The Bewilderness

Respectable Veneer or PC Sneer?

France and the United States, two countries with a better record of isolating Muslim extremism than Blair's administration, prevented Tariq Ramandan from entering their countries as they alleged that he supported violence for Islamist goals.

How does Blair follow this lead? He appoints him to the commission working on extremism. A clever Potemkin village for consumption by a Muslim media or PC appointees designed to soften a harsh policy. Who is kidding who?

Gift for the Conservatives

The European Union, not satisfied with savaging the retail sector, has now set up another dilemma for Blair. Europe or Security? These are his terms and someone at the Commission does not like him.

At the same time, however, the European Commission is preparing to publish a new directive that will effectively bar EU states from sending people back to countries where they could face persecution or torture.

It will also limit the length of time people can be detained pending their deportation.

Proposals to be unveiled tomorrow will set out rules for returning illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers to their home countries.

Simple rule: the more laws that Brussels makes, the more that they will conflict  domestic  policies.  As Mandelson's quota system has shown, no-one, no matter how (in)competent could not prevent the rot showing through.

Oil Price Spikes Above $70

As Katrina batters the Gulf Coast, oil prices headed above $70 as traders factored in the short-term closure of refining facilities in the United States. As there is rising demand, and a bottleneck in refining infrastructure, the price of oil is still on an upward trend.

Agbeli Ameko, managing partner at First Enercast, said crude prices could push toward US$75 a barrel Monday and said US$80 a barrel in the short term was realistic.

Oil prices have been driving up to new record highs as refineries struggle to cope with booming energy demand around the world.

Any problems with production anywhere have been sending prices up still further.

The hurricane was expected to have a significant short- and long-term impact on energy markets, impacting production offshore and onshore, and shutting in refining and processing facilities.

This will lead to a further reduction in growth as inflation increases. Within six weeks, the effects of the hurricane on prices will be clear. We are now in the price range where Al -Qaeda or Iran could exact a huge risk premium if they close the Straits of Hormuz or attach refineries around the Middle East.

The Plagiosphere

This was an article recently referenced from the Technology Review that examined the increasing complexity of webcrawlers and their ability to compare millions of pages of texts for plagiarism.

What NASA did to our conception of the planet, Web-based technologies are beginning to do to our understanding of our written thoughts. We look at our ideas with less wonder, and with a greater sense that others have already noted what we're seeing for the first time. The plagiosphere is arising from three movements: Web indexing, text matching, and paraphrase detection.

The articles argues that access to text detection tech will narrow to nothing our self-satisfied and pompous references of artificial originality. Intellect dies in sexual selection.

Kyoto Agitprop from Peru

One final post on 'climate change' as represented by the BBC: simplified, uncritical and sentimentalised. The latest human interest story, dated the 25th August, comes from Peru where  climate change (ie. global warming trends) has caused the retreat of tropical glaciation. It is claimed that this will have catastrophic conseqences for Peruvians since they depend upon the glaciers for all of their water!

The majority of its population lives in a narrow strip of land between the Andes mountains and the sea.

This area is mainly desert and the people who live here receive their water from the mountains. Melting glaciers also provide water for hydroelectricity, industry and farming.

There is even a resident quote, edited for sentiment, from one farmer who will suffer the consequences outlined:

Emilio Himenez has farmed land in the shadow of the Llanganuco lakes for almost four decades. He irrigates his land with water from the glaciers that supply the lakes and grows a variety of fruit and vegetables which he sells at market.

"I can see the snow caps aren't like they were before," says Mr Himenez.

As he works in the fields with his wife and daughters, one of his grandchildren, four-year-old Frank Michael looks on.

"Perhaps in 20 more years, there won't be water if the snow caps go," Mr Himenez adds.

"It will be very sad because when there is water there is life and when there is no water, there is no life, not for the animals, or the humans, or for the agriculture. And, I don't know what situation our grandchildren will be in."

Yet, the inspiration for this article may lie with Reuters, who also produced a survey of the problems Peru faced, on August 3rd. Their article was more wide-ranging, and included the problems of landslides as well as water. Notice however that both invoke the mystic priesthood of 'experts' to support their assertion that glaciers will disappear due to global warming.

Reuters quoted Mario Aguirre, the head of glaciation studies at INRENA, Peru's Institute for Natural Resources, on this subject. The BBC, possibly to avoid accusations of overt Reuterism, spoke to Marco Zapata, who works at INRENA, presumably on glaciation.

You would think that there would be enough stories in Peru without two appearing on glaciers in the same month.

Perfect 10 Screwed By Google?

Perfect 10, an adult website, sued Google last November for infringing upon its copyrighted material, its trademarks and, to get bang for their bucks, unfair competition. The original complaint was covered by Wendy Seltzer.

