Rants Archive 2007
What's Another Year?
So what's changed since the end of 2006?
Everything, and yet nothing.
On the home front, if anyone was sufficiently deluded to believe that the departure of The Great Deceiver from offfice in the middle of the year was going to mean a new era of openness, inclusivity and intelligence from government, then even the most hoodwinked of them should by now have tumbled to it. How anyone could seriously think that replacing that grinning, self-righteous bastard with the man who had sat at his side for a decade was going to change anything for the better is quite beyond comprehension.
And so, indeed, it has proven. The same craven capitulation to the agenda of a foreign power (albeit expressed now more with a rueful scowl than a puppy-like simper), the same oiling up to the mega-rich for money in return for power, the same refusal to see economic justice as not merely sound policy but as a moral imperative, the same blaming of the victims for the crimes committed against them, and the same obsession with their own secrecy whilst wishing to deprive us of even our most fundamental right to privacy.
And all this without even the thin veneer of competence which the spin doctors of the previous régime managed to project, however risibly.
And so our society falls further and further apart: the gap between the rich and the rest of us widens by the day; corporations are allowed to use every dodge in the book to avoid their responsibilities, whilst the most minor infractions of the rules by those without money or clout are punished by ever more extreme and vindictive sanctions; if you can't afford to employ a lobbying company, the State will not hear your voice, however loud your scream of anguish; billions of pounds of our money are thrown into the laps of management consultants and private corporations so that they can bank the largesse in tax-dodge paradises whilst exporting jobs to low-wage markets in Asia and eastern Europe. And the only thing the State can think about is how to control, even to the extent of giving the police effectively a licence to murder with impunity.
Further afield, the forthcoming presidential election in the US is a cause for gloom. The complete ethical corruption of the process must now be obvious to anyone who cares to think beyond the next commercial break. The Repugnicons are trying to find someone who is Bush-but-not-Bush, i.e. folksy but with a small degree of intelligence. And if they're a religious nut, it'd help. Meanwhile the Dimocraps, having completely squandered the mandate they were given a year ago to stop Bush's wars - instead of which they have further enabled them by voting through the budgets for them, whilst at the same time blocking any attempt to impeach Bush and his ventriloquist - are dividing up in support of two equally unattractive candidates, neither of whom have anything much that the people of war-psychotic, sub-prime, outsourced America want to hear. The Bland leading the Bland. And no doubt, when the turnout for the election turns out once again to be below 50%, the professional political and pundit classes who have encouraged a situation whereby no-one who has anything worth saying can be allowed to succeed will be wringing their hands and proclaiming that there's a Crisis For Democracy, and that it's the fault of The People rather than a machine which is broken beyond repair or redemption (much as they are doing here, in fact).
There are small signs of hope, in that more and more people are getting wise to the ever-closer relationship between governments and corporations. However, this is far from being a mass phenomenon, and so the populace at large can easily be diverted from what matters by manufactured scandals involving soap stars or other nobodies, or by carefully-stoked campaigns of prejudice and vituperation against a convenient alien scapegoat.
Happy new year...
Guilty, But Unpunished
I'm still not sure that I understand this.
- Two armed officers (identifiable only by their Police baseball caps) run on to an underground train
- They force an unarmed young man back into his seat while he is being completely restrained by another police officer
- They fire seven shots into his head at point-blank range
- All this in front of a carriage full of witnesses
- The police then knowingly lie to the media and the public about the whole thing
- The prosecuting authorities decide that there isn't anough evidence to bring charges even of manslaughter against the perpetrators, but that they will prosecute the force for breaches of health and safety regulations
- At the trial, the police's version of events is shown to be a total load of bollocks, designed to malign the victim and cover their own arses
- The police are found to be as guilty as a fox in a henhouse and heavily fined (a fine which will be paid by the taxpayers of London)
- And still the people directly responsible will not be brought to account, nor even required to resign. Commissioner Blair (what is it with self-righteous incompetents who have that surname?) has been given the full support of Jacqui Smith (thus proving that the first ever female Home Secretary is perfectly capable - of being as big an illiberal thug as her male predecessors) and Ken Livingstone (proving that there is nothing quite as dangerous as a poacher turned gamekeeper). Cressida Dick was promoted, and the killers are still on the streets and (no doubt) armed.
---- me pink!
I can say no more. Septicisle, speak for me.
Fighting Back
I'm pleased to report that Craig Murray is back (at a slightly different location) and already kicking some righteous buttock.
In particular, take a look at this, his Address at his Installation as Rector of the University of Dundee. In it, he shares his views as to what universities should really be about, rather than what they have become in the last twenty years - a means of turning out suitable drones for 'commerce'. Indeed, his views could also apply to the whole of our education system, which has become geared almost solely to turning out 'product' for corporate interests and the politicians and administrators down whose Y-fronts those same corporations have their hot, sticky hands, ready to twist should those decision-makers ever consider pursuing any genuinely progressive policies.
It is no doubt for this reason (along with the fact that Murray had some caustic things to say about the people who have been running Dundee in recent times) that the University has refused to publish the text of his speech because they "do not agree with it". In this way, they have merely reinforced Murray's point.
The Parochial Metropolitans
A few years ago on this site, I said:
"In my experience, no-one is quite as provincial (or as shallow) as the English metropolitan reviewer, especially when the subject of the review comes from one of England's subject cultures. Unless it conforms to a clear set of stereotypes, which obviates the need for the critic to actually think for him- or herself, then it may safely be patronised, dismissed or (in the hands of a truly versatile reviewer) both."
I have now been provided with more collateral for this view.
Seachd (or, to give it it's English title, The Inaccesible Pinnacle) is a film shot on the Scottish isle of Skye, which tells of an old man relating a series of stories to his grandchildren. Yes, it's a fantasy movie, of the sort which seem to be all the rage at the moment, so you would think this would stand substantially in its favour.
It has, however, one pertinent fact standing 'against' it:
It's in Gaelic.
This seems to have been sufficient in the eyes and minds of the self-styled British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to prevent them from recommending it for nomination to the Best Foreign Language film in the next Oscars.
BAFTA is the body (or is it corpse?) which has the power to decide what film (if any) to submit for that particular award. A sub-committee (and doesn't the blood turn to ice when you come across that word?) decided (on the basis of watching a DVD of it, for goodness sake!) that both Seachd and a Welsh film under consideration "didn't merit going forward" as they were not "outstanding".
(This last 'reason' is particularly amusing when you see the vast savannahs of shite which make up the nominations for BAFTA's own awards year after dross-laden year)
So, it's not "outstanding" enough for you, is it dahlings? How about these reviews for you?:
- "Dramatic, funny and spectacular" - The List
- "Tender, graceful" - The Herald
- "Breathtaking" - BBC
- "Glows with warmth and humanity" - The Observer
And just how do BAFTA square their decision with the fact that the film won strong reviews at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and that the film has been or will be screened at major festivals in Rome and Finland soon?
OK, I haven't seen the film. But I'd like to, and this would have been the chance for people around the world to be made aware of it. Just think: a chance for a widely-praised film to garner major international attention, and BAFTA fucked it all up with their customary purblind metrocentric arrogance. They might as well rename their little group PLAFTA (the Parochial Luvvies And Fatuous Twonks Association). Seachd's producer, Chris Young, has resigned from the 'Academy' in protest, and the US Academy itself has called BAFTA's decision into question.
The message from this seems quite clear to me: in the eyes of the incestuous art-cliques within the charmed circle of the M25, if it's not in English (and especially if it's not from England either) you have to be twice as good to get their approval. It is time that film-makers (and artists in general) in Scotland and Wales stopped trying to gain the plaudits of such ignorant metropolitan ignoramuses and aim to impress the real world instead.
Seachd's website is here.
Up They Pop Again
Rather like that embarrassing turd which simply refuses to go round the bend no matter how often you flush it, here come Uzbek crook Alisher Usmanov and his team of twisted briefs once more.
Having tried to silence those who would point out that Arsenal's expected new sugar daddy has a less-than-sweet past, and having indulged a variety of corporate media hacks in what they called a 'charm offensive' (as ever, they got it half right), Schi**ings are now threatening the Indymedia UK site. See here for the details, and spread the word.
(Thanks to Chicken Yoghurt for the latest alert).
Caught Up
There's no list of non-ARRIVAls this week.
There was one which didn't show up (and on Monday morning at that!), but these things happen and I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being vindictive about it.
Bloggers' Revenge!
Mike Power has an
animated video about the blogging world's reaction to the Usmanov
capers. Don't blink at about 1:32 in, otherwise you'll miss me going
through.
(I wonder how he came up with that name for his blog....? 
)
This Week's Non-ARRIVAls!
Yes! It's time for the first installment of the new and (almost
certainly) regular feature chronicling my adventures with an unreliable
bus company.
| Day |
Date |
Service |
Direction |
Time |
|
| Tuesday |
25/09/07 |
12 |
Brymbo-Wrexham |
0733 |
No
show |
| Wednesday |
26/09/07 |
12 |
Brymbo-Wrexham |
0723 |
No
show |
| Thursday |
27/09/07 |
12 |
Brymbo-Wrexham |
0823 |
No
show |
| Friday |
28/09/07 |
12 |
Brymbo-Wrexham |
0723 |
No
show |
'Heads Up
Just to report that Tim Ireland's Bloggerheads site is back
up in temporary form, but with an interesting summary of the events of
the past week.
Craig Murray's site remains down for the time being, alas.
What's Black And White And Yellow Right Through?
Answer: the UK press.
One might have hoped that, even in these degenerate times, the
threat to freedom of speech engendered by the likes of crooked Uzbek
businessmen and their overpaid briefs would have the Great British
Newspaper thundering about the importance of the Freedom Of The Press™
and how attempts to curtail it should be fought against with all the
weaponry that a free society has at its disposal.
