This won’t be a substantive post, but more a notice to myself to build one. A seriously under-reported story on the global guerrilla beat is that the Nigerian government has succeeded, at least for the moment, in either defeating the Niger Delta rebels or making deals with them.

It’s worth rolling back a little; time was when they were roaring about the rivers of Rivers State in RIBs with three or four huge Evinrude outboards, assaulting oil installations and demanding money, following a strategy that was based on the current situation of the oil market, including things like the latest hurricane sweeping towards the Gulf of Mexico, refinery stock drawdown – essentially, they followed the market for oil like IPE traders in London. Their faceless spokesman operated from a Hotmail account and a PAYG GSM phone somewhere in South Africa, usually.

Everyone, especially J-Ro, reckoned they were our insurgent future. The lumbering energy infrastructure, supposedly, could never be defended from persistent but random disruption aimed at its key network nodes. They certainly were a guerrilla navy that was tactically and operationally very effective, and whose leaders were pursuing an intelligent strategy; their technology was obviously of the moment.

But what happened, then? A key element, of course, was the price of oil. However, the relationship between the Brent index and the violence in the Delta wasn’t linear; as the price of oil rose, MEND was more able to cause trouble, but the Nigerian government and the oil companies had more money. They could spend it on soldiers, or on bribes. In the other direction, as the price of oil fell, the power of the insurgents to send bursts of panic into the market fell – but the Nigerian state would itself be weaker, and the pool of recruits wider.

Crucially, the demand for oil fell; this is possibly more important than its price. Here’s me in August 2008 on this subject. As an oil-bombing insurgent, it’s not so much the price that you’re interested in as your ability to cause trouble. Much of the industrialised world has passed its peak demand for oil; the US may have done, or it may be the recession. We will only know in hindsight. This means that the oil market is structurally less sensitive.

This is, of course, less to the point if MEND was indeed a new kind of rebellion. I rather doubted this; it always struck me as a fight for a share of export revenues. Oil, as resources go, is remarkably suited to landlordism. Its extraction is capital-intensive, not labour intensive; much of the work is done by expatriate specialists. And, crucially, it helps to run an artificially high exchange rate, which is an excellent way for an elite to loot a country. As a robber elite, most of what you want in the way of goods are imported, and most of what you want in the way of the capital account is an export. You want to get your money out. This also tends to destroy local industries and favour importers; especially importers who need to get a licence from you.

This, and the back story of the rebellion, suggested that the main aim was what they said it was – to extract oil revenues from the Governor’s gut. Unlike tension in the oil market, the money you raise from high oil prices can be stored for later use; the government deployed it this summer, both for force and for persuasion.

I hope this post can expand to take in more information; I’d like to know more about how it happened. I do know that some of the rebel leaders’ men paraded through Port Harcourt getting drunk and shooting in the air before piling their rifles. But that’s about it.

Here’s that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap – she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa’ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else.

Some points on the text.

1) Black humour. Abu Walid certainly likes his snark. Example?

It is relatively easy to believe that the eagle has turned into a canary after a minor facelift. But it is difficult to imagine that academic work can turn a security officer into a natural person, like the rest of God’s creatures.

Something probably gets lost in translation, but you can’t deny the punch of the joke about spooks. And this is hilarious:

If this was the case I would have opened an office for consulting and terrorism and become very rich.

As is this:

But if the reverse is proven, I will donate all money seized in order to build a Jewish settlement in Holy Jerusalem.

It’s like Bernard Manning with much less booze.

2) Self-mockery. You usually expect to find that a fanatic is someone who is utterly blind to the possibility they might be funny. I’ve always thought that the knowledge of one’s own absurdity is a force for civilisation; we’re all bloody ridiculous at some level and we should all probably wind our necks in. Orwell thought this about trying to make people goose-step in Britain; H.L. Mencken’s crack about a good horse-laugh is much the same point. So this is pretty good writing.

Mrs Farrall is looking at the subject of Islamic groups, in particular “Al Qaeda”. I am the only one with the chronic writing disease…

3) A certain amount of the truth. It’s always better to deliver the truth in highly controlled doses than it is to lie.

In general, the security services always deliberately inflate the risks and invent things from scratch. So we can see them exaggerate the ability of people who are against the law so the efforts of their departments will be admired and valued so they will get the awards and admiration. More importantly, they will get more authority and power so they can fully put society and the country under their control, if that is possible. This has actually happened in many countries, whether big or small.

