Hugh Barnard

So the TCP (that’s the tribe of cognitive pygmies, not the antiseptic) has demanded that ‘harmful emissions’ be reduced from the Olympics site.

The best way to do this is to stop the Olympics and find something more intelligent to do with all that time, money, equipment, brainpower and manpower. No?

Meanwhile, can we fit ‘harmful emission reducing devices’ to the Palace of Wesminster itself? Examples of harmful emissions emanating from there are ‘the Olympics’, ‘NHS computer system’ and in general any of their ill-considered speech acts. Squabble amongst yourselves (quietly) and leave us alone.

After an OK from our council to East End Lies which ‘does not lie around’ (it mysteriously sticks to the ceiling and then transports itself to recycling, what magic!). Perhaps it’s ‘the paper that lies directly, not around’, it could be the new slogan, no?

Anyway, now we have useful holiday advice from EEL, ‘cancel your newspapers because they build up whilst you’re away’. Yes, I’d love to cancel mine, but I can’t can I? Apart from the huge salaries (and no, Martha, a big salary does not necessarily equal a competent person, that’s cognitive surrender, not logic), we waste at least £1.5 million on creating democratic deficit in an already struggling borough with this.

By the way you EEL folks, I’m going to the CRE about your ‘harmony’ operatives. Can you guess why that would be? Put it right now, right now or better still let’s just cease publication.

After watching some seasonal muncipal workers in Gruissan plant unsuitable (that is, they’re not indigenous plants) hedges, which require a lot of hosepipe water and then frequent cutting, I formulated the mission statement for any administration:

We use your money to create problems that we fail to solve.

That’s a bit harsh, in that some bits are OK, but which? Schools, army, hospitals and police, perhaps?

Well, first of all, the poor dears (in between huge and clearly addictive bouts of self congratulation) ARE trying. Also, this project is a pilot, that’s sensible too. So, two muted cheers.

East End Lies just (in its inimitable style, happily no-one tries to imitate it, either) announced a composting pilot project for ‘garden waste’. Here’s what’s wrong (a few things, give me a day or two and I’ll find ten more):

• The waste is being taken to Rainham, composted and returned. Nothing like a good fuel and handling bill, as long as it’s the citizens that pay for it! This is an ecological and a logistic nonsense too.
• The compost (our compost, we’ve paid all the associated costs and the raw materials are ‘ours’) is then going to be sold to us. I presume this little earner will pay for lobster tails eaten in the Mulberry Place fortress?
• The composting is just garden waste (as far as I understand EEL) whereas all peelings and most kitchen waste can be composted. Something much more encompassing is needed and easy.
• If you have a (locally-sited) anerobic unit, then meat waste etc. can be composted too. Again, within the council there is interest in this, but only via ‘grant funding’. Meanwhile, if there’s space, it’s not exactly high tech to start a nice compost heap, is it? But, see below.

What’s wrong with local composting? Well, it’s too ‘messy’, citizens musn’t do that, to quote the end of this:

The problem, he said, was reaching a social, political and economic consensus. And legislators and planners - the latter of whom “hate food in cities because it’s messy” - would need a huge amount of persuasion.”

Not only is it messy, it’s genuinely empowering as opposed to grant-funded ‘diversity dance empowering’ (people depend less on the government, supermarkets etc.), upsets a lot of vested interests (some of whom fund the major political parties) and changes things. We don’t want any of that, do we?

BT obviously can’t be bothered with even the vague ethics of direct marketing.

I’m on the mail preference list and the telephone preference list, anything that has to be ‘hard sold’ is a bad bargain, good things are their own envoys.

However, BT, together with Sky (whom we understand as being scum, without even fifteen seconds of reflection) have decided that the preference list is not ‘for them’ and they send their crap (to use the technical term) to ‘the Occupier’, saves a lot of trouble for their mindless drones. This also creates externalities (in the economic sense), I have to sift through their crap, throw it away and my borough has to (try and, they’re not exactly clued up) recycle it. So BT are scum that are costing non-customers time and money.

That’s not the end though, there’s a tiny note at the end of all this unwanted paper, saying (and I quote) ‘Together we can reduce paper consumption’ and a website link, presumably toward some flatulent set of lies about their ’social responsibility’.

