A Hunt

Jeremy Hunt is found to have acted illegally a second time, this time by the appeal court. Instead of apologising for his crime and for wasting our money, he insists he was morally right and will change the law so that another time it'll be ok.

I'm afraid I can't think of an insult disgusting enough

Illiteracy

According to the BBC website “Grayson Perry asks if revolution is a defining idea in art, or has it met its end?” Actually, I think he suggested that art has met its end; not revolution.

Some hours later, Naomi Campbell responded to a question: “It's not ignorance; it's not knowing”

Facebook

I'll say this in the light of Mr Snowden, and in the light of a nice Bell cartoon today of an ear extending to wrap around Morales' plane

I think the following message to Facebook puts it clearly: “I do not want a Facebook account. Every now and then you write to me as if we are old friends. When I just unsubbed you said you had amended your records or something. I don't want you having any record of me. I think you are despicable. Please confirm you have entirely deleted your record of me”

This was after Facebook wrote to me chatty and said I seemed to be missing out. You know, the way a god salesman tells you how they are pleased to see you.

I unsubbed although they had subbed me without my knowledge; and they said they had updated my preferences.

My problem was that I wanted to know where the “fuck off” button is. In reply to the message above they said “Thanks for your feedback. We aren't responding to each email we receive through this channel, but we may reach out to you for more info as we work on improving this experience.”

So these dog turds with business qualifications decide if they reply or not to a request that they stop their harassment. It seems to be impossible to get a response. Kafka's Castle anyone?

Dungheads & pointlessness

I havent written here recently for a variety of reasons including a sense of pointlessness. I thought back nearly 20 years to when my employer decided to victimise me and another union activist for standing up for our colleagues' rights although those colleagues did precious little to help themselves. When this happened, those colleagues paused briefly in their endless asking “What has the union ever done for me?” to declare us both trouble makers who were getting what we deserved – the impetus to obedience driving them.

This morning I thought that I must write though because I read in the paper that young people are turning to the Tories because of their imposition of the bedroom tax. This was in The Guardian and wasnt some wet dream of the Daily Mail.

How could this be? I wondered. The answer would seem to be that those young people are Dungheads, like much of the rest of the population. In no way could one support the policy rationally – i.e. I challenge anyone to make the case. At best it would a demand to be given some of the action at the expense of others without doing anything oneself, like brats having tantrums.

But I am busy and a bit under the weather and was going to let it go. What is the point of writing that people are Dungheads when people are Dungheads?

And then I arrived at the cafe where I work, because it has wifi and where the official propaganda encourages you to work in a quiet atmosphere, to find a dune of shouting mothers and screaming babies occupying two thirds of the tables with electricity and blocking access to all the others with armoured personnel carriers.

I asked them politely to move these vehicles so I could get through and was just waved away. So I said they were selfish and moved a table out and clambered in. Tell him to fuck off, said one.

I worked. After a while one baby began screaming piercingly and was ignored, which is why presumably it was screaming; and I gave in and said For God's sake shut it up.

Trying and failing to be suave, the mother turned to me and told me to go to the library if I wanted quiet.

Clearly she has not been to the library. The library is full of screaming adults and children running riot. That's when it's open.

I said This place is supposed to be quiet.

No it isn't, she said, without hesitation.

So I was dealing with religion. To confirm that there was a mothers' knot of voices as various of them shouted at me their opinion. From what I could gather, which was little, most of them were not relevant to the exchange; but whenever has the believer made a pertinent reply to an objection? It was pointless to reply because their aim was not to reach agreement but to impose their will.

But of course I am wrong. I forget that there are only 7 billion of us, that there is empty cheap housing, places in schools and an abundance of open space. I forget that children are best socialised by being given no guidance.

In due course their attention gave out, they forgot what they were doing there, and they left, a few hurling insults as they left. It reminded me of trying to teach teenagers in school.