So it was that I spent a fair few minutes over the weekend scouring
the websites of our most famous (and notorious) newspapers for their
reaction to Usmanov's war on the truth.
Only to find...well, nothing, really. The massed ranks of
Fleet Street's finest were almost totally mute. The BBC and ITN didn't
mention it at all; nor did the Express, the Telegraph,
the Independent (sic), the Mirror or even the Sun.
The Guardian and the Times referred to it only in
tangential terms, treating it simply as if the worst thing Schillings
had done was to inconvenience Boris Johnson. The Mail had only
an archived story from earlier this month which at least had the virtue
of talking about Usmanov's original threat to Craig Murray.
Quite remarkable. A story of this nature almost totally ignored by
every news media outlet in the country. It may be as I said in my
previous post, that Usmanov and his shysters have put the frighteners
on them all, but surely one of them might have broken ranks to
tell the bastard "We publish; you be damned!"? But no, the
streak of cowardice clearly runs right through them.
The next time you hear newspaper hacks or editors trumpeting about
the importance of The Freedom Of The Press™ when they've been brought
to book about their coverage of smackhead popsters or lamp-post
supermodels, ask them where they were this last weekend. If possible,
get the exact location of the rock they were hiding under.
An Equation Of Thuggery
Right, pay attention, class!
Consider the following equation:
a + b = c
If I now tell you that a stands for a crooked and thuggish
Uzbek oligarch, and b stands for a firm of shysters in London,
then what is c?
If you get the answer that c = censorship, award
yourself a gold star.
The oligarch is a man called Alisher Usmanov. His current claims to
attention are that a) he is bidding to take over Arsenal Football Club,
and b) he has just paid more than £20million for the art
collection of the late Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch.
However, there are other things for which the dear chap is known.
And he would very much prefer that as few people get to hear about them
as possible.
Like his criminal convictions for fraud and tax-dodging, for
example; or his close alliance with the infamous dissident-boiling and
democrat-torturing Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov (a man so thoroughly
evil that even the Bush régime has been forced to distance
itself from their former ally), for another.
These facts (not merely allegations, note: the truth is out there)
have been revealed by a number of sources, not least of whom is Craig
Murray who, as former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, is in a better
position than most to comment.
And comment he has, on his own website and elsewhere. This has led
to Usmanov getting a high-fee firm of London libel lawyers called
Schillings to send threatening letters hither and yon (including to
websites run by Arsenal fans) ordering them (ordering them, if
you please!) to remove any material which they deem defamatory to their
latest meal-ticket.
Many have been forced by circumstances to comply with Schillings'
threat. Craig Murray, however, is made of sterner stuff. He contacted
Schillings to give them the address of his own lawyer, inviting them to
send any writ for defamation to them, so he could have his day in court.
Schillings, surprisingly for a firm who seemed to be so sure of
their ground, did not do this. Instead, they sent a threatening letter
to Fasthosts, the company which hosts Craig Murray's website, demanding
that the 'defamatory' material be removed.
To their eternal disgrace, Fasthosts complied immediately, and at
the time of writing, Craig Murray's website
remains missing, believed wiped.
I'll stress again: Schillings merely claim that the
material is defamatory; they have made no attempt to bring any
actual court cases against the people who have made the allegations
against Usmanov. That Fasthosts should have pulled the plug after
nothing more than a steaming pile of horse-shit from these shysters
indicates that a) Fasthosts are cowards who should not be allowed to
host anything more controversial than a knitting circle, and b) the
libel laws in this country are a complete and utter mess which need
urgent, radical reform.
If you go to Fasthosts' website (and I can't say I'd see the point
anymore), you'll find a press release from late July entitled "Fasthosts
keeps websites online amidst severe weather". I don't suppose
they'll now issue one called "Fasthosts pull websites on orders of
bullshitting lawyers".
It isn't just Craig Murray's website which has gone, either. Other
political websites have been 'disappeared' by Fasthosts, seemingly on
the grounds that they were hosted on the same server and had the same
site administrator as Murray's (and Tim Ireland's Bloggerheads
site, which was also the subject of Usmanov/Schillings' attentions).
Among them is the home site of the Tory MP and London mayoral candidate
Boris Johnson. All gone.
Schillings had earlier sent the same sort of threats to a number of
major press and broadcast news organisations in the UK, threatening
them with action if they dared annoy their paymaster. To their immense
discredit, too, those thrusting organs of public enquiry all went limp,
which is why you will not see any coverage of Usmanov's criminality in
a British newspaper or on radio or television.
I'm delighted to report, however, that the 'blogosphere' (and a
rectal rocket for the person who dreamed that word up!) has reacted
with great speed, aplomb and vehemence. Usmanov quite clearly
understands no more about 'freedom' than he does about 'business
ethics', and calling in the briefs to engage in a dick-waving exercise
on his behalf is almost certain to leave him grabbed by the short
hairs. There is no way he would be able to take libel action, because
then all of the facts about his conduct would be dragged out in a court
case where he would be under oath to tell the truth.
Wedges can have very thin ends indeed. The way that bloggers from
all parts of the political/ideological spectrum are standing together
on this issue is, to say the least, encouraging.
This Judge is happy to join the effort, in whatever small way he
can. So, I can tell you that a copy of the main article which has got
Usmanov steaming can (for the time being at least) be found here.
Beat This!
I've just opened a carton of eggs. On the inside of the lid, it
says:
Allergy advice: Contains egg.
Where the hell are we in this world?
Do we really have to guard our society against people who are
sufficiently stupid to think that eggs don't contain egg? And
what might these benighted folk think eggs do contain?
Marzipan? Kevlar? A minor suburb of Budapest?
This is what happens when you get a litigious society: everyone has
got to cover every possible eventuality, including that of unstifled
human imbecility. Whatever happened to caveat emptor?
In his novel The Number Of The Beast, Robert A. Heinlein
gives a brief description of life in a parallel-universe analogue of
our world. In it, 1965 appears in the history books as "The Year
They Hanged The Lawyers". I can't help but wonder if we missed
something there...
Struck Out
I love baseball.
This is not an easy thing to do when you live on this side of the
Atlantic. After all, the game at its topmost level is played in the
Americas, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. So there's little if anything about
the sport in our wonderfully self-centred media.
So, how did I get into it in the first place?
Back in the early 1980s, when I was at university, I acquired a
pen-friend called Susan, who lived in Minneapolis. We corresponded for
a year or so, then lost contact with each other.
At about the same time, Channel 4 opened up. Part of the scheduling
of the new station was weekly highlights from the National Football
League. I suppose it was the novelty value of it which led me to watch
every Sunday evening. What's more, once I'd graduated from University
to a life of unemployment, I used to listen late into Sunday and Monday
nights to the US Armed Forced Network (AFN), broadcasting on medium
wave out of what was then West Germany, who would relay live broadcasts
of the games.
The NFL season in those days was a bit shorter than it is now, and
once the Superbowl was done and dusted in January there was nothing to
listen to. I didn't find listening to (ice) hockey on the radio very
interesting, and I found basketball completely boring (something about
too many people in too small a space, I think), although I did have an
amusing moment with it once. I was tuning along the medium wave band
late one night, desperate for entertainment, when suddenly I heard a
male American voice exclaiming excitedly:
"Robinson penetrating; he puts it up and in!"
My eyebrows levitated for a moment before realising that this was
the NBA I was listening to.
Anyway, I was tuning around again one late night in July 1987, when
I came across what was clearly another sport entirely.
What is was, was baseball.
I'd seen baseball before. ITV's World Of Sport
programme used to show highly-condensed highlights of the World Series
every year, although never without that sort of smug condescension
which they also used for monster trucks and tractor racing, i.e. "These
Yanks, eh? This is what they call sport, is it?".
But I'd never heard baseball before, and I sat there in a form
of bemusement, hearing all this strange terminology coming out of the
mouths of the commentators. Having nothing better to do, I listened on
in the same sort of drifting way one might listen to a piece of
experimental music; certainly, it made about as much sense to me as
some of Stockhausen's wilder works.
What became apparent as the night wore on, however, was that I had
somehow picked up more knowledge than I knew I had. OK, much of the
technical language was opaque to me (what was a 'bunt'? what
did it mean when the guy behind the microphone said that the defense
'had a shift on'? Were they all wearing it?), but knowing the
basic shape of the playing area, terms like 'left field' and 'first
base' were familiar enough, and I could understand enough to listen on.
Have you ever had one of those life experiences which felt like a
door opening? Well, my curiousity well and truly aroused, I listened
again the next night, and every night I reasonably could bearing in
mind the 5-8 hour time difference.
This was halfway through the 1987 season, and I soon realised that
in order to make it really interesting, I'd have to choose a
team to follow. Although I had long since lost contact with Susan by
this time, I had supported the Minnesota Vikings when I'd been
interested in the NFL, so it made sense for a number of reasons to
transfer my loyalty to the state's Major League Baseball team, the
Twins.
This turned out to be a good move in more than one sense. That
year, the Twins reached the World Series for the first time in 22
years, and it proved to be a real see-saw affair against St Louis, with
every game going with home-field advantage. As it was the American
League team's turn to host four of the seven games, this was enough to
give the Twins the series.
I don't remember much about that series, although I'm pretty sure I
listened to every game, or as much of it as I could when propagation
conditions meant that either the signal from AFN faded in and out at
the most annoyingly inconvenient moments, or the signal was simply
unlistenable.
Three mediocre years of Twins baseball followed, although I
listened to a lot of games on AFN and picked up not only an adequate
working knowledge of the game, but something akin to a passion for it,
having by now all but left the meat-heads of the NFL behind.
