Blood & Treasure

widow strangling

The Kaulong people, one of the dozens of small populations living along the southern watershed of the Island of New Britain, just East of New Guinea, formerly practised the ritual strangling of widows. When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not nurderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressured into this ritualized form of suicide by other members of her society. Instead, she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or her son if she had no brothers) to fulfil their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance, and sat co-operatively while they did strangle her.

From The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond's latest. I'm interviewing him tomorrow so I won't be blogging until very late at least.

Anyway, should be an interesting chat.

the usual gang of lunatics

I suppose it was inevitable but I never realised that there was quite such a rich vein of conspiracy theorizing about the Bo Xilai affair; these examples being by the notorious Wayne Madsen. It mostly involves the insertion of the Bos into a familiar narrative of 'globalism', involving the Rothschilds, George Soros etc. New wrinkles involve various sinister Canadians, along with Cass Sunstein and his 'cognitive infiltrators', which sounds like both a pile of crap and, of course, a half-decent name for a band. Via.

panopticon for all

So Beijing watches the people, who in turn watch each other:

After talking to Qi, I decided to go on a bug hunt. Friends of mine are concerned about listening devices, so I picked up a detector for about $35 and went to their office. I turned off office equipment to avoid any undue interference and went to work. In just five minutes, I detected bugs in a lamp, several phones and two fax machines.

And here’s another datapoint in the political economy of mistresses:

"Our profession is seen as a serious concern by China's high-level officials," Wei says through nicotine-stained teeth at a tea house. "Mistresses are what corrupt officials are most afraid of. That's the weakest link in their defense system."

So ernai are not only symbolic of multiply abusive power relations, but also the point at which public and private  - vertical and horizontal – surveillance networks intersect. And obviously, it’s a vital interest of the government that horizontal networks don’t start pointing upwards even as their products are harvested by the relevant organs.

Timbuktu is liberated

Over here. Nothing much to say, actually, except that it's kind of cool to be able to use the phrase TIMBUKTU IS LIBERATED. 

Shout it from the rooftops. If anyone asks you why, say it's because Timbuktu is now no longer a dagger pointed at the heart of Ouagadougou.

Typical bloody French. Anglo-Americana has been rampaging around for the past decade with nothing much to show but a huge pile of skulls. I know the French are involved in Afghanistan, but it's not like they're very keen or anything. And then they swan in and liberate Timbuktu.

terminal taxis

Bringing business discipline to health care: Black Ambulances.

In April 2012, Liu Jing, owner of a privately run ambulance, was sentenced to pay compensation of 180,000 yuan ($28,900) for contributing to the death of a patient who underwent a heart surgery in Wuhan. Liu locked the door of the ambulance and turned off the air-conditioner when having a dispute with the patient's relatives, which has accelerated the death of the patient, the court said.

There have been numerous cases reported, including some in which patients were detoured hundreds of kilometers away to ill-equipped private clinics and lost precious time for treatment. 

In fairness, these things are illegal. But they are apparently an irresistable proposition in an environment where ambulances are charged for like taxis and where individual hospitals and clinics compete for patients.

Black Ambulances are cheaper than the legit versions, but 'cheaper' to the value of Ryanair: any medical treatments in transit are charged for as 'extras'. And how's this for a conflict of interest:

If the patient dies on the way of transporting, then extra fees apply again. "We transport the living, not the dead. We normally charge thousands of yuan if the patient dies on the way," Zhou said. 

today is Wednesday so it must be cancer

Here's an impressive readout of the Daily Express front page cycle: the EU and its sinister designs, apocalyptic weather, sickness and miracle cures, pensions, miscellaneous thieving scum, many of foreign origin. And then over again.

There are occasional eruptions of royalty, but it's a sometime thing. The author notes that house prices are not on the grid, which to me indicates that the folk reading this are too old for the property market, eking out the bitter dregs in pain and fear, in occasional hope of a miracle.

It is obviously a grid: reactionary populism of the kind that can be auto-generated by an understaffed newsroom from a bunch of press releases. Anyway, it's safe in there, in the office, making only occasional forays into the outside world and its mongrel filth accumulating under lowering skies.

I was going to say that what we have here is a holding pattern, attendant the arrival of a strong man who will clear all this up. But it's really a newspaper for people who no longer have the vigour to hope for such a solution. It's the product an ex-porn magnate, a former wanking impresario, produces for people waiting to die.

privilege checked: it's ours

Via Alex, here’s a link to Alex Massie’s takedown of the ostensibly bizarre howl of overclass self-pity from Anthony Seldon on the matter of the supposed oppression of children whose parents are wealthy enough to be educated by dubious charities.

