Sunday, May 11, 2008
Bashful Brownites
Anthony Wells is arguing about what percentage of don't knows in the polls for the Crewe & Nantwich byelection are actually Labour voters who feel embarrassed to say so - analogous to the "shy Tories" of the 1990s. I would think the number is considerable.
During my candidacy in Egham Hythe, I knocked on and got an answer from around 100 doors. In the event, there were roughly 600 Conservative votes, 300 Labour, and 200 Liberals counted. My own canvassing numbers logged 22 Liberal, 28 Tory, 1 BNP, 1 UKIP, 31 Don't Know among those who said they would vote...and 4 Labour. Yes - four. 5.19% of the total answers, as against 30% of the vote. Redoing the sums, assuming the same pattern for the non-answerers, predicted 51% Tory, 40% Liberal, 7.3% Labour (note this is a two-councillor ward, so votes for candidates must be divided by 2); the event was more like 60% Tory, 30% Liberal, 20% Labour, 10% nutters and spoilt ballots.
Conclusion: There are a *lot* of quiet Labour voters out there.
During my candidacy in Egham Hythe, I knocked on and got an answer from around 100 doors. In the event, there were roughly 600 Conservative votes, 300 Labour, and 200 Liberals counted. My own canvassing numbers logged 22 Liberal, 28 Tory, 1 BNP, 1 UKIP, 31 Don't Know among those who said they would vote...and 4 Labour. Yes - four. 5.19% of the total answers, as against 30% of the vote. Redoing the sums, assuming the same pattern for the non-answerers, predicted 51% Tory, 40% Liberal, 7.3% Labour (note this is a two-councillor ward, so votes for candidates must be divided by 2); the event was more like 60% Tory, 30% Liberal, 20% Labour, 10% nutters and spoilt ballots.
Conclusion: There are a *lot* of quiet Labour voters out there.
Labels: bad science, elections, LibDems, politics, statistics, Tories
The Opposite of Architecture
Via Calculated Risk, galleries of repossessed houses in Los Angeles. This one can stand for a common theme.
It's hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show - houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like a great big fat ugly gob. Anything human in the architecture skulks behind the garage, as if ashamed. It's as if cars designed these buildings for their own use - realising, of course, they needed to make provision for the people, but sadly not being quite able to understand their needs.
This is, of course, not irrelevant to why they are already down one-third of their value. Perhaps we need a word for the opposite of architecture?
It's hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show - houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like a great big fat ugly gob. Anything human in the architecture skulks behind the garage, as if ashamed. It's as if cars designed these buildings for their own use - realising, of course, they needed to make provision for the people, but sadly not being quite able to understand their needs.
This is, of course, not irrelevant to why they are already down one-third of their value. Perhaps we need a word for the opposite of architecture?
Labels: architecture, class, economics, energy, photography, US, weirdness
Public Service Announcement
The Daily Mash: better than drugs.
Labels: funny ha ha
which in your case you have not got
Remember when we nixed the January 2007 Iranian weapons scare? We explained how pretty much any competent terrorists could build an EFP, and followed up with the revelation that the steel balls came from an Indian bike parts factory. Well, this made me smile.
Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and had echoed the U.S. accusations of new Iranian-made arms being found in Basra. But neither the United States nor Iraq has displayed any of the alleged arms to the public or press, and lately it is looking less likely they will. U.S. military officials said it was up to the Iraqis to show the items; Iraqi officials lately have backed off the accusations against Iran.Feel the performance. Feel the power. Feel the steel balls!
A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.
When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.
Labels: 4GW, intelligence and stupidity, Iraq
scaleydelic!
So we had the world's first military coup motivated by a 3G network licence, in Thailand; we had the shootout between the Chalabi Boys and Orascom security men in Baghdad. Now, there's the Hezbollah/Amal coup de force (or de folie as Robert Fisk preferred), motivated in part by the Lebanese government's desire to control their secret telecoms network, including a CCTV system they installed at the airport to monitor the comings and goings.
Curiously, I've yet to hear any actual details of the system, except that it provides 99,000 "lines" (an increasingly meaningless metric, but one that implies it has a softswitch architecture rather than straight IP) and uses buried fibre. But there are also tales of WiMAX and other things radio. Apparently, the leader of Hezbollah has claimed that their signals were their most important weapon back in 2006. Perhaps - you've got to know when to move your ATGW team back over the reverse slope, I suppose. Some doubt this on the grounds that a fixed net doesn't seem that useful, but then, all mobile networks are fixed at some point, and if the fibre is dual SONET it needs a minimum of four independent cuts to partition the system. The Lebanese Army has now said that
Arguably, this suggests that some of the ideas floated in 2006 about incorporating Hezbollah in the Lebanese military as some sort of reserve/militia/national guard/territorial army/jagers/greenjackets/cossacks/whatever else you call those crazy bastards on the border, as long as they don't bother you and keep the roads open, are being put in effect de facto. Perhaps the military have a deal, under which the Shia will support their commander in chief for president (and they do), and in return they will have a free hand to create their not-state in the south? It's a solution to the problem of a bunch of dangerous and independent-minded borderers that has a long pedigree indeed.
