Blood & Treasure

habemus wonkus progressivus

I can’t tell you about the excitement here in Manchester as Labour reveals and crowns its new leader. It’s indescribable, mainly on the grounds that’s it’s also undetectable. You could puncture the atmosphere with a wet kipper. I was going to say that it's breathless, but I was just on Cheetham Hill Road and people were definitely breathing. 

UPDATE: In fairness, I expected Labour to lurch to the authoritarian right after the election, and there were certainly those in the party that urged exactly that course. But they all seem to have got behind the losing Miliband brother. So, well done, Mr Ed.

Chinese president sucks life force from close ally

Going by the trend, KJI would be well advised to stop shaking hands with Hu; it’s clearly not doing him any good.

on fishing

It looks like the Japanese have backed down in the trawler collision dispute, releasing the captain of the Chinese fishing boat that collided with two Japanese patrol boats earlier this month. Here’s the deep structure (pdf) of the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. Via.

Dilbert in China

There may have been all sorts of cross cultural misfires, but maybe the basic problem was that the translator is basically humourless. Anyway, Dilbert’s having another go.

strangers on a train

Report from the hard seats:  

The sight of a Chinese-speaking gringo has drawn a crowd – many of them smokers who linger on in the sink/bathroom area after they finish their cigarettes. This is fine, except that one of the guys who sticks around is a practitioner of Falun Gong, and he wants to debate the monk (“I know about Sakyamuni. Li Hongzhi extended his teachings!”) and get support from me (“but you can establish a new political party any time you want in America and Taiwan!”) in his arguments. He claims to have been at the demonstration outside Zhongnanhai that got the Jiang Zemin regime freaked out about FLG in the first place. (“When my friends and I left, we took every piece of garbage with us! That part of Chang’an Jie was the cleanest part of Beijing! Think about it – when the PLA soldiers do anything they scatter their shit all over!”) This is really interesting and special, but the crowd is only growing and I deeply do not want to be near, or perceived as involved in, this conversation. 

Overall, the post tends towards evidence for the proposition put forward by certain Christians that religion is on the rise in China, but not in a way that they would necessarily like.

brooding in their tents

What a difference an election makes. Labour are in town from tomorrow; and instead of making the whole city centre a security zone as they did in their pomp, the Green Zone has now contracted to the area immediately around Gmex and the Midland Hotel. No snipers are visible on rooftops from local offices, and photographers hoping to compile the Cops with Carbines Calendar for 2011 are not in for easy pickings. Instead of being occupied territory, Manchester has become a kind of zoo for the dispirited followers of defeated warlords, brooding in their tents, throwing dust upon one another’s heads. We are not, in short, under occupation. 

But the Tories are coming next year...

different drummers

Time for a bit of North Korean telly, courtesy of the Uriminzokkiri youtube channel. Here, two young people perform the ever popular number ‘I promise the Dear Leader to forever beat in the skulls of American imperialists in the glorious manner of Emerson Lake and Palmer.”

if granddad could see him now

Here’s a variant on the law of three generations: 

 

Bo Yibo: Veteran Chinese leader, one of the eight immortals of the CPC, Politburo member, Minister of Finance, chair of the State Planning Committee. Prominent victim of red guards, later rehabilitated. Key supporter of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of political control and economic openness. 

Bo Xilai: Currently mayor of the Chongqing megalopolis, former mayor of Dalian and governor of Liaoning province. Politburo member. Has won plaudits for cracking down on crime and corruption, but raised concern for a style of governance often compared to Mao. Privileged in background, arch populist in politics; begetter of the “red text” campaign: 

Bo Xilai issued a public SMS encouraging people to forward “red” text messages. Called the “Red Words Praise,” Chongqing government officials encourage people to send or forward “red text.” Bo said red means a positive, healthy, progressive message, both embodying the spirit of the Communist Party and traditional Chinese virtues. 

