All you need to know about the Tories

Tories? Tories? Did someone say Tories? Yes, they surely did..Teh Grauniad covers a speech by Alan Duncan, the shadow DTI Secretary, to the Centre for Policy Studies, on the topic of youth. Verbatim:

We need to empower teachers so that they can exert the control too many parents are unwilling or unable to exert," Mr Duncan, 49, will say.

"If there is no fear of authority, there is no respect for it. It cannot make sense in a civilised society for children of school age to face the discipline they need in court rather than in class or in the home.

"We are condemned to decline if adults and institutions remain unable to reclaim authority over younger people. Living out in real life the disturbing plot of William Golding's Lord of the Flies risks corroding Britain's well-being."

If there is no fear of authority, there is no respect for it. Christ on a bike. I think Mr Duncan needs to look up the meaning of the word "respect," and specifically the meanings that don't involve gangsters. But I doubt this is a mistake. What is conservatism if isn't the doctrine that we should all be scared into supporting hierarchy of one kind or another? This is Straussian and then some.

I was going to resist mocking Duncan over style, but I would love to know how you can live something out if not in real life, and I'd also like to know if he has read Lord of the Flies, whose plot involves the evacuation of children from Britain ahead of a nuclear war, the unprovoked shooting-down of their aircraft, their regression to savagery on a remote island where they worship the corpse of a pilot shot down during an air battle overhead, and eventually indulge in ritual murder. I should think our well-being would be more than rusty should this come to pass.

Duncan is a member, if I remember rightly, of the Tories' "libertarian" wing. Well, either it was always bullshit, or else ambition makes you look pretty ugly. But if you want to know the Tories' central message, let us take a look at David Cameron's pals. From the Oxford Student, I give you the Bullingdon club:

"...All 17 members were arrested for wrecking the cellar of the 15th century pub, the White Hart, in Fyfield.

17 bottles of wine were smashed into the walls of the pub after the civility of a gourmet meal descended into a brawl, leaving a trail of debris that was compared by eye-witnesses to a scene from the blitz. The inebriated members started fighting, leaving one with a deep cut to the cheek, and the landlord recalls attempting to pull apart the fi ghting parties, only to have them set on each other once more, exclaiming, “Sorry old chap, just a bit of high spirits."

...snip...

he club was once banned from entering within a 15 mile radius of Oxford after all 550 windows of Christ Church’s Tom quad were smashed in one night.

‘I like the sound of breaking glass’ is one of the society’s mottos and particularly true of one member who, at L’Ortolan in Berkshire, took it upon himself to eat his wine glass rather than his Michelinstarred meal. At another infamous Bullingdon garden party, the club invited a string band to play and proceeded to destroy all of the instruments, including a Stradivarius...

..snip...

That’s why Alexander Fellowes, at the White Hart, tipped the waitress £200, on top of all of the members paying for the damage inflicted. Our source described the White Hart landowner as “unfair” for reporting the matter to the police and as having “no sense of humour”. Most people, he adds, are willing to let such matters slide in exchange for the remuneration on offer."

That sounds violent, yobbish, uncivilised, lacking in respect for authority or indeed anybody else, and just plain fucking unpleasant in about equal parts. And it's the money that makes me want to vomit. But I confidently predict it ain't the Bullingdon boys old Liberty Duncan wants to scare.

The tailormade blue tailcoats cost at least £1,200 and a formal dinner, of which there are usually one or two a term, costs a flat rate of £100, although once damages are added the cost is far greater than this. Richer members may have to pay an even larger membership fee, sometimes approaching £10,000. Nonetheless, our source claims that there are still plenty of people who are rich enough to join, but claims that it is hard finding “the right kind of people”.

Nah, won't be them, will it. Anyway, more importantly, what's so great about respect for authority anyway? Authority is easy to respect, or at least to obey, which is what it actually wants. It will hit you with a stick if you don't, and might reward you if you do. What about respect for people who don't have authority? Waitresses, for example? Now, that takes effort. It's also far more like "respect" than the other kind, better termed...what..."subservience"? "obedience"? "arse-licking?"

Speaking of which, watch respectful Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope oppose the publication of the EP torture flights report because the Council of Europe has also been at it.

