the FA: a case study in modern thinking

Here's an interesting example of modern thinking. Appropriately enough, it's one drawn from sport, which seems to play a special role in the whole phenomenon. The Government wants to force the FA to change its internal structures.

Progress on reforming the FA Council and its endless list of committees has also stalled. As part of the Burns package of proposals, the FA promised to make the 116-member council more inclusive with greater representation for ethnic minorities, women and fans. "Rugby did it with the old farts, cricket has done it – although there are still issues in cricket that need to be faced - and football is in a similar position," says Sutcliffe. "The old school can't continue."

Basically, we're looking at a case of representativeness - by analogy with truthiness - versus representation. This kind of thing is common throughout modern thinking - you identify some sort of democratic, or at least elective, intermediary institution, and then decide there's something wrong with it, often framed in terms of making it more "representative" in terms of being closer to a representative sample of the population.

But the way in which this is implemented always involves a net reduction in democracy. The number of elected representatives is reduced, or powers are transferred away from them. More appointive posts are created. Reserve powers are taken out by the central government over institutions, or alternatively they are forced to subdelegate their powers to new organisational entities created by the modern thinkers.

Classic examples include the Blairite attitude to city councils and the like; despite a strong rhetorical interest in decentralisation, what happened was that new, appointive bodies emerged which wielded powers over councils, or that city councils were ordered to delegate part of their budgets to a menagerie of semi-elected (or just obscure) "neighbourhood kitties" and the like. A more radical option was to make city government more "responsive", "representative", etc, by creating private or psuedo-private entities like Business Improvement Districts, CCTV-operating Community Safety Partnerships, etc, and moving funds and responsibility into these.

Similarly, many organisational changes in the schoolsnospitals sector were justified by being "representative", "new localist", etc, and consisted of transferring power and responsibility either away from elected local authorities, or away from ministerial line management with its associated responsibility to parliament. What is being proposed for football is, again, a devaluation of the vote - the FA's council, which consists of delegates from the local FAs' elected councils, would be replaced by an entity consisting of 5 representatives of the professional game, 5 of the "national" game (i.e. elected), and 2 "non-executive directors" who will apparently be co-opted or wished on the FA by the government.

The phrase "non-executive director" is telling here; in its natural habitat, non-executive directors are meant to be elected by shareholders to hold the company's management responsible. But here, they are going to be either chosen by the management or imposed by the government in order to hold the voters responsible. However, one lesson about company boards is that whatever the nature of a reorganisation, the only important question is always "Who controls the company?"

And this proposal clearly implies that the Premier League, plus the Government, will control it. Theoretically, the two very executive non-execs could side with the amateurs, but that's just not going to happen.

So, let's derive some conclusions. What matters here is not representation - the function of picking someone to represent collective interests. It's representativeness, by analogy with truthiness - the quality of looking like a body that should have been selected to represent the voters had the voters agreed with my own set of prejudices. And this might not be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that the vote, and only the vote, checks the process by which demanding more ethnic minorities, etc, gets you more powerful people congenial to other powerful people but who emanate representativeness.

Rather than labour representation, you get Alan Johnson, a perfectly featureless Blairite with stick-on postman's uniform. Rather than real city government, you get an appointed infrastructure planning commission and an appointed Olympics agency that make big decisions, and a dogshit panel with a whole £5,000 budget.

The Modern Thinkers always like the appearance of democracy, but they are deeply suspicious of voting. On another level of analysis, they tend to be very keen on elections in foreign policy, but much less so on democracy. Remember the purple fingers.

reviewing the results

Here's a ManyEyes visualisation of the top 40 airlines on the Viktorfeed, after a bit more than a year's data logging.



The old gang has shrunk a lot; British Gulf is still in there, but only because of their dominance before the end of February, when they cut off never to speak again. Eastern Express and AVE/Sky Cabs, the new name for what used to be Phoenix Aviation, are the new kings. Compare this one:



and this one:



Southern Air - a name long associated with the US government in various forms - is back. Oddly, Phoenix Avia, the Armenia mini-me of Phoenix Aviation, has made a comeback and has rapidly run up a surprising number of movements towards Afghanistan. The lesson appears to be that if your protection from the UAE authorities holds, you're OK.

But we knew that.

a question

Back in September, 2006, we were talking illegal immigrants and artisanal shipbuilding in West Africa, over at the Fistful.

one of the curious economic details you could notice was how the process was in fact exhibiting an increasing returns type feature, in that the increased demand for boats increasingly meant that a number of would-be migrants were actually not sailing but staying since they could make a reasonable living in the newly developing artisanal shipyard industry, with the consequence that more boats were being built as knowledge and experience (human capital) was being accumulated...

One other interesting detail is that the level of workmanship seemed good. They even use, as I say, 1980s style Volvo teams rather than Adam Smith like pin production lines.

As it happened, the crisis passed, and the big attractor - the Spanish housing bubble - collapsed not long afterwards. So, I was wondering what had become of that sudden industry churning out huge versions of traditional boat designs. After all, there is more than one use for a boat in the black economy.

And you know what? I've no idea. As far as I can make out, that particular route lost salience during 2007, almost certainly because of the macroeconomic crisis rather than the arrival of EU FRONTEX assistance. With that, it's passed completely out of the news environment. I couldn't find anything useful in the way of statistics either; Eurostat is just what you'd expect from someone's dentist,

So, are there thousands of wooden vessels abandoned on the beaches? Does anyone know?

(I'd like this post to grow if possible.)

I told you so

I see the MG Rover report is out. The document is here.

We blogged.

I like the detail that one of the four was caught having bought something off the interwebs to clear his hard disk, and that the investigators were able to tell which folders he'd run through the l33t gadget. Just the people to fix a hugely complex industrial company.

the extra cost society

It's fascinating how Tories manage to pollute an otherwise sensible idea. Consider Barnet Council, fief of comedy food mountain Brian Coleman, and its so-called Easyjet model. I'm going to get at the lo-co fetish, but first, the substance. Among much else, they want to offer people who receive social care an individual budget, which they can use on the services they feel they need. This proposal is roughly sensible, I think.

One of the problems of the welfare state was always that it tended to work on the principle that if everyone had equal rights, then they also had equal needs and equal preferences. The more confident, articulate, informed, and supported by your peers you are, the more likely you are to defeat this, so there was a source of structural inequality embedded in it. It's also a source of structural inefficiency; if you're underproviding some people's needs, you're also probably wasting resources elsewhere.

Naturally, this was still an improvement over a system where some patients would be entitled to treatment and others would be charity cases. But it became increasingly necessary to protest and to hammer on the system with sticks to get it to adjust to human realities, and through the 70s and 80s, a combination of service-user activism and change in professional practices actually achieved quite a lot of this.

I suspect that this is considerably more important in social work than in medicine; much less can be reduced to specific procedures. So, budgets are good; on the other hand, I'd object quite violently to making this mandatory. Why?

For a start, there are people who won't be in a position to manage the budget, and this will be a class- and race-biased phenomenon, and there is a danger that they'll be left out. Voucherism is also almost irresistably tempting to people seeking low visibility cuts - the usual line is to suggest that you could also make a voluntary top-up contribution, and then shrink the actual funding by the same sum, which is a nice way of levying an invisible tax rise.

Another inevitable temptation, especially for Tories, would be to make the voucher valid with the private sector. Not only is this a giveaway to a client group, it also opens a second route for the user to get screwed - over the pricing of services, as it's really unlikely that you could take your social care voucher very far from home. The option of integrated public service provision has to remain open in order to contain other service providers' pricing, to guarantee universal service, and to signal to everyone involved that the service will still exist.

Now, those low-cost airlines. Whoever at Barnet Council or elsewhere thinks they're going to use "the EasyJet business model" is a prize oaf. For a start, both EZY and FR (Ryanair) borrowed it in some detail from Southwest Airlines in the US, and if you don't know that you don't know much about it. Secondly, it can be summed up in two words - yield management. Every airline does this, but Southwest and its followers simply did it harder and more.

What it means is that the fares follow a curve as the date of the flight approaches - some time out they are cheap, then they rise very sharply during the period when the average ticket is bought, and then they fall drastically in the last few days because even a couple of quid is better than transporting the empty seat. Hence the "1 million seats for £1" ads - you won't actually get a seat for that, but they are on offer in a legal sense.

I really struggle to see how a local council can apply this. But then, as I said, they don't mean it. Instead, they like to talk about "making the price of everything transparent"; this refers to all the extra-cost options and distress sales involved. But this is either silly or mendacious.