1991 was a season in which little was expected of the Twins,
especially has they had finished with the worst record in the American
League the year before. Somehow, however, they got it all together and
reached the World Series again. This time I know that I
listened to every game, right up to that remarkable seventh one (the
series having gone with home-field advantage yet again), when Jack
Morris pitched a game for the ages to shut out a potent Atlanta
line-up. It was about 4:30am here when I sat upright in my bed in the
darkness of an October morning with tears in my eyes as Gene Larkin's
single in the bottom of the tenth inning brought Dan Gladden in for the
only run of the game. Days of glory!
Following the game then started to become difficult. I was now in
full-time work, so late nights were at a premium (I'd taken a few days
off to listen to the World Series). Moreover, with the fall of the
Soviet bloc, AFN reduced the power of its transmissions from Germany,
meaning that its signal had a constant battle with a high-power station
in Spain. It usually lost.
Then, just in time for the 1997 season, Channel Five (as it was
then called) opened up and started showing live games late on Sunday
and Wednesday nights. Once again, I could follow the game properly,
instead of just keeping an eye out for the Twins' scores in The
Guardian and wondering where they were in the standings.
The time difference was still a problem, of course, so I ended up
taping Channel Five's output and watching it the following evening.
Then, in 2001, I got online and it became easier still to follow
the game day by day. I also found the Usenet group for the
Twins and one of the regulars there, who goes by the name of 'AnnE
Austin', was able by one of those wonders of modern communication to
put me back in touch with Susan after a gap of twenty years.
The internet meant I could actually watch baseball on a daily basis
as well, through Major League Baseball's own site. I started watching
its Daily Rewind highlights package every day in order to keep
up with what was going on. Especially useful since I junked my
television set last year.
This is where you find out exactly why this piece is on the
Rants page, folks!
Last Tuesday morning, before going to work, I saw the headline on
the BBC News site which said that Barry Bonds had finally broken the
all-time home run record. So I went straight to mlb.com and watched the video of it,
intending to catch the rest of the coverage when I got home from work.
So, that evening, after my tea and a much-needed nap, I fired up
the PC and went back to mlb.com to catch all the news surrounding the
record, and to watch The Daily Rewind as usual...
...only to find that I couldn't anymore.
Without any advance warning or notice, during Tuesday MLB replaced
the Windows Media streams I had previously watched with a different
video format. This meant that I would have to download something called
Microsoft Silverlight in order to watch anything.
Except that Silverlight won't run on Windows 98. It won't
run on Windows Me either. Nor on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server -
at least not yet. It'll only run on the very latest version of the
MacOS; and if you're running any version of Linux, forget it. And they
have the nerve to promote Silverlight as a 'cross-platform
plugin'!
This means that I have been completely shut out of (*) MLB's videos.
(I accidentally typed "shit out of" there at first (as in
'luck'). Appropriate enough, all things considered).
I sent a snotty e-mail off to them, but haven't received any kind
of reply five days later. I've no doubt that, were they to deign to
answer my request for the restoration of the Windows Media streams,
they would use all sorts of bollocks-speak about "enhancing the
viewing experience" and "delivering expanded and interactive
coverage", or some such, so perhaps it's just as well that I've had
nothing back from them. Homicidal rages can be dangerous in a man of
middle age whose health is not so much 'rude' as 'somewhat impolite'.
"So what?", you might say. "Technology moves on, doesn't
it?". Yep, it sure does, but that's not the whole of what's
happening here.
Certainly this is another manifestation of fashionable neophilia. I
mean, Silverlight isn't even the finished article yet: it's a
Release Candidate program. Of course, the web gurus and self-appointed
arbiters of what the Web should be absolutely adore it. Blog
after blog endorses this mighty leap forward in online media provision,
without a single word or thought about those of us who are excluded by
the change.
And yet, despite its incomplete state, organisations such as MLB
have rushed into using it already, hurtling up Bill Gates' arse with
the speed of a Randy Johnson fast ball. Why?
Well, it seems that it makes it easier for 'rights-holders' to hang
on to their 'content' for one thing. The techniques for ripping and
saving Windows Media streams are well enough known to enough people to
cause night-sweats and soiled linen to corporate lawyers and
accountants. So, let's have a brand new program which makes it more
difficult to do that, and to hell with whoever else it may
inconvenience!
Again, you might say, "So what? Why don't you upgrade to XP, or
even Vista?"
Well, for one thing, although I could afford a new system - and
have been giving serious thought to getting one for some time, if only
to act as a backup to my current setup - I deeply resent being forced
into doing so by some corporation's consideration solely of its own
well-being. When someone tries to push me, I become determined not to be
pushed, and I get stubborn as well as resentful. My current PC still
works wonderfully well after six years, and I see replacing it before
its expiry as wasteful. It's the way I was brought up, which is why the
avarice and deliberate conspicuous consumption of recent years makes me
want to puke.
(Besides which, I certainly wouldn't get a machine with Vista on
it? have you seen the End User License Agreement? It allows Macroshaft
to cripple your PC if one of their robots thinks you're not running
kosher software.)
I haven't asked mlb.com to remove Silverlight; just asked
it to continue to run the Windows Media streams in parallel for those
of us who are not running, cannot run or will not run the
operating systems required for using it. Given the amount of money made
in and by Major League Baseball nowadays, I don't think it's a lot to
ask.
It won't happen, of course. For all their yap about 'choice' and
'customer service', we'll get what the corporations want us to have.
So, it looks like my baseball-watching days are over for now. Gee,
thanks MLB! You've just struck out!
Spanish Practices, or F**k Their Royals, Too!
Another censorship thing happening, folks.
The Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves responded to a
recent Spanish government campaign which would mean that Spanish
couples would be paid 2 500 Euros for each child they produce, with a
front-page cartoon showing Crown Prince Felipe fucking his wife, while
saying that sex was the closest he would ever come to working.
The Castilian State, which still retains many of the attitudes of
the bloody forty-year dictatorship of Franco, has now ordered the
seizure of all copies of the magazine, claiming that it "...insults
the royal family".
The judge who granted the order, Juan del Olmo, is a noted
supporter of the Castilian State's repressive attitudes, particularly
when it comes to suppressing the freedom of the Basques to advocate
their national autonomy, however peaceably. Many Basque activists have
found themselves in Spanish prisons for long periods of time (and
facing serious maltreatment) as a result of the biased decisions of del
Olmo and his colleagues. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that del
Olmo regards freedom of speech as something which should only apply
when it agrees with his prejudices.
In a small attempt to prevent this act of censorship from
succeeding, I here reproduce the 'offending' cartoon.
Luchen, amigos, por la libertad de expresión!
Bus-t
I'm one of the fourteen or so people remaining who don't drive.
There are reasons for this. When I was about seventeen, and would
have liked to have learned, I didn't have the money. Now, although I
have the money, I no longer have the inclination. There are enough
freaking idiots behind the wheel as it is, without adding one more to
their number: one, moreover, with a limited attention span.
On the whole, I'm quite content with this. It's probably cheaper,
and certainly more ecologically-minded. But it does leave you at the
mercy of the people who run public transport in this country, and my
experiences of the last two days have made me wonder ever so slightly
whether I'm on the wrong track...or perhaps I should say the wrong
route.
Yesterday, I came out of work at 4pm as usual, to await the bus
which was due at about 4:09.
At 4:15, I was still waiting. I realised that it wasn't going to
turn up.
The next bus was due at 4:22, but followed a slightly different
route. This meant walking a couple of hundred yards to the next stop.
So, that's what I did.
4:22 came and went. As did 4:25, 4:30 and 4:35, with no sign of a
bus of any description.
Finally, at 4:39, it arrived. And, of course, because the two buses
before it hadn't put in an appearance, it was standing room only,
despite it being a 40-odd seater.
So, I had to stand for it. Well, I had to stand. For about
two miles. On a route not known for long straight stretches.
What made it worse still was that it was the occasion of another
(mercifully) brief encounter with The Little Cow (see the middle
section of Out Of Control on 27/05/07 for
our previous meeting). I managed to keep pretty much at a distance from
her this time, although that didn't stop me wanting to slap her one
again. Just on general principles, you understand.
I got home just before 5pm. It had taken me an hour to go four
miles.
Today, I finished at 4pm again, and went to wait for the 4:09.
Which again proved conspicuous by its absence.
This time, I didn't bother walking to the next stop once it became
obvious that it wasn't going to turn up. I walked a mile into town,
through yet more of the pissing rain which has made this summer, in
weather terms, just about the worst I can remember.
I saw the 4:30 going by, and I think TLC was on it. There was no
way in which I was going to place myself in the way of aggro (and
temptation) again.
(I'm told that I'm not the only one she has targeted in that way,
which makes me feel slightly better - at least I know it's not anything
to do with my own actual or perceived peculiarities which set her off)
I never saw the 4:40, despite the fact that I was walking along the
route, so I suspect that didn't run either.
I got to the bus station shortly before the 4:50 arrived. There
were, as you can imagine, quite a few people waiting. When it pulled
in, it turned out to be a 27-seater, and it was jam-packed before it
left. I decided I couldn't face yet another two miles or more
of hanging on to a metal pole for dear life, so I let it go. I finally
caught the 5pm, which was a few minutes late (I can live with that -
the traffic is quite bad at that hour), and - having, you'll recall,
left work at 4pm - I got home at 5:30.
After Thursday's débâcle, I sent a snotty
e-mail to the bus company (Arriva), asking what the hell they were
doing not running buses during peak times. It's one of the largest bus
companies in Europe: surely in the case of breakdowns they had
vehicles and/or drivers in reserve?
Add to this the fact that the 7:23am bus into work hasn't run for
three successive days, and you wonder what's going on with them. As if
they cared, of course.
I've no great hopes of a reply. Eighteen months ago, they cut a
portion off the route altogether without any warning. My complaints
then went unanswered.
So, Arriva, this is for you. It sums up how lousy your service has
been this week.