Now, Perfect 10 has requested that Google is prevented from showing any of their copyrighted images.  Their argument  is that, through advertisements accompanying these  images, Google  profits from their display even though it is perceived to be a free search engine:

Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, "from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue."

Perfect 10 claims that under the guise of being a search engine, Google is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.

Dr. Norm Zada, the founder of Perfect 10, argues that the business model of Google, whereby images can be displayed and downloaded for free without accessing the original website, reduces the profitability of pay-per-view pornographic websites. Furthermore, as the majority of searches are for pornographic images, this represents a misappropriation of intellectual property, since Google depends upon lust for its profits, at the expense of companies like Perfect 10.

Overture's Key Selector Tool indicates that most searches on the internet are sex-related," says Zada. "Google's extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to eighty billion dollars, is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else," says Zada.

This court case represents an attack upon the business model of Google. It also demonstrates the  unresolved tensions  between the perceptions of intellectual property that pervade new and old media. Zada explains why his injunction is beneficial to other traditional media outlets:

Any website publisher can sign up for Google AdSense. It's an easy way for publishers to display Google ads – those being paid for by its AdWords customers – on their content pages. AdWords customers pay Google and Google pays a commission to AdSense publishers. So Google can maximise its revenues by maximising the traffic that it sends to AdSense affiliates. Perfect 10 does not suggest that Google is weighting its search results in favour of AdSense-supported sites; but it does argue that Google profits directly from the popularity of porn, and its particular concern is that it profits from Perfect 10's porn that has been stolen by others.

Zada believes that the outcome of Perfect 10's motion for preliminary injunction should have a major impact not only on Perfect 10, but also on traditional media outlets which are losing the ad revenue war to search engines, in part because of all the nude and semi-nude images search engines offer for free.

Right now, he says, consumers who want to view a nude scene involving Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, or other Hollywood beauties, can view that scene for free by visiting a search engine without purchasing the DVD. "If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a 'search function,' that will be the end of intellectual property in this country," says Zada.

Is this a principled defence of intellectual property or an opportunistic front in the war against the new media?

When did Occupiers Just Observe?

The cliffhanger Iraqi constitution has proved the spark that has lit combustible conflicts amongst the Shi'a community. In the southern zone, where British reconstruction has gradually been replaced by the rule of the local elites, Amarah has become a city dominated by fighting between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the militias of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Whilst the conflict has been reported as an ideological fight between those who support Shi'a autonomy in the south and the centralisers of the Badr brigade in Iraq, the primary objective is money. Federalism ensures that oil revenues remain in the provinces, reducing the amount that al-Sadr could dole out to his supporters. Nor is it clear how this broader concern interacts with the influence of Iran or wider support for the Constitution.

Articles such as this one in the Sunday Herald,  providing airtime to the oil poor Sunnis, provide an unbalanced perspective on how the various powers have negotiated the constitution.  One quote (unnamed) says it all really:

As a retired Arab specialist in the Foreign Office told the Sunday Herald last night: “Like it or not, we are heading for a theocracy – the constitution is a disaster for all Iraqis who longed for democracy and the creation of a secular state.”

As a consequence, British forces are no longer intervening as local militias battle to win control of cities such as Najaf or Amarah:

But to the surprise of officers at Camp Abu Naji, just outside the city, commanders ordered the 700-odd troops to remain in barracks. Yesterday, Army officials insisted that a tactical assessment had led them to decide that intervention was "not required". Other military sources, however, said the city was allowed to fall out of control.....

"There were at least 70 explosions logged on Wednesday night, which even by Amarah's standards is extraordinarily violent," said one source. "In the past we would have done a serious show of force, but this time the order was given not to enter the city. That seems to be part of the new policy of allowing Iraqis to find their own 'equilibrium'.

"But there is a difference between that and losing control of the place completely."

Military sources that appear to disagree with this amended strategy have tentatively voiced their dissatisfaction in the Sunday Telegraph. Yet, with the election of a hardline government in Tehran, the British government must sense that the armed forces may have been transformed from 'occupiers' to 'hostages'. Perhaps this is a recognition of new realities - that Iranian influence may be fought out in Iraq amongst different parties and factions. Then the question becomes: who is Khameini backing?

A recent article in Time details the support that Iran has given the Badr Brigades and the fundamentalist militias that established themselves across southern Iraq after the fall of the Ba'athist regime. Now factions within Iran are attempting to develop an insurgency in Shi'a territory that attacks coalition troops, using tactics developed by Hizbullah. Therefore, based on the flows of money and territory, Shi'a autonomy in the South is favoured by Iran as an easier route to influence, but al-Sadr is fighting for continued financial assistance, rather than for a developed sense of Iraqi autonomy.

