December 28, 2004
Putin aide attacks Yukos sale "fraud"
An aide to Vladimir Putin Andrei Illarionov, has attacked the forced sale of Yukos's oil-producing subsidiary Yuganskneftegas as a "fraud".
The unit has ended up in the hands of a company - Rosneft - headed by Putin's deputy chief of staff. "We are used to seeing street hustlers doing this kind of thing," Illarionov, "but now it is being done by officials."
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December 22, 2004
Canadee-i-o
Last month's Uncut contained two CDs as cover mounts. One was "Tracks influenced by Bob Dylan" and the other "Tracks that influenced Bob Dylan". I got the second. I have been playing little else. If you can track this down, or buy it on eBay - do so.
It has some great standards, including Hank William singing the Lost Highway, and The Dubliners performing The Patriot Game. But the stand-out track is a shanty called Canadee-i-o by the British folk singer Nic Jones, originally released on the album Penguin Eggs.
Stuart Maconie the DJ said that this might well be the best acoustic folk album ever. I can believe it. The way Jones plucks the guitar has a real spring and energy to it ... and the song takes place in one of those mysterious Dylanesque landscapes where a girl, dressed up as a sailor, stows away to travel to a seaport town - Canadee-i-o. The sailors discover her, "fell in a rage" and threaten to throw her overboard ...
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Buffalo, Fish and carbon credits
There are no Buffalo roaming the prairies of the United States. Once there were tens, even hundreds of million. But the buffalo were wild. They belonged to no one, and therefore to anyone with a gun. They were slaughtered for their hides (the meat left to rot) and came close to total extinction.
This tragedy is being repeated at present in relation to fish.
Wild fish belong to no one. Therefore the person who catches them gets pure profit from it. They put nothing back into the sea for what they take out. The result is that fish species are fished and fished until they are on the verge of extinction. Cod stocks in the North Sea are at one tenth of their 1970 levels. And the politicians, when they intervene, side with the people who make (dwindling) profits from the trade. The fish don't vote, after all. And if consumers, at some point in the future, complain that there is no wild fish to be had, then US President Bush who this month signed the dell knell of the US North West salmon fishery and UK and Scottish Ministers Ben Bradshaw and Ross Finnie who this month condemned North Sea cod to extinction by refusing to close the fisheries, well they won't be around to hear the complaints.
It was no one's fault, you see. No one could have presented it. It is the tragedy of the commons.
And yet: there is a solution. First of all, states could ban wantonly destructive fishing habits like long line fishing , which (apart from killing seabirds) brings up a lot of fish which (because over quota or under-size) have to be thrown (dead) overboard. They could widen net sizes. Then nations could agree that fish in their waters are (e.g.) EU property and levying a per KG toll on the fishermen. The tariff on the rarer fish could be increased to reflect their scarcity. The tariff level could be set by a process of auctioning permits to fish. The money raised could be put into re-seeding wild fish stocks, or even (given the politics of the situation) paying the fishermen to stay in port.
The consumer would pay a premium for scarce fish, instead of prices (as they currently do) bearing no relationship to the scarcity of the object. An example of this is the kind of policy being tested in the carbon credits market.
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December 21, 2004
Bit Torrent index hosts squelched
Pressure from the MPAA has blacked out sites like suprnova.org which provided lists of content available by BitTorrent.
Indexing of file sharing content is always the weak link. This was the problem with Napster (too centralised), with Freenet (too dispersed) and even with Gnutella (too flakey). Kazaa solved it, but even they had to control the "super-peer" machines that provided the indexing, and that control made it possible to go after them.
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December 20, 2004
Doh!
TfL have been restoring Kennington tube since 2001 and were supposed to have completed the work in July 2004.
The work is generally of a reasonable and sometimes of a very high standard - particularly the tiling. But the works are over-running and probably over budget: they only work when the station is closed, between 12.30am and 5.30am. By the time the workers have togged up and arrived at the job they have a four hour shift. They could work a six hour day by daylight, since outside the rush hour the station is deserted.
Recently the supervisor must have been off sick.
(The bench was there six weeks ago, the sign that makes it impossible to use arrived last week).
