Blood & Treasure

his times

On the topic of daft passages in books, I think A.N. Wilson's OUR TIMES deserves its own posting.

Now, I quite like Wilson.  I thought THE VICTORIANS, GOD'S FUNERAL, and his Tolstoy biography were all excellent.  But his books have always had excursions into silly-conservative territory.  In OUR TIMES, though, it isn't an excursion but a full blown walking holiday, complete with a tour of the lakes.  I give you some samples. 

"Dwight Eisenhower, the great 'Ike,' whose slow handling of the occupation of Europe in 1944-45 had guranteed the enslavement to Soviet tyranny of all the peoples of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia ..."

"Surely any country who had such a figure as its Head of State in waiting would rejoice?  Not since Prince Albert had there been in the Royal Family a figure who had such public spirit and such a range of talents.  And when considered beside the Prime Ministers of Britain in his grown-up lifetime, he towered above them all. But - and the previous passages of enconium have been waiting patiently for an inexorable 'but' - Prince Charles lived in strange times."

"If compared with the sketches of The Two Ronnies, which were being aired in the same decade, most of the Monty Python sketches cannot be seen as funny at all."

"There were an estimated five million cannabis smokers in Britain at this date.  That is a lot of people risking, not the slow wits and silliness of the Bob Dylan generation, but the outright and seemingly incurable madness of the skunk-minded.  In such circumstances, the government's vigilant attacks on cigarette smokers looked to some citizens like fiddling while Rome burned."

sometimes painful explanations

A spokesman for Cameron declined to discuss the nature of any confidential communications that might have been obtained by WikiLeaks. It is thought that the American ambassador to the UK, Louis Susman, has been trawling files to guess what might have been leaked.

Susman today personally briefed London officials, including the Foreign Office and No 10, requiring sometimes painful explanations.

So they’re covering for British exposure.Still, Rusbridger folds:

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said tonight: "I appreciate why the DA notice might make people anxious. But, from my reading of the WikiLeaks material, only a tiny part of it is covered or relevant."

Or does he? I think it’s the “tiny part” that Guardian readers in particular might be interested in. But screw them. I love the Groan’s Machiavellianism. First it inserts itself into the government with a shrewd bet on the Lib Dems. That one paid off, and now the paper has it in its power to publish or withdraw information embarrassing to the government to which it offers conditional support, or to bargain with it over material which might discredit the last government, to which it also offered conditional support, and to which it may offer conditional support in the future. The obvious material quid pro quo involves preventing the government rewarding its traditional media supporters by presenting them with the Guardian’s public and third sector advertising, such as it is these days. Bear in mind that the more it shrinks, the more you need a monopoly.

two out of three elite clubs

I usually check out Kim Myong Chol, Pyongyang’s Thomas Friedman, when I can, not least because in some respects North Korean propaganda is even more bizarre in plain English than in KCNA speak.

North Korea has emerged as a full member of two out of three elite clubs, the club of world space and nuclear powers, without the assistance of foreign military being based on its soil - unlike South Korea. There is also a strong likelihood of it joining the last one, the club of affluent nations, by 2012.

Uh, yeah. The North is also going to provide the world with lightweight portable nuclear reactors. Maybe that’s why Pyongyang is demanding that China build it another five star hotel. I mean because of all the visiting businesspeople and everything.

a leader for a new generation

"I said I was going to go and talk to them at some point. I was tempted to go out and talk to them," [Ed Miliband] told BBC Radio 4's Today. Asked why he had not, he explained: "I think I was doing something else at the time, actually."

But what, exactly, was he doing?  From the coyness and the clear urgency to finish, it sounds suspiciously like it involved a crafty office wank. 

how high shall we string them up?

A list of Daily Express phone polls. I think this is that British Tea Party we’re hearing so much about these days. Via.

at a conference hopefully far away from you

Guess who’s got a new part time job? Apparently the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit couldn’t get David Miliband.

The global rubber chicken circuit is a truly weird thing: an obviously voluntary transaction before an audience that doesn’t really want to endure the event but has nonetheless paid for the package which contains it, which is not entertained or enlightened and which takes nothing of value away. The speaker obviously gets his or her fees. But how can you extract such a large cash value from an event which is simply an expression of the joint need for conference organizers and retired politicians to fill time in some way? They’re such bizarre non-events, you end up quite willing to believe that the actual purpose of these gatherings is child sacrifice or cannibal banquets, or a combination of the two. Even if you don't, it's certainly a rumour worth propagating.

Anyway, now Gordon’s off on a kind of Sartrean hell world tour; drifting round the world Flying Dutchman style addressing to the Rotarians of Khazakstan, the Lions of Tierra Del Fuego, the business leadership forum of the leading trade paper of Antananarivo, the Dayak Young Headhunters Entrepreneurship Club, twinkling away and casting the fairy dust of statesmanship over one and all.

