“[D]emocracy is like a horse, or a beautiful woman. It is a fine thing to see, and everyone admires it, but in order to get it to behave sometimes you must beat it and torture it and shock its gen[i]tals.

(from Fafblog’s exclusive interview with Iyad Allawi…)

There are many mysterious things about September 11, but any would-be conspiracy theorist should be aware that certain things are highly unmysterious (and that regarding them as evidence for a conspiracy makes you look unhinged).

* US airline security was appalling before 9/11. Their are documented cases of people who managed to accidentally carry *guns* in their hand luggage, never mind small blades.

* The success rate of a air defence systems at spotting threats is not as high as people would like you to believe (this is why Star Wars is a stupid idea, among other things). If the air defence system’s controllers hadn’t been informed of a potential threat from hijacked airliners used as weapons, the threat might not even register at all.

* Flying a 767 or a 757 isn’t an easy job, but it’s not an enormously hard one – and the difficult bits are things like landing and flaps, not airside steering. Purely on the basis of my MS flight simulator experience, I managed to do some reasonably impressive-looking things in British Airways’ real 767 simulator a few years ago. The reason pilots train for a long time is because if you mess it up then everyone dies, so a 95% chance of success isn’t really acceptable. The terrorists appear not to be too worried about people dying.

* The WTC towers were specced to withstand a plane impact, but not to withstand a full planeload of kerosene setting them on fire. While passers-by didn’t think the towers would fall, experienced structural engineers did.

* The towers were also specced so that if they did ever fall due to external force, it would be in the form of a perfectly downward controlled-like demolition. This is the case for all new skyscrapers – everyone concerned really wants to avoid playing Manhattan dominoes.

* Liking strippers and drugs doesn’t stop you from being a crazy religious fundamentalist, as a cursory glance at various American TV evangelists might reveal.

Backword Dave is drunk. Very drunk. But Oliver Kamm is a pompous neoconservative, and in the morning Dave will be sober.

Me, I’m sober now. I’ve been working all night. I know…

The Rigorous Intuition list of ‘coincidences’ about September 11 certainly isn’t an impeccably sourced, Seymour Hersh-esque masterpiece (it’s way too reliant on Democratic Underground postings, for a start). It is, however, very scary.

The list tends to conflate examples and cover-ups of breathtaking incompetence with implications of something much more sinister going on. The incompetence is pretty obvious, as anyone who’s paid any attention to the 9/11 commission’s report knows.

But on the sinister side, even the reminders of the things that we already more or less know to be true (the suspiciously-behaving Israeli agents, Osama’s James Bond escapes, the anthrax’s military provenance), combined with reports that are rather more suspect but that don’t appear to have been debunked yet (the suggestion that the pilot who expertly hit the Pentagon was too incompetent to fly a Cessna six weeks beforehand, the strange drugs connections, the potential involvement of Pakistan’s ISI – and the allegation that an ISI colonel wired Mohammed Atta $100,000 and then met up with Bush Sr and Dick Cheney on September 10), are disturbing.

I don’t believe that George Bush, or senior figures in his administration, had advance knowledge of the attacks – and that isn’t even based on assuming they’re moral people. If this were true and to be found out, it would literally lead to a revolution in America: killing innocent foreigners to enrich government cronies may be tolerated by the US public, but killing 3000 innocent Americans is not. And being lynched isn’t the way anyone wants to end their presidency…

It does seem likely that the CIA knew enough about the hijackers and their plans that it’s surprising the attacks took place. It also seems likely that the same is true for Mossad, and various other Western intelligence agencies.

Putting on my conspiracy hat (mmm, real tinfoil) the most plausible explanation appears to be that the CIA were running a covert operation – whether to infiltrate Al Qaida or to do something more nefarious is unclear – but that the attacks happened sooner than they’d expected. If their supposed Al Qaida double agents were actually triple agents, this would make sense: your plans are becoming compromised, so you either go ahead early or pull out altogether.

In the aftermath, everyone involved realises that the outcome if this truth is revealed would be at best mass sackings at the CIA and no 2004 re-election (and at worst, a lot of people going to jail). So it’s time for a cover-up.

Hell, maybe they were just conventionally incompetent. I’d almost rather believe my version of events, since it at least implies intelligence agencies might be able to stop it next time.

More importantly, please can some proper investigative journalists look into this? It’s far too important to leave to armchair pundits and conspiracy theorists.

One of my favourite phrases is ‘total management incompetence’ (the correct pronunciation is in a very angry West Indian accent). It’s an excellent way of both expressing and defusing tension induced by any fuck-up perpetrated by authority, and I strongly recommend using it whenever possible.

The creator of these immortal words was a South West Trains guard in about 1996, during a tannoy announcement along the lines of ‘this train [our last train home] will now terminate at Woking due to…’. The journey home was painful, but the words made the suffering worthwhile.