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Yukos production arm sold to front company
The main production arm of the Russian old company Yukos has been sold to The Baikal Finans Group "which listed its address as the same as that of a cellphone store in Tver" - a city 75 miles from Moscow.
The state auctioneer received just one bid from either of the two bidders in a ten-minute auction. The opening reserve was $8.65bn, the hammer price was $9.35bn. In a concession to Western ways, the auctioneer wore a bow-tie.
The notion of selling the large oil and gas-producer to a front company seems to have arisen because of a court judgement obtained by Yukos officials in Houston, USA on Friday, which led to some of the financiers from Gazprom - the state oil producers - withdrawing their financing. As a result Gazprom made no bid.
"The whole thing just makes Russia look bad," comments an analyst in the New York Times's piece.
No shit.
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December 18, 2004
Who gives a Straw for the law?
Jack Straw has the nerve to say that the Law Lords were "wrong" to throw out the government's claim to be able to detain foreigners without trial indefinitely.
He says that we should trust politicians instead of Judges. Straw was one of those politicians - like Blair and Hoon ... all lawyers - who knowingly took an illegal decision to invade a country on the pretext that it posed a strategic threat to them. Lord Butler and parliament have now demonstrated beyond doubt that they knew this was not the case. The Government, as the Defence Ministry confirmed, knew that Saddam's capability was tactical. Iraq posed a threat, but it was not of the immediate level necessary in law to justify invasion.
Straw's lack of respect for the law is apparent. Why we should trust him and his colleagues to uphold any aspect of it is far from clear.
The security services, like anyone else, have to gather evidence if they wish to put people in jail. If they can't discuss their evidence, they can't expect - particularly after the lies of Iraq - for the courts or the public to take it on trust.
That means that they need proper warrants for surveillance. Let them apply for them: they are unlikely to be denied. But let the judicial scrutiny of their work continue.
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Methylisothiazolinone - what you should avoid
Apart from Head & Shoulders , other products which contain the toxic product Methylisothiazolinone (MIT) which has been found to impair the neuronal development of rats, are listed on this helpful page .
They all sound so great, don't they?
Willow Lake ...
Olay complete body wash for sensitive skin ...
Avon ANEW pure O2 daily oxygen facial cleanser ...
Suave Performance series healthy shine shampoo ...
Dig the pure, "healthy", willowy, fresh air message. These things are full of a poisonous gloop you also find in paint.
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Yukos auction enjoined
The bent knock-down auction of the Yukos cash-cow Yukansneftegas has had a temporary injunction put in place against it by a court in Houston. No one thinks this is going to stop it, but it might give the European financiers of Gazprom's bid pause for thought.
I guess their game is that they can force the Russian government to reform Gazprom down the line. And in the meantime they want to be in.
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Balls 7
Back in London. I have two inch-and-a-half long blanket-stitched scars on either side of my balls.
The operation - the epididymovasostomy - took place in the Plano Medical centre, Dallas on Friday 10th December. It took five and a half hours instead of the normal four hours. The surgeon Jeff Buch found "considerable scarring" which he said was approximately equal on both testicles, suggesting to him that my problems could have been congenital. I am not entirely sure what that means - inherited, or perhaps a family predisposition. Or it could have been the result of one or more severe urinary infections. I can remember two or three at least, from 19 onwards. Jeff observed that my urethra was an odd shape, as it had a kink where it met my bladder, and as a result catheterising me during the operation was difficult (and really painful for me). Whether this was part of my problem is unclear.
Jeff found a small tubule which contained live sperm towards the upper part of the epididymis (the structure of complex little tubes where the sperm emerge) and created a connection with my vas deferens on either side. The slenderness of the connection means my chances of producing sperm are 75% and of producing enough to conceive naturally are smaller than the normal 50%.
My job is to treat myself with icepacks and avoid having further infections (I am on antibiotics for a fortnight). The icepacks - brilliantly designed by Kimberly Clark - are made of plastic lined tissue and stay dry even in bed. They are fantastic. The pain has been substantially less than it was for the multiple testicular biopsy earlier in the year at St. Thomas. I should have had them then. The NHS doesn't go in for much post-operative care. (Or indeed much care of any kind. The day before we left for Dallas I had a call from Guy's and St. Thomas's hospital, where we had been referred by our GP. We are on some kind of waiting list there, but had missed a follow-up appointment. The difficulty of even the smallest transaction with them (Where is my appointment? Do you have my notes? What about that counselling session you mentioned?) gives one zero degrees of confidence. The idea that you would actually go privately to them and pay them many thousands of pounds for private fertility treatment is laughable.)