Does anyone imagine that one transaction on the Web application that does Ryanair's online check-in actually costs £5? If so, their IT department is incompetent to an unimaginable degree. In fact, transparency is the last thing to expect here, rather than a selection of suspiciously round numbers there is no possible way of checking and no competition against. But I suppose it's a viable model of society, if you're a Tory: Welcome to Britain, where life is an extra-cost option.

modern thinking

Charlie Stross wants to know what the future holds in terms of ideology - what the killer memes of tomorrow are likely to be. He's working from the position that the huge ideological systems of the 20th century were all ways of coping with, or seeking, modernity; thus you have the big two, communism and fascism, plus (in Charlie's view) a third ideology that never took off, technocracy.

There was, actually, a formal Technocratic Movement in the interwar US and elsewhere, which foresaw a future dominated by a benign hegemony of engineers organised in an economically integrated world state. Like the others, it was fascinated by the potential of technology, and well aware that classical liberalism and conservatism were no longer sufficient; just like them, it imagined that the replacement would need to be hyper-centralised and opposed to the formalities of parliaments, judiciaries etc.

To some extent, of course, the other tyrannies were also technocracies. This brings up the notion of the developmental dictatorship - the 20th century was full of people who thought that they could Drag This Country Into the Future, if only the Serious Technocrats were in charge, and that the Incorruptible, Decisive Military - or the Party - could achieve this. It's possible, in fact, to consider all the regimes in this way.

It was an era in which tyranny was usually future-oriented; a major difference between the Left and the Right was whether the deep past was an era of grim oppression from which it was necessary to escape, or whether it was the source of the ideals that showed the way to the future, but there were no takers for pure conservatism. If the past was important, it was important as a motivation or as a guide to the future.

Charlie is especially interested to know what strange new political ideas might be brewing in the new fast-industrialising states; but giving it some thought, I'm fairly optimistic. This is because the core package of future-oriented tyranny has been tried out in most of them, with bad results. The repertoire is limited, and everyone's seen it before. You could object that this doesn't help; what matters is power. But power craves legitimacy, and there has never been a tyranny that had zero public support. And there are reasons why individuals, groups, and classes compete for power in one way and not in another; coups are frequent in some similar countries but not in others.

Brazil, for example, experienced two waves of authoritarian technocracy - in the late 30s, and more recently, in the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. Unfortunately for the claims of future-oriented tyranny, the dictatorship roughly parallels years of stagnation and frustration in which not much at all was achieved; the optimism of the postwar era, and the industrial breakout since the 1990s, book-end the dictatorship neatly.

India had its own flirtation with dictatorship in Indira Gandhi's emergency rule, although there was always a strong degree of authoritarianism and of technocracy before that - inherited from the Fabian influence on the Congress and from the colonial civil service. Again, the achievements of the last 15 years had to wait for much of this tradition to be abandoned after 1991.

Turkey seems to have discovered a replacement for dictators, in that it now has a strongly bourgeois, liberal-conservative party which is often described as being like German Christian Democracy, but with Muslims. There was a very significant strand of Dragging This Country, etc, in the history of apartheid South Africa - all those huge military-industrial projects, carried out with the benefit of cheap labour and the secret police (two critical elements of a good future-oriented tyranny). Poland was a development dictatorship before the Second World War, went through occupation and Stalinism, and spent the 1980s as a dictatorship that outsiders often thought was more like a Southern Cone junta than communism. Spain and Portugal successfully exited perhaps the classic technocratic juntas and joined the EU.

So it seems unlikely that anyone will think that the future wears jackboots. Of course, there will be future tyrannies - but what sort?

The ideas that seem to be winning in the fast growth countries are:

Disappointing but acceptable social democracy.

Both Brazil and India seem to be sticking fast to this. The alternatives in these cases are clientelist nationalism and Muslim or Hindu Democracy. Historically, it's an idea with legs and remarkably few corpses in its pile. Not that anyone will be happy about voting Lula, again. But they never are - as Clement Attlee said, "they think I'm not socialist enough...I know them of old".

Muslim Christian Democracy

Basically we're thinking of the AK party in Turkey here, but its name and ideas are spreading, and if Moussavi had won the Iranian elections, he'd probably have offered something similar. In India, this is the upside potential of the BJP - that it becomes a roughly conservative party with religious stylings. It appeals heavily to the middle class and the business community, but especially to the Mittelstand element of industry rather than the FTSE-100.

Modern Thinking: the Post-Liberal Consensus

This is the turd in the punchbowl; Thaksin Shinawatra and the Three Bs, Berlusconi, Blair, and Bush. A form of soft authoritarianism, keen on micro-intervention in social life and public-private blurring in economic life, with a bizarre delight in big events like the Olympics and the Champions' League. Whereas the others talk left, or right, of where they govern, the Modern Thinkers govern to the right economically and to the left socially of where they campaign, which is straight down the middle.

They are the classic users of the postmodern politics package; which may explain why despite their constant promises of modernity and demands that we all keep up, they tend to struggle with big technical projects. Like old-fashioned junta technocrats, they often deny any political views or ideological claims, which should tell you plenty about their real mental history.

Oil rents

Thomas Friedman is an idiot, but he is right that there is almost an ideological class of states that are defined by oil. His pet example is Venezuela, which shows that he's a fool; mine is the UAE, with its tiny population of official Emiratis who get the oil rents and its huge army of semi-slaves from the Indian subcontinent. The key markers here are authoritarian government, generous but usually highly circumscribed welfare benefits, and concealed inequality. Of course, the very definition of this group makes it self-limiting.

Of course, the swing factor here is China. Jamie Kenny has long argued that the Chinese Communist Party should be considered as part of group three, as another group of modern thinkers obsessed with the Olympics, closed-circuit TV, and big business. I'm not sure; their leadership is much more genuinely technocratic than most of the Modern Thinkers'. Further, it seems clear that the Party sees the future as something other than communism, but with its own leading role preserved.

It's now been quite a while since entrepreneurs were recognised by the Party, and far more importantly, the Party has shaped its entire economic, social, and foreign policy in their interest - the whole idea of holding down the RMB and thus parking huge quantities of China's economic surplus in dollar assets, perhaps the dominant fact of the last 10 years, doesn't make sense except as a way of maximising industrial investment growth, and absorbing internal migration. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics isn't *that* far from Muslim Christian Democracy, conceptually.

So, I'm quite optimistic about ideas; even if a lot of this is based on the principle of having tried all the other systems and found them worse. What really worries me is what more damage the Modern Thinkers can do.

feathered

How did I miss this? A Sikh who thinks he's a native American shaman? In Bradford?

Where else? Weird religion is a Bradford thing, and it's in our best tradition that it should go all syncretic like.

some like to go out dancing, some others like us, we gotta work

Goes especially for Antonov-32s. They seem to attract trouble, or the other way around. We've been seeing a few AYK Avia flights to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere lately. Based in Armenia; ICAO AYK. Here's a cracking detail about one of their Antonov-32s, EK-32500 (Kyrgyz registry), serial number 2009 in its past guise as 9L-LFP (i.e. Sierra Leone registry).

painted in faked UN-HCR c/s, used to transport Tchad rebels from Sudan

The owners at the time were 748 Aero Services, a company repeatedly banned from the EU in its Sierra Leone guise, and which seems to have liked classic British aircraft (although one HS748 was meant to have been destroyed in south Sudan but turned up in the DRC). They got her from Trans-Attico, a version of Air West/East West Cargo/East Wing, former owners of ST-AQA...

David Cameron...and the MAFIA, but not in the way you think

This Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist guy was clearly so shocked he almost said something.

At the moment, however, I can't help but think of this touching scene in terms of signalling and secret communication. The problem is Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate, which recently attracted attention because of its section on the vital importance of mediocrity to some Italian academics. I'll do a formal review of it later, either here or at AFOE, but before we do that, let's try putting it in practice.

He argues that much behaviour among criminals is driven by the problems of communicating things like group membership, reputation, and availability of goods or services in an environment where it is both easy to fake it and impossible to signal openly. Therefore, members of the Mafia never use the word "mafia" or indeed any specific term to refer to the organisation - what could be harder than trying to convince your mark that you are part of a mighty criminal society whose name you don't know? - and they operate a sort of web of trust, in which two mafiosi who don't know each other can only meet if one who knows them both mutually vouches for their identity.