Topology-aware P2P

A lot of ISP people are concerned about the volume of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, especially thick stuff like video. To be more specific, they are usually concerned about the volume of P2P traffic their users draw from outside their networks, as after all, it's the extra upstream transit they pay for, or the upstream peers they piss off.

One well-known solution for the delivery of popular content across the Internet is a so-called content delivery network, in which the CDN operator places big servers in ISPs' data centres and fills them up with stuff. Then, the local DNS server is altered to point the downstream users at the CDN server, not the original source of the content. Therefore, the stuff is downloaded once over the wide-area network, and served many times in the local network. (The best-known one is Akamai.)

You could, theoretically, set up a box with lots of peer-to-peer clients running on it and seed the local network, but there is no guarantee your users would go there for their videos. This is because most (if not all) P2P clients are unaware of the network topology.

Why? After all, it benefits everybody if the client tries to find content close to it first of all - except in a few corner cases, it's going to be faster and experience less packet loss, it costs the ISP less, and it costs their upstream provider less. It's also likely to be more resilient. And it shouldn't be that difficult to implement.

The first thing a P2P client has to do is to find peers and ask them what they can supply. By extension it also has to declare what it can supply. At the very least this has to include an IP address, port number, and filename, but to do the job properly there should be some metadata and a user identifier. This service discovery function is usually one of the most difficult problems. Now, however you do it, you'll have to initiate a connection across the Internet to your peers to get this data. So why not use this opportunity to measure the round-trip latency, hop count, and packet loss? Then, when the content information and this traceroute-like data is collated, rank each group of peers offering the same stuff by proximity, and make the client prefer the local source.

There are some security implications - a lot of people attempt to hide their network layout from the world in order to make hackers' lives more difficult, and in a topo-aware world this would be an efficiency-reducing technology.

Schrödinger's Veep

Apparently, Dick Cheney's lawyers are actually trying to invoke in court this batshit insane doctrine they seem to have cooked up, that claims that Cheney is both part of the Executive and the Legislature, and that therefore he answers to neither.

That's just head-spinningly weird. They are arguing, in a sense, that a sort of legal version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to the Vice-Presidency. As in a particular kind of diode, where the quantum uncertainty whether an electron is at one end of the component or the other means that it appears to travel faster than light, Cheney could either be President of the Senate or Vice-President of the United States at any one moment, and no-one can say which he is. Or rather, observing him would cause the implied wave function to collapse into one state or the other, which would obviously force any judge in the case to recuse themselves on conflict-of-interest grounds. Therefore, neither branch can call him to account. It's brilliant - Schrödinger's cat applied to politics!

That implies a further layer of weirdness-if this is true, then the Vice-President has far greater powers than the President! But I think I see a flaw. If Cheney can be either part of the executive or the legislature, and this cannot be determined by empirical observation, we are entitled to ask the question: how can we be sure that Dick Cheney exists? In fact, we could go further, and take action: why not just assume he doesn't?

Now, you may wonder about the pseudo-theoretical physics in this post. But it's there for a reason - postmodernists of the high period famously loved half-baked quantum mechanics, see Alain Sokal for details. But the modern global Right has operationalised postmodernism as a system of power.

Drive-by quantum mechanics, ideological critique, constitutional law, and logical philosophy - all in one convenient blogpost!

The enemies of embittered freedom come in unexpected forms

Following an unexpected referral to this blog, I came to this discussion of Theodor Adorno. Well, that takes me back. I remember having reams of him stuffed down my neck at Vienna University in the winter of 2001, which I didn't like in the least. I certainly didn't like the cult of personality some people surrounded him with, (I remember one painfully well-brought up student punk who went around with "Glückliche Sklaven sind die Feinde der erbitterteren Freiheit" scrawled on his tastefully ripped shirt) and I didn't think much of his books.

So I'm immensely amused by this tale of how he reacted to the student movement of 1968, when a group of his students at the Institut für Sozialforschung decided to occupy the place. Specifically, he called the cops, like any good Ordinarius faced with a buncha dirty hippies. Scheißkritische Theoretiker!, (Shitty critical theorists!) howled the leader of a demo as the riot squad dragged him away past Adorno's office.