The impact of the general anaesthetic has been severe. For much of the last week I have felt as if I was on drugs. Only on Thursday could I really concentrate on, or think about working.
We flew back overnight Sunday (perhaps too early) and I slept for one and a half days pretty much non-stop. I had foolishly scheduled appointments for Tuesday - which I had to cancel. Two on Wednesday I could not cancel (as one had been long-postponed and was with a key customer). I attended it feeling wretched and fluffed my way through the demonstration. It felt like drunk driving.
Thursday night was the office party for the friends' company where I am freelancing to pay the rent. I had to stand in a pub for an hour and felt real pain - I fled into the street and sat down in a shop doorway until it subsided.
Now it is early Saturday morning and I am contemplating Christmas shopping. A trip to Greenwich market? I want to take it easy, but Christmas demands huge volumes of small and desirable objects, an excel spreadsheet, and a great deal of patience. At least this year I have an excuse not to drink.
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December 16, 2004
Imprisonment without trial "illegal" (who knew?)
Nine law lords have thrown out the Government's legislation which allows imprisonment without trial on the basis that:
it is discriminatory - it only effects foreigners;
it contravenes basic human rights - namely the right for prisoners to have a trial.
The law should treat all equally, and all should have the right to trial, their Worships observed.
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December 12, 2004
Balls 6
I am sitting in hotel room in the Fairfield Marriott in Plano, North Dallas - pretty much out of my head. The doctor prescribed me something which is an alternative to Darvocet. It makes me feel completely hatstand.
I had the surgery (epididymovasostomy) the day before yesterday. It was a long complicated operation. From 11am to about 4.30pm. There was a lot of scarring which might have been "congenital", Buch said, or which might be the result of repeated urinary infections. However, Buch said that he found a tiny tube which contained live sperm and managed to hook it up to my vas deferens.
Now, I have to treat it with ice packs and wait.
It could be 6-9 months ...
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December 7, 2004
Sleep yourself thin
Getting enough sleep is good for weight control, says a new study . It makes sense. Although I had always associated obesity with the consumption of Diet Coke.
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December 6, 2004
Christmas ... Bah!
The ever-resourceful Adbusters suggests we buy nothing for Christmas this year.
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Head and Shoulders not so good for the Head
A key ingredient in such cosmetics as Head and Shoulders and Pantene turns out to kill neurons in rats . You may develop a glossy and dandruff-free mane, but that blank, happy look may be caused by brain damage.
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December 5, 2004
Schroeder plumps for China. So should Blair.
German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is making his sixth official trip to China. He is hoping, the FT says, to sign deals worth a billion euros. Schroeder is pursuing a policy of mercantilism, the FT observes. He wants to create a Germany which is prosperous through trade, particularly with Pacific rim nations.
The Chinese economy has now by some measures become the second largest in the world. But UK prime minister Tony Blair has visited China only twice - this despite the British interest in Hong Kong.
Blair's foreign visits (the total is hard to find, but an estimate arrived at by adding 97-99's 48 visits to 03/04's 20 visits gives an average of c. 23 visits a year) have rather focussed on doing his assumed job as an apologist for Atlanticism - or if one is to cynical, putting across George Bush's foreign policy. If the US government were a corporation, one might cast Blair the VP of its Middle East and Africa division - EMEA. In this role, where the Bush policy seems to imply "fuck you", Blair sees his job as accentuating the positive. Bush may have turned his back on the UN when he couldn't get support, but the US President, Blair assures us, is committed to democracy in the Middle East; he may have accepted Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank, at least he is supporting the withdrawal from (most of) Gaza.
It is certainly good for the US, but is Blair's stance good for Britain?
Foreign Direct Investment in the UK has been declining since 1999 - the year of the launch of the Euro. A rising tax burden in the UK, sucked into inflated state spending, is not helping this.
