Sion Simon: Ignorant.

On Newsnight last night, Blairite fatster Sion Simon MP demonstrated that he is too stupid to be trusted with glue. And Jeremy Paxman demonstrated that he no longer has any credibility, but we'll get to that later.

Well, let's deal with the fool before the knave. Simon was on the show to defend the government against trade unionists who are angry about private-equity funds buying into their employers. Now, there are a number of arguments you can have about this, for example whether the private-equity guys are more likely to squeeze the company for cash, or whether their ability to ignore the stock market is likely to offer stability.

But Simon wasn't going to be bothered with any flummery about efficient capital markets, contestability, or similar rot. When the GMB representative he was facing suggested that the government should end subsidies to private equity, Simon pigged at the cam and snarled, several times, that "there is no subsidy!"

He doesn't know what he's talking about. Private-equity funds typically borrow heavily to buy into target companies, thus benefiting from leverage. This is crucial, because the tax system treats two forms of return to capital very differently. Dividends, paid to shareholders, are taxable. Interest, paid to creditors, is considered a cost of doing business and is tax-deductible. This is a subsidy to capitalists who use debt financing rather than equity financing, such as private equity funds.

Interestingly, nobody really knows why this is so - the convention that interest is tax-deductible began in the 19th century for no very clear reason. But the last person to ask about it is clearly Sion Simon MP.

Paxman, and many others: Sick.

Whilst I'm on the topic of last night's TV: what the fucking fuck is fucking Jeremy Paxman doing pretending not to know the basic facts on the Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001?

Recap: this legislation made it possible to deport or lock up foreign nationals on the basis of secret evidence, which did not have to be disclosed to a court or to the detained. Their only legal recourse under ATCSA is to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, SIAC, which hears their cases in camera, the detainee being represented by a special advocate approved by the government. Even he, though, doesn't necessarily get to see the full case.

Now, recently, ATCSA has been used in an attempt to get rid of some people who were originally subject to the iniquitous, no-evidence "control orders" before they were struck down by the courts. Most recently, the alleged spiritual leader of Al-Qa'ida in Europe, Abu Qatada, failed in an appeal to SIAC against his deportation to Jordan.

SIAC ruled, it seems, that because the Jordanians had promised not to torture him, he would be perfectly safe there, and therefore his deportation would be lawful. They promised, see. Not that this protected another man who was deported to Algeria in a similar case, and was promptly locked up despite the fact the Algerians promised not to lock him up. But, apparently, they promised, so that's all right.

We could stop at this juncture to debate whether the fact a powerful actor promised not to do something is any kind of security, especially when that actor is a sovereign state, or whether a judge has any business relying on promises as an argument to trump the law. But we won't. We've had these arguments many, many times already.

But what Jeremy Paxman thinks he is doing in shouting at some chap from Amnesty that "he KNOWS the charges against him! he KNOWS the evidence!", when the whole point of the case is that he DOESN'T and neither does anybody else (did you know that the SIAC judgment is going to appear in two versions, one secret and one public?), well, that goes beyond me.

A close shave

Apparently, the Red Army in Afghanistan called the kind of raid it calls a "zachistka" in Chechnya a "prichyoska" or haircut. "An unnecessarily brutal cordon-and-search operation, sir, and something for the weekend?"

YouTube and the "series of tubes"

Looking at this inspiring achievement, I fell to wondering exactly how YouTube is serving up its videos. Now, so far I can remember seeing YouTube content from hostnames with the form lax-vXX.lax.youtube.com or ash-vXX.ash.youtube.com, where the x stands for an arbitrary number. Clearly those are either LA or Ashburn, Virginia, where the big Equinix East Coast IX is located.

What interests me, though, is whether or not YouTube makes any effort to serve files topologically close to the user. They don't use any multicast or CDN-ing, so do they just dump the stuff out there, or do they traffic-engineer at all? Now, being in the UK, I'd expect to get ash.youtube.com all the time, but I don't - it seems to be about equally likely to come from Ashburn or LA. Now, if you were trying to shorten the haul, a simple way of doing it would be to replicate content between the two data centres and do some form of traffic engineering. That would also allow fail-over between them, which is nice.

YouTube might be doing this, but something else as well. For example, they might be working on the principle of serving from the nearest data centre, but also load-balancing across them, so you would get the nearest unless it's congested. Alternatively, they might just be accepting uploads to whichever data centre and then pouring it forth.

