“But this time it was Hetherington, a printing worker, who led the frontal attack (on the demands for freedom of the press). His ‘Poor Man’s Guardian‘ carried the emblem of a hand-press, the motto Knowledge is Power, and the heading ‘Published contrary to “Law” to try the power of “‘Might” against “Right”.

And as an example of the seditious power of satire, a power the ‘might’ of the government, the industrialists and landowners tried to crush, here’s a sample of some of the work of William Hone:

“Our Lord, who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. Give us our usual slops, and forgive us our occassional absences on divisions; as we promise not to forgive those that divide against thee. Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.

New Labour spin doctors; eat your hearts out.

The next day, glancing at the BBC website I noticed a story about ticks and looking down, realised my legs were covered in the darn things – at least a dozen which I proceeded to remove.

The power of the web – good points; it’s possible to order tick removers and find out all sorts of things about them. The bad points – there is a huge amount of conflicting advice and thoughts about ticks and disease.

However, one thing that occured to me today while walking in a different bit of woodland (and being much more cautious about plunging into the undergrowth) was that there has been a bit increase in the incidence of the diagnosis of Lyme Disease.

Now, is this because there are more ticks, and they are more toxic; or has the web spread more basic knowledge about the risks that ticks bring and encouraged people to visit the doctor if they have a tick, or think they may have had one?

Can NAMES NOW BE NAMED.

Who exactly is responsible for this ongoing debacle on the railways? Which particular senior civil servants, which politicians (John Major was an instigator), which consultancy firms. Well, hopefully I for one are about to find out as I’ve sent off a Freedom of Information request.

I have a particular interest because for the past six years I’ve used the service on a regular basis. It is slow, unreliable, and increasingly more and more expensive. When the service was run by GNER, it was possible to get a ticket to London for around £11.00.  Under ‘National Express’ that ticket increased to £12.50 and then to £15.00. Then a few weeks ago, without any announcement or explanation, the cheapest tickets could no longer be brought before mid-day, or after 2.30pm coming out of London. The cheapest ticket to leave London after 4pm have more or less now gone up to around £96.00. The reality is that althought I buy cheap tickets, I also quite often buy more expensive tickets as well. There is a quid pro quo here. My averaage journey cost isn’t £15.00 – it’s much higher because I also use the railway on an unscheduled basis. I can make it affordable by buying cheap and not so cheap tickets. What I can’t afford is to pay high fares for every single journey I make.

There were two serious flaws with the award of the contract to National Express. Firstly, the contract management was done within the *minimum* EU rules for procurement, and it was done over a Christmas holiday period. Rail experts, and other companies that were considering a bid, complained about the way the contract was managed AT THE TIME.

Secondly, the amount that National Express said they could pay back was ludicrious. Again, experts pointed  this out at the time. But no – the clever, clever civil service know much more than the industry experts. So they swalled National Express daft claims and now, yet again, the whole franchise is in turmoil.

How much exactly has this cost the taxpayer? I can’t help thinking that if the whole process had been MANAGED PROPERLY then perhaps the cheap tickets could have been maintained. Perhaps all the money spent changing the signs of the stations, and painting logos on trains could have been saved. Perhaps all the money spent on lawyers and advisers could have been spent on ensuring that at least the basic things of the railway – crucial things like ’signals’ actually work – day after day after day.

So why do we blog? Because trying to get the voice of reason heard within government feels like a waste of time. Hoping the government will make the right decisions is a futile optimism. So at one level blogging helps us let off steam; it becomes the new democracy, because out there in cyberspace someone might be listening, unlike in the corridors of Whitehall or the chamber of the House of Commons.

With this pension money I bought myself a luxury item. An semi-acoustic guitar

Now I do not claim to play the guitar well; this is purely for my own amusement and entertainment. I don’t imagine I’m any of the well know guitar heroes, I just trash out 3 chord tricks or make the thing squeal away in my own personal version of the blues.

What I have noticed though is that there is a qualitative distinction between playing something on an acoustic guitar compared to electrification. Electrical sound adds buzzing, distortion, feedback – and of course is louder. The loudness initially suggests *better than* although I’m not sure why.

So I’m wondering whether the electrification of information has this amplifying effect? Whether the hum of computers, the brightness of screens, the rapid ability to move from one cluster of information to another, the ease at which (some but not all) information can be accessed and retrieved makes us think it’s better?  Does this environment of electricity seduce us into thinking that digital is best, that it has an inherent quality above that of paper, books, libraries, documents, newspapers?

