Archive for February, 2006
Well, as the title suggests, I’m back from the 3GSM World Congress, the monster mobile telecoms shindig held this year in Barcelona. The doctors tell me most of the bullshit should have passed through my system in a few days’ time. Some points: Video-sharing through the IP Multimedia Subsystem, demonstrated at the show, sucks so badly it reminded me of early 80s Tomorrow’s World reports on videophone trials at British Telecom Martlesham Heath (for US readers: like Bell Labs without money)…what did happen to all the WiMAX hype?…NTT DoCoMo’s display of phones playing music through those tiny Marshall practice amps was absurdly cool (no pic, sorry, but no doubt BoingBoing will have it soon enough)…it’s still impossible to make Bellheads dance…and what is Hutchison Tel’s game in encouraging high-end phone users to Skype over their UMTS datanet?
In the past the junket used to be held in Cannes. Before my time, but I can’t imagine how anyone could stick it there. At least Barcelona offers considerable opportunities to escape the manic hysteria, knobjockey hucksterism and pervasive BS. Hell, you can even go see Edward “AFOE” Hugh, which is precisely what I did when the deranged postal worker fantasies began to set in.
It was curious, to say the least, to finally go there after years of hearing northern town hall politicians talk about it as a model – throughout the 90s the Leeds and Manchester city fathers barely stopped regarding it as a sort of ideal rival in culture, economic regeneration and (of course) sport. You could draw a chart of this tendency rising from the 1992 Olympics, dipping past Manchester United’s stinging humiliation by Barca in 1994, David Beckham’s first European appearance (and goal) a few weeks later in the return match, and peaking with Leeds United’s win in 1999, before the plummet into securocratic Blairite gloom..
Oh Lord. Apparently Glenn “Instawhatsit” Reynolds has been advocating some fool’s paean to the Madman Theory, that wonderful old idea that you can and should get your way in international politics by deliberately projecting the impression of irrationality. The Crooks have (of course) already made the point that the current US government would have to work hard to be any more dangerous and unpredictable – perhaps they should do something sensible in order to get the point over? But that’s just low-grade snark, really.
18 months ago I wrote an MSc thesis for Steve Haines’s IR course on exactly this subject, and specifically the 1973 superpower crisis arising from the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war. (You can read it here.) A couple of relevant contemporary points. First of all, the principles. As someone on the CT thread points out, deliberately appearing irrational and dangerous requires that the other party is rational enough to be scared of your bizarre behaviour. If they’re faking it too, following the same strategy you are, this is wildly dangerous. But if they are genuinely mad, it’s even worse. It’s more complicated than that, though.
If you are trying to induce them to accept some sort of negotiating proposal – which is after all the point – you have to leave yourself an out. You have to be barking enough to scare them, but not so barking that your barkingness obscures the prospect of a reasonable solution. In fact, you have to pretend to be mad enough that they will give in rather than risk your madness whilst simultaneously demonstrating that you aren’t mad at all. Which is itself arguably insane. Mr. President, we only needed to be mad enough so that they see we are not mad but will go mad if they don’t come to their senses! The risk being, of course, that if you overdo the madness they may decide there is no point talking to you and that it’s high time to whack you over the occiput with something long and leaden before you go ape. Of course, you see that one coming and go madder earlier.
There’s also a negative side. The practicals. Just as you have to ensure that your display of creative psychopathy is recognisable as a display, you have to ensure that any signals you use to demonstrate it are recognisably signals. It’s rather like the distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream. Yes, it looks like a B-52, but really it’s..a symbol! Something which looks very different when you see the bugger on the radars. Even words can do this. You ask that cartoonist. Oh, we were only upholding the principle of freedom of sp..
Applying anything like this to Iran would be incredibly stupid. First up, the whole argument for attacking Iran is based on the assumption that there can be no stable deterrent relationship between Iran and Israel, because the Iranians aren’t logical, Captain. Well, if they are really, genuinely mad, pretending to be mad in order to scare them is not very sane. Second, if we then say that, well, they sound mad but they are smarter than they let on, we run up against the problem of assuring what might be termed credible implausibility – after all, it’s no good if they decide we really are mad after all, being surrounded by hostile or semi-hostile states as they are, and initiate their own madman defence. And there’s no point anyway, as if they are sane enough to recognise our madness they are sane enough to be scared by 200+ Israeli nukes.
Finally, once you are sure you’ve secured that credible implausibility, the other side are free to recognise that you aren’t really mad and ignore your ravings (as Brezhnev and at other moments Golda Meir did in 1973).
It’s just not worth it, although it was a fun thesis and contained the only MiG-25R in the year.