Incidentally, I’ve now complained about this to them, I’m expecting an amusing reply, probably (if like Barclays) containing ‘dismay’ about my language. What exactly do you do about people who crap over everything just for money? The complaint reference is: 080716-002112

So, all in all, I think BT wins out over Sky. I’ll be writing to the chief honcho, to ask where to send the simulated 100% genuine dog-poo that symbolises the award. Well done BT, well out of order!

I just came back from my holiday, to find no bills (nearly everything is now paperless, because I’ve requested it be so) and a ‘pile’ of East End Lies, including one half-poked through the letter box.

This is a fire risk, a burglary risk and a source of paper waste (in a borough that has one of the worst recycling records in the UK).

Now, I find, reading the East London Advertiser, that one of our councillors has called for restraint on ‘free’ papers in the borough, BUT East End Lies is OK, because it ‘does not lie around’. This, with BT (who sends stuff to the occupier with an admonition to ’save paper’) wins an extreme hypocrisy award and probably a runner-up for ‘cognitive surrender’ (awarded to public figures and corporates who can’t actually connect thoughts in any recognisably logical way).

Extreme hypocrisy is a ‘new’ Olympic sport, only politicians, bureaucrats and corporate drones can participate.

As a practical matter, I’m now going to charge the council, if they don’t stop delivering it. We also need a no-thanks sticker for example:

to put on letterboxes.

Actually using people-power and a computer printer, you can do this yourself! Do it now and save polluting your mind and the planet!

I’m so happy that the BBC investigated itself and exonerated itself after the Sunday Times (admittedly, a dirty-digger publication) showed clear evidence of product placement! I have every faith in any public organisation that investigates itself, the results are always scrupulously fair! We live in a truly wonderful world, with talking bunnies and, why! here’s my old friend Walt (he looks a bit mangy because he’s dead), I’ll stop this prattle now to talk to him!

Meanwhile, their financial news commentator has turned up with a North Face branded anorak on their news channel. But I’m sure they can exonerate themselves again using DoubleThink ™, an Eric Blair family product. Perhaps they can advertise that? They sure like it, yessiree Bob!

Well, since Eric Huggers and Ashley Highfield are such Microsoft lovers, we have another serious and competitive round of Bill-licking from the Bill-licking (finger licking good and the croissants cost us 3 a mere billion per year, a bargain, really) Broadcasting Corporation.

How about this, for giving 1984 a run for it’s money in the Rewritten History Awards?
And how is this interesting? How much does he pay for product placement and inidivdual publicity? How much is the public charged for switching to defective Windoze products (iplayer etc.)?

We can see the same thing on BBC2 tonight. I’ve cancelled everything and I can’t wait. But seriously, this is so far in the wrong direction that it’s not even worth mocking.

I’m subscribed to the Mail Preference Service, so I don’t receive junk mail, in principle.

However, Sky TV, have recently started bombarding me with mail addressed to the occupier, about their grubby little company. Well, who wants products from these sleazy, grubby, ethically challenged morons?

Added to the list, British Telecom, well, we all know the joke about BT being a synonym for ‘out of order’. Full of time serving idiots, they haven’t improved either.

So have Domino’s Pizza, a company from the Toxic States of America (fine but they need to keep their own toxicity within their borders). I’d also give honourable mention to Dialogue Solutions of Edenbridge who helped them with this, don’t collaborate with the enemy, folks. Domino’s provides television advertising and expensive chemical-flavoured inedible pizzas. Don’t eat them…

Perhaps they can all use their own bodies to accompany the landfill and waste that they are creating. No-one will miss any of them.

Well, last week was not great.

Firstly, big, noisy, six-hour, drinking party in the playground at the weekend, at a time when the SNT weren’t on duty. Reported it to the ‘ASB hotline’ (the name creates the impression that there’s feverish activity associated with it, but that’s not really true) who referred me to Rapid Response. Rapid Response said that I shouldn’t be contacting them directly and promised to phone me back (they didn’t). Didn’t bother with 999, they only turn up for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and then when it’s not being committed by masons, of course).

Then my bicycle was nicked from the back garden and, I suspect, dumped because of its obvious green wheels. Since I have excess on my insurance, I’m down about £120. Reported it simply to get a ‘crime number’ there’s no clear-up for this small-scale crime any more and, indeed, I believe general clear-up is well below 20%.