Elsewhere, the Indian Prime Minister seems to have forgotten who David Cameron is. How’s that special relationship going?

drowning in salt

Is there a word for books one reads with a pinch of salt so heavy it threatens to swamp the taste of the whole text?  Because I'm about 400 pages into R.W. Johnson's jeremiad on post-apartheid South Africa, and his numerous biases are so obvious that it's drowning out some pretty interesting things. For starters, he buries everything in unreliable footnotes, making it difficult to tell gossip from fact, and he has such corrosive contempt for Mbeki - in sharp contrast to Zuma and Buthezuli, who he's ready to overlook just about anything for - that it's quite wearing.  Plus, of course, ex-Marxist rah-rahs for the free market are never that convincing. 

I went to South Africa once, doing due diligence for a Taiwanese investment firm on a prospective new South African airline.  (I was entirely unqualified for this job, as was my friend who had been doing similar projects for a while and roped me in; between us we could have written a pretty good dissertation on medieval Germany, but had absolutely no knowledge of finance or the airline industry.)  I still don't feel I've actually been to the country, because we were ferried between hotel and conference room.  I did, however, get to see a collection of private planes for African leaders being refurbished, which was entertaining. 

Anyway, Johnson quotes (approvingly) a Francis Fukayama line so egregiously stupid that, if I had been reading on a book rather than a $200 Kindle, I would have chucked it across the room. 

"Sadly, it would appear that colonialism [and he's also referring to apartheid here], far from having been responsible for Africa's poverty, was in fact a major source of skills and infrastructure, and that the region has become worse off economically the further away from colonialism it gets."

Well, gee, you don't think that has anything to do with systematically creating educational and economic structures in which Africans were massively discriminated against?    I mean, I've got no love for a lot of the post-independence African regimes, but claiming that the disappearance of a privileged white overclass that dominated local resources shows how colonialism was a boon to development is just teethgrindingly dumb.

I always wonder with this kind of thing; are they conscious of writing to an ideological agenda, or does it so permeate their thinking that they don't even realize the logical leaps and historical fallacies involved?  (This is also a question I frequently ask myself when editing Chinese academics and "media commentators.)

 

suppressio veri, suggestio falsi

So, the Telegraph has been running the old bollocks about a "Roman village" in Western China again, this time based on a study that shows that 2/3 of the village are descended from "Caucasians."  Well, yes, because Western China is Central Asia, especially along the border. The absence of any actual evidence linking them to Rome, and that the villagers themselves only started dreaming up this identity in the 1980s, is conveniently ignored.  (There's a very good visit to the village in Colin Thubron's SHADOWS OF THE SILK ROAD.) 

The irony here is that Lanzhou University actually did a study disproving the claims a few years back.  But now they've got Italian government funds for an "Italian Study Center," as the article notes (but doesn't make enough of), and so they're trotting off a quick piece of nonsense to keep the foreign funders happy. 

 

 

modern prophesy

“Socionomics”

Its central hypothesis is that herding instincts generated by interactions between individuals create a "social mood" that influences events. If "mood polarity" is negative and mass psychology pessimistic, then financial markets falter. Skirts will be longer, horror movies will be popular, people will buy dull-coloured cars and governments will favour protectionist policies. When the social mood is positive, optimism will prevail, bubblegum pop will be popular and miniskirts will be everywhere.

Wooga-wooga. Anyone know what Faith Popcorn’s doing now?

the Yeonpyeong incident and the China dimension

I don’t know about you but I think this is happening on the wrong side of the border, so to speak:

After North Korea’s attack on Yeonpyeong Island, the South Korean government is cracking down on people who have and are still spreading false rumors about national security issues.

The Cyber Investigations Unit at the North Jeolla Provincial Police Agency is investigating a 34-year-old man surnamed Lee yesterday for writing on the Internet that the Yeonpyeong Island bombardment was provoked by South Korea.

According to the police, Lee posted a Web portal article at around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday entitled “Conclusion: South Korea provoked first, North responded later,” hours after the artillery assault by North Korea.

... Police said that during questioning, Lee told them, “After gathering a slew of information from newspaper and television reports, I came to the conclusion that the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island took place because South Korea ignored the North’s request to halt a military drill off the shared coast in the Yellow Sea, and carried out the Hoguk military exercise anyway. Thus, I wrote that on the Internet.”

The word provoked is obviously, well, provocative, to say the least but I don’t think it’s unlikely that the North shelled Yeonpyeong as a response to the South’s military exercises. The neighborhood psychopath probably genuinely thinks you’re looking at him funny before he whacks you in the face, especially if he’s got other things on his mind.