Thank you, anonymous SWT guard, for enriching my vocabulary and my life.

“Flame retardants high in farmed salmon, study says”, according to a trade site I sometimes use at work. This seems like an unusual ingredient, but then again what do I know about the workings of the chemical industry…?

While I was in India in March, Time Warner sold off Warner Music Group to some private VCs. This is more interesting than it sounds…

The whole of WMG was only worth $2 billion – not petty cash, but not a lot in context. Even if you assume Warners will never sign another successful act, the deal implies that the copyright to about 20% of the entire recorded music industry is worth about the same as the worldwide takings of Titanic.

It’s not fair to blame filesharing alone for the low price – total management incompetence is also relevant, as are CD copying and professional pirates. But it’s pretty clear that the expansion of these ways of getting the music you want, when you want it, for free has hit record labels hard (and iTunes and its rivals aren’t replacing free MP3 downloads, but are destroying the ‘pay $15 for an album on which you only like three songs’ model). Hence the RIAA’s deranged crusades against fileswapping students and soldiers.

If I worked in the mainstream movie industry, I’d be scared, and not just from the coke paranoia. Downloading a movie over an ADSL connection is approximately as fast and convenient as downloading an album over dialup (not very) – and as with CD sales in the late 1990s, DVD sales are still growing fast. But in three years or so, home Internet connections will be fast enough to download movies in a few minutes.

This is something the movie industry has long claimed that it’s ready for, and maybe the combination of legal download stores and sueing people’s arses off will mean we don’t see movie studios being flogged to vulture funds for a pittance a couple of years down the line.

But given the ease with which all extant forms of DRM can be subverted, it would appear that either legal download stores will have to charge the DVD price of $20-30 a download (‘hmm, everyone’s using P2P for some reason’), or the standard price of permanent movie ownership will need to fall to the rental cost of $3-5 (‘hmm, our revenues have just quartered’). This doesn’t strike me as a model for long-term profit growth.

“Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world”. And that’s not an opinion, it’s a definition.

If you’re sceptical, read the whole article (by someone named Philip Agre, of whom I hadn’t previously heard). And if you happen to have conservative friends, forward it on. If they’re sufficiently aristocratic, they’ll quietly chuckle to themselves; if not then they might just question their own beliefs…

The London Borough of Newham got an excellent deal on its software contract renewal with Microsoft by seriously considering Linux instead. Which is fair enough; I’m more concerned that their advisors, IT consultancy CapGemini, seem to have lost all vestiges of sanity.

According to CapGemini consultant Leslie Burr, “open-source software has more security issues” than Microsoft. He also says “we established that Microsoft had invested considerable time and energy into the security of their systems”.

The second quote is true, if misleading: Microsoft does invest a great deal of time and energy attempting to fix the holes in their systems before everyone gets worm-infected. However, the idea that someone who is paid to know a lot about IT might not only believe but also *say* the first quote is a scary one.

Perhaps CapGemini assesses an IT platform’s security based on how often the supplier releases critical updates?

I realised while failing to get to sleep last night (I miss A/C) that I was wrong to suggest it was the engineers’ fault that ultra-clever consumer electronics products have crap UIs. As with most things in life, it’s actually the fault of the marketers.

The first example is my Nokia 6600. I didn’t expect this to work in the US with my UK SIM card beyond basic SMS and call functionality, but actually it can manage GPRS roaming (I’m slightly scared of how the billing’s going to work, but selah) – but it did.

The insanely stupid thing that almost mitigatated the technological excellence here wasn’t that the phone worked on AT&T Wireless but not T-Mobile; I’m guessing the Krauts haven’t yet got GPRS enabled in New York. It was that some marketing idiot, I assume at Orange, decided that my phone would have network selection disabled by default. So if it randomly selected T-Mobile, and I wanted to use GPRS, I’d need to switch it off and back on again and hope that it picked AT&T this time.

The second example is the iPod mini, the purchase of which some of my more regular readers may remember. Setting it up on a knackered old laptop in the US, I was amazed at how easily it was to rip all the CDs I had with me, transfer them to the iPod, and have a noticeably better journey home.

Getting home, I thought ‘aha, I’ll install iTunes on my home PC and copy all the tracks I ripped in New York from my iPod’. But the iTunes software isn’t set up to do this. It can show me all the details of all the songs on my iPod, but it can’t do anything with them. Instead, you need to search through the hidden folders on the iPod (which also appears as another hard drive) for files with a .m4a extension, copy them to a folder, and import them into iTunes separately. And it takes you about half an hour to work this out, because the iPod obviously *isn’t* just another hard drive…

The only reason Apple could possibly have set it up this way, I realised last night, is to appease the bloodsucking leeches of the music industry.