You could call it the Haganah-isation of Hezbollah; it's changing not just from a guerrilla force to an army, but also from a political party to an unstate with a shadow administration, an economy, and its own infrastructure, just as the Israeli founding generation built a mixed economy, a trade union movement, a shadow civil service, and a highly capable semiguerrilla army/intelligence service long before the state became a formal reality. I'm only surprised they didn't start a commercial GSM network as cover for their own command-and-control system; perhaps they will.
Meanwhile, again, this is an example of the democratisation of technology. You don't have to invoke a secret Dr Evil to explain how they built this; annoyingly, I see some people are yelling about Huawei and how it's all teh secret Chinese-Iranian plot. Perhaps. But they'll sell to anyone. And if there is WiMAX gear in there, it's cheap; the base stations are already under $10,000, and the biggest expense in a fibre build is always at Layer Zero, that is to say the business of going and digging the holes and renting the transmitter sites. I suspect right-of-way is less expensive in southern Lebanon than it is in Surrey, armies are rarely short of people if they need to dig a hole, and Hezbollah presumably doesn't have much trouble with NIMBYs. (See also.)
Was this a civil war? Perhaps the idea is wrong; it seems to me more like one of Gwyn Prins' "diplomatic-military operations" in one country, perhaps something an unstate like Hezbollah - or the Sadr movement - is uniquely suited to, as this superb article of Spencer Ackerman's argues.
Curiously, I've yet to hear any actual details of the system, except that it provides 99,000 "lines" (an increasingly meaningless metric, but one that implies it has a softswitch architecture rather than straight IP) and uses buried fibre. But there are also tales of WiMAX and other things radio. Apparently, the leader of Hezbollah has claimed that their signals were their most important weapon back in 2006. Perhaps - you've got to know when to move your ATGW team back over the reverse slope, I suppose. Some doubt this on the grounds that a fixed net doesn't seem that useful, but then, all mobile networks are fixed at some point, and if the fibre is dual SONET it needs a minimum of four independent cuts to partition the system. The Lebanese Army has now said that
it would handle the issue of the communications network in a way "that would not harm public interest and the security of the resistance". It also said it was reinstating the head of airport security [CCTV Guy].Which, I think, means they're going to let it slide, if they don't actually hook it up to their own signals network. This is of course one of the least obvious features of the whole crisis; all the territory Hezbollah and Amal took was immediately handed over to the official Lebanese military, an increasingly powerful force in politics.
Arguably, this suggests that some of the ideas floated in 2006 about incorporating Hezbollah in the Lebanese military as some sort of reserve/militia/national guard/territorial army/jagers/greenjackets/cossacks/whatever else you call those crazy bastards on the border, as long as they don't bother you and keep the roads open, are being put in effect de facto. Perhaps the military have a deal, under which the Shia will support their commander in chief for president (and they do), and in return they will have a free hand to create their not-state in the south? It's a solution to the problem of a bunch of dangerous and independent-minded borderers that has a long pedigree indeed.
You could call it the Haganah-isation of Hezbollah; it's changing not just from a guerrilla force to an army, but also from a political party to an unstate with a shadow administration, an economy, and its own infrastructure, just as the Israeli founding generation built a mixed economy, a trade union movement, a shadow civil service, and a highly capable semiguerrilla army/intelligence service long before the state became a formal reality. I'm only surprised they didn't start a commercial GSM network as cover for their own command-and-control system; perhaps they will.
Meanwhile, again, this is an example of the democratisation of technology. You don't have to invoke a secret Dr Evil to explain how they built this; annoyingly, I see some people are yelling about Huawei and how it's all teh secret Chinese-Iranian plot. Perhaps. But they'll sell to anyone. And if there is WiMAX gear in there, it's cheap; the base stations are already under $10,000, and the biggest expense in a fibre build is always at Layer Zero, that is to say the business of going and digging the holes and renting the transmitter sites. I suspect right-of-way is less expensive in southern Lebanon than it is in Surrey, armies are rarely short of people if they need to dig a hole, and Hezbollah presumably doesn't have much trouble with NIMBYs. (See also.)
Was this a civil war? Perhaps the idea is wrong; it seems to me more like one of Gwyn Prins' "diplomatic-military operations" in one country, perhaps something an unstate like Hezbollah - or the Sadr movement - is uniquely suited to, as this superb article of Spencer Ackerman's argues.
Labels: 4GW, command, cultures of war, geekage, hacker, Hezbollah, Lebanon, politics, rockets, strategy
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Viktor Indicted
After not much happened for a while, charges have been filed against Viktor Bout in a US court.
Meanwhile, there's been a significant increase in the proportion of flights we're logging from Dubai and Sharjah to various war zones that are carried out by Transavia Export of Minsk, which some think was the first Bout company of them all. It would be nice if the authorities in Sharjah didn't let planes belonging to folk like this leave for unstated destinations; the night of the 5th-6th of May saw no less than four departures to "unknown" or "ZZZ", including one Phoenix Aviation/AVE, one Transavia Export, and two South-Airlines.
The indictment charges Viktor Bout with four terrorism offenses, including conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill U.S. officers or employees, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.You can get the document here, at the CTB. The document specifically mentions two cargo planes he apparently produced a brochure (!) on, explaining how they could be used for accurate airdrops into the Colombian backwoods. I'd really love to know which aircraft they were, but there is nothing in the document that helps, and practically all types in the network are capable of airdropping to some degree or other. (An12, An24/26, Il-76...even the An124, if they can get hold of one, can do it, although it would be a tad dramatic.)