In the meantime global Foreign Direct Investment in China has soared , and has become a large driver in the Chinese boom.
Blair's concentration on representing US political goals as VP, EMEA has not helped the British in Europe. A trivial example of this was the zero points awarded to the 2003 British Eurovision entry. The song was admittedly a deplorable effort, but the politics of voting in Eurovision are clear (Greece votes for Cyprus, Germany votes for Croatia, Luxembourg votes for France etc.). In Europe, in much of Asia and in Central and Latin America the UK is diplomatically friendless for its pro-US stance. A small example of this was the extended wait I experienced in April 2004 flying into Mexico. The British tourists were singled out for victimisation after a British whistleblower admitted helping the US to spy on the Mexican UN delegation. US tourists, ironically, were unaffected. They are too powerful to be slighted.
There is absolutely no chance of Britain winning any international popularity contests at present. The 2012 Olympic bid teams might as well pack in now. The advantage Britain once possessed in the EC with its comparatively liberal economy and low proportion of state spending are being eroded by the ballooning demands of Brownism. The Eastern nations of Europe now look like better bets.
Blair's foreign policy looks backwards rather than forwards, to the era when British links with the US were based on an approximate equivalence in global diplomatic power and when Britain could deliver the support of her global empire, which was strong in the areas where the US was weak - the middle East, the Far East (ironically) and the sub-continent. Now that Britain is a small nation with a dependence on international flows of capital, his stance is based on the somewhat doubtful notion that the US will look after the UK.
Forget it. For the US too, the action is in Germany and China.
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US in Falluja targets Doctors, independent Media
How to stop the story of the Falluja casualties getting out? Simple: silence the doctors and the journalists. Naomi Klein provides the evidence.
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Police investigate journalist "to steal documents"
Cheshire police arrested journalist Paul Atkinson in order, he claims, to steal documents which might identify policemen who helped him make a programme about police racism.
The programme he made The Secret Policeman was broadcast in 1993 and caused a series of resignations.
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December 3, 2004
Balls 5
Only a week to go now until I am under the knife on a slab in Texas and Jeffrey Buch tries to unblock my tubes (or, more precisely, tubules) and make me a fully-functioning man again.
This process throws up snags like a mad thing. I ring up the clinic where we are to undertake IVF - called the ARGC - and announce that I intend to bring back some sperm in a thermos flask from Dallas.
"You can't do that without a license," says the embryologist Puja. Why not? I enquire. "Well a foreign clinic might sex-select the sperm ..."
It is all down the HFEA , she says (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority). There is a monthly committee meeting which decides on license-issuing, and there is no way on earth that I can get it sorted out before the end of January. The HFEA was set up a few years back to regulate artificial conception, which is now a boom industry. They forced the hospitals doing it to publish their success rates. In some cases (step forward the incompetents at Homerton Hospital) these were as little as 2%, in some as much as 40%.
I ring up my mate who used to work at the HFEA and he rings up his mate and she talks me through the process. No promises, mind.
Today I ring Puja back at the ARGC and tell her what she needs to do. The clinic has to apply for the license on your behalf, you see. You can't do it yourself. Oh, dear me no.
Why are you doing this in the US? Puja asks.
He is an andrologist, an expert in male fertility I explain.
"Why didn't you come to us?"
I am unaware that you employ andrologists. Or perform this operation. There is a pause.
"Why not find someone in London?"
His success rates were better.
"Why are you having this operation?"
Because it gives us a chance of conceiving naturally.
"I predict that you will still have to do IVF," she says.
Well, that may very well be the case.
"How much is it costing you?"
"About as much as you charge for a single IVF cycle."
That shut her up.
The nerve of these people astonishes me. They don't want you to fix the underlying problem, because that's bad for their business. They are like garage mechanics. "Who on earth did this? You've had a right lot of cowboys messing around here." They use their knowledge as a weapon to browbeat, humiliate and patronise you.
My wife got the same thing earlier this month when she took a blood test. For the first time in three months her follicle-stimulating hormone levels were low enough for ARGC to consider doing a cycle. But they couldn't do it, because we had committed to this operation in Texas and would be away.
