DKE

I was reading the various Boris Johnson blogs earlier this week when something struck me. It was the combination of the Boriswatch story about the basis of the whole obsession with Routemaster buses falling apart, and the news that Boris Johnson's crazyarse idea about building an airport in the Thames Estuary was being examined "in-house" at the GLA, an organisation with no airport expertise at all. I thought, hell, this really is the Dunning-Kruger Effect at its best. Come to think of it, you could call this lot the Dunning-Kruger administration.

The DKE is a major result in cognitive psychology, discovered in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger at Cornell. They tested groups of students on various skills, and asked them to evaluate their performance relative to the rest of the class. They then marked the test papers, and informed the students of their scores. Here's the clever bit: they then asked them to self-evaluate again. What they found was this: high self-evaluation was correlated with low performance. The worse students, across all the skills tested, consistently thought they were the best; in fact, the worst 12 per cent marked themselves, on average, in the top 38 per cent.

That wasn't all. The gap between ego and reality shrank with greater competence; but it did so faster than you might expect, so the two lines crossed early. The most competent students actually tended to underrate their own abilities. And here's the really interesting bit. The genuinely sick bit; every psych experiment needs one of those. When the incompetent students were shown their grades, their self-evaluation got worse. The good news is that intensive teaching and practice improved both their performance and their self-evaluation.

Mayor of London? Sure I can do that. Piece of piss. Anyway, then there was some kind of kerfuffle in the Corfu yacht club involving my favourite shadow chancellor. Dunning-Kruger? You bet. And I'm suddenly faced with the thought that perhaps Boris Johnson *is* the clever one. Politically speaking, I mean. Obviously he's DKE up to here when it comes to airports, buses etc, but think about it; suddenly, the Tories are in a major fix. The economy is going down the toilet, but at the same time, the Tories' credibility on the issue is doing the same...and they're the opposition.

Perhaps Boris recognised that the Mayoral election was going to be a great opportunity, and there wasn't going to be many of those going for a while? Despite a lot of red-flashing warning signs the economy hadn't really suffered yet, the great consumer boom was still going strong, the Tories' success in the game of personality politics was still intact. All he needed was a good framing campaign; and the Bendy Jihad was it. In the same way as the subjects in the Dunning-Kruger experiment simply adjusted their view of reality to match their internal reality, this sort of media campaign surrounds us with false consensus, relying on us to adjust our internal references to match it. The Bendy Jihad was quite clearly designed to exploit two of the standard cognitive biases - DKE, and the availability cascade. This worried me quite a lot; it suggested that the Policy Exchange/Tory Decent crew could win anything.

But now? I don't think so. The times are not for bendy jihads and bicycling twerps. And George Osborne's horribly botched attempt at a political stabbing? So Dunning-Kruger.

Homemade particle physics

It all started with this Making Light thread; Bill Higgins was musing about improvising a radiation detector, which led him to this deeply cool device - scroll down for the cunning methodology that goes with it. But James MacDonald beat him, I think, with this cloud chamber implementation:

Field-expedient cloud chamber:
Needed:

1. shot glass.


2. High-proof vodka


3. Rubber balloon


4. Rubber band


5. Dry ice


6. Light source

Pour a shot of vodka. Drink it. Do not wipe out glass. Put rubber balloon tightly across mouth of glass, fixing it in place with rubber band. Set glass on block of dry ice. Shine light through side. Pull up on rubber sheet to lower pressure in the shot glass. Observe tracks in the cloud.

And then I saw this story; it turns out that when you rip off sticky tape (that's a scientific term) in a vacuum, there is a discharge of static electricity, so electrons are transferred from one side to the other, and when they strike the tape, they slow down. Energy is of course conserved, so it has to go somewhere, and somewhere in this case is a astonishingly powerful burst of X-rays. This is yer bremsstrahlung, right?

You can probably see where I'm going with this. Now, who sells dry ice in London N19? The spirit, obviously, is no problem. Need to think of a way of arranging to peel off the tape under a vacuum, though.

Hey, it's significantly less crazy than freeze-distilling H2O2, or doing the same thing to Timothy Taylor's Landlord Ale. (You know who you are.)

Bonus Tim Worstall Stupidity Watch

Shorter Tim, Energy Edition:

Commodity prices always come down in the end; except when I really want the price of steel to stay at 2007 levels because it harms the economics of wind power. Further, supply of manufactured goods always responds to price signals except when I have a bizarre ideological opposition to some particular technology. And nuclear power is magically proof against the price of materials, the cost of labour, the rate of interest, and the planning process.

Tim - nuclear power stations are made from reinforced concrete. What is reinforced concrete reinforced WITH? Perhaps this is why he doesn't go on about his metals trading business so much these days.

Actually, the article he's drivelling about is fairly sensible and much more optimistic than either Timmeh's deranged take on it or the Obscurer's headline; it is here. Basically, the worldwide boom in wind power is putting the industry under capacity constraints; like, say, the semiconductor industry in the PC boom. They can sell'em for almost any price as fast as they come off the line, and they've built up a huge order book. Of course, what will eventually happen is that the wind turbine makers will expand and probably eventually end up flooding the market in a few years' time. This will, however, definitively not happen with nuclear, because a nuclear power station is essentially a working definition of one-off job production; it's a hell of a lot easier to make something cheap when you're making thousands of it on a production line.

Further problems mostly centre on the planning process; both for turbines and for grid interconnection.

Of course, in Timmehworld this shouldn't be happening, because wind power is a bizarre plot organised by British socialists, which no-one else in the world would possibly use. But Tim lives in Portugal, one of the world's biggest and fastest wind developers; and as far as I know, the hens haven't stopped laying, the skies have not darkened, and the rain has not become chubby there. This doesn't change the essential issue, though; his problem is that it's gay electricity.

is there anything stupid going on at Tim Worstall's?

We've blogged before about the NHS's computer project. So I'm not at all happy about this remarkably silly post at Timmeh's. He takes issue with a post of Richard Murphy's about bank nationalisation:

Yup, the people who brought you the NHS Spine are to be put in charge of developing all banking software in Britain.

Well, this is a strawman to begin with. Is Murphy the Chancellor now? But let that pass. Really? A group of mostly American healthcare computing specialists? Several of which no longer exist? Or does he mean the big IT consulting firms involved - like IBM, BT Global Services, and Accenture? Because I'm pretty sure they do a hell of a lot of financial work as it stands; in fact, everyone was worrying last week about IBM's third quarter results precisely because banks are big customers. (They turned out to be OK, in that mysterious IBM way.*)

But perhaps he thinks the NHS NPfIT was developed by teh government bureaucrats? Or at least, he's willing to pretend it was to suit ideology? The whole problem with NPfIT, as we've said before, is that the system was developed completely in isolation from NHS bureaucrats or indeed anyone else who would have to use it. The NHS trust IT departments were kept well out of it. The upshot was that the developers knew literally nothing of the NHS's requirements, its business processes, or the data the system was meant to handle.

No wonder it was a disaster. In fact, when a group of US hospital bureaucrats had a go at designing a medical IT system, they came up with a beauty - there's even a satisfied customer in the comments. Why? Because they knew what it was meant to do and how. Compare this comment:

I met a guy who works for this company. I cannot repeat what he said, since he has a family to feed. But suffice to say he was deeply worried about the implications for safety of life. That was a few months ago.

The whole thing is rotten to the core, and desperately needs to be scrapped. Now.

The good news is that the thing still doesn't work well enough to turn it on even as a pilot project, so we're safe for a while yet. But what did happen the last time the Government took on a really challenging in-house IT project? You ask Daniel Davies.

(* probably something to do with asking the fucking users - that or the staple Nazi market, or wearing a lot of pale blue shirts.)

Meet our intellectual masters

The Daily Mash is still making more sense about the economic crisis than the entire global conservative movement. ECONOMISTS WARN OF BILLY BRAGG:

Professor Bill McKay, of University College London, said: "The core economic purpose of any Labour government is to prevent Billy Bragg.

"If, as it appears, we are returning to a cycle of boom, Bragg and Jimmy Sommerville's excruciating falsetto, one is forced to ask the question, 'what is Gordon Brown for?'."

If you think about it, that's actually true; New Labour's chief aim has indeed been to prevent any return to Billy Bragg, by being tough on Bragg (i.e. noisy leftist opinion) and tough on the causes of Bragg (internal party democracy, social acceptance of Bragg, real ale, heavy industry, mass unemployment, etc). It now appears to be the case that the leader of the Conservative Party wants to bring back many factors correlated with Bragg. We may be facing a Bragg election.

