Goodbye To All That

Osama bin Laden ... Muammar Gaddafi ... Kim Jong-il ... George Papandreou ... Rebekah Brooks: 2011 was a bad year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Of course, recent years have in general been bad for people with difficult-to-spell names, although the majority of them would seem superficially to have had a better year than usual, thanks in no small part to the Arab Spring which brought peace, love and understanding to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Libya.

The troubled history of Iraq culminated in the triumphant withdrawal of U. S. Forces and would certainly have been marked by mass public celebration had the crowds not been forced to disperse to make way for ambulances. Even now, as Sordel scowls in a corner typing out his inexcusably jaundiced nut-binding of 2011, the power-sharing government in Baghdad is celebrating several minutes of successful cooperation as President Nuri-Kamal al-Maliki's Shiite faction seeks Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi on charges of running a death squad.

One way or another, 2012 looks to be another memorable year for people with difficult-to-spell names.

Elsewhere, people with difficult-to-spell names agreed to merge them in an effort to dodge the jinx hanging over their heads. Hence 'Merkozy': a different making-of-the-beast-with-two-backs than Shakespeare can have anticipated, yet one equally likely to result in someone being smothered under a bolster before morning. Still, no one said that France and Germany have actually to be at war with one another to be mutually ruinous; it just helped.

Comedy Moment of the Year (for those who can see past the oddly pedestrian circumstance of a bride being upstaged by her sister's bottom at the Wedding of the Century) was the U.S. playing "Mister, can we have our ball back?" with their RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and Iran. What's next? Asking for their bullets back from Pakistan?

Anyway, Sordel looks forward to 2012 with one lingering concern. If education continues on the path it is currently following, all names will become generally more difficult to spell. As trends go, it's not exactly encouraging.

Bishop's Move

For those amused by the discomfiture of the clergy, there has been undoubtedly an entertainment in watching the officials of St. Paul's Cathedral tying themselves into more knots than you would find in a Franciscan's cincture. Unfortunately all jokes eventually wear thin (a fact of which Jonathan Ross should have been apprised in about 1993) and it's becoming more difficult to see the funny side. Not least on account of a report today that Dr. Richard Chartres (surely that isn't his real name?) is advancing the argument that the protestors camp should be evicted on the grounds that it might be infiltrated by violent activists.

Chartres, described by The Times as "the third most senior cleric in the Church of England" apparently voiced the following concerns: "we do not know what is going to happen. The camp could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment."

Well, much as it pains Sordel to slip into the vernacular, duh. I don't know who will be running Dixons next week: it could be taken over by people who are very different from the ones who are in charge at the moment. Just in case, maybe it should be closed down.

The counterargument to this is obvious: Dixons is operated by a bunch of professional retail experts (bolstered, it should be admitted, by a load of spotty teenagers who always seem keen to chat in a back room rather than show their acne-ridden faces on the shop floor) whereas the Occupy London protestors are a bunch of naive and erstwhile-tree-hugging hippies ripe for exploitation by would-be criminals. Violent infiltrators usually gain entrance to Dixons through the front windows via the energetic application of waste-bins, not by applying for jobs and working their way up. In this (and perhaps nothing else) Dixons would seem to have a robustness and resilience totally absent from a protestors' campsite.

Yet while Dixons does not seem to warrant the mistrust that Dr. Chartres lavishes on Occupy London, I can think of at least one institution that does.

The Church of England.

Isn't the Anglican clergy full of precisely the same variety of wide-eyed idealist who is currently camping out in front of St. Paul's Cathedral? Aren't they all the same feckless bunch of warts on the behind of society who have demonstrated by their lifestyle choice their complete incapacity to make a conventional contribution to society, yet who make a profession of asserting their high moral standards? Aren't they a proven target of criminals (in this case, child molesters) who would like nothing better than to infiltrate their organization and use it for other purposes?

When we start evicting people on the basis of what might happen in the future, it is my modest proposal that we don't stop at the doors of St. Paul's but proceed directly into the body of the cathedral.

In the meantime, perhaps Dr. Chartres consult a book with which he is supposedly familiar and take "no thought of tomorrow, for tomorrow shall take thought of the things for itself". Or he could, you know, pray.

50/50 Hindsight

Sordel is feeling somewhat soiled today, having been forced to visit the Daily Mirror website so that you, Dear Reader, do not need to.

The poor old Mirror (broadly speaking a distorting mirror, given that the people therein reflected are always wickeder, more repulsive or otherwise just more than they would be in real life) is up in arms because of the injustice of a largely random competition having a largely random result.

Nathan Hageman (separated from the hangman by one small letter) is evidently a "thug" and a "brute", as well as being £1 million pounds the richer as a consequence of a roulette spin on the new Ant & Dec vehicle, Red or Black?. Contrary to all reasonable expectation, the roulette ball seems to have paid no attention whatsoever when bouncing around the wheel to the fact that Hageman was sentenced to five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend.