The television is perhaps an example; it’s certainly more animated than a book is; but is it any better in terms of quality? I really, really don’t think so.

In the process I’ve discovered that books can now be printed on demand.

So…if you’re ever looking for a copy of

Bruce, John Collingwood. The Roman Wall: A Description of the Mural Barrier of the North of England. 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867.
Go to Abebooks and you can pay £8.00 (current prices) for a copy. But the next question is – how does this work and can I print myself a copy?

There’s been a couple of discussions I’ve been half following recently about e-books.  Maybe existing books could become e-books but with the addition of hypertext within the book itself; so for example, The Origin of Species could be created as an e-book with links within the text to relevant resources. Maybe this is already happening, or has happened.

I will post a comment or two about NHS and information systems in the next day or two.

Mortgage – by around 10% (c’mon the 0.5% base rates don’t affect MOST people as they have fixed rate mortgages)

Food – 18%

Council Tax -4%

Train fares – up around 10% and now up another 10% in the next month

Gas and electricity – 33% – remember when that was announced without notice? No sign of those prices going back down by 33% even though oil prices have fallen.

And as the pound is now on parity with the Euro, most trips to the continent cost 30 -50% more than they did a year or so ago.

So how is the zero inflation calculated? Does it only include items that MPs claim on their expenses? And with all this knowledge management and  information, it seems odd that the government is able to get away with so much spin, rather than hard facts and figures.

If there is such a thing as ‘knowledge management’ which has any meaning beyond management double-speak then it really needs to be applied to the realm of ‘real life’.

So in the past few days when I have read that there is likely to be ‘hospital cuts’ and ‘more efficiencies’ I found myself almost buying a can of spray paint to write on the walls of the Bank of England; ‘Praise Marx and pass the ammunition’.

If you don’t know what ‘efficiencies’ mean in this context, then lets spell it out. Efficiencies is about handing over huge sums of public money to consultancy firms who then make wide sweeping statements that really boil down to sacking people ‘to save money’. At a micro level, wherever I’ve had the misfortune to be anywhere near an ‘efficiency’ project I have seen the following; a revolving door of consultants which means there is no accountability and permanent staff are left to pick up the pieces of ‘efficiency recommendations’. In one case, a team was left with several thousand pounds of ‘efficiency’ savings that they had never agreed to. Where was the consultant? Oh off to another marvellous project.

In another efficiency project, the figures looked great on what was ’saved’. Until the costs of the support for a new system and the consultants costs were added in. But the fantastic thing is that those costs were NOT added in to the ‘efficiencies’ report. It’s the same nonsense that’s wrecked the economy applied to IT projects. Where did these voodoo economics come from?

The way some organisations seem to roll over and die when confronted by consultants and supplier is just truly bizarre; particulary when they hand over a large book full of empty cheques. I have seen organisations fret and fury about the fact that some pensioner might be getting tuppence ha’penny too much a week (and introduce huge IT systems to make sure they don’t) – and at the same time pay invoice after invoice to suppliers without even checking whether the work has been done properly – and that’s for thousands and thousands of pounds.

If this all seems a bit over the top, it’s worth reading – or re-reading ‘Plundering the Public Sector’ by David Craig.

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001109,39280421,00.htm

And the soundtrack to all of this should include the wonderful ‘Bank Failures’ by Bob Miller.

As more and more photos and footage emerges of the police violence – and it can’t be described in any other way – of the G20 it is clear that they acted as a law unto themselves with no regard to the democratic right of people to protest. There are two issues here. First; we live in a democracy that was fought for over a period of decades and generations. We don’t live in a police state and most of us don’t want to. If we don’t like the government, if we don’t like bankers getting huge bonuses for incompetence and if we don’t want the planet killed by the greed of a few multinational corporations then we have a right to say so. We have a right to march, a right to assembly and a right to free speech. On April 1st the Metropolitan Police did it’s utmost to stop those things happening. It is an attack on democracy.

Second; the violence of the police on demonstrations is nothing new. We could go back to the death of Blair Peach in 1979. We could go back further. Many individual examples could be pointed to; the police attack on the miners demonstration in 1984 in Whitehall. I was actually at the point of the march when the police smashed their way in, regardless of children in prams, elderly retired miners or whatever. Or the attack on the printers in Wapping – eventually all settled out of court – but by then, Murdoch was safe. Or the anti-apartheid demo – remember apartheid? Mandela was still in jail at the time. The police were taking demonstrators into the subways under Trafalgar Square and kicking the sh*t out of them. There was blood everywhere.

