Alternate Seat of TYR

Anthony Wells is arguing about what percentage of don’t knows in the polls for the Crewe & Nantwich byelection are actually Labour voters who feel embarrassed to say so - analogous to the “shy Tories” of the 1990s. I would think the number is considerable.

During my candidacy in Egham Hythe, I knocked on and got an answer from around 100 doors. In the event, there were roughly 600 Conservative votes, 300 Labour, and 200 Liberals counted. My own canvassing numbers logged 22 Liberal, 28 Tory, 1 BNP, 1 UKIP, 31 Don’t Know among those who said they would vote…and 4 Labour. Yes - four. 5.19% of the total answers, as against 30% of the vote. Redoing the sums, assuming the same pattern for the non-answerers, predicted 51% Tory, 40% Liberal, 7.3% Labour (note this is a two-councillor ward, so votes for candidates must be divided by 2); the event was more like 60% Tory, 30% Liberal, 20% Labour, 10% nutters and spoilt ballots.

Conclusion: There are a *lot* of quiet Labour voters out there.

Via Calculated Risk, galleries of repossessed houses in Los Angeles. This one can stand for a common theme.

It’s hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show - houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like a great big fat ugly gob. Anything human in the architecture skulks behind the garage, as if ashamed. It’s as if cars designed these buildings for their own use - realising, of course, they needed to make provision for the people, but sadly not being quite able to understand their needs.

This is, of course, not irrelevant to why they are already down one-third of their value. Perhaps we need a word for the opposite of architecture?

The Daily Mash: better than drugs.

Remember when we nixed the January 2007 Iranian weapons scare? We explained how pretty much any competent terrorists could build an EFP, and followed up with the revelation that the steel balls came from an Indian bike parts factory. Well, this made me smile.

Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and had echoed the U.S. accusations of new Iranian-made arms being found in Basra. But neither the United States nor Iraq has displayed any of the alleged arms to the public or press, and lately it is looking less likely they will. U.S. military officials said it was up to the Iraqis to show the items; Iraqi officials lately have backed off the accusations against Iran.

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

Feel the performance. Feel the power. Feel the steel balls!

So we had the world’s first military coup motivated by a 3G network licence, in Thailand; we had the shootout between the Chalabi Boys and Orascom security men in Baghdad. Now, there’s the Hezbollah/Amal coup de force (or de folie as Robert Fisk preferred), motivated in part by the Lebanese government’s desire to control their secret telecoms network, including a CCTV system they installed at the airport to monitor the comings and goings.

Curiously, I’ve yet to hear any actual details of the system, except that it provides 99,000 “lines” (an increasingly meaningless metric, but one that implies it has a softswitch architecture rather than straight IP) and uses buried fibre. But there are also tales of WiMAX and other things radio. Apparently, the leader of Hezbollah has claimed that their signals were their most important weapon back in 2006. Perhaps - you’ve got to know when to move your ATGW team back over the reverse slope, I suppose. Some doubt this on the grounds that a fixed net doesn’t seem that useful, but then, all mobile networks are fixed at some point, and if the fibre is dual SONET it needs a minimum of four independent cuts to partition the system. The Lebanese Army has now said that

it would handle the issue of the communications network in a way “that would not harm public interest and the security of the resistance”. It also said it was reinstating the head of airport security [CCTV Guy].

Which, I think, means they’re going to let it slide, if they don’t actually hook it up to their own signals network. This is of course one of the least obvious features of the whole crisis; all the territory Hezbollah and Amal took was immediately handed over to the official Lebanese military, an increasingly powerful force in politics.

Arguably, this suggests that some of the ideas floated in 2006 about incorporating Hezbollah in the Lebanese military as some sort of reserve/militia/national guard/territorial army/jagers/greenjackets/cossacks/whatever else you call those crazy bastards on the border, as long as they don’t bother you and keep the roads open, are being put in effect de facto. Perhaps the military have a deal, under which the Shia will support their commander in chief for president (and they do), and in return they will have a free hand to create their not-state in the south? It’s a solution to the problem of a bunch of dangerous and independent-minded borderers that has a long pedigree indeed.

You could call it the Haganah-isation of Hezbollah; it’s changing not just from a guerrilla force to an army, but also from a political party to an unstate with a shadow administration, an economy, and its own infrastructure, just as the Israeli founding generation built a mixed economy, a trade union movement, a shadow civil service, and a highly capable semiguerrilla army/intelligence service long before the state became a formal reality. I’m only surprised they didn’t start a commercial GSM network as cover for their own command-and-control system; perhaps they will.