In this, as usual, God has had his little joke at the expense of those who care. Some might say it was affliction enough on His part to have permitted Red or Black? be green-lighted in the first place, but now He compounds the misery by allowing the sun to shine on the unjust man while the rest of us get the thorough drenching that only ITV on a Saturday night can bestow.

Simon Cowell is reportedly livid that someone of such low moral character should get rich from reality television which (apart from setting up an obvious but quite unwarranted joke) merely suggests that Cowell did not understand the rules of the competition that he himself had scratched on the back of a beer-mat.

Before we castigate the creator (and the Creator) too energetically, however, it is worth noting that there evidently was another and more immediate failure: on the part of the show's producers when they were "vetting" contestants. Evidently, Hageman admitted to having a criminal conviction for ABH and aggravated burglary, but claimed that the victim was a man and not his ex-girlfriend.

It reveals the mentality of the producers to a nicety, then, that their consciences (which would have been untroubled by a violent criminal winning the prize had his victim been a man) pinch somewhat when the victim is revealed to be a woman.

Sordel, meanwhile, is willing to admit to having watched roughly five minutes of Red & Black? last Saturday and would like several series of The X Factor to be taken into consideration. I consider myself to be the principal victim and can assure you that no women were harmed.

Can I haz my million still?

Looters to the Court of St. James

Doubtless you shared Sordel's shock. An ambassador was among those recently rioting in London! Some Ruritanian minor nobility, one might presume, tired of cowering behind the windows of his embassy in silk sash and monocle while the people of England marched for civil rights and HDMI cables.

But, hang on.

It was an Olympics ambassador.

One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.

A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.

Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.

Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.

The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.

One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.

The Hours Crawl By

The essence of "water cooler television" used to be that a programme was so memorable that everyone at work would be talking about it the next day. These days it's a branding thing: watch this thing tonight or tomorrow you might have nothing to talk about.

Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.

Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.

The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.

The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.

There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".

As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.

A Fate Worse Than Death

Sordel recently argued that - far from taking society to some new moral nadir - restoring capital punishment is like a leafy suburb somewhere on the line between The City of God and our current societal Sodom. Naturally this is far from an argument on behalf of the restoration of capital punishment (just because bad things happen, no need to add to them!) but let us turn out attention for a moment to how bad capital punishment really is as a legal resort.

How would it be if you could experience the fear and discomfort of death and not die?

Good punishment? Bad?

Waterboarding was routinely used by the U.S. as an interrogation technique. For the person being interrogated in this way, the experience is said to be similar to being drowned. Some claim it's torture, but it was contended by the Bush administration that it is not. Either way, we're not killing the person, so why worry, right?

Waterboarding does not infringe the natural right to life, and it can be used both as retribution against the convict and as a deterrent. Since it is not a capital punishment, it is proportionate for all sorts of crime. It's cheap, causes no permanent (physical) damage ... what's not to like?

No wonder that U.S. interrogators apparently felt that it was okay to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.

(No wonder there is such understandable anxiety in America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might cheat justice and elude the death penalty.)

Of course, that's just the United States, and it can be argued that the use of waterboarding was primarily preventative rather than punitive. Interrogation may have saved many more lives than it ruined and - unless you actually believe in natural rights - the end (on a purely Utilitarian calculation) often does justify the means.

My philosophical concern is not whether waterboarding itself is justifiable, but rather this: is there no number of waterboardings that equal, from the standpoint of retributive punishment, one actual execution?

Because, if other punishments (including those inflicted without due legal process) can exceed in cruelty capital punishment, then why are we drawing this artificial moral line?

Why do we strain out a gnat and swallow a camel?

Hang 'Em (Even in Conservation Areas)

Good news everybody! You have a fundamental human right to a satellite dish. When it comes to human rights, the BSkyB is not the limit, but it is certainly the icing on the cake.

To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?

Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.

The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?

If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)

How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?

If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?

Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.

We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.

So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?

Out For The Count

Like the Periodical Cicada, Marcus de Sautoy is observed only occasionally on British television and presumably at prime intervals. When last seen, in 2009, Sordel's favourite boffin was frolicking on a beach with everyman-for-hire Alan Davies, but now he is out on his own, trying to solve The Code, which is his post-Langdonian nomenclature for boring old mathematics.

"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.

Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.

From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."

The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)

The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.

But of course there was.

Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.

Gee, Officer Krupke

Anyone looking for a handy excuse for bad behaviour can now shorten their list by reference to Charlie Gilmour, whose defence on a charge of violent disorder seemed to use an awful lot of them to little effect.