Bought And Sold (Out)
I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that for most of us,
ethical shopping is simply impossible. Here's another example.
Just under a year ago, I
reported that I would no longer shop at Iceland because of the
company's decision to close a local distribution depot. Since the end
of September last, therefore, I have not darkened Iceland's door.
This left me in a small fix about where to get my frozen foods.
I found a nice shop called Cooltrader on the Island Green estate,
and so I've bought much of my frozen stuff (and other things besides)
there. A particular discovery was that of the scrummy ice-cream
chocolate mousse made by the German Bofrost company.
A few weeks ago, however, I noticed that they were stocking one or
two of Iceland's own-brand products.
I did some research and have found, to my dismay, that Cooltrader
is a subsidiary of...yep, Iceland.
I give up. I honestly do. Tomorrow, I'm going to Asda to fill my trolley
with Coca-Cola
and Nestlé
products, prior to buying a shit-load of shares in BAe Systems. I might even kick
a cripple in passing, just to be consistent...
P(l)ay Nicely, Now!
If you, Mr, Mrs and Ms UK Taxpayer, ever wondered how some of your
money is spent, I can give you an example.
As I've adverted to before, I work in a major branch of the home
civil service. On the Departmental intranet back in mid-April, I saw
this:
"Dealing With The Cultural Change Aspects Of Desk Sharing
The cultural change consultants supporting the move to desk
sharing are offering 2 types of support event, Preparation workshops
aimed at the individual and Etiquette workshops for teams."
(Note the inappropriate use of Capital Letters: always the sure
sign of the self-important Tit)
It appears that, in one of the Depratment's headquarters buildings,
things have come to such a pretty state that ten very senior members of
staff are having to share eight desks between them. Hence, presumably,
the need to train them. After all, we've only been doing it in the
'front-line' offices for, ooh, fifteen to twenty years now.
The Depratment has one of those 'feedback' mechanisms whereby you
can e-mail questions to the grands fromages, and they will
answer them...sometimes...
So, on April 18, I asked the following questions:
- What is a 'cultural change consultant', and what do they do?
- Are the consultants in this exercise in-house or brought in from
the private sector?
- If from the private sector, how can ‹name of Department here›
justify the cost at a time when front-line...activities are being
starved of resources...?
- Why are staff in ‹location of big-wigs' office› deemed
specially in need of 90-minute workshops on the subject?
- Are there plans to roll out similar support to local offices
where desk-sharing is far more prevalent, where space is far more at a
premium, where failures in implementation would be far more detrimental
to the Department's 'outcomes', and where no such support has (to my
knowledge) been offered to date?
That was April 18. By late May, I still hadn't had a reply, so I
resubmitted the questions.
Early July. Still no response. Perhaps even the Grand Masters Of
Obfuscation can't come up with a form of words for it.
I think it only fair, then, that I let you know that this
is one of the ways in which Your Tax Pounds Are At Work.
(This public service broadcast is dedicated to Neil Hiatt)
A Fond Farewell
I started to write a long, analytical piece about the reign of Emperor Tony The Mad, but I got bogged down half way through, and cataloguing all those lies, all that thuggishness and dishonesty, caused my blood pressure to rise so far I thought my elbows were going to explode.
So, for the moment at least, I'll just have to be content with a précis:
Time For A Logotomy
So this is to be the logo for the 2012 London Olympics:
Yes, that's right. £400 000 of our money handed over to an agency, and this is what they come up with.
Public reaction has been, to put it at its kindest, mixed. While there are some who think it is an insult, others take a different view, considering it to be an absolute fucking outrage.
They're all correct. I mean, look at the bloody thing! It's all jagged edges (perhaps to represent the bits of the new handy-dandy facilities which won't be finished in time), you can't see clearly what it's supposed to be (except, of course, a 'high concept'), and the colour schemes are enough to induce nausea in a four year old (if only because said four year old doesn't see why his design - done in crayon on the bit of cardboard his grandad's new shirt came with - was refused the commission).
Of course, those behind this mess are giving it everything in an attempt to bulldoze their lack of sense and taste through. Someone described by the BBC as 'a London 2012 spokesman' (although it turns out to be a spokeswoman) claimed, "Our emblem needs to be modern, bold, flexible...". I'm only surprised that she didn't call it "synergistically dynamic and diverse", seeing as she was in Marketing Bollocks mode. And Sebastian ('Lord') Coe, appointed as chief huckster for this Festival Of Shite, went so far as to say, "It's not a logo, it's a brand...".
Of course it is, Sebbie dear. It should be a brand. It would look good on the foreheads of whatever pretentious dorks designed and chose it.
Look at it again. Someone pointed out straight away that it looks like Lisa Simpson giving head. I'm not so sure. I think it's Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State at the DCMS (the Department of Craven Murdoch Servility), paying her favours to the wretch Blair for keeping her in a job light years beyond her competence for nearly a decade.
But, I suppose, it sums up Blairian Britain perfectly. The triumph of some bright-eyed young thing's idea of 'style' over meaning; the sneering in-your-face discordant glare; the idea that the new Great And The Good know best, with its arrogant 'complain as much as you like, you won't change our minds' attitude.
I prefer this, created by an anonymous correspondent to The Register:
Jesus H. Christ On A Segway!!
If you wonder why I'm an atheist, or why I bash god-botherers so much, just go here.
I can particularly recommend (chilling the blood, for the purposes of) the Comments sections. Seldom will one come across such a mass of twisted, ignorant and hateful material, even on the internet.
There are lighter moments to be had, though, albeit accidentally. So we read:
"I understand why Christians would get tired of confronting Stan on a regular basis.."
I'd also understand why Stan would be a bit pissed off with it as well.
Out Of Control
I've been debating with myself whether I should put this here, but over a week has gone by since the main incident described below, so I may well be safe by now.
First, a sort of prelude:
Two or three weeks ago, coming home from work on the bus, there was one of those little madams (about 14/15 years old) playing music on her mobile phone for all passengers to hear (whether they wanted to or not). Apart from the fact that this is anti-social in the extreme (a bus being not only a confined space, but a form of mobile captive audience), the - for want of a better word - music which comes out of phones always leads me to suspect that someone amongst the mental molluscs of the music 'biz' is trying to co-ordinate a Chipmunks revival.
When this happens, usually the bus driver does nothing. I think this is because most bus drivers hereabouts are men and are, as such, far too wide open to the possibility of false accusations being made at them by teenage girls: and even mere accusations are enough to destroy a man's career - or even life - in these hyper-hysterical days.
On this occasion, however, the driver was a woman in her thirties. She stopped the bus and ordered Mademoiselle to turn the noise off (which, it seems, she'd already had to do once before I got on). "I've turned it off!", whined the bitchlet. We set off again.
Scarcely fifty yards further on, Little Miss I-Can-Do-What-I-Like-And-You-Daren't-Stop-Me switched the racket back on again. Once more, the driver pulled in. She turned around from her seat and told the twerpette off in terms which were non-obscene, but nonetheless forceful and extensive.
The phone was switched off once again, and the only sound to be heard from then until Miss Selfish got off the bus two stops later (with, it goes without saying, a face like a smacked arse) was the silent hum of approval from the rest of us.
Now, the main act:
Just over a week ago, I had a hospital appointment after work. This meant catching a slightly later bus home than usual. When it arrived, it was almost full, but some loud adolescents at the back of the bus told me there was a seat up there. Like a fool, I accepted the invitation.
One of the gang (for such it clearly was) was a girl of about fifteen, who was sitting in the seat in front of mine. I'm pretty sure I'd had a run-in with her before a couple of years previously, when I'd had the temerity to tell her to shut up and stop making a noise on the bus.
Immediately, she turned around and started asking very personal and pointed questions in a very loud voice. I tried to parry them as best I could, but wit and repartee simply do not work with pond life.
Her friends were alternately egging her on and squirming with embarrassment from the fact that Madam was a) loud enough to be heard all over the bus, and b) in possession of an extensive working knowledge of those parts of the English language beginning with the letter 'f'.
The questioning became more vituperative and the insinuations (if so subtle a word could be used for what she was saying) became more intense.
Then, she snatched the glasses off my face and tried to put them on herself. I snatched them back. She then continued with her loud innuendo about what she imagined was my private life, then tried to grab my glasses again. I fended her off and held her by the wrist.
At this point she accused me (at full volume, of course) of being a "fucking paedo".
I wasn't feeling well in any case, but I was angry now as well. I detest bad behaviour in public by anyone, but by teenagers and children in particular.
I lost it.
I slapped her across her left cheek. The slap wasn't that hard, if only because I didn't have the room to get a good run up at the little cow.
It was the first time that I'd hit anyone in anger since my school days, some thirty years before.
She wasn't hurt. She wasn't even upset. I think 'mild surprise' might be the best description of her reaction. She moved to a seat across the aisle from me, and continued her flow of rhetoric unabashed until she got off about a quarter of a mile later. As she got off the bus, she was complaining volubly about my slapping her and that she'd "not dun nuffing".
(A couple of stops later, a little boy of about three or four years old got off, saying to his mother, "That lady wasn't nice", and when I got off, the driver responded to my customary "Cheers, mate." with a cheery "Thanks a lot!" I found myself hoping that he'd been looking in his mirror at just the right moment.)
What little joie de vivre I'd had earlier had completely evaporated, and I spent the evening half-expecting a loud knock on the door. Oh, I was sure that she didn't know where I live, that she was unlikely to report the incident (if only because there were far too many witnesses to her lousy behaviour), and that the threat to get her alleged father on to me was probably just that - a threat. But it made for a very uncomfortable and paranoid evening and weekend.
I'm not proud of what I did. I should have maintained a cool silence and just sat it out. I'm only human, alas.