Time to Part

The Grauniad cannot resist imparting its own spin to Australia's decision to switch from Greenwich Mean Time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC):

Australia is about to sever a yet another historical link with Britain. It will abandon Greenwich Mean Time and adopt a new national standard next week, based on the atomic clock.

Coordinated Universal Time is based upon the atomic clocks, measuring time intervals through the precision and predictability of radioactive decay. Read on in the article and you will get to see that it is a standard form of measurement adopted by everyone:

New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and most of the European Union have already adopted UTC. When European space scientists land a probe one of the moons of Saturn, when Australian surveyors rendezvous with relief aircraft in the Antarctic, when Egyptian jumbo jet pilots land at Heathrow, they all use UTC.

British space scientists and Antarctic explorers also use UTC, which is "maintained" by 40 time laboratories all over the world, using 260 atomic clocks. Some of these are at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, west London, and these keep British time accurate to about one second in three million years.

Why does the Grauniad feel the need to politicise a story about time? Is nothing sacred to these people?

Warming Towards Cameron (Only Slightly)

David Cameron set out his proposals for reforming immigration controls and national security in a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre. Although he invoked Godwin's Law, comparing the Islamists to Nazis, there were a number of arguments presented which could have been cribbed straight from Instapundit or the milblogs. Detailing his proposals outlines a reform programme (although his byline "freedom under the rule of law" begins to grate after a while), under which Labour's poor responses, handicapped by multiculturalism and pride, can be compared.

1. That a border police force is set up, although this would allow a government to plan convergence with the Schengen Agreement and allow greater co-operation with other border agencies under moves to harmonise border security;
2. That deportation controls are used, although he does not argue for repealing the Human Rights Act;
3. That the security services are given increased resources;
4. That citizenship is denied individuals inimical to the British way of life;
5. That faith schools must teach the national curriculum including exchanges with other communities and that all immigrants are encouraged to learn English;
6. That imams in Britain are trained to speak English, preach a 'moderate' form of Islam and understand the British way of life; and,
7. That a 'national movement' is established to reinforce values amongst school leavers through community service.

Cameron's wideranging program addresses the areas where counter-terrorist policy now resides: security, border control and educational/social policies to promote integration. The objectives are agreeable, but Cameron depends upon state structures to achieve these goals. Given the incompetence that the state has already shown in addressing these problems, it is not clear to me what further regulation of schools and mosques will achieve.  Usually the outcome, in this case disaffection and a stronger religious identity, is the opposite to that which the state intended.

This is a better response than the government has provided so far. Kudos to Cameron for questioning the knee-jerk drafting of further anti-terrorist laws that are never used. However, the 'national movement' evokes images of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, with Cameron in baggy shorts trying to round up chavs for drill practice. If this is his concession to the 'faith and flag' brigade, it detracts from the rest of his speech. Yet, this  'national movement' encapsulates the problem since no politician has been unable to think outside the box.

Dealing with homegrown suicide bombers who live in a community sympathetic to their attitudes requires intelligence of the highest order. At best, you can contain, at worst, you suffer. Long-term reforms promoting assimilation and secularisation may eventually loosen the generational grip of jihadism on British Muslims, but state control and regulation of 'faith schools' or other religious institutions may narrow our liberties of association, belief and education for little or no gain.

Trigger Men

The most recent news indicates that the suicide bombers were fanatics, rather than dupes, since 'police sources' have stated that that they had to manually set the bombs off. The authorities have also given the first hint that officers involved in the murder of De Menezes may face criminal charges.

The revelations came as the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot on July 22 at Stockwell tube, heard that officers involved may face criminal proceedings. John Cummins, the Independent Police Complaints Commission senior investigation officer, told the hearing that Scotland Yard had given his team a "comprehensive handover package" on July 27, when the IPCC took over the shooting inquiry. But there was still a "considerable amount of fresh work" to be done.

Although those involved must be charged if a crime has been committed, this will prove a further impediment to the successful defence against suicide bombers. It provides doubt and hesitation for police who have seconds to  save civilians or die if faced with a real suicide bomber. Given the revelations involved, it is doubtful that any jury would convict. This farce has turned into an absolute mess, compromising our capacity to counter terrorism.

We know that the government prefers to throw the 'rank and file' to the wolves rather than allow any accountability amongst the elite. Charles Clarke's new 'promise' is not promising either. Whilst removing non-citizens from our midst, the policy does not address the problem of homegrown individuals who support terrorism, and provides further powers for the state to deport those it does not like. More rhetoric, whilst London potentially burns.