It was regarded by the defence as a mitigating factor that Gilmour was drunk (in addition to being on a cocktail of valium and LSD). David Spens, the defending QC, also advanced one of those arguments that would be enough to make any mother proud: "up until Topshop, the worst of his behaviour was playing the fool, showing off, posing for the cameras." High praise indeed.

It was argued on his behalf that the Cambridge history student was unaware of the significance of the Cenotaph when swinging from it by a flag. The Judge, Nicholas Price QC, specifically rejected this claim when handing down a 16 month jail term today.

More troublesome, however, was the claim that Gilmour's psychological decline had been due to having been rejected by his natural father, the poet Heathcote Williams. This was a case in which family looms large.

According to the headlines, Gilmour is the son of Dave Gilmour, and much of the brouhaha attendant on his involvement in the riots sprang from the idea that he was the feckless millionaire offspring of a rocker who had quite possibly served as a very poor moral role model to him.

Son of Rock Star in Riot is a headline; Son of Poet in Riot less so.

Of course, to all intents and purposes Dave Gilmour is indeed Charlie's father, having adopted him when the boy was only four or five, yet such is the destiny of blood that the boy looks very like his natural father: slender, with black wavy hair sufficiently striking to have persuaded Charlie to register with a modelling agency.

Who knows what psychological drama may have unfolded in Charlie's mind if indeed he were to have been rejected by his poetic sire? And, who cares?

Investigations into the roots of crime are doubtless of great sociological interest, but the circularity of blame becomes less than compelling when the crimes are of the order of throwing a waste bin or sitting on the bonnet of a car.

We do not inquire into the root causes of crimes that are trivial, and we cannot afford to consider the root causes of crimes that are immense.

Long Spoons, Short Memories, Tall Stories

Short of toppling a statue of Rupert Murdoch and beating at it with their shoes, Britain's MPs could scarcely have depicted themselves in recent days more like the long-suffering victims of the despot's whip.

For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.

Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.

Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.

Yet where was all this a month ago?

To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.

Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.

The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.

The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.

Tomfoolery

Here's a challenge: try to think of some characters from Four Weddings and a Funeral and write down either the character name or the name of the actor or at least some distinguishing characteristic. Four or five should do.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

All done?

Now, take a look down your list and see if you have Tom, played by James Fleet. You may have described him as "upper class nitwit and brother to Kristin Scott Thomas's character, Fiona", although if so you would seem to have been taking this exercise more seriously than I anticipated.

What's that you say? Not at the top? Didn't really think so.

Now, to my point. Sordel believes that the very best that David Cameron can do in his entire career is to come away with a place in people's hearts as dear as James Fleet's Tom. That's it. It doesn't get any better. Cameron was never going to be the romantic lead of British Politics.

Tom is the quintessential example of the tolerable aristocrat. If someone were building a guillotine, his would be the last head in line for the basket, and by the time he arrived for execution he would have so won over the crowd that he would be set free with a gentle cuff of the ear.

Under the terms of their Hippocratic Oath, all would-be Toms fall under a strict enjoinder to "do no harm". They are also sternly admonished to keep well out of the way of trouble: something that Cameron has managed quite ably thus far, but "Golly ... bloody Thunderbolt City!" is still some way off.

If one is aiming to be Tom, the last thing one wants to do is to create the impression that your jacket is out at the elbows from brushing up against the likes of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.

Moreover, finding yourself on the other side of the issue to Hugh Grant, unlikely wielder of the Sword of Truth, is definitely a misstep.

The trouble with Tom is that really, deep down, the British Public has an instinctive hatred for him that only some clever mugging and a self-deprecating joke can attenuate. He who would be Fleet must first be fleet.

The News of the World scandal is Cameron's first real crisis, and it will be very interesting to see how he weathers it.

Boring Writer Declares Less Boring Writer "Boring" Shock

In the days before Sordel suffered the misfortune of subscribing to a newspaper, I admonished a friend for writing a vituperative series of blogs about columnists. "Set your gaze upon a target lofty enough for your critical muse," I encouraged him.

Yet it comes to this.

Richard Brooks, the "veteran arts reporter" of The Sunday Times, writes what is intended to be a bitchy gossip column by the name of Biteback. This week he turned his attention, inter alia, to Tony Blair, and this (in full) is what he had to say:

"Tony Blair has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine, We Love This Book. I'm gobsmacked he has actually read nine. Even so, three are religious tracts - no surprises there. At least he remembered to list the boring Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. After all, it was the one he chose on Desert Island Discs 15 years ago."

Really, Richard? You are gobsmacked that Tony Blair has read nine books? You really are very susceptible to surprise; I would have thought that Tony Blair is exactly the sort of person who would have read nine books.

In any case, it's the sort of line that would be pretty thin if used of Wayne Rooney, but it would need some dressing up for him. Something like: "Wayne Rooney has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine: I'm surprised his colouring pencils held out that long." (It's not comedy gold, Ladies and Gentlemen, but at least there is a genre of Rooney stupidity jokes.)