Further, GOVERNMENT TAKES 60% STAKE IN AL-QAIDA.

Prime minister Gordon Brown said that if suspects cannot be detained for 42 days the only alternative was to nationalise much of the terror industry.

Mr Brown said: "This move is very much in line with our current strategy. If all else fails, just buy the fucker." He insisted the day to day operations will remain with a small group of religious psychopaths working out of a cave in Pakistan.

The prime minister said : "We must ensure that, as an institution, it continues to provide a useful, ongoing threat without actually blowing things up."

Who could deny that, deep down in the core bureaucracy, the Government, or rather the State, wants precisely that? There's just a shade of Terry Pratchett here, who I think nationalised burglary in one of his novels - the rationale was to provide jobs for burglars while keeping burglary down to a level that would be tolerable but wouldn't be so low as to put the insurance companies out of business. Seriously, you could do worse than abandoning the newspapers and just reading the Mash.

From the pony to the spherical cow

Whilst we're at it; watch Tim Worstall claim that the banks don't have any mortgage-backed securities on their books. Indeed, Tim, if you were right there would be no reason to nationalise them; but then, we wouldn't be in this mess. As Molotov said to Ribbentrop, so if the British are finished, why are we in this bunker and whose are those planes?

It's always a laugh waiting for the talking points caches to sync with the authoritative nonsense server.

Attack Of The Camorset

Cameron today outlined his plans for economic responsibility to replace "irresponsible capitalism and irresponsible government" under Labour. He began his attack by accusing the prime minister of basing his financial decisions on "false assumptions" that he said had left the economy in ruins.

Among them were the ideas that a successful economy could be built on a "narrow base of housing, public spending and financial services" and "that you could abolish boom and bust, and that the good times would last forever".

Eh? A Tory complaining that the economy is too dependent on housing and financial services? Yes.

"We've got to broaden our economic base to include more science, more hi-tech services, more green technologies, more engineering and more high-value manufacturing, drawing upon a much wider range of industries, markets, people, towns and cities."

Did he just say that? Did Dave from PR just announce a medium-term industrial strategy? This is, by any measure, a political moment of the first order; the Tories, the people who decided UK plc should be a huge investment bank based in London, ran a high interest rate and strong pound policy that killed off most of engineering and high-value manufacturing, and whose pet thinktank apparently believes the North should be evacuated...they said that?

Perhaps they've realised that yes, Virginia, the UK is no longer an oil exporter because they pissed it all up the wall in the 80s and 90s, and that turn-London-into-a-huge-investment-bank thing ain't looking so clever any more. Perhaps they've found one of Michael Heseltine's old memos from his shakeout'n'invest period in the files. OK, then, where do I sign?

But what is this?

He dismissed critics who believed that "permanent state intervention" was the only way to avoid a repeat of the problems. Those who believed the change the country needed was a "turn to the left" were wrong, he said, as he promised to inject greater responsibility into the economy through a centre-right platform of measures

Responsible us back the DNA-sequencer activities of Amersham International plc, willya? Could you perhaps responsible up a wave power industry while you're there? Anyway, before we slide into bitterness...there's also this.

He promised a new debt responsibility mechanism, with the Bank of England required to write regularly to the Financial Services Authority about sustainability of the level of debt in the economy. "If the level of debt is growing unsustainably, the bank will instruct the FSA to ensure banks either slow their lending or put aside more capital."

So no permanent state intervention....except for the bit where you take powers to intervene in the management of the entire banking sector, including the bits that are still independent of the state. Also, direct government controls on lending? Isn't that the Sovietisation of Britain or something? What next, exchange control stamps in your passport?

But that's apparently it. Cameron is planning to regenerate the entire industrial base (and "high tech services", which I think means BT Global Services 'cos we don't have any other firms like that since Leo Computers in the 1960s), and he intends to do this simply by running a smaller budget deficit, and imposing a bank lending corset. He's not even promising any tax cut ponies.

There is one actual measure in there, though. Apparently he wants to change the insolvency laws to protect "sound but struggling businesses" (and again, there's a sick laugh from the 80s for you...). But how is this going to interrelate with the Cameron Corset proposal? Camorset for short, which sounds nicely like the sort of southwest-central shire where the buggers come from. If it's harder to cut off credit to those "sound but struggling" businesses, but the banks have to reduce their loan books 'cos Dave says so, where do they cut? Doesn't that imply they'll have to bear down on everyone else even more? Why should a sound business that's not struggling quite enough to be protected take the punishment? (Why don't any Tories seem to understand marginal economics at all?)

Operation Firedump - the great rampcheck

So, if World President Brown was to ask me what to do about the headless Viktor Bout empire, and the operators like it, what would I say?

Here's what I'd do: Let's draw up a big list of dodgy airlines. Better, let's use rules; ex-Soviet aircraft, or old 737s, based in the UAE, registration in certain West African, Balkan, or Central Asian states, routes mostly to Middle Eastern and African destinations, and (especially) aircraft bought from or sold to other airlines in the list. We could implement it in software quite easily, at least to provide a filtered list for humans to review.

And then, whenever they land anywhere with trustworthy civil authorities, let's invoke the long-standing right of any landside state under the Chicago Convention to do an immediate safety inspection, a ramp check as they say in the trade. Naturally, quite apart from crawling over the plane with feeler gauges, that will involve checking all the documents; the manifest, the tech log, the ops manual, the QRH, the pilots' licences and log books, the air waybills for everything on the manifest, the aircraft registration documents... And, of course, whilst we're at it there's no reason why Customs and Immigration shouldn't search the hold.

If anything is out of order, we'll ground the plane; if anything is really bad, we'll seize it; if anything is outright criminal...yes. It may sound a bit hopeful, but consider some of the blog's back pages. We've seen UN-11007 hurtle off the runway in Riyan, officially full of fish but they burned all too well; the An-12 was registered in Kazakhstan to Air Bas, operating from Sharjah, but was working under yet a third and unknown AOC, that of "RPK" - a company which doesn't seem to exist. In Sudan, an Ilyushin-76 crashed working for Jet Line International, registered to Aerocom, on lease to East-West Cargo. One of the old Irbis Il-18s was grounded in Pakistan after a terrifying flight, several times overloaded with passengers, during which one of the pilots passed out with hypoxia.

It seems to be a defining condition of arms traffickers in the air that the aircraft make sense from one angle, usually that of the UAE authorities; as soon as you look at the details the whole picture dissolves. Here's another example:

During a ramp check in Beirut, it was discovered that the aircraft's operating documentation was split among all these firms; the insurance policy applied to a different plane, the tech log was from Ariana, the MEL (the list of the minimum equipment required for safe operation) was the American Airlines one, later replaced by a Swazi one that hadn't been approved by the Swazi authorities. These institutional flaws complemented a long list of physical ones. None of this should be surprising; UTA's chief pilot wasn't qualified on the B727 and neither was anyone else there. The tech manager was trained on the Lockheed Tristar and DC8, and the strong impression is given that literally no management structure for 727 operations existed...

So, I'm delighted to see this report from SIPRI, always sound on the issue right back to the 90s, which suggests exactly that. You can get it here. Of course, being a bunch of Swedes or at least in Sweden, they're a lot more serious than me - they've got studies an stuff and tables and data. But don't take my word for it. Read the whole thing

Now, the same people are trying to get a change in European Union regs through the European Parliament to make this job easier. You might want to tell your MEP about it, especially if they're a member of ALDE - the European Liberals.

Update: Here's a specific talking point.

Lobby for, and support amendments and mechanisms by the relevant EU actors: European Commission DGs, the European Council, the European Parliament and concerned member states “to formulate and implement effective measures using existing EU instruments and regulations that will further reduce the number of air cargo and maritime companies involved in destabilising or illicit small arms shipments to Africa”.

GSM Warlord, again

Mobile phone wars. Georgians complain they can't get American submarine cable engineers to come back, for fear. And they sue.

The Administrative Panel of the Tbilisi City Court has rejected an appeal filed by Russian cellco MegaFon against fines imposed by the Georgian National Communications Commission (GNCC) for unlicensed use of radio frequency spectrum within Georgia's sovereign territory. The GNCC won its claim that before the recent war Megafon covered only part of the former Autonomous Republic of South Ossetia, but that in August the operator unlawfully expanded its coverage area and exceeded the conflict zone to include the regions of Gori and Kareli.