Wonderfully, having insisted on pressing charges against the advice of Jürgen Habermas, ever the most reasonable of the Frankfurt Schoolies, Adorno didn't bother to give evidence against the guy because it would have interrupted his summer holidays. I can't help imagining him - trudging up an alp? in lederhosen? sunning himself on the white beaches of Sylt? - surrounded by the Daimler-Benz executives and senior civil servants he excoriated as bearers of faschistische Kontinuität, whilst the case he insisted on bringing against the student he set the cops on collapsed for want of his testimony.

It's always interesting to watch somebody confronted with their own utopia, and Adorno's ferocious assaults on authority could really only be read by a 60s German student as a savage critique of the old-fashioned professoriat's authoritarianism and pomposity. He even made use of this trope in his own work - I think it's Erziehung zur Mündigkeit in which he boasts that when he returned from exile, there were still students at Frankfurt who clicked their heels when they spoke to an academic, and now look at them! That was written some years after his experience on the receiving end of his own principles, so clearly he re-evaluated somewhat, or at least he recovered his composure.

3GSM World Congress: Iberia Pax Beware

Currently in Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress, the mobile phone industry's annual shindig. And, blogging from the TYR Deployable Intelligence Centre Kit, aka my laptop, a length of cat 5 and a slightly iffy Internet connection, here I am.

First, though, a warning to travellers. If you are heading to Barcelona on BA, Iberia ex-Heathrow, or Lufthansa, DO NOT GO TO BAGGAGE RECLAIM, because your baggage will not be there. In fact, although these flights arrive at Terminal A, the baggage will be taken to Terminal B for some reason, so turn RIGHT and walk to Terminal B. Worse, if you do go to reclaim in Terminal A, you will not be able to return to the airside concourse, so you will have to leave Terminal A, walk along the road to B, walk along the length of Terminal B, pass through the departures security checkpoint, and seek your luggage.

Anyway, if you're a real techie, you won't have any checked baggage anyway, will you? My colleague, who did have checked baggage, succeeded in passing the security checkpoint by producing his ticket stub, but this is not recommended, especially for non-Spanish speakers. This ends the public service announcement (without guitars).

I've had a couple of arse-awful transport stupidity experiences lately. In London, Iberia's self-service check-in wasn't working, due to a subtle failure. It had run out of blank boarding cards, but was functioning in all other respects, so at the end of the process you were simply told it could not be completed. The ticket desk sent me to the fast bag drop desk, who printed off my boarding card with the seat I'd selected on the machine, thus proving that it was actually working. But, as no-one thought to mention this, still less put more blanks in the machine, everyone else was clarted up in the queues.

Then, a couple of days before that, it snowed! Knowing South West Trains, I thought I'd check on the Net before setting out. Imagine my surprise to find no meaningful information on the SWT homepage, their real-time website (at the annoyingly unrelated url journeycheck.com) fallen over in a puddle, and the Network Rail Live Departure Boards site overloaded enough to fail to load actual data, but not enough to fail to load the inevitable banner ads. Don't want to lose any of those precious eyeballs, now, do we.

The howling clue vacuum was just as obvious a few weeks earlier when a storm brought down 1,000 trees onto the rails. If you're seeking either SWT or the LDBs, it's a fair assumption that you are either travelling or about to travel, so you'd think somebody might have considered that its users might not be seated comfortably before a 21" screen designer-spesh Mac G5 with a dedicated T1 line. But SWT's site is literally unreadable on a mobile gadget and there is no low graphics/mobile version (which would also help a lot in coping with peak loads). Network Rail's site is apparently "PDA friendly", which I take to mean "validated", but there is no direct link from the front page to any of the cutdown sites. They do have a WAP version, but then, if you're down you're down.

Compare Transport for London, whose tfl.gov.uk is quite humane in itself, but also has a genuinely austere mobile self. On the night, TFL was legible, SWT an eye-buggering slow-loading horrorshow.

Bleg: WebDAV

Dear Lazyweb: Where can I host a small WebDAV file before Saturday afternoon? Does NTL provide this service? (I'm a customer, but I dread talking to their support line. No, "turn it off and back on again" does not answer my question.)

Build Beauly-Denny

What it says on the tin.

