The rape of Changchun

So there was a bit less hoohah this year about the famous Rape of Nanking (or Nanjing). The Herald Tribune's Eamonn Fingleton writes: "For observers of Sino-Japanese relations the big news in the past week has been that there has been no news. Although last Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the notorious Nanking massacre, political activists in both Japan and China have been notable - so far at least - for their restraint.

"Given that the massacre, which began on Dec. 13, 1937, and continued for six weeks, was one of the worst atrocities in military history, the Chinese people would be forgiven for expressing their feelings in less muted terms."

Prize-winning Chinese writer Xu Zhigeng estimates the dead at over 300,000 dead. Maybe he won the prize for making the highest guess. Other estimates are as much as 50% lower. Wherever the truth lies, it was a sad chapter in history.

Almost as sad, in fact, as a similar massacre ordered eleven years later by a Chinese general, Lin Biao, presumably (according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's version of events) at the behest of that arch Malthusian, Mao Zedong. Lin's actual words used on May 30th 1948 were "turn Changchun into a city of death". This was achieved by blocking all food going into the city and refusing exit to anyone, man, woman or infant in arms. Towards the end of the five-month-long agony, starving mothers were coming out to offer their babes to the soldiers who barred their exit, while begging to be killed themselves. Changchun's mayor's estimate was of 170,000 survivors out of an initial population of half a million, a higher death toll than even the highest estimate of the Nanjing massacre.

While this horror story was unfolding, I was being born in a pleasant town on England's south coast in a thunderstorm. So should I have a beef? It all comes down to the luck of the draw.

Changchun is a fairly featureless North-Eastern Chinese provincial capital city whipped by blizzards in the winter and sandstorms in the summer. Its pride is an international sculpture park intended to offset in some small measure the drabness and boredom of the place. I have only met two people connected with the city. One was a girl who was born and bred there and came to France to study. I asked her if there was a siege museum in her town similar to the one in Nanking and she didn't know what I was talking about. The other was a young gay American who had been paid $17,000 US to marry the daughter of a wealthy Changchun family to help her get the hell out of the country.

This shows that the Chinese Boss Party is capable when it so wishes, of tastefully burying memories along with the dead, and therefore the lack of fuss about Nanking should come as no surprise. As for those whose memories could not be erased, and whose faith in their country might have been shaken by the siege, some were able quietly to save up enough cash to buy a Green Card for their progeny, to avoid that most terrible of fates, extirpation of the family line, should the wind ever start blowing the other way again.

The good news is that tourists are once again welcome in Changchun. One online travelguide mentions tea shops and pubs and exotic flavours. For lovers of history the Jilin Provincial Museum exhibits glorious stories of Chinese heroes during the Anti-Japanese War (1937 - 1945).

And for those of you who find history a big yawn, you can't knock the genteel attractions of Bournemouth. As its name implies, a great place to be born.

Brainteaser

Having been advised that my blog needed livening up with some pictorial content, I decided to go one further and give you a little brainteaser. The image below contains three types of bloodsucking animals. Can you name the one hiding in the middle?

People in grass houses...

...shouldn't stow thrones.

Heart attacks are nature's way of disposing of superfluous troublesome males. This highly politically inkorect revelation came to me as a result of reading an article about red deer. Apparently they have heart attacks too. Usually it is the fate of previously dominant males who have been dethroned by a younger, stronger rival. Such individuals have outlived their usefulness to the herd and have become a nuisance and a danger to its survival. So nature does what nature does. In terms of evolution it shouldn't be too hard to sketch scenarios to explain why groups with this disposal mechanism could win battles against those without it. Killing off old rogues gives the group an evolutionary edge.

So, my best beloved, if this is true, you will doubtless want to huddle round and learn how not to become superfluous old rogues. Sod the group, I want to live! I hear you say.

In the article, which must be over twenty years old at least, the precipitating factor most commonly observed in red deer deaths by heart attack was sudden loss of territory - and the concomitant loss of control over females. Parallel situations in human society can take many forms, and territory can have many guises. An orchestral conductor has his patch, and can tell the pretty Korean cellist when to come in, while a bus conductor has his and can tell people where to get off. Some territories are unique and unassailable, while others change hands faster than boxing trophies. Humans have evolved so many ways of carving out patches that it is sometimes hard to recognize that a patch exists at all. Academic specialities multiply and subdivide, allowing some old professors a long, golden retirement, with the occasional Christmas card from former female students. New records keep being added to the Guinness book, creating new fields for excellence. With each new field, there is room for a new top dog, and groupies to cheer him on. And then along came the Internet, with its domains, personal pages, blogspots and an endless supply of virtual terrain just going begging.