Prosecutors said he was offering a deadly arsenal of weaponry: more than 700 surface-to-air missiles, thousands of guns, high-tech helicopters, and airplanes outfitted with grenade launchers and missiles. The indictment said his price-tag was $15 million to $20 million.
Meanwhile, there's been a significant increase in the proportion of flights we're logging from Dubai and Sharjah to various war zones that are carried out by Transavia Export of Minsk, which some think was the first Bout company of them all. It would be nice if the authorities in Sharjah didn't let planes belonging to folk like this leave for unstated destinations; the night of the 5th-6th of May saw no less than four departures to "unknown" or "ZZZ", including one Phoenix Aviation/AVE, one Transavia Export, and two South-Airlines.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Earliest Wigan Walk Known to Science
Call the anthropologists. I believe I encountered the earliest instance of the Wigan Walk in the history of rugby league on Sunday.
OK, so Wigan played St Helens, their great tribal race enemy, in Cardiff; less obviously, Saints hit a savage burst of perfection and ran up 35 points to nothing in the first half. The moment I recall most is Ade Gardner's try just before half time, or better, Matthew Gidley's part in it. St Helens had pushed on to the Wigan lines, but didn't look like breaking through, and shipped the ball slowly along the face of the defence; then Gidley hit it, running - always the first rule - and immediately drew a marker from the line.
What happened then was what you go for; he stopped in pelt, and turned through 360 degrees around the Wigan man, rolling-out with the ball re-handled from one arm to the other while this went on, and chipped it to the flag for Gardner to race onto, with just little enough weight for it not to get there too soon. Ignorant people always think this game is about force and force only, but folk like Gidley and Rob Burrow, and Sean Long, who incidentally had a superb master's evening, almost worth that bloody club colours gumshield, show it's more than that.
One of the fan traditions is that Wiganers supposedly never stick around for a beating; considered a sign of spoilt arrogance. And on Sunday, with 25 minutes to go - there they were, filing out of the ground. But this was Wales; at Wigan's old ground, Central Park, a home fan leaving could easily have been at home in five minutes. In Cardiff, where did they go? To watch the rest on TV in a pub? To sit on the coach and chunter, with the crispdust?
Anyway, this has given me enough confidence to point out that Keighley are having a good year. Kly ! Kly! Boing! Boing! indeed.
OK, so Wigan played St Helens, their great tribal race enemy, in Cardiff; less obviously, Saints hit a savage burst of perfection and ran up 35 points to nothing in the first half. The moment I recall most is Ade Gardner's try just before half time, or better, Matthew Gidley's part in it. St Helens had pushed on to the Wigan lines, but didn't look like breaking through, and shipped the ball slowly along the face of the defence; then Gidley hit it, running - always the first rule - and immediately drew a marker from the line.
What happened then was what you go for; he stopped in pelt, and turned through 360 degrees around the Wigan man, rolling-out with the ball re-handled from one arm to the other while this went on, and chipped it to the flag for Gardner to race onto, with just little enough weight for it not to get there too soon. Ignorant people always think this game is about force and force only, but folk like Gidley and Rob Burrow, and Sean Long, who incidentally had a superb master's evening, almost worth that bloody club colours gumshield, show it's more than that.
One of the fan traditions is that Wiganers supposedly never stick around for a beating; considered a sign of spoilt arrogance. And on Sunday, with 25 minutes to go - there they were, filing out of the ground. But this was Wales; at Wigan's old ground, Central Park, a home fan leaving could easily have been at home in five minutes. In Cardiff, where did they go? To watch the rest on TV in a pub? To sit on the coach and chunter, with the crispdust?
Anyway, this has given me enough confidence to point out that Keighley are having a good year. Kly ! Kly! Boing! Boing! indeed.
Labels: Rugby League
Sunday, May 04, 2008
The Only Way To Defeat This Is To Surrender
This should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that?
I can't help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this - via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can't do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don't make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)
But a T-shirt with the following message:
More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I'm so keen on a carbon tax is that it's an option that doesn't involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.
I can't help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this - via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can't do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don't make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)
But a T-shirt with the following message:
;INSERT INTO watchlist (pnrs) VALUES 'ADDINGTON/DMR';COMMIT TRANSACTION That would be cool. One of the nice things about QR codes, of course, is you can do these things graphically. Look into my eyes...
More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I'm so keen on a carbon tax is that it's an option that doesn't involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.
Labels: banter, hacker, surveillance, sustainable
Doomed To Technology
BoingBoing apparently thinks this little line-shaft workshop is bizarre and incredible. Maybe. But I had one of these as a kid in the 1980s; it went with a Mamod steam engine, and had various tiny machine tools - a press, a pillar drill, a buffing wheel, and eventually we rigged a little dynamo to have it generate electricity, thus making the hop from the first industrial revolution and mill buildings to the second and electric motors. (Have I mentioned I once worked in a printing plant in Shipley - this was in the summer of 2000 - where the machinery came from Germany in 1963...East Germany?)
And it rocked, especially because it filled the house with the unique smell of live steam and hot oil. Oh, and that time I fired it up without my dad being around, with the result that the safety valve wasn't quite correctly seated, and extremely hot steam under pressure launched it into the fucking ceiling? Sorry, mum. But technology ought to scare you occasionally, right?