4) Women. On the other hand, there’s something seriously wrong here. The text is laced with a sock-pong of misogyny. He constantly goes on about “beauties”, and he’s obsessed with the figure of Lynndie England – of all the other US war criminals and torturers he could mention, it’s only the woman who gets a jersey. Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Cambone, Feith, Cheney, and Miller are nowhere to be seen. Rumsfeld just scrapes in at the finish.

horrible images of the beautiful female soldiers…the beautiful American…the same beauty with a sweet smile…Today another beauty is researching on a living person and they are a candidate to become the next victim…So we become ready for an intellectual dialogue with the security beauty and the terrorist fighter, Mrs Farrall…The beauty “Leah Farrall” ( the fitna is worse than murder)…our brothers in the Arab media relied on comments in the article written by a woman “Farrall”…the Arab media who only relied on what the Australian beauty said…It is okay because whatever comes from the beauty is beautiful even if it is interrogation techniques approved by the ugly Rumsfeld

The fitna is worse than murder. And then I opened my eyes and saw a cup of tea….

5) Paying the cost to be the boss. It seems that denying the Holocaust is something you have to do in these circles, like saying “trust the people” and promising to do, well, something with the European Communities Act 1972 if you’re a Tory. Abu Walid makes a couple of sick jokes in this line, but I have the impression he doesn’t really believe it; his heart isn’t in it. Which only makes it sicker.

And now they cry over the remains of false tragedies that they invented or made themselves like the holocaust lie or the demolished buildings of New York………..I am fully aware that my picture won’t improve even if they prove I am one of the disciples of Jesus Christ. Also, my picture won’t become worse than it is now, even if they discover I was a consultant to “Adolf Hitler” for the Holocaust.

This doesn’t strike me as a real troofer. Although, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen Hitler in scarequotes. The really sad thing here is that, if you were to swap out some nouns (you can probably guess which ones) and pass the whole thing through a proper spike-helmeted chief sub, you’d end up with something indistinguishable from the average output of, say, Fraser Nelson.

An American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he’s currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to slurp chunks of German into its own culture.

Looking back at this post from June, 2005 – and wasn’t the summer of 2005 a fucking joy? – it looks a lot like nobody really wants to do this. Which mirrors the strategy with uncanny precision. Bureaucracy knows; if you want information, measure what you’re actually doing.

Why are there so many good bloggers on the Left who work in the financial sector?

Just off the top of my head, I can think of Chris Dillow, from Investors’ Chronicle, actual fund manager Duncan Weldon, stockbroker Daniel Davies, Lloyds’ List journo David Osler. The team at Calculated Risk. You have to decide whether I should be counted under financial or techie, and whether I count as a worthwhile blogger.

(The List is a T&F Informa paper, so on that basis my time at Mobile Comms International might count me in. But then, I remember the CEO sending an all hands e-mail that described us as a Japanese keiretsu and “an archipelago of trading islands rising out of the sea of mediocrity that is the Internet”. Or as we put it, a huge disorganised ragbag of entirely random acquisitions that didn’t so much as share editorial pubs or lifts, let alone content. I’m pretty sure we published Fishmonger 2.0, and I know we put on a conference on Fire Safety at Sea.)

That’s five bloggers; not many. In terms of impact, though, they can all claim a pretty high opinion multiplier effect. Me, I reckon it’s a job.

Something interesting about the NHS NPfIT project. During my recently completed two-week conference binge, I spoke to people from a British telecommunications company who were fresh, if that’s the word, from tangling with the NHS IT Zombie, and had apparently escaped before it ate their brains with a spoon. I also heard people from a French telecommunications company who had been working in the same field speak.

They agree on this; national healthcare institutions are too complicated for any one organisation to build the kind of comprehensive, end-to-end workflow system that NPfIT envisaged. This is partly because of the incredible complexity of their business processes; an episode of care can span anything from a GP appointment that ends by the patient being told there is nothing the matter with them, or an immunisation being administered in a single visit by a nurse, to 20 years of treatment for a cancer and subsequent surveillance. There are a hell of a lot of other organisations that interact with the NHS, and who aren’t part of the project.

