In this hefty and rather dense tome there are two chapters devoted to the strange tale of Raymond Davis, the CIA operative who was captured by Lahore cops a few years ago. He only got out of Pakistan after the US gov paid millions in blood money to the families of the men Davis shot. The first Davis chapter contains some lovely details about what Davis was carrying in his vehicle and that haul included — along with SIM cards, GPS devices ammunition etc —  wigs and masks.

The excellent CIA analyst Bob Baehr on Radio 4 this morning (in a great interview someone has decided should not be on the podcast page) puts a brave face on the fiasco by claiming that wigs, make-up and the like are just there to make any casual onlookers “forget the face”, and even went so far as to suggest that over-sized moustaches are also used quite frequently in this way.

So I think we can conclude that the next time the Us appoints a badly-coiffured secretary to the chief immigration officer of the Department of Tourist Visas for any US embassy anywhere in the world, we can all tap our noses and give a knowing wink.

The cover, if ever there was any, like Mr Fogle’s awful hair, is now well and truly blown.

Like everyone else I first encountered the Divinyls via their big hit “I Touch Myself . . ” but I came across this track on — believe it or not — a Mark ‘Chopper’ Read CD. It’s a beauty, far better than Touch and really shows off the throaty vocals which I love so much (0’51 & 2’01 for great examples).  You can see her influence today with the likes of Maja Ivarssen of  The Sounds. A great role model for any aspiring female vocalist. A few years back — 2007 I think — ABC or maybe Ch7 in Oz were showing a fly-on-the-wall doco about the band’s comeback . . her humour and bawdy laugh were evident throughout. Sadly missed.

“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

And who would blame a Cypriot granny for immediately going online to download the software . . . so what if it takes over 13 years to mint just 2 of the things and they could be worth zilch by then anyway? Let’s be honest, if you’ve just watched your government steal up to 60% of your life’s savings in order to make good on its own debts then a virtual currency you barely understand starts to seem like a good deal.

I know better than to try and recap for readers just how Bitcoin works, suffice to say it is a rather elegant piece of cryptography, but if Bitcoin is the answer to our financial woes then I wonder if the question was right?

As I write the cost of one Bitcoin whooshed past $117 dollars and the very fact that I checked and almost simultaneously felt a pang that I was missing out confirms to me the whole thing has that whiff of a bubble about it. People are piling into a scramble scared to be the last. Alas it is human nature to obsess over the now even though we know it harms us; as wealth expert Spencer Sherman commented: “We want instant gratification. People cannot stand short-term fluctuations. It’s like me asking my wife every few minutes how our marriage is doing. I would be divorced by now”. So ask not if you are interested in short or even long-term gains but rather is Bitcoin itself in it for the long-term? We know thanks to mathematics — those lovely laws so much more inviolable than the discredited regulations of the SEC or EU — that decades from now there will only ever exist a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins. So we know the supply, but what does this mean for demand? No way to print money scream the Believers. But wait, aren’t there valid occasions when you need to do that? This week the press is full of praise for Japan’s decision to stuff new money into its system to stop “prices falling” (I thought low prices were a good thing!?). Meanwhile here in the UK the government battles forlornly like a child playing whack-a-mole in the funfair to keep inflation down. Are they both wrong? I’ve no idea but if the answer is only privy to those with advanced economics PhDs then I ask myself do I really want in? Tugging in the other direction however, is the strong urge within me actively willing Bitcoin to succeed. This largely stems from a desire to stick one in the eye of the current financial system which has done so much harm. But even the lamest Craigslist therapist will tell you spiteful banker-bashing and government mistrust is not a healthy motivating force. Right?

Not so according to F. A. Hayek (and I suspect most Cypriots would concur). This nobel prize-winning economist despised the very idea of government-issued cash and predicted the rise of something like Bitcoin way back in the seventies in a paper called “The Denationalisation of Money”:

As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of interesting questions arise which have never been examined.

In my view it’s the last bit that counts. Has Bitcoin really been examined? Yes, I know it’s open source and a gazillion eyeballs – we assume – have scrutinised the code for glitches and nefarious activities, but what I want to know are the long term effects. Is it vulnerable to manipulation? Can it be hoarded? What do we do when governments want to control or tax it as they inevitably will? What about confidence — could a wealthy Manhattan hedge fund boss short Bitcoin and talk its value down to near zero?

