Ecuador the recursive

Notice anything odd about the flag of Ecuador?

Apart from the busyness of the design, that is, and the now dodgy associations of the fasces. To be fair, there are a lot of cluttered flag designs featuring a coat of arms, and Ecuador's isn't the only coat of arms to still feature a fasces - there's one on Watford Borough Council's coat of arms, too. 

Watford Borough Coat of arms (image credit Heraldry Wiki contributor Knorrepoes)

 

Spooky coincidence; the fasces-bearing arms of Watford Borough Council were granted in October 1922, the very same year and month when Mussolini marched on Rome and then took power in Italy.

Anyway, back to Ecuador's flag, and the oddest thing about it (in my opinion). Look at the coat of arms in the middle.

The odd thing isn't the condor on top, the fasces on the bottom or the shield (?) depicting a sun, mountain, river and ship in the middle. It's what flanks the design; halberds from which are draped ... Ecuadorian flags. It's a flag containing little copies of itself. A recursive flag. A bit like the Droste effect, only not quite, with more than one small copy.

I'm now idly wondering whether there are any other flags which contain images of themselves. I think there probably must be some (although not necessarily national flags). My very quick web search hasn't turned any up, although it did come up with some recursive flags identified by Redditor and vexillology enthusiast Cawren. The trouble is, Cawren's definition of recursive wasn't quite what I was looking for; the flags cited are ones where you can zoom in infinitely, keeping the same aspect ratio and the flag will stay the same, i.e. a very boring fractal, as illustrated below.

 

But it's flags which literally contain pictures of themselves that I'd like to see and some time when I have more time and energy I'll devote more than a couple of minutes to looking for more examples. Or maybe I won't. Who knows?

 

Watch this space. Or don't.

 

Anyhow for no other reason than it seems appropriate, here's my favourite remix of that 1997 banger Ecuador, originally a hit for the DJ and record production team Sash!* (it got to number one in Flanders, Romania and Scotland). 

 

Enjoy.

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*I should point out, for those too young or old to be aware, that the exclamation mark is part of Sash!'s name, like Westward Ho! But the asterisk isn't. Obviously.

Secrets and spies

So the Pentagon leaker, turns out to have been (apparently) an immature nerd trying just to impress a bunch of teenage boys with his edgelord antics,* rather than a guy who sold secrets for money, or a Philby/Maclean-style sleeper agent recruited by ideological fellow travellers from abroad.

The aspect I find more interesting than the confused motivations of a messed-up 21 year old was raised in this piece by Daniel Drezner. Drezner lists the material that we know has been leaked and concludes that it seems pretty "meh":

You know what? I’m not seeing much in these reports that I find particularly surprising or shocking. All of these assessments mirror the takes one would get on each of these questions from analysts with zero access to classified intelligence.

In other words, the Kremlin could have deduced most of what Teixeira leaked from open source intelligence (OSINT), so having a mole in the other side's camp doesn't necessarily give an opponent that big an edge.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has reacted to the leaks by reposting a piece he wrote in 2003, in which argues that the effectiveness of spies and spying in general is very much over-rated.

 

The basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. If the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another.

The biggest problem isn't, though, that spying is mostly ineffective, but that it provides the justification for having an intrusive intelligence apparatus which ends up being deployed against the state's own citizens rather than against hostile foreign powers:

The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents.

Quiggin's critique of intelligence services over reach seems as relevant to me now as it was when he wrote it in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps it's even more relevant now when the organs of the state are partnering up with hugely well-resourced surveillance capitalists to keep an ever closer watch on their own citizens.

*If Teixeira had been a 51 year old billionaire, rather than a 21 year old national guard, he could have just bought Twitter to impress his teenage fanboys.