In fact, if they were, the scale and scope of NPfIT would increase to the point at which it encompassed most of the public sector; it would have to integrate with the social security system, and because of all those benefits that are delivered as tax credits, with the Revenue as well, and (because the NHS provides the armed forces’ medical care) with the MOD’s personnel system and even with tactical communications systems in the RAF, because Selly Oak receives casualties direct from the war. Of course, it no doubt already needs to talk to the Treasury’s systems. You might as well just ask the ghost of Stafford Beer to build us a Cybersyn for the whole economy.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The real problem, according to my source, was that the designers of NPfIT believed that there was an organisation called the NHS. In fact, this was a bit like modelling a blue whale as a homeogenous sphere to make the maths easier. The killer wasn’t that medicine is complicated; it was that the NHS isn’t a monolithic organisation. It is, of course, an institution – a set of social, political, and economic expectations and relationships, a recognisable culture, a way of understanding the world. But it’s far from being a single organisation.

Instead, it’s an ecosystem, made up of many organisations that sometimes play similar roles (it’s a hospital; it’s a GP practice) but differ dramatically in their internal structure, rather as a dolphin and a Humboldt squid are both social, pelagic, fast-swimming predators in the subtropical ocean. However, only one of them is even a tetrapod, and only a real idiot would assume they were both sufficiently described by the concept of “shark”. And the interactions between the creatures in this ecosystem are deeply complicated.

In that sense, it’s quite a lot like the Internet. That, too, consists of a grab-bag of diverse organisations that cooperate with varying success on the basis of a few rules and a rough common culture, which is often honoured more in the breach than the observance. That also has a lot of odd emergent features that arise from its complexity, and would almost certainly be impossible to design as a single organisation. Indeed, an old staple of Internet-related mailing lists is the question of what the word “Internet” actually means.

Cue facile libertarian woofing. Yadda yadda Hayek privatise the BBC. Spare me. Neither does this mean the NHS is disorganised; it may well mean that it’s better for its geographically and functionally diverse components to work differently. It would be surprising if they all shared a single optimal strategy. Of course, there is a perfectly good paradigm for building effective information systems in circumstances like these (and another one). What’s really deeply depressing about this is that after all the blundering about and the money, there’s still not the key element that makes a Web-like approach possible – standard data formats and interconnection procedures.

How much would it have cost to sponsor an effort to fix that, coming up with an XML standard or a Semantic Web ontology and some NHS standards, setting down for example where the canonical data would live and who could get at it in what circumstances?

A bit of Viktor Bout news. It looks like, according to AFP, that the Americans are planning to deploy B. Hussein Stalinhitler himself, when the President is in that part of the world next month. I can remember when “someone high up in the contracting world” actively wanted to encourage him, in support of a “network of friendly militias”.

Relatedly, the Federation of American Scientists’ Security blog has published documents of the US case against him. I have to say that I’m underwhelmed; most of it looks like vague scrawl, and the maps and aircraft documents involved are generic to say the least.

This chap’s loadmaster trip strongly suggests that quite a lot of the scene has moved down the road to Fujairah, and that the UAE ban on Antonov 12s is far from leakproof. (Why do I always end up parsing more Web pages?)

But, on the other hand….ROARING TRIUMPH! And again! I never imagined they’d catch up with Pierre Falcone, still less that Charles Pasqua would be convicted of anything, but the first got six years and the second one. I’d bet good money Pasqua won’t do any time, but still.

Here’s a case study in unpopular populism: ‘The ravers should have more respect for Mr Blobby. He was a hero to a lot of kids and the thought of them taking drugs and having all-night raves in his house is completely disrespectful.’.

The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one:

Of course, it was never popular in the first place, as evidenced by the fact the whole enterprise crashed within two years, with one of the projects only lasting three months. Strangely, the Mail doesn’t mention that Noel Edmunds and the local council together managed to burn a sizeable amount of Morecambe taxpayers’ money, in what should in hindsight have been a kind of cautionary preview of the whole strength-through-casinos project. (They later moved onto leaping into bed with Urban Splash, just in time for the property crash.)

I’m also, however, surprised that it was so late into the 90s; I’d associated it with the rainy era of early John Major. Now, of course, the medium density fibreboard, gypsum, glue, and pink paint has gone the way of the hype, after 13 years of exposure to successive North-West European winters without maintenance; once the roof leaks, any light structure has had it, “ravers” or no “ravers”.