With Blair, the jokes are all to do with how much of a liar he is, or how superficial. "Tony Blair has given us a list of his favourite books, which only leaves us to wonder which of them he didn't enjoy and which of them he hasn't read."

Such a missed opportunity.

I'm not convinced by the other jokes, either. I'm sure that many people find Blair boring, but it isn't exactly a satirical staple. Is the joke that Blair is boring and therefore likes boring books? Or is the joke that Walter Scott is boring? If the former, a better joke would be to say that he is too exciting by half. If the latter, well, Scott entertained a lot more people than Brooks ever will and his books are scarcely the dust standard of literary dullness.

Oh, and those "religious tracts"? A look at the Bookseller reassures us that there are no religious tracts in Blair's list. The books are Jesus Was A Jew, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and Martin Lings's biography of Muhammad. These are not exactly the books that one would choose if you were seeking to characterise Blair as a joyless Catholic.

Then again, perhaps Brooks was counting The Lord of the Rings as a religious tract. When it comes to titanic battles of Good and Evil, Blair may have been more Tolkienesque than was entirely to the interest of the rest of us.

To Crack This Code Took Sega

In today's column - in a regular series in which Sordel draws upon extensive experience in the shadowy world of Internet hacking to decrypt the private communications of the hactivists - I shall break a code that has defied even our most august media outlet.

This, from Alexi Mostrous (surely not her real name) in today's Times:

"If the police want to stop these groups, they will have to penetrate murky online chatrooms and learn the hackers' language, which seems, at least to an outsider, often inexplicable. "Current Target: store.playstation.com || Status: FIRING NOW!" one member wrote during an attack on Sony."

While I am sure that Bletchley Park would have scratched its collective head at this code, and - at this moment - GCHQ has thirty supercomputers running permutational algorithms in the hope of cracking the private key with brute force, to Sordel this code is as simple as if it had been written in perfectly comprehensible English.

First one must work back from the known fact: that this was written during an attack upon Sony. Although this is not widely known, secret corporate documents reveal that the brand name Playstation was registered as a brand by Sony some years ago. This is just the sort of arcane commercial information that is prized by Anonymous.

Revisiting our code, we can therefore see that the string "store.playstation.com" is possibly a location of some sort.

Now examine the structure of the secret message. There are two binary pairs in the syntax, each separated by a colon. Since we now believe the second string in the first pair to be some sort of target, it is credible that the first binary pair represents some sort of targeting function. Indeed, the first part of the dyad does seem to include the word "target", so we may be thinking along the right lines.

Again, it will not be widely appreciated outside the group itself, but attacks of the sort mounted by modern anarcho-techno-rebels require both a target and some sort of temporal coordination. The word "status" is a little-known marker, used at the start of the second binary pair, to indicate the situation at the time that the message is issued.

Many of these hackers play computer games such as "shooters" in which words such as "fragging" are used as oblique references to attack. "Firing", presumably imported by analogy from the world of employment to which so many young IT amateurs have been excluded, is one of these, representing "attack, as with a laser pistol".

Finally, "now" is used to indicate the time of the firing. In order to encode this information, it has been converted to upper case. Without information as to the time that the message was sent, it is impossible to identify the actual date and time represented by the "Now Function", but it would certainly have been expressed in UTC in defiance of state borders.

I hope that nothing in today's edition will compromise similar codes currently in use by the CIA and MI5. After all, it's all fun & games until someone gets extradited to the U.S.

Some Blood for No Oil

The pro-war media (and I don't mean those media pro- the Libyan war but those media who would happily line up behind any war whatsoever) are very fond of telling our government to "hold its nerve". This instruction was trademarked some years ago by The Economist, but today's leader in The Times, which was presumably written some weeks ago in the expectation of civilian deaths, trots it out with equal confidence.

Don't stop bombing Tripoli now, just as things are going so well.

Sordel veers towards pacifism, appeasement and running away screaming like a small girl at the first sign of trouble, but even I must admit that to get this far into a war without significant civilian deaths or (to the best of my knowledge) any NATO military casualties, is a remarkable success. It's rather like going into a bar, shooting the place up with a shotgun, but doing so with the care and attention required to leave its clientele largely unmolested.

Unfortunately, this display of scrupulous vandalism is not entirely cheering.

For a start, Danny Alexander announced over the weekend that the Libyan War was costing tens of millions of pounds and would likely run to hundreds of millions. That's a bit like shooting up a bar with a shotgun and having to pay for repairs. While living under threat of having your house repossessed.

Secondly, the rebels aren't advancing, and a report in today's Times paints a sorry picture of their condition. After their last advance failed due to indiscipline, they have retrenched in Misrata and claim to be facing a more effective government assault. They have also run out of money.

