factoid android

OK, some festive season lightness of a sort.

The love of decontextualised facts is useful for winning pub quizzes, but destructive for making people think they are knowledgable and intelligent when actually they're not.

Still, I do love headtwisting factoids.

- Pink Floyd's Nick Mason holds the record for making the world's largest ever crumpet.

- Mick Jagger's dad wrote Know The Game: Basketball, the UK's best selling book on how to play the sport.

- The USA was the first country to use napalm in warfare - they dropped it on France, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

- John Peel was at the front of the press conference where Texas police first showed Lee Harvey Oswald to the public - he can be seen in archive footage standing between Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Oswald the next day.

So I commend unto you the BBC's 100 things we didn't know this time last year, which features gems like;

- Ernie Wise made Britain's first mobile phone call.

- the Little Britain wheelchair user and friend Lou and Andy are named after Reed and Warhol.

- it takes 75kg of raw materials to make a mobile phone.

- devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people.

- whilst what we call Arabic numerals (actually invented in India) have been in use for nearly 2,500 years, but we didn't get the = sign until it was invented by a 16th century Welshman.

Then there are several great morbid ones, like;

- you can bet on your own death.

- the day when most suicides occurred in the UK between 1993 and 2002 was 1 January, 2000.

- nettles growing on land where bodies are buried will reach a foot higher than those growing elsewhere.

midnight ukulele disco

Once again I've sat at the screen and said out loud 'this is why I love the internet!'.

You need a bit of broadband time and your speakers on for Midnight Ukulele Disco, but oh sweet Christ on a unicycle how it's worth it.

The site is, as the name semi-implies, a repository of video clips of songs performed on ukulele. Hundreds of them.

It appears to be a low-budget US TV show where people send in clips of themselves doing songs on ukulele. Utter fucking genius. There is, as you'd expect, some folky tunes like Dirty Old Town. But there's a lot more besides. The very first thing they posted was Wild Thing!

I'm a sucker for an incongrous cover version, and whilst I'm spoilt for choice at Midnight Ukulele Disco, I have to say the ones that really wet my whistle and tickled my fancy were Turning Japanese, Live To Tell, the great group performance of My Best Friend's Girl, and a different ensemble doing an instrumental version of Staying Alive that's already my second favourite cover of the song, better still than the one by Dweezil Zappa and Donny Osmond. (My favourite, by quite some distance, is the flat-out grindcore version by a band who not only do the best cover of Staying Alive but also have one of the best band names ever, Anal Cunt).

However, back on Midnight Ukulele Disco, all the above mentioned toweringly magnificent ukulelistic efforts are themselves dwarved by the stunning halfway-to-a-proper-video thing of a serious rock dude doing Enter Sandman, complete with distortion pedal, Fender amp and, if I'm seeing it right, an Ovation ukulele!

Off to never-never land indeed.

the puppy killing philanthropist

Oliver Letwin, Tory front-bencher and a man who shoots puppies for fun, has declared that the Tories want to see a redistribution of wealth.

Mr Letwin, who is one of Mr Cameron's closest advisers, says that there is now a moral and social imperative for tackling inequality.

I love that use of 'now'. Inequality and poverty were morally acceptable until just recently, then.

Has Mr Letwin had chance to consider issues of wealth before? Just a tad, as Jim Bliss told us in a pre-election musing last April:

[Letwin] was a bigwig at NM Rothschild financial megaglomerate. But he didn't have a Road to Damascus experience and decide to dedicate his skills to public service. Like fuck did he! In fact, it's only a year and a half ago that the tories were able to convince him to resign his position. Eventually he got the message, it might be a conflict of interest to be running the nation's budget, setting taxation policy, regulating the financial sector, and what have you, whilst still a director of NM Rothschild. Just might be a conflict of interest.

And this is something that more people should be talking about. Most of these tory spending plans that are being bandied about at the moment are the work of a man who was working for NM Rothschild whilst formulating them. It is safe to assume therefore, knowing as I do the workings of corporations at high levels, that these plans are first and foremost the plans of a Rothschild director, and second the plans of a public servant. You just don't exist at that level of a corporation if you're playing for any team but the home one. Feel free to deny this if you choose. You will be wrong though.

A tory vote, therefore, should be cast full in the knowledge that your hopes and dreams need to coincide with those of NM Rothschild if you expect your MP to address them.