That one could be titled “Spiritual Britain”, I think. There’s also one of two pink spheres described as “mushroom-type objects”. Unfortunately they’ve removed one that showed the old health & safety at work violation on opening day, grinning over the heads of three visibly unenthusiastic kids.

A special point; behold the benefits of openness. Since the Daily Hell got a proper Web site, I’ve actually linked to two articles on it; one on ACPO, and this one. In the absence of their Web presence, I wouldn’t have even imagined that anything of any interest might come from that quarter; but the ACPO one demonstrated that they do, sometimes, carry out solid reporting, and this is at least funny. And the photo caption “Ghostly: a destroyed miniature Blobby lies abandoned, while filth lines the inside of the house” is a minor classic all to itself.

(Hat tip to History is made at night; you don’t think I spend my time actually reading that fucking rag, do you?)

OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when it wasn’t Charlie Stross-esque. Notably, two projects struck me as emblematic of a certain kind of thinking.

The first one was the Isophone, which is a mashup of a flotation tank and a telephone. The idea is that you sink into yummy sensory deprivation while talking to someone else in the same condition; it looks like this.

Maybe it’s just me, but having to take phone calls under a state of total sensory deprivation is not my idea of fun. I couldn’t help imagining some sort of nightmarish prison call centre, a whole pool full of them.

Then there was Mutsugoto. Let the official description speak for itself.

Mutsugoto is meant to be installed in the bedrooms of two distant partners. You lay on your bed and wear a special touch-activated ring visible to a camera mounted above. A computer vision system tracks the movement of the ring and projects virtual pen strokes on your body. At the same time these pen strokes are transmitted to and projected on the body of your remote partner. If you follow your partner’s movements and your strokes cross, the lines will react with each other and reflect your synchrony. Special bed linens, silk curtains and other aspects of the physical context have been designed to enhance the mood of this romantic communication environment.

But what are the civilian applications? As they say.

Well, I think we can probably guess. Anyway, I found both of them depressing; it also struck me that too many of these projects are all about sucking information out of the virtual space and representing it on a piece of hardware in private space. Basically, a gadget that reads out Twitter feeds, that you’re meant to think is your friend. Further, once you get rid of the microphone, pointing device, keyboard, webcam, etc, you’re basically watching TV on your own. It’s read-only communication into the private realm.

The suit faction in this field, oddly, works the other way round – the M2M (Machine to Machine) community in telecoms, the big IT types, they’re all more interested in getting data from the real world and representing it in virtual space. Basically, it’s all SCADA applications – monitoring the current status of CO2 pipeline valve number 58634. Flowrate, direction, valve setting and temperature, please, and when did you last have your grease changed?

What seems to be missing from this as an artistic project is sending stuff into the public space. A lot of data gets captured from the public space into the private space; CCTV is one version, promoting your demo on Flickr and taking photos of the cops is another. Nothing much seems to be sent back, though; can’t we have truth-screamer robots that run about yelling out under-reported news? Of course, if you or I were to encounter one we’d probably dropkick it into a handy canal. Splosh; “Hey there! CitizenMediaBot is sinking!”

But it would at least be fun, and more fun than gazing at a waldo that turns puce when #drivel is trending again. I suspect there’s scope for this with things like Layar, who were also presenting. Then, we’re deep into the Strossosphere; “what do we want? Brains!” indeed.

Without comment:

Mr Cameron has said he would relish the opportunity: “Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons are no substitute for a proper prime time studio debate…”

David Cameron is surely the ultimate anti-blogging candidate; look at what he said. Discursive, textual culture has no value for him.

So where’s WhoseKidAreYou? “Well, I’m working on it” is the short answer. I have recently reorganised the code in the user script, and I’ve been fiddling with Sindice, a semantic/linked data search engine. I’m fairly certain, however, that the first version out will work like this.

User script tries a range of XPath and DOM parsing options to obtain a byline and identify the element in the page that contains it; it then does various paper-specific things to clean up the data and convert it to wiki-style Name_Surname, and templates this into the query. The query is fired as an XmlHttpRequest in the background – because you can do cross-domain requests inside Greasemonkey – and the page renders anyway while waiting. When the queries to Sindice/DBpedia/Sourcewatch/Tobacco Archives happen, the results get templated in a chunk of HTML, if they contain hits, and then this is used to replace the byline.

Otherwise, a default element pointing you to a Wikipedia edit page will be inserted. That way, we get a triangular feedback going.