Now, I seem to recall seeing somewhere that they account for 20Gbps/s of outbound traffic, rising fast. That was back in June last year. Their own blog claims 45 terabytes a day, i.e. 52 GBytes a second. What would be interesting to know would be the average number of times one of their items is viewed, which would give an idea of the net imbalance between their upstream and downstream traffic. In so far as the two match, YouTube could cover this through peering - after all, it might as well be a fair-sized ISP. But the excess outbound traffic is what they have to pay for.

Now, I did a quick check on the selection of "most viewed" videos. With the top one being viewed 553,934 times and the bottom 6,837, I used the Malatesta estimator to arrive at an estimate of 196,270 views for a top-100 video. Supposedly, 100 million clips a day are accessed, but it's not clear whether those are unique - does anyone know how many are on there? But if the top 100 accounts for, say, 60 per cent of the viewing, we'd be looking at a figure of, say, 270,000 views per vid, with a highly skewed distribution.

To put it another way, YouTube is a giant copying machine, that kicks out 270,000 bytes for every byte it takes in. Call it the content replication factor. Because the replication takes place at source, and the replicated traffic has to be carried over the backbone network, this implies that essentially all YouTube's traffic requirement must be covered by paid-for transit, which costs about $20/Mbits-sec/month at this scale. That would be - ouch - $8 million a month...

And at that price, you certainly don't want things like this happening:

11 t3-1.mpd01.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.2.102) 165.207 ms 108.370 ms 112.946 ms
12 t9-3.mpd01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.222) 186.815 ms 186.259 ms 191.197 ms
13 t7-1.mpd01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.194) 231.125 ms 187.475 ms 188.842 ms
14 t4-2.mpd01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.230) 187.148 ms 187.109 ms 191.818 ms
15 g0-3.na21.b015619-0.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.112.36.50) 174.083 ms 175.773 ms 174.523 ms
16 10.254.254.233 (10.254.254.233) 350.527 ms 278.645 ms 202.520 ms
17 ash-v83.ash.youtube.com (64.15.118.204) 184.436 ms 183.616 ms 182.910 ms

Oops.

Support Iraqi democrats

This time, Blair seems to mean it about British troops beginning to draw-down their presence in southern Iraq. All the usual provisos still apply - so far, it's just part of the extra force that is going, and the last squaddie is scheduled to leave in three Friedman units' time, like he has been since 2003. But this time we have a timetable within one Friedman and a number.

So it's time to talk seriously about the people who have worked for us in Iraq. The Americans are only accepting risible numbers of refugees. 50 per cent of Iraqi refugees in Europe are in Sweden. It won't do to claim that the situation is peachy in Iraq. The interpreters, for example, are marked men.

Back in August, 2005 I said that

Unfortunately, the best form of support the British Left can offer secular Iraqis would be to countersign their applications for political asylum. I think someone suggested this recently - perhaps we could get a Pledgebank going?

The government is still trying to force existing refugees onto aeroplanes to Irbil in Kurdistan, this being the only place not so dangerous that the law would forbid it - apparently, if you get killed between Irbil and home that's OK. It's high time that we went operational on this.

Method, not ideology

Over the last few months, I've done a succession of posts which can be read under the tag TWOS, for the war on stupidity, which explore various forms of ideology and consensus. More related posts will be tagged as I go. But is this just an exercise in pooflinging? Beyond tirades about managerialism, Tony Blair, bad engineering, and other stupidity-generating institutions, does TYR offer anything? Daniel Davies, of course, would argue that poo-flinging is indeed enough, for a variety of reasons.

He's right, up to a point. After all, when the forces marshalled behind incredibly bad ideas are so powerful, who would want to waste time discussing alternatives when you could be concentrating your fire, or rather poo, on the enemy? And his rationale - that most people can identify the flaws in a proposal, but coming up with ones that have fewer requires ability - is reasonably persuasive.

But I think this doesn't go far enough. Stupidity in organisations is like noise in information systems. Claude Shannon worked this stuff out at Bell Labs in the 1940s, when he theorised that the factor governing the informational throughput of any communication channel, all other things being equal, was the error-rate. Therefore, for a given bandwidth, the fastest link is the one with the better error-cancelling procedure.