Trade does follow the flag, then; at least some kinds. I'm struggling to see how the Georgians hope to collect, but I suppose they feel better for it.

Meanwhile: a plan.

Non-governmental organisations would distribute mobile phones to Afghans for them to make their own video diaries.

Anti-Western films already circulate on Afghanistan's estimated 6m mobiles. These films are also distributed among the country's half a million internet users.

The plan has been devised by an outside consultant. Although no decision has yet been taken, it is said by the Foreign Office to "have merit". It envisages having up to 100 short films made by Afghans ready in time for a film festival next summer.

A film festival? Christ, the Mick & Ruth approach is taking hold. More seriously, I can't think of any way this is going to actually harm anyone, so I suppose it should be welcomed, and there's a reasonable chance of it being a useful check on warlords of various persuasions. This is probably more useful, however.

I recall a similar project sponsored by the GSMA that involved a suite of short films by various directors, led by Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt. The killer detail being that while he was being feted at 3GSM, he was also on the lam from the Indian police...

if you're not on the list you're not coming in

OK, so what about those identity cards for (some kinds of) foreign nationals? You'll recall that the Government promised, back in the spring, to have them out and operational in 300 days. As late as July, there were no actual contracts for the job, but they did actually manage to bring in Thales to start work. So how's it going?

Well, despite the vast cutback in scope and scale, the decision to base it on crappy existing records, and just to forget about the National ID Register for now (thus obviating the whole point)...it's already over budget by 29% and it's sliding right, from March 2009 to August 2010. Cracking; the element of the project they specially rushed forward in order to get something, anything working on time has now slid so badly that it's caught up with the rest of the project.

Meanwhile, the Home Office is issuing 5,400 fraudulent passports a year, among some 200,000 dodgy docs in circulation. Apparently "automated facial recognition" will solve it; this doesn't make very much sense, as surely the main problem is people submitting genuine photographs of themselves and falsifying the biographical section of the form.

Further, face recognition systems are poor enough (remember the one in Newham that never actually caught anyone?) at positive identification; checking the face provided against the one on file. The failure rate in the Home Office 2004 trials was about 30 per cent. But the IPS and DVLA seem to think they can rely on it to guarantee that the same person isn't already registered, and do this by matching faces to a database containing tens of millions of faces, taken under all kinds of different circumstances. What kind of false-positive rate can you expect from that?

In fact, it's worse; if they're trying to detect multiple applications or applications under false names, the evidence of an honest application will be the absence of a match. So the most common failure mode will result in the document being issued anyway, and there is no way to detect this. And you won't be able to assume that a match is proof of fraud either, because of the inevitable false positives; so the chance of successfully getting a passport or driving licence in someone else's name might actually be better.

HOWTO: remove giant statue of Sir Fred Goodwin

think I've said before that I find public sector accounts incredibly weird. Here's a great example; it's a very good FT story on the bank nationalisation plan and how it affects the national finances. Bizarrely, the £25-50bn of government bond issuance required to raise the money probably won't count towards the public sector net cash requirement (what used to be the PSBR in John Major's days of sound finance...not!); it's a "financial transaction" and these are excluded.

Well, that makes a weird sort of sense; the liability on one side is matched by an asset (the stake in the banks) on the other, the net change in the government's cash position is zero (at first, but even later, any dividend paid on the preferred stock would at least balance the interest payments). The next bit, however, gets really strange; although it's not counted as new public borrowing, it is counted in the figure for the national debt. It's debt, right? Yes, but if the government was anything else but the government, the increased debt would be matched on its balance sheet by the stash of bank shares. It being the government, however, it's not.

Now, it gets really counterintuitive when it comes to the really big money - the £250bn guarantee for wholesale bank lending. Apparently, if the Government (as suggested) charges the banks a significant fee for the guarantee, this will force it to take the full wad on its books as a liability of the public sector. (Even though most of any transactions among the eight participating banks will add up to zero; if Lloyds lends Barclays £1bn and Barclays lends HBOS £1bn, and Barclays then goes bust, the state guarantee would only come into it if Lloyds and HBOS couldn't agree to settle the transaction between themselves.) If the Government offers the guarantee free of charge, however, the rules on public sector contingent liabilities mean they can keep it off the books. Yes, you heard that correctly; it's in some sense financially better for the state not to receive quite a lot of money.

Anyway, in these weird times, let me propose a weird solution. The Government has promised to put manners on the banks in return for the £50bn, pressing for executive pay restraint and measures to help small businesses. Some people are concerned that they won't be able to make this stick because preference shares don't come with a vote. I disagree; whatever the formal terms, anyone who fronts up as much as half of RBS's capital base is going to have several billion votes, and indeed it looks like the CEO is going to be sacked as a condition of the deal. It's a question of political will.

EDINBURGH, October 12th: Crowds cheered as the giant statue of Sir Fred Goodwin was torn from its perch by a Royal Engineers' armoured tractor. As the news spread this morning, a mob gathered around the base of the monument, unavailingly beating it with sledgehammers and dragging at it with ropes. Eventually, Sergeant Mick Kelly's Chieftain AVRE arrived. After a few minutes, its engine roaring, the huge vehicle succeeded where they had failed and the dictator's figure crashed into the dust. In a sinister orgasm of rage and contempt, the mob beat it with their shoes, spitting and jeering as the ruin was towed through the streets....

Like I said, it's a matter of political will.

However, it will be much easier to hold the Government's feet to the fire about this if they do have formal rights to intervene, as well as safer, as unwinding the stakes in a hurry in order to punish a recalcitrant bank wouldn't be easy. One option is to buy ordinary shares as well as the new preference ones, and have the Treasury Shareholder Executive manage them; the numbers involved would put the Government in a position to insist on a seat on the board and extensive influence over management. However, this would be riskier, as ordinary shares don't have the charge over cashflow the preferred kind do, and it would also spook the market even more, as issuing the new shares would dilute the existing shareholders.

It would also be affected by weird public accounting, as this would make the banks into public-sector entities and therefore bring them on the Treasury's books; in which case, only their liquid assets would be counted against their debts and the national debt would therefore reach unheard-of proportions.

But there's another option. For many years after privatisation, the Government held so-called "golden shares" in a range of ex-nationalised industries considered to be strategically important. For example, that in Rolls-Royce gave the Government a veto over changes of ownership and the right to reserve the top management positions to British citizens. Some of them were abandoned in the early 2000s at the request of the European Commission; notably those in BAA plc. Now, these shares were legally structured as "special preference shares", and the Office for National Statistics didn't consider them to be sufficient state control to put BAE, RR, National Grid plc, BAA and the rest on the books - but they certainly granted the Government special rights over these companies. In fact, they still do at BAE Systems and Rolls.

Update: Oh well, here comes the shock and awe. Sod golden shares, preference shares, whatever - it looks like we're in for the whole hog, 75% of RBS's market cap, voting stock, Government directors, sack the board, don't open the London Stock Exchange...fuck, did they just say that? Looks like the opening of the books must have been quite a dramatic event.

missing: 198 middle-aged men

I am beginning to think I was a little harsh on Simon Heffer yesterday. After all, it's got to be tough; not only has the entire structure of policies, assumptions, and style he's devoted his entire working life to just been demonstrated to be utter drivel, but who else is even trying?

Seriously. I'm sure there used to be a Conservative Party somewhere around here. You know - blue rinses, die hards, wets, dries, One Nation, Policy Exchange, Eurosceptics, backwoodsmen, Notting Hill set, John Redwood. That lot. Hey, only last week, they were still trying to save the Bradford & Bingley with magic central bank ponies. But now? Not a peep.

In fact, you'll find far better commentary on the crisis from the Daily Mash than you will from anyone even vaguely on the Right. The field has been left entirely to the professional economists, and the broadest possible Left.

But it's not just that; it's the whole of world conservatism. The US Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Bank and the Fund, the Republican Party - none have the least credibility.Who now remembers when the IMF was feared by all right-thinking people? If you want to know about the world economy, you ask some random blogger called "Tanta"; if you want practical advice you ask Tom Scholar of HM Treasury and, well, Gordon Brown, who is suddenly basking in international respect. If you want cash you ask the Bank of Japan. And we're asking the Afghan government for assurances over the fate of POWs we might hand over to them....assurances that the Afghans won't let the Americans have them, because we don't trust them not to commit a war crime.

Again, the Daily Mash is more cogent than the global conservative movement:

Emma Bradford, an office manager from Luton, said: "Whenever things were going well there was always this voice in the back of my mind saying, 'make the most of it because sooner or later it's all going to be completely fucked by some bastard Americans'.