 

Bo Guagua: Age 22, first PRC national to enroll at Harrow public school, went on to study PPE at Balliol. Twenty four hour party person, supposedly rusticated for a year by Balliol authorities, though for reasons that no one outside the university seem to have been able to find out. Graduated this summer.And according to this China Daily profile,  Member of the Adam Smith Institute.

the case of Wu X

Summary: On the 7th in Xinyi of Jiangsu province, a 3 and a half year old boy was hit by a BMW X6 while playing, and this car then ran over him three times causing his death. Video footage shows that the driver left after making sure that the child had died, without calling for help or trying to rescue. The BMW driver has already been arrested on suspicion of traffic violations. The boy’s relatives suspected that the driver intentionally killed [the boy], but the police claim that the driver and the boy’s family have no history of problems, and therefore no motive for murder. 

What the Sinosphere believes, by contrast, is that the driver rubbed the child into the ground before driving off because he calculated that a dead child would cause him less trouble than a living one. They believe this partly on the grounds that the child was repeatedly run over, and also on the grounds that the driver’s car was a BMW X6.

why we no longer fail to worship dog-headed Svantovit

Hmmm. Yeah. The major problem with Celtic-style paganism as a civilization and therefore state building entity was its incorrigible localism. It’s hard to build up a polity when the rock worshippers in this valley won’t unite with the fountain fanciers over the hill. There were obviously Gods in common, but what seemed to matter in terms of the imagined community was the local manifestation. So you’re stuck with cattle raiding and holding as much as a small warband can seize. The Romans, of course, managed to integrate everything into a pantheon capable of absorbing genius loci off the line of march. But an empire based ultimately on an iron age Mediterranean port had material advantages from the outset. 

There were attempts late on in the history of Slavic paganism to unite behind a particular God: Radegast for the Elbe Slavs and Perun for the Kievan Rus confederation (backing Daniel’s general assertion, the interwar Latvian fascists actually named themselves after that particular thunder God). But a better bet for your average warlord in a hurry was to convert and then try and contract directly with Rome for the appointment of clergy, rather than have this fall into the hands of the Franks, Ottonians or whoever. 

The obvious exception was the Lithuanians, proudly pagan kickers of Teutonic knight ass. But there was a good deal of happenstance to their success. According to Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades, the war turned in their favour after the introduction of artillery, which meant that they could just float bombards down the Niemen, knocking over Teutonic forts as they went. And, in the end, even Jogaila of the Gediminids thought Warsaw was worth a mass. 

For those interested, Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians has an exhaustive discussion of this and kindred topics.

assassins end

The US Central Intelligence Agency is running and paying for a secret 3,000-strong army of Afghan paramilitaries whose main aim is assassinating Taliban and al-Qa'ida operatives not just in Afghanistan but across the border in neighbouring Pakistan's tribal areas, according to Bob Woodward's explosive book.

What struck me when I read the above is that this is the kind of career that will very probably end, for those who survive it, with the proprietorship of a kebab joint near an army base in somewhere like South Carolina.

Sarkozistan, etat-voyou

This seems to be the best approach to reporting current events in France.

lights out

One of the things local market consultants say that their clients are surprised to hear is that China still has five year plans.

No TV. No internet. No air conditioning. Traffic lights off. Hospitals deprived of electricity. Tens of thousands of household fridges and freezers without power. Milk curdling. Vegetables rotting. The risks of delaying energy-saving measures have been all too apparent in a Chinese region where the authorities initiated draconian rationing last month to achieve the state's efficiency targets.

Anping County, in Hebei Province, cut electricity to homes, factories and public buildings for 22 hours every three days in a radical move that has highlighted both the serious last-minute effort that China is making to achieve environmental goals and the immense long-term difficulty of shifting away from a dirty, wasteful model of economic growth.