We can see similar processes at work throughout the natural world, and throughout society. Evolution, markets, debate - these are all processes that create a big pool of errors, and then use a stupidity-elimination process to sieve out the least silly. Then shuffle, recombine, iterate, and destupidify. The persuasive force of this is well shown by simple computer simulations - like this one, ICE, which aims to defeat the argument against evolution from irreducible complexity. ICE sets a simple challenge, to catch as many randomly dropped balls as possible using crosses on a grid. Its organisms are randomly-generated, then tested and ranked in order of fitness. Then they are recombined, with random changes, and the whole thing is run again, with those below a threshold level eliminated. Evolution is visible within two or three iterations.

So, here we are at my first point. The Redwood consensus, as we identified in this post, relies on the creation of anxiety about security issues that the core executive of the state can offer relief for, as a substitute for anxiety about economic issues that the state will offer no relief for. It further assumes that a managerialist elite consensus knows what to do on all issues.

Clearly, this is highly stupidogenic. Managerialism relies, after all, on the use of pseudo-scientific methods to enforce compliance with the managers' a priori beliefs. The deliberate exemption of a large sector of the political sphere from normal debate is at the heart of the consensus - UK-US relations, control of drugs and borders, the workplace. Where de-stupidising processes are not at work, stupidity accumulates.

Therefore, we need a more hostile memetic environment.

But that's not all. If we want faster memetic evolution, as well as sharpening the stupidity-remover's blade, we need to increase the size of the pool of errors behind it. I've said before that I can't understand why conservatives, and for that matter right-libertarians, think that innovation is best encouraged when the cost of failure is maximised and the barriers to entry high. Consider the experiment Jonah Lehrer describes here, in which monkeys were raised in three environments of varying richness. Poverty of experience had visible effects on the monkeys' brains. Interestingly, though, the benefits of a richer childhood showed diminishing returns - above a certain point, the monkeys derived no further benefit.

Now think of society. Can anyone seriously argue that a few percentage points shaved off Bill Gates' income would deter any significant innovation? Can anyone seriously deny that a few tens of millions of dollars wouldn't have a seriously beneficial effect on a significant number of children in, say, Africa? (Bill Gates certainly wouldn't, after all, as he is giving substantial amounts of his money to them.) Just as importantly, trying to do anything new needs space, time, and freedom. And, as we pointed out, there is a sense in which greater equality is greater freedom.

But wait. Isn't this contrary to our first principle? Might there be some awful social failure mode concealed in a left-libertarian utopia? You'd be right. If there's one philosophy that has achieved more than any other and is still to cause any pyramids of skulls, it's scepticism.

Now, scepticism may not tell us very much about what to try, but it does have a built-in stupidity-reduction process. Even if you're a fascist, if you are a coherent sceptic you won't be able to do too much damage. Whatever your ideology, it doesn't matter, so long as you get your methodology right. Rather than thinking about end-states, utopias, and anti-utopias, wouldn't it be a more robust practice to think about processes, methods, and principles that minimise stupidity and maximise creativity? Another lesson from evolution is that incremental steps towards problem-solving are more likely to hit the target than revolutionary change.

This brings us back to the importance of negativity as a creative force. If democratic participation, evidence-based policy, and other nostrums are to have any meaning, they must have one vital feature - they must be able to force the government, the management, or whoever to change course. This is what Tony Blair's friends fail to realise whilst havering about "engagement", "community" and other pabulum - it won't gain anyone's trust whilst the only result of a negative answer is that Blair's office sends out millions of e-mails to tell the citizens that they are stupid.

One of the most important reasons we need stupidity-removing institutions is control lag, coupled with the salience heuristic. As a rule, people overestimate the importance of the loud, the obvious, the dramatic, and the immediate. Equally, they find it difficult to manipulate anything when the response to their actions is delayed or ambiguous - an excellent example is Goodhart's law. Lag tends to cause exaggerated control input - the longer you wait, the greater the temptation to press the button again. (Two words: John Reid.) The end result can be a positive feedback loop, with the deviations getting bigger and bigger as you struggle to get ahead of the cycle.

It's another reason why politics should be difficult. It's also an argument against hierarchy. John Boyd's concept of the OODA loop, drawn from his experience as a fighter pilot, argues that in any competitive activity, the actor with the fastest process of observation, orientation, decision, and action will win. Boyd argued that this implied a flatter command structure for the military, among many other things. Similarly, David Stirling originally thought that the SAS's four-man teams would prevent a leader emerging in each. Empirical data shows that small teams capture most of the benefits of aggregating information. At a lower level, lag and information loss are always less the shorter the link. People who actually do the job usually know how it works, and anyway will find out first if they are wrong.