A crucial element is the creative use of biological signalling theories, which revolve around the insight that an identifying signal needs to be cheap for a real user to produce, but expensive for a faker, or at least, that a signal needs to represent a real commitment of resources to be credible. In this sense, I think I can see the purpose of those signs - we know, after all, that the canned crowd were willing to be relieved of their own signs and have others thrust into their hands. Would you put up with this treatment?

I suspect if you're reading this, you would probably find both the reality of the censorship, and the aesthetic horror of the fakery, quite offensive. But then, you're also unlikely to want to be part of a canned crowd for George W. Bush....unless you were trying to fake it for some reason. Clearly, one of the effects of this procedure was a form of cost-discriminating signalling - the organisers demanded that their activists signal certain things that fakers would find difficult to mimic. You had to demonstrate that you were willing to abandon your stated opinions and wave ones they gave you instead.

As far as I can see, the qualities this process selected for would be obedience to authority and tolerance of ugly kitsch. Does anyone doubt that these would indeed qualify you to wave a sign behind the former president? This is an example of using costly signalling to communicate with people who score highly on the indices of social authoritarianism; as well as the political implications, it's probably true that staging a preplanned media photocall with a crowd of people selected for their obedience to authority is just easier.

This is something which comes up occasionally in Gambetta; it's possible for communication to evolve independently of intention. Even if our man the Bush '04 intern was trying to stop the rent-a-mob turning up with 666 - TAKE A CLOSER LOOK!!! or OSAMA BIN KERRY signs, the way he did it had the secondary or unconscious effect of selecting the kind of person who would appreciate them most.

Over time, such effects could come to determine the culture of an entire political movement. Obviously, people who go to rallies are likely to be the same people who take part in all the other forms of campaigning, so if this (and other practices with similar effects) are common, it would likely tend to help boil down the base to its stinking, bitter, toxic, sticky residue.

O.K. Enough beating about the Bush. A practical example with David Cameron. The thing to grasp here is that whatever he's apparently saying, or not saying, may be better understood as a way of identifying and communicating with like-minded people on a secure side-channel. Here, he's saying that we don't need to do anything, plus a whole lot of implied ideological justification. The obvious corrolary of not needing to do anything is to suggest that nothing is wrong. But what is the cost investment here?

headless in Twickenham

So, what did the great blood crisis mean for London Rugby League? Well, either quite a bit or not much; I went along to the last home game of the season, against Castleford, and to be frank, either it completely wrecked their morale, or else they were so awful that no external influence could have made a blind bit of difference. Thanks to South West "Trains", we were late, but when we got into the ground London were still only 12-0 down.

The atmosphere, however, was like a wake; even the Castleford fans seemed a little depressed. And then the sky fell in, and Cas started scoring every time they got the ball. They narrowly missed out on a half century, but for a while at the beginning of the second half, I was wondering if Keighley's cherished all-time record for the biggest away win (104-4 against Highfield in 1995) might be under threat. All discipline, organisation, and basic skill had flopped, and a ferocious number of penalties were being given away.

Of course, that sort of match always gets weird; part way through the second half, someone dressed as a Mountie went round the stand singing "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" with friends togged out as various beasts. Cas took their foot off the pedal after the 40th unanswered point went in, and they missed three conversions, so London got away with 48-0. And someone tried to blame it all on the ref.

Something like that had been coming; a few weeks before this, I'd seen them lose to Huddersfield in a match which stood out for being one of the worst I've ever seen - completely uninspired and dull as ditchwater, with Huddersfield phoning it in and collecting the points for basic competence. At the time, it almost counted as a top-of-the-table four pointer, too, due to London's good start to the season.

This leaves us, anyway, with a play-off series in which Leeds and St. Helens are the top two, but the rest includes Huddersfield and Castleford but not Bradford, and Hull K.R. but not Hull F.C, and a Catalans side who haven't been as good as last time out, but who have just beaten Saints hollow.

change

Really delighted with the changes you've seen in Britain? Especially the ones embodied in architecture, the art that we shape and that then shapes us? Let the Labour Party, and any other party that shows up (we like a good party) know, by adding your photos of change to this Flickr group!

So far I can see a lot of stuff from user "Labour" (hey - communications signed by a Thing - it doesn't get any more Web 2.0 than that), at least one obvious sleeper, and someone calling themselves "Womble Lancs" who is posting a hell of a lot of pictures of public buildings in Lancashire and Greater Manchester and whose user pic shows someone on a motorbike. The only possible conclusion is that this person is actually Hazel Blears.

I'd like to broaden this out, though; why not photos of change inflicted on the public by the powerful more generally? Anyway, I'll be on it as soon as I've given Yahoo! actual "money" in exchange for more Flickr space; it's a new business model in Web 3.1415 that might catch on, apparently.

(Appreciation is due to Owen Hatherley.)

Read this now

A classic piece at The Register on biometrics and stupidity: read David Moss and you'll be more competent than anyone in government on this issue. It's the false positives, of course; but the truly shocking thing is that despite everything, the ID scheme still depends on the n=10,000 trial from 2004 that they deny is a trial.

Go, read.

No Future in the Cath Kidston Favela

I have some problems with "10:10", the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic.

No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to trinkets that will very likely go into landfill. Couldn't they have made the bits into wind turbine blades, or solar stoves, or bicycle frames if you must, or even just wiggly tin roofing? Or something, at least? Instead, it's a poster example of what Bill McKibben calls "downcycling". And, of course, it's the wrong bloody problem anyway; we could shut down aviation tomorrow and not meet the 10:10 goal, but lose fast international travel anywhere but a smallish chunk of Western Europe.

Another example; the climate campers apparently held a course on running a 12v power supply for a sound system, driven by someone pedalling. Well...engineering FAIL. If the only possible source of power is pedalling a bloody bike, wouldn't it be better to keep the bike and the calories for transport? Would a stereo be a high priority then? Wouldn't it be better to use the wind, the water, or the fire with a Sterling engine? In context, solar PV would be way out of the question. (I was pretty impressed by the edit your own sousveillance vids one, though.)

Not so sure about content, either. The Guardian is of course a biased source here; but they only found one person who wanted to build anything. An architect, of course. The front page coverage made me want to give up and buy a huge car; here's blonde Daisy, 16 and mugging for 14, suggesting we "grow veg on the balcony". Darling. Couldn't they have found Keisha-Tigrette from Tottenham who wants to KILL OIL IN THE EAR? I think they probably couldn't, and we'll get to that later.

As with most British media green pushes, there's little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour - what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it's a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change - nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn't going to work. And, again, it's all consumer guff.

The problem with consumer guff is that it's a limited way of approaching the problem. It's arguable whether or not investment is the defining value in the macro-economy - it's pretty clear that it's crucial to the climate/energy position. It is defined by the stuff we build. And further, without any mechanism to keep up to it, nothing is more evanescent than promises to do better. It doesn't even take backsliding to break them; what if you lose your job, and have to move somewhere where you need to commute 40 miles to work? Alas poor 10% saved by being nicer.

It's tough, however, to suck insulation out of the walls; this is one of the reasons I'm keen on retrofits as an alternative to winter fuel payments. The Tories can't take them away once they're done.

My third problem is this: where is the optimism? Everyone's talking about demog-friendly nostalgia for rationing that the demographic in question doesn't remember. That's not a sacrifice; woodbines, box at the Empire, sixpence, yadda yadda. Nobody is saying: Let's do BETTER this time. Let's build something BIGGER and SHINY and DRAMATIC and FANTASTIC and OUTRAGEOUS that doesn't just meet a 10% target but SMASHES it.

Where is the future in all this? What kind of a future is it? How are we meant to be full of confidence and aggression without it?

Actually there are some other options, chiefly RAGE and HATRED. No sign of them, either; but identifying an enemy is the oldest motivator in the book. There's no sign of a stinking mob hunting British Gas fatcats or an army of Rosie the Riveters basting Vladimir Putin like a turkey with their sealant guns. Why the hell not? We have enemies - why not make the most of them. I bet Keisha would be delighted to have King Abdullah and the CEO of Exxon burned in effigy, or perhaps just burned...after the block gets superinsulated.

Unfortunately, we're relying on self-righteousness as the driving emotion; not optimism (shorthand: lust), not greed, not rage, not hatred. Mind you, it is clearly an infinitely renewable resource, just like stupidity.

And while I'm on the point, where are the workers in this? Who's monitoring what exactly the council, or the diddly-dee semi-privatised thingy organisation, does when they refurbish the estate? Does anyone care about the "fuel poor" if they can't offer them a cash handout just before the elections?

