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A post in another place gets me thinking a bit more about the much debated issue of the MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, and whether or not he was “censored” on Big Brother – and furthermore, if he was induced to be on the show under false pretences. I’ve no particularly set opinion of the subject, but from what I know, a number of the claims of “set up” and “censorship” sound do sound a bit implausible. I’ll try to rattle through why I think that is:
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I just heard that Trevor Kavanagh on the radio. A few thoughts immediately sprang to mind:
Fuck “gay relationships in the past”.
Fuck “moments of madness”. Fuck “errors of judgement”. Fuck “while at University”. (Fuck “sharing a bed to save on the hotel bill.”) Fuck “dangerous double lives”. Fuck “mistakes”. Fuck “sordid”. Fuck “disgusting”. Fuck sniggering. Fuck hounding. Fuck innuendo, unless it’s really good innuendo. Fuck people who can’t say the word “bisexual”. (Fuck people who only say “bisexual” when they mean gay.) Fuck four-page London Whale souvenir pullouts (nothing to do with this, just because.) Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck.
And fuck anybody – anybody – who tries to defend the headline “Another one bites the pillow” as being just fine so long as you’ve got a sense of humour. Fuck them hard.
That was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Fuck Things Party.
Much fun is being had with the claims by Russian state television about British embassy officials conducting espionage using a big fake rock. Never ones to miss the chance for a James Bond reference or fifty, the news presenters have been wiffling on about “outlandish” schemes and “weird and wonderful” devices.
All very jolly… but, er, isn’t this just a modern version of the timeworn old Cold War technique – a bluetooth Dead Letter Box? One person downloads their message onto the device as they walk past, then a second person can upload it hours later. In fact, it solves the only weak point in the dead drop protocol – the need to stop, unobserved, to deposit or pick up the material – because you don’t need to make physical contact with the DLB, or even necessarily to stop walking. It’s pretty obvious, it’s simple to build and run, and frankly you’d be astonished if half the bins and Evening Standard boxes in Whitehall didn’t have similar devices in them. The most complicated bit would be making the fiberglass rock – because, you know, they always look like bits of a crappy old Star Trek set. Having said that, you can buy low-tech versions of them to keep your keys in.
Indeed, it’s not like the Russians could act terribly surprised about it – as their own spy in the FBI, Robert Hanssen, suggested a similar system to them in 2000, using Palm VIIs:
As you implied and I have said, we do need a better form of secure communication – faster. In this vein, I propose (without being attached to it) the following:
One of the commercial products currently available is the Palm VII organizer. I have a Palm III, which is actually a fairly capable computer. The VII version comes with wireless internet capability built in. It can allow the rapid transmission of encrypted messages, which if used on an infrequent basis, could be quite effective in preventing confusions if the existance [sic] of the accounts could be appropriately hidden as well as the existance [sic] of the devices themselves. Such a device might even serve for rapid transmittal of substantial material in digital form.
Of course, as the Register article “FBI traitor suspect had mad C skillz” makes clear, the Russian agency never took him up on the suggestion – probably on the basis that that, in geek language, the phrase for “this technology is essential for the future of your organisation” is exactly the same as the one for “I want a new toy”. Hanssen was eventually arrested, making an old-fashioned dead letter drop of classified documents in a park in Virginia.
In short, it seems that this was very nearly the perfect covert information-gathering scheme… with the nitpicking exceptions being that the streets of Moscow aren’t normally covered in large boulders, and the bit where one of the British officials casually picked up the rock and carried it away. But yeah, apart from that, flawless.
(more…)
I’ve just done some sums, and I’ve worked out that the next week or so should go absolutely swimmingly if I can just find some way of making each day 32 hours long.
What I really need now is some kind of simultaneous, 4-day timey sort of thing. That would be swell.
Opposites create Opposites. Opposite Creators required. Singularity God impossible. Opposites de-god Religion.
Opposites create the universe.
And relax.
UPDATE: Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the best blonde joke ever.
Well, that’s that, then.
Roughly two responses come to mind over Charles Kennedy’s resignation (the responses from others range from the thoughtful to the entertainingly gloaty). First up, the moderately serious one, and then the groan-inducing joke after the jump.
Serious one:
It’s sad. Really, properly sad; head-shaking, chair-kicking stuff. At least 0.3 Brokeback Mountains-worth of sad. Charles Kennedy doesn’t deserve to have his political career end this way (and hopefully it won’t be the end). But really… what else was there to do?
Those unpleasant off-the-record briefings aside, the idea that the MPs who went public were committing an act of betrayal – I can understand why some people feel that, but I just don’t buy it. Everything suggests that they’d all have rather kept this behind closed doors (after all, why the hell wouldn’t they? What do they gain from looking like spiteful backstabbers?) It was Kennedy’s horribly ill-advised attempt to do a ‘95 John Major that turned the situation into a miniature bloodbath. Classic resignation blindness: that strange delusion which afflicts even the canniest of politicians, as – at the point of crisis – every shred of judgement deserts them and they attempt to struggle on long past the point where their inevitable exit could ever be described as “dignified”. That moment was the trigger; if you ask people to “put up or shut up” you can hardly be miffed when they do, in fact, put up.