To recap briefly: ideas are not the problem, as they will be generated in conditions of freedom and maximised horizontal exchange. Stupidity elimination is the problem. Hierarchy is the problem, management is not the problem. Final goal targets are not the problem, psuedo-statistics is the problem.

And most importantly of all, if we're serious about a new left-wing consensus, we ought to install it on top of a sceptical operating system.

The party of business, again

Anyone remember this post from March last year? The Tories somehow managed to swing a deal on the freehold of their HQ in Smith Square that would have left them paying a yield of 6.42% to the buyer, a £2.2m hit to cashflow. I had originally had the impression that the deal had been suspiciously profitable, but it turned out that the Tories lost on it.

Anyway, since then, there has been some more hot, filthy, frenzied property action down in SW1. And, it turns out, Minitrue has news. Specifically, the property wasn't bought, but a mysterious British Virgin Islands entity which owned it was. The sale netted precisely the £30m Jonathan Marsland said it would, but this company has been kept in existence despite the sale of its only assets. Funny that.

Beer for Bloggers

It's come to my attention, again, that the fine Samuel Smith's Brewery of Tadcaster, West Yorkshire produces beer that a nontrivial number of bloggers enjoy and recommend. Smiths is best-known outside Yorkshire and the real ale community for the clutch of pubs it owns in central London, much favoured for their low prices and scruffy ambience. Exhibit A: Brad of Sadly, No! brandishes a Smiths glass. Exhibit B: Alex "WorldChanging" Steffen advocates sustainable lager. Exhibit C: well, me, really. Sam Smiths: top bloggers recommend it.

Caffeine Bomb!

I recall a fellow student at RHUL, an American, who argued constantly that this-or-that detail of Chinese economic growth meant that democracy in China was imminent and George Bush was right. So thought Thomas Friedman, whose The Lexus and the Olive Tree was at the time a set text on our course (MSc International Relations!). I still haven't read it.

So also thought Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who said this:

No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.

Syntax more never, style atrocious and, tortured I see did. More seriously, what the hell did he mean? Unless I have been tragically misled, the US middle class has a rich choice of coffees and a choice between two political parties.

Even more seriously, there is a solid track-record of rapidly industrialising middle classes swinging over to really deranged politics. See Wilhelmine Germany, Austria in the same period, Japan, and perhaps some more recent cases, like the South Korean military dictatorship.

Show me all those snowpeaked mountains way down south

Because, on top of one of 'em, there's a great big phased-array radar, pointing right down to Saudi Arabia. Check out this paper by Pavel Podvig of RussianForces, and scroll right to the bottom for the radar coverage map. Alternatively, there's this Globalsecurity.org page, which is rather out of date. But the key point is that the Russians have a large phased-array radar down in Gabala, Azerbaijan, with enough range to cover the vast majority of Iranian territory, Iraq, the Gulf, and northern Saudi Arabia. The only bit of Iran it can't see is the hardscrabble desert down on the Pakistani border, a long way from anywhere. On the other hand, everywhere in that part of the world near anywhere is covered.

Fascinating, no?

Meanwhile, is anyone concerned about some details regarding the Trident decision? Consider the White Paper, and specifically the possible cases it gives. Three options are given - one is the obvious one of buying the next US SLBM system, another is the silly one of a homegrown ICBM system, and another suggests the procurement of a force of large airliners and the development of a new very long-range cruise missile.

Neatly, the stated alternatives are all knockout arguments for the favoured option. Option 2, a helpful graphic explains, would require missiles to be placed in every corner of the nation (subtext: will affect house prices in your constituency) in order to match the dispersal provided by a submarine patrol area. It would of course also require inventing a brand-new huge rocket. Option 3 is blatantly silly, indeed dishonest.

The RAF is in the process of buying some new aeroplanes - specifically, the Eurofighter Typhoon's later variants are intended to be the best strike fighters in the world. They are capable of carrying the Anglo-French Stormshadow cruise missile, with a range of 200 miles. If it was given a nuclear warhead, and all the options assume that AWRE Aldermaston would develop one, that would be enough to attack Moscow with a degree of certainty. But inventing a whole new cruise missile, one with enough range to be launched from a large civilian aircraft, which is what Option 3 assumes - well, that's going to be absurdly expensive. After all, an airliner-as-bomber would have to launch well away from any possible air defence, unlike a Typhoon or for that matter an F-35.