You've got to wonder what he was doing during the Thatcher years, as the gap between rich and poor got wider than it had ever been, whilst British champagne sales more than doubled. The rich got richer because they took it from the poor. That extra champagne that Letwin and friends were quaffing was bought by the sell-off of state owned industries and tax cuts handed out at the expense of public services.

But now, in rejecting the inevitable result of Thatcherism, he's saying that he's some kind of benevolent cuddly guy not out to enrich the wealthy any more, abandoning his party's raison d'etre and the aims of his old job at Rothschild's .

Next week, Letwin announces Tory plans to nationalise all the utilities and banks. 'If Labour don't want Clause IV then we'll take it off their hands,' he says.

really though, nothing to fear

From The Independent (reproduced here in full cos they tend to pay-archive their articles)

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.

Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

the innocent have nothing to fear

Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat on our streets
- Tony Blair, Labour Party conference 1995

Of course, extra coppers and ID cards are actually part of the same thing. Seeing the energy crisis looming, the government is putting in place the necessary provisions for dealing with civil unrest.

Once we no longer have the comfort of an energy surplus and affordable food, the have-nots will resent the haves and so the haves will use whatever force it takes to protect themselves.

Why else are we getting all the new 'anti-terrorism' laws? They were being put in place before 9-11, with the Terrorism Act 2000 (under which wearing the wrong T-shirt is punishable with 12 months in jail).

As I've said elsewhere, if you fly a plane into a building, blow up a barracks or shoot a politician you are already seriously breaking the law. If you help or encourage such people, you are already breaking the law. There is no need for any new legislation on this stuff, so we should be automatically suspicious of new ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation.

Similarly, the peaceful protest of Brian Haw is the supposed target of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Can a bloke sat on the pavement asking for peace really be 'serious organised crime'?

When Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asserted to his party conference that the invasion of Iraq was about liberation, Party member Walter Wolfgang was ejected for saying 'nonsense'.

Thing is, Wolfgang was questioned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Had he dared to say 'nonsense' twice, he could have been prosecuted under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997.

Section 1 (1):
A person must not pursue a course of conduct-
(a) which amounts to harassment of another, and
(b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other.

Section 7:
(3) a "course of conduct" must involve conduct on at least two occasions.
(4) "Conduct" includes speech.

That law was brought in supposedly to protect women from nutter ex-boyfriends, yet has been primarily used to prosecute politicial dissent.

And so to ID cards. The innocent have nothing to fear, we're told. Which would be a great excuse for any surveillance measure you can think of. CCTV in your bedroom? Full online publishing of transcripts of your phone calls? A guy in black suit and shades following you everywhere mumbling into a radio about everything you do?

In 1994, in an attempt to discover the problems caused by ID cards, Privacy International compiled a survey containing reports from correspondents in forty countries.

Slightly strangely, it was cited by anti-ID Republicans in congressional testimony when Clinton tried to introduce ID cards in the USA.

Amongst the gravest of problems reported was the over zealous use or misuse of ID cards by police - even where the cards were supposed to be voluntary. One respondent wrote :

On one occasion I was stopped in Switzerland when walking at night near Lake Geneva. I was living in Switzerland at the time and had a Swiss foreigner's ID card. The police were wondering why I should want to walk at night to look at the Chateau de Chillon. Really suspicious I suppose, to walk at night on the banks of the lake to look at an illuminated chateau (I am white and dress conservatively). I had to wait for 20 minutes whilst they radioed my ID number to their central computer to check on its validity.

Correspondents in most countries reported that police had powers to demand the ID card. A correspondent in Greece reported:

In my country the Cards are compulsory. If police for example stop you and ask for identification you must present them the ID or you are taken to the police department for identification research.

Police were granted these powers in the late 1980s, despite some public misgivings. Non European countries reported more serious transgressions, In Brazil, for example:

They are compulsory, you're in big trouble with the police if they request it and you don't have one or left home without it. The police can ask for my identity card with or without a valid motive, it's an intimidation act that happens in Brazil very, very often. The problem is not confined to the police. Everybody asks for your id when you are for example shopping, and this is after you have shown your cheque guarantee card. We also other similar cards. Nobody trusts anybody basically.