There is, actually, a powerful response to some of this. That is: 10:10 looks a bit like a vacuous PR stunt because it's a PR stunt. The aim is to influence the deliberatiwoos in Copenhagen. Superistical. Das ist gut so. But this done, treaty signed, etc, we've got to go implement. With the North Sea gas running down, we've got to do that quicksmart anyway.

So, you ask, where are my positive proposals? The D-word? Well, I'm interested to hear what anyone else thinks about a campaign for an answer to climate and energy issues that points forward, that leans left, and that isn't based on whose-kid-are-you media bullshit. I'm planning to squirt sealant into every corner of my own place before this winter, too.

they told me over a drink we have ways of making you think

There is a fascinating paper here on how people believed that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qa'ida. Essentially, if you give people enough free-floating emotional energy, they are likely to decide that if you care so much, then there must be an explanation for the holes in your logic. It's called inferred justification, and it surely explains why the global Right are so keen on content-free mobilisation. Keep'em teabagging, in short, it stops them thinking.

Something similar is at work in this quote in a Conor Foley post at Crooked Timber:

Crime offers the imagery with which to express feelings of loss and social decay generated by these other processes and to legitimate the reaction adopted by many residents: private security to ensure isolation, enclosure and distancing from those considered dangerous

Strategies of neuro-politics; how do you keep other people from thinking, and indeed keep yourself from thinking? In the first study I mentioned, only 2 per cent of the people interviewed altered their beliefs based on new information, and 14 per cent of those who said they believed in a link between Al-Qa'ida and pre-war Iraq in the survey later denied it.

So what are we going to do about it? If the best idea anyone has on the Left is a High Pay Commission, we're not getting anywhere. I'm against this for a couple of reasons: first, the obvious work-around is to stick to the money as profits, and if necessary, to reorganise at least part of the company so the super-high earners are shareholders or partners. It wasn't many years ago that Goldman Sachs was still a partnership, after all.

Second, it doesn't do very much for the office cleaners, even if it manages to offend the investment bankers. It doesn't even bring in any tax revenue, nor does it hold out any hope of higher wages for the poor rather than marginally lower ones for the rich.

But what it does do is provide a focus for indignation; something to get worked up about, or in other words, a piece of politics-without-thinking.

If that's no good, neither is the guy who's trying to bill companies for the time he spent consuming their products; a clever conceit, and probably fun, but tragically art-knobber at bottom. (But then, as the inventor of ContentFree Comment, who am I to talk?) As Owen Hatherley remarks in a cracking interview:

Criticising consumerism is what people do when they can’t quite stomach criticising capitalism.

So, what to do? I was impressed by this guy's style - as well as the .38 and the giant TEABAGGERS = FAIL sign, check out all those neat data visualisations on his banner! If Habermas and Hunter S. Thompson had collaborated, wouldn't it have looked a little like that - the gonzo public sphere...but clearly this isn't practical or even desirable on a large scale.

The big question, I think, is how to define the Left as the side that's fighting for positive liberty, and to work out how we operationalise that. Chris Dillow is right that stronger unions, not high pay commissions, are the answer to that particular problem. But I'm also interested in things like this - politicised DIY, basically and this, and of course neurogenesis.

We won't get anywhere, however, as long as the incredible revolution in our understanding of cognition is reduced to a set of buzzwords (nudge, Taleb, etc) used by the Tories to misdirect attention anyway from the ugly truth.

coming to a security theatre near you

US security agents indulge in street theatre, frequently accidentally involving members of the public:

As a presidential limousine rolls closer, an instructor cues, "How about a little homicide bomb?" Bracaglia throws himself at the limousine and detonates.....Mike "The Horse" Dutch, who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 280 pounds, has been playing villains for five years. He's been hit by so many training bullets that he has "black-and-blue dots all over . . . the size of a dime." When Dutch sunbathes at the beach, people stare, "like I have leprosy."

"I hate getting shot in the rear end," says Bill Embrey, who wears shorts under his pants to soften the impact. "I'm stiff, for goodness sakes. When did we have our last 'force on force?' "

"Tuesday," says Dennis O'Toole, his role-playing partner. They ambushed President Obama's security detail during in-service training, firing simulated AK-47s.

O'Toole rolls up his sleeve, revealing a pocked arm. "Sister Mary Margaret is in these FX [special-effects bullets]. They will help you learn your lesson."

Embrey and O'Toole play "op-4s," opposition forces, and "tangos," terrorists. They specialize in assassinations. Embery's wife, a kindergarten teacher, describes Embrey's job as "playing all day." Some days the men hide out for hours in the woods at a secluded Maryland site, waiting for a motorcade to prey on. Once, after a snowfall, they wore white camouflage and lay so still, O'Toole says, that an agent "stepped on me."

How many times has he assassinated the president? I suspect he must have some very strange dreams. The bulk of the trainers are out-of-work actors, who volunteer because it beats the usual round of restaurant and bar jobs, but they also include a clinical psychologist who specialises in portraying the maniacs of today. Since the Reagan administration, he's changed the style but not the content.

When Spodak first played a character named Jeffrey Barry, he was "a mentally ill person, picking up trash and babbling about killing Reagan." During the 1990s, Jeffrey Barry believed Joan of Arc wanted him to kill Bill Clinton. Today Barry, still mentally ill, wears a Muslim prayer cap, receives messages from the 12th-century sultan Saladin and tells trainees he has incinerated a kitten as "a sacrifice to Allah."

Characters also change with presidencies. "I just had to dump 18 roles from the Bush administration," Spodak says.

For Obama, Spodak created a new character, Gideon Caine, a white supremacist who works as a data-entry clerk at Wachovia...

I really, really want to know what the acts whose run in this very special repertory company ended with the Bush years were; wasn't a Muslim kitten-torcher Cheneyesque enough? You can't fault the cultural observation, though; where else would a berserk racist teabagger work but at a huge, semi-bankrupt, South Carolinan mortgage lender kept alive by transfusions of public funds?

More to the point, in a real sense, nothing has changed - whatever their props and verbal furnishings, Spodak's character remains the same, the archetypal crazy gunman. Stephen Sondheim, come to think of it, dedicated a whole drama to the notion that this is a fundamental American character type, and it looks like these guys agree. However, the style is very different. Both highly formalised - motorcade, escorts, crazies - and formless, it can be staged anywhere in the public space, literally shooting holes in the fourth wall and recruiting random civilians into the action. Brecht would approve. Like this:

Five minutes before his job interview, John Fisher parks at Ace Fire Extinguisher Services in College Park, his window open and his stomach jumpy. He is nibbling on spoonfuls of cottage cheese when shouts erupt from the car next to his.

Fisher believes what he is seeing is real.

"Gun! He has a gun!" a man with a Secret Service earpiece yells, riffling through the glove compartment.

Actually, it's not Fisher who's pulled a gun, but how long before that happens, and someone who was a spectator a few moments ago gets to become the Crazy Assassin? Until then, of course, the main message the lucky participant/spectators will take away is that they should remain terrified, as David Kilcullen said about airport security. (Come to think of it, that's another theatrical exercise where you are both a spectator, and also get to play the role of Suspect.)

And this is no surprise; the impresario behind what you might call the Unmarked Gulfstream Ensemble is Military Professional Resources International, Inc, a company better known for hiring ex-servicemen as instructors for armies the US wishes to support.

What will happen to Harlequins RL?

What about some rugby league, then? First of all, I'm delighted that we had another Challenge Cup that's gone to an upset; even if Warrington taking it wasn't quite as cool as the Catalans, it's still a hell of a long time since they won anything. It's getting on for a while since their agonising near thing in 1993-1994, when they missed out on the championship on points difference, after losing a game 8-6 to Wigan - had they saved the point, they'd have pipped both Wigan and Bradford Northern. But it didn't happen; Keighley nearly knocked them out of the Regal Trophy the year after, Jonathan Davies went back to union, Iestyn Harris went on to bigger things.

I was pleased to see regularly underrated Lee Briers have a spectacular match - he's always been held back by playing for Warrington (among other things). The kick ahead on the second tackle for Chris Hicks' try should certainly go in the file of great Wembley moments in the game; and wasn't it good to be back, as well? I always rather suspected that the longer it took to build the damn thing, the less likely it was that Rugby League would ever be allowed back inside it...

In related news, I'm beginning to worry about the future of London RL. History suggests this is one of those things, like Pakistan, that must be more stable than it looks because it's still here. But some people are suggesting that the union half of Harlequins might be relegated or even banned from their competition over the great fake blood scandal; and what happens to the London club then, now it's been integrated with them?* It doesn't look good, even if they are now just another institution I dislike that's proved me right since about 2001.