This is also something of a de-escalation by North Korean berserker standards. 46 people died on the Cheonan. Past North Korean exploits have included blowing up half the South Korean cabinet while it was visiting Rangoon, bombing an airliner in mid flight because Kim Il sung was in a snit about Seoul hosting the 1988 Olympics and inserting a commando team to storm the South Korean president’s office and kill everybody in it. Arguably what we’ve seen this year is a career criminal slide into recidivism, so far comparatively mild by its own established standards, following a fairly long period of minding his own business, more or less, in his own inimitable way.

This year’s Hoguk exercises have come at a particularly sensitive time in the North, involving a decidedly hurried succession to a young and untried Kim family member who may simply be the available rather than preferred choice in a process which requires and has apparently got outright Chinese sponsorship.

I think the creeping Chinese protectorate over North Korea is probably the under-reported story of the year, but it does seem to have become an accepted fact to the extent that everybody now seems to expect China to do “something” about the latest incident though nobody seems to know exactly what China could do, including possibly the Chinese themselves. Thus far, the preferred choice seems to be to work multilaterally through the six party talks. The idea is presumably to bring a shiny faced and repentant Kim Jong-un to the table to promise he’ll be a good boy from now on, starting by renouncing his nukes, thereby demonstrating China’s ability to deliver on regional security, with all sorts of spinoff benefits.

As such, it’s quite possible that the shelling of Yeonpyeong was undertaken by regime elements hostile to either the succession, Chinese influence in it, or the resurrection of the Korean Workers Party as an instrument of policy at the expense of the KPA. The aim here would be to make it impossible for any other regional actor to agree to work with the regime, thereby denying China its diplomatic coup and making it look like the sponsor rather than the reforming agent of a rogue regime. If so, given the way that the succession process is rattling on – KJU's inaugural round of purges are well underway – the time to act is definitely now.

whose ears are burning?

Well this should be fun:

The U.S. government has notified Ottawa that the WikiLeaks website is preparing to release sensitive U.S. diplomatic files that could damage U.S. relations with allies around the world.

U.S. officials say the documents may contain accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians and could result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.

And elsewhere:

Three sources familiar with the State Department cables held by WikiLeaks say the corruption allegations in them are major enough to cause serious embarrassment for foreign governments and politicians named in them.

They said the release was expected next week, but could come earlier. The detailed, candid reporting by U.S. diplomats also may create foreign policy complications for the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, the sources said.

Among the countries whose politicians feature in the reports are Russia, Afghanistan and former Soviet republics in Central Asia. But other reports also detail potentially embarrassing allegations reported to Washington from U.S. diplomats in other regions including East Asia and Europe, one of the sources familiar with the WikiLeaks holdings said.

Both via. I guess if the name Blair was featured here it would have already leaked, but one lives in hope.

What things in life always give you warm fuzzies and make you feel comforted?

Now there's a boardgames supplier in Beijing, an excellent coffee shop near my apartment, a superb cheese shop by Chaoyang Ximen, and I have a Kindle, what I *really* miss most about the UK is Viz. And Sainsbury's Garibaldi biscuits.

TypePad Conversations » Answer this question!

what's mine is mine

This isn't technically an MGI, but same area 

Short form; two coal bosses go to war after local government rules against one, bombs and guns come into play, 9 end up dead and 50-odd injured.  This used to be common in the US in the 20s - we haven't seen full-scale wars of unionists-vs-bosses yet, though that's surely only a matter of time.

Anyway, actual shooting wars are rare enough to draw down the heavy hand of the authorities, but violence is a mainstay of the Chinese countryside.  Rural culture's highly macho, to begin with - take the bizarrre obsession with arm wrestling, for instance (not much else to do in Bugfuck, Anhui).  It normally extends only to cudgels and iron bars, though there's a surprising amount of armament drifting around.  (I'm told, though I've never been able to confirm it, that guns were all over the Chinese countryside until a post-Tiananmen crackdown, but it's still not that hard to put your hands on a gun, especially in the South.) 

crackstache

A friend and I were swapping Thomas Friedman quotes the other day. I led with this - "Because we’ve eaten through our reserves, because the lords of discipline, the Electronic Herd of bond traders, are back with a vengeance — and because that Tooth Fairy, she be dead."

And he skillfully countered with "friends don’t let friends drive drunk — especially when we’re still in the back seat alongside an infant named Democracy."

I think the metaphor part of the man's brain is damaged.  They should scan and study him - it could be  "Friedman's Area."  He's worryingly popular in China; I keep seeing his books on pirate stalls. 