And considering the 28 “rebel” MPs who signed one of either Cable or Davey’s letters, I’m not sure the idea that it was just a faction of right-wing orangebookies out on a power grab really holds up either. There’s too many old Kennedy loyalists, for a start. It’s hard when there’s so many competing factions and motivations to discern any sort of pattern; however, one or two things suggest themselves. The most obvious trend is that MPs whose contituencies experienced a swing against the Lib Dems in the last election split 60/40 in favour of rebelling – 46% of the rebels saw their share of the vote go down in 2005, compared to only 27% of loyalists. The actual size of their majority appears irrelevant, as does the party that poses the closest threat in their seat – perhaps oddly, considering the general assumption that the Cameron factor was major catalyst for the leadership crisis. The split’s roughly 70% Tory to 30% Labour for both groups. So if this was about self-interest, it seems that for many it was at least a democratic self-interest…
Ultimately, why this was fatal comes down not to the drinking itself, but to the effect that the associated deceit would continue to have on the party. I know , I know… alcoholics don’t lie, they deny; Kennedy is a decent and honourable man, and I’m absolutely sure that he was decieving himself as much as others. But unfortunately, that get-out doesn’t apply to the people who work with you and who have to cover up for you. His behaviour forced his staff and his colleagues to lie to each other, to the press, and to the public. If he stayed on, every Lib Dem MP would be on the back foot, left vulnerable to questions about how much they knew, and when, and why they said nothing. Any hope of agenda setting would be shot to buggery. Public opionion’s a weird beast, especially when it’s looking round for someone to blame on emotive issues. So you end up with a situation where Charles Kennedy gets sympathy, but all other Lib Dems are liars. And that’s bad. Really, properly bad.
What else was there to do?
…here’s Westminster’s worst-kept secrets, numbers 2 to 5:
2. The brutal, bareknuckle “fight club” events organised by the 1922 Committee, held on the lowest level of the car park every full moon.
3. Dennis Skinner’s 2002 gender reassignment surgery.
4. The “Swearing Hansard” – the unexpurgated draft that’s produced before it gets cleaned up for public consumption.
5. How to find a bar you can get a seat in on a Friday night.
Those leadership contenders in full:
Simon Hughes – 2 to 1
Simon Hughes, The Cricket Analyst – 3 to 1
Menzies Campbell – 3 to 1
John Menzies shops – 10 to 3
The Ming Dynasty – 6 to 1
Ming the Merciless – 8 to 1
Nicky Campbell – 10 to 1
Bruce Campbell – 10 to 1
Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can – 12 to 1
Mark Oaten – 16 to 1
A packet of Oatso Simple – 20 to 1
Lembit Opik & Sian Lloyd dream ticket – 25 to 1
Lembit Opik & an asteroid – 33 to 1
Michael Barrymore – 100 to 1
George Fucking Galloway – 250 to 1
Somebody you’ve never heard of – 10 to 1 on
Charles Kennedy – 2 parts whisky to 1 part soda
(I’m so sorry…)
Doing the rounds right now is this year’s Big Honking Question from John Brockman’s The Edge salon:
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
One thing that immediately stands out (beyond the fact that Mike Nesmith from The Monkees is one of the thinkers quoted, and that his dangerous idea sounds suspiciously like the Timecube guy) is how the same themes and ideas crop up over and over again. The philosophy of mind, materialism, relativism. Communitarian epistemology, participatory cultures and memetics. Crick’s astonishing hypothesis. Religion, religion, religion. I lost count of the number of riffs off the “most dangerous idea is that ideas can be dangerous” concept. More than a few contributors list ideas that are dangerous regardless of their truth value, while a good many more offer concepts that might give a nice quick hit of iconoclastic self-satisfaction, but could hardly be called “dangerous”.
Also, sadly, not one of them suggested “Windows Metafiles”.
For all that, there’s plenty of thought-provoking and provocative gems in there; some on topics you’d never have considered, others statements of the (seemingly) obvious that you kick yourself for never having spotted before.
So, in the spirit of the thing, here’s a (top-of-the-head, purely speculative, utterly unresearched) dangerous idea that isn’t exactly covered by any of the Edge guys – although Ray Kurzweil comes close, Joel Garreau even closer, and several others touch on related subjects. Ironically, it’s nearly directly contradictory to the first one currently on the site. It’s also overlong, terribly vague, and is entirely based on some extraordinarily sweeping and unsubstantiated assertions, but it tickled me enough when it occurred to me that I thought I might as well take it out for a spin. Let me know what you think…
The human species is now effectively invulnerable to extinction
