There is something pleasantly surreal about this story. London Reconnections reports on the appearance of the heads of Tube Lines, the Underground, and Mr. Chris Bolt before the London Assembly’s transport committee. It doesn’t sound obviously hilarious, but then, who is Chris Bolt? You may vaguely remember him as the Rail Regulator, the chap who had the unenviable task of acting as ref between Railtrack, the train operators, the rolling stock lessors, and the Government in the glory years of rail privatisation. That was all 10 years ago, so why is he being quizzed by the committee?

Because the Tube PPP contracts specify that he, and only he, act as arbitrator of any disputes between the contractors and the Tube. Not the institution of the Rail Regulator, which in any case has been abolished – Mr Bolt personally.

It’s been a while. Did they ever lose touch with him? What colour was his hair when he answered the call? I can imagine Department for Transport civil servants looking on park benches and in squats in Dalston, scrutinising all the Facebook pages ending in Bolt, placing advertisements in provincial newspapers. What if they hadn’t been able to trace him? Would his next-of-kin have inherited the heavy responsibility – the DfT Director, Railways descending on an otherwise harmless citizen, like some Sicilian matriarch in a grey suit bringing news that the vendetta is now up to you?

Or is the process less brutally secular? Perhaps a Bolt will simply emerge, like the next Dalai Lama.

Of course, Bolt’s role is deeply mythic. Alone, the Bolt continues to guard the sacred wisdom of the Railtrack years, wandering in the wilderness. One day, he will return to judge Tube Lines’ trespasses, or rather not:

Chris Bolt felt it was important to reiterate that the increased cost of the contract was not based on the failures of Tube Lines so far, but on a natural increase in the theoretical cost of the upgrade work.

The faith cannot err; it can only be betrayed.

Even Boris Johnson has repented of rail privatisation.

It is time to bring an end to this demented system.

Actually, he’s only recanted – I see no sign of repentance from the man who accused Stephen Byers of being as bad as Robert Mugabe, not once but twice, in order to defend Railtrack after the corpses had piled up.

Love has the uncanny ability to show the truth…truth about who you really are verses who you portray yourself to be.  Being honest with yourself to see through your facades, as if just a piece of glass separated you from your inner truth, is the best gift you can ever give to yourself.  If you live your life from your “wished-for perception”…you may find yourself perpetually living in a gray zone, and ultimately unfulfilled.  If you’ve been brave enough, and love yourself enough, to do some soul-searching and embrace the true you…at that point, all of life is available for you to pursue with wholehearted effort and enjoyment.  Those people who choose to deceive themselves thinking they are something or want something that is not congruent with who they really are…bring misery to their most significant relationships…and eventually lose them.  How sad to live with the wool pulled over your own eyes, binding yourself from actualizing the best life has for you…because you’ve convinced yourself you are something you’re not.  The gray zone is full of silent suffering and the ambiguity breeds dysfunction.  Somehow, we need to find the safe zone…to sit with ourself, undistracted, and really see through the unobstructed glass to who we are at our core.  Only then, will we step into the light needed for us to find happiness with ourself and be able to act in a healthy way in our most special relationships.  Being brave may take a few tries before we get to the place where we look fully through the glass…but keep at it…you’ll be so relieved when you finally do!!

How could I forget this?

The Obscurer’s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is:

Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists.

Awlaki had contacts with Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of carrying out the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in November in which 13 people were murdered. According to government officials, Awlaki was also the spiritual adviser to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, while he was an imam at a mosque in northern Virginia. The FBI investigated him in 1999 and 2000, believing him to be a possible procurement agent for Osama bin Laden.

In Toronto, a terror cell watched videos of Awlaki at a makeshift training camp where an attack was planned on the Canadian parliament and prime minister. “He’s a star attraction as a recruiter to young Americans and Canadians,” one former American intelligence official told the US media.

This month, in an interview with Al Jazeera, Awlaki expressed surprise that the US military had failed to uncover Hasan’s plan, to which he gave his backing. “My support to the operation was because the operation brother Nidal carried out was a courageous one, and I endeavoured to explain my position regarding what happened because many Islamic organisations and preachers in the west condemned the operation,” he said.

Awlaki left the US and moved to Yemen in 2002 where he established an English-language website that has thousands of followers around the world. In January 2009, he published an online essay, 44 Ways to Support Jihad, in which he asserts that all Muslims must participate in jihad, whether in person, by funding mujahideen or by fighting the west.

There’s something missing here…can you spot it?

Concerns about his influence in the UK have been expressed by experts on community cohesion. In August, the Observer reported anger that Awlaki was due to speak via a video link at Kensington town hall. The broadcast was dropped after the local council stepped in. He has also been invited to give talks via video link at several London universities. “Mutallab is the latest in a long list of terrorists [Awlaki] has inspired and encouraged,” said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion.

“The preacher has long been a highly respected figure within a number of British university Islamic societies because, unlike most other radical preachers, Awlaki speaks English as a first language, and being born and raised in America has given him a good understanding of western culture. This makes him very appealing to young western Muslims.”

Meleagrou-Hitchens called for British universities to increase their vigilance. “This incident should act as a wake-up call to university authorities,” he said. “It is crucial that they now accept the central role they must play in resisting extremists and preventing student groups from promoting hate preachers.”

Did you spot it? The Obscurer didn’t actually say that he had any connection with the pants bomber. They didn’t even quote Hoekstra saying so – and Hoekstra is a comedy rightwing buffoon anyway. They didn’t adduce any evidence of his connections with him in any way – just cut straight to Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens. Whose kid are you?

Oh, right. He’s “worked” for Standpoint, the Centre for Social Cohesion, Policy Exchange, and the Henry Jackson Society. I think he gets a free cup of coffee and 200 air miles if he can punch another content-free wanktank funded by the Tories’ neocon wing on his loyalty card.

PolEx’s Web site has an “Alumni” page, but mysteriously it bears no trace of him. Google, however, knows:

He has also worked at the Stanford University based think tank, the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, and the Washington DC based think tank, Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD).

He holds an MA in International Relations from Brunel University, and a BA in Classics from King’s College London.

Alexander researched for publications providing policy recommendations on creating a robust defence against the threat of terrorism in the UK and abroad.

FDD as well! Free cuppa for you! There is, of course, no suggestion of or link to any work on terrorism he ever did.

Today, he’s in the Obscurer again. Let’s roll the tape.

Recordings of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida sympathiser who is believed to have inspired Abdulmutallab in Yemen, can be bought through British-based websites and bookshops. Three shops in London and Manchester were contacted by this newspaper last week. Staff said they could sell DVDs of the speeches by the cleric, who is banned from the UK.

As recently as last April, students at London’s City University Islamic Society’s annual dinner were invited to hear the words of al-Awlaki being broadcast live into Britain.

So why is he “believed” to have inspired pants boy? Where is the evidence? It’s not even the electioneering torture fan Hoekstra this time.

Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a research fellow for the think-tank the Centre for Social Cohesion,

For it is he.

said that al-Awlaki has become an increasingly influential figure. “For well over a year now, organisations such as ours have repeatedly warned about the dangerous influence of this man, with most of our warnings falling on deaf ears,” he said.

Call now and buy your anti-terrorist water ioniser – 20 per cent off before the end of this broadcast! And don’t forget to donate now and claim Gift Aid!

“They had no objection to his giving a video sermon to a gathering at Kensington and Chelsea town hall. We are also often told that, although al-Awlaki’s views may be unsavoury, he has never been convicted of any crime. Clearly, this excuse is simply not good enough.”

The excuse that he hasn’t done anything wrong.