Note the classic bureaucratic technique. Pre-filtering means that the choice presented to mere democrats is kept down to a choice between the impossible and the expedient. And what is the problem with the cheapest and most independent option? Silence...

The freedom to get crushed by a crane jib

Via comments at Our Word, Rob makes this excellent point.

It’s always struck me as a serious tactical mistake for those on the left to argue against laissez-faire on the grounds that it deprives people of economic security, because this hands a powerful rhetoric of liberty to the right, who basically only care about it for rich people. The sensible thing to say is that what redistributive transfers to is redistribute freedom: money is general all-purpose means to doing things, and taking it from one person and giving it to someone else doesn’t of itself create or destroy freedom, but redistribute it...

The point isn’t conceptual - freedom from want is probably a kind of security - but practical or political: rhetorically, saying something is a kind of freedom is pretty powerful. Stripping the libertarian-right of a quasi-monopoly of a discourse of freedom would be, I think, a generally good thing.

I've never understood a particular point of conservative discourse, which is that a) it's good that people should take risks, start new businesses, invent things etc and b) this can best be achieved by worsening the consequences of failure. I entirely agree with the first half of the point, but it's the second I don't get. If you work in the kind of organisation where you get told "It's not your job to use your initiative!", you're not unionised, and the consequences of being fired are maximally dreadful, you're unlikely to have any good ideas.

I think this point is getting increasingly important. I don't believe any more, if I ever did, that nationalising a lot of stuff is going to help anything - it's not the differences, but the similarities, between big hierarchical organisations in the private and public sectors that are impressive. And frankly, I don't expect much from Blairism-and-water politics. Says Chris Dillow:

why, if a centrally planned economy is a stinking idea, should a centrally planned company be a good one?

Wrong Way - Go Back

Failed states and warzones, like Iraq, create a plume of violence downwind of them, like burning oilwells. Iraqslogger:

Sulaimaniyah, Feb 17, (VOI)- Iraq's Kurdistan region border guards arrested on Saturday two persons while trying to smuggle arms to Iran, an official at Sulaimaniyah border guards department said. "The border guards arrested today two persons trying to illegally cross the Iraqi borders to Iran and confiscated 115 pistols found hidden in their car," Brigadier Ahmed Gharib told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). He added "the arrested smugglers were handed over to Sulaimaniyah security department." Sualimaniyah border guards man checkpoints along the borderline with Iran.

Maybe they know where the WMDs are?

Posted without comment

BBC News:

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the operation to hand over frontline security in Basra to Iraqi troops had been "completed" and been "successful".

Asked about reports he would announce within weeks an effective halving of UK troop numbers in Iraq, he told the BBC's Sunday AM: "Let's wait and see."

He said Iraqi forces were in "control of frontline security in the city"...

..[snip]..

"The issue is the operation that we have been conducting in Basra is now complete and that operation has specifically been to put the Iraqi forces in the main frontline control of security within the city.

"It's actually been successful as an operation and as a result of that there's reconstruction that's come in behind it and we've been able to make real progress."

Reuters DeathWatch:

BASRA, Iraq, Feb 18 (Reuters) - British forces clashed with gunmen armed with machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades in a Shi'ite militia stronghold of the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Sunday, killing at least three, Iraqi police said.

The British military confirmed the clashes, saying its soldiers had been supporting Iraqi troops on a "strike operation" in the northern slum area of Hayaniya when they came under attack.

"There were numerous attacks with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades," said British military spokesman Major David Gell.

"We returned fire using proportional force. A number of gunmen are reported to have been shot, but we have no confirmation of casualties."

Clearly.

A man alone ain't..

Simulated Laughter reads an al-Qa'ida document and asks if the terrorist disorganisation is moving to a new phase of "lone wolf" individualised terrorism. They argue that this would be a very bad thing. I disagree. I suspect the core of the disagreement is probably a cognitive framework issue.

Laughter argues that the worst acts of terrorism, short of the obvious, in the US have been the work of such "lone gunmen", for example the Oklahoma City bombing, and works from there to conclude that Al-Qa'ida lone gunmen would be even worse. Thinking in terms of the IRA and the history of guerrilla warfare, I reckon that these acts are very rarely effective in terms of the terrorist's aims. More broadly, it's arguable that the "propaganda of the deed" has never been an effective strategy - compare the history of the 20th century and the gap between the effectiveness of anarchist individual terror and Marxist (or anarcho-syndicalist) organising.