I suspect there is a future for Bitcoin and it will be far more mundane than the horror scenarios I just outlined – as a senior Reddit exec recently said: “new technologies are always over-rated in the short term and under-rated in the long”. Bitcoin’s future is likely to involve more and more people taking a far less cautious approach than me and jumping in feet first. But therein too lies a potential hazard. Anyone who makes their living from open source software will tell you there’s one word they dread: fork. A split development path has happened to a great many OSS projects and usually means a maintenance headache and some mild market confusion. Hayek was cool with this and reckoned competing money suppliers were just as valid and necessary as competing electricity suppliers. So what would it mean for Bitcoin if I got my act together and created another virtual currency: psst, wanna buy some PaulyPennies? Standby for a drop in Bitcoin value. I’d be surprised if angel investors in Silicon Valley weren’t already formulating such plans and in fact the more I think about it the more I reckon I should get going . . . I wonder if the founder of Bitcoin had the same glazed, watery-eyed expression and dreams of a yacht I’m getting right now?

Ah yes, Bitcoin’s founder. Introducing one Satoshi Nakamoto. At least that’s the name on the original white paper along with an e-Mail address but don’t try sending a message; it’s fake, the identity having been dreamed up by the real founders, although tantalisingly, my attempt to reach Mr Nakamoto didn’t bounce — raising the possibility that someone’s reading the mails. At Bitcoin gatherings the name is whispered in hushed tones lest you put a hex on the whole thing. This Keyser Söze-type figure adds a lovely frisson of mystery to Bitcoin which sends the hacktivists wild with lulzlust. To experience this yourself simply register on a Bitcoin forum and post the query: “Hey, I’m new to this game can someone put me in touch with Satoshi?” O my, what larks these Bitcoiners will have with you. However, it’s worth reminding ourselves what happens with Mr Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects (Sort-of-a-spoiler alert!): everything that you thought had gone before in the preceding hour and a half becomes totally irrelevant. When Mr. Nakamoto finally does decide to reveal himself as a 15-year-old script kiddie from Ukraine or — SURPRISE! — a CIA technician who dreamed it all up in his lunch break, we’d better pray that we don’t get a similar denouement. Especially those of us with $86K of Bitcoin in our retirement fund. As a 2012 report by the European Central Bank drily states:

“The fact that the founder of Bitcoin uses a pseudonym does nothing to help promote transparency and credibility in the scheme.”

Quite.

In many ways the financial world now is very much as Marquez described: recent and things don’t got names although by golly we’ve tried a few: Eurocrisis, Economic Meltdown, Sub-prime, Sequest-a-geddon, Toxic Debt . . . . all fancy terms for governments and individuals that have basically got more going out than coming in. So while we enter uncharted territory with flailing national and supra-national powers standing idly by grunting before being stung into action by angry hordes, permit me to haul my tired and by now very saggy Marquez metaphor over the finishing line for one last hurrah. It seems that Bitcoin is a neat mirror image of that author’s most famous novel: an impenetrable mix of complicated family ties, dynastic relationships and supernatural forces which everyone unquestionably accepts. I never really got the book but I love to claim I’ve read it and while I may not understand the point Marquez was making I sure remember the climax. The world ends. Everyone dies.

I am a latecomer to Heaven 17. I got their best of a few years back and this is one great track. If you’d attended my Scottish comprehensive school back in 1984 and admitted to liking this then you would have been quite simply lynched.  The sax at 2:09 is well tasty.

“The fisherman that depended upon that fish . . had no way to feed themselves..but they had boats . . they became pirates”.

Sigh, Seligman repeats the old canard that if only Europeans hadn’t decimated the fish stocks of the coast of eastern Africa then Somali pirates wouldn’t be such a problem. Leaving aside whether it’s true an area the size of western Europe has actually been over-fished or not, isn’t it a tad shocking to find this attitude prevailing from the boss of an organisation that has pledged to “ensure a healthy and productive planet for us all”?

I wonder if the reason we so often hear this tired old saying is because piracy is such an emotive term? It still carries with it the old connotations of an age when half the world was crudely mapped and the other half simply labelled “here be monsters”. The image one has upon hearing the word pirate is a Johnny Depp-style swashbuckling vagabond  fighting the good fight, stealing from the rich and giving (a bit) to the poor.

If you actually break down what your modern-day Somali pirate does for a living into its constituent parts it makes the they’ve-no-fish-so-they-have-no-choice-the-poor-little-blighters argument a whole lot harder to articulate.