Further, Hitchens Minor seems to be missing someone in his laudable crusade on the home front. I refer, of course, to the current and past tenants of Kensington & Chelsea Town Hall, or in other words, the Conservative Party in London. Could this perhaps have something to do with the fact that his boss at Policy Exchange is now the Conservative Mayor of London’s director of policy?

While I’m on the subject of Diego Gambetta, without formally reviewing his book, Codes of the Underworld does explain an interesting case from the blogosphere. You may remember the two Italian academics who sent a paper to Medical Hypotheses, the famous journal with no peer review at all, which argued that calling Down’s syndrome patients “mongols” was entirely sensible, because they liked handicrafts, sat crosslegged, and ate foods high in monosodium glutamate.

Gambetta expands on the politics of selection for academic careers in Italy; promotion depends on favour, that of the small group of professors who sit on selection committees, in competitions that are held rather infrequently. These people are statistically likely to have a far poorer record of publication than either the average, or the people whose claims they had to scrutinise. Crucially, the candidates who actually got tenure were actually worse than those who didn’t. The explanation is that the appointments depend on long-term reciprocity between the selectors, and that therefore any attempt to make progress yourself would destabilise these understandings, which would be the worse for everyone. So would promoting the brilliant to posts that might lead to a professorship.

Therefore, it’s always best to pick the dullards, and to be dull yourself. That way, you’re no threat, and therefore reliable in promoting your friends’ clients.

Now, we can understand what was going on with Federica Mafrica and Vincenzo Fodale of the University of Messina’s Department of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Anaesthesiology. For some reason they needed to signal their incompetence with unusual force. They needed to get their crazy on all night long. But why? Which selection committee were they on? Fodale, at least, was on the scientific committee for his department and several others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much fuss about the yellow press listening to voicemail through knowing the default passwords. I’m rather more worried about their network of private detectives who had access, according to the print version, to police databases and to BT’s billing system. And I’m depressed about a group of journos who, given the keys to the 650 terabyte BSS/OSS database at BT Martlesham Heath, couldn’t think of anyone more interesting to spy on than Gordon Taylor. He’s not even the most interesting person in football I’d want to pull a STELLAR WIND call detail record/social network plot on.

But I’m really keen to know why nobody wants to mention that Andy Coulson, News of the Screws editor, and Rupert Murdoch’s ambassador to David Cameron, isn’t just mixed up in this. He is. But he’s also involved – according to the courts – in a dispute at the paper which ended with him and other execs trying to bully one of their employees’ doctor into changing his mind over whether they had bullied the employee into quitting. They further tried to force the guy to see a company doc – a Dickensian mine-owner’s trick – and two of Coulson’s direct reports (his deputy and the sports ed) were named by the court as having lied about the affair.

You want names? The liars are Paul Nicholas and Mike Dunn. But Coulson was in charge, just as he was during the spy operation. Now, if I was a pol looking to sink the Tory spin-control ship, I’d want to pull this story in as much as possible. A fit and proper person? Well…

But who, being fit and proper, would take on the job of a Tory Ali-C clone?

What is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out?

And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for a period when the party’s central institutions were regularly totally out of contact with the public mood and spectacularly incompetent; it certainly serves the interests of the top officials and MPs to push responsibility onto an amorphous and vague stereotype essentially based on hostile newspapers’ take on the 1980s. Arguably, believing hostile newspapers’ take on itself has been the fundamental mistake of the Left since about 1987; the entire Decent Left phenomenon, after all, was all about demonising anyone who was right about Iraq in identical terms. Does anyone imagine that the Sun in the Kelvin McFuck era wouldn’t have savaged and libelled any non-Tory power holders?

In a comment at Dunc’s, Paul “Bickerstaffe Record” says:

I want to kick off a bottom up meets top down economic analysis of how Labour /Left leaning local authorities should now be challenging the Thatcherite orthodoxies of cost control/rate capping in a sort of ‘1980s no cuts militant’ meets 2000s grassroots-dictated economic policy. The institutional/legal framework has of course changed out of recognition since 1984, but heh, that’s a challenge rather than an insurmountable problem

He has a point. Consider the position; it’s still conceivable that Labour might luck into a hung parliament next year, cue Liberal and Nationalist (of various types) rejoicing, but any realistic planning has to include a high probability of a fairly rabid Tory government in the near future. Further, the financial position is not great – it’s nowhere near as bad as Gideon Osborne makes out, as a look at the gilt rates shows, but it’s very far from ideal.

So whoever is in charge will be looking for cuts, and it is a reliable principle of Whitehall politics that one of the best ways to get a policy implemented that you want for your own ideological aims is to attach it to a supposed saving. Only the special relationship and the police-media complex can beat this principle as all-purpose justifiers.

The possibility space includes a Labour government in coalition or under a toleration agreement with the Liberals, which is likely to still be strongly influenced by the Blairite stay-behind agents, a Conservative government heavily influenced by products of 80s Tory culture (the mirror image of the London Labour party in the same period), and some sort of grand-coalition slugthing. It is clear that the balance of risks is towards an effort to legitimise a lot of ugly hard-right baggage through an appeal to cuts.

The Tories are planning to make all spending departments justify their budgets at line item level to none other than William “Annington Homes” Hague; it’s certainly a first in British history that the Foreign Secretary will control the public spending settlement, if of course he finds the time to show up.

Therefore, even though there is a need to steer the public finances back towards balance once the recession is clearly looking over, there is a strategic imperative to push back and push back hard against the agendas the cross-party Right will try to smuggle through. After all, the nonsense industry is already cranking up.

Which brings me back to the importance of being loonies, and a bit of politics by walking around. One thing that strikes me about North London is how much stuff in the way of public services here was visibly built in the late 70s and the 1980s; there is a reason why Ken Livingstone hopped right back into the Mayor’s office. Despite all their best efforts, the Thatcherites were never quite able to shake the core welfare state; was it, in part, because down on the front line people were still pushing out its frontiers and changing its quality?

A lot of ideas (service-user activism, notably, environmentalism, a renewed concern for architecture and urbanism, and the whole identity-politics package) that were considered highly loony back then are now entirely orthodox and are likely to stay that way, especially given the main parties’ obsession with putting taxpayer funds into the “third sector”.

I fully expect that anyone who talks a good game about making black schoolboys click their heels in front of teacher – you know the stuff they like – will be able to secure reliable venture capital funding in the million class from a Cameron government, just as they have been able to from Boris Johnson’s City Hall, with remarkably little monitoring. William Hague will be snarky. Let him. Nobody cares what the Foreign Secretary has to say.

This creates both opportunities for action – perhaps someone should prepare a Creative Commons or GPL toolkit for citizen-initiated delivery quangos and thinktanks – and also targets for ruthless mockery, when the Tories’ preferred third sector entities fuck up. We’ve already had some very fine examples of this courtesy of Boris Johnson. Clearly, the only rational response to the times is to go mad.

Jamie Kenny watches the Lebanese elections and asks if the Saudis could spend so much money on British politics. The answer is simple: they already have.

Consider the original Al-Yamamah contract, and the famous National Audit Office report that was shown to two MPs and then buried for good. We’re still not trusted to see it. Consider all the many, many people around the 1980s Conservative Party involved with them – Aitken, Archer, Hart, Calil, Thicky Mork himself. Consider the whole complex of turds that was the arms-to-Iraq affair.

Then consider the BAE Systems case and, of course, Anthony Bailey, the lobbyist who integrated the Labour Party’s finances, the City Academies program, Prince Charles, BAE, and the Saudis in one dubious political kebab.

And look at this; Aitken clearly still wants to be an MP.