After all, if your beef is with State power, it makes no sense to give the state more opportunities to implement repression. Repression is something the state has a significant comparative advantage in producing. It loves the stuff. And, historically, theories of "backlash" and such are usually either wishful thinking, or an effort to torment the working class into revolution.

On substantives, I suspect the effectiveness of such "lone wolves" in producing terrorism would be quite a lot less than the existing network model. In fact, I think I'm going to pick up the ball in terms of IT analogies applied to terrorism, and boot it further down the road. Successful 4GW organisations/disorganisations display not just scale-free networking, but service-oriented architecture. In organising an attack, the highly-connected nodes in the network draw on services provided by others on an ad-hoc basis. For example, someone may have access to secure money transfers, Linux clue, explosives, contacts, without necessarily being very connected to the terrorists. The organisational model sees the highly-connected nonleaders, if that is a word (and it should be), grab bits and pieces from participants (witting or otherwise) in adjacent networks and combine them into an act of war.

What would make this model more dangerous, and partly fulfil SL's conclusions, would be if the proportion of these services that have to be sourced within the worldwide jihadi movement was to fall.

Surging insurgents

Remember this post?

It looks to me like they cut back their activities over Christmas, whilst it was on the table. But now, with this explicitly rejected, and the talk of "the 80 per cent solution" and such..well, all that keeps it from being a betrayal is that there was no explicit offer, at least not that we know of. More likely, the message communicated is that the Americans need a punch in the mouth before they will talk sense. Worse, the obvious counter-strategy to a "tilt to the Shia" is to provoke the Sadrists, thus cutting the 60 per cent of Shia in half.

Like Spinal Tap, their amps go up to 11. And their DShKa machine guns go up to 8,000 feet.

Well, well, well. NYT:

Seized near Baghdad, the documents reflect the insurgents’ military preparations from late last year, including plans for attacking aircraft using a variety of weapons.

Officials say they are a fresh indication that the United States is facing an array of “adaptive” adversaries in Iraq, enemies who are likely to step up their attacks as American forces expand their efforts to secure Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

“Attacks on coalition aircraft probably will increase if helicopter missions expand during the latest phase of the Baghdad Security Plan or if insurgents seek to emulate their recent successes,” notes the intelligence report, which analyzes the recent helicopter crashes.

The American military has said that seven helicopters have been downed since Jan. 20, a figure that exceeds the total number of coalition aircraft shot down in 2006.

[..snip..]

The intelligence report supports the concerns expressed by an American general this month that militants were adapting their tactics in an effort to step up attacks against helicopters. Such strikes have increased since the United States expanded its military operations in Baghdad in August. From December to January, the number of antiaircraft attacks rose by 17 percent, according to an American military report.

Insurgents in Iraq have boasted about the helicopter downings and posted video of some of the wreckage on militant Web sites. While Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has claimed it has “new ways” to shoot down the aircraft, some American analysts believe they are probably not employing new types of weapons but rather are making more effective use of arms already in their inventory.

Insert blogger triumphalism here.

This is officially getting ridiculous

This is now getting silly. Admiral Fallon, the head of CENTCOM, is saying that he has no idea who might be smuggling weapons into Iraq. General Pace of the JCS says he hasn't seen any evidence that the Iranian government is involved or even merely complicit. One wonders who the people at the "anonymous briefing" in Baghdad actually were. I'm beginning to feel more optimistic that we may have caught this meme before it left the ramp. (hat tip: DefenseTech, who also added to it by picking up on my EFP post.)

Apparently, the briefing in Baghdad was repeatedly called off as the content was redrafted, and the final result was hardly convincing. Now, we see that a further claim, that Steyr-Mannlicher sniper's rifles sold to Iran were turning up in Iraq, is struggling. We're that serious about it, we haven't even bothered to ask Steyr AG to look up the serial numbers. And, anyway, the rifle is now, ahem, open source hardware..

“Our weapons are copied around the world. It’s just like with pharmaceuticals, there are lots of imitations,” he added. [snip] Holzschuh however pointed out that the license for its HS50 rifles had “expired a long time ago,” making them easy to copy.

I mean, please...

All you need to know about the Tories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...snip...

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

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

..snip...

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

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

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

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

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

Topology-aware P2P

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schrödinger's Veep

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

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

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

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

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

The enemies of embittered freedom come in unexpected forms

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

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

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

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