They told her she was making a big mistake.
You don't want to take your car to another garage. After all, they might fix it.
(Follow the instructions below to perform your own epididymovasostomy)
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David Byrne's blog
It's full of good things . He has been reading Stasiland, too, I see.
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Public IT: This is where the money goes!
Gartner claim that the IDC total for UK government IT spending is an underestimate. They say the UK spends more public money on information technology than any other government in Western Europe $19.7bn "almost double that of Germany in second position with $11 billion in 2003".
This is where the money goes. To replace this website, and allow the user to apply for driving licenses online, the British taxpayer has shelled out £550m. No that is not a misprint. Half a billion pounds!
And in two years, it hasn't even been finished.
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December 2, 2004
Barghouti to stand
Marwan Barghouti will stand for leadership of the PLA, his wife says. He seems very likely to win. It will make Israel's desire to have a veto over whom they negotiate with on the Palestinian side hard to maintain. Hard, but not impossible. Look at what happened to Bobby Sands MP.
Hamas have announced a boycott of the election. They won't win, so they won't compete, which is a contemptible stance. At least Barghouti has the makings of a political leader.
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Public IT: Where does the money go?
According to IDC, the UK government spends £7.8bn a year on IT projects. That's about £340 a year per taxpayer, which is maybe what you might spend on Christmas. It certainly is Christmas for the IT industry.
On Tuesday night I was talking to a senior technology professional with experience both in the public and private sector who expressed bafflement at where the money goes on large government IT projects. The Child Support Agency apparently spent £456m to build a non-performing system to calculate payments, before its head resigned in disgrace.
The NHS is spending billions. I know several contractors working in this area. It is common knowledge in IT circles that the government is sloshing around money like a drunken sailor. If you want a reason why tax rates will go up in the next Labour administration, look no further.
Contrary to what the professionals who do this kind of work - Capita and so on - advise the government - software development is now very cheap. Open source solutions and commodity technology have drastically cut the costs of implementing even the largest projects.
If the contractor sets hard deadlines for functional spec requirements and refuses to alter them between releases, there is no reason that a system capable of dealing with millions of users cannot be built for hundreds of thousands of pounds, rather than hundreds of millions. If a software system can deal with one user, it can deal with millions.
Naturally, there is huge scope for cost overruns if projects are delayed whilst rival civil servants bicker and prevaricate. And there is even more scope for it if IT projects are introduced into failing bureaucracies like the NHS and Child Support Agency.
In these circumstances, it is very easy for large institutions to fall into the traps laid by consultancies. The project manager can say "Have you made up your mind? Because if you change your mind, the price of the project will double." The bureaucrat says yes. The project is implemented. Then the bureaucrat is sacked or resigns. His or her successor has no understanding of the spec, but demands changes anyway. The price doubles. The pattern then repeats.
I saw this happen during the BBC's attempt to build a back-end programme support system (music reporting, budget reporting etc.) which would replace all the idiosyncratic variations which had evolved.
This kind of project should be evolutionary. It should be created online, giving all users APIs to their existing systems and allowing different user to create different reports depending on their requirements.
Instead there was a large committee which sat every month to discuss a n ever-changing specification. A consultancy was employed to build something. The project was called "Darwin". It was a name intended to suggest that the committee meandering deliberations represented a kind of evolutionary discipline. In fact nothing was ever built, let alone subjected to survival of the fittest.
The costs involved were buried. I Googled for it in vain. The public sector hides its follies. A select committee just found out how effect the government is at letting the civil service squander our money in secret when John Oughton who runs the Office of Government Commerce refused to identify "failing" IT projects on the grounds the internal review process "Gateway" which identifies such failings, is intended to create a "safe space". Safe for whom? Not for the taxpayer.
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December 1, 2004
Examiners to penalise poor spelling, grammar
For the last couple of years I have been employing school leavers. All, without exception, have straight A’s at A-level. However, a large proportion (even of the brighter ones) couldn’t spell and found it hard to write a sentence that made sense. Now I discover why.
The Education Secretary has announced a new plan to deduct marks from pupils who couldn't spell or write a good English sentence. Previously in the strange parallel universe inhabited by educationalists this was not considered of significance.
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