"I just assumed I'd be horribly maimed as a knock-on from one of their insane, catastrophic wars, but instead they have, in the most beautifully co-ordinated fashion, demolished the system that provides me with a job, a home and the vague hope that life may not an elaborate waste of time. I'd applaud them, if only I wasn't so weak from all the nauseating terror."

I mean, what do you do as a British Tory if you can't credibly speak for the City, the Landed Interest, or the Americans? Perhaps you do what Greasy Phil Hammond just did:

"This accelerating decline in house prices will inevitably lead to wider negative equity and more repossessions ."

In other news, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and one-man real estate lobby said that heat flows from a hotter to a cooler body, 2+2=4, and that he is a pathetic excuse for a politician who doesn't deserve to lick the boots of the civil servants at his putative department who are putting this lot back together.

I can't be the only one who's noticed that Brown's "national economic council" is built exactly on the traditional civil service handbook for a war cabinet, nor that it looks a lot less like a gimmick now than the week it was born. Nor that spotting the possible use of ATCSA2001 to recover Landsbanki UK assets is just the kind of thing we pay them for. Bank bailouts: expensive. Depression: worse. The Home Civil Service: priceless.

I won't fix your computer. Or perhaps I will...

KDE4 user? Been having problems with the DCOP and DBUS servers? Do your K-applications no longer launch from the graphical user interface? Do they sometimes not even launch from the command line? Have you got references to "file retriever failed: 149" in your .xsession-errors log?

Well, you're in luck. I've been having this problem recently - it's especially annoying as things like KNetworkManager and KPowersave can be affected, although non-KDE apps still work (except, of course, when they have to integrate with a K application in some way). It's associated with KDE4.1 in some way, as KDE3 apps still work, including the KDE3 versions of the same apps. But I'm not any more. Trying to fix the problem, I decided to have a look in the /tmp/ directory, and what did I find? North of 250MB worth of worthless cruft, old prefetched web pages, prefetched ads from old web pages, blank cache files, that sort of thing.

So I removed it all; just to be vindictive I ran the KGPG Shredder function through it as well. And then I moved on to the /yorksranter/tmp/, which was also stuffed with crap. Upshot? Everything works again, faster and better than before. Presumably, the stuffed /tmp/ caused KLauncher to time out before it got something registered somewhere. 250MB is a lot of cruft, but it's not that much; I think the problem was caused by the number of directory entries rather than their size. Perhaps I should set up a script to flush the e-crapper automatically.

Tory Takfiri

This arse-awful gaggle of crap by Simon "Craven" Heffer has already been effectively fisked by Dave Osler among others, but I reckon there's still some unexploited stupidity in there to be had. It's actually even worse than this one.

Basically, this article is an example of what Islamists would call takfiri thinking; takfiris are an especially crazy and extreme version of Wahhabist jihadi, who believe that the millions of other Muslims around them aren't really Muslims, and therefore are even worse than the crusader scum, the Jewish parasites, Shia apostates, etc etc. From this they conclude that they've all got to go. Now, if you need someone to drive a car packed with explosives into a police station, they're your boys; but unfortunately for you, they also have a tendency to turn on all your friends as well. This is roughly what happened in north-central Iraq over the last few years - the NOIA groups, like the 1920 Revolution Brigade, started out by being delighted at the steady supply of Saudi idiots with bags of money and a hankering to blow up, but found the buggers started to take over, chopping off heads and trying to decree weird laws.

So they very sensibly sold them to the Americans. Now, the word "takfiri" means something like "excommunicationist" or maybe "denouncer"; one who wants to purify the community by drumming out everyone who doesn't agree with him as traitors. So what can we make of something like this?

For the Government to take stakes in our leading banks in order to re-capitalise them is not quite the sovietisation of Britain, but it is a pretty good start. Given the instinctively socialistic leanings of our Prime Minister, it may well have been a move he undertook calmly and, quite possibly, with a little excitement.

The sovietisation of Britain? Christ. It wasn't so long ago that this would have been equivalent to an accusation of treason, and I suspect in Heffer's mind it still is. Did you see what I just did, by the way? I used an argument based entirely on my own claims about someone else's private thoughts. Quite possibly with a little excitement. Does it get any better?

By the 1970s the inevitable endgame of socialism was being played out: unions battling with government over rates of pay, prices and incomes policies, food subsidies, the three-day week, the winter of discontent. The state had to create jobs because there was precious little incentive for the private sector to do so. Investment was scarce. The state was everywhere.

The maxim of the American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand came close to fulfilment before the denouement of Old Labour on May 3 1979: that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

Oh. You just accused half the political spectrum of being as bad as Nazis or Stalinists. So no, it doesn't get any better. The whole point of Heffer's Tory Takfir is clearly visible here - it's to shift as much of the domain of legitimate debate over the line into the illegitimate, to excommunicate as many people to his left as possible, to demonise and menace and denounce. And, as always, we're asked to look for the secret enemy among us - Heffer takes care to include all previous Conservative governments in the general smear.

I'm not going to bother with the substance, such as it is; it's merely a selection of more or less dishonest strawmen and scare-stories. Britain between 1945 and 1979 was a poverty-stricken desert where the dead went unburied, evil socialists caused national bankruptcy in 1976 (but the finances being so dire as to give the IMF a veto on UK foreign policy in 1956 was apparently peachy), the 70s energy crisis was all Harold Wilson's fault but the 80s oil bust was entirely Thatcher's own work, and this comment has already summed it up very well:

Well, at least one thing is back to normal. Mr. Heffer has reverted to his usual excellent form after his brief lapse into constructive thought yesterday.

Not a word about the merits or demerits of the bailout versus *not* bailing out the banks. Goodness no, that would require judgement. Let alone any recommendations along the lines of "Liberty" and "Anti-Statism". That would require intelligence, insight, and courage.

No, I know a better strategy (Mr. Heffer knows it too by the way). Simply fill a few pages with gripes and moans while pointing out the (glaringly obvious) disadvantages of bailing out the banks, and no-one will ever be able to fault you. You were merely commenting on government action and voicing sensible caution.

If, on the other hand you wrote something substantive you could be faulted the day after tomorrow. Can't have that, right? Better safe than sorry.

But what, you ask, did I expect? The man's an idiotic blowhard, an egregious right-wing hack, a factual counterindicator of Kevin Hassett proportions. Here's the point, though - the politics of denunciation and excommunication is everywhere (even here) at the moment, and Heffer is in it up to his neck, and ignoring it just lets them grab hilltops.

participatory panopticon python programming post

Just to say that the Viktorfeed/Google Maps mashup is now working, and it's here. Relatedly, the URL for the GeoRSS feed is changing; replace seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml with www.harrowell.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml.

this is radio clash

Utterly trivial, but fun - here are all the songs I've referred to on the blog for the last 6 months, in reverse chronological order. (You know 3UK's voicemail service plays messages back to you in *chronological* order, so you have to listen to all the others before getting the most recent? USABILITY FAIL.)

Know Your Rights - The Clash
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
The Big Man and the Scream Team Meet the Barmy Army Up Town - Primal Scream featuring Irvine Welsh (can anyone point to this on the Net? thanks, dsquared)
Tommy Gun - The Clash
Stand Down Margaret - The Beat
Probably A Robbery - Renegade Soundwave
Battle Flag - Pigeonhead/Lo-Fi All Starz remix
Roll, Alabama, Roll - traditional (*Phil Edwards gets a point for finding this)
Song For My Sugar Spun Sister - The Stone Roses
Shipbuilding - Nick Lowe/Elvis Costello/Robert Wyatt
Boris The Spider - The Who
Do Nothing - The Specials
Hanging On The Telephone - Blondie
Fit But You Know It - The Streets
Ring Ring Ring (Ha Hey Hey) - De La Soul
Opportunity by You Say Party, We Say Die!
Marcia Baila - Les Rita Mitsouko

Mission accomplished

As someone once said: ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

It appears that - of all people - Boris Johnson gets the honour of dragging "Sir" Ian out of his spider hole. Of course, this raises all kinds of legal issues as to who, exactly, gets to hire'n'fire the commissioner of the Met. Is it the MPA? The Home Office? The Mayor? The Mayor's delegate, as deputy mayor for policing and fantasy airport design? It's a little more simple now Boris has decided to be his own MPA chair, but not much.