Predictably, political hot-spots have seen widescale abuse of the card system:

One problem that Afghans encountered carrying these "tazkiras" (ID cards) was during the rule of the communist regime in Afghanistan where people were stopped in odd hours and in odd places by the government's Soviet advisors and their KHALQI and PARCHAMI agents and asked for their "tazkiras". Showing or not showing the "tazkira" to the enquiring person at that time was followed by grave consequences. By showing it, the bearer would have revealed his age upon which, if it fell between 16-45, he would have been immediately taken to the nearest army post and drafted into the communist army, and if he refused to show, he would have been taken to the nearest secret service (KHAD) station and interrogated as a member of the resistance (Mujahideen), imprisoned, drafted in the army or possibly killed.

Many countries reported that their ID card had become an internal passport, being required for every dealing with people or institutions. In Argentina, according to this correspondent, the loss of the ID card would result in grave consequences:

I got my first personal ID when I turned seven. It was the Provincial Identity Card. It looked like the hardcover of a little book with just two pages in it. It had my name, my photograph, the fingerprint of my right thumb, and some other personal data. I never questioned what was the logic about fingerprinting a seven-year old boy. It was suggested that identification was one of the major purposes for the existence of the Police of the Province which issued the card. It was required for enroling in the Provincial School I attended. Attending the primary school is compulsory, hence everybody under twelve is indirectly forced to have the Card.

Well, this Book was required for any sort of proceedings that the person wanted to initiate, e.g. enrol at school, buy a car, get his driving license, get married. Nobody could do anything without it. In addition, it became a prerogative of the police to request it at any time and place. Whoever was caught without it was customarily taken to jail and kept there for several hours (or overnight if it happened in the evening) while they "checked his personal record". In effect, Argentine citizens have never been much better off than South-African negroes during the Apartheid, the only difference is that we Argentinians did not have to suffer lashings if caught without the pass card. As for daily life without the ID, it was impossible.

Of greater significance is the information that ID cards are commonly used as a means of tracking citizens to ensure compliance with such laws as military service. Again, in Argentina:

The outrage of the military service was something that many people was not ready to put up with. Nevertheless, something forced the people to present themselves to be drafted. It was nothing more or less than the ID. In fact, if somebody did not show up, the army never bothered to look for them. They just waited for them to fall by themselves, because the ID card showed the boy to be on military age and not having the necessary discharge records by the army. Provided that in the country you could not even go for a walk without risking to be detained by the police, being a no-show for military duty amounted to a civil death.

Another respondent in Singapore noted that many people in his country were aware that the card was used for purposes of tracking their movements, but that most did not see any harm in this:

If that question is put to Singaporeans, they are unlikely to say that the cards have been abused. However, I find certain aspects of the NRIC (ID card) system disconcerting. When I finish military service (part of National service), I was placed in the army reserve. When I was recalled for reserve service, I found that the army actually knew about my occupation and salary! I interpreted this as an intrusion into my privacy. It might not be obvious but the NRIC system has made it possible to link fragmented information together.

The consequences of losing ones card were frequently mentioned:

A holiday in Rio was ruined for me when I was robbed on the beach and had to spend the rest of the brief holiday going through the bureaucracy to get a duplicate issued. One way round this (of dubious legality) is to walk around with a notarized xerox copy instead of the original.

The Brazilian experience shows that the card is often misused by police:

Of course violent police in metropolitan areas of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro love to beat and arrest people (especially black/poor) on the pretext that they don't have their ID card with them.

Phew. At least our coppers are all fine upstanding guardians of justice and would never sink to the harrassment, intimadation and abuse of power shown by their colleagues elsewhere. The innocent have nothing to fear.

kill me to save me

Wildlife conservation organisation WWF have come up with this great money-spinner:

In Zambia's Kafue Flats, WWF has helped the government forge an important link between development and conservation... Trophy hunters pay to hunt animals, and the money raised is reinvested in community development and wildlife management.

Next week, Barnado's pimp children and use the cash to build new orphanages.

commercial break

From the dependably excellent John Vidal's Eco Soundings column in the Guardian:

Seen those BP ads on TV and in the press? Impressed that the oil giant is getting the message on climate change? Think again. BP is also running a big advertising campaign in the US to coincide with the Montreal climate talks. Both versions have the same graphics, the same nifty tune, the same style. But whereas we Brits are told to "work out your carbon footprint - it's a start", the American consumer is told: "We're investing $15bn in finding new oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico - it's a start."

remembering john

I still believe in love. I still believe in peace.
- John Lennon, 8 December 1980


John was really against war. We both were. It's crazy how a situation like that repeats itself. Peace is so very important. More than ever, we shouldn't be afraid of saying we want it.
- Yoko Ono, August 2005

the spirit of the material

A long long time ago in a publishing coolective far far away I published a book about my time at the Newbury Bypass protest.