And then some business types arrived. I committed some of it to memory but the memory has turned to sludge. None of them were actually making anything or doing anything useful. It was all, as so often, the application of Onanism to administration.

The place is full of people with babies all inordinately proud of their achievement in reproducing, though flies can do that.

As Timon said, More Man. I may as well post it. Perhaps one of my enemies will read it and become so angry they have a heart attack.

A sample of the electorate

I just had an “interesting” experience, sitting in a branch of Caffe Nero. There was some kind of family group in and they were worshipping a child. They shouted and the child shouted. The more noise they all made the happier they all were. The child could speak but they all spoke baby language and the child joined in to ingratiate itself

I had been concentrating on what I was doing, but at the time it was fairly routine. However, it came to a point where the noise the child was making, and it was a child and not a baby, were painful – what is sometimes called ear-splitting. It was way beyond not being able to work. (Caffe Nero say they think one can work in their cafes.)

I called out to them to keep it down and they gestured at me in a sort of 2001 opening scene sort of way and went on encouraging their child to join them in making pre-verbal noise.

This repeated several times and the more that they refuted my arguments with their detailed analysis and rhetoric, the more self-righteous their grunting gestures became.

No one else complained. They just got up and left. People are coming in now. Now there are 6.

You might think the staff would tell them off. Three or four of them were occupying about 1/5^th of the entire place. One of the staff has just spent some time returning the furniture to its place where the adults and child had displaced it by running up and down. They were disruptive.

But I infer that the staff are not allowed to tell people off. If they have money, take it off them. That's the policy

There came a moment when the child uttered a really painful scream and I flipped - shouted at them to bloody shut up. The squattest of these early primates loped over and uttered various phonemes. I found it a little bit frightening that someone who might just be human was so incoherent. I asked him what he was saying and eventually pieced together his propositions.

1 That's a child.

It is a fundamental tenet of all bad parenting that children make an unbearable noise and cannot be stopped, that to dispute that is to be stupid and that any child who does not make an unbearable noise is probably exhibiting signs of disease. Furthermore, parents who discourage their children from making an unbearable noise are bad parents.

2 This is a public space and I can make whatever amount of noise I want.

I disputed that and he refuted my opinion before I had finished it with “course I can”. I told him he was anti-social and he said fuck off which he seemed to think was a clincher.

It reminded me even then of a woman who responded here “it doesn't affect you”. When I disputed that, she said “No it doesnt because it's my child and not yours.” Some weeks later I had said to an acquaintance, someone who was becoming a friend, that I wasn't sure I'd be able to spend time in their home because of their smoking. They said “It doesnt affect you” When I said it did, no matter how hard we both tried, she said “It doesnt affect you because it's my choice”

At such times I wonder if there is any point in learning any logic, in learning anything, if we are subject to this sort of crap. Anyway that was the beginning of the end of that friendship.

3 If you want to play, go to the library.

Now I did find that impenetrable for some time; but in my quest to communicate with alien species, I persisted in saying, I confess, what are you burbling about? and eventually noticed that as the creature was saying this sentence it was gesturing with one of its forelimbs at my laptop

To the creature, the noise he and his fellow creatures was making was serious and anything done on a computer is playing. I think that's it. Such play is to be conducted in the library. I think that's it.

And I think that was when I first used the word “moron”. I am not proud of it. I do not condemn slugs for being themselves; but I do remain outraged that someone with such an aggressive and selfish and stupid attitude help to elect the government.

It seemed the noisy one was incapable of understanding that the objection was to its noise regardless of what one was doing

I do not think they are morons. I think they are culpable. I think they have never bothered to think. Before I realised that they only spoke proto Modern British, I asked them “Where do you get your sense of entitlement from?” and one replied “We are entitled”

This is the reality of the electorate

14 people in here now.