There are less than four months left until the end of China's current five-year plan, during which the economy is supposed to have become 20% more energy efficient. That target (which measures energy use relative to GDP growth) is crucial for a nation that wants to move up the economic value chain and prove to the world that it is making a significant contribution toward tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

So they slammed on the brakes. A old friend doing some research in a township in Anhui province during the nineties told me that local officials were pretty much ignoring the stream of directives that came down from provincial and central level government, except for a select few – enforcement of the one child policy, for instance – which would drive them into a frenzy of activity. Thus you can read back from local level to where power actually lies in Beijing. What this story seems to show is that the MEP has a great deal of clout, which is pretty good going for an entity which wasn’t even a ministry until recently and one which is still in the process of developing its own industries.

beaten man gets sent abroad to perform

Philip Gourevich gets it wrong.

hard, patient and obstinate

A discovery. Some benefactor has put up the whole of Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’etat. Enjoy, or not. What follows is from this account of Stalin’s destruction of Trotsky. 

I saw Stalin in May 1929 at the Pan-Russian Soviet Congress, walking up on to the stage in the Grand Theatre of Moscow. I was just below the footlights in the orchestra stalls when he appeared from behind a double row of the People’s Commissaries, the delegates from Tzic and the members of the Party’s Central Committee, lined up on the stage. He was quite simply dressed in a gray jacket of military cut and dark cloth trousers gathered into his high boots. Square-shouldered, short, thick-set, his massive head covered with black curly hair, and narrow eyes accentuated by very black eyebrows; his face was darkened by shaggy black moustaches; he walked slowly and heavily, striking the ground with his heels as he went; his head thrust forward and his arms swinging made him look like a peasant, but a peasant from the highlands—hard, patient, and obstinate. Ignoring the thunder of applause which greeted him, he walked on slowly, took his place behind Rykoff and Kalinin, raised his head, looked at the huge crowd which acclaimed him, and stood motionless and stooping slightly—his eyes fixed straight in front of him. About twenty Tartar deputies, representing the autonomous Soviet Republics of the Bakirs, the Bouriat-Mongols, Iakouts, and Daghestan alone observed a rigid silence in their stage-box. They were dressed in yellow and green silk kaftans, with silver-embroidered tartar caps on their long black shiny hair and they stared at Stalin with little narrow slit eyes: at Stalin the dictator, the iron fist of the Revolution, mortal enemy of the West and of civilized and bourgeois Europe. When the delirious shouts of the crowd began to die down, Stalin slowly turned his head toward the Tartar deputies: the Mongols’ eyes met those of the dictator. A great shout filled the theatre: it was the greeting of Proletarian Russia to Red Asia, to the people of the plains, the deserts, and the great Asiatic rivers. 

I get the same sense from the book as from the latter parts of The Volga Rises in Europe; of a dissident fascist believer in technocratic totalitarianism casting a fraternal and comparative eye over how the modern movement was doing points East, with added gothic fabulism. But check out what he makes of Hitler, a "mere woman."

more of a sit down than a walkout

As organized labor faces declining membership, one of the country's most storied unions is looking to a new growth industry: marijuana. 

The Teamsters added nearly 40 new members earlier this month by organizing the country's first group of unionized marijuana growers. 

Such an arrangement is likely only possible in California, which has the nation's loosest medical marijuana laws 

Via. They did the business as well: 

Their newly negotiated two-year contract provides them with a pension, paid vacation and health insurance. Their current wages of $18 per hour will increase to $25.75 an hour within 15 months, according to the union. 

Hard to say what union would represent this fine and vigorous trade in Britain. The old agricultural unions got folded into the T&G, which I think is now part of Unite. But surely there’s a case for a good old fashioned craft union here. At any rate, I’m seeing sit-downs here rather than walkouts. And think of the slogans: 

“What do we want?

 A Mars bar! A king sized Mars bar! 

 When do we want it? 

 As soon as we can get it together to go to the all night garage!” 