Need a reminder? Here we go — in no particular order of brutality:

• Torture
• Murder
• Execution

To paraphrase Angel Eyes in TGTBTU: Not enough for ya?

• How about rape and threatened rape too?

Having one’s fish stolen is a poor excuse for any of the above crimes on their own let alone for an obscene amalgamation of all of the above. Let’s start calling pirates by their real names.

I used to get a lift to work with a colleague called Karl, he was a bit of a rebel in many respects not least this album he foisted upon me in 1988 at the peak of Guns n’ Roses metal madness success. It worked though, I’m eternally grateful to him for introducing me to Cohen. I particularly like the little bridge “I’d really like to live beside you baby…”

I feel I should point out that nobody nowhere has actually put an Islamic religious text in a bathroom.

Nobody nowhere hung an Islamic text above a toilet.

This all happened in a virtual world. It’s not real. It’s a bunch of pixels on my screen. We’re by now used to certain religious groups’ offence reaching extreme levels of reaction to things that happen in reality – critics of Islam in Denmark are still under threat – now they’re restricting what goes on in unreality. It’s not therefore unreasonable to speculate that the next sphere to encroach upon will be what people actually think. As Muhammad Ali put it:

‘You ever dream of beating me you better wake up and apologise’.

That sounds cute as a pre-fight taunt lobbed at the latest schmuck to try and take down the Great one but when some groups start using this as a legal basis for censorship we’ve got serious problems.

For the record I’m running: Win 8 Pro 64-bit on a home system not a tablet with 4GB RAM and an Intel Core i7 CPU, 1 x SSD for the OS and 1 x IDE for files).

Disclaimer: I have become increasingly belligerent with applications over the years — this could be age, I grant you — but I blame my own background in app dev and reluctance to tolerate poor coding and rubbish interfaces. Also sharing the blame is Steve Jobs whose culture of making things easy and smacking down coders whose desire to show off outweighs their desire for stability/ease-of-use/nice experience appeals to my sense of software justice: if your Gran don’t get it then it should never have been released.

1. The Mail app

The tiles are enticing, I’ll give the designers that, great big blocks to click on, so why not try the Mail app sitting invitingly up there on the top left? I’ve been using Outlook Express on another machine for ages so it seems the time is ripe to switch to a fancy new version of that venerable old app. So I clicked. Unfortunately when you access the Win 8 Mail app you are asked to sign into Microsoft. No problem I thought, I’ll just hit cancel to get past that, I surely don’t need a Microsoft Account to fix up my computer to my POP3 provider . To paraphrase an angry Andy Garcia in Godfather III. . right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

Now it could be my impatience getting the better of me here, perhaps if I go through the hassle of signing up to an MS account and relaunch this app there will, somewhere deep inside its innards, be an option to let me get my POP3. But somehow I doubt it . . . and frankly, I don’t have the time for a misnamed app that seems to be nothing more than an attempt to get me to sign up for another corporate web site whose password I will inevitably forget. Lame.

2. The Games app

Nothing could be more innocuous than a PC game — remember the superb Pinball game that came with XP?  So I clicked. I am immediately presented with a fetching XBOX-branded portal . . . there are a few choices down on the left, Pac Man catches my eye, I spent a large part of the late 70′s playing the table-top original of this game (did you know it was marketed as Glutton in the UK?) so why not give it a whirl. The result is dispiriting:

It’s a measure of how little I care than I cannot even be bothered to google this error and find out why it’s not working. If, as the message seems to suggest, I need another app to get this app to work — or perish the thought a new piece of hardware — then this is shoddy. Perhaps the Pac Man icon was simply a placeholder reminding me to get the real thing from the MS store . . . either way the error is poorly constructed (it’s not really an error). I don’t even bother to try some of the other games listed. Onwards . . .

3. The Travel App

A pleasant surprise. This app takes me to a nice horizontally scrolling portal with some ready made choices although I don’t understand why the choices presented are there: Los Angeles & Thailand first two? Do they change each day? Is someone paying to get their location to the top of the list? I click on Thailand and am pleasantly surprised to see some well-written text courtesy of Frommers and some nice pictures all about that fabulous country. There seems to be a problem with search however, I drag to the top right, get the search box & type in ‘Scotland’ . . . no results. Hmmm? Must try a wider cast so I type in ‘UK’ and get a travel destination up of Ukhahlhamba-Drakensberg park in South Africa. This seems to be a tailored search   . . . I don’t see the benefit of this over simply running a browser and typing in ‘Thailand’ to Google.com? Yes, I’m aware there’s probably very good content and unique features deeper inside . . .  but to get me to drop Chrome they’ve gotta grab you straight away.