Thirdly, although the coalition has done a very creditable job of preventing civilian deaths and injuries, it does occasionally bomb the rebels themselves, which is ... embarrassing for us, and fatal for them.

And fourthly, while shooting up a bar without killing someone is an achievement of sorts, shooting up a bar several times a night for three months is hardly a kindness to the people unable to leave that bar in whose interests one claims to be doing it. The bombing raids themselves inflict terror on the people of Tripoli.

So "holding its nerve" is not really going to be enough for the British government. What The Times really needs to do - in the fashion of Lady Macbeth - is taunt the government on to do something bloodier and yet more ruinous.

Because this isn't a war that is going to be won on its current rules of engagement.

This Just In: People Lie On The Internet

Let's just clear this up straight away: Sordel is not [repeat: not] a gay half-American girl called Amina Abdullah who lives in Damascus.

And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.

McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.

Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."

Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.

The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.

Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.

Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.

Separating the Sheepish from the Goats

People sometimes say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Sordel heard a longer version of that which makes rather more sense. "Which is better: a stopped clock or a clock that is slow by five minutes?" The paradoxical answer, the clearly incorrect answer, is that the better clock is the one that is stopped because it is right twice a day.

People going around celebrating the purported accuracy of a stopped clock are missing the point.

Doubtless (in some sense or another, one day) the world will end, and there's a chance (since there are many churches) that a small band of devoted religious followers will on that day be celebrating the arrival of "The Rapture" or somesuch. Should a Pythonesque hand descend on that day from a fluffy cloud and gather up God's True Believers, they might feel entirely vindicated.

The correct division is not, however, between those who happened to be right and those who happened to be wrong, and in this those atheists delighted at the conspicuous humiliation this weekend of Family Radio Worldwide are just as mistaken as the ardent followers of Harold Camping.

The correct division is between those who are sort of muddling through but inaccurate and those who, while accurate, are totally broken.

There is no rational eschatology under which the people who are saved are those who happen to adhere to a religion in which salvation is accorded to those either a) born into the right race/religion or b) able to calculate a correct date based on conjectural dates of events in the Old Testament.

If God's hand is going to descend from a fluffy cloud and gather up Jews, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or Harold Camping, then the god running the system really hasn't given the rest of us much to go on.

It's true that God might not play into human ideas of fairness, but being saved by an unfair god is not really much different from being damned by it. Salvation should not be like buying a lottery ticket.

Broadly speaking: if a religion only functions accurately at one moment of history, you'd be better off with one that is somewhat helpful whatever the day, date and time.

Those Nine Preferences In Full

Under the Alternative Vote system, voters would get (would have got) the ability to register up to nine voting preferences, which is all very well and good, but I got to the Voting Station this morning and made a disturbing discovery.

I don't even have a first preference.

While certainly I have been an undecided voter in earlier elections, this is the first time that I have looked at the voting form without having given any real thought for which party I would like to support with the mickle might of my vote.

Moreover, this was not just a "Lib Dems or Labour" thing. Even David Cameron - a man who probably used to wear a morning suit to buy his morning newspaper but now makes much show of not being able to put his hands on one for a Royal Wedding - was in with a chance of the Sordellian imprimatur.

Nick Clegg, aka the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, could well have swung it for the Lib Dems. Ediband The Unknown could have taken it for Labour. It was certainly not unthinkable that the Greens would stand secure beneath the impregnable aegis of my cross.

The problem, though, was not a lack of interest, but a genuine lack of what for want of a better word one must call an Alternative. If it's true that the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow (and according to Wikipedia it isn't) then we had better start working on a larger vocabulary for the otherwise indistinguishable shades of political platform upon which we are invited to lavish our electoral enthusiasm.

It's a sad day for something-or-other when one has a more decided preference on what socks to wear than one does for which party should govern, but that seems to be my predicament.

(Admittedly, Sordel is unusually attached to socks, like a recently-liberated house elf.)

Still, it's comforting to think that despite my near-complete aporia, my vote will have been registered with the same vanishing significance as someone who actually cares.

Abbottabad-a-Bing

At a time when the moral compass for international affairs seems to be having significant difficulties pointing steadily in any direction, let alone North, Sordel would like to take a moment (with all due deference to Buffy) to suggest a new doctrine:

"What would Michael Corleone do?"

Much as the Obama administration chooses to say that justice was served on Osama Bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces, our ideas of what is just, proper and "right" don't really embrace murder.

Sordel is not being squeamish or scrupulous though. We all love it when bad things happen to worse people, and this is what makes Corleone justice so compelling. Helicopters, assassins dropping through the darkness ... sure, it's a bit "Part Three", but Michael would assent, just as long as he could brood over a Catholic rite while it was taking place.