Enter headline here

This is the kind of story journalists are meant to dream of. But just how would you headline a tale that involves a knife- and pepper-spray wielding female astronaut, an apparently fantasised love triangle, a 900-mile drive, adult nappies, and a freakout confrontation in an airport carpark? So J.G. Ballard.

Fortunately it happened in the US, where long headlines are expected. My best effort so far: Knife-Wielding Aviatrix in Love Triangle Wears Nappy to Airport Freakout. You know where the comments are.

Something's happening, but you don't know what it is..

What a sick business the affair of the A-10A tapes is turning into. Recap: the inquest into the deaths of the Household Cav soldiers killed by a US airstrike in Iraq in the spring of 2003 had learned that the MOD's own board of inquiry, which sat in secret, had heard a cockpit voice recorder tape from the aircraft that killed them. However, as the US Air Force classified it secret, it could not be released, even though a copy arrived at the court.

Then, strange things happen. First of all, the coroner says he'll play it anyway. Then, the transcript appears in a national newspaper this morning. Which national newspaper? Ye gods, the Sun. This is, well, out of character, to say the least. Something odd seems to be happening over there - since we last discussed them, they have come out against various manifestations of the surveillance-bureaucratic complex, something they never used to do. And now this - a defence story that isn't OUR BOYS GLURBY ONTOS 4 BLISS, and throws direct discredit on the Americans.

It's pretty damn discreditable, too. The transcript reveals every failure you can think of, and then some. Apart from a drastic lack of situational awareness on the part both of the A10 pilots and a controller callsign "Manila Hotel", there is some hopeless vehicle recognition - they took the Scimitar CVRTs for ZIL flatbed trucks - and desperate human factors issues. The mis-recognition comes only after "Manila" had suggested that no friendly forces were in the area, thus helping form a perceptual fix. Progressive target fixation sets in. Even though the pilots spot the orange panels on the turrets of the Scimitars, a NATO standard recognition mark, the formation leader rationalises it away and neither the other pilot, nor the controller, says anything.

Neither does anyone communicate with another US Marine ANGLICO forward air controller on the ground until he comes up on the net, after it's too late, to stop the attack. A British FAC wasn't heard because the A10s, "Manila Hotel", and the Marine FAC ("Lightning 34") had changed to another frequency. After the strike, it's clear they knew they'd fucked up - not only does one say "we're going to jail", but they keep saying they thought the orange panel was a "rocket".

But there is always one solution that works. Guess whose contract won't be renewed? Apparently they only took the coroner, Andrew Walker, on because of a "backlog" of military inquests in Oxfordshire. Backlog? So, there aren't going to be any more corpses coming into Brize Norton? Can we have that in writing?

When Memetrackers Attack

OK, so there's a memetracker web service called Visibility Index that claims to monitor "positive" and "negative" Internet activity about your company. Seems either Caterpillar, Inc. or someone with an interest in them is using it.

On Sunday, I used a metaphor and described Thomas Barnett as being like a Republican caterpillar beginning to stretch out the beautiful wings of shrillness. This made me, briefly, a top-five source of negative PR points for the manufacturer of diesel engines, bulldozers, and such. If I'm not very much mistaken, this post should repeat the experiment.

I imagine the working principle is that it searches Google for [company name], then carries out some sort of test to sort "positive" and "negative". It can't surely have been the word "Republican" that done it? Caveat emptor.

Never get out of the boat

Sebastian Junger has a spectacular report in Vanity Fair on the MEND guerrillas in the Niger Delta. Seriously, read the whole thing - we have corrupt warlords, men with Czech machine guns, huge outboards, and a crazy look in the eye, communiqués issued by a mysterious online presence, people in the US phoning their friends in Nigeria on mobile phones to track the movements of the reporter. All that good 4GW stuff.

Some points that arise: so far, despite the wide applicability John Robb, William Lind and others give to "global guerrillas" theories, their effectiveness appears to be concentrated in societies of one particular type. Southern Nigeria could almost be an ideal type of the rentier state invented for a scenario-planning exercise. Its economy is dominated by a single resource export, poorly substitutable, whose sale is denominated in hard currency and whose revenues are monopolised by an elite of questionable legitimacy.