*(Did anyone else notice that apparently, Dean Richards was in the habit of threatening players with a spell in the league squad?

most of the people watching this are in fact my sworn enemies

This is right, as is this. But what's this? I essentially joined the Liberal Democrats back in 2004 in order to escape the - ah, thanks, flyingrodent - belligerent content-free woofing blaring out of every other political entity, and here's the party's leader in Scotland, whining because they let a guy out of jail to die in a rather less awful fashion than the jail doctors would offer.

Seriously:

Tavish Scott, the Scottish leader of the Lib Dems, said the justice secretary needed to explain his actions to parliament. "The eyes of the world are on the Scottish government and they are being found wanting," he said. "MSPs need to come back to Holyrood to debate this issue. Parliament must be recalled."

Oh, of course, it's all serious and chin stroking David Broder bollocks about recalling parliament and the eyes of the world, but as they say, you've got to choose your camp, and Tavish Scott seems to have chosen the belligerent content-free woofers. This is especially worrying, as the Lib Dems' only people with government experience are the ones who served their time in Cardiff or Holyrood.

Meanwhile, you've got a choice between Britain's Bill Frist (doctor/politicians pretending to diagnose someone by remote control for partisan ends? Just what we needed, Richard Simpson MSP!) and this lot - ever wondered why Squealer in Animal Farm was a pig?

I'm feeling a bit Toyama today, frankly. What worries me is that I don't seem to be getting angry, just sarcastic, which is less productive.

Banned airlines come to the West Country

From the Viktorfeed: Phoenix Aviation/AVE, a company banned from the EU and which has a long history of dubious activities, sent off a flight (number 2E501 - note this as it's important later) from Dubai at 1539 with destination Bristol (Lulsgate). DXB's Web site lists it as "passenger charter" (click "more"). AVE is the UAE-based subsidiary of Phoenix set up to operate its Boeing 737s around the worse parts of South-West Asia; we can see that it is indeed part of Phoenix because it tends to use either their ICAO codes (PHW and PHG) or else 2E, which is assigned to a Sri Lankan operator that ceased to exist in 2000.

The aircraft is a B737 Classic; therefore its cruising speed is 485 mph. The ever-handy Great Circle Mapper lets us make a handy map. It's 3,516 nm from Dubai to Bristol; so that's a planned flight time of 7 hours 15 minutes. The B737 doesn't have the range to do it in one jump, however, having a maximum ferry range of 2,240 nm. I've plotted that distance from both airports on the map; there will have to be a stop somewhere in the intersection of the two areas.

This gives quite a lot of scope - Istanbul or Bucharest would be the most direct. (Checking, the great circle route goes directly over Bucharest.) Allowing 45 minutes for the tech stop, that's an eight hour flight, which gives an ETA of 2339 in Bristol. Bucharest, and the EU, would come up after four and a half hours, just after eight o'clock.

guaranteed - 100% content-free blogging!

ContentFree Comment is alive!

obligatory NHS post

Something worth remembering, from comments at Making Light:

Back before she became a vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin proclaimed a "Healthcare Decisions Day" in Alaska, when Alaskans would be encouraged to discuss end-of-life care with their physicians. Just last month Newt Gingrich wrote an editorial for the Washington Post praising "community-wide advance care planning".

They're faking it, of course. It's just another alternative truth; the post-modern politics package is what they do.

But I wondered: what is the special impact of maintaining a system that wastes about a trillion a year, compared to the cost of the same performance elsewhere? Even if there's $80bn of profit in there, surely any system or elite that was even minimally sane couldn't accept something the size of the war-swollen budget deficit going down the toilet every year.

As far as I can see, there are a couple of ideological/aesthetic effects of the healthcare system that may explain (or expalin - freudian!) it. The first one is something which I've noticed thanks to the blogosphere: Americans talk about health insurance the way drug people talk about drugs. Indeed, it's the drugs that vary. It's all about waiting for this, trying to get that, coming up with schemes to get hold of that despite not having such-and-such - a combination of dependency and fascination, on the one hand, and bitter, whining resentment on the other. The system is so complex, and its motivations so mean, that the good ol' fundamental attribution error makes it impossible to avoid imputing will and whim to it; I'm waiting for my man, indeed.

British conservatives tend not to get this bit, the degree of insecurity it provides; they imagine that you pay a bill every month and it just works. This is of course because of the NHS; if your employer stuck to the premiums, you're still covered anyway, and the private healthcare biz is limited in how far it can go in "medical loss management" because of the system's existence.

And insecurity is deeply political - whilst you're desperately trying to score the next month, what aren't you thinking about?

The second: The desperate insufficiency of negative liberty. Another thing which always comes up - sticking to some crappy job to get health insurance. This raises an interesting point. What kind of a huge X-inefficiency must that be? Further, if you believe in liberty, what kind of an infringement of it is this? One of the great achievements of the NHS is that you never need to think about it, or rather, that you can think about it in rational, public terms rather than under constant personal and private insecurity.

This is a crucial point about libertarian ideas of liberty - if, as they usually maintain, we need freedom in order to be creative, innovative, and enterprising, why does this usually get delivered in the form of making it as dangerous as possible to be any of those things? It's almost as if...there was a complete disjuncture between the top layer of ideology and the operational code that makes it all happen!

And thirdly, the flip side of being obsessed with health insurance is being obsessed with health (self, quackery, etc).

No wonder they're so keen.

Which reminds me; while the transatlantic bit of the whole palaver played out, my grandfather was waiting for the results of an NHS case conference as to whether they could carry out a procedure to place a rather special stent at the very top of his throat, in order to re-open it, without the tumour interfering with his breathing. He's over eighty, he's been ill for some time, he's already had several rounds of radiotherapy. And, of course, he's not Stephen Hawking, but an old sailor and former GEC Marconi electronics engineer, an orphan who was a communist from the Depression until he got to know Yugoslavia in 1945. The procedure is complicated; they need the respiratory specialist to be present at the same time.

They provisionally scheduled it for Friday after next.

The NHS is perhaps the definitive creation of democratic socialism in Britain...

foggy

Well, well; the interesting bit in this story about Blackwater involvement in a CIA assassination program (which didn't actually happen) is this.

It was never fully operational, and has been canceled twice: once by then-CIA Director George Tenet, restarted by Porter Goss, and finally by CIA Director Leon Panetta in June.

This is crucial; Goss was the leader of the whole Republican/spook intersection, and the patron of the various characters whose corruption landed Randy Cunningham and Dusty Foggo in jail. That he resumed this slightly unlikely project (what good would a bunch of berserkers like that have been for anything discreet? the CIA already has a paramilitary arm anyway...) argues strongly for its being yet more political manipulation or corruption.

Here's some interesting detail about another angle of the whole thing. Foggo's old job had been as the head of logistics in Frankfurt, where he behaved like James Bond would have done had he been a real spy - i.e. inefficiently, and surrounded by unwelcome publicity. It seems he was also responsible for setting up the "black site" prisons; which raises another question.

Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

He managed dozens of employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.’s stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot.

Whose cargo planes? The fateful contract with Brent Wilkes' Archer Logistics that landed Foggo in jail referred to a "secret plane network". As far as I know, no-one has ever explained this reference, which presumably meant something beyond the well-known handful of business jets. Out of the original three Viktor Bout-related fuel contracts, two of them (BGIA and Air Bas) were clearly associated with general transport into Iraq. We never did identify what was happening with No.3 (Sky Traffic Facilitators)....

Perhaps the Americans should ask Thailand to extradite him on charges related to his activities on their account? However, if the FARC is considered a protected political entity in Thai law, I suspect the CIA would be as well.

There's an interesting interview with the Abu Dhabi National here, about some of the founding generation of dodgy Russian businessmen in the UAE, specifically the man who originally registered San Air General Trading. He's not doing too well. The Bangkok Post has an interview with the man himself, in which you can also see some of his notes from the fateful meeting (to be fair, he denies their authenticity).

And there's a good story by Dmitri Sidorov of Kommersant which names Igor Sechin, a top official in the Presidential Administration (crazy guys - the same building and the same people as the old Central Committee Secretariat) and now a deputy prime minister, as an old comrade of Bout's from Mozambique in the 1980s. Which is interesting if true.

the tape recorder, for special music

As you can probably guess, I'm back; and if anyone can identify any of the songs here, I'd be grateful. Do we have a fado expert in the readership? (Actually, don't answer that. I encountered a British wannabe expert at this gig and within five minutes I wanted to chuck him in the harbour.)