Pilotless drones firing rockets into a meeting of the Five Families? If the shadows are suggestive of chiaroscuro and a snatch of Italian opera is played, why not?

Risible Whack-a-Mole while trying to kill Qaddafi in the ruins of Tripoli? The Don demurs.

Michael Corleone's guiding principle was not morality, but effectiveness, and it wouldn't be hard to be on the side of democratic governments were they more effective. Protecting civilians, for example, is such a laudable aspiration, but there comes a point when an incompetently attempted good deed is even less welcome than a boldly effected crime.

Unfortunately, there is an admitted flaw with this new guiding light.

The event most typical of the Corleone approach is not the raid on Osama Bin Laden that took place in 2011, but the attack on the World Trade Center that took place in 2001. Ultimately, an ethical system that is enamoured of effectiveness to the exclusion of all other attributes owes its existence to the man who has now become its latest and most prominent victim.

Justice has been served all right, but only the poetic variety.

M in Masterpiece or F in Fraud?

On 5 April, The Bolton News carried a headline that for once was inaccurate in a wholly informative way: "Fake Art by Banksy and Tracey Emin on display at museum."

The headline was inaccurate in the sense that the fakes were not by Banksy and Emin at all: they were fakes of Banksy and Emin by people with an ability to copy. It is notable, however, that Emin herself has not the ability to copy, or even, seemingly, trace, as her portrait of William and Kate's balcony kiss rather demonstrates.

"What's this, Sordel?" I hear you demand: "are you really going to devote an entire nutshell to championing outmoded bourgeois theories of art?"

Well, yes, actually.

The Independent, one must admit, has scored another hit. It is comparatively rare for a newspaper's front page to become a genuine subject of discussion, and only The Sun has been better at it than the UK's foremost contrarian chip-wrapping. On a day when every other paper was running colour pictures of the prince in his red tunic, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Independent would go with sober black & white.

What is less to be expected is that they would have selected (perhaps even commissioned) a work that falls so short of any minimal standard. There is a taste test to art. First we must recognise it: as something meriting attention as a piece of art. Hard though it may be to judge art, I wouldn't recommend any aspiring 15-year-olds to supply work of Emin's standard as part of their G.C.S.E coursework.

In Emin's "The Kiss" (to dignify it with a title) the most persuasive piece of draughtsmanship is the actual words "THE KISS" printed in block-capitals (though admittedly on a slant) beneath Kate's veil. Were one required to defend it, one could applaud the focus on the military trappings of the jacket, the baldness of William's head and the emptiness of his face, as pointed statements by a master portraitist, but this would be playing along too much. It would be to supply as the viewer an effort of creation that is missing in the artist.

Go peruse Google images for Tracey Emin and be amazed by the paucity of her oeuvre. What, to rephrase the old drummer joke, do you call someone who hangs around with artists?

Margate 2: This Time It's Personal

Sordel is confident that we all thought the same thing when we heard that the BBC's Resident Intellectual had obtained a super-injunction to prevent publication of the news that he had been unfaithful to his wife:

It's only to be expected when one is as irresistible as Andrew Marr.

It has often been observed that the mind is also an erogenous zone, and that Mekon-like pixie, whose high-domed cranium becomes only more disproportionate as time goes by, must have been beating them off with a stick these many years.

Nothing says amours like a Marr.

Indeed, one can only imagine that he sought the super-injunction not so much for the sake of his reputation as to protect the ladies of this island, who might be driven to self-destructive yearning at the discovery that - far from being permanently off the menu as previously assumed - this dish was, like sashimi fugu, a rare delicacy obtainable by the woman reckless and dedicated enough to attempt it.

Before you dismiss this, however, as mere tawdry Schadenfreude, a loathsome paddling in the neck of tabloid sensationalism, Sordel would like to raise in your mind an intriguing possibility.

Marr's wife, Jackie Ashley, is a journalist. The woman in the case is evidently also a journalist. Andrew Marr ... well ... he knows a great many journalists. Here is a man whose championship of the Freedom of the Press would normally be above suspicion.

Is it beyond possibility that this great mind, with his lofty view of the chessboard and ability to think many moves ahead, actually foresaw that if one wished to break the issue of super-injunctions, the only way to do so would be to obtain one and then voluntarily forego it?

Might it not be that at the very moment that strange fingers coyly fondled his Full Windsor for the first time, the plot hatched in that mighty brow which only now has come to full fruition?

Sordel says not that it happened thus, but how could it have happened else?

Eh? V?

Those who consulted, memorized and obediently signed up to Sordel's previous reflections on democracy will not be surprised to hear that a referendum on a new electoral system in the UK leaves me somewhat cold.