The local-currency benefits of oil have been taken, as is usual in such states, by selling below-cost fuel, which in turn means a perpetual fuel shortage as demand rises fast and the state oil company can't afford to build refining capacity. The costs are, again as usual, socialised in terms of pollution, land grabbing, and the Dutch disease.

The guerrillas' aim is, at bottom, to redistribute export earnings. Other ideological motivations may be interpolated in this, whether because the guerrillas believe in them, or because ideologically-motivated groups seek out the guerrilla/black market scene. Popular support, almost always on class lines, makes it possible to continue the cycle of repeated systems disruption John Robb has described so well. Exports are the chief target, as in Iraq, where the NOIA has systematically set out to permit enough oil production to feed the Baiji refinery and no more. As the sale of oil products at home is a lossmaker for the elite, and exports their source of hard-currency profit, they hope this will coerce the elite.

A further twist is that attacking foreign companies is a force-multiplier. The companies are likely to exert more pressure on the elite, as are the governments of their home countries if it goes far enough. There is also a fracture of interest between the foreign companies and the elite - they have no interest in crushing the rebels if making a deal with them behind the elite's backs would serve as well. And the whole point of being a rentier state elite is that you don't have to study petroleum engineering and go to work, because you hire expats to do this, which leaves you free to enjoy the fruits of power.

But it strikes me that, at bottom, it's just guerrilla warfare adapted to crappy oil tyrannies. The crucial element is still popular consent at the tactical level, and the crucial political dynamic is still primarily Marxist. The style, though, is sui generis, like the Hell's Angels, NWA, and Mr Kurtz plus the pirate mythos.

What links these links?

Evolution appears to accelerate over time, and new scientific evidence suggests this is due to bacteria exchanging genes - but not within their own species, but horizontally, between groups. Thus, the total rate at which genetic information is exchanged can be faster than that provided by sexual reproduction and random mutations alone.

Horizontal information exchange - it's also the way ideas spread if you let them. Like cafés, lab corridors, open-source software, remixes, and (sadly) 4th-generation warfare's cooperating IED teams. And it's what built your immune system:

"We know that the majority of the DNA in the genomes of some animal and plant species – including humans, mice, wheat and corn – came from HGT insertions," Deem said. "For example, we can trace the development of the adaptive immune system in humans and other jointed vertebrates to an HGT insertion about 400 million years ago."

The new mathematical model developed by Deem and visiting professor Jeong-Man Park attempts to find out how HGT changes the overall dynamics of evolution. In comparison to existing models that account for only point mutations or sexual recombination, Deem and Park's model shows how HGT increases the rate of evolution by propagating favorable mutations across populations...

"Life clearly evolved to store genetic information in a modular form, and to accept useful modules of genetic information from other species," Deem said.

Meanwhile, Thomas P.M. Barnett's slow march into the arena of the shrill continues. He advocates a Danish- or Scandinavian-style combination of a welfare state with deregulation, but his personal development isn't what concerns me here, inspiring as it is to watch a Republican caterpillar unfurl the wings of shrillness. What got me was this..

Then there’s this lurid fascination with the top 1 percent who are cleaning up--Michael Jordan style--as the search for global talent gets hotter and hotter. But that’s a hard one to curtail, since the rising complexity of managing global corps simply drives up the cost of effective leadership.

I mean, who wants less effective leadership of these globe-spanning industry leaders?

How much of this is really just the well-known phenomenon that every inefficiency creates its own constituency? After all, it's not the complexity of their activities that increases with global reach and greater scale - it's the complexity of the organisation. Hierarchical information loss, diseconomies of scale, and conflicting interests make the task so much harder, so many fewer people could tackle it, and hence the economic rent to them increases. Alternatively, the same factors select those people who can manipulate the hierarchy in order to extract more money.

"Managing increasing complexity" is very close to "managing the management", which is a self-licking lollipop. The answer is to make the organisation more simple. Moving on, there used to be a British police organisation, the National High-Tech Crime Unit, that acted as technical advisor to police forces in the UK. Recently, the government created a big, complex new organisation, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, which subsumed it. Now, the Association of Chief Police Officers wants to recreate a small, expert group outside SOCA to advise police forces on NHTCU's old job.