Now the bad bit. In both cases, I have form letters (not signed by a person in the case of the Met and without email) from Victim Support Unit (LBTH, two form letters) and the ‘Crime Management’ Unit (Met, one form letter), saying ‘there there’, we are ‘concerned’ by your ‘concerns’, that kind of vapid thing, but all pumped out of NuGov.com computers (well, at least some of them work or the printers work, anyway).

Obviously, Wellington rather than assembling guns, tactics, artillery and and soldiers should have formed a ‘Defeat Management Unit’ to send letters saying that he shared our ‘concerns’ about irregular verbs in French (which we should soon have to speak). All the people who man (person) these units are, in fact, unemployed. They are just receiving excellent unemployment benefits.

Well, after the Olympics consultation, which consisted of asking a couple of people whether we wanted to waste £1 billion (well it was about that then because neither Jowell nor I’m-weak-at-maths Brown did their sums properly, 1 does not equal 20, on this planet anyway) and then Coe-baby deciding to do it anyway, now people believe it’s of no benefit.

The ‘consultation’ was really good too, did Tower Hamlets learn from them or are all NuGov.com ‘consultations’ done in this same putrid way. Remember ‘no taxation without representation’, oh sorry that’s the cousins isn’t it? Didn’t they rebel against the British government at some stage?

Here’s the complete olympian set.

Browsing through Wikileaks, as one does, I discovered this briefing to the Tonster, about ‘NHS IT’. One of the more vociferous participants is Neil Holloway, a M$oft supremo. He has the cheek to expostulate about standards, by which I presume he means nice, closed ones, the ones that Microsoft prefers and has been fined for.

Also, it’s interesting that he’s there at one of the highest levels of government, are M$soft our rulers now? No, no, don’t answer that…

So now we understand one reason why ‘NHS IT’ will be bloated, proprietory, closed and charmingly useless. The others being the usual suspects consultancy companies which also make it expensive, a missing adjective in the above.

Also, it may explain one reason why Microsoft Vista is so named, don’t want to lose any business in the health market place to Open Vista Medicare, a open source system that works.

Hey, we could save some money and have stuff that works out of the box, ha-ha, as if that would happen, given our cancerous tribe of cognitively challenged political pygmies.

Let’s start with this list compiled by Dr. David Hill of World Innovation Foundation:

1.Northern Rock – Loss of £24 billion, but almost likely to be nearer £40 billion (Observer)
2.Foot and Mouth Disease – Cost to the nation, at least £20 billion (Economist)
3.Defence – MOD overspends over a decade – Lost £6 billion (NAO)
4.Underestimated NHS IT System - loss from £6.3 billion to most probably £40 billion but still will not work when completed (senior civil service quote)
5.National asylum IT System – Scrapped at a cost of £77 million (NAO)
6.Identity Cards – Initially estimated at £1 billion, now to cost up to £30 billion (Times)
7.Child Support Agency IT System – Loss for £1.72 billion remains as debt or uncollectable (WPC)
8.The Tax Credit System IT System – £100 million lost (HMRC)
9.Passport Office IT System – lost of £12 million (NAO)
10.Defence IT System DII – initially £4 billion, now £5 billion (parliamentary questions to the secretary-of-state)
11.Future Joint Combat Aircraft programme – Demonstration and Development Phase initial estimate US$ 33 billion, current projected cost US$41 billion (Parliamentary questions, secretary-of-state for Defence, 2004).
12.Swipe card system for benefit payments - £1 billion (NAO)
13.Defence IT System – Scrapped at a cost of £41 million (BBC)
14.Pensions IT System - £40 million compensation paid out (NAO & the BBC)
15.GCHQ IT relocation – estimated 1.07 billion, cost £1.63 billion (NAO)
16. Railtrack – Lost £3.3 Billion (parliamentary questions)
17.War in Iraq - from £3 billion to £7 billion and still counting (NAO)
A total of over £140 billion in a single decade of completely wasted money by government and their astute advisers. The truth most probably though, if all waste and loss were added up, over £500 billion if not more.

I can add more, for example, from this list, to get nearer the £500 billion mentioned.

As I write, Terminal 5 at Heathrow is providing exciting levels of chaos to all those who try to fly from there. I haven’t mentioned Equitable Life or the PPP disasters concerning the London Tube either.

We’ve lost our competence somewhere probably in the mid to late 20th century and now our civil service (the constant failing feature in all this, governments do CHANGE (though they contain recyled stereotypes, union activists or PPE/law at Oxbridge, take your pick) from time to time, as if we care), government and our captains of industry provide Malevolent Muddle.