As a genre, how does this differ from She Was Poor But She Was Honest? Justify your actions.

Tory of the Week: Dan Hannan

So what is wrong with Daniel Hannan? To understand this Tory of the Week, it's worth looking back to this post on the role of the Daily Telegraph in the world media ecosystem. Specifically, it acts as a sort of reflector attack for nonsense, picking up propaganda that can't be released directly into the US press and rebroadcasting it straight back. Once published by a newspaper of record, no-one has any problem printing it again.

There are two things here; one is the continued attraction of the US's well funded rightwing infrastructure. Dan Hannan, being an MEP, doesn't have to publish very much in the way of a declaration of interest - in fact, in the past he's been pretty strident about this. At the same time, hard-right politicians throughout Europe are well known for funding their party organisations out of EP expenses, and Hannan is doing the reverse; rather than using EP funds for party purposes, he's using his status as an MEP to go on the speaking circuit in the States and bask in wingnut welfare.

The second is that the US political circuit is being used as a sort of substitute for British politics here. Hannan at least thought he could say things in the States that would get him in a good deal of trouble in either Westminster or Brussels; intervening in US politics is a way of positioning yourself in Tory internal politics, without showing your hand too much. To be publicly rightwing enough that you want to abolish the NHS is not career positive if it gets into the papers; he seems to have thought that the public wouldn't notice as long as it happened beyond the seas, but that the sort of Tory constituency associations that could get him a Michael Gove-like seat for life would notice.

Interestingly, it seems to be the case that Conservative Party politics operates in a trans-atlantic world akin to "the isles" in recent British historiography - up until the 18th century or thereabouts, it was possible to play off Scotland or Ireland against London effectively, Scottish and Irish armies were deployed to England during the civil war as (mostly) English ones went the other way. Similarly, Conrad Black imagined himself kingmaker from Toronto. It's happened before, too - here's a fascinating letter about Saskatchewan's NHS-like system, which faced a barrage of redbaiting and was eventually set up with the assistance of volunteers from the UK.

It goes beyond the mere intergovernmental alliance; tellingly, Atlantic Bridge in its current form was set up in 2003 to drum up support for the Iraq war, and it is chaired by Dr Liam Fox MP, one of the Tories who spent 2002-2003 arguing that the Blair government was not sucking up to the Americans enough. I've argued before that the Decent Left movement has succeeded, in that it's found a home in the Conservative Party through figures like Michael Gove; Hannan is probably too much of a tribal Tory to be considered Decent, despite being close to Gove and wired up to the Iraq noise machine.

However, all this relies on the Atlantic as a semi-permeable membrane. It is crucially important that only the bits of your westward enterprise that you want arrive back in London. Access to the bridge must be strictly controlled. This appears to be what went wrong with Hannan's propaganda tour; when the Guardian is one of the most read newspapers in the US, it's much harder to achieve compartmentalisation, and the instigators of the #welovethenhs Twitter drive blew the seal so comprehensively that they forced David Cameron to join up and very publicly disown Hannan.

Marked out as a loose cannon, his chances of being parachuted into the Commons must now be considered poor. So you can expect a lot more wingnut chum from him, as he steps up his campaign for a sinecure at the Heritage Foundation.

Chris Dillow points out that perhaps, if we were to do it all over again, we might not design the NHS the same way. Well, maybe not. The really interesting bit, however, and the conclusive evidence that this was a content-free piece of Tory internal politics is that Hannan and Gove's own proposals are essentially identical to Obama's.

Both books call for the NHS to be replaced by a new system of health provision in which people would pay money into personal health accounts, which they could then use to shop around for care from public and private providers. Those who could not afford to save enough would be funded by the state.

So, personal insurance, with a public sector option, and Medicare/Medicaid benefits. West of 30 degrees, he agrees with people who think this is equivalent to Nazism; east of 30 degrees, he thinks it's genius. The real content here is that Hannan wants to be considered a maximum rightist in two different political systems, and doesn't give a damn for the actual content of anything he says.

I am who I am!

Simon Jenkins is opposed to forecasts in general. He thinks they are surrounded by too many caveats:

We hear much talk about those who study English needing to be taught science. In my view, it is those who study science who need to be taught English. What is the point of public predictions so smothered in caveats and qualifiers as to be drained of significance? The same scientists who lecture ministers on the exactitude of their calling – on the purity of "the science" – use qualifiers that any English student could see render nouns worthless.

Fish excuses his colleagues with weakening words such as chance, might, could, possibly, probably and even pot luck. Yet he is supposed to tell us what is going to happen

He also thinks there are too few caveats:

The office now claims that it is "66% certain" that next winter will be warmer and wetter than last. The figure is an ominously precise advance on the 65% certainty of a warm summer. The information is useless without knowing the likelihood of the "66%" being correct.

He thinks the weather forecasters always say it will be sunny when in fact it rains:

This is from the same people who said that both 2007 and 2008 would be "warmer than average", when they were cooler and wetter.

He also thinks the weather forecasters always say it will be rainy when it is sunny:

There is rarely a weekend forecast that does not stress rain (or that curious synonym, showers) at the expense of sun, even if the rain falls, if at all, for a mere hour a day. Nor do forecasts favour coastal microclimates, which are mostly sunnier than inland and are where most holidaymakers go.

A pub in my Welsh coastal village used to print out the BBC weather forecast each Friday – invariably "rain in Wales" – and put it on a board so visitors could hurl darts at it. The Scottish village of Carrbridge once threatened to sue the Met Office for a continually inaccurate forecast of rain that was ruining its tourist industry.

Strangely, the two cheapjack silly season tabguff anecdotes above are the only factual evidence produced in the whole piece. You might think a slightly more, ah, numerate and forensic approach, cold accountancy as Corelli Barnett liked to say, would be appropriate for such a statistical matter as relative forecasting skill. One explanation is that his nibs didn't touch this bit of work - does it taste of unpaid intern, perhaps? The Lord's Test and Goodwood are behind us.

But Jenkins, Lord of the Manor by purchase, seems to take the worst version of any calculation the IMF or the Conservative Party comes up with as gospel writ. When it agrees with him. Curious, that. And he likes to impute treasonable motives; not as hard as the Craven Heffer, but it's there.

Yet whenever criticised, the Met Office pleads for more staff, more research and a bigger computer....The purveyors of British weather forecasts are relentlessly upbeat in the long term and gloomy in the short, in other words they are probably political

This is kinda noticeable, no? He thinks voices on the TV weather forecast are plotting against the Conservative Party. If you live in the Elthorne Estate, London, N19, or close equivalent, this gets you a prescription likely to make you gain 60 pounds of weight and give up independent life forever. Jenkins, though, not so much.

He also imagines that the Met Office is a serious problem in terms of the public finances. Now this is where it gets serious. There is only one bit of that institution that has been investing urgently in high performance computing; the Hadley Centre for Climate Research, proud owners of one of the most powerful computers in the world.

Jenkins is working his way towards coming out as a climate change denier; he's not on the dancefloor yet, but you might spot him looking shy at the Carbon Bar when his wife's out of town. He's hanging out with the landed knobber set that make up the denier group in the Tories. Mark my words.

you say you want a revolution, well, you know...

A really good fisk is almost like a remix; you should be thankful for the original chunk of hackwork for giving us the chance to do something interesting. Hence Matt Carr, who dons the positive-pressure mask and takes the scalpel, chops up Christopher Caldwell's book, and demonstrates the throbbing worm guts to the eager students in the audience, before dropping the lot in liquid nitrogen for the permanent record.

Caldwell, of course, is the man who thought that Robert Kilroy-Silk was going to rule Europe, and who got the New York Times Magazine to publish a six-page hagiography of the silly fool. I tackled it at the time; he drooled over RKS's desres mellow-crunchin' country mansion whilst ranting at "the old country-house condescension", among much else that was ridiculous. He could have said less about the tan and the ice blue eyes...

Now he's written a whole book called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, whose content seems to be much the same as Mark Steyn's America Alone. He's been described as "knowing his way around the banlieue", having written some berserkly alarmist pieces back in the winter of 2005. Perhaps he talked to a cab driver...a cab driver who voted FN.

But enough. It's not that surprising that he's still a hard-right libertarian/Republican, after all that's happened - it's not an ideological position, it's an identity. It's slightly more interesting that the tactical disasters that have happened didn't affect him in the least - in 2005, he went looking for a catastrophic mob crisis in Europe, and he was damn well going to find one. He'd already got the title, and probably the advance. And so, despite the failure of all his predictions, here we are with his Revolution.