Oilrigs to turbines

In Louisiana, they're rebuilding old oil rigs as platforms for an offshore wind farm. This is about the coolest thing I've heard in years. When do we start doing this in the North Sea? It's not like we haven't got enough dead shipyards.

On a related issue, Lotus seems to be enjoying a new flush of youth as a designer of electric cars. As well as the linked one, don't they build the Tesla chassis as well? See also Tanfield Group of Newcastle.

Wardriving Tony

The immeasurable SpyBlog has been doing fine work reducing the bamboozlement certain bloggers have been propagating regarding government e-mail addresses and the cash-for-peerages inquiry. (Shorter: "x.gsi.gov.uk" domains denote the top level of network security, not TEH SEKRIT EMAILS!!)

But the Spy has found something, though - as well as the netblocks assigned to Energis and C&W's Government Secure Intranet operations, there's another, PA space out of Pipex, that's registered to the "Prime Minister's Office". Some of the IPs in this block are used for the No.10 website, but not all.

I have a little theory. I can well imagine that the No.10 LAN is entirely x.gsi and secured within an inch of its life by the securigurus at CESG. Which gives you a problem when you have non-gov.uk visitors. Would you invite the CEO of Google over and not offer him any bandwidth? Quite a lot of security-minded organisations maintain segregated networks for their own purposes and visitors. For example, at a large IBM facility in Montpellier, they have not just a secure LAN and a secure WLAN, but also a nonsecure WLAN firewalled off from the rest of the system for random visitors to use.

There is of course one way to find out...

Here we go again, again, again

Well, Mick Smith quotes the Parachute Regiment's journal as saying that Brigadier Butler was forced into going along with Operation MOUNTAIN THRUST, the offensive the US command in Afghanistan initiated the month before General Richards arrived in Afghanistan. Read the whole thing. This is much as I thought at the time - essentially, neither the Americans or the Afghan government had had an effective presence there since 2001, and the arrival of British troops was an irresistible temptation. The one month's interregnum between their arrival and the change of command meant that the Americans could essentially borrow the train set and then hand over the mess to the Brits.

Given this bad start, shorthandedness, and the non-start of the reconstruction effort, I reckon Richards can claim to have done reasonably well in having won all the fights, extricated the army from an ill-advised posture, and come to a sensible settlement at Musa Qala that actually did hold and permitted the expansion of our area of control. More recently, the first big success, the restoration of the Kajaki dam, is within reach. Now, though, it looks like the increase in force when 12th Mechanised Brigade relieves 3 Commando Brigade has actually managed to buy us rather less influence with the Americans. Dan McNeill is the new commander, the ARRC staff is going home with Richards, and the Taliban have responded by pushing a force back into Musa Qala, setting a sprat to catch a McNeill.

Antagonising Iran, the only power that is actually getting anything done in Afghanistan, isn't going to help either. (I was amused to see this post drawing traffic from parliament.uk hosts.)

This is Radio Clash on pirate WLAN

OK, so this guy's designed a little program that is intended to provide access to pay-for-play wireless LANs. The idea is simple - one host actually pays up, and connects to the WLAN, and then acts as a proxy for other users, who treat the "WiFi Liberator" as a WLAN router. My initial thought was that "oh gawd, he says it's an art project....I hope he's not going to give the users of the Liberator RFC1918 addresses, seeing as practically all WLANs use private addresses and NAT."

In fact it's actually better engineered than that. Rather than multiple-natting, you have to set up a small web proxy server on a machine with a globally routable IP address, and the Liberator host tunnels into that machine, and the traffic is broken out onto the public Internet there. That, of course, also opens up some other useful possibilities - if the tunnel is encrypted, which it damn well should be, and the proxy is located in a civilised country, it's also censor-defeating. Actually, closer reading shows that the tunnel is implemented using TCP-over-ICMP, which despite being clever means that it's going to be slow. There's no mention of encryption, and the user is advised to leave the WLAN encryption off to preclude the need to give others a password - so this is certainly not for use anywhere dodgy.