The muddle bit is clear, I hear you say, why malevolent? Simply because it damages our quality of life as citizens every day and on every level (service levels delivered, health, crime, taxation, ecology, you name it). These people are a chronic disease for which there is currently no current cure. Perhaps, it’s time we began to devise one?

Incidently, income tax receipts are currently about £150 billion per year, so muddle-free over ten years, the difference is significant., without starting on the £100K salaries paid routinely to medium level apparatchiks in my poor (the people are poor and the performance is poor) borough.

Sorry, need to go now, someone seems to be knocking at the front door.

I am SO delighted to see a ‘letters’ column in East End Lies. These ‘letters’ are, of course, on an anodyne (look that up, guys, it’ll be in a dict-ion-ary) subject chosen by the Mulberry Place fortress dwellers (rather than, for example, the general, corrosive, spin-ful uselessness of EEL itself or any substantial subject).

It’s difficult to see whether even the most sycophantic, unrealistic fanperson will swallow this.

However there are some gems within, for example: ‘we used a controlled sample through the citizens’ panel’ (concerning how they ‘decided’ to put CO2 charging into parking permit charges).

Various non-council organisations have been trying to get the council to reveal actual FACTs (that’s numbers, events, things that are TRUE) about the ALMO ‘consultation’ (just to take the largest recent and most visible slice of democratic deficit) and failing.

Taking a smaller one, a ‘consultation’ revealed that we can easily close our local housing office, again, no supporting data for the ‘consultation’.

We also had a ‘consultation’ about major works in which our comments were immediately and comprehensively ignored.

So we can draw a few conclusions:

1. Mulberry Place does not use the word ‘consultation’ as other english speaking human beings use it. They use it in the sense of ‘tell’ rather than ‘listen, learn and change’.

2. ‘Consultation’ sample data is never published and, often, the ‘consultees’ are hand-picked from samples of unknown sizes.

3. Sample sizes, actual questions and detailed data are NEVER published. Compare and contrast the normal interaction of MORI (the polling organisation) and a ‘real’ newspaper for example.

Apparently the NHS management uses the same semantics for ‘consultation’: pretend to listen and discard, so perhaps it’s dot.gov thing?

The Bill Broadcasting Corporation is breathlessly (the breathlessness is sheer desire, of course, but in a nice, non-sexual, way) for another interview with Bill Gates, their main sponsor apart from the helpless taxpayer.

How very predictable and so uninteresting. Of course the upper reaches of BBC technology are littered with Microsoft fanboys (take a bow Ashley Highfield and Eric Huggers, who was a top Microsoft executive) so this is probably why the BBC is cosying up to Gates for the nth time.

Is it really good enough to syphon tens of millions of UK public money into an American near-monopoly via the Bill Broadcasting Corporation?

Remember that we could create re-usable software in the BBC (and thus have value for public money, apart from the enormous hip/karmic effect), if they decided to turn away from the dark side.

I’m waiting for an interview with Torvalds or Larry Wall (you know why this would be, don’t you, guys?), for example. Ha, as if THAT would happen.

Happy pcsoo (pronounced p-sue or more sarcastically, piss-soo), politically correct something-or-other, you indolent and resentful serfs of NuGov.com !

You can be assured that your wishes and aspirations will be ignored this coming year, as every year before. You are but battery hens for complex and onerous taxes that support a steadily growing, redundant and superfluous class of ‘politicians’ and ‘officials’ who contribute nothing to the earth but blasts of flatulent hot air, thus exacerbating global warming.

Don’t encourage these redundant and cancerous outgrowths by voting either, when we’re down to 20% turnout, even they will have to admit that they have no legitimacy or democratic mandate. Prefer to write ‘none of the above’, the option that is not allowed on the ballot paper (presumably because it would win every time, as the old joke goes: ‘if voting changed anything, it would be illegal’, actually I think that’s an Emma Goldman quote, but, like dot.gov I am too indolent and full of pcsoo pudding to look it up).

Finally, I note that the peasant’s revolt (which started in Essex) was mainly motivated by harsh and regressive taxation.

I recently wrote a letter to the mayor of Tower Hamlets about their propaganda sheet, East End Life aka East End Lies (as it is known by most of the borough, except for the senior inhabitants of the Mulberry place fortress). This letter, in edited form was published as an op-ed piece in a newspaper (as opposed to a ‘community newspaper produced by the council’).