I may even receive some relief from the tabloids. Under the act it is ­defamatory to report a spent conviction if done maliciously. I shall not be ­rushing to instruct Messrs Sue Grabbit and Runne for breaches of this law, not least because I so often speak and write from the perspective of an ex-offender. Yet I hope that fair editors will think about their obligations under the act towards all ex-offenders before ­regurgitating, pejorative labels such as “disgraced ex-jailbird”.

How dare you threaten us, you old bastard.

“God breaks no barriers; neither did He make them. When you release them they are gone. God will not fail nor ever has in anything. Decide that God is right and you are wrong about yourself.” 

 From A Course in Miracles

I could not wait to share the above quotation with you when I experienced the freedom that came with accepting it as true if only for a moment.

To decide that we are wrong about ourselves is not as easy as it may seem. We are very enamored of our character in the dream– that one that bears our name.

 In ACIM Jesus tells us we must deny the denial of truth since the truth is already present and available. Awareness of it is blocked only by our belief in the world and the body– the denials of truth. Neither exist according to A Course in Miracles.

You can see why there is so much resistance to doing this Course and following a Teacher that points us out of the dream. Shall we continue?

Yesterday, while taking a walk in the park, I was inquiring into a specific matter that was keeping me quite involved in the dreaming of the world.  As anyone who believes they are actually living here in the world I was also following the ego’s plan for solution. Blame somebody. Anybody. 

Just then my right mind kicked in, and I was wisked off the battleground. This is not something I can take any credit for other than having devoloped some willingness over the years to be mistaken about everything I think I know about any given situation. It has take time to learn that all problems are the same problem.

From above the battleground I could look back at the dream without any investment in the outcome. This looking without judgment at the dream is forgiveness. We obviously cannot forgive from within the dream. The ego, who wants to be special,  does not forgive. It can however pretend to for the sake of its self image.

A few things became  clear to me as I looked back from outside the dream.

First,  all relationships, are opportunities to get over ourselves. This includes the ones we think we  hate and the ones we think we love. Either one can be used to strengthen our image in the dream. Our self concept, good or bad, kind or mean, loving or unloving , is what the ego is. When we are identified with it we are asleep and following the ego’s plan.

From the ego’s point of view everyone is used to build our self concept. The purpose of special relationships, be they hate or  love, is to keep us preoccupied with our self image be it one of pain and suffering or one of pleasure and self congratulation. What gives value to the dream and its dream figures is our self concept, aka specialness.  

Our special relationships– those that exist between two bodies– are the means that the Course in Miracles has given us for our awakening so we ought to pay attention to them. Said more accurately we ought to pay attention to how we use our relationships to build an image that we are promoting of ourselves. That’s what makes them special. They satisfy a need that we are not up front about.

Everyone who thinks they are living in a world has special relationships. To deny that we do is to deny the means of our awakening. The ego, sensing threat on this topic, will counsel that you are the exception– you do not have such a thing as a special relationship. That is called denial.

The special relationship we are talking about is really not about someone else. It is about the relationship we have with our ego, our self concept. The “other persons” that appear outside and separate are no more real than our own self concept. This is our magical fantasy that we call living. It is the ego’s plan to keep individuality. As long as we remain preoccupied in the dream the ego is safe from us learning that we have a mind and that mind can chose against it (the ego). It is a brilliant plan but fortunately it is not God proof.

Well, Blears and Smith were good, but Geoff Hoon walking the plank? Klasse. Apparently there is talk of making him a European commissioner again; God knows why. Alan Sugar is some sort of minister and a peer of the realm. Peter Mandelson is turning into Michael Heseltine before our boggling eyes. Better get some cardio training in, Pete. Were you still lucid for Hoon, or had you already decided the only objective reality was the one inside your own head? It’s Ballardian time.

The Guardian’s reporting on this, which has been outstanding, managed to use the word “dymanic” in today’s offering, which puts it better than I could.

It’s at times like this that old-fashioned lobby reporting comes into its own; I suppose it’s nice to know they are there. As usual, though, the quality of any given political story in the Grauniad is proportional to the percentage written by Allegra Stratton as opposed to Michael “the most disgusting journalist in Britain” White or Patrick “Unseasonably Mild” Wintour.

A question, though. Tessa Jowell is Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office as of last night. Really? Blears bites the dust for using taxpayers’ money to speculate in property while avoiding capital-gains tax; has everyone forgotten that Jowell did much the same, but with the crucial distinction that she used money paid to her husband as a bribe by the mafia, in the person of Silvio Berlusconi. I believe I was first on this story in December 2005; I’m going to be the last off it.

Because, to resounding silence in the UK, David Mills was convicted by the Italian courts a couple of months ago of corruptly accepting the money from il cavaliere. This is Italy, so it is unlikely he will be punished in any way. Yes, she suddenly discovered irreparable cracks in their marriage, rather in the way that the RAF suddenly discovered them in the Nimrod MR2s, and kicked him out of the door. But I am not aware that she renounced any of the profit involved.

For shits and giggles, compare these statements: BBC News, 04/03/2006:

“They hope that over time their relationship can be restored, but, given the current circumstances, they have agreed a period of separation.”

The Guardian, 17/02/2009:

“This is a terrible blow to David and, although we are separated, I have never doubted his innocence.”

How’s that coming on?

A further question. In all the excitement, and all the mortgages, I don’t think we ever clarified whether the property in question was declared as a first or second home to the Parliamentary fees office, and whether any capital gains tax in respect of it was paid.

Obviously, this is just the woman I’d pick to oversee a succession of gigantic public construction contracts as Olympics Minister, and the intelligence establishment as SoS for the Cabinet Office. If I’d just been playing the Withnail & I drinking game. Here I am! indeed.

What is all this whining about MPs doing constituency work? It seems to be conventional wisdom across the more fogeyish commentators (Simon Jenkins, Vernon Bogdanor etc) that members of the Commons are spending too much time representing the interests of their constituents; no article on the upshot of the great expenses row is complete without a ritual reminder that in the 1950s hardly anyone actually lived in their constituency, with shoutouts to Barbara Castle for some reason (saves research, I suppose).

This is painfully crappy.

Constituency work is great, for a whole range of reasons. For a start, it is very hard to be secretly working for the Sun or the Saudis in chasing down Mrs Miggins’s housing benefit claim.

Secondly, there’s the argument from organisation theory; legislating is the original activity in which you are most affected by the loss of information in a hierarchy, and it is almost proverbial that the Commons is good at passing laws – or repealing them – which then turn out to have some dire consequence down the track, usually to the poor. However, getting stuck into some concrete injustice has every chance of making somebody’s life marginally less awful, and an hour spent on constituency work is an hour not spent passing a dangerous dogs bill.

Thirdly, it keeps them off the streets and out of trouble. You cannot be boozily lying to a journalist about your friends and colleagues – the essential activity underlying all the nostalgic crap about the tearooms, all night sittings, etc – or selling security passes to the Palace of Westminster to passing lobbyists if you are busy harassing the UK Borders Agency to get them to leave some bewildered refugee’s kids alone.

Fourthly, in which other field of activity are the assorted lawyers, poshos, moonlighters, and ruthless expenses hounds that make up the Commons ever going to encounter the facts of ordinary life? Annie’s Bar? I think not. If you’re lucky, a few will be old trade-union hands, but we can all think of examples of those turning rotten. Constituency business is about the only force that keeps the political establishment from adopting my proposal to seal itself in a huge glass box.

Fifthly, you can be a repellent pig-bastard on the floor of the Commons but still do some good in the world if you devote some time every week to constituency work. A truly surprising number of really horrible Tory MPs have been willing to engage in things like anti-deportation campaigns which would shock the piss out of their colleagues and their pet newspapers. It is simply more difficult to be evil at this level.