So have we averted the risk?

In order not to be kicked off a throne, a good plan might be to avoid sitting on one. At the heart of any territory is that old human need: recognition. It is what drives those heart attack prone over-achievers. If we could live without that, could we avoid heart attacks?

Or if we could learn to content ourselves with recognition from our dog, could we live to see better times? What happens when the dog dies?

Now that is a question which has stumped humanity for a long time.

Homo seropositivus

We read on bbcnews that:

"Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge (...) People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species."

It is always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by theorists. Even if 100,000 is a much too generous timespan, and a Hollywood world view has blinded the man's science. A much faster-acting splitting mechanism than sexual choosiness could be HIV/AIDS.

It won't be long (in evolutionary time) before some HIV carrier populations become resistant to AIDS. They will be able to interbreed quite happily among themselves, but any attraction non-carrier populations may feel for them will always be fatal.

The privilege of being HIV negative will over time accrue to those with access to better education and information, and the means to afford blood tests for their propective partners. These could well converge with the class that Professor Curry describes as "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

The emergent overclass may appear to have all the advantages, the best schools and hospitals, choice of mates, and the power to oblige HIV positives to be tattooed at birth with dodgy equipment; but as the pariah caste becomes stronger and more resistant to HIV's pathogenicity, it will have gained one significant genetic advantage over the HIV negative Uebermensch.

But perhaps by then the overclass boffins will have figured out a way to farm underclass blood to produce a vaccine against their heinous effluences. That way bored baronets can revert to sharing a needle with the butler and poking the parlourmaid without fear of the consequences.

Sounds like heads I win, tails you lose.

Is the Koran actionable?

Muslims in the UK and other countries trying to have incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief banned could be shooting themselves in the foot. Drafters of such a law will have to tread pretty carefully if they want to avoid having the Koran itself withdrawn from shelves.

Muslims are known to revere the text and are categorically opposed to the idea of changing one iota - or hamza - despite the book's evident need of a good editor or ghost writer to sort out its rambling, incoherent style, its ranting tone and penchant for self-serving anachronisms such as the claim that Abraham was a muslim. And that's before we even look at the legal aspects.

One group who might consider itself poorly treated if the book is allowed to continue to be available in public libraries is the growing majority of atheists which the Koran calls unbelievers. To find out if the text actually incites hatred of this group, nothing simpler than to type in the word "unbeliever" into the searchbox of the searchable online Koran.

What the search reveals is that although Allah is going to do unspeakably horrid things to unbelievers, the believers themselves are simply enjoined not to number unbelievers among their friends. So the question boils down to does sending to Coventry count as an act of hatred, or do you have to be more beastly?

An alternative way to resolve the conundrum would be to substitute the word "muslims" for "unbelievers" into the results of the search, and ask muslim lawyers if they consider the resulting sentences actionable. If so then they must be equally actionable in their original form.

They might then contend that incitement to hatred on grounds of belief does not include incitement on the grounds of unbelief . Do unbelievers not believe anything, or can it be claimed they actively believe there is no God? The simple solution to protect everyone's rights would be to insert the words "or unbelief" after belief, so that the wording reads "incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief or unbelief".

While I feel that the book could incite impressionable minds to a paranoid world view and should therefore not be given to children, the incitement to actual hatred is not explicit enough to merit outright banning, and anyone who hates people as a result of reading it is the sort of crackpot who probably hates people without the need for literary justification.

As I said, in framing such a bill careful attention will need to be paid to the choice of words, the more so as it is too late to ask the book's author to measure his.

An ark for the Big One

One day a huge earthquake is going to make a lot of people wish they had built themselves geodesic domes.

Well of course it won't, because domes have not been on most people's radar for a while. But traditional rectangular houses have two main weak points: the right-angle joins, which fail in wooden structures; and the parallel walls, which respond in unison to directional shocks. That pretty much takes care of the whole house.

One thing which makes city planners shy away from domes is the problem of packing them together in high density districts. What do you do with the "wasted" space between adjoining circles? Also, how can you build high rise?

I have often wondered why we can't build in hexagons like bees. A bee must navigate using six cardinal points rather than our four. So our problem could be simply one of vocabulary. Were the honeycomb principle to be extended to houses or hotels with many rooms, those bodily directions - left, right, back and front - would be inadequate for giving directions to the restroom. It seems we are limited to the amount of limbs we have. If only it were second nature to think North, Earth, East, South, West and Worth - with East and West sliding down to 4 and 8 o'clock and Earth and Worth moving in at 2 and 10 - we might have less earthquake victims and more interesting brains. But to be as brainy as the bee we would need an extra pair of arms.

