Blood & Treasure

Sinosphere Friday

Number eleven! So here we go...

Man burns himself alive in Chongqing. No-one knows why.

Political commentary in Chinese manga.

Behind Ghostnet, meet the patriotic hackers. More here.

Things I never knew:

Scared your favorite pork dish may harbor swine flu? China's Health Minister advises adding some star anise. The numbing spice is a key raw ingredient for Tamiflu, one of the main anti-virals used to treat swine flu, and is also a popular flavoring in Chinese cuisine.

Thai anti-communist propaganda posters of the 1960s.

China moves from being an exporter of orphans to developing the domestic market. This is cheering:

A slow shift in gender perception may also be playing a role. While girls still make up 95% of children at orphanages, Zhong says that, too, has shifted. "People's attitude toward having girls is changing dramatically," Zhong says. "I have friends [in China] who have girls, and they are just so excited."

Gay marriage in China. See also.

And finally, meet the new bosses.

cough, cough, mumble

At least six of the confirmed swine flu cases have been in people who have recently returned from Mexico, where there have been 168 suspected deaths.

Early days yet, but not that early. So its reassuring that there are a) no deaths and b) nearly all the people who have it got it in Mexico. Very few of the people they breathed on since they came back have caught it. It seems to be less infectious as well as less virulent. I put this down to us being saved by the native genius for mediocrity. We don’t do your funny foreign revolutionary pandemics here, oh no. This is England, home to the mother of parliaments, where everybody has a bit of a cold.

what the Gurkhas actually did for us

This from George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe out Here.

I was never among them during an action, but I was once privileged to watch, from a distance, a company of them attack a Japanese position. There was a Highland unit to their left, advancing at that slow, steady 110 paces per minute tread which used to be the trademark of the kilted regiments; the Gurkhas were trotting to keep up, little green figures with bush hats at a rakish angle, each man with his rifle at the trail in his left hand and his drawn kukri in his right. The Highlanders accelerated suddenly, but any noise they made was drowned by the earsplitting scream of the little hillmen going like demented dwarves, brandishing their knives as they scampered into the trees – and I was profoundly glad I was not Japanese. One of the Highlanders told me later…that they fund the ground outside the position littered with Gurkha rifles. Most had gone in with kukris alone.

master k returns

On the table: a neo-Confucian constitution.

The House of Profound Confucians (Tong Ru Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the sacred Way, the House of National Continuity (Guo Ti Yuan) represents the legitimacy of cultural heritage and tradition, and the House of Plebeians (Shu Min Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the common people’s will and desire.

Hmmm. This is certainly tolerated by Beijing, though my guess is that it is indulged rather than promoted in classic third force-false face style. It certainly stands in self-conscious opposition to China’s democratic tendency, and it’s out on the international conference trail, liberally quoting Burke and expressing admiration for classical Anglicanism.

explosive consequences

Freudian fun from the Smoking Gun:

Terry Nichols, the domestic terrorist who teamed up with Timothy McVeigh to murder 168 people, 19 of them children, in the Oklahoma City bombing, is unhappy with his prison diet, which has left him struggling with "chronic constipation, bleeding, hemorrhoids" due to a lack of insoluble fiber. Remarkably, a federal judge yesterday rejected Nichols's bid for a preliminary injunction against the Bureau of Prisons, though a lawsuit filed last month by the 54-year-old killer remains pending. As seen on the following pages, the complaint filed by Nichols--who is imprisoned at the "Supermax" lockup in Florence, Colorado--contends that "God created mankind to consume unrefined whole foods" that work "in a synergistic way to keep one's body (i.e. God's holy temple) in good health to ward off various diseases."

A big fan of Kellogg’s bran products, apparently. He’s been joined in his quest by Eric Rudolf, the anti-abortion terrorist who planted the bomb at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

His thoughts on this also echo the original manifesto of John Harvey Kellogg, whose various dietary innovations – he invented peanut butter as well as corn flakes – were intended to purify the intestinal flora, which when left untended were the source of all foulness and disease. Kellogg was also a big fan of yoghurt, administered from both ends.