Surely they can't have been that rare. Here's a quote from the comments at BB:
Inspired by my Grandfather I built my own peripheral for it. BTW, it had a standard, open interface for everyone to hook up their own shit to the engine... it was a drive wheel, hooked up to the flywheel where you could place a rubber band and drive anything you could imagine. I chose to drive a tiny Electric Motor, that was hooked up to a flashlight bulb. It just might have started my ongoing involvement with science.Yes, I did that too; I think the aim was trying to build up enough steam pressure to overload and burn out the bulb. If I had really been militant about it, I suppose I should have thought of some way to link it with the ZX Spectrum, but I don't think it put out enough wallop even to drive one of those.
And I never finished the rocket-propelled boat, even though I did get as far as cutting and soldering tin plate sections (more than the joint forces of the Government, BAE, Thales, Vosper Thorneycroft and Babcocks Rosyth can say for CVF).
Labels: energy, engineering, hacker, personal history
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Donal Blaney: Hypocrite, Political Whore, and Torture Fan
Blaney:
Blaney:
Blaney:
Blaney:
Blaney:
Blaney:
Blaney:
How many nuclear power stations did she build, Don?
Blaney:
Are you against the market, Don?
Blaney:
Blaney:
Hectoring and aggressive, eh?
Blaney:
(Note that he therefore goes against the British Army's doctrine on human intelligence collection and sides with, ah, the Gestapo. Are you against the troops, Don?)
Feel free to add any more Dons you find interesting in the comments. Unfortunately Don's forgotten how to use the moderation function, or something.
Donal Blaney said...
I do not bandy the term "nazi" or "racist" about in the same way the left do.
2:05 PM
Blaney:
This is how the Nazi traffic wardens of London behave when they see a nice car that they decide they want to tow.
Blaney:
First, a confession. I was appointed a house prefect at school and I handed out a record 400 punishments over 14 months for a variety of offences, most of them trivial. In doing so, I recognise that in many instances I abused my power.
Blaney:
Now we know where the thousands of extra police are being deployed - on low level "crime" rather than preventing and investigating violent crimes and burglaries that are what we're all most worried about.
Blaney:
Where do I accuse anyone of plotting to suppress an accusation of paedophilia? What drugs are you on to have written such nonsense?
Blaney:
Secondly, a Labour council candidate was arrested last week on suspicion of child porn offences. Needless to say, had he been a Tory it would have been the lead story on the BBC and in the national press.
Blaney:
Thatcher would use nuclear. She wouldn't want us dependent on foreign gas and oil in today's world. It is the one area, apart from cuisine and gun rights, where the French are better than us.
How many nuclear power stations did she build, Don?
Blaney:
Cut Petrol Tax, You Greedy Sods
Are you against the market, Don?
Blaney:
Amnesty International once again show their true political colours in a campaign ad against the practice of waterboarding. This sanctimonious clique of naive peaceniks and leftist fellow travellers want us to fight the evil psychopaths who indiscriminately kill innocent men, women and children of all colours, creeds and religions with one arm tied behind our backs.
Blaney:
Hectoring and abrasive, Humphrys has become a parody of himself. In the same way that Jeremy Paxman's sneer seems to have become more exaggerated as the years go by, so it is with Humphrys' aggressiveness.
Hectoring and aggressive, eh?
Blaney:
I obviously agree that torture is not the answer.
I think I draw the line at permanent physical harm to the prisoner. Humiliation or psychological interrogation techniques are, in my view, not a problem - but we're all entitled to a different view. Waterboarding doesn't do the prisoner any permanent physical harm although he may be reluctant to shower or use a flannel again in the future when/if he is freed.
I am aware that the CIA has in the past used a creative interview technique which involved blind-folding a suspect, placing him into a helicopter and for the helicopter to lift a foot or two off the ground. If the prisoner didn't answer questions, he was told he faced being pushed out of the helicopter from (as he was told) hundreds of feet up. This too concentrated the mind.
(Note that he therefore goes against the British Army's doctrine on human intelligence collection and sides with, ah, the Gestapo. Are you against the troops, Don?)
Feel free to add any more Dons you find interesting in the comments. Unfortunately Don's forgotten how to use the moderation function, or something.
The Joy of Linux
So I actually bought a printer; in fact, a printer/scanner. And I considered buying two pairs of jeans after showing up at the count with interesting new holes. Am I descending into bovine consumerism? And the obvious next step was to qualify it with the Linux Lappeh.
It wasn't quite the "And then my troubles began..." experience like the BIOS reflash in January, but I was very amused by the fact that XSANE both throws a dialog box containing the following words:
I recommend and endorse hplip.
It wasn't quite the "And then my troubles began..." experience like the BIOS reflash in January, but I was very amused by the fact that XSANE both throws a dialog box containing the following words:
You are trying to run Xsane as root! This is DANGEROUS! Please do not file bug reports for anything that happens when running Xsane as root: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!and also suggests running as root as a generic troubleshooting option in its documentation. Well, I did, and all went OK. As I said to Soizick: the great thing about using Linux is that you get to feel like a mad scientist.
I recommend and endorse hplip.