Yeah, well, wonk away. In the meantime, my plans include rejoicing, and possibly burning a huge effigy on Hampstead Heath. I'm having a good week; so far, the count of "things Alex has protested against that were actually reversed" has gone from zero, to one (Austrian tuition fees, which can only be estimated a smidgen picayune), and now to a massive two.

The Grauniad has details, including bits I'd forgotten - like bugging Lord Goldsmith! I mean, I can think of few people I'd rather bug, and anything that bugs him must be good, but it's rather illegal, a bad precedent, and undignified. Bugging the IPCC! Now that was just fucking outrageous. Pretending to have taken part in the Balcombe Street shootout! Yes! Seriously! Giving his best mate's IT shop three million quid! Lying about how much it cost to ineffectually harass Brian Haw!

Now there's a thought to chew on - Brian Haw can bed down tonight secure in the knowledge that he's outlasted his second police chief, through nothing more than his own glorious pigheaded obstinacy and their pompous, gut-chafing stupidity. It makes you proud to be British.



On this fine evening in the liberated capital, who on earth could remain bitter? Martin Kettle, that's who! And guess what? He's still whining about the Rio police force! Now let's ask a question - had the cops shot the train driver, or their comrade "Ivor", as very nearly happened, would anyone have mentioned the performance of this outfit? Obviously not. Kettle has been arguing that it's OK to off people who come from countries with really bad police forces, on the basis of some twisted sort of reciprocity. It's perverse, it's stupid, it's basically the same ugly racist gunk as the "De Menezes Was An Illegal" guy was pushing, dressed up for Guardian consumption. (Oh, so what did happen to that blog? It hasn't been updated for two years, presumably after it became clear he wasn't.)

More seriously, Kettle also manages to say that greater democratic oversight of the police is simultaneously good and bad, and he doesn't appear to know that we have elected police authorities, as we used to have watch committees, precisely in order that the police answer to someone who was actually elected. But who cares? Despite the fullest confidence of the prime minister, the home secretary, Kirsten Hearn, John Roberts, Jenny Jones, and Martin Kettle, ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

CSRF, and a bleg

Good post from Jeff Atwood about cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. One thing that comes to mind is that this is an example of the best kind of security exploit - one where the exploit depends on the target system doing the right thing. A Web server is meant to respond to URL requests, and determine its response according to the browser credentials and any arguments passed in with the URL.

A CSRF attack essentially consists of arranging things so that users cause this to happen without being aware of it; for example, placing an object on some other Web site that carries a link to the target URL, or a button that causes an HTTP POST to a target URL as well as whatever it's meant to do. As a refinement, you could so arrange things that the request was passed through something you control, so you can snarf the credentials and perhaps also the reply.

Rough; but it's precisely the fact that you can do this sort of thing that lets you do all sorts of Web-application magic. What happens when you call a third-party API (or even just an image hosted somewhere else) from within the browser? That's right, the user loads your Web page and incidentally loads the third-party service's URL with their browser credentials.This is how the del.icio.us feed in my sidebar (on TYR 2.0) gets there. Oh noes, no YouTube or embedded GMaps, or a whole lot of other useful stuff.

Oh well, enough of that. Does anyone know of a Firefox extension or similar that lets me submit comments I leave on other people's blogs to a service like del.icio.us? I specifically don't want a blogging tool, I just want to keep the comment URL, the URL of the related post if separate (i.e. haloscan style), and the text of the comment, and perhaps some tags.

All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy

What have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper.

The spider chart was meant "to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change," Wurmser said. "It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say, twenty relationships between X and Y, and twenty between Y and Z, then there's at least a suspicion that Z and X are interacting through Y." A map like that could bring insight, but there were perils in surmising too much.

Suppose X and Y were Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Twice they served in senior posts under presidents named Bush. In the early 1990s, they worked at the same address and were spotted together on international flights. They communicated frequently, encrypting their secrets....

That'll have been back when they still trusted him with the felt tip pens, I suppose. It reminds me a lot of this post from last August, regarding surrealism, rolling news, and TV anchor Glenn Beck's "methodology", which seems to have been identical to Wurmser's.

The problem with this sort of semi-random links-and-ties analysis is twofold - not only is your brain predisposed by millions of years of evolution to impose patterns on raw data, which means you're bound to find pattern if you look for it, but the spurious ones we inevitably perceive come from somewhere. Specifically, they come from our preconceptions, prejudices, and perhaps most of all, from the ones we don't want to admit to. Just as you'd only dump the whole logs from a computer program to trace a bug, you don't free-associate in order to make plans.

So as well as generating lots of time-sucking, budgetivorous false positives, this kind of thinking actually tends to make us behave even more stupidly, because it strengthens all the least rational forces within us.

I really mean this, by the way, and I'd love to hear from anyone who has comments about its potential implementation.

The Conservative Party: Can't Be Trusted With Glue

Oh bloody fuck. He's at it again. George Osborne is in his white coat, on the stage, flogging his snake oil. All he needs now is a gospel choir. I think we've pointed this out before, but here goes. The Bank of England was nationalised in 1946. It's part of the State. The money in it is as much public money as the money in the Treasury. It is fundamentally dishonest to pretend that you can take the assets of a failing bank onto the Bank's balance sheet without any cost to the Government budget.

And George Osborne thought the Bank's balance sheet was composed of public money back in the autumn of 2007. We were told that the loans to Northern Rock were regrettably unavoidable but also a terrible risk taken with our money. Here he is at ToryKennel:

"The question we now ask of the Chancellor is simple: has he been honest with taxpayers about the risks that they face, and has he told the whole truth? ...[snip]

The Chancellor will not tell us the size of the facility, when he expects it to be repaid or the terms of the repayment, even though much of that information is an open secret in the City. Indeed, the Governor of the Bank of England wants to publish the letter that he sent to the Chancellor to set out those terms.

Suddenly, after nationalisation, this statement became inoperative. The Bank of England had become a kind of charitable institution, nothing whatsoever to do with the Government, devoted to acting as a hospice for dying banks. Strangely, its Governor appeared unaware of this change.

Of course, this is a teachable moment about the Tories and the voluntary sector. As Boris Watch wisely points out, they are obsessed by the idea that Britain is full of charities who all have inexhaustible resources of their own, topped up regularly by squadrons of flying ponies. Poor old Gideon; what a nasty surprise to learn that the Bank is a public sector agency staffed by Daniel Davies' past colleagues and notably deficient in ponies.

Further, does the Bank even have the capital to digest a whole failed bank on its own hook, without having to turn to the Treasury, or print money? Well, we could always look at the sodding books, couldn't we? Bringing the Bradford & Bingley's mortgage book (about £41bn) onto the Bank's balance sheet would imply a Bank with one-and-a-half times the current level of assets, but no more capital than it presently has. Its current net worth is only about £2bn. Now, B&B's liabilities were about £51bn, of which £22bn was made up of deposits, which have been taken over by Banco Santander; so for the rest, assets exceeded liabilities by some £12bn. However, for public sector accounting purposes, net debt/credit is defined as liabilities less liquid assets, and the whole point is that the mortgages are far from liquid. To put it simply, the Bank of England would have had a negative net worth several times as great as its existing capitalisation.

We would have successfully replaced an actually quite well capitalised bank with a desperately undercapitalised central bank. This isn't that big a problem; central banks are weird financial institutions anyway. But the vast bulk of the Bank's assets are loans to other banks, as you'd expect, and the last thing we want it to do under current circumstances is to stop lending to other banks.

Now, the whole point of this crazy exercise is to save the Treasury's books. But it's literally insane - and inane - to behave as if the taxpayer was on the hook for some sort of huge debt. The problem isn't on the liability side of the banks' balance sheets; it's on the asset side. Now, how bad do you think the problem is? Shall we assume that the housing market will go down 50% from the peak, a crash of epic proportions? Well, that would still leave the Treasury sitting on £20.5bn worth of assets (or about equal to the Bank of England's assets), with no hurry to liquidate them. And the Treasury has essentially got it for nothing. It's also fundamentally dishonest to pretend that literally every mortgage at the B&B is worthless.

However, Osborne insists on arguing that the total numbers involved are incredibly high, and also that the Bank of England's puny capital base is sufficient to handle them without cost to the general Government budget.

I notice that Vince Cable, as usual, is talking sense.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said that ideally a private buyer would have been found for B&B, but he recognised that part-nationalisation was the "only other way forward". Mr Cable said the deal could even benefit taxpayers. "They have got a lot of bad loans, they have got the buy-to-let mortgages, they have got the self-certified mortgage arrangements," he said.

