Vatican Rag Week

Well, ain’t that interesting. It looks as though Henry VIII’s victory over the Vatican may have been a temporary achievement after all.

Back to Basics

Well, that was a lot of blog posts. I will admit I have not read all those published by the writers I follow since I effectively went offline; that’s because you guys posted over a thousand articles in that time and much of it is no longer in any way “news”. But I did find a few things I felt rant-worthy in my trawls through the blogosphere.

Wut?

Right. I’ve got things at the pub under control. I’ve had a couple of days off. My email works again, and I’ve got internet from home. I’m back. Be warned.

JQP in Boxes

So, just after the house-move one of my full-time staff broke her leg, and is out for 6-12 weeks. So I’ve just done two weeks of most of her work as well as mine… and I’ve really had no reading time. Add to this a continuing state of internet fail at home, for reasons of BT, and I’m still on hiatus. Sorry…

In other news, really everyone needs to read this.

None Dare Call It Treason

The Climate Camp is back, and thoroughly established on Blackheath, scene of a number of very drunken evenings of burly cheer back when I was a Kent schoolboy rugby player. They’re slowly getting their message across in spite of all the distractions. They’re a broad, consensus-based coalition which carries no universal ideological burden. The only point of cohesion is that they are all dedicated to true debate, to collective action and to direct, rather than representative/corruptible political self-determination. They are able to be all of these things because they live in a society where the cost of entry into the communications market is so low that normal people can play too. And they’re winning the spin war, so far. Being factual, organised and in the right really helps with that. Mr. Cameron, take note.

O Frabjous Day!

And so it came to pass in the year of the Millenium, when all manner of dangerous prophecies and signs were spread about the place, that the green hills and merry cities of ancient Albion were afflicted, nay, Invaded, by a terrible WYRM of great and hideous aspect, well hung with wispy tentacles of Vaporous Vapidity and Malicious Mindlessness. As its terror and INFAMY spread throughout the land, it cast down from on high the sages of Oxford and of Birmingham. From its evil Eye burst forth tendrils of calumny and gossip which infected those of high and low estate alike, who settled squelching into the swamp called Superiority Complex, saying “Hah, hah, we’d never let our children grow up like that!“: but they did speak falseley for the BEAST fed itself upon those very same children. And the names of the BEAST were many and nefarious, but its true and secret name was Cliche.

Enlightenment: noun, apparently transitory

I sometimes wonder if I just need to stop reading the internet. Since I returned to the world of mass media (i.e. this morning) I have been made sequentially angry by 9 things, and was planning a fairly serious In Brief about them until the 10th thing came along and just overwhelmed my capacity to think for a while.

Books in Boxes

JQP has fallen down the hole marked “House-move” and will climb out eventually.

JQP in Brief

Allies

It may prove a strategic error for the Cambridge PD to have shown their collective asses right at the start of Blog Against Racism week. It practically guaranteed them the spotlight as “offenders of the week” at a time when thousands of honourable people were looking for a bigot to pillory. On the other hand, I didn’t even know it was IBARW until Jennie Rigg mentioned it: hat duly tipped.

Surveillance Societies

[ Editor's note: This article was originally written for PSUK and appears here by permission of the editors. ]

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Surveillance, it seems to me, comes in two categories differentiated by purpose; that is, all surveillance efforts will fulfill one, or both in some mixture, of two purposes. The first is the easiest, and the most etymologically obvious: surveillance is investigative.

A typical example of such surveillance work would be a phone tap. You initiate a phone tap to find out things you didn’t know before; it is an investigative tool. A point-to-point communication which should thus limit information exposure is compromised by external surveillance, permitting the watchers to learn things they would otherwise be unable to learn. But it is worth noting that this investigative function for surveillance is effective precisely in so far as it is covert; a subject aware of observation behaves differently.

The Wrath of the Righteous

I had a nice little list, today. Things worth bringing to the attention of my occasional lectors. I was going to write about how England won something. At cricket no, less. I was going to mention how Neil Amstrong wants us to go to Mars, and how strongly I agree: and how South Africa has finally redeemed itself after Thabo Mbeki by developing a potentially viable AIDS vaccine. But then I checked up on what the Angry Black Woman said today and now, I’m angry too.

In truth, I am not angry. I am enraged. Which proves I should heed Nojojo’s advice better in future, and not read the comment threads on articles about race in America.

Ties That Bind II

Re-capping my last, the tie made a certain amount of sense as part of the consolidation of British pub trade, in the context of the generally anti-competitive run of business over the later 20th Century. But it didn’t really do any good for anyone except brewers. There were even advantages from the advent of keg lagers, and the occasional keg bitter: they are point and click. To be a real ale cellarman is a craft, with physical and intellectual skills that must be taught and learned, practiced and honed. You have to know the beer, you have to know the tools, and you have to use them every day. This meant that a bad landlord could really mess up your beer (I’ve heard dark tales of the drip trays going back into the top of the mild every night, for example). With keg, you’d have to take an axe to it to really mess it up.

But the over-all consolidation of the trade was, as I said, not really good for anyone except capital accumulators. It made the beer worse, it made pubs worse, it made publicans lives’ hell and it radically reduced competition within the UK market. We’ve gone some way to fixing that, partly through the work of CAMRA and others, partly by just making better beer. Where there were 60 independent brewers in Britain at the start of the 80s there are over 600 now. Brewing is beginning to be a competitive industry again. But the pub trade is getting even worse: 35 pubs a week have been closed in the last year. Think about those numbers for a moment.

Ties That Bind I

It hadn’t occurred to me, though it really should have, that the British Government is now a considerable player in the pub trade. It was pretty much inevitable, given that the financial crisis is derived from an artificially inflated and then over-exploited property boom, that at least one of the failed banks was going to be a pubco owner.

So, my hat is tipped to Private Eye (1240, p29) who have had a good look at the ridiculous and incestuous relationships between the PubCos, the government, and the Government’s “independent” body of pub valuers, RICS. This Labour administration (by “this” I mean New Labour, not Broon Labour) has continued the trend established in the 80s of setting thieves to encourage thieves when it comes to regulation. In the process, they managed to create the conditions for a scam even more ridiculous than the tied lease.

It’s better when you talk

Apologies to all British readers for reminding them of a truly dire series of BT adverts. Over at GeekaChicas A Nonny Mouse has been talking about the city travails of Bozeman, Montana. In brief; a major local employer who also happen to be the city administration and therefore publicly funded, decided that all job applicants must submit username/password data for their internet community sites, including Facebook, Livejournal and email sites. The purpose of this remarkable “background check” was to verify that servants of Bozeman should be “of the highest moral fiber”.

JQP in Brief

So I’m back on the Metro run for the first time in a while, having spent 9 days in a field in Somerset making actual things out of wood. A short list of things I felt rant-worthy appears below.