My friend Jim was another of the protesters, and in the last couple of weeks I've been honoured to be one of the proof-readers for his newly finished memoir of the time he spent at Newbury, Stanworth Valley and Fairmile in the mid-90s.

It's a thoroughly absorbing, warm, insightful, intelligent, compelling book that balances the politics with the spiritual and philosophical drive behind the campaigns, the wider intent with the impact on the inner lives of those involved and his own personal story.

You can be sure I'll be plugging it here once its published, but in the meantime, here's an extract.

It may well be a good thing that more people don't live in the woods - the damage of human activities on such sensitive habitiats is not hard to imagine. And as more woodland is destroyed, or is degraded by nearby developments, the ones that remain become more and more precious for the species they support. But there's a lot to be said for experiencing life in such a delicate context and being made aware of the repercussions of our every action.

Before the arrival of farming, people would never have stayed in one place for so long anyway, so the problem of impoverishing an area like this would never have arisen. In England since then, nearly every square inch of land has been subject to human habitation at some point or another, and it's a testament of our ability to cohabit and the endurance of an underlying culture of respect that our countryside has survived with all the richness that it has. Which makes it all the more tragic that so much is now being denigrated and swept away by men who have no understanding of the fundamental connection that was still enjoyed by most poeple not more than two or three generations ago.

Many woods in Britain could actually do with a stronger human presence - in particular those needing coppicing, which apart from anything else helps preserve a species-rich series of habitiats. If traditionally managing indigenous woodland like this could be made commercially viable again, then it would actually help preserve the woods that are left - and give rise to the planting of more. For centuries there was a strong culture of people living in the woods in this way, using trees to make products that were a part of everyday life. Now everyone is surrounded by pieces of plastic and the woods that are left have largely gone quiet.

Our material surroundings define our world in a way that most of us can only begin to suspect. With a little more wood in our lives, and a greater respect for the spirit ingerent in natural, physical things, we might begin to shift the world back to something like balance. Our understanding defines the world we live in; the world we create is borne out by the world we have already created, or allowed to transpire, in our minds. Until we address our connection with the spirit of the material, and in doing so come to grasp that manufacturing a thing like polystyrene or plastic is an actual act of violence, then attempts at restoring environmental balance will be rootless, however goodwilled.

we're all rosa

It was 50 years ago today that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus. A great act of courage and dignity, although, as I mentioned when she died, it wasn't the 'one tired woman' spur of the moment thing it's commonly portrayed as. It was just one of many premeditated acts of deliberate criminal defiance that were going on at the time.

Whilst Rosa is a genuine hero, there's always a danger of deifying such figures and so making their acts look inimicable to us.

When an environmental activist recently evoked Ghandi in conversation with a senior Greenpeace manager, the manager nervously giggled and said we couldn't aspire to that.

Why the hell not? Ghandi, Rosa Parks, the Spanish Anarchists of 36 and so many others get talked of in these awed terms which go beyond admiration for their actions and into hero-worship. By focusing on a few individuals we see the achievments of an entire movement as being the works of a few superhuman people. So we end up disempowered, believing we could never aspire to something that, in fact, ordinary people readily achieved.

All these idolised figures were just people doing what they could, just part of a much wider movement who we remember almost none of by name. Rosa was just one of many equally brave and uncompromising activists.

The power Rosa had is power we all have. In denying our power we cede it to those who would rule over us. Recognising that we have it is, in itself, an act of reclaiming it. With that recognition comes the attendant duty to use it. It makes us see the huge overlap between dreams and possibilities, and dares us to fight for what we dream of. That may unsettle us from comfort zones, but it also gives the only chance of the radical changes so desperately needed.

Rather than statues and deification of Rosa herself, seeing her as one of us and us as ones like her would be a more honest and befitting legacy.

'If we cannot see the possibility of greatness, how can we dream it?'
- Lee Strasberg