The limits to British camaraderie

I was on a plane comming back from Warsaw. British Airways. Extremely late. We were meant to leave at 5pm but left at mid night. Special plane etc. No business class passengers as they’d all been flown home on swans or angels or whatever money buys. So we’re sitting in our cramped little seats knocking our elbows together and we take off and the driver, who shares our pain, tells us that he’ll “peddle as fast as he can” to get us home. We chuckle, we British, with our British humour. A moment of camaraderie. Blitz spirit. Well, Poles present, so general Nazi bombing spirit. Alcohol served, general conviviality. What a day, all be home soon.
On the way back from the toilet I decide I may as well sit in a business class seat. They’re all empty and they’re only two further forward. The only difference is that they are separated by a curtain.

But no. A steward has a quiet word. I have ruined the moment by my presumption. I must go back to my seat. Feeling of camaraderie ebbs away. Bloody stuck up British wankers.

Hey ho.

Here is a picture of an impressive building in Warsaw.
 

Moscow

I have been in Moscow recently. The interesting thing about Red Square is that it is neither Red nor Square. The interesting thing about St Basel’s cathedral is that it looks very childishly decorated and would suit Basel Brush better than St Basel.

The interesting thing about your Russian is that he orders his vodka in a carafe. A Carafe mind you not a Cafe. You wouldn’t find a Russian dead in a cafe, not an English Cafe anyway with bacon and eggs and whatnot. Well, even if you did find a dead Russian in an English cafe it wouldn’t be one of the famous Russians like Lenin as he is dead in Red Square. Not dead in the centre, but on the side, up against the wall of the Kremlin.

Peter Oborne is a windbag!

I just listened to The Radio 4 Debate From Hay on Radio 4.

A bunch of the great and the good talking about the UN, disaster and intervention.

Isn’t Peter Oborne a windbag!

His main theme seemed to be that the UN should be ashamed of itself for the state of the world. The ex UN man kept pointing out that the UN is merely an amalgamation of sovereign states and has no army or money of it’s own yet Oborne seemed to think that the beaurocrats at the UN should take on the task of invading Zimbabwe on their own.

Seems to me that Oborne likes the sound of his own voice and indeed he has one of those tedious resonant voices that work so well at whipping up audiences. At Hay he was applauded as he fervently apportioned blame everyone but himself though I’d bet that if you asked the audience what they’d just applauded they’d be incapable of answering.

A brief reference to Wikipedia reveals Mr. Oborne is political columnist at The Daily Mail.

No surprises there then.

Sand and Sea in Namibia

From The Daily Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/1916883/Namibia%27s-empty-expanses.html

Lawrence Ren

 

The following extraordinary letter appeared in The Economist this week:

  

“SIR – You seem to support various accusations made by exiled Tibetans (“Torch song trilogy”, April 12th). You could also explore opinions that are more in line with the majority of the Chinese people. Tibet has been a protectorate of China (and later under formal Chinese jurisdiction) since the Qing Dynasty 300 years ago. It will always remain a formal part of China. The Chinese people should migrate to Tibet in massive numbers. Then maybe 20 years from now we can hold a formal free referendum in Tibet to decide its fate and satisfy the international standard for democracy.

 

Lawrence Ren

Guangzhou, China”

 

 

 

 

 

Guangzhou

 

 

Let us deconstruct his letter:

  

“You seem to support various accusations made by exiled Tibetans (“Torch song trilogy”, April 12th).”

  

OK, an accusation, fair enough.

  

“You could also explore opinions that are more in line with the majority of the Chinese people.”

  

The majority opinion of The Chinese are irrelevant for two reasons:

 

Firstly, nobody likes their neighbours dictating what they do. The opinions of myself or Mr. Ren have no bearing on how the people of Tibetan run their affairs.