I say ostensibly because the affair brings to mind something my stepson told me when he was at Cambridge. Our Alex – Alexes all over in this story – went to the local comp and so was seized upon by the college authorities to spread the word among feral youth that they too could have a crack at the glittering prizes if they were bright enough and maybe did a little less dicking about. No guarantees: but why not have a go?

This effort was conducted with a certain amount of discretion, he said, because the outreach folk were of the belief that if colleges were too aggressive in seeking out bright kids from state schools, the word would go out among private schools that they were ‘unfriendly’ and these schools would then encourage their own applicants to apply to other colleges. In other words, a discreet and unofficial boycott would take place.

I have no idea how true this perception was or is. But it does put this para of Massie’s into perspective:

Indeed, remove from the equation the top 30% (say) of those who gain a place and there is very little difference in aptitude between the remaining 70% of new students each year and many of those who are not fortunate enough to be admitted. There are plenty of people – from all types of background – who are bright enough to go to Oxbridge but who do not get a place. Hard luck stories abound every year and it’s not unreasonable to suppose that even the pupils of Wellington College might be expected to endure their share of disappointment.

Or perhaps not. As a statement, Seldon’s whinge makes no sense, especially as the current political environment is not exactly redistributive, except upwards. As an implied threat, however, it has a certain amount of force. And politically, it’s exactly the right time to make it. 

down those mean streets

In unsurprising news, leaked reports of recent Xi Jinping speeches seem to indicate that he isn't a Secret Democrat. My evolving take on the Xi administration is that he does intend to make a fairly serious clearout of the CPC's worst actors while repressing independent individuals and agencies which might generate unwanted momentum from the whole process. The upshot is that you get a cleaner Party and greater control. Datapoint:  renewed interest in local private investigators.

China's private detectives inhabit a shadowy, semi-legal world, where political rivals are as likely to hire them to dig up dirt on high-ranking officials as jealous wives.

According to Beijing-based Zhu Ruifeng, who runs the anti-graft website Supervision by the People and has exposed sexual scandals linked to officials in Chongqing, some people also use detectives to expose shady dealings that officials would rather keep quiet.

"Mostly, it's the mistresses or wives of officials, but often it's their political rivals who hire private detectives," Zhu said.

...Zhu said the latest clampdown on private eyes was likely linked to their role in exposing official corruption, rather than to any concern for the privacy of individuals.

Zhu, the man who kicked the whole recent expose off with his release of the Lei Zhengfu sex tape, spent a good dealm of Monday at a police station in Chongqing, where he was put under pressure to hand over other videos in his possession. So far as I'm aware, he hasn't been charged with anything yet.

Both links via.

where it all went horribly wrong

And dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory?

Nice piece by Tom Frank on the Occupiers of yore.

censors withdraw labour

At the intersection of labour activism and censorship in China:

I’ve been wondering why the word “strike” has suddenly been unblocked on Sina Weibo, and I may have found some leads.

My suspicion was that there may have been some story that was significant to someone, or some organization, within the government that regarding a strike-related story, thereby requiring the keyword to be unblocked. In the past, I’ve called these “party-promoted posts”, associated with the unblocking of keywords related to sensitive issues.

The word strike has always been barred as a keyword search across the various Weibos. Keegan Elmer relates its lifting to a strike by Chinese bus drivers in Singapore (ie PRC citizens, not Singaporean Chinese) a report of which duly appeared in the People's Daily. Keegan Elmer relates this to tension between China and Singapore. I've not personally seen much sign of this, except maybe that Beijing thinks Singapore is taking a too pro-ASEAN line in the various South China Sea disputes. At any rate, the basic takeout is that the higher organs wanted a peek at the story, so let there be light.

Elsewhere, Baidu, China's Google equivalent, noted that the phrase  'Labour Contract Law' was one of its most search for items last year. So we can see that labour disputes continue to be a live issue.

Lastly, Mr Elmer, proprietor of the Bagong Watch blog, is also the author of Battle Lines in the Chinese Blogosphere: Keyword Control as a tactic in managing mass incidents, which is well worth your time. Extract:

This paper uses these case studies to examine which acts of keyword control might be part of a set of coordinated directives in a broader media campaign over a particular politically sensitive issue. Observations based on these case studies suggest that changes in keyword control on microblogs might be the earliest detectable sign of shifts in the government’s position in their response to politically sensitive issues.

Ah, yes: censorship as neural map of the Party's thought processes