Meanwhile, again, this is an example of the democratisation of technology. You don’t have to invoke a secret Dr Evil to explain how they built this; annoyingly, I see some people are yelling about Huawei and how it’s all teh secret Chinese-Iranian plot. Perhaps. But they’ll sell to anyone. And if there is WiMAX gear in there, it’s cheap; the base stations are already under $10,000, and the biggest expense in a fibre build is always at Layer Zero, that is to say the business of going and digging the holes and renting the transmitter sites. I suspect right-of-way is less expensive in southern Lebanon than it is in Surrey, armies are rarely short of people if they need to dig a hole, and Hezbollah presumably doesn’t have much trouble with NIMBYs. (See also.)

Was this a civil war? Perhaps the idea is wrong; it seems to me more like one of Gwyn Prins’ “diplomatic-military operations” in one country, perhaps something an unstate like Hezbollah - or the Sadr movement - is uniquely suited to, as this superb article of Spencer Ackerman’s argues.

After not much happened for a while, charges have been filed against Viktor Bout in a US court.

The indictment charges Viktor Bout with four terrorism offenses, including conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill U.S. officers or employees, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.

Prosecutors said he was offering a deadly arsenal of weaponry: more than 700 surface-to-air missiles, thousands of guns, high-tech helicopters, and airplanes outfitted with grenade launchers and missiles. The indictment said his price-tag was $15 million to $20 million.

You can get the document here, at the CTB. The document specifically mentions two cargo planes he apparently produced a brochure (!) on, explaining how they could be used for accurate airdrops into the Colombian backwoods. I’d really love to know which aircraft they were, but there is nothing in the document that helps, and practically all types in the network are capable of airdropping to some degree or other. (An12, An24/26, Il-76…even the An124, if they can get hold of one, can do it, although it would be a tad dramatic.)

Meanwhile, there’s been a significant increase in the proportion of flights we’re logging from Dubai and Sharjah to various war zones that are carried out by Transavia Export of Minsk, which some think was the first Bout company of them all. It would be nice if the authorities in Sharjah didn’t let planes belonging to folk like this leave for unstated destinations; the night of the 5th-6th of May saw no less than four departures to “unknown” or “ZZZ”, including one Phoenix Aviation/AVE, one Transavia Export, and two South-Airlines.

Call the anthropologists. I believe I encountered the earliest instance of the Wigan Walk in the history of rugby league on Sunday.

OK, so Wigan played St Helens, their great tribal race enemy, in Cardiff; less obviously, Saints hit a savage burst of perfection and ran up 35 points to nothing in the first half. The moment I recall most is Ade Gardner’s try just before half time, or better, Matthew Gidley’s part in it. St Helens had pushed on to the Wigan lines, but didn’t look like breaking through, and shipped the ball slowly along the face of the defence; then Gidley hit it, running - always the first rule - and immediately drew a marker from the line.

What happened then was what you go for; he stopped in pelt, and turned through 360 degrees around the Wigan man, rolling-out with the ball re-handled from one arm to the other while this went on, and chipped it to the flag for Gardner to race onto, with just little enough weight for it not to get there too soon. Ignorant people always think this game is about force and force only, but folk like Gidley and Rob Burrow, and Sean Long, who incidentally had a superb master’s evening, almost worth that bloody club colours gumshield, show it’s more than that.

One of the fan traditions is that Wiganers supposedly never stick around for a beating; considered a sign of spoilt arrogance. And on Sunday, with 25 minutes to go - there they were, filing out of the ground. But this was Wales; at Wigan’s old ground, Central Park, a home fan leaving could easily have been at home in five minutes. In Cardiff, where did they go? To watch the rest on TV in a pub? To sit on the coach and chunter, with the crispdust?

Anyway, this has given me enough confidence to point out that Keighley are having a good year. Kly ! Kly! Boing! Boing! indeed.

This should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that?

I can’t help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this - via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can’t do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don’t make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)

But a T-shirt with the following message:;INSERT INTO watchlist (pnrs) VALUES 'ADDINGTON/DMR';COMMIT TRANSACTION That would be cool. One of the nice things about QR codes, of course, is you can do these things graphically. Look into my eyes…

More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I’m so keen on a carbon tax is that it’s an option that doesn’t involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.