Funny way to run a business. But if you have seen some of the regional managers or whatever they call themselves, you'd understand. Up themselves smartarses

The Cloud made Honorary Dungheads for May 2013

Further to the last post, I have just been cut off 3 times in 25 minutes -- forced to reconnect, presumably because these fools who would need help masturbating have expanded their business beyond their infrastructure capacity. And they have the Dungheads' sense of entitlement that tells them it's ok to make false promises that we put our trust in and then consequently waste time just so long as they steal a living.

This must be happening to people all over the country. The reality of green shoots. The Cloud Dungheads for May 2013

Wifi company seeks the Dunghead 2013 prize

Nowadays I spend a lot of time connected to the net by The Cloud from branches of Caffe Nero.
The trouble is it is a bad service. It takes a lot of effort to connect in some places; and you have to remember that you will almost certainly be cut off without warning, which can lead to loss of data. Sometimes it is within 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes after hours; but in a day it can occur 2 or 3 times and there is no pattern.
Often it is difficult to login. Their database is unreliable and records disappear. If the record cannot be found, they post a message (if you're lucky) saying "I'm afraid that's lost with the clouds" or something like that, which I am sure the inane smartarses at The Cloud think is funny.
I challenged them on that and they explained that it means "your browser does not allow cookies". I responded that by no stretch of meaning could "I'm afraid that's lost with the clouds" mean "Your browser does not allow cookies" (it was at that moment that I discovered the existence of Modern British, the democratic language structure for evading meaning) and also that my browser does allow cookies.
They didn't apologise or admit that they had lied; but they said the message would be altered. It has not been altered.
One is referred to this help desk when they do not connect you to the net: they give you an email address. It does not seem to have occurred to them that if they do not connect you then you cannot send an email.
But when you do send it, they may or may not answer in about 5 days. They never apologise beyond a railway sorry for anything.
But if everything goes well then it is a cheap way of connecting, if you don't mind making sure you always have your current work at least in the RAM of a non-net application and don't mind spending 10 to 15 minutes connecting
I have purchased an external wifi receiver because it brings more control. The inbuilt PC system allows Free Pub Wifi across the street to connect; and it fights back if you try to disconnect it. Or else BT cuts in. Where I am, Caffe Nero, they seem to have gone for the cheapest option and the result is it rarely connects of its own will to The Cloud. I have complained to Caffe Nero and they have not bothered to answer.
Today I connected to The Cloud at 10:26 a.m. but my browser couldn't find any page. First I had to login. Fair enough, though I have never gained any benefit from them knowing who I am. Supposedly, The Cloud intercepts a call to the web page one chooses and takes you to its login, where, as I said, it may or may not grant you entry.
Now when it does that, logs you in, it leaves you there. Clearly the intention was to return you to the page you sought -- you can see that url being passed as an argument of the interception -- but it is at that point their programming skills failed them. I suppose they didn't cut and paste everything. So one must call the page a second time.
But you can't do that if it doesn't intercept. Sometimes, I poll their website myself and that sometimes works; but this morning I had to poll it one hundred and three times before it responded. 102 times The Cloud said it couldnt find the The Cloud website.
The website responded at 10:40, 13 minutes after I connected. Free Pub Wifi connects almost immediately so it is just a matter of a trash system.
When it responds, it does so with a link to click on. Usually 6 or 7 clicks are all it takes!
Then you go to another link to click. The record for that is now 24.
I imagine the whole thing running on an Amstrad CP/M machine.
It's at this point that you get the "lost with the clouds" crap and from now on have the
excitement of guessing when you will be cut off. Yesterday was the latest time that my email was "lost in the clouds" but I was simultaneously welcomed by my correct name so it wasn't lost at all. Who said quantum computing is far in the future. All I had to do was clear my cache and login again and everything was fine.
So they waste about 30 minutes of my time each day. On average. It did once tgakes me 3 and a half hours to connect, but I worked on paper while they finished playing with themselves.
If the company is really successful, I expect some of them will be made Lords. Then they can lecture us on waste and productivity