For his part, Nichols wanted to cleanse America of unclean and impure races. Rudolph’s thoughts ran in that direction too. The metaphors sometimes drawn between internal and external purity can sound a bit overblown, but here you have it: from my bowels to the master race.

false positive

One for the lexicon of murderous euphemisms:

In November, the US, Colombia's largest military aid donor at about $500m (£340m) a year, suspended the eligibility for funding to several army units that were believed to be involved in the extrajudicial executions, known as "false positives".

One of those white coated euphemisms, redolent of detached scientific enquiry. I suppose the people who killed them were simply experimenting with gunfire.

This really needs a verb form. In Latin and South America, death squad victims are commonly ‘disappeared’. In India they are ‘encountered’. In the Philippines under Marcos they were ‘pinpointed’. In Colombia we seem to have a choice. Victims can either be ‘positived’ or ‘falsified’.

This kind of euphemism – like the torture that often accompanies it – seems to go back to the Spanish Inquisition, whose victims were relaxed into the control of the government, prior to burning at the stake.

one step further

From Crime Central:

Sir Paul Stephenson is in favour of them and says he wears one whenever he's in uniform. Julie Spence, in Cambridgeshire, has made the wearing of them compulsory for her officers.

The row over TSG officers allegedly removing their numbers during the G20 disturbances has sparked debate about whether the police should go one step further and wear not just numbers but names on their uniforms. Denis O'Connor, HM Inspector of Constabulary, will look at the idea during his review of public order policing. Failure to wear numbers, he said last week, was "utterly unacceptable".

Via. Steps one to three

i) Police cover up/remove their id numbers on demonstration
ii) It’s outrageous! In fact, police should wear name tags!
iii) Police cover up/remove their name tags on demonstration

It’s a classic: reform as three card trick. Reform as a substitute for enforcement is the basic manouevre in domestic violence cases too.

a fascist remembered

Discounting Jesus as "the counterfeit Christ of the Christians", Jordan described Hitler as "messiah" and "saviour", and as a seer and priest who brought a "message of salvation". In a 1989 essay he declared: "The crucifixion of his creed was by the spears of baleful war alone, devoid of higher sanction from any worthier creed. His was the spiritual victory." He went on to forecast Hitler's "resurrection" as "the spiritual conqueror of the future".

With few takers for such a vision, Jordan faded in his leadership role in the far-right underworld, though he continued to write books and pamphlets and at no point showed any sign of moderating his views. His credibility was further damaged by a court appearance on a charge of stealing three pairs of red knickers from Tesco's; he was found guilty and fined £50.

This didn’t further undermine his credibility: just fixed it in its appropriate position.

relative timing

Some local news, of relevance to the minister for empowering communities:

HAZEL Blears has spoken of her shock after a housing campaigner killed himself after emailing a suicide note to a government department which sent him a £3,000 bill.

As reported in the M.E.N. Neil Hill, 57, had received a demand to cover legal fees from Treasury solicitors acting on behalf of Ms Blears - the Communities and Local Government Secretary and Salford MP.

Mr Hill, from Irlam, had lost a case he brought on behalf of hundreds of council tenants who faced rent rises.

Within an hour of the case being held at Salford County Court he had received a bill from the government.

He sent an email to a Treasury solicitor saying: "By the time you receive this I will be dead, having committed suicide. I hope you feel very proud of yourselves…

… Mr Hill was discovered hanged in his flat by police, after they were alerted by government officers three days after the suicide note was sent.

My emphases. More background here. Short version: Council encourage tenants to transfer to private sector landlord on rosy prospectus. Tenants comply, Blears signs of on deal in official capacity. New landlord slaps rent increase on everyone. Angry local campaigner makes possibly ill-advised attempt to link Blears personally with the case. Government comes down on campaigner like proverbial ton of bricks. Campaigner swings gently for several days before government bothers to alert police to his suicide note. It could, I suppose, have been sent on the Friday of a bank holiday weekend though if that had been the case you would expect the point to have been made publicly.

Hazel, meanwhile, makes herself scarce.

Ms Blears denied that her cancelling of an appointment in Salford yesterday in which she was to attend the launch of affordable housing scheme was connected to Mr Hill's death. "That is not true. I had other things to do. I have been out and about talking about Metrolink issues."

chubby cheeks

My interview with Steve Bell, published in this week's Big Issue in the North, available over the fold.