"But it may that in the long-term, having acquired this for virtually nothing, the Government will be able to sell it and perhaps either cover itself of probably even make a profit." Mr Cable contrasted the situation with that in the US, "where the taxpayer is actually paying to buy up bad loans." He said: "here the Government is effectively getting them free, and depending on the competence with which they are managed, it may prove to be a relatively successful deal for the taxpayer."

Not so Osborne. From the same article:

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: "I don't think the taxpayer should pick up the bill that really should be borne by the City.

"What is really being saved here are not the depositors or the jobs - it is the large institutions that lent lots of money to Bradford & Bingley and made money out of that when times were good, and now that times have turned down, are asking every single person in the country to pay more in their taxes to bail out this bank. "Under nationalisation, the taxpayer steps in and says 'We are going to give you your money back'. I'm not sure that's fair."

The bill *has* been borne by the City; the shares have gone to zero, the bank has been broken up. In fact, the "large institutions" lose out badly, if by that he means the major clearing banks; they ended up stuck with most of the £400m in new shares issued a couple of months ago, which are now worthless.

Here's a little extra for you (hey, I had a Halifax savings account when I was a little boy and they had branches in Dales villages); Osborne, and the entire Tory party, were very horrified by the bill for the nationalisation of Northern Rock because they claimed it contained provisions for the takeover of more banks, and only an evil socialist plot might explain this, as this would never be needed again. Clearly, when Gideon says they're all being alarmist, it's time to go short.

Update: The numbers in an earlier version of this post were based on B&B plus NR assets and liabilities, which was far from clear in the text. I've recast it to take account only of B&B. You can, of course, add the NR numbers...

stupidity tax

I'm relatively laying off US presidential politics this year, unlike in 2004 (and aren't you glad?), but this sticks out: John McCain gambling serious money, and apparently considering casino execs his "friends". Long before the point that he gambles with them and apparently wins, which is bad enough, you've got to wonder, haven't you? They're not your friends...

Piracy Drivel Watch

Just to note that one issue of the Sun this week managed to rehash the much debunked pirates will knifecrime our asylums!!! story, yet again. It's still drivel, of course; after all, here are those excitingly amoral Frenchmen, about to wire their pirates up to the ship's power bus....or not. The latest lot are heading for France and their trial, like the others.

In other news, this is only going to end in tears.

Mr 10% meets the 27%ers up town

OK, someone's left an armed UAV in the changing rooms. Is it you, Harrowell? No? Speak up? America? Turkey? Italy? Well, it would be interesting to ask somebody how many Predators the RAF possesses at the moment, compared to a few weeks ago.

Relatedly, this is wrong:

Pakistan, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation and trans-national Islamic terrorism are now fully enmeshed. They are one and the same, and a failed state, Pakistan, is the linchpin to them all.

No. Not you either, John. Pakistan isn't a failed state in any reasonable sense of the term; it's misgoverned, frequently with the assistance of the Western alliance in various forms, it has problems. but its systems function, its economy has been doing well, it is well able to defend its borders and it is making this very clear - 7.62mm clear.

PPB says that it was getting there just before Musharraf's coup and it's only offensive to say so if you're Nawaz Sharif. But that's not the point; the problem is that the US is horribly likely to behave in Pakistan as in Somalia if the failed-state meme takes hold. And nothing makes states fail like the perception of state failure - it's very like a bank in that sense. Nobody can afford this in a country with (as everyone, hackneyedly, clichedly says) nuclear weapons, with the Indian and Chinese dimensions, with the coast on the tanker routes, and the MSR to Afghanistan.

Of course, it's a crappy cliche to assume that the Pakistani military elite doesn't keep the nukes very close. But cliche seems to drive policy here. Pakistan doesn't need gap shrinkers, assault ships, setting up the precinct or any other Thomas Barnett bollocks. What it needs is respect, and specifically respect for civilian government.

But don't imagine that there won't be people who want to burn shit down. For example; I don't believe this, even though Sean Taylor's Not a Good Day to Die was good. Note the total lack of direct evidence. Gordon Brown was apparently in Washington over the last couple of days, so he had the opportunity to take my advice; but then, as a comment says, you want to talk to America, but what phone number do you call?

Big miscarriage of justice of our times, phase 2

This is sick, but perversely reassuring. With the great miscarriages of justice of the 70s, the first phase was that the judge, the cops, the Home Office, and all right-thinking people agreed, and nobody took seriously that the victims might be innocent. This lasted a long, long time; but then we passed into the second phase, when the cops and the government spin doctors concentrated on bullying those of the victims who had been released, and those people who dared to say they were innocent. It was an important stage in the evolution of resistance; dissent was suddenly worth punishing.

Not that this helped very much, and it won't help Jim Bates much. But the sheer stupid desperation here is telling. They arrested him for possessing the hard disk they'd given him to examine; brilliant, PC Brains. We've discussed Bates before; it's worth pointing out that absolutely none of the facts of the cases he was involved in depend on his credentials. Nullius in verba, right? They didn't here; they didn't here.

But if Bates is guilty of possession, then the obvious conclusion is that...so are the police! Perhaps they should arrest themselves?

The shock of the old

I've been blogging longer than the Rude Pundit.

Petrov Day

25 years ago today I was a three year old boy, living in a village in the Yorkshire Dales, from where you could see the golfball aerials at the NSA's Menwith Hill base. Later, people I knew well would protest it for ages, and a man who was supposedly an engineer for LockMart there lived next door.

Via Charlie Stross, today is Stanislas Petrov day. As a Soviet air defence forces colonel, he was in charge of monitoring their satellite early warning system when it indicated five incoming missiles. But he was well aware of the system's possible failings, and the strategy the US was expected to pursue - after all, what on earth would be the point of firing only five missiles, on a polar trajectory that the Molniya satellites would detect?

And so he declined to give the warning, knowing that if he was wrong, the radar line would light up with panic soon enough. The phones certainly did; they complained he hadn't filled in the station log right, to which he said that he couldn't because he'd had a phone in each hand all night. Of course, the radars didn't go off because there were no missiles - when the ideologues and bureaucrats handed the issue to serious scientists, they worked out that it was an inherent flaw in the system's design, connected with the unusual orbit of the satellites and rare conditions in the upper atmosphere. A false positive could have happened at any time.

That didn't wash with the Karlo Rovskis; they sacked Petrov, who had anyway had a nervous breakdown (who wouldn't?) not long afterwards.

Petrov's heroic success was based on a few things; the first was his sound understanding of the machines. He didn't need to ask the experts or believe the big computer. The second was that he understood the political and grand strategic situation. It made no sense to send five rockets. The third was that he feared what the buggers might do anyway; yes, it might be clear that nobody would send five rockets, and anyway the radars would give enough time to press the button, but who knew what the politicians (of every kind) would do under the effect of fear?

The fourth was that he acted, not letting the fools take the wheel. The Soviet Union was in the hands of a middle-ranking air force colonel, as in so many science-fiction horrorshows; but no-one could have been better. I can't help but think of the lowborn Model Army men of the civil war; Colonel Hewson and Cornet Smith against the Duke of Godknows.

kings and queens and generals learn your name

Ah, MEND - everyone's favourite dark-globalisation guerrilla gang, whose strategy is based on the world oil market as they career around Nigeria in RIBs with six or so huge outboards and silly numbers of heavy machine guns, while God knows where their leader/committee/nameless mobile phone number is. You can see why the defence establishment loves to worry about'em; like the Vikings, the Hell's Angels, the rappers and the Viet Cong at once. Never get out of the boat, as someone said. J-Ro is always mad keen on them; I reckon they're far more classically Marxist, fighting for a better share of the resource export money.

But I think their campaign may be slipping. Here's why.

Reuters Alertnet reports them issuing a wave of threats to foreign oil workers on the 13th of September. On the 14th, they declare an oil war. What else was going on at that moment? Hurricane Ike was certain to hit the US oil infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico by the 10th or thereabouts - the landfall was on the 13th. It was the perfect moment for a global guerrilla group to hit the infrastructure of a major oil exporter. But the price of oil was dropping sharply; even threats to step it up further only had a marginal impact.

On the 21st of September, MEND announced a ceasefire; you'll note that the reduction in supply they achieved was around 150,000 barrels a day. The day after this, the oil price jumped wildly; the best explanation for this is a classic bear squeeze, as that particular day was a witching (the last day to buy oil before the futures contract for that month expired).