Labels: hacker, introspection, Linux, moral horror
Gordon Brown: My Part in His Downfall
You may be wondering why this blog missed a week; the answer is, of course, a repeat of my 2006 candidacy for mayor of Aspen Runnymede Borough Council. As in 2006, I shocked the local Liberal party with the radical option of actually going and knocking on doors; as then, I achieved absolutely nothing. Both Egham Hythe seats went Conservative with about 600 votes, followed by 200-odd for the Labour candidates and just below that for me and the Runnymede Runningmate.
It is of course completely ridiculous to try and draw conclusions from this, but I would point out that the Labour vote came as a surprise; 7 out of 100 voters I canvassed said they would vote Labour, which compared to the result suggests that pollsters should be applying a truly heroic "Bashful Brownite" adjustment to their results. And yes, people do vote BNP out of ignorance, or at least the guy who shouted that he was going to vote fascist did; they didn't put up a candidate.
It didn't seem the right moment to tell him, though. Later, I was chatting to a Tory who claimed to be impressed by Brian Paddick when I noticed a business card stuck to his fridge: Xxxx Xxxxx, Legacy Systems Architect, Home Office E-Borders Agency, based in one of those ridiculously named po-mo office parks by Heathrow (Civil service readers will know the one I mean). "Are you the E-Borders chap?" I asked. No, he said. "Well, thank God for that - or I'd have to kill you."
No, I didn't quite say that - I'm not actually Hunter Thompson. Actually I said that this was good news, because we were doing everything we could to crush his dreams and frustrate his plans. To which the Tory replied "Great! He keeps parking his sodding car in my driveway! And the FUCKING ALARM goes off EVERY NIGHT!" There's a surprise - a Home Office surveillance bureaucrat unaware of the costs of false positives, and completely inconsiderate of the ordinary citizen? Who could possibly have guessed?
The count was completely normal, and if anything less fun than the last time; all that stood out was the fact that another ward has a 'kipper who is actually Vietnamese (how's that work?).
Still, I have the satisfaction of being present at the LibDem Sorpaso; the moment we overtook Labour in share of the national vote. And unlike the original one, we didn't even need to include the estimated GDP of the Mafia to do it.
It is of course completely ridiculous to try and draw conclusions from this, but I would point out that the Labour vote came as a surprise; 7 out of 100 voters I canvassed said they would vote Labour, which compared to the result suggests that pollsters should be applying a truly heroic "Bashful Brownite" adjustment to their results. And yes, people do vote BNP out of ignorance, or at least the guy who shouted that he was going to vote fascist did; they didn't put up a candidate.
It didn't seem the right moment to tell him, though. Later, I was chatting to a Tory who claimed to be impressed by Brian Paddick when I noticed a business card stuck to his fridge: Xxxx Xxxxx, Legacy Systems Architect, Home Office E-Borders Agency, based in one of those ridiculously named po-mo office parks by Heathrow (Civil service readers will know the one I mean). "Are you the E-Borders chap?" I asked. No, he said. "Well, thank God for that - or I'd have to kill you."
No, I didn't quite say that - I'm not actually Hunter Thompson. Actually I said that this was good news, because we were doing everything we could to crush his dreams and frustrate his plans. To which the Tory replied "Great! He keeps parking his sodding car in my driveway! And the FUCKING ALARM goes off EVERY NIGHT!" There's a surprise - a Home Office surveillance bureaucrat unaware of the costs of false positives, and completely inconsiderate of the ordinary citizen? Who could possibly have guessed?
The count was completely normal, and if anything less fun than the last time; all that stood out was the fact that another ward has a 'kipper who is actually Vietnamese (how's that work?).
Still, I have the satisfaction of being present at the LibDem Sorpaso; the moment we overtook Labour in share of the national vote. And unlike the original one, we didn't even need to include the estimated GDP of the Mafia to do it.
Labels: elections, Home Office, LibDems, politics, surveillance
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Blue Streak, Black Arrow
Bill Higgins is boasting about buying a very cool secondhand book indeed; Manned Spaceflight Operations, stamped "Edwards Air Force Base".
I'll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn't track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this:
I'll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn't track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this:
Well, I watched this one: In the bad old 60's when tubes (valves to fellow Yorkshiremen) were top technology and our missiles needed lots of them, me and my fellow tech men had to sort out the best from the worst in large vibrating testers. The 97% not-so-good one's were either used for the parking lot improvements or were spirited away for the booming home stereo market.I have a reader who worked for De Havilland Dynamics? That's ridiculously cool. Where were you on the 17th? Eh? Eh?
The parking lots eventually became too high to use so they found some other way. This occurred in my sight at DeHavilland Lostock and DeHavilland Hatfield. This all sounds very similar to your TI story. Colin.
Labels: electronics, geekage, history
Bourgeois COIN
The Independent has been doing a great job tracking a crucial new trend of our times; the way modern counterinsurgent practitioners are making common features of suburban life into quiet weapons against the common enemy. 12th April:
What are you doing for the PTA, Mick and Ruth? Well, I'm organising the jumble sale, and Mick is leading the school council to cut the Taliban area leader's head off and stick it on a spike.
Elsewhere, in High Wycombe, only yards from RAF Strike Command's nuclear bunker, dinner parties and interior decoration snobbery are deployed to win hearts and minds.
