Slap Her, She's French

The normal sobriety with which our press covers defence issues seems to have given way badly over recent days, resulting in coverage that has at times resembled a teen drama.

Our military representatives in Washington had for some time, been carrying America's books and helping him with his Chemistry homework in the general hope that he would invite them to the prom. Now, however, a pretty French exchange student has arrived and caught America's eye. They have been looking for excuses to slip off together to the stacks and she keeps looking at us appraisingly before whispering things in his ear that makes them both laugh.

Once upon a time, it was understood that going to war as the U.S.'s bagman was done from broadly noble motives, but the tone of The Times especially gives Sordel pause for thought, because it's becoming clearer by the day that the real reason we go to war is for fear that the U.S. won't ask us next time.

Perhaps those of our generals wont to fill their hand luggage with Pentagon-issue complementary sewing kits and drinks coasters with the seal of the president are worried about their Frequent Flyer points, but there has been much public gnashing of the teeth that their status has been "downgraded" (and are presumably all now to be found in Premium Economy.)

Before we get entirely demoralised, however, that it was only ten years ago that America's "oldest ally" was so utterly out of favour in the U.S. that, anecdotally, even French Fries themselves were renamed in some quarters as a sign of national disapproval.

All America really needs is a gal who can get him where he's going. Come prom night, he'll be with the girl who can drive him to the gym, and he always dances with the person who brung him.

Hurtful though it may be to our generals not to be able to spill blood in the interests of the special relationship right now, there's no reason to believe that the opportunity will not crop up again soon.

Unqualified Writer Questions Qualified Writer's Qualifications Shock

Writing in The Times yesterday, Kevin Maher took to task Lucy Worsley for introducing herself as "Dr. Lucy Worsley" on what he rather high-handedly terms "the BBC's pop-history show" If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home. Evidently the only people permitted to refer to themselves as doctor are those who kiss Kevin's boo-boos and allow him to take a lollypop from the jar.

Naturally it's not that Maher is just bothered about the doctor thing: he has another axe to grind with her and just lampoons her obvious self-importance as a side-swipe. To show that he is no mere sneering oik, however, he does let drop that he is quite au fait with this education business himself and has an M.A. ... but naturally (being the sort of person who sets these gew-gaws at a clear-sighted estimation of their importance) he got over that some years ago and is no longer clinging to it.

Let's just compare those two qualifications then, shall we?

Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. "She's also a winner of the Royal Historical Society's Frampton Prize, a visiting professor at Kingston University, and one of the few beardless Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries." (God help us ... even Sordel is beginning to go off her!) She is the author of several books about history and her doctoral thesis was written on a subject in the history of architecture.

One might almost think that she introduces herself on her programme as "doctor" to reassure the audience that, unlike many people who present programmes on television, she is actually qualified to speak on her subject with authority. (And let's just leave on one side the additional defence that she was probably encouraged to style herself so by the BBC programme-makers.)

Now, Kevin Maher.

He may not have written his biog on The Times website, but he might have at least proofread it: "Kevin has been a film editor forThe Face magazine, a film pundit for The Big Breakfast, and a film researcher for Channel 4. He now writes about film, because he can" [sic]

Exactly what he "can" is left unsaid, or at least unpunctuated, but at least we have discovered that film is Kevin's metier.

Well, Film Studies is perhaps not the most elevated of academic subject ... but we should certainly congratulate Kevin on sticking to what he loves and making a career of it. A Masters degree is, after all, still a Masters degree and Film Studies need fear no bullying from the likes of Architectural History.

Except Kevin's Masters dissertation is not in Film Studies. Its title - as he mentions in his column - is "Beyond Good and Evil: A Post-Feminist Analysis of Charlotte Brontë's Villette With Respect to Nietzsche". [sic]

Does it perchance become crystal clear why Maher is so opposed to academic willy-waving when he has no relevant qualifications in the field in which he writes? (And this despite the fact that there must be suitably-qualified writers queuing around the block at all nearby Job Centres.)

Moreover, those schooled in reading dissertation titles will be ready to set at nought Kevin's endeavours with even more zeal than he himself modestly brings to bear. A dissertation advancing a "post-feminist" analysis reading one novel by Brontë (1816-55) in the light of the student's almost certainly superficial acquaintance with the work of Nietzsche (1844-1900) ... that's basically university code for "here's a load of crap I made up to look interesting to girls".

A show of modesty when one has so much to be modest about is scarcely virtuous, Mister Maher.

Hard Times for Dickens

It must be a very slow day at the offices of The Times (and, for that matter, at Sordel Villas) since they've decided to devote an entire article to the decline in readership for the works of Charles Dickens.

Claire Tomalin (whom, probably quite unjustly, Sordel can only imagine as a Miss Flite character, poring over her clippings and promising a large colony of domesticated cats their liberation on the day that the royalties come in on her biography) has popped up to complain that young people have destroyed their attention span by watching television and playing videogames and are therefore incapable of sitting still long enough to sup at the whiskery nipple of her favourite author.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity." So says Claire, but she does not tell us which of those two things is a pity.

What she does tell us is the reasons for reading Dickens in the first place. For example: "You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant — the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament, how the country is run by Old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Of course, if you want to know about any of those things, you could just read about them in some august periodical of the day (such as ... The Times) for, though far-sighted, Dickens did not actually know more details about those matters as they concern 21st Century Britain than Wikipedia. Equally, it might be felt that the little toerags have whittled their attention span to the point at which they could only tolerate a column-inch of newsprint. Is it strictly necessary to read a six hundred page novel for the benefits to the young in terms of their awareness of current affairs?

What else have you got, Claire?

"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the ‘unimportant’ and ‘peripheral’ people were just as interesting to write about as ‘great’ people."

Do we really need Dickens to make this point today when we have Eastenders? Surely you were only droning on a minute ago about the country being run by Old Etonians ... it seems to me that you are the one with a disproportionate interest in 'great' people ... but, pray, tell me more.

"He has gone on entertaining people since the 1830s and his characters' names are known all over the world."

... and his reputation is thus surely safe without being read by the lovable ragamuffins of today ..?

Sorry, Sordel's attention span just came down like the blade of the guillotine upon Sydney's Carton's neck. Even a nutshell is proving tiresomely protracted these days.

My point, though, would have been this: there is nothing innately laudable about bringing up the young to read Dickens. Dickens is actually good. Where the work would be required would be ... to get someone to read a biography of Dickens.

Or was that her concern all along?

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.

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.