Yet the thing is there’s always someone in these circumstances who wants something not only different but completely unobtainable like a slice of grilled elephant or a sorghum vodka trifle, or so I am reliably informed. So the perfect becomes the enemy of the good and solidarity is undermined.

let us know the worst at once

UKpolling report has some results up from a YouGov poll that basically just asked the great British public to let rip: 

19% think God created the earth in days 

39% think some people have psychic powers (!) 

31% think aliens have visited earth 

32% think Dr David Kelly was murdered 

18% think time travel is possible 

67% think humans evolved from apes 

37% think there is life after death 

61% think climate change is happening and caused by humans 

You can see various beliefs lining up in column: climate change/evolution/ Dr Kelly was not murdered is one obvious combination, and aliens/psychics/time travel another. But the potential overlaps are fascinating. There must be a few people here who believe that someone came from the future, used his psychic powers to force Dr Kelly to kill himself, and then left on a spaceship. At least, I hope so.

bouncing along like the clappers

If it weren't so humiliating, it might actually be funny. Responding to allegations that dogs and shit (and dog shit) were to be found in abundance at the Commonwealth Games athletes' village, one organiser said, entirely without irony, that it was a "stray incident". Meanwhile, the chief minister of Delhi, where the Games are being held, tried to calm visiting delegations after a pedestrian footbridge collapsed outside the main venue. The bridge was only for the use of spectators, she told the press, not for athletes or officials.

But it is funny. That sound I hear from over the horizon is them laughing their heads off in Beijing. 

I think the structural problem with the Commonwealth Games, as opposed to the structural problems with the facilities in Delhi, is that it’s been eclipsed as the Dr Johnson’s dog of athletics meetings by the Paralympics, or whatever it’s called these days, where the offering is so much more poignant. Why watch mediocre athletes at sport when you can thrill to the achievements of the limbless and genetically disprivileged, each and all representing a Triumph over Tragedy? And as Jimmy Carr got criticized for pointing out, all the NATO countries are adding some very fit young men to the pool of potential competitors; it’s really quite something to see them bouncing along like the clappers on those upright skis. It gives a nice, hard technological edge to temper all that human warmth and sympathy, too. Certainly as a consumer experience it offers much more cohesion than seeing a bunch of people run races against each other on the grounds that once upon a time we had the gatling guns and they did not.

laughter and punishment

In his account of the Paul Chambers tweet threat case, Jack of Kent says: 

First, there is the horrifying lack of common sense or proportion shown by any of those who dealt with the matter. 

I think this lack of proportion goes back beyond the last government’s round of anti-terrorism laws. It seems to have been accepted for years that, for instance, anyone who makes a lame joke at an airport about a bomb in their luggage is automatically denied their flight, subjected to searched, intimidated by customs and police and threatened with prosecution; all for revealing verbally that they pose no threat at all. The actual offence here is, of course, showing disrespect to those who have power over you, and for quite a number of years before 9/11 this kind of behaviour by airport staff has been considered perfectly acceptable. Following the post 9/11 expansion of terror laws, many more in authority have the power to get in on the act. 

They also have a kind of implicit justification. Anti-terror laws are not just meant to define criminal action and intent, but are meant to shape public behaviour in response to the demand that we must take terror seriously and respect the wishes and whims of those who claim to fight it. Paul Chambers is being prosecuted partly because his “terror tweet” was obviously a joke. He was not “taking terror seriously” and expressed this fact in a way which exposed him to punishment.

Thompson, he dead

About an hour ago I saw a Hell’s Angel riding up Crumpsall Lane like the ghost of subcultures past. I don’t mean a generic biker – rare enough in these parts – but your actual stig of the dump wearing your actual coal scuttle helmet. It’s hard to express how null the sight was. Adjectives would dignify the creature. There goes a man who got everything wrong: decisions, proportions, priorities, the lot - cosmic cluelessness on an unmuffled bike. 

I don’t know why I’m so down on someone who never did me any harm. Seeing him just made me intensely weary.