4. The News App

The app picks up that I’m in the UK (using IP address?) and presents me with the ‘Bing’ top story of the day. In other words this ‘app’ seems to be another tailored search and clicking on the ‘about’ tab reveals this app is powered by Bing . The sources tab seems to have a very limited supply. Not much in the way of non-MSM news sources. Again: why should I use this instead of my favourites list in Chrome?

5. The Music app

I plug in my MP3 disk and cannot wait to try this. First off it tells me there’s an update to the app with the cryptic comma misplacement of: “To sign in, get the latest version of the app”. I don’t want to sign in to get an app update because I don’t have an account so I try clicking update anyway and whoa . . it turns out I’ve 15 updates waiting! Kudos to Microsoft for not forcing down these updates by default  like some - well done. I click all of them off apart from music, let’s not get too ambitious. The update opens up the Store app & goes well and is surprisingly fast. The new app plays my MP3s no probs. I quite like the look and feel of it. The auto pull-down of album art doesn’t seem to work for my own music lib though.

By now I’m a little tired. Yes, some of these apps have a gorgeous look to them but everything I have done  I can already do from the desktop and furthermore, from the desktop I have much more control over the app’s behaviour, e.g. when I ALT-F4 from a Metro/Tiled app I’m never really sure the app has quit . . . is it gone or has it just backgrounded? Again, I could probably find this out on the Web somewhere but why bother, the desktop gives me what I want already. It’s gonna take a lot more than this to drag me off it.

One other thing, Win 8 64 has proved remarkably stable. I’ve had no major crashes and I’m using a no-name home-build system with various bits n bobs from all over the world (Lian Li chassis, Corsair PSU, ASUS MB). This is an achievement in itself and makes me pleased I finally moved off XP . . . oh, and for the first time ever my system goes into hibernate mode without any horrid side effects. Well done.

Hi Paul,They are officially finished!  Thank you for your blog post!

Sybil

Such a shame they never managed a UK Drive Thru.

If you’re interested in my take on these wonderful films over the years then go here, for my take on the superb soundtracks go here.

In a post from 25th Jan Robin spells out 5 scenarios for David Cameron’s future as a politician and leader following his big EU in/out speech of 23rd and they’re worth reading in full however, I’d like to take this opportunity to add a sixth outcome to Robin’s 5:

Scenario 6: Cameron wins the next election, forms a government (majority or coalition) , holds the referendum as promised and finds the result so unpalatable that he is forced to ignore it. His defiance of the popular will is so brazen that his credibility is shot and he resigns.

Nobody can predict the political climate of 2015 but experience tells us that in Europe, when politicans get a referendum result they dislike, they simply ignore it or hold another referendum until they get the result they want.

No matter what opt-outs, buy-ins and cherries Cameron picks from the wizened EU tree the British people will vote OUT anyway and therein lies the problem: no politician amongst today’s current crop — save perhaps a UKIP Prime Minister — would ever take Britain out of the EU . . .  the outcome could be apocalyptic.

Cameron, caught between a personal campaign fought with all his “heart & soul” to keep the UK in and the let’s say 63% who will vote for OUT no matter what concessions obtained, will be forced to dismiss the popular will. The praise for this principled stand from Angela Merkel, Mario Monti and Jacques Delors speaking from his retirement home will only add to his woes; the opposition will have a field day; UKIP’s popularity will soar; Tory membership will plummet; Cameron will resign. Boris Johnson steps in as interim leader and criticises the referendum question as “ambiguous”, he promises another referendum to “clarify” what the British people really want and under pressure from the entire nation he holds a snap general election within 6 months.

UKIP, with a temporary leader standing in for Nigel Farage (still bed-bound with a hangover from referendum night celebrations), will win a slender majority and form a government with the ever-opportunistic Lib-Dems. Handicapped by the obligations of coalition they are unable to get the votes in Parliament to take the UK out of the EU. Britain returns to the status quo. Farage becomes PM and devotes his remaining time in office to reducing the top rate of tax for stockbrokers to -5%.