts in the junta, agrees that a small-noticed trip in mid-June to Beijing by No. 2, Vice Snr. Gen. Maung Aye had as much to do with appeasing the dragon as talking shop. ASEAN states, a mite less mighty, have continued to dither. We'll get to them another day.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton aired a new carrot-and-stick strategy at a July 22 meeting in Phuket, Thailand:. "If she [Suu Kyi] were released, that would open up opportunities, at least for my country, to expand our relationship with Burma, including investments in Burma. But it is up to the Burmese leadership," Clinton said.

Strong condemnation from the foreign or exiled media. Clinton's approach would sell out for a symbol the more than 2000 other political detainees, or even the 10,000 waifs wandering the streets after years in Burmese prisons. So responded Ko Bo Kyi, co-founder of the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, with the focused zeal of a former detainee -turned-lifelong crusader for Burma's gulag hoppers.

But that's hardly enough for Enzo Reale, in the Burmese exile paper Mizzima: "What about internally displaced people? What about forced and child labour? What about recruitment of children in the Army? What about refugees? What about the climate of intimidation and fear? What about Burma?"

Which takes us back to the point at hand. Does Clinton's gamble resonate deep into the bunkers and tunnels of sprawling Naypyidaw?

(Which incidentally isn't to say that retreat into a worm's fantasyland underground precludes bursts of urban Spring cleaning that vaguely recall the slum largesse of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Brig. Gen. Aung Thein Linn, mayor of Rangoon, has apparently restricted the decades-old practice of street-side hawking. (We're assuming they're restricted to presumably licensed areas, by which we mean licenses bought off the general or others in his retinue)
What!? Rangoon minus its spectacular moving feast? That said, easier by far to brave vehicular traffic than tread over, round or through the tropical growth of makeshift shops choking the sidewalks with everything from fried locust to, well, anything Made-In-China.