So why do so many commentators hate it so much? Jenkins (who can stand for the others, as their views do not differ much) tends to argue that the problems that reach MPs should be sorted out by local government, by councillors or mayors. This is ponyism. MPs doing less constituency work will not by itself restore local politics. There is no pony. Unless you have a plan to restore the dignity and power of local politics to go with it, you’re arguing for power to be left alone to do its worst. And constituency work generally involves the confrontation of the forces of authority with the poor.

Further, it is almost always local authorities who are in the wrong; this is why it is called “constituency work”. In a Stafford Beer-influenced (Beer-sodden?) view, problems are resolved within a subsystem until they go beyond its capacity to resolve them, at which point they are escalated into the next recursion level or transferred horizontally into a different decision network. It is both right and natural that problems created by a local authority should be resolved by either a more central one, or else one in a different network. It is also very true that local authorities in the UK are probably more frequently corrupt than central government. John Poulson’s ghost is not yet quiet.

It goes without saying that Simon Jenkins and Vernon Bogdanor opposed, to the best of my knowledge, every proposal to return powers to lower levels of government that has ever been seriously suggested. Jenkins occasionally toys with the idea of an English parliament, but it is far from clear how a body representing 53 million citizens is much less administratively remote than one representing 60 million, so this should be taken as a matter of style rather than content.

If they don’t actually want – and their actions and words show they do not – devolved government, what is the point here? It is surely that they don’t consider the sort of thing covered in constituency work worthy of MPs’ time. Grand legislators don’t do this sort of thing; it is too much like work, it involves working-class people and their problems, and perhaps there is even a hint that it is women’s work? Instead, the debating chamber is a truer life, an idealistic project which keeps the messy, vigorous concerns of democracy well away.

Proponents of UAVs like to talk about the “enduring stare”; their ability to remain on station, to keep pointing at the target, rather than taking discrete reels of photos. Blogging ought to be a bit like that; keep after the story, don’t accept the official news (or bullshit) cycle.

Hence, this McClatchy story, which has uncorked a whole lot of other reporting.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

There’s more to it than that, as well; it seems clear that one of the motivations for torture was trying to extract supporting evidence for the Iraq war. Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney is implicated. You wonder if he couldn’t find a way to work a tax cut and perhaps a gay abortion in there, too; it’s the grand unified scandal. But anyway, look at those dates, and also at this piece of Laura Rozen’s.

It seems there were at least two distinct waves, or bouts, of torture, the first in the summer of 2002 and then a second in the winter and early spring. There also seems to have been some overdetermination with the first, which may also have been involved with a scheme to find a leaker in Congress.

But what strikes me as interesting is that it corresponds well with the PR-driven schedule for the famous dossiers and the run-up to war in general. Recall the “Downing Street Memo”, written in late July. The facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy. This culminated in the first coordinated spin drive in the autumn. At the same time as Abu Zubeydah was being lashed to the board, the White House Iraq Group and the Iraq Communications Group were being established to coordinate transatlantic PR operations. The first dossier would be launched in September. Interestingly, I’m seeing a spike in search requests for both organisations.

A second wave of propaganda activity was then launched in the spring as the key UN and parliamentary votes approached and the military time-table counted down. And, sure enough, there was a second bout of torture; on this occasion, extra torture was approved by Donald Rumsfeld before the authorisation was taken back.

Via the Armchair Generalist, meanwhile, it turns out that the one detainee whose words actually made it into Colin Powell’s February 2003 address to the UN, and who was tortured, has conveniently died in a Libyan jail.

Josh Marshall speaks sense; there is more here including an interview with Charles Duelfer, who apparently refused to order the torture of an Iraqi prisoner-of-war. Bully for him, if true. Few public officials can have been so Cheneyed; remember when he was being sent “leads” for the Iraq Survey Group that turned out to be in Lebanon?

Meanwhile, for colour: yer man was travelling with a doctor and a biochemical survival suit. I’d pay cash money to see him wear one of those.

A lot of other countries who are small economies compared to the USA or China, industrialised, and heavily dependent on foreign trade have a government policy of keeping a substantial local ownership stake in important businesses or important technologies. This may or may not be held by the State. Examples of such so-called “core investor strategies”; Austria, France.

If the post-Thatcher game of running a permanent and large current account deficit reintermediated through a huge financial sector, which is then expected to export financial services derived from this task, really is over, should the UK be doing something similar, and what would be your strategy for making such decisions? I recall Dominique Strauss-Kahn (I think) saying that he couldn’t understand why the British had let the DNA sequencer activities of Amersham International, at the time the market leader, be sold to the US; I’ve also read somewhere that the French general staff consider sovereignty to be a function of R&D spending.

I reckon that if we start disbursing cash to industry (and the European Investment Bank loan to Jaguar-Land Rover shows that’s happened), we ought to take equity stakes in the companies in question, so as to build up a base of interesting technologies. Yes, this makes me an unreconstructed social democrat; I think that’s a feature.

But even if you object to capital being allocated by the State, you can hardly suggest that it shouldn’t be allocated at all. And, as I said back in October, with no financial sector there’s only one game in town. And further, what else are we going to do? So that’s the Harrowell option.

I think it’s fair to say that Foxtons won’t be on anybody’s list. I have a plan for them as well. A tower of redundant fake-graffitied fake-Minis, in Trafalgar Square, toppled by a screaming mob beating them with their shoes. The Harrowell option remains open!

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads has a hell of a story. Now, I’ve not always been totally convinced by Tim; he spends an inordinate amount of time pursuing minor politicos for breaches of netiquette I think I’d just forget. But two of the crucial principles of journalism can be summed up as the clam ethic – once you get hold of a story, clamp down and never let go – and the Take That principle – never forget. They always want you to forget.

So, the Sun ran a patently ridiculous story that jihadis on the interwebs were threatening Alan Sugar. Apparently they imagined that he had to be in the story because otherwise the public wouldn’t grip it; I would have thought that a nontrivial percentage of the population would have been delighted. Hey, I grew up with an Amstrad PCW. But the Sugar element was the crucial break point, because it was this bit that was reliant on their source, who turned out to be a self-made spy called Glen Jenvey, who turns up all over the place in moderately well-funded “anti-terrorist” astroturf exercises.

And so on, and so on, until he demonstrated that Jenvey was a) the author of the threats, not just a reporter on them, b) using Patrick Mercer MP (for it is he) to lend weight to his nonsense, and the British Ambassador to Afghanistan’s brother too, and c) the sort of shameful arse who throws around accusations of paedophilia. Richard Bartholomew has been doing good work on this too.

It’s a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the “Internet” flag set – it means “stuff I don’t understand” to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey’s Comedy Gladio.

“Londonstani” has a superb post at Abu Muqawama about Ed Husain’s The Islamist. Read the whole thing. Then look at the comments and cry.

Meanwhile, shouldn’t this story be getting much more press?

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service..

[snip]

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.

An agent network? This is the sort of thing the Americans were constantly trying to put over on us in the 1950s and 60s and Sir Peter Wright, by his own account admittedly, spent a lot of time and effort kiboshing. It appears to be John Reid’s fault, which is interesting but hardly surprising. It’s much more surprising to find this in the Daily Telegraph, but there you go.

A pint of wanker goes to Patrick Mercer MP, who is quoted as basically saying he’s cool with that and daddy knows best:

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the House of Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said: “The special relationship is a huge benefit to us. It clearly works to our advantage and helps keep the people of the UK and the US safe.

“There is no doubt that a great deal of valuable intelligence vital to British national security is procured by American agents from British sources.”

World of Ken MacLeod Watch is obviously a feature we’ll have to introduce here.

