Blood & Treasure

no-one move his bones

It seems about the right time for a tour of the most spectacular and crepuscular gravestones and monuments of London. I like particularly Charles James Fox, immortalised in stone, checking out the cleavage of the busty Roman matron. Wilberforce’s chronic constipation is worth checking out too.

lifting the lid

People are supposedly getting letters from the laogai:

Julie Keith was unpacking some of last year’s Halloween decorations when she stumbled upon an upsetting letter wedged into the packaging. Tucked in between two novelty headstones that she had purchased at Kmart, she found what appeared to be a letter from the Chinese laborer, who had made the decoration, pleading for help.

Or maybe not. The letter combined strategic misspellings with perfect syntax. Also, as China Hearsay explains:

A certain persecuted “religious” organization, whose practices include some sort of mystical heavy breathing meditation techniques (or something like that) was mentioned prominently, which suggests to me where this might have come from.

It's the Falun Gong show. This seems to be part of a campaign:

This is not the first time a letter like this has turned up. Just this week, another plea was found written in Chinese on a toilet seat and posted on Reddit.

A late contender for hoax of the year, I think.

punditry as a solitary vice

Speaking of gobshites Lord Rees-Mogg dies. From earlier, his memoirs are reviewed:

Nor am I wholly convinced that Rees-Mogg is quite the harmless old buffer of his own self-portrait. In one of his entertaining memoirs, Simon Raven describes the panic Rees-Mogg created at Charterhouse when he spread the rumour that masturbation caused syphilis in a priggish attempt to stamp out solitary vice. 

And when it occured to him that these people will believe anything, his course was set.

shovels, entrepreneurs, China etc

Bit busy over the next day or so, but meanwhile amuse yourselves with the Thomas Friedman op-ed generator: it's the sort of thing that the out of the office auto response email function would love to read.

The first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels. 

 

disruption economics

Another great article from Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, this time on Syrian insurgency economics: very micro-scale thirty years war, with rebels deserting all over the place to war bands which can arm and feed them. Also, this:

The war in Aleppo is not only funded by what can be appropriated by the various units, but also by the patronage that they can attract from sponsors outside Syria, a factor which has also contributed to the myriad forming and re-forming of units, all of which control individual fiefdoms in the city....

...Fighting units often exist only because of their sponsors. If a sponsor loses interest a battalion is dissolved and the men join another, better-funded battalion. Battalions are often named after historical Arab or Ottoman figures in order to help lure money from the Gulf kingdoms or from Turkey.

I’m seeing a really excellent way to revitalize the Dragon’s Den franchise:

“Well Duncan, we have a warehouse full of RPGs, FN-Fals, slightly used Mercedes and Syrian army issue diesel fuel from when we were the Suleiman the Magnificent Brigade. Now, as the Lions of the Prophet, we’re expanding into gold, restored home furnishings for resale and a bunch of iron bombs we got from a base near Idlib airport, which we intend to plough back into the business once we figure out how to remove the fuses and repurpose the explosives.

“In return for £100,000, investors will get 30% of the equity and naming rights on the Damascus front. It could be the Duncan Bannatyne Brigade that finally sweeps into the presidential palace, creating numerous cross promotion and synergistic opportunities with your chain of excellent health clubs, as well as contributing to your no-nonsense personal brand”

More seriously, I bet the insurgents are kicking themselves over the fact that they’re not in opium growing country. Drug production is the best autonomous way yet discovered to fund a long running insurgency and establish a domestic economy along with the rudiments of a tax system without looting the civilians under your control.

smashing the black to support the red

Xujun Eberlein has a fascinating translation in two parts of a long interview about policing in Bo Xilai's old fiefdom of Chongqing when it was under the control of his sidekick Wang Lijun. The political dynamic here is that Wang was responsible for operating the 'smash the black' anti-crime campaign that underpinned public support for Bo's wider programme. In other words, Wang re-organised the local force to police public perceptions and expectations of crime in pursuit of fundamentally political objectives, a state of affairs not unknown outside China. Quite a bit of modern thinking/joined up government stuff going on here, in fact.

Elsewhere, Danwei has a review the top ten criminal cases in China this year: Madam Gu's apparent murder of Neil Heywood is prominent, but gets beaten out of top spot by 'Sticky Rice' Kang and the Mekong Massacre.

dialectical immaterialism

The class struggle does not have to exist. On Earth, on the contrary, the process of history has played out like this. There is no reason why the same should be true of other planets. The organisation of society could take on infinitely superior forms, without struggle and antagonisms. There is no reason for fighting. If beings on other planets saw us, they would say, astonished: ‘Oh! They are fighting over a car, shooting, killing each other!’ For them, death does not exist. Here, it does

Fellow workers before the dawn! Lift your eyes to the skies and behold! Some benefactor has finally translated the notorious Posadist tract on Flying Saucers and the Socialist Future of Mankind!

prediction revisited

Gordon Chang: dateline 29/12/11

Not long ago, everything was going well for the mandarins in Beijing. Now, nothing is. So, yes, my prediction was wrong. Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it.

In fairness, Gordon’s still got four days. And if that doesn’t work out he’s got the ‘this will be the last Party Congress’ dodge to fall back on, which gives him ten years to play with.

Personally, I think it’s a ravens leaving the tower of London scenario. The Party is quite safe so long as the mood music of Gordon’s doom laden murmurings continues: but when he finally gives up...

surprisingly, the children of powerful people get rich

Lying in a Beijing military hospital in 1990, General Wang Zhen told a visitor he felt betrayed. Decades after he risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, the ideals he held as one of Communist China’s founding fathers were being undermined by the capitalist ways of his children -- business leaders in finance, aviation and computers.

“Turtle eggs,” he said to the visiting well-wisher, using a slang term for bastards. “I don’t acknowledge them as my sons...”

... Today, the 71-year-old Wang Jun is considered the godfather of golf in China

 Bloomberg’s got another stemwinder up on the ‘eight immortals’, the senior revolutionaries who first helped bring Mao to power and then united behind Deng’s reform programme, and thereby gained considerable rewards for their families.

 Good stuff for the most part, though I incline to the view that overclass privilege is something China has in common with the democracies; but then I’m a citizen – technically a subject – of a nation whose current leader got his first job because his mother in law made a phone call from Buckingham Palace. And if you want overpromoted scions destroying your country’s reputation, I give you George W Bush. 

che guevara and his amazing underpants

People are still arguing about whether Che Guevara was a Stalinist. His underwear was certainly disciplined:

Things are happening to Guatemala, viejo’, Rojo told him. ‘An important revolution is going on there: it’s something you’ve got to see.’

Ernesto was persuaded. Then he proposed a wager: he bet his companions that the underpants he was wearing, the only ones he had owned for the last two months, would stand up by themselves. ‘Guevara took off his trousers’ he remembered. ‘Before our eyes was a piece of underwear that looked like a bricklayer’s work pants, the material was so stiff and its colour so incredible. He removed this also and we had to give up. Guevara had won the bet. His shorts stood upright and their owner promised that he would soon teach them to mark time.’

And, as we can see, clear militarist tendencies. That from Alex von Tunzelmann’s Red Heat.