 

Secondly, as a true patriot Mr. Ren must be a “communist” and should therefore know that supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Since the Chinese communist party have no mandate they are an illegitimate government and maintain their hold on power in China and Tibet by force. To assit in maintaining their grip on power the Chinese Communist party controls the flow of information to all it’s citizens. The Chinese people therefore have no way of knowing the true state of affairs.

 

This is clearly evidenced by the fact that Mr. Ren’s letter offers no original opinion and merely parrots the propaganda force fed to all Chinese citizens.

  

“Tibet has been a protectorate of China (and later under formal Chinese jurisdiction) since the Qing Dynasty 300 years ago.”

  

Possibly, I’m no expert but I don’t see China doing much “protecting” of Tibet. Is Mr. Ren suggesting that if land was once held by one power it should always be? Would he support the return of Hong Kong to The British Empire.

  

“It will always remain a formal part of China.”

  

This is purely an opinion. A similar opinion might be: “The Chinese people will always be ruled by a corrupt and repressive elite” or “Mr. Ren will never be able to think for himself”. Let’s hope that none of these opinions are true.

  

“The Chinese people should migrate to Tibet in massive numbers. Then maybe 20 years from now we can hold a formal free referendum in Tibet to decide its fate and satisfy the international standard for democracy”

  

It is this last statement that is so telling as it shows either a complete ignorance of freedom and democracy or a ruthless and selfish wish to impose the ways of one community upon another.

  

I believe that Mr. Ren’s letter shows him to be ……….

 

TALKING BOLLOCKS!!!

 

Fire in Casablanca

Surealism has globalisation to thank for a story about a matress factory fire in Casablanca being reported inthe British press.

Is The UK a “country of immigration”?

Population density per square kilometre - Source: Wikipedia

It’s fashionable for British politicians to side with the argument that immigration to The UK should be on some kind of points system according to the potential immigrant’s skills. Along with this usually goes the argument that “Britain is a country of immigration”. I heard this argument just today on The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4.

A country of immigration (COI). What does that mean? Well, let’s consider what other countries are COIs. There’s The United States of course and Australia. I’m not aware of any other country that deems itself a COI.

I don’t expect the native Americans or Australian aboriginals consider their land a country of immigration but as modern countries both The USA and Australia were both initially Anglos Saxon so that is one thing that they have in common with the UK. All three countries are democracies and all have English as the predominant language.

However, I’d argue that what makes Australia and The USA COIs is their low population density. In short they have loads of space. The USA has 25 to 49 people per square kilometre and Australia only 0 to 9 people per square kilometre. By contrast, the UK has 150 to 299. Figures according to Wikipedia.

The house prices in the UK are astronomical, the traffic is heading toward gridlock, getting a seat on a train is a miracle. The UK is full yet Keith Vaz, MP thinks that The UK is a Country of Immigration so none of this matters. He is of course…….

TALKING BOLLOCKS!

All countries accept some degree of immigration and immigration has made a huge and positive contribution to The UK but The UK has no special designation as a Country of Imigration. COI is a term put about by the pro-immigration lobby to somehow establish imigration as an ongoing part of British culture.

Let me make it clear that I have no preference which races or religions do not come to The UK. We should accept asylum seekers and EU citizens of course but the idea of opening up The UK to immigration by ability is merely part of New Labour’s project to turn a sovereign country into the first corporate state. It may increases GDP and make Gordon Brown’s figures look good but individually, black, white, Christian, Moselm or atheist, we all lose out to overcrowding.

Infosec 2008

I attended the Information Security exhibition “Infosec” at Olympia yesterday.

This was very popular this year and was packed out. The vendors presented the usual mix of boxes with button, diagrams, gorgeous young women and pushy bald salesmen.

In my purely subjective opinion vulnerability scanning seems to have grown in popularity and there were some good products in this line. End point security was being pushed though perhaps not as hard as last year.

I attended one pretty good seminar where some guy had worked out the value lost for each record of data which had been stolen by hackers. He claimed this worked out at £ 43 per record.