Under the protection programme, sometimes called School Councils or School Shuras, villagers agree to provide a small quota of night watchmen to take turns on guard. "Parent power is exactly what it is," an education official said. "We bring parents, teachers and some key people in the community together to agree to protect the schools."
In Logar province last month, a primary school was saved by a gang of furious fathers who chased would-be arsonists into the night. The head of the local PTA, Basir, said armed men approached a co-ed primary school for more than 600 students after midnight. "They had guns and petrol to burn the school. But the guards saw them and started shouting," he said. "Everyone came out of their houses and when the terrorists realised, they ran away."
What are you doing for the PTA, Mick and Ruth? Well, I'm organising the jumble sale, and Mick is leading the school council to cut the Taliban area leader's head off and stick it on a spike.
Elsewhere, in High Wycombe, only yards from RAF Strike Command's nuclear bunker, dinner parties and interior decoration snobbery are deployed to win hearts and minds.
"It might seem a bit aspirational to be thinking a few dinner parties can change the world, but it's got to start somewhere," says Richard Hoyle, 50, another guest of the Hickmans. "Anything that's breaking down barriers has got to make a bit of a difference."Aspirational; now there's New Labour for you.
Labels: 4GW, cultures of war, funny ha ha
You're fit, but don't you just know it...
Time for some rugby league blogging, right? I saw London knock Castleford out of the cup on Saturday, and I can report that I'm beginning to think London (sorry, sorry, Harlequins RL) are getting to be dangerous. Cas dominated the first half and went in 12-0 up, but ended up with a 42-14 thrashing. They were, as it happens, missing their star loose forward Jon Westerman, who I was looking forward to seeing, but I doubt he'd have changed anything. When a team just gets run over like that, individuals don't matter much.
What does matter is that London are ferociously fit this year; Brian McDermott has really prepared a side almost as tough as he is (hey, he's been a Royal Marine Commando, a prizefighter, a British Lion, and a Yorkshire Dales hill farmer; enough macho to kill a normal man). And they are making a strategy of it; every time I've seen them recently, they've soaked up the pressure in the first half and then unexpectedly cranked up the speed after the break, which is a killer if you haven't either got the stamina to match it or a 20 point lead. It's an old Wigan trick from the 90s; it's probably as old as the game.
However, I would like to say that whoever introduced those inflatable sticks you whack together to generate noise deserves everything they get. It's not just the volume, it's the odd piercing quality of the sound; I can happily put up with RL terrace fixtures like the old dear driven by a truly disturbing blood lust, but this is new. Perhaps that's what pushed the youth-team guy who picked a vicious brawl in the club bar after the match, incidentally hurling his target at my girlfriend, over the edge. (He also saw his way to trampling on a Cas shirt and assaulting someone who looked to be his father, so who knows.)
What does matter is that London are ferociously fit this year; Brian McDermott has really prepared a side almost as tough as he is (hey, he's been a Royal Marine Commando, a prizefighter, a British Lion, and a Yorkshire Dales hill farmer; enough macho to kill a normal man). And they are making a strategy of it; every time I've seen them recently, they've soaked up the pressure in the first half and then unexpectedly cranked up the speed after the break, which is a killer if you haven't either got the stamina to match it or a 20 point lead. It's an old Wigan trick from the 90s; it's probably as old as the game.
However, I would like to say that whoever introduced those inflatable sticks you whack together to generate noise deserves everything they get. It's not just the volume, it's the odd piercing quality of the sound; I can happily put up with RL terrace fixtures like the old dear driven by a truly disturbing blood lust, but this is new. Perhaps that's what pushed the youth-team guy who picked a vicious brawl in the club bar after the match, incidentally hurling his target at my girlfriend, over the edge. (He also saw his way to trampling on a Cas shirt and assaulting someone who looked to be his father, so who knows.)
Labels: banter, beer, mindless violence, Rugby League
hey hey hey, ring ring ring
This looks like a must-read; Kevin Myers' personal history of 1970s Belfast, complete with fundamentalist landladies, Provos concerned about the morality of using a condom in the initiator for a carbomb, the only civil war in history where both sides were receiving welfare benefits from the same government, the UDA as the only terrorists in history to have a regimental blazer, and the unpleasant but undeniable fact that so many people Myers knew were enjoying the war.
This bit specifically got my attention:
Which is why, perhaps, this guy may have been more of a threat than I'd otherwise have thought. I mean, who hasn't called John Reid a tyrant? But it's this bit that's more interesting; he's a BT electrician. ISTR the Operation Crevice team were trying to recruit BT linesmen at one point; not just to chop the wires, perhaps.
This bit specifically got my attention:
While Catholics were discriminated against by the Stormont civil service they were admitted into the then imperial civil service, run from London. This included the Post Office telephone system, which recruited and trained many Catholics, who became the most sophisticated electricians in Northern Ireland; some of them were in the IRA, whose bomb-makers became the finest of any terrorists in the world, while the loyalists, supposed inheritors of Ulster's great engineering traditions, continued to make what were in essence big fireworks.You want historical irony? You want the sociology of technology? Right there. In a sense, nothing could be more appropriate for a bunch of reactionaries like the UDA than that precisely their aims - making damn sure no taigs got above semi-skilled in the shipyard - were actually sabotaging their military effectiveness. As for so many places up north, the second industrial revolution - electricity, chemicals and all that German stuff - was never particularly welcome.