OK, the last post wasn’t totally serious.

But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He’s been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil service-run mixed cabinet committee that super-sets the outsiders, some cabinet members, and some officials.

And the Conservative line is becoming increasingly clear. They believe the rate of interest is too low; this means they want to put it up. So much for independent central banking, the guarantor of sound money. The justification is that they want to encourage saving. They also want to cut or hold public spending. And they vaguely suggest that they want to fix the exchange rate, or at least intervene upwards in it.

These are all deflationary and demand-reducing steps. If you’re a monetarist, they want to increase the price of money by reducing its supply; if you’re a pragmatist, they want to push up sterling and keep imports cheap, which implies pressing down the level of prices generally; if you’re a Keynesian, they want to pull money out of the circular flow into a storage tank, whether private or public. If you’re a 1980s New Classicist, they want to make cash scarce compared to goods, so that the price of labour eventually falls far enough so that the price of goods and services clears the market.

Bing! That’s it. They are still obsessed by the idea of hammering down wages, as they were in 1985, and 1995, until we get to…what? Where can it go, in a world that includes Bangladesh, and overheads? For them, that is the solution. Strangely, no-one ever suggests that the price of enterpreneurship ought to fall; haven’t we had enough bad ideas for a while? The only answer is what it was back then; we’ve got to make good stuff, or good services, and the best way to do this is not by bidding up the price of houses in the suburbs of Middlesbrough.

Yes, there’s the idea of guaranteeing loans to small businesses. But here’s a question for you. Not so long ago, it appeared that the Government guarantee of wholesale interbank lending would result in a monster liability on the public balance sheet – but only if the Government charged a fee for this service. Weirdly, if the Government did it for free, the liability vanished out of the moneysphere. Either way, certain pol…..no. Fuck him. George Osborne used the liability to back his own version of the numbers.

Now, George wants to guarantee £50bn worth of loans to small businesses, and charge a fee; but for him, the wholesale guarantee is “Labour bankrupting the country again”. I know I’m a sad, twisted bastard, but I still remember when lying in the House of Commons was a resigning matter. Perhaps I should have learned something when Jack Straw and Hoon back in 2003-2004….no. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, said Havel.

Maintain your rage, said Gough Whitlam. I happen to know that some really serious donors to the Tories think Osborne ought to be sacked, moved to Communities and Local Government, /dev/null, Siberia or wherever. Most of all, they want him nixed. Step away from the controls.

It is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture:

The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.

He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to ­provide packages restricting access to websites without an age rating.

Oh shitty fuck. I thought it was bad enough when a colleague of mine mentioned that Burnham wanted to make YouTube put warnings next to everything it carried that included rude words. But no, it’s worse. This is dire in so many ways; for a start, this is our Secretary of Culture yelling for censorship. Not the Home Secretary, or the Minister for Promoting Virtue and Punishing Vice, or the Lord Chamberlain.

Shouldn’t he be the voice for culture in the Cabinet, like the Chancellor is for finance, or the secretary of defence is for the military? The Home Office will always demand more surveillance and more control, but shouldn’t the Department of Culture demand culture?

Further, there’s the crappy idea of special “packages” of the Internet with bits missing. There is a clear reason why this is crappy: if it is so desirable, why isn’t anyone selling it? Isn’t there a gap in the market? Of course, one of the problems is that it would be expensive – who will go through all the websites censoring them? But then, they say you can’t buck the market, and if you can’t do that to build a national fibre network or keep Amersham’s DNA sequencer business in the UK, you can’t do that for censorship.

It’s also crappy because it does nothing about peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging, VoIP, USENET, e-mail (remember that?), but it’s worse than that – it’s based on a set of fundamentally stupid and discriminatory assumptions.

First of all, there’s the idea that sin can leap out and grab you, to quote Holden Caulfield. Paedophiles can make vapours rise up from the keyboard. But secondly, there’s the idea that this only applies to some very specific and rather puny kinds of sin. There is surely plenty of stuff in an average edition of several national newspapers that, if we looked at it clearly, we would all agree is highly unsuitable for children; and it has little or nothing to do with the usual tropes of rude words and naked flesh.

Third, there’s a weird discrimination of means. Not only is a punch in the mouth worse on this scale of values (violence!) than the delivery of a 1,000 pound bomb (this is called “action”), pretty much anything is OK if it is delivered in print or in the theatre. Nobody seems to want to censor the printing press or reintroduce theatrical censorship. The explanation is in part that the National Theatre’s seating capacity is less than the peak daily traffic of this weblog and heavily London-focused. But that’s not enough.

If the buggers are reading books, this is in a sense enough – they look more middle-class, dammit, and who cares about the content. And if you’ve got them into a theatre for something of their choice, it’s unlikely they are the ones you’re worrying about.

But I am even more furious about the reference to the “English-language Internet”. For a start, this betrays deep ignorance. There is no such thing; the Internet has no notion of English language, and it’s damn right. It’s because of this that it can work in every language. And Burnham seems to think he owns the English language, that he can impose his will on anyone who chooses to write in it. What if an Indian does so, on a website hosted in Holland, operated by a Chinese company? Who is this Burnham?

It’s worse than that, though; he is trying to push his quack nonsense on the Americans, which means he doesn’t think he can get it through Parliament and he also doesn’t think he can get it through the European Parliament, so he wants a nice little unpublished understanding with the Americans that the prime minister can sign and instantly ratify under the prerogative power, and then place in the Commons library, or perhaps not. Rather like the whole wealth of other understandings that have to do with electronic surveillance of one form or another.

The good news, however, is that his proposals might contravene the US constitution (we can’t expect too much from our own). If they can have secret transatlantic understandings, then I intend to have one of my own.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s top five cities get fibre to the home.

An interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the NYT.) Here’s an interview he did with PBS television.

[INTERVIEWER]:Just before 9/11, in that summer and the spring, how hard was Tenet pushing on the terrorism threat?

[BRENNAN]:I think he was pushing at every opportunity he had. … George and [former CTC Director] Cofer [Black] were very much of a mind-set that we can’t sit back and wait; we need to do things. We need to do things in Afghanistan. We need to go after Al Qaeda. We need to ratchet up the pressure on the Taliban.

George took several trips out to Saudi Arabia and other places to try to gain support from the Arab states to try to put pressure on the Taliban to give up bin Laden and others. George would knock on any door. He would pursue any course. I think what he was trying to do, prior to 9/11, was to make sure the administration was focused on that.

[INTERVIEWER]: And were they?

I think they were aware of the issue. I don’t think they, in fact, appreciated the seriousness of it, because I think they were trying to get their ducks in a line on a number of fronts to include Iraq prior to 9/11.

You heard the guy – they didn’t appreciate the threat from Al-Qa’ida because they were busy ginning-up a war with Iraq. And who was responsible for this?

[INTERVIEWER]: When did you get the first hints … that there was this movement in the direction of Iraq …?

[BRENNAN]: The train started to leave the station before the election of 2000, with the neocons putting things out. There was a real focus that we needed to do something about Iraq. It was gaining momentum and strength. And with [Iraqi National Congress founder Ahmad] Chalabi and [former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard] Perle and others feeding those fires, I do think they just had a complete lack of understanding of the complexity of doing something like that.

They’re very outspoken and vocal about the need to take action. It’s easy to execute; if there is criticism that is being made of this administration, [it] is that the decision to take action is only part of the challenge. It’s the follow-through; it’s the strategic planning afterward. Those areas really need to be paid attention to, because the U.S. military [has] no problem as far as just decimating the Iraqi army, but the people like Chalabi and the other neocons, and people like [then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith, who I think has a very superficial understanding of some of these issues — I don’t know how much time Doug Feith has spent in the Middle East or in Iraq, but it’s a very, very complex society.

