Clearing out the link pile

Ed Miliband joins Total Defence!

Labour councils across England will act as the "last line of defence" against the controversial health act, Ed Miliband said as he pledged to overturn its "free market, free-for-all principles".

Speaking at the launch of the Labour local election campaign in Birmingham, Miliband said Labour councils would use the public health and well-being boards to resist the most damaging aspects of the Health and Social Care Act.

Meanwhile, the NE London Foundation Trust wrote to me to confirm that I am now a member. An amazingly large proportion of the letter is devoted to encouraging me to join the NHS staff-discount scheme, which apparently I now can. For some reason this reminds me of a remark my old college mate Tim Lewis made in San Francisco the week before last, to the effect that Virgin Atlantic is the New Labour airline. And on the flight back, yes, there is something distinctly Blairite about their general aesthetic. Boomer nostalgia/exciting purple/lower-case type/gratuitous Ginger Spice Union Flags/forced jollity/total lack of anything like dignity or design austerity.

Berlin's city fathers destroyed the world's best airport once, and now they're going to do it all over again by killing off the wonderful spaceship/cold war modern, 20 metres from the kerb to the plane, German architecture and French Army engineering Berlin-Tegel so you can damn well traipse in from Schönefeld, which will become a giant shopping centre with a runway.

France, delightedly nuclear-armed power to our south, has absolutely no doubt about sticking with the Bomb and indeed maintaining both a submarine and an air-launched capability. The BBC interviews Jean-Dominique Merchet, Francois Heisbourg, both well worth reading.

Bruce Sterling apparently didn't hear about the whole homeless-person-as-support-structure-for-WLAN-box thing so he hasn't stuck SXSW right there with the CBOSS stand at Mobile World Congress, but he does have some interesting remarks although as always his commitment to staring right into the future's eyes seems to render him less critical than he should be.

He has company. The New Aesthetic has the “scenius” of London’s Silicon Roundabout to support it. These people are working creatives of Bridle’s generation, with their networked tentacles sunk deep in interaction design, literature, fashion and architecture. They do have some strange ideas, but they can’t all be crazy....It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.

So, ah, it appears to be me?

“Theory objects” from the Internet are squamous, crabgrass-like entities, where people huddle around swollen, unstable databases

And he thinks that's a good thing. Squamous = either skin cancer or Cthulhu. Swollen, unstable database = big problem. Huddling around it = pointless. And what the North American-blinkered fuck is crabgrass, I've not seen any growing around Telco 2.0 Towers in the Curtain Road heart of Sillyabout? I'm tempted to use it as a synonym for vague futurist-y guff. "Hmmm, I see your point, but I think the next slide is nothing but crabgrass."

Coming soon

A review of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for the Fistful of Euros. That will be the high-style eurocratic version.

Another review of Kahneman for this fine blog. That is tentatively titled Kahneman for Thugs and will be a sort of juddering, noisy remix of the other one concentrating on action-oriented political advice derived from it.

Further action on the Lobster Project. I ported quite a bit of it from the pile of scripts on my laptop into ScraperWiki today, and I now need to debug and shake down those sections of the workflow. ScraperWiki now has the awesome NetworkX war-on-some-kinds-of-terror social network analytics lib, so I'm scraping in data, creating NX objects, and then reading out analytics in a string of loosely coupled scrapers. I've even been giving the look and feel some thought...sorry...oohing over fonts.

Liiinks

After the wave of links posts, here's a links post with no particular theme.

Fantastic new civil servant blog has some interesting thoughts on Trident replacement and the interactions with US defence cuts. Specifically, as the Americans reduce their nuclear arsenal, will they still want an Atlantic and a Pacific SSBN fleet, and in the case that they close Kings Bay naval base, is it practical for the RN boats to sail to the West Coast to pick up new rockets?

Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk discusses whether the US might be thinking about a minimal-deterrent option, in which case it might paradoxically be less of a problem for the UK as submarines would be relatively more important.

The best paper map. I was really pleased to see a demo at Mobile World Congress in which the radio coverage footprint was overlaid in Openlayers onto the OpenStreetMap.

UKBA stops signing up new users for the IRIS biometric identifier. Thank God we spent all that money issuing new passports! Passing through Gatwick North on Thursday night, I noticed that, as usual, it took several times as long for IRIS to deal with a passenger as it did for a human.

A history of Sharjah Airport...but only up to 1952.