According to research cited by The Economist the consequence of a move to the A.V. system would be that 16% of seats would change hands at a general election rather than 13%. The ideal - a swing of 100% to the None of the Above Party - is, to say the least, unlikely, and even were the 3% of constituencies that changed all to become BNP that would only bring the BNP representation in Parliament up to (checks sums) about 3%. None of this counts as a smooth transition to democracy.

Sordel's contention is that very few voters actually care about elections, and this can be extrapolated to the Middle East and Africa where, we are repeatedly told, populations are rising up to demonstrate their ardent thirst for a fair vote. Certainly some of the people are rising up for a fair vote, but it seems a reasonable guess that the greater number would also be willing to rise up for an oligarchy stacked in favour of their tribe, religious orientation or favoured tyrant. Not many of the rebels in Libya would be risking their lives to see Qaddafi fairly elected.

More significantly, it seems reasonable to suppose that many of the supposed beneficiaries of democracy in Libya are much like ourselves: more interested in the wellbeing of our families, businesses and neighbourhoods than we are in who is in government. Many of those who are currently dying for democracy in Misurata were just trying to get on with their lives. Posthumously turning them into martyrs for a political ideal is a typically political manouevre that demonstrates that while the rebels may not be a fitting army, there are those among them well suited to a career of bribery and corruption.

Returning, then, to the United Kingdom, AV would seem to be the perfect voting system for our national temperament: an ever more long-winded process to satisfy us that our miniscule contribution to the election of our political masters has been felt. Religion may be the opiate of the people in some countries, but all you really need to pacify an Englishman is a big piece of paper and an ill-sharpened pencil.

Together In Perfect Harmony

Looking rather like a poorly-animated mugshot of herself in ten years time, Hillary Clinton appeared on television yesterday to claim victory in Côte d'Ivoire.

"This transition sends a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world: they may not disregard the rights of their own people in free and fair elections and there will be consequences for those who cling to power. We commend the United States, the government and people of France and other members of the International Community who have worked diligently to ensure the safety and security of the Ivorian people throughout this crisis."

(Quite why we're commending the United States is unclear, but perhaps it's the even-handed way in which former aides to (Bill) Clinton lobbied for Gbagbo in Washington. It is indeed commendable when a country can roll over any obstacle to commerce.)

Now, Sordel knew nothing at all about Côte d'Ivoire until the rebels had actually surrounded Laurent Gbagbo's compound, but before we break out the champagne and toast to a much-needed fillip to democracy and security, it's perhaps worth taking a critical look at this victory.

Laurent Gbagbo - universally described as a "strongman" (which summons up in Sordel's mind only images of curled moustachios and a striped bathing costume) - was presumably some sort of horrific tribal warlord wearing the teeth of his opponents as a necklace. Somehow he started out as Director of the Institute of History, Art, and African Archeology at the University of Abidjan, but we can assume that he degenerated pretty swiftly after that.

Gbagbo's political manoevring in Côte d'Ivoire has seemingly been pretty unscrupulous over the years, with a number of human rights abuses and electoral tricks employed to keep him in power. It's lucky for the Ivorian population, then, that members of "the International Community have worked diligently to ensure the safety and security of the Ivorian people throughout this crisis."

Protecting civilians is, after all, something at which the commendable United States excels.

So, readers may share Sordel's mild surprise at a Human Rights Watch report that claims that Ivorians have been raped, killed, maimed, have had their villages burned etc. etc. all by people fighting on behalf of incoming-president-and-champion-of-peace-&-democracy Alassane Ouattara.

While the U.S. was ensuring their safety and security?

Ouattara The Fuck?!!

Perhaps before Hillary draws the moral of this tale she should consider some other possible morals that might be inferred, such as the following. That both sides in a sufficiently-entrenched conflict will ultimately become guilty of horrific abuse? That if you want to conquer a dictator it helps to have rebels who have been battle-hardened in a civil war and spent several years governing a substantial area of the country?

Or maybe, just maybe, that the best way to participate in the affairs of another country is to do absolutely nothing at all until a winner becomes clear and then turn up in time to claim the assist.

Not Just For Christmas

David Cameron (whom, for these purposes, let us imagine in full Little Lord Fauntleroy garb with copious lace and silk knee-pants) must have cut an eager figure as he approached the harassed Obama for a new war. "I'll feed it, and walk it, and you won't even know it's there," he must have implored.

Forgetting that this is what Sasha and Malia told him about Bo (his only surviving election promise) the embattled president seems to have reluctantly agreed, the fit measurement of that reluctance being that he has left Libya in the hands of Cameron and Sarkozy while he addressed more pressing issues, such as the fact that his entire government is on the brink of being shut down.

And, indeed, Cameron and Sarkozy did walk the war, proudly and ardently ... for about twelve hours. Now, with matted fur and an unsettlingly wolfish expression of resentment, it is defecating on the hall carpet and howling through the night.