There is an ancient disused Koranic school out there in the Colorado desert - or is it New Mexico? - built on a honeycomb plan. When I wrote to Time's editorial board about this after the last Los Angeles quake, they buried the story.

I therefore mention it here for the benefit of Time readers who feel they are not being fully informed.

Burma: whaddya gonna do?

Corrupt dictatorships need corrupt dictatorship neighbours for mutual money laundering and, if the worst comes to the worst, as padded boltholes for overthrown leaders. China's support of hoodlum governments in North Korea, Laos, Burma and Kazakhstan is the fruit of parleys between goons who, while talking up friendship between peoples and making large scale deals in oil and lumber (and arms and opium and rubies...), respect each other for what they are: greedy slimeballs. All that's missing is the Jersey accent. As for the protesting monks, the Burmese leaders probably saw this one coming when they moved the capital 400 km northwards. To dislodge them, the marchers have a long way to walk, and they will have to get past a lot of Chinese hardware.

I read in the First Post "In a country of 55m, there are 400,000 soldiers. Add in their families and dependants and you get 2m people who live better than the rest, with their own shops, schools and hospitals, have a grip on the country's resources and see little reason to give it up." HEY! That idea was stolen from the Brits! Actually, the Japanese stole Burma from the Brits, then perfected the idea. Does that sound too confusing? They then farmed the idea out to the local generals, in return for looted hardwood and rubber. The deal is still on. It's what they call constructive engagement.

The plundering of England

It used to be simple: Normans against Saxons. You could tell which side was which by the language. Normans were the tall blond ones who spoke French, which was the official language of government in England for something like 400 years. Saxons went from being freeholders to become tenants. Now, 941 years after the Norman invasion the linguistic divide has been reduced to a few vestigial shibboleths, and a German royal family sits on a vast real estate portfolio amassed over the centuries by Norman and Tudor forebears, with former owners paying for recalcitrance with their heads, and often spilling their guts as well. Over time the gruesomeness has gone but the Domesday heist continues. The use of treason charges to increase Crown property was rendered unnecessary by the purchasing power generated by estates already under management, and calls for land reform have been democratically stymied by the landowners sitting in the House of Lords.

So are we now at peace?

In modern England the two sides have morphed into two opposing "interest groups": those who pay *interest* - or rent - and those who collect it. The former have a vested *interest* in higher inflation, which reduces their debt, while the latter have an *interest* in it staying low, and also hold the most of the levers to make sure it does. Perhaps significantly, house prices are left out of the calculation. This simple omission masks an important fact: that even when interest rates appear stable, the rising equity base on which interest is being paid means ever increasing income for the lenders.

Look at the small-ads outside Earl's Court station and you will see that all the rents asked for accommodation are higher than the wages offered for jobs. This situation would have been familiar to Saxons living under Norman landlords.

The Norman invasion's legacy is a nation obsessed by property - and blondes. Hair dye has allowed Saxons to become temporary Normans. Tabloids and trash TV create working class celebrities out of nothing, and then shoot them down when they start behaving to the manor born. Conversely, Normans have learned to jettison plummy vowel sounds when dealing with the feral underclass at home, only to rediscover them when among their own kind in foreign ski resorts.

Curiously, Brits facing eviction for unpaid mortgages still love their Queen. But if a flick through the Daily Mail is anything to go by, they still have a lot of hatred to spare, and no fixed object to pin it onto: dole fiddlers, philandering vicars, other drivers, football referees, striking railmen, pedophiles, and the judges who let them out.

Maybe by sending their brave lads to sort out other conflicts in the world, they can make their own ones disappear. Bringing home the World Cup would help. But I think we ought to draw the line at pontificating at African governments who go in for genocides, ethnic cleansing and wholesale expropriations. After all they are merely preparing the ground for constitutional monarchies of their own. And will one day learn to plunder in a more gentlemanly way.

The Soup God anyone?

Who could ever accuse Stuart Kauffman of atheism? In his creation scenario where chemicals self organise into cells, as a water droplet finds its spherical shape, internal forces are at work. Compounds begat compounds, until a quorum of compounds with catalytic action took over, an autocatalytic set was formed and creation took off big time. This is where the soup thickens, and gets too complicated for most voters. But mercifully Stu boils it down for them by saying all we need is to assume 1 or 2% of the compounds are catalysts and the whole thing ferments on its own. We don't even have to name any individual components, just do the math! The same process of self-organization is happening on the macro scale in human society.

Stu's explanations are elegant and for some, esoteric, while his writing style has reviewers divided. So how are we going to popularize his ideas to reach type A personalities and the Bible Belt voter? Stu's book At Home in the Universe is meant to be a popularization of his earlier work The Origins of Order. One thing comes through: Stu is a believer. But being clever is a lonesome business. What we need to do is figure out how we can sell the Soup God to the mathematically challenged. A hard road lies ahead.