He also claimed that industry takes a big hit from fraud committed by System Administrators and to my mind this is now emerging as a very weak link in the security chain.

All computer and application systems that I am aware of (and I’m aware of a lot) have the concept of an Administrator. The name may vary (eg root, supervisor or admin) but function is the same. They allow the user to do ANYTHING on the system.

Traditionally this has been necessary to allow the technicians to install and manage the system but in this era of ubiquitous networked computing this emerges as a gaping hole in security.

Manufacturers are starting to address this though not as quickly or thoroughly as the should. Oracle have a product called Digital Vault which bolts on to their Database Management System (DBMS) to segregate the role of the manager of a database from the security administration. Other Intruder Detection/Prevention Systems provide monitoring of administration activity from outside.

However, these are all separate products and Operating Systems, DBMSs and applications all require an overhaul of their administrative role architecture. The role of the administrator needs splitting out into multiple roles to deliver segregation of duties. Interestingly Novell made moves in this direction with the auditor role starting  in Netware 4 as I recall.

Cross site scripting raised it’s ugly head again and I don’t think users are well enough informed of just how dangerous this can be. Opening a link sent by a hacker can inadvertently provide that hacker with administrative access to your PC and anything else your PC has access to. All without a user knowing.

Do not open links in Emails from unknown sources. – This can’t be stressed enough!

 

A company named Qualys had an interesting scanner which allowed vulnerabilities and policies to be mapped into a framework such as COBIT. This is an excellent idea as it allows IT governance practitioners a way of interfacing with the technical aspects of systems.

The image of IT workers is of introverted nerds. Some are of course but this was the old days. IT has become big business and by turning over so much money the IT industry now attracts salesmen. Hoards of them, lounging around in suits balling into their blackberries.

I had intended to spend two or three days at Infosec but after one day I’d had enough.  By the time I left the sun had come out and London looked pretty good.

Free Tibet - in Australia

A supporter of the 2008 Beijing Games looks at the sky while a plane writes “Free Tibet” during the Olympic torch relay in Canberra, Australia - Daily Telegraph online

Global Warming and interglacials

Personally I am sitting on the fence re global warming. I do all the “green” things because I think it’s good to limit pollution and Glob Warm may be true. However when I read or hear pundits banging on about Glob Warm a few questions occur to me which never seem to get mentioned let alone answered.
Questions like: How long has this warming been going on and how does it compare with how long humanity have been industrialised? What percentage of CO2 is generated by humanity compared with natural emissions? How much CO2 does a random volcanic eruption produce?

This site addresses these questions and many others.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

It’s basic thesis is that the Earth cycles between ice ages and “interglacials” and at the moment we are at the beginning of an interglacial which is why the climate is warming up.

After 20,000 or so another ice age will come along whether we drive big cars or not.

One problem with this idea is that it presents a different narrative for the future of humanity from that in the popular imagination. The present Western view of the future of humanity is something along the lines of Star Trek. Western values will sweep the globe, we’ll become united, we’ll develop technology and in thousands of years time we’ll all but nipping around the universe in space ships but returning to Earth to for our holidays.

This doesn’t sit well with civilisation being wipes out by an ice age.

Here are some excerpts from the site:

“Global warming started long before the “Industrial Revolution” and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age– a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.”

“Approximately every 100,000 years Earth’s climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.”

“At 368 parts per million CO2 is a minor constituent of earth’s atmosphere– less than 4/100ths of 1% of all gases present. Compared to former geologic times, earth’s current atmosphere is CO2- impoverished.”

“Beginning about 18,000 years ago the Earth started warming up, halting at least temporarily a 100,000-year-long Ice Age, during which the upper latitudes of almost all the continents lay buried under thick sheets of glacial ice.”

 

 

 

It also points out that many of the “scientists” who signed petitions to do something about glob warm know bugger all about climate.

If you’re passionate about global warming then be prepared to get angry.