So what's going on? Here are the figures for US oil demand in the relevant period. The demand for oil fell by 1,400,000 barrels a day compared with the same week a year before, which was itself down on the year before. That is no small quantity. That's not too far off half Iran's exports, and it's ten times the cut in output MEND can reliably achieve when its leaders call for it. This is interesting; strategy beats tactics, after all, and the power of the global guerrilla is meant to be based on a permanently hypersensitive infrastructure.

Part of this is due to international trade in fuel, of course; but although there's apparently a queue of ships in New York waiting to unload, I haven't spotted a consistent spike in product-tanker rates, as opposed to VLCC ones, yet.

Meanwhile, every wind turbine is a vote for independence from Russia.

I see no joy, I see only sorrow, I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow

I don't believe this; note the lack of any direct evidence, not even packets of Indian steel balls. What I do believe is that we're heading for a serious catastrophe with regard to Pakistan. As I've said before, the American meta-narrative seems to be that it's something like a 50s-70s rightwing military dictatorship in Southeast Asia or Latin America; everyone is secretly communist but we've got to support El General or, god knows...

But this is drivel; the facts are that nobody votes for the Islamists. Even in the NWFP, they didn't break 15 per cent. All the things we claim to support are embodied in the politics we're making enemies of - the lawyers' movement, the middle-class activists behind the PML-N, the working class support of the PPP. Les forces vives de la nation, you could say. Both the working class, and the new mobile phone network bourgeoisie (it's more than symbolic that the missing at the Marriott include the CFO of Mobilink).

But we've been encouraging Mr 10% to dishonour his agreement with the PML, thus dropping the movement for democracy in it. As soon as Mr 10% got his new status as Musharraf 2.0, supported by his own party and the near-mafia in the MQM (thanks, Mark Lyell-Grant), the Americans began doing airmobile raids over the border and the Pakistani army began shooting back.

Here is sense:

Second, contra the apocalyptic prose of the LA Times, the main concern of the Pakistani elite is not that tribal extremists from a thinly populated hinterland will take over Pakistan, an urbanized, populous, and industrialized country of 120 million people. The main concern is that the democratic institutions haltingly restored in the post-Musharraf era will be swept aside by violent unrest and a return to military rule if Pakistan is forced to bow to the United States’ demand for an all or nothing military solution in Afghanistan and western Pakistan.

But it goes beyond that; there is absolutely no possible goal in the NWFP or Afghanistan that is worth risking making things worse in Pakistan. We could, after all, quit Afghanistan. (We did it before.) But in Pakistan, there is the huge modern army, the nuclear bombs, the coast on the oil tanker routes, the special relationship with Saudi Arabia, the Indian and Chinese dimensions. Even Osama bin Laden in person is not worth this stuff. Strategy beats tactics.

And just to speak of tactics, Britain is in the first line to lose here. The Army's main supply route to Helmand is vulnerable to the Pakistani Taliban, the Baluchistan Liberation Front, and the Pakistani army. And there's a good reason why you can get regular flights from Manchester to Islamabad. We don't need this shit.

There was a time when a Labour prime minister was involved in a war, in which the Americans were too. They wanted to do something crazy, irresponsible, and vicious; they wanted to go nuclear in Korea. Clement Attlee went straight to Washington to say no; some disagree as to what impact this had, but at least he was trying. Brown should head right for Washington and say no. No intelligence cooperation, no help with the financial crisis, everyone out of Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible. I'd vote for him.

(Note that there certainly was something going on in there: a sailor who was a crypto technician?)

further stages of the extradition process

Well, there's something for you. Viktor Bout's lawyer actually showed up for a hearing; this is after lawyer no.1 repeatedly failed to appear and pleaded sickness ("I...I have a heart condition. I have a heart condition. If you hit me, it's murder...") and lawyer no.2 found he was permanently busy.

I had wondered if he planned to stay in Thailand as long as the local bar association wasn't exhausted of lawyers who hadn't taken part in the case; but it seems he's actually going to fight the extradition, so the court adjourned until a date is set to hear arguments against the prima facie evidence required.

The man himself looks rather more cheerful than around the time of his arrest.

Meanwhile, Rogue Planet reports on a string of arms smuggling cases in South Florida, including the AEY Inc case and another one involving an attempt to sell Russian helicopters to Zimbabwe. It might be worth noting that the Missing 727 and 3X-GDM cases both involved planes sold by one "Maury Joseph", apparently based in Florida and a fan of big steaks.

Carl Hiaasen said that the hardest part of his job was staying ahead of the curve of weirdness and depravity.

Sir Ian Blair, Sir Ian Blair! The Lord save me from Sir Ian Blair!

"Sir" Ian Blair addresses the troops:

"Our approach will be one of humility. On 22nd July 2005, we confidently believed that our systems of command, of surveillance and of firearms intervention were among the best in the world. However, they failed in response to a previously unforeseen circumstance, suicide bombers on the run."

Well, it's an admission of sorts. But it wasn't all that unforeseen, was it? The Met had two plans in place, a static one (Operation C) to deal with an attacker at a major event and a mobile one (Operation KRATOS) to deal with...a suicide bomber on the loose in public.

They just didn't decide which one fit the circumstances, came up with a dog's breakfast of a hybrid instead, and then carried it out so poorly it would have been a disaster whatever the plan.

We haven't had any Metropolitan Police blogging for a while, which is a pity given that "Sir" Ian seems to be bent on making enemies of literally everyone on the force. I can't help thinking that Tarique Ghaffur and Ali Dizaei are making this into a personal vendetta, but then, who the hell wouldn't?

probably a robbery

From the always wonderful, Satin Pajama shortlisted, Where the money is..., the rock band who stage guerrilla gigs in banks. Bursting out of a white van, the men in balaclavas from the power trio Caracho (as in "Ni karasho!", I presume) charge into the bank, assemble their specially hacked backline amps, and hit it. This could really only happen in Berlin, no?

I liked the policeman's reaction as quoted : "I've never seen anything like it in my life...but I'd have very much liked to see their identity cards." This is apparently the product: Caracho live ´07.

Hmm. Well, there's always Renegade Soundwave.

gideon watch

I'm glad someone else has picked up on this: James Graham has at an especially witless statement from Gideon/George Osborne. What Osborne is doing here is far less stupid, and also far less honest, than usual; for a start, he's managing expectations whilst at the same time bashing the Government, by pretending that he's expecting something like the scene when the British took over one of the Boer statelets and found less than a pound in the treasury. Some people will believe it, and it means that if he does get to be chancellor, he's almost certainly going to have a nice surprise available. It also serves his purposes in bargaining with putative Tory spending ministers, who will be easier to discipline if they're scared.

And, of course, it's easier than having a policy. Simply not fit for government.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time

More China convergence blogging. Declan McCullagh reports on efforts by the US and China to sneak something nasty into the ITU standardisation process, through a committee that doesn't publish its documentation or let anyone else in the room. But the Chinese appear to be the ones leaning forward;

The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China's state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17's parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.

A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes: A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so, protecting the anonymity of the author.

Now that's what I call a use case! The standards group in question includes someone from the Chinese ministry of telecoms and an NSA official whose biog appears to be secret, as well as someone from Verisign; who is hilariously quoted as saying that:

"The OSI Internet protocols (IPv5) had the capabilities built-in. The ARPA Internet left them out because the infrastructure was a private DOD infrastructure."

(Trust me, if you know your Internet history, it's hilarious.) The poor darling, still wishing for someone to bring back OSI. And the representatives of the Chinese Communist Party conspiring away with the NSA.

Oh well; it's not as if it's going to work. Viz:

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”

Read the whole damn thing; it's one of the best reported stories on the Internet infrastructure I've ever seen, they spoke to the right people (Renesys, k c claffy, Odlyzko), and the conclusions are interesting to say the least.

The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet. “The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”

If the "American Internet" is ending, it's because they don't deserve it any more.

tomorrow's public inquiry today

Is anyone else disturbed by the fact Ed Balls appears to have been replaced by Chris Dillow?

Ed Balls, the schools secretary and only member of the Co-operative party in the cabinet, will today propose that 100 schools over the next two years become co-operative trust schools owned and controlled by the local community. He will tell the annual conference of Labour's sister party that he is putting up an extra £500,000 so trust schools have extra financial help to become co-operatives. The move comes as Michael Stephenson, the new general secretary of the Co-operative party and a former political officer at Downing Street, claims co-ops could be on the brink of a revival in Britain. "Co-ops are an idea whose time has come back."