One problem, though, and it's a traditional one. Why does nobody ever think of the children...sorry...the radio implications? WLAN can only be used as informally as it is because it has various features to deal with inter-network interference. Specifically, any device using it has to listen-before-transmitting, and renegotiate the channel with the other party if there is someone else there. This works, but the more interfering networks there are, the more time spent looking for a patch of the 2.4GHz ISM band quiet enough for a chat, and the lower the informational throughput - the first 11Mbits/s 802.11 cards sometimes used more than 50 per cent of the rated link speed for informational overheads like network control messages and resending dropped packets.

Now, the problem with this proposal is that it suggests that you plonk another WLAN router, transmitting merrily on the default channel, in somebody else's network where they will by definition interfere. This might be a feature, if you think making other people's Internet access shit will convince them of the rightness of your cause, but I reckon subjecting them to electronic warfare jamming is probably a loser.

why not just bounce it and see just what goes well

Jamie K, hence the Madchester title, takes issue with a Johann Hari column arguing in favour of National Service on the grounds that it will make politicians less likely to go to war. Two points: first, as a commenter points out, making the army less efficient as a way of preventing war is stupid. It's also as bad, morally, as promoting wars to be fought by someone else - in the event that there is a war, you are effectively hoping that someone else is more likely to get killed.

Second, and more importantly, we have a practical experiment to inform us. Consider Desmond Swayne, Conservative MP for New Forest West. He is the only British legislator to have taken part in the war with Iraq. Despite knowing that he had a mobilisation commitment, he voted repeatedly for the invasion of Iraq, and answered the call when it came. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he is the only pro-war politician in any coalition nation to have risked his personal comfort and safety, not to mention a significant chunk of his income, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Sheena's party, that's a case in point

OK, Slugger O'Toole quotes the complete lobby briefing by PM's Spokesman Tom "Walter Mitty figure" Kelly. What struck me is not just that the Big Kahuna moving through the joint is a cop these days. That was obvious enough, ever since Angus McNeil and Norman Baker punched through the crust of elite consensus. No-one had ever imagined that someone would actually report a PM to the cops over the well-known and entirely ignored provisions of the 1925 act, but there was no specific factor you could name that would keep Bob, Bill, and their brothers from the door at No.10. Just the perceptual framework. No surprise that a Scot Nat and a Lib Dem - note that these are the only parties whose names are routinely truncated - were the ones to bring a drop of the old sys.disrupt to the party.

But the there here? Here it is. Scrolling down the transcript, you get to this beauty:

Asked if Jonathan Powell had been questioned again, the PMOS said that Jonathan Powell was a Special Advisor and therefore a temporary Civil Servant, therefore he would not talk about him or his work.

Now, I've made fun of Powell before. The head of Blair's personal staff is worthy of a whole blog - his super-elite background, his parents' closeness to the neoconservative/Thatcher/Bush scene, his decision to make a career outside the civil service, his return, his insistence on the basic currency of Whitehall, line management powers, when he got there, his performance at the Hutton inquiry, all could make a neat map of the post-Thatcher deep state.

Irony doesn't come any deeper, though, than the man who the Serious Press excoriated for giving orders to civil servants without being a proper one himself being protected from the press on the grounds that he is a civil servant, and therefore, the PMOS could not possibly answer questions about him for fear of politicising the civil service.

Of course, the whole argument about "politicising the civil service" serves the Redwood consensus beautifully. Look at its apostles - Lord Butler is exhibit A, one of a tiny elite of bureaucratic chieftains to have run not one but two official whitewashes. The first one let Jonathan Aitken off on the grounds he was a gentleman. The second let Tony Blair off on the grounds his terms of reference limited him to "systems". These were political acts, pure and simple. The first served, unsuccessfully, the aim of protecting ministers and officials from institutional scrutiny. The second protected the unfettered discretion of the intelligence-administrative deep state.

What is meant by "politicising" changes over time. It's dynamically typed, as a programmer would say. It used to be "Shock! The Labour government expects the government press officers to argue its case!" This usually came from the retired, for reasons that should be obvious. Now, it's "Shock! Parliament and the broader public wants to see the documents!" This comes from everyone, for reasons that should be obvious.

But it's always, in the end, open to the government and the indistinguishable top officials to order anyone else around. Only accountability guarantees civil service independence.

Useless metric of the decade

Does the idea of "embodied energy" convey any useful information whatsoever in the vast majority of its applications?