Well, how’s that Operation Firedump thing going? Crap, would be a fair assessment. All it seems to have achieved is getting various bits of the Romanian government to read this blog, starting with the Foreign Ministry, moving on to the Civil Aeronautical Authority, and landing up with the External Information Service – that is, the equivalent of MI6 (they’re at on IP address 217.156.127.19). No sign of a seizure of 3C-QRF, though.
God knows how difficult it will be to get anywhere with the UAE. After all, UN-sanctioned Irbis Air Co.’s UN-75003 was photographed at Sharjah on the 4th of January. We know they are there.
In the meantime, though, why not crack into another bit of mystery jet weirdness? We’ve mentioned before (may well have been a world exclusive) that Iraqi Airways’ planes are all registered in Sierra Leone, that a tribal sheikh, Hussain al-Khawam, is the new boss, and that the aircraft originate with a Jordanian entity (Teebah Airlines) with close connections to mercenaries well-known from West Africa and also with Kam Air and Phoenix Aviation/AVE. More recently, it turned out that Mr. Al-Khawam was responsible for arranging kickbacks to Australian Wheat Board officials around their oil-for-food contracts. Nice.
Here is a riddle. This photo shows 9L-LEG, an Iraqi AW Boeing 737 Classic, serial number 22885/966, in Baghdad on the 15th of September 2004, wearing the smart green livery of both new and old Iraq’s airline.
But..sadly, no! Take a look at this one, taken at Southend Airport 17 days later and spot the deliberate mistake. First of all, although it’s still registered 9L-LEG, it’s changed colour and moved to something called “Destiny Air”. Well, that can be achieved with a spraygun and a dose of elbow grease. Destiny Air sounds like it could claim the title of The World’s Most Ominous Airline for its advertising, too. Second, it’s got no windows. This is a rather bigger job, but not outside the bounds of the possible. Thirdly, damningly, it’s changed into a Boeing 727!
Now that seems like carelessness. Letting one of your aeroplanes metamorphose is frankly unprofessional. Here’s another photo taken at the same time and place: link. Clear enough, no?
But by February last year, it turns out, 9L-LEG had just been going through a phase. Here it is, at Amman (Queen Alia) International on the 7th of February, back in its B737 civvies. And again, at Amman, on the 1st October: here.
So. Either we have a transgender aircraft on our hands, or there’s a 727 missing. Fortunately, through the magic of teh interwebs, we have the answer. Destiny Air was created in Sierra Leone in 2004. It has only ever used one plane – a Boeing 727 freighter (like the one in the photo) with the registration 9L-LFD and the serial number 21245. -LFD, of course, is just a splash of white paint and a length of gaffer tape away from -LEG. Photographic evidence puts 21245 at Southend throughout the summer of 2004 undergoing major maintenance, and thisphoto taken by the same man as the -LEC ones places it in Southend, in its right registration, on the 12th of February 2005 when it left Southend for Chateauroux (of all places).
During that summer the plane was sold by Air Contractors Ireland to Destiny Air via a broker called Weir Equipment Finance. It had previously been working under a wet lease from ACI for the well-known parcel freight firm TNT. Aerotransport.org currently lists it as “stored”.
So, we know the what and quite a lot of the how. Why? It’s all extremely strange.
In fact, it might well be. Nokia just released an implementation of Python, the well-known scripting language, for Symbian Series 60 phones – and it’s all open source so anyone can have a go at making their own fancy “services”.
What’s the betting that a) 90% of its uses will be completely frivolous and b) the other 10% will be a damn sight better than anything the netops have come up with?
(Hat tip to the Schockwellenreiter.)
BoingBoing recently posted regarding the long-tailed boats used in South-East Asia, essentially traditional designs with old lorry engines installed on a long steerable propshaft in the stern. I was reminded of a curious piece of history and wrote to the BBsters as follows:
It’s not well known that those boats originate from a change in the British government’s motor vehicle Construction and Use Regulations in the late 1960s. What with the new motorway construction programme well under way, the (largely old) truck fleet had begun to get in the way. So the then Ministry of Transport (Secretary of State for Transport being Barbara Castle) introduced a minimum power-to-weight ratio.
This meant that a ton of trucks with Gardner LX 105hp (mostly) or Perkins P4 engines suddenly became obsolete. Exporting second-hand trucks to places that would accept them (essentially, the third world) was not great business, so they were either scrapped or retrofitted with more wallop. Hence a mass of very reliable, very user-serviceable diesel engines going begging.
Some sly fox saw a chance, and went round the country buying the engines and shipping them to Hong Kong and Singapore for sale to chandlers. As the engine arrived complete with the reverse box and the end of a propshaft, they just put in a length of shaft and a prop. Local boat builders came up with the rest and a new, unmistakable craft was born.