Now, the coda:
Sitting here last night, a knock came on the door. I opened it, to find three trainee idiots, aged about eleven or twelve, standing there. One of them claimed to be looking for his cat, to which one of the others remarked that his friend was "looking for his pussy". They became nearly incontinent with mirth at this.
Well, I suppose I found that sort of thing funny when I was little, but they then ran off making other innuendos about homosexuality and paedophilia.
Well, examine the facts:
- I'm in my mid-forties
- I live alone
- I've never married
- I keep myself to myself
Of course I'm a pervert! With a life-history like that, I must be, mustn't I? Just like that poor woman in Newport was a few years ago. You remember, the one who had her house vandalised because the mob which did it was too fucking dumb to know the difference between 'paedophile' and 'paediatrician' (as if a paedophile would put a plaque on his wall advertising the fact!).
As the years go by, I become increasingly worried about what sort of 'society' we have now and will have in the future. We seem to be in a state of near-terminal breakdown, and the most obvious signs of it are in the behaviour of children and teenagers.
I'm not going to get misty-eyed about this. Every age has had to deal with similar issues. But I can't remember my generation ever behaving as badly, or with such a sense of untouchability, as they seem to do now.
(Note: this is a generalisation, of course. I'm talking about a minority of them, and quite a small minority. But a noticeable one nonetheless).
All sorts of fancy theories can be adduced to account for this: one may claim in mitigation that the parent(s) must go out to work in order to keep the family in the style to which it has become accustomed; it could be argued that the type of law-of-the-jungle capitalism we have suffered under for the last quarter of a century encourages aggressive behaviour; you can claim that the paucity of expectations of the Underclass (how dreadful a description of human beings that is!) leads to resentment which expresses itself in violence or resort to drugs (both legal and otherwise); you can even make a case that a diet rich in chemical additives has unhinged an entire generation (where have all these cases of ADHD come from?).
None of these will wash, I'm afraid, although they could all be making a contribution.
The problem, to my mind, is that there are too many parents nowadays are are unable or unwilling to control their offspring. In order for children to develop the self-discipline which is essential for us all to have a working society, the concept of discipline must first be inculcated in them, and the younger the better. When children have regard for the way their parents would react if they knew of bad behaviour on their (that is, the children's) part, then their conduct is likely to be more controlled, and more in keeping with notions of civilisation.
Note: this does not necessarily involve the use of physical force. One of the things which kept me in line, for example, was the knowledge that if I pissed my mother off, she would go into a dreadful sulk with me which would last until I had conducted a humiliating (or just totally embarrassed) climbdown.
Of course, one must not use any species of force (physical or emotional) to instill proper behaviour in children nowadays. We're told that it damages the poor darlings, leaving them to cope with the most dreadful traumas. We therefore have now raised at least two generations of what someone wonderfully termed 'free-range children'.
But even if discipline cannot be enforced in the old ways, it can still be enforced. The trouble is that, for whatever reason, a significant proportion of parents don't seem to be willing or able to do so. They would prefer, for example, to crash out on their ever-widening arses in front of whatever trash Sky Television is pumping out that evening or to get half-pissed in their living rooms, rather than to take full responsibility for the children they have brought into the world who are, at that moment, causing alarm (or worse) in the general vicinity.
(I still consider it remarkable that parenthood, one of the most important roles any human being can undertake, can be achieved by people who have little aptitude for it, and no qualifications other than possession of the requisite physical organs).
Things have come to such a state now that the only way in which inadequate parents could be dealt with may be to place them under the same penalties as their offspring when they transgress. If their running-wild sprogs get ASBOd, let the parents be ASBOd too. If their spawn are dragged before the courts, let them stand in the dock and face the music as well. Let us have a campaign to 'name and shame' inadequate parents. Not only would it place the blame for delinquency where it most properly belongs, it might even deter unsuitable people (that is to say, those with no talent for it, or those who simply don't give enough of a damn anyway) from breeding in the first place.
OK, perhaps that is a little far to go. But not by that much. Let's have a move to enforce parental responsibilities properly. Then, perhaps, we might have a society worth living (and growing up and growing old) in.
Forward With The Backward!
So, what's changed?
Nothing much, it seems.
It was always a foregone conclusion that Labour would finish as the
largest single party after yesterday's National Assembly election; it
was just a question of how far short of a majority they would fall.
The answer? Four seats.
Is that all? The party which brought you illegal military
adventurism, thoroughly cocked-up health service 'reforms' (which means
that a huge chunk of the population can't get dental treatment unless
they pay through the nose for it - excuse the mixed anatomical
metaphor) and cronyism galore? And they still finish within grasping
distance of forming a government outright for the next four years?
But, then again, the electoral system we have for the Assembly is
proportional in name only. Two-thirds of the seats are decided in the
constituencies on the completely discredited 'first-past-the-post'
system, which means that a party can win a seat with scarcely a third
of the votes cast. This is always good news for Labour, of course,
given the preponderance of constituencies in the Valleys, where people
really would vote for a dog's arse if it had a Labour rosette
sticking out of it (cf. Leighton Andrews).
This time, Labour didn't even get a third of the vote in the
constituencies, yet still end up with 60% of the seats. Its share of
the vote dropped by 10% or more in seven seats. Shome mishtake, shurely?
Still, it was there for the taking for the other 'main' parties (of
which we have four, London media please note). What of their
performances?
I'm sure Plaid (or whatever it is they're calling themselves this
month) will feel pleased at having gained a massive three seats, but
their share of the vote showed scarcely any increase on 2003, and their
performance in those self-same Valleys hardly induces hopes of future
progress on the 1999 scale.
The Tories? Well, a net gain of just one seat at a time when Labour
is seriously on the skids is not something for them to be jumping for
joy about. Their share of the total vote scarcely increased. So, no
danger of them fulfilling the wretched Hain's prophecy that we could
have woken up this morning to find Nick Bourne in charge of our health
services (a claim which was bollocks on a plinth from the very start,
of course).
And a word about the Lib Dems: pathetic. No gain in vote share, no
gain in seats; more static than a nylon carpet.
And yet, these perennial losers may well end up in power. Yes, the
smallest party in the National Assembly will almost certainly be
sounded out by Rhodri Morgan regarding the possibility of a coalition
government. Just like Morgan's oleaginous predecessor Alun Michael did
before him.
I can imagine the scene on Monday morning. There in his office,
shrouded in gloom, sits one R. Morgan, Suddenly, the door bursts open,
and in strides darling Michael German (barely elected from the South
Wales East list), flanked by his enforcers Bates and Randerson. German
comes over and thumps the desk. "Rhodri!", he cries, "we
will prop up your unwanted minority government! But only if you respect
our fundamental principles!" Here, he tosses a small brown envelope
with vague jottings on it in front of dear Rhodri. "These!",
booms German, "are our principles, Rhodri! And, if you don't like
them....we'll change them."
So that's what we're likely to get: a re-run of 2000 - 2003. Four
more years of drift and dithering.
This was, perhaps, the great chance to break the system open, and
to end Labour's virtual monopoly on the political processes of our
country. And we muffed it like good 'uns. So long as we have a skewed
electoral system, combined with the inability of Dai and Dilys Davies
in Dowlais to even consider for a moment that it is actually permitted
to vote for someone other than Labour ("I've voted Labour all me
life, see? An' me da' voted Labour all his life, see? An' Grampy voted
Labour, see? Our family's voted Labour since 1785, see, an' we're
not gonna change now! Dilys, pass those paracetamol will 'ew? Me
teeth are givin' me gyp again..."), then it will be forever thus.
Truly, we get the 'leaders' we deserve...
Spreading It
Having spent a couple of frustrating hours straightening out some code for the Big Site Revamp (which I hope to have in place by mid-June), I thought I'd unwind by a little Blogwanderung. That's the process whereby I start at Joe Gordon's Woolamaloo Gazette, clicking on the 'Next Blog' button at the top, and seeing where I get to.
There's not always much entertainment to be had from this: a lot of blogs in Portuguese, for some reason; whoney, self-obsessed teenage girls from all over; sites where music loads with the page and which you can't switch off, and being regularly redirected to a site trying to sell medications of various desperate kinds.
And then there are those blogs you hit upon and think, "Oh, these look like nice, normal people", and then you read on. Tonight's discovery was of a married couple from somewhere in middle America who say they love their family, their friends, etc., and then go on to say that they're learning the language of some obscure Central American tribe so that they can go to their homeland, learn about their culture, and then......bring them the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ in their own language for the very first time."
Look, bible-belters! These people you're going to bring the benefits of guilt, sin and rampant bigotry to are probably getting on with their lives quite nicely, thank you. The last thing that would be of any use to them would be to have a Stepford Couple coming along and fucking with their minds! If past experience is any guide, although they may live in equilibrium with their surroundings now, within a generation they would have completely defoliated their environment in order to build wooden churches with fifty-foot spires on "to the grader glory of Gahd", and worshipping a plasic figurine of Bayubby Jeeeezuz you bought from the Wal-Mart branch in downtown Buttf*ck, Kansas. And then, of course, your bodily assumption to heaven would be ensured, wouldn't it?
Why can't these people leave well alone? Evangelists should be stripped naked, smeared in Golden Syrup, and then staked out over an anthill. For a first offence, of course.
As Stephen Fry has said:
Ah! Religion!......Shit on it!"
No Style
In case you think I've faded off into the sunset, I'm still here.
In June this year, this website will be four years old. I thought that it was time for a revamp, because (one or two minor aspects apart) the design has not been changed in all that time.
This time, I though, I'll do it right. So, the navigation bar will be visible wherever you are on the main pages, I'll stop being so dependent on tables (you're not supposed to lay out your content that way, unless it's actually tabular data, of course; I'll learn how to do Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to make changing the way the site looks a lot easier, and I'll make the site as compliant with recognised standards as possible.