Miaow. So catty you could throw him a ball of wool!

[INTERVIEWER, talking about Paul Pilar and the Iraq NIE]: He told us that … even at the time, he wasn’t aware about how politicized it was, but he was — especially as he looks back on it, especially around the “white paper” — really embarrassed, I think is the word he used at how faulty it was. Did it feel that way at the time, or does it just look that way in hindsight?

[BRENNAN]: At the time there were a lot of concerns that it was being politicized by certain individuals within the administration that wanted to get that intelligence base that would justify going forward with the war.

[INTERVIEWER]: Could I ask you who?

Some of the neocons that you refer to were determined to make sure that the intelligence was going to support the ultimate decision.

Ah, I see. The facts were being fixed around the policy. The intelligence was being, ah, sexed up. Recognising this ought to be the criterion of seriousness for anyone seeking a post in the intelligence/foreign policy complex, or indeed anything else. That Brennan does so and says so openly is a very strong mark in his favour, as is this:

That’s where the issue of maintaining an independent intelligence organization is so critically important, because departments have certain policy objectives and goals. If you have a department such as the Department of Defense that controls the intelligence function as well, there is a great potential for that intelligence to be skewed, either wittingly or unwittingly, in support of policy objectives.

Yes. Yes. Which is also why it’s important to maintain a independent career-path there, like it is in the civil service. I was very surprised to learn that had Brennan been appointed, he would have been a rare bird as a career spook in charge of The Community. Mind you, the three best MI5 chiefs – Guy Liddell, David Petrie, and Martin Furnival-Jones, in my opinion – were respectively an army officer, a cop, and a professional spook, so British experience doesn’t necessarily corroborate this.

Clearly it was right to drop him; but it worries me that getting rid of the neocons and torture fans will require people who are a) clued-in about the intelligence service, b) committed to cleaning up, c) ruthless bureaucratic thugs, and if possible d) personally untainted.

Regarding intelligence and independence, meanwhile, this blog has often said that one of the main reasons why the UK got involved in all this is that we don’t have an independent reconnaissance satellite capability. Out of the major powers in Europe, the UK, Spain and Italy went to the war; neither the UK nor Spain has an imagery satellite, and Italy launched one jointly with France a few months after Iraq. France and Germany both have their own synthetic-aperture radar sats, and didn’t go to the war. Poland, Romania, et al have large armies but no recce capability and they went.

But perhaps this isn’t as significant as it used to be. It appears that The Guardian is the first newspaper to become an independent space-faring power. Seriously.

From a vantage point 423 miles above the Earth, the lawless waters of the Gulf of Aden appear tranquil and the 330-metre-long ship sitting low under a £68m cargo looks like a tiny green cigar floating on an inky ocean.

These pictures, taken by a satellite commissioned by the Guardian and hurtling over Africa at four miles a second, show the Sirius Star, the Saudi supertanker which 12 days ago became the biggest prize ever seized by the Somali pirates who have claimed the Gulf of Aden as their hunting ground.

I love the “commissioned by the Guardian and hurtling over Africa at four miles a second” bit. That’s incredibly science-fiction, and in a good way – Arthur C. Clarke would be delighted. This has been possible for some time; who else remembers poring over GlobalSecurity.org’s IKONOS or DigitalGlobe shot of the day in the bullshit-rockin’ autumn of 2001? But as far as I know, this is the first attempt by a media organisation to acquire overhead imagery on an operational timescale. Hey, it’s Tim Worstall’s worst nightmare – Polly Toynbee in spaaace!

What might have happened or not happened had somebody tried this earlier is a very interesting question. Of course, finding the Sirius Star is a fairly easy challenge – we know where to look, she is a huge and unambiguous target, and she is nicely contrasting with the sea in a part of the world where the skies are usually clear. We still need SAR capability of our own, quite possibly more than we need Trident, and IKONOS won’t sell you that.

Quite a score for our reader “Ajay”, who I think is the first to spot that the Mumbai terrorist attack bears a very close resemblance to the coup plot in Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, which makes it the third and possibly fourth case of someone actually using Forsyth’s book as a practical handbook. The exact number depends on whether you believe the story that Forsyth actually took part in planning a coup in Equatorial Guinea in 1977 which didn’t go ahead, and recycled the work he did on it as a novel. Forsyth now semi-confesses to this, but this may be self-publicity from a man who was, after all, sacked from the BBC for making up the news.

Certainly, however, the so-called “Wonga Coup” team in Equatorial Guinea read the book, Mike Hoare’s “Froth Blowers’ Society” attack on the Seychelles apparently issued a copy to every participant, and now this. How does, say, Curzio Malaparte’s Theory of the Coup d’Etat compare to that? Forsyth can probably claim that more people have died as a direct result of his book than any other book not written by an economist.

In fact it’s closer than you might think; the Grauniad, whose coverage of the whole incident was excellent, has a neat map you might want to consult. Apparently, two of the Zodiacs used were found at the north end of Back Bay, on the west/left hand side of the map; this suggests the attack plan was very close indeed to Forsyth’s. There are two groups of targets, and each group is fairly close to a beach on that side of the peninsula, even though some of them are closer to the east (harbour) side. But doing it this way saves navigating around the headland and keeps away from the main port, where you could expect a police presence.

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Very roughly, it’s about 2,050 feet from each of two landing spots near the targets to a point exactly half-way across the entrance of the bay, so you’d know when to set course – this is exactly how the mercenaries in TDOW set up their attack, launching further out to sea in a big group and using the ship as a mark to lay their course to the jumping-off point, which they identify by a transit between two landmarks. Of course, there are plenty of buildings they could line up to identify this waypoint laterally (the Wankhede Stadium looks like a candidate).

Politically, this implies that the “Deccan Mujahideen” weren’t from Deccan at all – otherwise, as someone pointed out, they’d just have taken the train in. Clearly they needed to cross a border, or else the ship and the Zodiacs would have been just more moving parts. This also suggests that they couldn’t rely on getting arms in India. I wonder what they did with the ship? One option would be to have her sink; another for her to sail quietly on, although the chances of getting away wouldn’t be great.

There was worrying reporting that a Pakistani merchant ship had been stopped by the Indian navy but fortunately, if you like your Ganges without plutonium, a search of the ship revealed nothing suspicious.

There’s another question – this wasn’t designed as a suicide attack. Suicide attackers have no need of false papers, cash, and certainly not credit cards:

A bag found in the Taj Mahal hotel contained 400 rounds of ammunition, grenades, identity cards, rations, $1,000 (£650) in cash and international credit cards, indicating a meticulously planned operation.

That certainly sounds like the equipment of someone who at least wanted to keep the option of escape open, and of course we have little idea how many people landed. It was quite possibly a suicidal mission, but that’s not the same thing. The special horror here was that the violence was dispersed and prolonged; it happened all over the place, and it kept happening.

This of course carries some information as to what kind of group carried it out. Clearly, they weren’t the sort of people who you recruit because all you need is someone to carry the bomb. They had to take independent action, and they had to sustain their will over an extended period of time. Good relations between India and Pakistan don’t really provide much net information; when things are bad, you’d expect terrorism, and when things are good there are people who want them to be bad again.

Meanwhile, the Dogs of War parallel holds in another way – the mercenaries’ exit strategy is the weakest bit of the plot, and had it been put into action the endgame would probably have been a lot like the last day or so in Mumbai, with the coupsters being gradually picked off around the presidential palace as they ran out of time, ammunition and ideas.