He is looking at how to persuade Labour to bring the co-operative model into railways, schools, housing and other public services, arguing that Labour, searching for new ideas, can find intellectual renewal in those behind co-operatives. The Co-operative party has already succeeded in persuading Network Rail to review its governance structures to see how it can make rail users part of its board.

The actual policy is fairly milksopful, but still; it can hardly blow up too badly. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown announced an insulation push, but for some reason, not an air-source heat pump in sight. It's been badly received; there could be more, although that's hardly an insight, but I'm not impressed by Tony Woodley trying to make "lag the loft" a smear analogous to McCain's tyre gauges.

If this is officially policy amateur hour, I'd point out that my own pet scheme on this issue deals with the problem of what if this winter's really bad and WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN CODGERS? rather well. To recap, I propose to fund it out of the existing bill for fuel subsidies capitalised over several years, and make it subject to individual choice, and voluntary-but-automatic. Those who don't want to or can't take advantage of it can just continue to receive cash. Full implementation of it would eventually reach one-third of UK households, and the bill is £1.98bn, all of which is existing spending. So we could chuck in the £910m from the gas pushers to fund an extra payment for the opters out.

Oh yes, and there's this. I'm beginning to picture some sort of awful inquiry commission wanting to know just what I was thinking, and how I can claim I didn't know cooperatively-owned prefabricated guerrilla hospitals linked to some sort of leftwing cross of Facebook and CVSTrac were going to grow to enormous size and attack our cities.

Not Just Armies, But Antonovs

Ooh, more Iran-war nonsense, this time from none other than mouthpieceful Russia Today, via this thread. There seems to be a meme floating around that there was a war between Russia and Georgia because the Russians intervened to prevent the Americans using Georgian airbases to attack Iran (obviously, a war with Iran is the universal explicator for everything). Quote:

Shortly after that, a phone call came from a college friend who had just come back from Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he had seen American battle tanks being unloaded from a Ukrainian-registered Antonov-124 "Ruslan", the heaviest and largest cargo airplane in the world. The friend asked if I had any idea what tanks would be good for in Afghanistan, and I said I didn't. It's an established fact from the Soviet war in Afghanistan that tanks are no good for most of the country's mountainous territory. They are good for flatlands, and the main body of flat land in the region is right across the border in Iran.

Later in August there was another bit of unofficial information from a Russian military source: more than a thousand American tanks and armored vehicles had been shipped to Eastern Afghanistan by Ukrainian "Ruslans" flying in three to five shipments a day, and more flights were expected.

Wrong! For a start, the Canadian and Danish armies brought their Leopard 2 tanks to Afghanistan. But far more importantly; there are 26 active An-124s in the world (not counting ones operated by the Russian air force). You could load, at the very most, two M1A1 Abrams tanks in one plane. To move a thousand tanks - if the US Army has that many spare, which sounds unlikely - you'd therefore need 500 flights, or 19 sorties for the complete available fleet.

You couldn't get the complete fleet anyway, as it has regular contractual commitments; if you could round up 12 An-124s for the job...well, with 122 tonnes of cargo, the plane has a still air range of 2,335 miles. This means it will need to make multiple stops between Kabul and anywhere in the US; at a cruising speed of 490mph, each hop would be about 4h 45mins long, so at least a 13 hour haul, which implies you're only going to get one trip every two days. So that would be about 83 days' work. At a cost of about $20,000 an hour that's $478 million in air chartering alone.

So this is evidently drivel. But why would Russia Today be pushing it? Perhaps this story in Le Monde might tell us something. Despite all the buffoonery, the Russian government has decided not to break off an agreement permitting NATO to send supplies through Russia to Afghanistan, and will further be providing 4 Mi-8 helicopters for EUFOR in Chad. Now that it's all out of the papers, both parties are paying the price for their harder statements by trimming back their actions. Although, you have to wonder what Sarko offered or threatened to get them out of Poti.

In which we review the Organise project

Met up with regular reader and Linux hacker Duane Griffin to discuss the ORGANISE project . As a result, here's a new and much amended specification that supersedes the first one.

quick vik

If you've been following the Viktorfeed, you may have noticed that something's been emerging; Tahmid Air (ICAO: THM) had been flying occasionally between Sharjah and Almaty, but since early August it's started to generate more and more movements (the maximum was achieved on the 10th August with 12 flights) to more and more interesting places. Here's a list of their routes:

Dubai - Basra
Dubai - Sharjah
Almaty - Sharjah
Sharjah - Almaty
Dubai - Location Not Found -  
Sharjah - Abu Dhabi
Dubai - Erbil
Dubai - Bagram
Dubai - Kandahar
Astana - Sharjah
Sharjah - Astana
Dubai - Djibouti/Ambouli
Dubai - Abu Dhabi
Dubai - Entebbe

Interestingly, they've recently stopped being listed with an airline name; just the flight number. So worizzit? The company is registered in Kazakhstan and officially based there - unlike quite a few, we know they occasionally visit the place too. (It's progress of a sort.) There are two Boeing 737s on the register; UN-B3709 recently became UP-B3703, with serial number 22632. It started out working for charter airlines in the UK (Air UK, Thomson) and later Royal Air Maroc and LAN Chile, but then after Air Caribbean things took a turn for the worse. Tahmid got the plane (as EX-212) from MaxAvia of Sharjah, which keen'n'agile minds will remember was one of the rebadged versions of our really old friends, Phoenix Aviation of the UAE, who had been operating it as EX-632 having bought it via another subname, Dolphin Air.

The other, EY-533, serial number 23517, is reported to be on lease from Tajik Air. This particular plane has also seen service with Kam Air as EX-736 (so in the Kyrgyz registry again), leased from something called Eastok Aviation, a Sharjah-based, Bishkek-registered outfit that shut down after being blacklisted in the EU. All the 4 old 737s it bought second hand from Delta ended up at Tajik Air, but this one seems to have gone further.

Whilst we're on the subject; we're seeing some Transaviaexport (TXC) call signs again on the Iraq and Afghanistan routes, and something called "Centrafrique Air Express" (c/s CAE) sent off a flight to Baghdad at 2300GMT yesterday as CAE416; however, it was listed coming straight back from an undisclosed location 15 minutes later. CAE (IATA: 6C) was apparently started in November 2006 in the Central African Republic; it has two planes listed, a 737 (TL-ADR, 21281) ex-Saudi Arabian Airlines, and a 727 (TL-ADY, 21385) they bought off Damascene Airways in Damascus. There's an atmospheric pic here; it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

Towards an Empirical Determination of Sampling Error in Iain Dale's Survey

At number 7 in Total Politics' Top 100 Left-Wing Blogs: "Alternate Seat of YTR". That's apparently me.

At number 100 in Total Politics' Top 100 Left-Wing Blogs: "The Yorkshire Ranter". That's also me. I thought personality went a long way, but it looks like looks have quite an impact. Or maybe it's Don Blaney who puts these things together?

Yes, I'll get around to moving the whole thing over into the new look'n'feel, in my own facilities...as soon as I get round to it, program something to map all the individual permalinks on the two systems together, etc. It's as much fun as Virgin Media's billing department in here. But did nobody over at MessageSpace/YouGov/WebCameron/Teh E-Conservative Movement notice that I'm not just a member of the Liberal Democrats, but a candidate for election several times over?

fear and loathing, on the campaign trail

The meeting.

Two, three, four men who were not the ones you saw at podiums, behind Fox News desks. The man who's pure evil. Hard men. Men who say 'flip the switch' or 'push the button' or 'pull that lever.' When they were younger, they might have done it themselves.

They are the hidden men, not even the grey eminences. The fixers. "That one, now!"

Now the convention is booing Obama. Perfunctory, and unenthusiastically. Oh, line about immigrants being Americans too. Pro forma applause.

The crowd boos, the crowd cheers the war. Rudy Giuliani moves them to froth - Lindsay Graham moves them to scorn.

It's an... evil triumphalism. It's the party of Jupiter Maximus, with Mammon on the one side and thuggish Ares on the other. A party where the leaders are feted till they puke, where the powerful pushing down the weak, those declared 'entarte' or unclean - is not only allowed, not only encouraged, but considered a sacrament.

My God, you've done a journalism! The depressing thing is the comments thread; all kinds of people moaning that she was too cruel to the bastards. Shocked, shocked, I tell you, and nothing at all to do with this. No.

Don't listen to me

Listen here as well.