It’s true, also, that I have previous form here. I objected to Hackney Today (described by one Hackney councillor, in a rare moment of candour, as ‘Pravda meets Heat’) whilst I lived in Hackney. I’m an equal opportunities reformer.

I’m delighted (hey, was that sarcasm or was it sarcasm) to say I have a reply (page1, page2), pped from someone or other, I guess the mayor is probably too busy overseeing the ‘newspaper’ (imagine green eyeshades and cries of ‘hold the front page, the ALMO is not just very very good, it is WONDERFUL!’).

Some of their work has Beacon status (see letter, I’m SO excited about that) which is ’supported’ by the ODPM (John Prescott, a true visionary, if there ever was one). To cut to the chase, this is just gubbiment giving random awards to other bits of gubbiment.

The reply is, as I expected, patronising, slippery, bland, factually inaccurate in at least one place and badly argued (well, it’s mainly blairy-blather (or are we ‘on’ browny-babble now?) not actual argument, no supporting facts, we must just ‘believe’ like the good sheeple we are) so my objections are going elsewhere now.

I shall be publishing simple remedies too, I try and be as constructive as I can, even when confronted with this huge and increasing level of democratic deficit, locally and nationally.

Happily also, my ‘consultation’ (I’ve used the same process as the town hall uses for everything, ask a statistically insignificant number of people, then discard any replies that I don’t care for…) reveals that no-one (who can read, there’s a problem in the borough with that and with recycling, to take just a couple of examples) believes anything in East End Life anyway.

Thank you for trying though (we know that you lie to yourselves as much as you lie to us, see the Brezhnev period of this old joke) and happy pcsoo (politically correct something or other) to those senior members of the Mulberry place ‘high castle’!.

The same people that wish to plunder directly from your bank account, now seem to have ‘lost’ 25 million records with bank account details on them. The police are investigating the ‘loss’.

Oh, and also, It would probably be a day’s work or less to produce 25 million records with the bank details removed (which would render them safer, not safe though, it was an idiotic idea to put them on a CD anyway) from the original 25 million records. Their estimate for the cost for this was £5000, according to the Sunday Times. Come on, even the spotty 22 year old creatures from Accenture (who don’t know anything about computing) are ‘only’ paid £2000 per day. My official estimate is £500, where’s the call for tender?

So the statement by HMRC about ‘expense’ is either false or a statement about their deep and abiding incompetence with computer systems and value for money. The fact that ‘they’ (gubbiment + civil service, is civil service a sort of oxymoron by the way?) took ten days to come clean is not reassuring either.

A fortiori, the Gruniad comments about our ‘loss’ of expertise within gubbiment IT, including commentary about depending on large expensive subcontractors (EDS is mentioned, I guess Accenture has been on the wane since Enron). I’m not sure they had any and that there was anything to ‘lose’?

Well they’ve finally got their way. Why bother to ASK those pesky taxpayers to pay, when you can plunder directly?.

Since our new princeling Brown (Browny-babble or Ed’s balls has replaced Blairy-blather, but, frankly, there’s not much difference) is also still chancellor as well (who IS Alaistair Darling?) this kind of thing will probably just be the start.

I wrote about this two years ago, it’s based on a system in France, that is (surprise, surprise) widely abused by the ‘fisc’ (French Inland Revenue).

Well, another pompous unreplyable email from EG (notice how I protect your name) of ‘BBC Information’:

Thank you for your e-mail to the BBC Trust. As I am sure you will appreciate, members of the BBC Trust receive more correspondence than they can deal with personally, so once letters have been read they are forwarded by their office to BBC Information.

Of course, they are too ‘busy’ (doing whatever the great and the good do, who knows, waving and smiling, perhaps?) but that is not the point, my media-studies professional. The point is that you have confirmed to me that the BBC Trust and the BBC are the same thing, therefore any nominal progress gained from changing the ‘Board of Governors’ to the ‘BBC Trust’ is illusory. Or rather, it’s a piece of sleight of hand to distract the unwashed providers of cooerced BBC finance, us.

In other news, the BBC has exonerated itself for alleged product placement, however, since the ‘investigation’ was BBC by BBC and the result was a press release, the truth is still very unclear. We can rejoice in that fact as we see Dell PCs and North Face anoraks on BBC 24.