BoingBoing apparently thinks this little line-shaft workshop is bizarre and incredible. Maybe. But I had one of these as a kid in the 1980s; it went with a Mamod steam engine, and had various tiny machine tools - a press, a pillar drill, a buffing wheel, and eventually we rigged a little dynamo to have it generate electricity, thus making the hop from the first industrial revolution and mill buildings to the second and electric motors. (Have I mentioned I once worked in a printing plant in Shipley - this was in the summer of 2000 - where the machinery came from Germany in 1963…East Germany?)

And it rocked, especially because it filled the house with the unique smell of live steam and hot oil. Oh, and that time I fired it up without my dad being around, with the result that the safety valve wasn’t quite correctly seated, and extremely hot steam under pressure launched it into the fucking ceiling? Sorry, mum. But technology ought to scare you occasionally, right?

Surely they can’t have been that rare. Here’s a quote from the comments at BB:

Inspired by my Grandfather I built my own peripheral for it. BTW, it had a standard, open interface for everyone to hook up their own shit to the engine… it was a drive wheel, hooked up to the flywheel where you could place a rubber band and drive anything you could imagine. I chose to drive a tiny Electric Motor, that was hooked up to a flashlight bulb. It just might have started my ongoing involvement with science.

Yes, I did that too; I think the aim was trying to build up enough steam pressure to overload and burn out the bulb. If I had really been militant about it, I suppose I should have thought of some way to link it with the ZX Spectrum, but I don’t think it put out enough wallop even to drive one of those.

And I never finished the rocket-propelled boat, even though I did get as far as cutting and soldering tin plate sections (more than the joint forces of the Government, BAE, Thales, Vosper Thorneycroft and Babcocks Rosyth can say for CVF).

Blaney:

Donal Blaney said…

I do not bandy the term “nazi” or “racist” about in the same way the left do.
2:05 PM

Blaney:

This is how the Nazi traffic wardens of London behave when they see a nice car that they decide they want to tow.

Blaney:

First, a confession. I was appointed a house prefect at school and I handed out a record 400 punishments over 14 months for a variety of offences, most of them trivial. In doing so, I recognise that in many instances I abused my power.

Blaney:

Now we know where the thousands of extra police are being deployed - on low level “crime” rather than preventing and investigating violent crimes and burglaries that are what we’re all most worried about.

Blaney:

Where do I accuse anyone of plotting to suppress an accusation of paedophilia? What drugs are you on to have written such nonsense?

Blaney:

Secondly, a Labour council candidate was arrested last week on suspicion of child porn offences. Needless to say, had he been a Tory it would have been the lead story on the BBC and in the national press.

Blaney:

Thatcher would use nuclear. She wouldn’t want us dependent on foreign gas and oil in today’s world. It is the one area, apart from cuisine and gun rights, where the French are better than us.

How many nuclear power stations did she build, Don?

Blaney:

Cut Petrol Tax, You Greedy Sods

Are you against the market, Don?

Blaney:

Amnesty International once again show their true political colours in a campaign ad against the practice of waterboarding. This sanctimonious clique of naive peaceniks and leftist fellow travellers want us to fight the evil psychopaths who indiscriminately kill innocent men, women and children of all colours, creeds and religions with one arm tied behind our backs.

Blaney:

Hectoring and abrasive, Humphrys has become a parody of himself. In the same way that Jeremy Paxman’s sneer seems to have become more exaggerated as the years go by, so it is with Humphrys’ aggressiveness.

Hectoring and aggressive, eh?

Blaney:

I obviously agree that torture is not the answer.

I think I draw the line at permanent physical harm to the prisoner. Humiliation or psychological interrogation techniques are, in my view, not a problem - but we’re all entitled to a different view. Waterboarding doesn’t do the prisoner any permanent physical harm although he may be reluctant to shower or use a flannel again in the future when/if he is freed.

I am aware that the CIA has in the past used a creative interview technique which involved blind-folding a suspect, placing him into a helicopter and for the helicopter to lift a foot or two off the ground. If the prisoner didn’t answer questions, he was told he faced being pushed out of the helicopter from (as he was told) hundreds of feet up. This too concentrated the mind.

No, that was us, in Northern Ireland in the early 70s.
(Note that he therefore goes against the British Army’s doctrine on human intelligence collection and sides with, ah, the Gestapo. Are you against the troops, Don?)

Feel free to add any more Dons you find interesting in the comments. Unfortunately Don’s forgotten how to use the moderation function, or something.