What keeps him in business, then? My explanation is that he plays an important role among right-wing intellectuals in the US. Specifically, people who don't want to read Mark Steyn or Michelle Malkin read him. Indeed, they read him in order to know, themselves, that they don't read Mark Steyn. They are Caldwell-people, who imagine themselves in the columns of the Financial Times, not the willingly ignorant teabaggers. If they do read Mark Steyn, they only read him to know what the masses think. They say. W. H. Auden's crack that we say Masses when we mean ourselves in our weaker moments is very much to the point.

To be brief, Christopher Caldwell is an example of a group of writers who cater to people who believe of other conservatives the things conservatives believe of the rest of humanity.

tory of the week

OK, here's Tim Loughton, Tory MP for Worthing, who's utterly dedicated to fighting the surveillance state. He says so:

Using pupils' fingerprints in schools has been criticised by many MPs, including Sussex Conservatives Nick Gibb and Tim Loughton, who fear sensitive information about children could fall into the wrong hands.

Mr Loughton, MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, has said it is another step towards a surveillance society.

And again:

The Conservatives' children's spokesman, Tim Loughton, challenged the value of such a database [ContactPoint].

"Which do you think is more likely to protect vulnerable children - investing in more permanent and appropriately trained social workers and reducing their caseload or instead throwing money at another expensive data disaster waiting to happen?"

He's even against identity cards.

However, he's pretty strong on Internet censorship:

That this House expresses its deep concern at the availability of child pornography on the internet; congratulates the Romford-based internet service provider, Real Data Services, for blocking users from being able to access websites containing child pornography; and further calls upon other internet providers to follow suit, in order to track down the perpetrators of this obscene crime against children.

And he's all in favour of Radio Maryja, which ought to get him on the same page as Michal Kaminski - here he is on religious broadcasting.

And, of course, he's £30,000 a year in favour of installing CCTV in classrooms, with a little help from some dodgy number-style products.

Harrop Fold, a comprehensive in Salford, is another school that has installed cameras and microphones in its classrooms, but just to monitor teachers, the school says.

In the last four years, since executive headteacher Antony Edkins took the helm, the percentage of pupils achieving five GCSEs with grades of A*-C has grown from 18% to 52%. The cameras have made a "very significant" contribution to the rise, Edkins says.

Is that significant with 95 or 99% confidence?

Of course, what's genuinely telling here is the name of his company; Classwatch. I'm interested to know if any of you have a view on what the difference between the two worlds in his head is; I reckon he thinks that CCTV is OK because it's directed at the mob, or at kids in state schools, who clearly deserve it.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention his junket to Syria, where I think they know a thing or three about mass surveillance. There's contemporary authoritarianisms for you.

[Shall I make Tory of the Week a regular feature? Thrashing the corpse of Labour is so 2005, and, y'know, pre-emptive activism and all that]

first mover advantage

If it's possible to get Americans to start a string of minor riots in order not to have at least $80bn worth of national healthcare, surely it must be possible to start a good row about whatever it is the Conservatives have in store for us? We stand to lose at least that and more. I ask in the light of this post at Bickerstaffe Record, which suggests, not stupidly, that making an Aunt Sally of the credit rating agencies might be a good idea for a demo.

After all, it's very true that they played a key role in the great crash, and before that in the post-dotcom Enron/telecoms fraudfest. As Eavis & McLean point out in The Smartest Guys in the Room, the rating agencies were in the best possible position to work out just how much debt Enron had hidden down rabbit holes and in other people's wheely bins - because every time Enron pulled another fancy dan financing, they had the ratings agencies rate the bonds that came out of it.

We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

And, strategically, this is always going to be a problem, because unlike all other forms of credit risk assessment, the agencies make their money from the party issuing the debt, so it's always in their interest to be optimistic. (Similarities with this little beauty of a deal are entirely appropriate.) When they are dealing with private clients, that is; if it's Argentina or Britain involved, they just go ahead and shoot. John Quiggin has an excellent post on their failure and their role in pushing PFI in Australia.

But I have my doubts that any such action will change their opinion; in fact, it wouldn't be the aim of such an action. The point would be rather to render their opinion less relevant and alter the conditions under which it is formed. However, I have just ordered the domain name standardispoor.com, and I welcome suggestions for what we might do with it.

More broadly, what worries me is that the Tories will pull some horror out of their back pocket in the financial year 2010-2011, and by the time it's passing through the House, we'll just have started getting angry. This is one of the historical lessons of On Roads; if you really want to stop something, you need to start earlier than you think.

This is why, by the way, projects like FreeOurBills are important. If there's no point protesting about a road project after it gets into the national programme, the answer is to shorten the feedback loop and react quicker. This is much more interesting and important - real citizen technology - than Twittering for Iran, DDOSing low value Russian Web sites, or any of the other manifestations of the fake version.

So this is one of the few good features of open primaries I can think of; they provide an opportunity to put together an organisation early in the game, which is roughly how Obama dunnit. In a parliamentary system, though, this is much less important.

Shouldn't we be getting our lists together now, rather than waiting for the Tories? I agree that this implies giving up on the elections, but then, who wouldn't, and who doesn't suspect that a surviving Labour government wouldn't be just as bad?

...from the sea

What's wrong with PROFIT?! Death to all Marxists! Hey, I usually try to remain calm, but this is getting unnerving. Everyone with any sense knew there would be an epic wingnut freakout after the US elections - the structural forces made it inevitable, after all the time spent denying plate tectonics - but who imagined that the tactical triggering event would be the healthcare bill? I was thinking in terms of carbon tax, or something that could be presented as a racist issue - immigration, perhaps.

But there you have it; you really can turn these people on and off like a tap and turn them on anything, like a hose. If there's one remark I never want to hear again after the last few years, it's the one about "if you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything".

Meanwhile, things like this happen:

“We are working taxpaying jobs, paying taxes, and we can’t get insurance because we make $6.55 an hour,” said Laura Head, 32, of Rogersville, Tenn., the first person in line Friday for the first day of the Remote Area Medical clinic, an annual three-day event offering free medical care. “This is really a great beneficial thing, but it doesn’t have to be this way; we could all have insurance.”

A single mother of three who mows yards and moves trailers for a living, Head said she arrived at the fairgrounds Tuesday, to camp out at the fairgrounds until the health fair began Friday morning. Her motivation was simple: severe, constant pain.

Close to two years ago, her boyfriend smashed her teeth, she said – but, without the $6,000 needed to have the teeth pulled she has endured infection after infection, making literally 100 visits to the emergency room for antibiotics and pain medication.

Back in February, 2008, I blogged about the French Navy dropping off a load of school books for New Orleans during a port call. I'm beginning to think that someone should write the story about one of their new Mistral-lclass Batiments de Projection et Commandement doing a free clinic on the tank deck, like the US Marines do from their LHAs in West Africa, as part of a semi-acknowledged drive for political influence in a zone of potential pre-insurgency and instability.

Or would the redcoats be more shocking? Albion would be the obvious ship, just for the name.

square

Danny Rampling:

Since I've become a property developer my life has changed for the better

I suppose this was always on the cards. Kasimir Malevich:

We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!

Meanwhile, look who's got a new album out; others agree. Northern Stomp is officially twice as interesting as anything else you might find to listen to this year; I agree with Stylus that their main problem back in the late 90s was that they were a preview of the future, with a less...hideously white, as Greg Dyke would have put it, record collection behind them.

Also, if the title song is anything to go by, they're swinging back towards the northern anger of the first album; I'm currently seeking legal advice as to whether destroying Brighton would be necessary and proportionate in order to get at the Indelicates.

false positives

I got around to updating the Viktorfeed whitelist, and whilst I was at it, doing a clean-up of the database to remove all the known false positives by deleting all the movements that came from an airline that was on the list. Interestingly, this gave me an opportunity to calculate the false positive rate - as it turned out, about 7% of the entries in the DB were false positives, in other words, an accuracy over about a year of 93%. Which I don't think is at all bad for a system based on adding airlines to the whitelist as they appeared in the feed, but then again, this only covers the first phase of filtering and doesn't include a lot of once-off movements.

left behind

I was hoping we wouldn't be seeing any more of these. 86.62.12.74, on a high latency satellite link, searching UAE Google for IraqLEStaffScheme. My original post on the official instructions for UK employees in Iraq is here. This is why I was keen to re-raise the issue before the final withdrawal, which is now looking more and more final.