Anyway, on the topic of columnists, I really like Andrew Sullivan - not so much for his views, which are often wrong, as for actually having the balls to own up to getting this wrong.  I mean, it's hard to imagine most other opinion writers going to far as to link to their own past errors.

aimed at international Russians

This last observation has been taken as a motto by Snob, a Russian-language magazine that, having been launched in Russia and Europe, has just been rolled out in the United States. Snob, which is being funded by Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who recently acquired the New Jersey Nets and an interest in a big chunk of Brooklyn real estate, looks like a cross between Tatler and The New York Review of Books, printed on the kind of paper stock usually reserved for royal invitations. It features articles by Gary Shteyngart and Salman Rushdie, photography by Ellen von Unwerth and Francesco Carrozzini, and an alarming cover price of eight dollars. It is aimed at international Russians—those successful, educated cosmopolites who might live part of the time in London or New York but who, the folk at Snob like to say, think in Russian.

It seems to be the Russian role these days to force a kind of honesty on the overclass.

tasteless but topical

The Song of The Korean People’s Army Coastal Artillery, which for some reason recently popped up on Uriminzokkiri, North Korea’s Youtube channel.

scrambling the maps

There’s a map doing the rounds which aligns population size and existing national territories, with bizarrely fascinating consequences: it’s like a Max Boot wet dream.

The British, whose territory now belongs to Tunisia, move to Niger, just next door to Thailand, formerly Chad, which is now New Zealand; and just to the South of Mexico, which was once Algeria (which is now Mozambique). Saudi Arabia has moved to Madagascar and been replaced by Germany, whose territory is now occupied by Khazakhstan. North Korea has gone to Zimbabwe, so it should feel more or less at home, aided by the fact that South Africa is now South Korea. The United States, which stays exactly in place, recently fought a long, bloody and pointless war in Cameroon and is still engaged in a violent struggle against a fundamentalist guerilla movement in Peru which in turn is aided by its neighbour, Canada, which seeks to secure strategic depth against the threat from Bangladesh, which used to be India until the Indians moved to what used to be Canada.

World War Two started when Khazakstan invaded neighbouring Guatemala. Tunisia fought on alone against the Axis powers - Khazaks, Senegalese and Dutch - following the invasion of Malaysia in spring 1940 until an ill advised attack on China the next year followed by a declaration of war on the United States laid the conditions for victory in Europe, or whatever we're calling it now. And so on.

Thailand is now Taiwan. I suppose Beijing won’t like that, but since China has been moved to Russia, which has gone to Khazakstan, and been replaced by Indonesia, then maybe it doesn’t matter any more. Via.

tabloid China

Wuxi Business News covers the recent disaster in Cambodia. The headline reads “coffins urgently needed.”

Via. Maybe it was just one of those headlines thrifty papers have ready to go because it could be applicable in any number of places.

we are presenting our valued readers with this consumption opportunity simply because we believe they would appreciate it

Guardian product placement: cute as the proverbial shithouse rat and fully integrated with general cultural content.

47 years later

Does anyone still care about the assassination of JFK? After all, vast and growing numbers of people decline to answer the famous question on the grounds that they weren’t doing anything at the time because they hadn’t been born yet.

In 1983, Ron Rosenbaum wrote Oswald’s Ghost, a long survey of the general state of JFK assassination studies, later collected in The Secret Parts of Fortune. He found interest beginning to fall away even then, five years after the Senate report which suggested the original Oswald as lone gunman theory might be wrong. One of his interviewees suggested that the most popular alternative – the mob hit theory – was regarded as credible because it gave people a way out of the whole business. Most mob hits go unsolved. So call JFK for Carlos Marcello and leave it there.

However, the real diehards were still deep in the bowels of the matter, and burrowing away:

“He began to explain the thing to me in great and gruesome detail, a tale that might be called the Clue of the Asassin’s Skull.

To understand the importance of this new discovery, Gary said, you have to know what they did to Oswald’s skull during his first autopsy back in 1963.

‘It’s part of the record that they did a craniotomy back then’ Gary told me. They sawed off the top of his skull with a power saw. They reached underneath the brain, cut it out, and recorded in the official record that a craniotomy had been done.’

‘Now when the exhumation was made this time no mention was made of a craniotomy...The skin had rotted away leaving a naked skull. But with the craniotomy, the top of the skull should have fallen off. It didn’t. In fact there are videotapes of the exhumation showing them handling the skull, even holding it upside down, and nothing falls off. And at one point they severed the head and placed it on a metal stand. Somebody bumped it and it rolled on to the table, but the top still didn’t fall off. Which proves that it can’t be Oswald’s skull down there, it must be an impostor. Wouldn’t you like to see that tape, Ron?’

At that point, I made an excuse and fled town.”