Don't sell your huts

So Vanuatu is the happiest place on earth?

The archipelago of 83 islands in the western Pacific is the happiest place on the planet, according to a new "happy planet index" published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). The UK languishes in 108th place, below Libya, Iran, and Palestine.

Well I've got my beef about that too.

The three biggest unhappiness factors in modern society are rent, debt, and the lies of those in power. And the higher the rent, deeper the debt and more cynical the liars, the bigger is the unhappiness. What can be happy about a place where musicians can no longer afford to live, and greengrocers or fishmongers can no longer afford to set up shop? Where debts are resold behind the debtor's back at a discount he would be glad to receive himself? Where credence in disputes is given by default to the smarter dressed?

If, as many of my friends believe, the UK has gone down the pan, I am sure a lot of that is due to the Englishman's propensity to use his home as a financial instrument. And put himself in hock up to his eyeballs to do so. The only winners in putting housing out of people's reach are the lenders.

At this time of year, my picturesque little riverside village in the South of France fills up with English visitors. You can spot them with their faces glued to the photos in the real estate agent's window. On learning that I live here, one old gentleman looking for a place to spend his retirement, asked me if the area was up and coming, valuewise. He had two houses up for sale in Blighty, and could afford any of the houses here cash down. But he had lost the ability to simply decide if he liked something.

So my advice to the Vanuatu folk, faced as they are sure to be with an influx of well-to-do happiness-hunters, is: hang on to your islands. Let people visit. Let some people come to live. But don't sell them your huts.

The End of Trust

Francis Fukuyama envisaged an End of History in which men lost their chests and everybody sort of drifts into that least evil state: liberal democracy. He then wrote a book called Trust which explained why only the West and the Japanese can have a large corporate culture. I am still waiting for the sequels: The End of Trust. Or how about History Reboots? But seeing as how Frank's academic and government postings are helping mellow out his point of view towards the ultra violet end, maybe someone else should take up the story…

Is Liberal Democracy really the last stage of history? This idea of letting people vote for what they wanted slowly developed into the wholly laudable exercise of taxing the haves to pay for public services. It then morphed into buying the votes of the poor with the money of the rich. For a while at least. Now the USA shows the way forward out of this stagnant impasse: instead of taxing the rich you hit them for campaign funds to bamboozle the poor. A lesson from biology: stuff grows or it rots. Should Liberal Democracy be any different?

So how will Trust end? One way is stock option remuneration packages. They transform executives from loyal company servants into ravenous sharks with a three year agenda: to make the results look good at the end of that period for just long enough to cash in and get out – and on to the next. These predators will always be in demand because of the connivance of an equally predatory shareholder base. And Devil take the hindmost.

Another thing Frank has a dig at is Chinese society. The lack of trust outside the blood-related extended family is the reason why they can't have large corporations. The news provides examples of Chinese hankee-pankee:

• eBay.cn has had a taste of sellers copy-pasting legit ads from the US site into the Chinese site to attract innocent bidders for unbelievable (and not to be believed) bargains. Now you need an ID card to become a member of Chinese eBay.

• Beijing street vendors are selling mantou buns with a filling made of cardboard picked off the street and spiced up to taste like meat.

• Efforts by Chinese wine makers to create a French style appellation contrôlée culture are stymied by label forgers

• The biscuit goes to the recently executed head of the corrupt Food and Drugs administration, whose 170,000 product approvals will now have to be re-examined one by one.

These examples show what the Chinese need to learn from the West if they are to create the large corporate culture: they just don't have enough hypocrisy. Oops, I mean they lack a sophisticated business model. What those bun sellers could use is a pharmacy degree. They could go multinational and sell drugs! Those eBay fraudsters need to get Wall Street trading licenses to give their talents full vent. Give those label forgers green cards and let them become contemporary artists. And the Chinese FDA? Take a leaf from the American FDA's book and just don't be so obvious!

http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama/Books.html

Dubya's short memory

Iraq's political leaders have agreed on a constitution, Bush said. "Now they are discussing some other legislation about the sharing of the wealth of the country, about constitutional review. All this needs consensus. We are not working by the majority rule of 50% plus one." Did I hear you right, Dubya? Blessed are they with short memories.

Houdini in the desert

Well, the name hadn't been used, which was a good start. And it encapsulates the feeling you experience when you have finally released yourself from all your bonds, unpicked all the locks that held you back in your life, thrown of the chains and stood up a free man to discover... nobody's watching. And there's no water.