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the Collar, appears to belong to General Howe. He does this in the context of an exchange of compliments between armies arguing over who torched the mill to deny the other grain, and what this would do to the civilian population. Kings of War has been excellent recently after an influx of new bloggers.

Hopi Sen's grandad and the propaganda film.

There's a trio of kittens tucked into a tiny bed,

and what looks like a Golden Retriever in a shirt and tie, holding a long-stemmed rose between its teeth. At the bottom of the image it says, "PUPPIES & FRIENDS." "One deity rules over all the other spirits," Henry tells me as the sacrificial chickens are plucked and tossed into a hot caldero. "He is the Godfather.

We saw this one coming, and here it comes. Katharine Birbalsingh's academy (that's the one with the "private school ethos" right down to "I don't need to know Ohm's law, I read Greats") won't be opening due to a lack of buildings, money, and indeed anything.

Voidy contributes to King Mob vs. IDS, demonstrating that the DWP has been very keen to get rid of embarrassing facts from its web site.

Tab-clearing link fart

Mike Konczal and the snark:

We are perpetually in a spiritual crisis that can only be fixed by a woman in the kitchen. It’s a huge win for the second half of the 20th century that this argument has been moved from leading political figures addressing graduating classes to the shadier alleyways of the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

Robert Fisk fisks Gaddafi.

Brilliant, awe-inspiring Borderland Beat piece on the rise of the Sinaloa drug cartel, based on anthropology, history, economics, and Mexican/US counterinsurgency strategies as far back as the early 70s.

Where do these wanktanks keep coming from, education edition?

The lobbyist for brothels.

Python Module of the Week as a book.

Mulcaire must answer.

Oyster cards - they work perfectly simply inside the sensible public-service world of Transport for London, but everything changes when they cross the line into the twisted libertarian fantasy of the privatised rail network. Funny that.

Trying to fix the mortgage fiasco.

Dissolving a corpse in sulphuric acid - it's harder than you think.

Who's Lobbying now knows which lobbies use which lobbyists, although there's still no API.

constant levels of outrage

In this thread at Charlie Stross's, it occurred to me that social outrage is a constant, but that its content is infinitely variable. You could almost call it the principle of the conservation of outrage - outrage can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transferred from one object to another. Addiction to drugs or drink has transitioned from being a sin to being a medical condition. Mental illness is doing something similar. Sexuality, for several whole generations, is a ship that has sailed.

But you'd be a fool to imagine that the outrage has gone anywhere. It worries me that, for example, the revival of what Paul Krugman calls New Austerian economics is really explained by the need to be outraged at somebody - the surplus of outrage has been directed at the victims of financial misfortune, who are always in ready supply. Of course, the fact that it went that way is interesting in itself and tells us something about the functions the pool of available outrage performs.

le bateau ivre, port of call: Mogadishu

I wrote about this piece about brewing beer in southern Sudan, and incidentally creating a power station and a water works and a tiny industrial working class.

Well, SAB-Miller did a scenario-planning exercise about this sort of thing and came up with some truly odd answers. In the worst-case scenario:

a market with limited access to water and high energy costs, where people would migrate from areas of water shortage or turbulent weather

their proposed solution involved installing a brewery aboard a ship, so it could sail to wherever the thirsty masses had pitched up. Interestingly, as the story was released through the Grauniad's "Guardian Professional" advertorial division, this is also something SABMiller management was willing to pay good money to tell us about. Time was when big business wanted to keep its apocalyptic fantasies secret.

(Tagged "uncategorized", but should probably be under "uncategorizable".)

admin

Yr Viktorfeed. I fixd it agin. Kthanx fr fiting evul strukturd html!

In other admin, I finally found out what the mysterious lfgss.com referrals were. London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, indeed. Maybe I should get a new haircut?

Mortgage Pig vs Black Swan

RIP. Gilliard was a master of the snark element, Chris Lightfoot of the hacker element, Tanta of the policy element of great blogging. Together it's the blogging triathlon. (Yes, I agree this sounds a bit chilly.)

More broadly, folk like "Black Swan" Taleb have to deal with the fact that their great unpredictable validating event was predicted, years in advance, with considerable precision, by unofficial people who weren't paid six figure bonuses in any currency, as well as by economics professors who were paid considerably more. The CR team can claim to have predicted the housing crash not like economists - There is a significant risk of this happening, but we can't say when - but like meteorologists. Something like a crash has been observed building up in the North Atlantic, and it is coming closer at a rate of 5 knots. We expect it any time after X hundred hours.