George Osborne is not getting any better. His latest shaft of brilliance is to threaten everyone with a sterling crisis – Chris Dillow has details and more. The problem here is that for a start, he is deliberately beating the water to drive sharks away from his vulnerable ideological underbelly. The Conservatives’ “economic plan” currently foresees a range of stupid and incoherent things – they are for tax cuts, specifically in employer National Insurance contributions, but the cuts are to be funded by spending cuts elsewhere, and savings in that eternal demagogue’s standby, “waste”.

So this isn’t a response to the economic crisis in any way; a basic Keynesian accounting – and before you all speak up, this particular one is basic to essentially everyone’s view of economics – shows us that aggregate demand equals (C+I+G+X)-(S+T) where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government spending, X is net exports, S is savings and T is taxation. If you reduce T, you obviously increase aggregate demand. But if you’re paying for this by reducing G, the net effect depends on the percentage of an increase in income that isn’t spent – the marginal propensity to save. The value in terms of aggregate demand of a tax cut is given by dT/(1/marginal propensity to save), known as the balanced budget multiplier. This can in fact be quite significant, for example if the tax change is highly progressive, so that the rich (who have a high marginal propensity to save) pay more and the poor (who don’t – they don’t have the spare cash) pay less.

Actually, even if the cut was to be paid for by borrowing, it still wouldn’t help very much. The Tories intend to only cut NI for those businesses who haven’t laid anyone off – which will be how many in a year’s time? Surely, if they are consistent conservatives, they should be encouraging companies to sack people so as to bring about a fall in prices and the realignment of demand with long term aggregate supply? After all, if they still reject Keynes, as Osborne seems to, this is what they presumably want.

Sometimes, the inchoate voice of the Internet-at-large tells you more than any amount of data: like this.

What a lot of people who should have known better forgot at the election was – HE’S A TORY.

Further, it is not any Conservative’s place to complain that the pound is in jeopardy. The UK has been running a structural current-account deficit for many years, and the vast growth of the financial services sector is a consequence and apparently a deliberate one. When an economy has a current account deficit, this means it imports more than it exports. In order to pay for this, it needs to run a corresponding surplus on the capital account – it needs to import capital. Down at the micro level, this means that banks are lending money to people who want to buy imports, that the savings of exporters are not enough to fund this, and therefore that the banks must borrow on the wholesale market (or issue shares to overseas investors, etc).

A further important factor is the role of the housing economy; if house prices grow faster than GDP, which in the UK they always do during the boom phases, this means that the new mortgage lending cannot be funded from the repayments on the old, and that housing must import capital from the rest of the economy. And, as the rest of the economy has to import capital for its own needs, therefore the mortgage banks must use the world market for money.

As a further twist, the banks got very good at importing capital and then re-exporting it, taking a turn on the deal and therefore significantly contributing to the current account. Everyone who praised the growth of the City since 1986 implicitly supports this state of affairs. But all this is predicated on the import of capital, which implies a current account deficit and therefore a significant currency risk. (No wonder City Tories have no confidence in Osborne.) The Conservative Party, especially, has no right to complain about it whatsoever, having essentially invented this entire structural model, as Ross McKibbin explains in a now-seminal article.

But even this isn’t the worst. Consider Osborne’s actual remarks.

Mr Osborne suggests that Mr Brown “doesn’t care” how much he borrows. “His view is he probably won’t win the next election. The Tories can clear this mess up after I’ve gone. That is deeply irresponsible. It’s a scorched-earth policy, which I think the history books will write up as a total disaster and which the public will see through between now and the election.”

Osborne is being positively Straussian here, in attributing the worst of his own motives to others. And he’s got form for this. After all, in the event of a major sterling crisis, he would stand to gain impressively, although for the reasons I’ve given above it would do the country a power of bad. It would look catastrophic, and the J-curve effect means that the short-term effect of devaluation is deflationary – the recession would initially be worse. Further, the sectors most affected by this would be finance (obviously) and the import-heavy consumer economy.

The electoral, regional and class distribution of the impact would also be helpful for the Conservatives – the costs would fall disproportionately in South-Eastern marginals and on swing voter groups, whereas the benefits would arrive later, handily after a hypothetical Chancellor Osborne took office, and would be concentrated in the export economy, that is to say in the West Midlands, the North, and the new town techie belt. Or,just where the Tories worry that they need to build strength in the long term.

And if you want to know the sort of thing they actually think is good for us, under the exoteric surface, check out this beauty from Alan Duncan. Constrained by the existing law, Dunc can’t promise to get rid of your workplace rights, so instead he’s hoping to scare people off exerting them, by making anyone who loses an industrial tribunal case pay the employer’s costs. Now, that might well be appropriate in the majority of the civil law, but it’s wildly inappropriate for employment law because of the structural inequality of power involved. Arguably, the ancient legal principle of “equality of arms” can only be maintained in this field if you can’t be scared into silence by the risk of paying Sir Bufton Tufton QC’s bill.

Mind you, there are reasons to be cheerful. Osborne has just staked his career on a forex trade, only weeks after making an enemy of Nathan Rothschild. And even super-europhobe Tory funder Stanley Kalms is making noises about needing “more heavyweight, more grey hair on the front bench”; if that isn’t a reference to Kenneth Clarke I don’t know what is. Who else could it be? Heavyweight rules out Redwood, Franciscus Mediocritus and a bunch of others. Grey hair? Can’t be William Hague then..

Well. Being a Republican Party lawyer, I always thought, would be a job that at least got you out of bed full of curiosity at what the day might hold. A garage stuffed with uncounted ballots that have to disappear before sun-up? Suitcases of Saudi greenbacks? An unmarked Gulfstream-IV full of Cuban mercenaries with compromising video? A sickening whispering campaign of paedo vileness?

Clearly you’d have to deal with the sensation of your heart dying, calcifying into a sticky lump of careworn evil – but at least it wouldn’t be dull. Better rule in hell than serve in heaven, as John Milton put it; and he was in a government that cut the king’s head off when he wasn’t poeting. (Now that’s change you can believe in.)

So I have to say I feel for R. Dick Schifcofske III as he heads for Alaska; is he going to secretly replace the Secretary of State with a robot in time to influence a recount? Smuggle Todd Palin out to Colombia? Release cocaine-crazed pigs into Obama campaign headquarters? No. He’s got to account for Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, piece by piece. It’s enough to make you quit and devote yourself to a life of service to the poor.

Meanwhile, can you imagine that Brad DeLong actually linked this? The Stock Market Implications of CIA Coups d’Etat. It wasn’t that long ago that the prof ruthlessly purged references to the Long Pig Factor from his comments threads. Now look at him. A sign and a wonder, I think.

Whilst I’m on the underpants-of-the-election theme, here’s something else from the Poor Man Institute (for freedom, democracy, and a pony):

Jonah Goldberg wrote of Hitler’s Willing Executioners. These men and women are Obama’s.

Down through the ages, it is through the treachery of those leaders entrusted with the defense of freedom who abandon their posts in the hour of greatest need that the enemies of freedom and the agents of tyranny find welcome to our shores and entry into our citadel.
………….
I’d hardly equate support for Obama with serving with the einsatzcommando or as a capo at Auschwitz, so we ought to be careful wiht such analogies on the off-chance that some Obamunists have actually read Goldberg – or read anything for that matter…

The problem, I think, is that for a second or so I actually thought Jonah Goldberg might have written Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and I’ve read the bloody thing. In fact I’ve studied it. It’s a very bad book – the whole thrust of it is that Germans had a specifically evil kind of antisemitism, not further explained, which is sufficient to explain Nazism monocausally despite the fact that most antisemitic violence before 1938 happened almost anywhere in Europe but Germany. Somehow, burning your neighbour to death in a pogrom isn’t “eliminationist” according to HWE; I remember writing in reply to this that the difference between elimination and a pogrom is the availability of rolling stock. That’s studenty AJP Taylorism, of course, but I think I had a point.