Which is why, perhaps, this guy may have been more of a threat than I'd otherwise have thought. I mean, who hasn't called John Reid a tyrant? But it's this bit that's more interesting; he's a BT electrician. ISTR the Operation Crevice team were trying to recruit BT linesmen at one point; not just to chop the wires, perhaps.
Labels: 4GW, books, cultures of war, engineering, NI, terrorism
The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages On
This NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces' deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or other, because of the Human Rights Act. The details are opportunely left open; the usual formation of the story makes only two testable claims, one of which is that landing a captured pirate in Somalia would likely be illegal because the local authorities might cut their head off, and the other being that the pirate might claim political asylum aboard ship.
What the story does not actually say is why this would stop anyone from detaining pirates, or for that matter why the same doesn't go for the French. After all, as a State party to the European Convention on Human Rights, France has the same legal obligations. Now, the first claim is obviously true in the sense that yes, Virginia, Somalia is a nasty failed state run by a mix of more-or-less Islamist warlords and Ethiopian army officers. Handing someone over to this lot for trial might well be illegal. But has nobody else noticed that it would also be intensely, profoundly stupid?
Who on earth would want to return captured pirates to the state, or rather un-state, that permitted them to operate openly from their territory? Even if the Somali authority they were returned to actually wanted to try them, you've got to assume there's a significant chance of them getting away. In fact, the French mission gives us all the information we need; the pirates collected the ransom, went ashore, and seem to have planned just to drive off with it, which doesn't inspire confidence in local law enforcement.
Further, there is no legal reason whatsoever to give pirates captured off Somalia to the Somali police. Pirates have a special status in international law they share with slavers, torturers and those responsible for genocide; they are hostes humanae generis, enemies of all humanity, which in practice means that any state that can catch them has effective jurisdiction in the case. Once the pirates are caught, there is absolutely no reason not to take them to a proper court back in London, or wherever. That given, why should we need to even think about handing them over to a jurisdiction where they might escape, be tortured, or be put to death?
The second testable claim is that a captured pirate might claim political asylum. This is true. A longstanding principle of the law of the sea is that of exclusive flag state jurisdiction, which means that a warship of state A is for all intents and purposes part of A's national territory. The principle holds in a weaker form for merchant vessels. Americans really ought to be conscious of this, because they fought a war against Britain in part over the principle.
Now, a story. When I took my MSc in 2003-2004, my International Law course was taught by Commander Steven Haines, who had just resigned from his post as a senior legal adviser to the Royal Navy, round about the same time Elizabeth Wilmshurst walked out of her similar post at the Foreign Office. In fact, I heard Wilmshurst's name for the first time from him. He didn't give his reasons, but do I need to draw you a fucking diagram? (He's also the only person I know who ever had control of a nuclear weapon. Cool, eh? Pity he took so bloody long to mark essays.)
Haines took part in the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone, where he was involved in the decision as to what to do with limb-choppin' war criminal Foday Sankoh after his capture. The military were keen to fly him straight out to Illustrious, as he's not known for being a great swimmer and would be very unlikely to escape; Haines opposed the idea on the grounds that he might claim political asylum, which would have been politically more than problematic. Instead he was confined at the airport and then in the Freetown police station with a guard reinforced with British troops, but later cheated the courts by dying before he could be brought to trial.
So the problem is not new, but it's not like it helped Sankoh any. And there is no reason why some one can't spend their political asylum in prison; it doesn't confer immunity for one's crimes, and piracy is a crime. (That is both bathetically and pathetically obvious, but there is an important point here which we'll come back to.)
To recap: yes, it would be illegal to hand over a pirate to Somali warlords for trial. No, this does not constrain anyone in catching pirates, because anyone who can catch them can try them. And frankly, not handing prisoners to the Somali "government" is a feature, not a bug. Yes, you can claim asylum aboard a foreign warship; no, this is no deal-breaker.
So what did those thrillingly tough and macho Frenchmen do with their six captured buccaneers? They, after all, aren't letting themselves have their national essence sapped by do-gooding lawyers and bickering parliamentarians' quibbles, right? Up to the yard-arm? Walk the plank? Hand them to the fun-loving fellas from Ethiopian Military Intelligence? Er, no.
Far too many people who should know better have swallowed this transparent bollocks at face value, or indeed, at a considerable premium. For example: here's Information Dissemination getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muqawama getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muq getting it wrong again after initial treatment. I don't have the stomach to look into the fever swamp.
So why, do you think, is this story being pushed so hard? The ur-text is this Times article, which consists of pure assertion - there is no information in there implying the central claim, that the RN has been ordered not to detain pirates - and a quote from swivel-eyed Tory Julian Brazer MP apparently reacting to the Times reporter. Repeat it a few times, and voila; new facts.
But who, pray, is keen on demonising the very idea of law as a constraint on state action? Try this comment at AM:
By the way: as well as the Reuters report, Liberation has photos and commentary from the guy who runs Secret Defense.
Update: I'd forgotten that the original Captain Kidd was commissioned by the Navy to hunt down other pirates. He was a countergang that went wrong. Now there's a far better lesson for you.