Meanwhile, I still haven't heard from my new MP, marquee name Campaign Grouper Jeremy Corbyn....even Greasy Phil Hammond was better.

out

The remaining British training team in southern Iraq has been moved to Kuwait to await negotiations on their future status. A suggestion: couldn't they perhaps wait in...Britain?

tectonic plates

Over at CT, a link to two polls - here and here. The killer finding is that the same sort of percentage of the US population, and the same sort of people, deny that Barack Obama is a US citizen *and* that the American and African continents were once part of the same landmass.

Specifically, an actual majority - well, a plurality - of Republicans disagree with plate tectonics. The crossbreaks are hilarious; the only groups of which this was true were Republicans and Southerners, but the most likely groups to get it right were blacks, Latinos, and Democrats, in that order, so those were almost certainly the same individuals.

So far, another stupid Americans story. But the differences between the groups can be summarised as follows:

1. Less Republican groups had a small but real advantage in the percentage who voted yes.


2. More Republican groups had a considerable lead in the percentage who voted no.


3. More Republican groups had many fewer Don't Knows.

I think the most important statement is number three. The Democratic- and fact-leaning groups, although they had significant numbers of people who got it wrong, were much more likely to say they weren't sure than to choose No. Being unsure of the answer, they expressed doubt.

Republican-leaning groups weren't just more likely not to know, but more likely to plump for an answer anyway. Fools, you could say, rushed in.

Now, I really don't believe quite that many of them are ignorant of basic geology - I rather suspect that the question tripped a number of trigger words (Africa!) before getting to that point. Everyone thinks like that a lot of the time.

This is, of course, how operationalised post-modernism works - what matters is the theatre of action, jumping and yelling and trying to dominate the mental space, and all that determines which way you're pointing is a small set of identity-defining talking points. Did you know Senator X is weak on fufferum? Did you know that?? But why aren't you talking about his position on elefurt? That's what I want to know! The base have probably internalised this to a considerable degree.

That does raise the possibility of getting things done by tailoring your message to fire their immune receptors. The classic example is adding the word "security" to whatever proposal you have. Similarly, the Decent Left project was based on giving a whole lot of ugly right-wing ideas the right biological markers to stimulate a certain kind of leftie.

mobility

From the 14th to the 15th century, women became much taller. Around the same time, says Chris Dillow:

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the richest people were overwhelming those whose names derived from places, whilst the poor tended to have names derived from crafts: Smith, Wright and suchlike. However, by the 16th century, this link between wealth and surnames had vanished; the rich were as likely to have craft surnames as the general population.
This, says Clark, suggests that there was complete social mobility, if we look at a long enough time-span.

You can probably guess that my pattern recognition bias and salience heuristic are going ape with this apparent correlation. What does this say about the entry to the early modern era?

it's the new Middle East, or something

What's happening on the Viktorfeed? Something called "Skyway Ltd", using the ICAO code DGD, is doing quite a few flights into Iraq and Afghanistan; so is "Transaviaservice" or FNV. This last is the current owner of Antonov 12 ER-AXE/7345201, which we've had here before, both with Aerocom and with a shortlived project involving routes from South-East Asia to Australia that somehow required a cargo door that could be opened in flight. They also have ex-Air Van aircraft, and one that was used by Astral in Kenya; and several of their An-72s are on lease to SkyLink.

Since the An-12s were banned from the UAE, they've apparently moved to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq, indeed as far north as you can go before it ceases to be Iraq. Here's a of one of their An-72s in Tarin Khowt, Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Ethan Zuckerman muses on the possibilities of jarking for a good cause; he wants to release ammunition that deliberately jams the firer's weapon into the illegal supply chain. There's much more arms trade goodness, including this cartoon and his realisation that....

As I read the story, I realized I knew most of the terminology used, not from a close study of the issue, but from Frederick Forsyth’s classic novel, “The Dogs of War“.

fake private contractors

We've not had a good fake police story for a while. Here's one, though; Californian driving a car kitted out as a police vehicle stops a real policeman and gets arrested. It's not quite as good a story as all that - the real police car was an unmarked one, so the symmetry isn't perfect. Apparently they think he planned to rob the guy; surely you wouldn't plan to be the only fake policeman on the streets?

Or perhaps he was working on the principle that being robbed by cops was a plausible event in Oakland, which is telling if true.

Much, much more seriously, the Guardian concludes that the kidnapping of Peter Moore in Baghdad in 2007 was a police-as-fake-police job, perhaps Iraq's distinctive contribution to violence. It's argued that they wanted rid of him to prevent the implementation of a huge management-information system that would track all payments to government contractors, and therefore bring about an epic reckoning of just how much money was being stolen.

If true, it's well worth pointing out that he wasn't the only foreigner to pay the price for resisting the spectacular corruption festival we created in Iraq; the fate of Dale Stoessel, for example, remains a mystery. He was involved with a contract to dispose of surplus military equipment, at the same time as the famous 99 tonnes of arms imported from Bosnia in the Ilyushin-76 ER-IBV failed to arrive in the Iraqi arsenal. The aircraft frequently went on elsewhere from Baghdad; I've long suspected that the weapons were being re-exported, or possibly sold to the insurgents.

Interestingly, we do have at least one case of valuable goods being simply driven out of the front door of Baghdad Airport. Special detail: the perpetrator was a fake private contractor.

police and thieves

Bruce Schneier and Jason Sigger, usually sensible sources, both mock a study by some thinktank or other which raises the supposed possibility of hackers "using the Internet to start a nuclear war".

As they both point out, the possibility of anyone getting access to the actual command and control firing chain with metasploit is so remote as to be ridiculous, and we'd do much better to worry about tidying up old radioisotopes in Russia, and perhaps not having quite so many nuclear bombs.

My only objection is that we have, in fact, lived through a serious attempt to do just that, immediately after Lashkar e-Toiba terrorists attacked the centre of Bombay in December, 2008. As you might expect, they didn't try to get control of nuclear weapons from the command line.

Instead, they attempted to use the Internet to influence the political leadership - they placed a call to the Pakistani president's office, spoofing the calling line identification message in order to give credibility to their effort to pose as the Indian foreign minister. My technical analysis is here; the Indian government's investigation later showed that the attackers set up a VoIP network with nodes in the US and Austria for their own use.

Presumably the idea was to provoke the Pakistanis into doing something that would destabilise the situation, causing the Indians to respond and thus triggering Pakistani mobilisation for real. The Guns of August, 2.0, with Princip using a Linksys SIP handset.

Clearly, there is still a need for the existing nuclear states to help the new ones establishing solid command and control procedures, including the communications elements that make them work; one of the problems of international crises is that the system to be secured suddenly gets a whole lot bigger, as other systems - in this case the diplomatic/protocol bureaucracy - become closely connected to it.

It's not the early 80s hackers of War Games we need to worry about - instead it's essentially trolls, provocateurs, empowered by the technology available to today's spammer.

It strikes me that the possibility of ambiguous identity is a hard one to grasp; for a very long time, it was safe to say that such a message was unlikely to be a fake, and if it was, it was probably faked by a proxy for the real enemy. Consider the case of 4chan vs. AT&T.

AT&T null-routed the server which carries the bulk of 4chan's content; everyone freaked; AT&T claimed that a denial of service attack was coming from that IP range. But it was hardly likely that the 4chan crowd, of all people on the Internet, would have been daft enough to launch a denial of service attack from their own machine - DOSs have essentially always been distributed over many, many hacked computers (DDOS, for Distributed Denial of Service) since the first botnets emerged in the early 00s, this being harder to counter, offering much more stolen computing power, and being much more difficult to trace to its source.

A detail in the Ars Technica story explains it all. One of the sources cited mentions "persistent ACK scans" - when a computer wants to start a TCP connection, as used for the Web, to another, it sends a message called a SYN to the receiving party, which if it gets the message and wants to reply, sends a message called an ACK to the address provided in the SYN. If received, the sender replies with a SYN-ACK and then starts transferring data.

4chan was experiencing a DDOS attack itself at the time. Putting these bits together, it's clear that the attackers were altering the source header in the packets they threw at 4chan to point to a machine somewhere in AT&T's network, so that every one received generated a further packet thrown at the AT&T machine. This is a classic; it gets you two attacks for the price of one, it conceals your own position, and it brings the possibility that AT&T might go ape and do the job for you. If the first target is especially big, you could also use it to magnify the volume of traffic, in a so-called reflector attack.

It's surprising and depressing that they weren't aware of that; no more surprising and depressing, however, than the way so many people have been willing to believe patently false information just because it's "secret".