I ask because I recently read about the difficulties faced in calculating this metric. For the uninitiated, it means the energy consumed in creating one unit of product X. People concerned about climate change and the supply of energy, of which I am one, sometimes suggest that it should be used as a reference to encourage the conservation of energy. For example, some say it should be printed on the labels of consumer goods, or even used as a basis for pricing.

But nobody can agree how to define it. Do you include the entire energy usage of the factory? Heating? Lighting? Street lighting? Do you include the energy usage of the workers on their way to work? If yes, why not include the energy they use at home - after all, they are spending their wages from one lot of energy use to buy electricity, gas, and vehicle fuel? Quite quickly you get into a theological level of debate. Should BT take responsibility for the power used to route every IP packet that crosses its network? After all, it's buying the power to drive the routers and switches. But a lot of those packets, even a majority, are transiting from - say - AT&T to DE-CIX, and BT didn't explicitly choose to carry them. The contractual relationships don't include them, and they didn't start it. Shouldn't either DE-CIX or AT&T pay?

Worse, when you try to implement an energy tax on this basis, you hit some horrible policy landmines. Why should I pay for the embodied energy in X? Why should the manufacturer get away with it? Or their workers - if you include their journey to work, why should they be able to get away with their energy use? Imagine if every issue of Mobile Communications International's price included a tax to represent the electricity South West Trains uses on my behalf to get me to work. Why should the reader pay so I can go to work? Why can't I use the same principle and charge my season ticket to expenses? This is serious. I don't control the use of the energy, so a tax on me can't change the behaviour of the people who do. There's no incentive for the manufacturer (or their suppliers, or the distributor..) to save energy, unless you double (triple or worse) count. But there is worse.

The whole thing is a lot like VAT carousel fraud. There, the fact that the tax is collected or refunded at various points between the manufacturer and the end-user means that it's possible to make a good living shunting the liability from level to level. The best solution I've seen is just to charge it at the final sale to the end user.

Now there's an idea.

Rather than the intellectual struggle to define embodied energy, the even tougher one to avoid creating stupid distortions, opportunities for fraud, and perverse incentives, and the cost of the bureaucracy needed to police it, why not just impose a tax on energy at the point of use? Or rather, on nonrenewable and CO2-generating energy? We've already got a highly efficient system for the collection of indirect taxation, run by the least corrupt civil service in the world. It's called HM Revenue and Customs, and the taxation is VAT, as mentioned above.

There is one kind of product where "embodied energy" is useful, of course. That is anything intended to convert energy available in nature into a useful form, like a solar panel or a wind turbine. If they produce less energy in their design life than they use (nonrenewable) energy in production, they are useless. Seeing as there are costs of production and operation beyond energy, though, they are very unlikely to be worth producing.

IPCC: First Reaction

Well, I haven't read the IPCC report yet, but I can report that I got my hands on an advance copy of Tim Worstall's reaction to it. Here goes:

Those scientist chappies are awfully clever. But what about this tangential issue? Here's what the MSM isn't telling you: if you make entirely different assumptions that are more favourable to TechCentralStation's funders, you get a much more right-wing result! You won't see that on the euro-fascist BBC!

By the way, the EU should be abolished except for the bits I benefit from.

Update: In comments, GeneralDyer links to his argument on BNPBlog that all climate scientists must be turned into soap. Obviously I don't condone this, but I am going to link to it very publicly and emphatically, nudge nudge wink wink knowwhorraimean.

Come to think of it, this is just a special case of the general Shorter Timmeh:

I say someone says X. But if you assume that all markets are exactly like the perfect competition model you learn in GCSE economics, despite the fact that all post-GCSE economics education is devoted to teaching you that this is not so, I'm right. Aren't I clever?

By the way, the EU should be abolished except for the bits I benefit from. Update: In comments, GeneralDyer links to his argument on BNPBlog that all European civil servants must be turned into soap. Obviously I don't condone this, but I am going to link to it very publicly and emphatically, nudge nudge wink wink knowwhorraimean.

A.J.P. Taylor famously said that Manchester's Free Trade Hall was the only public building in Europe named for an economic principle. When bloggers take over the world, we'll rename the LINX after Dan Davies for inventing the "Shorter".