So a couple of weekends ago, I spent virtually the whole time learning the rudiments of CSS. The prospect of not having to piddle about designing whole pages from scratch was very appealing. I duly set up my first style sheet and viewed the result.
My default browser is SeaMonkey. I tried Opera for a few months, but it has too many little niggles for me to stay with it at the moment, so I switched back.
So, I looked at my redesigned front page with style sheet in SeaMonkey. Looked good, although I had to make a few little adjustments (nothing ever goes 100% right with these things first time).
Recognising that most of the world is still using various versions of Internet Explorer, I then viewed it with IE...
...Oh dear...
All over the bloody place
Further research in the the following days led me to discover what I should really have guessed already; when it comes to implementing basic standards of compliance, Microsoft have always tended to take one of three actions:
- ignore them altogether, hoping that they'll go away;
- implement just enough of them to avoid serious comeback from users and web designers: or
- take note of what the standards are, and then put them in place with added non-standard proprietary bells and whistles which will either break the page, your browser, or both. It certainly won't help your page or site get the widest cross-browser compatiblilty.
This third point is the main reason why no-one who is serious about web design should ever use MS' very own FrontPage™, as its use is the root source of much of the problem. Having abandoned it for the very useful (but cranky) NVu, I've decided that as the main design work of the site will be taken care of by CSS, I'll code all the pages on the redesigned site by hand. If I don't know how to do the HTML for a certain feature, I can always crib it from the existing pages: I feel a learning curve coming up.
(Oh, and while we're on that particular cliché, it's not a steep learning curve: extreme curves aren't steep, they're sharp.Gradients are steep, but I don't suppose we'll hear the phrase "steep learning gradient" any time soon, even from management consultants.
But the IE/CSS issues left me in something of a quandary: do I just carry on regardless coding for viewing in standards-compliant browsers, and let 89% of the audience go chase my Aunt Myfanwy round the Gasworks?; do I fall in with the sheep and code for viewing in IE, misbegotten abortion that it is?; or do I try to please everyone?
For the time being, I've decided on that third option. This involves writing two sets of style sheets; one for IE and one for the rest of us.
It's a good job there are still nearly four months to go before I want the new design to 'go live'. I might just make it...
Strike Hard!
I'm on strike today. So are thousands of my colleagues.
We're striking because of this government's decision to throw tens of thousands of our colleagues on the dole (a Labour Chancellor boasts about how many people he's making unemployed - how times change!), close dozens of offices (so making it difficult - if not impossible - for the public to get the attention and service they need), and the threat of sub-inflation-level pay settlements.
Support seems pretty solid, I'm glad to say, although there are exceptions.
Some people seem to have a limited (not to say retarded) view of what constitutes 'democracy'. On Monday, for example, our departmental Intranet suddenly sprouted a message from a man called 'Sir' Gus O'Donnell, head honcho of the home Civil Service. In it, he made the following claim:
"Of their [PCS] members, 77% decided either not to vote, or to vote against strike action...This low level of support can not justify taking national industrial action..."
OK, Gussie baby, let's take a look at those numbers in detail, shall we?
Percentage of those PCS members who were balloted voting in favour of industrial action: 22.1%
Compare with the 2005 General Election:
Percentage of electorate voting for Labour: 21.9%
I've briefly amused myself with a little drama whereby dear Gus goes into his next meeting with his political masters and says, "Sorry, but your level of support in a democratic ballot does not justify you calling yourselves 'The Government'."
Well, I can dream, can't I? After all, that doesn't cost me any money.
What really riles me (and others), though, is the behaviour of some of my colleagues. There will be, as there so often is, a number of them who will willingly (perhaps gleefully be working today. I'm not talking about those who are not members of the union - they don't have much of a choice (except to see sense and join, of course). I'm referring to fellow union members who will totally ignore a democratic decision taken by the membership of the union and...well, there's no other word I can honestly use...scab.
They use various excuses (where they can be bothered with justifying their actions at all), none of which is particularly convincing. If the boot were on the other foot, and the membership had voted against strike action, would those of us who disagreed be permitted not to work today? Of course not, and if we absented ourselves without authorisation we'd face disciplinary action. Yet these people can go in to work today without any comeback (at least from the employer, or from the law in general).
How easily the lessons of history are forgotten! When I did (however ineptly) A-level History, the course covered the period of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the rise of the labour and trade union movements, and the General Strike of 1926. It seems that some of my colleagues are unaware that people fought, that people were imprisoned, that people died for the rights of workers to defend themselves and their livelihoods against idiot, dangerous or vicious employers. Or at least, if they are aware, they don't much care. Not only are some of them working, but a number of managers have agreed to go to offices where nearly everyone else is on strike to man (irrespective of lack of experience to do so) the public counters, so as to give the illusion that it's 'business as usual'. What makes it worse still is that they will, in most cases, be going to offices where a substantial proportion of the staff were told (via e-mail) only yesterday that they'll be losing their jobs at the end of March.
And yet, I suppose these self-same people will be more than willing to enlist the union's help should they find themselves facing disciplinary action, for instance, and will certainly not refuse on point of principle to accept any pay rises the union wins for its members. Solidarity is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Well, isn't it?
Then again, if ignorance is bliss we live in a truly happy land. Once again the BBC News website's 'Have Your Say' section has covered the subject. just as on every other occasion in the past when they've done this, the floodgates have opened and the tsunami of prejudice and pig-ignorance has swamped the board. Here, as ever, are the sneering remarks about "workshy jobsworths", "Sack the lot", "How will anyone tell the difference?", "Welcome to the Real World!" and, of course, the favourite standby of the idiocracy, "Wake up and smell the coffee!" (my dears, that is so-o-o-o-o 1989!). And if I read just one more bloody reference to our "gold-plated pensions", I will not be responsible for my actions.
In fact, the degree of ignorance, stupidity, vituperation and general abuse in that section is of a nature which you wouldn't even see levelled at the BNP or Al Qaeda.
Much of the snarling comes from people complaining about how 'their' taxed are funding our generous salaries and gold-pl.....AAAAAARGHHHHH! THAT'S IT!!!
(Pause while I find a passing management consultant to machete to death.
Ah, that's a little better....better mop the bloodstains off the floor tiles quickly, though - they'll leave a mark otherwise).
Where was I? Oh, yes. To read them, you'd think that only people working in the private sector actually pay taxes. Listen, slaves, we pay at least as much as you do. More than that, those wonderful pensions are paid for out of our own contributions. So, in effect, we pay for them twice - with our labour and with our taxes and deductions. Moreover, we are the only sector of employment whose pay and conditions are set on the basis of political considerations rather than economic ones.
As for these privateers yammering on about how they work 169 hours a week for a handful of rice and half a roll of bog paper, and about how they'd be sacked if they didn't: well, that's what you get for supporting Thatcher's economic miracle, isn't it? There was a time when you could freely join trade unions or similar professional organisations and have people who would stand beside and behind you when you needed support against shite employers. But you swallowed the propaganda, didn't you? Unions were 'dinosaurs'. Unions were 'disruptive'. Unions made for 'inefficiency' (the lamentable Enoch Powell - and it speaks volumes that the right ever regarded such a man as an intellectual giant in their ranks - referred to them as 'beasts of disorder'), and had to be destroyed. Which, in the private sector at least, they have been to all intents and purposes. An employer can, even in the face of an overwhelming wish on the part of the workforce, totally refuse to recognise trade union membership in the workplace.
The results? People working ever-longer hours for no extra pay, scared shitless that if they so much as breathe a word of discontent they will be kicked our, or their job 'outsourced' to Slovakia or Thailand. The damage to the individual worker from this is bad enough, but the knock-on effects their families and on society in general are there for all to see. And this is the ideal that they think we should all aspire to? More fool them. I think I'd rather have a better balance to my one and only existence than that.
All this is driven by a regime which started out by using the word 'reform' (in connection with the public services) in its original sense. Then they started to use the word as a euphemism for covering up what they really intended to do: privatise what they could get away with, and devalue the rest. To assist in this aim, they bought - dearly- a brigade of fraudsters known collectively as 'management consultants'. So, inevitably, it wasn't long before government ministers were using such verbal diarrhoea as "Transformational Government", apparently with a straight face. This percolated down the levels so that now even local managers seem to have no difficulty in using null-speak such as "baselining", when trying to tell their teams how to do their jobs. The result? Demoralisation and anger at being alternately insulted and patronised by know-nothing con-artists.
OK then, private-sectorites, here's a Modest Proposal for you all to consider:
Sack us all, Go on, you know you want to. Scrap the whole of the public sector (except, of course, the armed forces and the police, who will be needed to keep order on us when we're standing on street corners). Sell it all of to your favourite supermarket or energy company. Let Thames Water take over the Prison Service - after two months, all the prisons would be empty because all the cons would have been allowed to leak out. Hand over the collection of taxes to Newscorp - after all, they know all about taxes there, having dodged so many of them. And when you need a social service assessment on dear old Granny so that you can get her into sheltered accomodation (owned by Securicor, natch), you'll be able to phone a special Hotline, where you will be stuck in a queue for six and a half house listening to a badly-synthesised South Asian voice saying, "Welcome to the Saga-ga-ga Seniors Assessment Helpline. Your custom is of the highest concern to us. Please hold until an agent becomes available...."
Go on, do i! Take us into that bold, thrusting and dynamic future! See your tax bills tumble...and your phone bills go through the roof (the Road to Mandalay is a long one, even by Bluetooth).
Perhaps then and only then will you see what you've lost. Just like you did with your right to defend your working conditions...
In Harm's Way
Sometimes, what I'd always thought of as a firmly-held view can be changed by a passionate statement which challenges it.
So when Anthony Canting Liar Blair said in Plymouth last weekend (to a military audience, I might add):
"On the part of the military, they need to accept that in a volunteer armed force, conflict and therefore casualty may be part of what they are called upon to face."