They still have (even brand-new ones with much later power units, radar and GPS) the traditional eyes on each side of the bow, a custom recorded everywhere from the Mediterranean to Japan and back into pre-classical antiquity.
Does this surprise anybody at all? Yeah, the worst department of state is up to its old tricks again. Its accounts are so dire that the National Audit Office finds it impossible even to tell how bad they really are. That’s pretty fucking bad, I think you’ll agree. Apparently they can’t even do their bleeding bank reconciliation.
It makes you wonder, really. My dad has spent an entire career scrupulously documenting his expenses incurred in the exigencies of the service, while the Ministry has apparently been behaving like a New Jersey waste disposal contractor on secondment to the CPA, throwing slack handfuls of geld up at the gilt minstrel’s gallery of some Saddam-era palace and grinning like an axe wound.
There is of course only one solution. Kill the beast. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: abolish the Home Office. Policing should be local. Devolve it. The proliferating profusion of centralised agencies – the Border Patrol or whatever it’s going to be called, PNITO, NCIS and MI5? Well, there should be proper ministerial accountability for the spooks, so they should come under a Secretary of State for the Secret Service or SOSSS for short. PNITO should be zapped. The actual port security mission should go to the respective police forces. The Revenue already runs Customs & Excise. Politicians have repeatedly shown they can’t be trusted with the question of immigration and nationality, so the IND should be quangofied to get it out of direct political interference, rather like the Bank of England. Prisoners are typically illiterate – perhaps the Department of Education should take over? A large majority of them have more than one mental illness – perhaps the NHS should?
All the monster database projects and such must simply die.
That leaves – what? The QE2 Conference Centre, I believe. Meh, privatise it. Who cares?
Kathryn Cramer is under some unwelcome pressure from a PR flunkey for the UN force in Haiti after her series on the activities of a bizarre bunch of mercenaries calling themselves “Consultants Advisory Group” down there. Specifically, one David Wimshurst at MINUSTAH headquarters responded to an inquiry from her side with a very unpleasant slab of legal spam threatening, essentially, “I shall do such things, I know not what, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” as in King Lear and accusing her of doctoring a PowerPoint slide that referred to old friends TopCat Maritime Security.
Wimshurst, frankly, deserves nothing but contempt. If, as he makes out, the whole thing is being got up to discredit the UN, why not open with the world and put the evidence out there? What has he got to hide? I think he needs to come clean with what he wants to allege – does he really think that Kathryn is the spearhead of a conspiracy by rightwing ex-US officers to discredit the Brazilian-led UN force and prepare the road for Aristide’s return? What more bizarre nonsense could be imagined?
Alternatively, the documents are genuine, and the CAGsters are working with (ironically enough) Lula’s army against the pro-Aristide chimérés. And Mr. Wimshurst? Aufklärung tut dringend not.
In fact, it might well be. Nokia just released an implementation of Python, the well-known scripting language, for Symbian Series 60 phones – and it’s all open source so anyone can have a go at making their own fancy “services”.
What’s the betting that a) 90% of its uses will be completely frivolous and b) the other 10% will be a damn sight better than anything the netops have come up with?
(Hat tip to the Schockwellenreiter.)
BoingBoing recently posted regarding the long-tailed boats used in South-East Asia, essentially traditional designs with old lorry engines installed on a long steerable propshaft in the stern. I was reminded of a curious piece of history and wrote to the BBsters as follows:
It’s not well known that those boats originate from a change in the British government’s motor vehicle Construction and Use Regulations in the late 1960s. What with the new motorway construction programme well under way, the (largely old) truck fleet had begun to get in the way. So the then Ministry of Transport (Secretary of State for Transport being Barbara Castle) introduced a minimum power-to-weight ratio.
This meant that a ton of trucks with Gardner LX 105hp (mostly) or Perkins P4 engines suddenly became obsolete. Exporting second-hand trucks to places that would accept them (essentially, the third world) was not great business, so they were either scrapped or retrofitted with more wallop. Hence a mass of very reliable, very user-serviceable diesel engines going begging.
Some sly fox saw a chance, and went round the country buying the engines and shipping them to Hong Kong and Singapore for sale to chandlers. As the engine arrived complete with the reverse box and the end of a propshaft, they just put in a length of shaft and a prop. Local boat builders came up with the rest and a new, unmistakable craft was born.
They still have (even brand-new ones with much later power units, radar and GPS) the traditional eyes on each side of the bow, a custom recorded everywhere from the Mediterranean to Japan and back into pre-classical antiquity.
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