I also recall that in a sense Jonah Goldberg could have written it. Goldhagen didn’t seem to engage with the fact that lots of non-Germans were at the same time doing almost equally horrific things to other target groups – were Stalin’s willing executioners eliminationist anti-anti-communists? – nor with the fact that lots of Germans emigrated to the New World but apparently didn’t take the poison along with them. It’s full of idolisation of America and rejection of any kind of structural argument for a very neo-con insistence on “evil”. (If you want a good book on the subject, try Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men.)

That’s another way of saying that HWE dodges all the difficult things (why did those French civil servants do it?) about the Holocaust in favour of a good story arc. And you don’t get more Goldberg than that. Truly, that nameless wingnut knew more than they thought.

It seems that Andrew Gilligan has been stung by the phrase “Bendy Jihad”. So much so that he has devoted a whole column to moaning about it, or rather to moaning about anyone having the cheek to disagree with him. It’s a pity, then, that he couldn’t see his way to attributing his attack correctly, quoting accurately, or refraining from beauties like these:

There’s a certain mad nobility in the way Boris’s opponents seem determined to strap themselves to the most unpopular causes going. You wonder what’s next a support group for double-glazing salesmen? A bid to rehabilitate that misunderstood feminist icon, demonised by the Right-wing media, Rose West?

Do stay classy, Andrew. Anyway, to get to the point: Tom Barry is not responsible for the phrase “Bendy Jihad”; it was me. I invented the phrase to express the bizarrely gratuitous nature of the campaign against these peaceable giants of the urban savannahs; is it really a top priority, after all, to replace some brand-new buses with other brand-new buses which have had some glassfibre curlicues added?

And it is gratuitous. We know now that they do not kill cyclists. Not one authenticated case of a Bendy attacking cyclists has been provided. No evidence for any of the other horrors they supposedly inflict on the public has been adduced whatsoever. But rather as so many Conservatives are indiscriminately in favour of killing small animals, the Bendy Jihad rolls on, despite the fact that the contracts between Transport for London and the bus operators mean that come what way, 50 bendies will still be in operation at the next mayoral election, despite the fact that some of the routes involved are impassable to double-deckers because they go through the Strand underpass, despite the fact Boris Johnson forgot all about paying for the extra drivers and conductors required for 24-hour operation…clearly, the role of the Bendy Jihad is not instrumental, but symbolic. Rather than fighting for a secular triumph in which the Caliphate of a better transport system is actually achieved, the Bendy Jihadis hope to prove themselves worthy of their place in paradise (also known as the House of Commons) by their sacrifice.

However, their religion is actually considerably less advanced than Islam in anthropological terms. Rather than propitiating god by good works or asceticism, they are still at the stage of making sacrificial offerings of dead animals; in this case, these savages intend to stage a mass cull of defenceless bendies. Perhaps they will build a giant pyre and dance round it, or burn Peter Hendy in a wicker man atop City Hall. It’s potlatch politics; they’re doing it purely because they can. Politically, it’s an appeal to the primitive instincts; watch us smash their big, long, red totem!

I suspect the authors of the Bendy Jihad are well aware of this; it’s hard to remember this now, but it wasn’t that long ago that the main strategic problem facing the Conservative Party was how to win an election in a climate of prosperous housing-boom contentment, without risking any of their core ideological substance. The answer, of course, is to pick an aesthetic and push it as far as you can.

Now, Gilligan claims that “one tireless Johnson-basher, Tom Barry, explains how the Mayor’s opposition to bendy buses is actually part of a sinister, global neo-conservative conspiracy”. Unfortunately, he’s got this the wrong way round. The opposition to bendy buses is actually a conspiracy which consists of sinister global neo-conservatives.

For example, we have Policy Exchange’s founder Michael Gove, shadow Schools Secretary. Mr. Gove is on record as recommending the pseudonymous “Bat Ye’or”’s book Eurabia, in which you can learn that the European Union is secretly controlled by Arabs. (There are pills you can take for that, I think.) We have its recent director Anthony Browne, the toast of US extreme-rightist group VDARE, who apparently thinks we are “on the edge of anarchy” because of the not-ricin not-plot, now Boris Johnson’s policy chief. We have the truly odd figure of Policy Exchange research director Dean Godson – advocate of “political warfare”, former special assistant to John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy (that’s the US Navy, and he’s now the head of John McCain’s transition team), and shaky-on-facts thinktanker. Why am I bothering with this obscure thinktank?

Because, of course, not only did Boris Johnson staff up from it, but it published a paper back in 2005 which specifically proposed the Bendy Jihad in the following terms:

One of the remarkable things about the debate over the Routemaster – London’s much loved hop-on, hop-off double deckers complete with conductor – is that it is about much more than just a bus. It is highly revealing about so many aspects of public policy in Britain today. The first is the rising tide of the group rights agenda (or at least a particularly extreme interpretation of it) which has overwhelmed key public utilities and those who do business with them.

That’s Godson. “The group rights agenda”, no less. Here’s some more:

The Routemaster’s crime, in short, is not that it is ineffective; it is that it is unfashionable. It does not fit with the modern, sleek, concrete-and-glass Euro-city that Mr Livingstone wants to create; never mind that this city exists only inside the Mayor’s head.

It’s always the EU in the end with these people, isn’t it? You’d think that Andrew Gilligan might have been aware of this document’s essentially partisan and political nature; after all, he wrote that last bit and Godson edited it.

What a bunch, and how bizarre that they all share a deep interest in buses despite having never been at all interested in transport policy before. I suppose their nonsense is explicable by the Dunning-Kruger effect – the principle, experimentally demonstrated, that incompetent people are not only unaware of their incompetence but convinced that others are even more incompetent than they.

Anyway, this is all very interesting, but it’s just a pity that Tom Barry didn’t actually say it, just like he didn’t invent the Bendy Jihad. The two halves of the quote, each side of the oh-so-convenient ellipsis, come from two distinct pieces of writing, welded together like the halves of a dodgy secondhand car and with much the same purpose. Tom Barry says in the first one that there is a curious overlap between the Bendy Jihad and a neo-conservative worldview, quoting me. I think we’ve amply demonstrated that. He says in the second that the Boris Johnson campaign was motivated by Tory hatred of Ken Livingstone for cosying-up to the “new economic superpowers”. That’s an opinion, on a whole range of stuff that has bugger-all to do with bendies.

Comment is free, facts are sacred. Remember? Much more of this and I might conclude Alistair Campbell was right. Which would be a considerable stretch for me. But then, they say you should never meet your heroes. Especially not when they get caught sockpuppeting.

You are unlikely to find anything much better to read than Nir Rosen’s report from Afghanistan. It’s the journalism we’ve been yelling at the professionals to do for years. There’s far too much to summarise, but one thing that strikes me is the sense of a world of tiny, hyperlocal, byzantine conflicts, with sudden interventions by people who may as well be on the moon – Taliban chieftains based in the UAE phoning in to say whether or not to kill the journalist, staff officers in Combined Air Operations Centres doing much the same thing, like gods in a Greek play.

Relatedly, Abu Muqawama deserves thanks for not swallowing idiotic red-baiting about “embedding with the Taliban”. Whilst you’re over there, don’t miss the excellent series on Darfur and the complexity of a situation where the insurgents in one part of the country are effectively the counterinsurgents in another, the importance of missing one stage of student radicalism, and just how close they came to overrunning Khartoum.

Also, Dan Hardie is back.