I didn't think much of it. After all, yes, the UK's military is entirely a volunteer one. No-one is forced to sign up (except for the fact that, for some of them at least, there may be no other prospect of employment for them), and they should go into the whole thing with their eyes wide open.
The thing is, it now occurs to me, can they do this? After all, anyone looking at the television, press and other advertising for the military (particularly if they're at that impressionable age that most people are when they join) could be forgiven for thinking that being in the forces is quite a jolly romp, all things considered. This is how the armed life has been sold to them (and us) for years.
What people are not told (at least, not until it's all but too late) is that when you join up you lose a substantial portion of your basic rights, you can be put in harm's way not in order to defend your country and fellow citizens from attack from without, but for the ideological agendas of those temporarily in power and, should you be unfortunate enough to be maimed (in body or mind) in the course of your duties, you cannot expect those who put you in peril to show any concern beyond a bit of public hand-wringing.
That (apart from the fact that the toerag has never served himself, nor has he had anything other than empty words for the families of those killed to date) is why Bliar's remark has proven to be so offensive to many serving military personnel. Thanks to the very splendid and worthwhile Blairwatch, I came across this response on the wonderfully-named ARRSE site:
"Blair - I've no doubt you've been on this website and I hope you're reading this.
I sit here typing this in tears of anger, frustration and despair.
Having never served, HOW FCUKING DARE YOU make a comment like that. The finest, brightest, strongest, bravest young men and women in this country signed on the dotted line in selfless service of their country and you BETRAYED them by sending them into unsound conflict without adequate support.
YOU have made the decision to send young soldiers into a HELL from which some have never returned.
...
And if you think I'm being unreasonble, consider for a second my friends and comrades who will never again see the light of day. Consider the parents who leave their brave young son's bedroom just as he left it in the false hope that he might one day come home to them. Consider the children who, whilst you were no doubt enjoying a family christmas, wept and sobbed because daddy wasn't there to open his presents - Because you murdered him in your political pandering.
May your dreams be haunted for the rest of your days by the youth and laughter which you've so smugly poured away.
Blair. You fcuking cnut."
And, as they say, you can't say fairer than that. Others in the army have chimed in to agree (see the relevant forum posts here - Warning! Contains more military language!).
Will the bastard listen, even to this? Hardly. Why? Because he doesn't have to. Why not? Because our cowardly legislators and our craven, celeb-obsessed media won't make him. And he'll be safely in the US inside six months, sharing George's Castle Of Delusions. And our military personnel will still be dying in Afghanistan, in Iraq and (who knows?) in Iran, all for those self-same delusions.
I don't believe in Hell. If I did, I still don't think there would be a circle deep enough to accomodate Blair.
Scanorama
So Blair has finally been honest about something. It hasn't often happened, but yesterday he finally came out and said that it was the aim of his regime to allow all the data it holds on each and every one of us to be shared by every Department of State without let or hindrance (and without any way we, as individual consumer units - sorry, I mean 'citizens' - can prevent it).
So let's see where we are now, shall we?
- In the name of 'Democracy', we have an electoral system which delivers a five-year-long working majority in Parliament to any party which can gain barely a third of the votes cast (and less than a quarter of the total votes available).
- In the name of 'Freedom', we have laws passed by that same 'majority' which forbid peaceful public protest anywhere where it might be seen or heard by those poor, sensitive souls who claim to represent us (unless you have six days prior permission from the Police, who will want to know all sorts of intimate details of your life and beliefs before even considering your request - unless you're a bunch of fundamentalist bigots bearing anti-gay placards, in which case you can do more or less as you please).
- In the name of 'Peace' we have perpetual war abroad and increasingly paramilitarised policing at home.
- In the name of 'Security' we have more CCTV cameras per head of population than anywhere else in the world; if you have a car, its registration number can now be logged wherever it goes; plans are now far advanced for the same thing to be done to people as well.
- In the name of 'Efficency', whatever you tell one arm of the State in relation to one specific area of your life can (and inevitably will) be available for perusal by every other arm of it as well.
It's just as well we live in a free country isn't it? Otherwise, I might get quite worried about all this. If I were worried, however, I think my concerns would run something along these lines:
Democracy: It is patently absurd that the outcome of a general election is determined almost entirely by the voting decisions taken by a few tens of thousands of people in the most marginal constituencies. Yet this, under the current system, is what happens. And so, not unnaturally, the main political parties tailor their message and their policies to influence that tiny proportion of the population. As those constituencies tend to be very similar in their socio-economic characteristics (outer-suburban, central-and-southern English), then the parties must produce what will go down best with them. This has been the main reason for the so-called 'centre ground' of parliamentary politics in the so-called UK moving markedly to the right in the last twenty-five years.
What it also means, of course, is that that vociferous, pursed-lipped minority called 'the middle class' wields a political and ideological power disproportionate to its numbers. This in turn means that the far larger number of people at the bottom of the heap are further marginalised. They, in their turn, see little point in bothering to vote at all, since none of the parties capable of winning any seats at all can be bothered to address their concerns. The natural consequence of this is not merely the anticipated alienation of the marginalised from any notion of democracy, but that the (comparatively or absolutely) affluent represent an even larger proportion of those actually voting. That group must then have its covetousness and prejudices pandered too all the more. And so the spiral rotates on...
Freedom: We are told that the ‹insert name of Bogeymen Of The Day here› hate us because "they hate our Freedom". OK, I admit that the notions of basic freedoms have yet to penetrate less 'civilised' parts of the world (Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, the Home Office), but the difficulty arises when you come to define what 'freedom' (capitalised or not) actually means. One thing it surely is not is tidy. It cannot be neatly delineated, formularised and packaged, which puts it at something of a disadvantage in the Marketing Age. For instance, Libertarianism and Anarchism (two equally infantile sides of the same dud coin) would follow the Rabelaisian dictum of "Do as thou wilt" (an outlook shared with those gloomy losers who style themselves 'Satanists'). The trouble with that, as my old history tutor Eric Earnshaw used to say, is that people tend to be naughty. Unless you can reconstitute human nature itself, this view cannot abide (or, at least, not unless you're prepared to put up with an awful lot of violence and unpleasantness until people adjust to the new order - it should take no more than a couple of thousand years).
So, 'Freedom' becomes contingent, in that one's own definition must be modified by, and modulated through, the definitions of the other people you share your cage with. This is where those definitions inevitably start getting fuzzy around the edges, and where contradictions start becoming more obvious. All you can hope for is to arrive at some set of core qualities upon which most rational people can agree.
But then again, even if you can agree on those qualities in general, when it comes to the specific, we all have our wished-for exceptions. For example, even some of those who are most vociferous in their defence of freedom of speech will see little contradiction in seeking to deny a platform of any sort to those whose views they themselves may find abhorrent. So you will have, for example, those who decry attempts to silence some Muslim campaigning groups nonetheless supporting attempts to ban members of the BNP from holding meetings.
(In case you think I'm being a bit lofty about this; yes, I too have my prejudices. They mostly involve religious fundamentalists of all stamps. However, I recognise this as not being an objective statement, rather an intestinal spasm. If you try to govern on the basis of intestinal spasms, you'll end up in a world full of shit).
This cannot hold: freedom of speech is indivisible. Once you start slicing bits off it, you end up losing the integrity of all of it. Even the preposterous, even the stupid, even the deluded, even the vicious must be allowed to express their opinions peacefully. Even if they may use words which are not - or appear not to be - peaceable, they must be permitted nonetheless: the alternative may be that they abandon violent words and turn to violent actions instead. It's not a comfortable solution, but it is the least worst: freedom, like the universe, is intractably squiggly.
The current regime under which we labour does not, of course, see things in this light. In the same way that it has arrogated to itself the power to define economic success (a rentier economy with an ever-vanishing manufacturing base, where those at the bottom must be taxed more to coddle the wealthy who can't be taxed because if they do, they'll leave the country), the power to define environmental responsibility (screwing up the public transport system while allowing people to fly to Tallinn on a mad whim for 85p, thus helping to shaft the environment) and the power to define responsibility for social problems ("anyone else's but ours, squire"), the semi-elected dictatorship we currently endure has taken it upon itself to define 'Freedom' as well. Increasingly, this does not include the right to dissent publicly from the government line. Hence the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA), which included a section permitting the government to declare exclusion zones within which no spontaneous protest - however peaceful - can take place. (This is analogous to the emetically-named 'Free Speech Zones' enforced by the authorities in the US, whereby you can protest against the President or his owners, but only in wire-mesh pens up to two miles away from where the VIP happens to be. Given that this creates a sort of mobile Potemkin Village for Bush, is it to be wondered at that the wretch doesn't know what's going on?). Well, actually, you can be allowed to protest: so long as you are willing to apply a long time in advance, subject yourself to a high degree of intrusive questioning, and accept the most ludicrous conditions. And even then, there's no guarantee you will be permitted (permitted, if you please!) your protest, especially as the government has the power unilaterally to change the boundaries of the exclusion zones when it may see fit to do so.
This would be bad enough, but there is already enough evidence to suggest that the decisions regarding which protests may be permitted and which may not are determined by political considerations. Whilst people quietly reading out the names of the dead of Iraq at the Cenotaph have been arrested and convicted under this Act (the main exclusion zone extends about 1km out from the Houses of Parliament themselves), last week a group of religious bigots were allowed to stand on St Stephen's Green itself holding anti-gay placards without any apparent interest from the Police at all - until, of course, a small counter-demonstration turned up, at which point it seems, you couldn't move for helmets.
But then, the reason for the exclusion zone around Parliament was nakedly political. It was aimed solely (and seldom has there been such a dispropotionate response in legislation to a problem - perceived or otherwise) at stopping Brian Haw from continuing his protest outside Parliament against Blair's war crimes. That it has not (yet) succeeded in doing so is a small sign of hope, but the Police and governmental harrassment of that remarkable man continues, and we dare not be complacent.