What the story does not actually say is why this would stop anyone from detaining pirates, or for that matter why the same doesn't go for the French. After all, as a State party to the European Convention on Human Rights, France has the same legal obligations. Now, the first claim is obviously true in the sense that yes, Virginia, Somalia is a nasty failed state run by a mix of more-or-less Islamist warlords and Ethiopian army officers. Handing someone over to this lot for trial might well be illegal. But has nobody else noticed that it would also be intensely, profoundly stupid?
Who on earth would want to return captured pirates to the state, or rather un-state, that permitted them to operate openly from their territory? Even if the Somali authority they were returned to actually wanted to try them, you've got to assume there's a significant chance of them getting away. In fact, the French mission gives us all the information we need; the pirates collected the ransom, went ashore, and seem to have planned just to drive off with it, which doesn't inspire confidence in local law enforcement.
Further, there is no legal reason whatsoever to give pirates captured off Somalia to the Somali police. Pirates have a special status in international law they share with slavers, torturers and those responsible for genocide; they are hostes humanae generis, enemies of all humanity, which in practice means that any state that can catch them has effective jurisdiction in the case. Once the pirates are caught, there is absolutely no reason not to take them to a proper court back in London, or wherever. That given, why should we need to even think about handing them over to a jurisdiction where they might escape, be tortured, or be put to death?
The second testable claim is that a captured pirate might claim political asylum. This is true. A longstanding principle of the law of the sea is that of exclusive flag state jurisdiction, which means that a warship of state A is for all intents and purposes part of A's national territory. The principle holds in a weaker form for merchant vessels. Americans really ought to be conscious of this, because they fought a war against Britain in part over the principle.
Now, a story. When I took my MSc in 2003-2004, my International Law course was taught by Commander Steven Haines, who had just resigned from his post as a senior legal adviser to the Royal Navy, round about the same time Elizabeth Wilmshurst walked out of her similar post at the Foreign Office. In fact, I heard Wilmshurst's name for the first time from him. He didn't give his reasons, but do I need to draw you a fucking diagram? (He's also the only person I know who ever had control of a nuclear weapon. Cool, eh? Pity he took so bloody long to mark essays.)
Haines took part in the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone, where he was involved in the decision as to what to do with limb-choppin' war criminal Foday Sankoh after his capture. The military were keen to fly him straight out to Illustrious, as he's not known for being a great swimmer and would be very unlikely to escape; Haines opposed the idea on the grounds that he might claim political asylum, which would have been politically more than problematic. Instead he was confined at the airport and then in the Freetown police station with a guard reinforced with British troops, but later cheated the courts by dying before he could be brought to trial.
So the problem is not new, but it's not like it helped Sankoh any. And there is no reason why some one can't spend their political asylum in prison; it doesn't confer immunity for one's crimes, and piracy is a crime. (That is both bathetically and pathetically obvious, but there is an important point here which we'll come back to.)
To recap: yes, it would be illegal to hand over a pirate to Somali warlords for trial. No, this does not constrain anyone in catching pirates, because anyone who can catch them can try them. And frankly, not handing prisoners to the Somali "government" is a feature, not a bug. Yes, you can claim asylum aboard a foreign warship; no, this is no deal-breaker.
So what did those thrillingly tough and macho Frenchmen do with their six captured buccaneers? They, after all, aren't letting themselves have their national essence sapped by do-gooding lawyers and bickering parliamentarians' quibbles, right? Up to the yard-arm? Walk the plank? Hand them to the fun-loving fellas from Ethiopian Military Intelligence? Er, no.
Six pirates sont transférés à bord de la frégate Jean Bart et ils seront remis à la justice pour être jugés en France.So yes, the six pirates were brought aboard the Jean Bart and will be tried in France.
Far too many people who should know better have swallowed this transparent bollocks at face value, or indeed, at a considerable premium. For example: here's Information Dissemination getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muqawama getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muq getting it wrong again after initial treatment. I don't have the stomach to look into the fever swamp.
So why, do you think, is this story being pushed so hard? The ur-text is this Times article, which consists of pure assertion - there is no information in there implying the central claim, that the RN has been ordered not to detain pirates - and a quote from swivel-eyed Tory Julian Brazer MP apparently reacting to the Times reporter. Repeat it a few times, and voila; new facts.
But who, pray, is keen on demonising the very idea of law as a constraint on state action? Try this comment at AM:
Ultimately the very notion of law itself may be bought into disrepute. As it is already in the ranks of the American forces.See? It's those bastard lawyers who MADE us torture them. Indeed it was; just not the same ones. This kind of embrace of raison d'etat has something of the power of all the ideas of a liberation from freedom about it.
By the way: as well as the Reuters report, Liberation has photos and commentary from the guy who runs Secret Defense.
Update: I'd forgotten that the original Captain Kidd was commissioned by the Navy to hunt down other pirates. He was a countergang that went wrong. Now there's a far better lesson for you.
Labels: banter, fisking, France, ideology, mastur/metablogging, moral horror, naval, personal history, pirates, politics
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Announcement: TYR RanterCon, 17th April
Here is the news; we're meeting up on Thursday, the 17th April, after 1900 at the Globe pub in Southwark. Here's a map; your nearest Tube station is Borough. There is no dress code, but I've been asked to put the whole thing under Chatham House rules (you can say what was said, but you can't say anything that would identify who said it).
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Labels: admin, beer, London, mastur/metablogging