The last time Britain and France went on their own without American leadership was, of course, the Suez crisis, when at least we had Israel, the world's most bellicose nation, doing some fighting for us. As a world leader (and I use the the word leader loosely) the last news that you want to hear is that the U.S. has ceded control of the air operation to you.

This is a bit like a young comedian getting on the bill with Billie Crystal and then learning that Crystal isn't intending to do any of the jokes himself.

Currently, the losers in this situation are the Libyan rebels, who should really have looked up the phrase "Iraqi Kurds" on Wikipedia before they took up arms.

Disastrous though the current situation is, however, there is worse to come for the people of Libya. If NATO gets its way, and Qaddafi is toppled, normal civilians in Tripoli and Benghazi may well come to view these as "the good old days".

And as for the puppy ... it's a rottweiler ... with a gentle disposition ... and has never showed any signs at all of wanting to savage the small boys who currently only pay it attention to poke it with a stick.

Rolling the Dice

Back in the days when the Rubik's Cube was young, Sordel's approach to this small bundle of polychrome frustration was as follows: if the current situation was not to one's liking, give it another turn and hope that it improves. Now in the grand scheme of things, this is an imperfect approach to solving a Rubik's Cube ... but it is an absolutely disastrous method for solving foreign policy.

Barack Obama has got the red side solved by turning the United States back into a Republican stronghold. Now, like most presidents who have been made redundant by electoral failure, he is looking across the sea. Rather than concentrate on Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Guantanamo Bay, however, he has set his sights on Libya. According to the New York Times this was much against his better judgement, but he seems to have been bounced into it by the French, who in this demonstrate an inclination to ironic comedy for which they have not as a nation been previously noted.

("You want some "Freedom Fries" with that, mon ami?")

Naturally there are some who are cheering on this latest excursion on the basis that it protects the fragile seedling of democracy. Quite what species these seedlings are that are peeking out from the oil-drenched soil of the Middle East is, however, open to question, as is the strength of feeling behind the protests that accompany them. After all, when thousands of people marched against the Iraq war, this was regarded by Tony Blair as mere grumbling, but if a hundred people raise a banner in Africa we are evidently ready to recognise their government.

If three men and a dog claimed that the town Sordel lives in had fallen into rebel hands, the BBC would colour it a different colour on a map and start describing the dog as "regional governor".

Whatever the rights and wrong of the two sides in the civil war for Libya, we can be sure that ordinary citizens with very little interest in politics will now be killed by both sides, and by the foreign airstrikes. With Obama's promise of "no ground troops" (a promise that immediately seems impossible to keep) we are looking to the rebels to provide an effective police system capable of restraining a Qadaffi regime that will inevitably conceal itself within the general population.

In the meantime, if the U.S. is serious about protecting freedom-loving innocents from an oppressor's rain of fire, it can do so by stopping bombing children gathering wood in Afghanistan.

Maybe finish one of our other wars before starting another?

Stop The Presses

It seems likely that when the great ideological struggles of the Twentieth Century are investigated by the historians of the future, more attention than heretofore will be given to that between the Radio Times and the TV Times.

Sordel's interest in this behemothian conflict was engaged by the front page splash upon which RadioTimes editors are pinning their Pulitzer ambitions this year: "EXCLUSIVE [and this word, mind you, in red, as though the caps lock was insufficient alert to journalistic dynamite incoming] Back at the Beeb! Jonathan Ross on why he's older, wiser - and safer".

Now, set aside the immediate objections. True, Ross's final episodes of Film 2010 and Friday Night with ... did only air in March and July of last year respectively; there is stuff at the back of Sordel's fridge that as been out of sight for longer. True, Ross was on Top Gear last Sunday, so unless we are actually supposed to be excited that he is "back at the Beeb" after a respite of a full week, the hoopla does seem overstated.

And true, this appearance by Jonathan Ross is actually only as host of the BAFTA film awards. As reconciliations go, this scarcely ranks with Lear & Cordelia.

Set these issues aside and incline your mind instead to the the most pressing question that arises from this cover story:

Who cares?

RadioTimes, like the Russian bear, is fighting the Cold Wars of the past, when every household took two bottles into the shower: shampoo for the BBC, conditioner for ITV and Channel Four. Back then, when The Goodies crossed the floor from the BBC to ITV, TV Times treated them like defecting chess grandmasters. The timeses (TV and Radio) were vassal states fighting and dying for their implacable overlords.

With its monopolistic grip on the BBC listings, the Radio Times was once a proud superpower on the shelves of the newsagents. Now, like an old man his teeth, it has lost even the space in the middle of its title. Yet still it looks back upon former grandeur in the expectation that its readership will view it as Auntie's bastion, partaking of its every victory and defeat.

Just don't mention Sky.