Peace: It has become fashionable to quote Orwell in conjunction with Where We Find Ourselves Today. Fashionable, but glib. However, we live under a regime which seems to have read Nineteen Eighty Four avidly and closely, but has mistaken it for a political manfesto. We live under the most interventionist government we have seen since that other post-imperial fiasco, Suez. The Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq. Some under the auspices of that by-now purposeless entity called NATO, others under the direction and control of Emperor George and his court of millenarial crackpots.
And what triumphs we have seen in the last five years!
The removal of a nasty, psychopathic regime in Afghanistan, and its replacement with a President who can't leave his palace without an army division to protect him, backed by an alliance of thuggish tribal chiefs who have proved what a good idea it all was by cranking up opium production to record levels, thus enabling desperate smackheads all over our country to get their fix that much more easily.
The illegal invasion of yet another sovereign country under yet another brute (who was conveniently put to death before he could reveal exactly what went on in those cosy chats he and dear Rummy had back in the mid-eighties), and his replacement by a puppet regime whose writ scarcely runs beyond its own tiny fiefdom, and which is about to hand over all control over the Iraqi nation's oil reserves to mostly American corporations. The inevitable fracturing of the country into tribal territories, with no help or succour for those caught in, figuratively speaking, the wrong part of town (ethnic Arabs in Kurdistan, for example). The turning of what once was a quite prosperous and very secular country into a ravaged landscape fought over by a variety of religious nutcases. The ongoing and increasingly vicious and desperate occupation, having the inevitable consequence of making even the most moderate of Arabs and Muslims see little to recommend itself in Western claims of Freedom, Tolerance and Justice.
Add to that the abominable silence of Blair when Israel was carrying out yet another act of concerted brutality against the civilians of Lebanon last summer, his continuing mealy-mouthedness on the subject of Zionist policies in Palestine, and his almost inevitable falling meekly into line when the US or Israel launches its equally inevitable attack on Iran, and we see why war abroad may be brought home to us.
But, although the regime wishes to create a climate of fear, we should not fear at all. After all, we have the Police to protect us. They have - and use - their powers most effectively to harrass people behaving suspiciously (e.g. being in possession of a different coloured skin), the powers to smash down people's doors at the crack of dawn and shoot them (especially if they're in possession of a different etc., etc.,), and the power to shoot people dead with impunity (especially if they are a Brazilian electrician who is mistaken for someone in possession of, and so on). We may sleep safely in our beds, knowing that even if some poor armed plod gets it seriously wrong and shoots us before we can get dressed, the traumatised unfortunate will be exonerated, promoted, and have his pension protected.
And, of course, we can always depend on the government to block inconvenient legal investigations into illegal arms sales to our democracy- and freedom-loving friends in places such as Saudi Arabia.
Security: The Word Of The Moment, of course. Everything, but everything must be done to make Gary and Marie Public feel secure. Afraid of hearing a twelve-year-old kid saying 'Fuck!'? Don't worry: we'll put the little bastard under an ASBO and throw him in jail for five years if he says it again. Don't like the look of the small group of fifteen-year-olds standing on the corner of your road? No matter: we'll put CCTV cameras up so that we can keep an eye on them. And if they just move off somewhere else, we'll put some more cameras up there as well. After all, it's more Modern than actually making the Police patrol the area, and much cheaper than giving those dreadful yobs something constructive to do with their time. We don't want to reward them for being visibly unutilised, do we? That would send out the wrong signal.
And, speaking of sending out signals, you need never fear getting lost in your car again, because we can track you wherever you go in it. And soon we'll be able to do the same thing to your kids as well. After all, they've got to be secure haven't they? Otherwise, they might end up getting ASBOs...
And don't worry: you'll soon be nice and secure, too, thanks to our wonderful ID card. OK, we know that we've given fourteen different reasons why they're essential, and none of the reasons holds water; we know that we won't be setting up one huge database to hold every jot and tittle of information about you, but merely trying to get three large databases which were designed for something else entirely to communicate accurately with each other; we know that it is still likely to be a highly-expensive fuckup. But we intend carrying on regardless, because it will make people feel more secure! You know, just like as if they were in prison...
Efficiency: This is another talisman of our times, as dragged out by Blair (and by the increasingly discredited John Hutton the previous day) to excuse the government's desire to know everything about you, and to have access to that everything whenever they want it. A psychoanalyst would have a field day with this regime's obsession with gathering information it has no right to hold and then seeking to use it to control people's lives. Perhaps they're anal retentives: they're certainly full of shit.
But why is it that the rulers of Ukania, unique amongst all those states which could, by some objective criteria, be called 'free', have such an all-consuming desire to do this? Perhaps, given their 'business-friendly' position, they are actually under the control of a cabal of junk mail companies and advertisers, who simply want an easy way to work out at whom to target their wares. Despite any assurances to the contrary, we know that our private details will find their way into their hands before too long: after all, local authorities have grabbed themselves a nice little meal ticket in recent times from selling our electoral roll information to such companies. Imagine the profits to be reaped by the Treasury from being able to sell all our personal information to the corporate sector.
But back to the matter in hand. The reason given by Blair and Hutton for enabling departments of State to pass around our private data like a sort of gigabit relay is 'efficiency'. Hutton gave an example which I suppose he hoped we would take as being typical, of someone having to deal with the death of a loved one who had to provide information (if Hutton is to be believed) to 44 different local and national state bodies. Now, as I say, that sounds a little far-fetched to me: when my mother died in 1998, I only had to deal with the county council, the local Register Office, the Department of Pensions (or whatever they were called that week), and National Savings (which had been privatised by then, anyway). I don't think my experience was - or is - in any atypical.
But then, as with the ID card scheme and many another dishonest manoeuvre, the government knows that it's always a good idea to try to go with a scare story, an extreme case. It creates the right feelings of subliminal anxiety in those too lazy or too busy to stop and think.
So, letting our medical records be viewable by the Home Office would be efficient. Allowing the record of any judicial decision against us (however irrelevant) to be read by Revenue and Customs would be efficient. Letting every little detail of our lives become free to whatever State organ claimed a reason for knowing it - all without any means on our part to control it - would be efficient.
No doubt it might - for them. But is it for them to have that power? No. Our information is our own. It is ours to share only with those who have a reasonable need to know it. And it is for us to limit its use. To believe otherwise is to effectively hand control over your life to the State itself. And the State is not neutral.
It isn't efficient, either. A long trail of failures is testimony to that, and those failures have ruined and destroyed innocent lives.
Should we want an efficient State anyway? I would suggest not. Only yesterday, and completely by accident, I came across this quotation from Harry S. Truman (not the greatest President the USA ever had, but a plain-speaking man if nothing else):
"Wherever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
When a State takes huge powers to itself (such as the old Soviet-style tyrannies, for example) the best defence ordinary people have against it is its inefficency. The Stasi had about 700 000 spies amongst the population of the DDR, but it still couldn't stop East Berliners watching West Berlin television, and it still couldn't stop the Wall from coming down.
Our best defence here in the supposedly free world is to make sure that the State never becomes efficient. This means, amongst other things, that we must ensure that it has only the minimum information required of it to fulfill its genuine duties to us, the citizenry, and not a single file more. It also means that we have to accept a degree of inconvenience to ourselves. If that means that we have to tell five different State agencies that Granny's corpse was on the roofrack when our car was stolen, well, that may well be a price we have to consider worth paying.
The alternative is the Efficient State. We've seen a good example of one in the last hundred years. You can see its memorials...at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
I'm sorry to have gone on a bit here, dear reader, but the turning of the year is a time when one becomes terribly prone to the Curse Of Summing Up. I see little to be hopeful about, especially as the population at large still seems to be largely oblivious to the dangers before us.
Actually, all I really wanted to do was to draw your attention to this animation which I put together last night with my customary inexpertise. It illustrates my last point rather better than all the preceding verbiage.
All At 6s And 7s
So how was it for you? 2006, I mean.
I've known better years, certainly. I've never known previous ones which featured:
- My niece and her husband separating after less than a year of marriage (so much for the Apache Blessing: perhaps I should have just hit them both over the head with it)
- The interesting, technical aspects of my job being outsourced, and the likelihood that the remainder will be centralised away at some point in the not-to-distant future
- Seeing my other colleagues being treated like farmyard animals by fuckwitted management consultants imported at huge cost from the private sector to tell them (i.e. my colleagues) how to do the jobs they've been doing damn well for years
- Seeing too many good and talented people leave us (see the entries on the Not A Blog page (and its Archives) over the past year if you want to see what I mean)
- Catching no fewer than four viral infections of one sort or another in the past six weeks: the latest of which has left me with my left-eye bloodshot from all the coughing
- My old CRT monitor showing signs of departing this life. As my PC is the only effective way I have of finding out what's happening in the world, I only hope it can hang on until I'm well enough to get to town again to buy a replacement.
Add to all this events in the outside world such as:
- Hanging Saddam Hussein. Yes, that'll really make things better in Iraq, won't it? Apart from that, note the obscene haste to kill the old bastard before evidence could come up in a later trial of how the US, West Germans and half the little fiefdoms in the Gulf enabled him to carry out many of his atrocities.
- The New Year 'Honours' List. Bad enough as it was to end the year getting Sir Bono de Bollocks, there were also awards for a moderately-achieving horsey girl (whose grandmother just happens to own the country); and to Scarlett, the professional liar who skewed the evidence in support of Blair's rush to war. Perhaps Saddam wasn't executed after all: perhaps he hanged himself in despair at not getting a gong for his services in enabling Blair and his pack of sneering greaseballs to pass all sorts of legislation designed to remove our basic liberties on the grounds of 'national security'.
Happy new year...