Police violence is nothing new. But what is new is that now everyone has a mobile phone and everyone has a camera on their mobile phone and everyone has access to the internet and knows how to post their photos and evidence. We could call it protest in the age of digital reproduction.

As for the bank window getting smashed – what sort of nonsense is that? It’s supposed to be a bank with loads of money inside. Is it really so easy to break in by using a chair leg?

There is now a photo account of Ian Tomlinson walking past the police. One photo shows him being hit across the leg with a baton. Another shows him being pushed with two hands by a police officer who’s face is masked. Not expecting this violence he is thrown forwarrd. Half an hour later, he’s dead. No wonder it’s become a criminal offence to take photographs of the police; as we’re always told, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide.

On the same page, there was an advert earlier (from the police) saying something like ‘justice done, justice seen to be done’. The advert is now no longer visible. It had a blue flashing light. I presume it was supposed to make us feel safe in a Dixon of Dock Green kind of way. The proximity of this advert and the photos of what the police really look like – complete with their telescopic coshes – and the photos of an innocent man being surrounded and attacked is one of these collages that the web can be so good at unconsciously producing. It takes the threads of history and weaves them together in surprising ways.

I sincerely hope that with all the modern CCTV, the survelliance, the need to collect data about everyone’s movements, that the Metropolitan Police never, ever claim that they can’t identify the police officer who did the pushing and caused this death. Because if that happens, and no one is brought to court, then we really have crossed yet another line in the removal of our civil liberties and another line that removes what we’re allowed to do, and another line that gives the state yet more (and unaccountable) power.

Now here’s an interesting fact-et.

I’m ploughing my way (again) through the superb ‘Making of the English Working Class’ by EP Thompson and have arrived at the suppression of the radical movement by Pitt. Despite the persecution, which involved execution, transportation and attacks by King and Church mobs, the reformers continued to agitate, educate and organise.

Thomas Spence, from a poor background in Newcastle moves to London. He had once been arrested for selling Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, a book estimated to have sold between 100,000 – 200, 000 copies at the time. As early as 1775 he developed a theory of land nationalization and advocated an end to the hereditary aristocracy.

He continues to publish and sell tracts advocating reform and against the oppressive authorities (who made wide use of spies and survelliance, albiet of a non-electronic kind). And one of the places he did this from was Little Turnstile. But Little Turnstile can’t be found on Google Street Level – presumably because a car can’t drive up this narrow alley in Holborn.

It’s curiously pleasing that a small alley in London that was associated with a huge movement for reform – which included annual parliaments, the right of association, a republic, much wider sufferage and many other demands – has managed to avoid being filmed by the all seeing eye of Big Brother.

I had to do a double take when I saw the ‘Science and Environment’ category on the BBC because ’science and technology’ is so prevalent; it would seem ‘natural’ to put the two categories together because of the axiomatic use they have had.

It would be interesting to trace the etymology of ’science and environment’; it introduces a more political conception than ’science and technology’. And that isnt’ itself a bad thing.

I would really like to see this in the flesh as it were (or whatever it’s made of) because I found my reaction to watching the video clip interesting. Before the curtain was unveiled I had images of a sort of terminator type robot that could obviously be sent into burning buildings to rescue people, or into dangerous mines or whatever. But would you want any harm to come to something as cute as this?

Creating a robot with facial expressions and human features (the bosom for example) made me think about robots in a very different way. And there was this sense of watching this and realising that many of the issues raised by science fiction writers could be realised. How would we interact with ‘human like’ robots and what would our emotional response be.

It feels like this robot is designed to be human like to create human responses within us. Could I talk to it? What sort of conversation might it have?

I got the sense that the robot is designed to have a social function as much as being the answer to some technical or other problem, and that’s complex; can we have ethical issues with a lump of metal and silicon chips and electronic circuits. No; because that’s all it is. But if it creates an emotional response within us, then the relationship between robots and humans is going to be very different to that between humans and other technologies.

The other fiendish capitalist institution I really hate (apart from the banks – and they are now in  super league all of their own) is BT. I HATE THEM AS MUCH AS VISTA.

How come it’s so expensive to have a telephone???? All the exchanges became digital years ago and an army of human operators replaced by silican chips.

Why can’t you buy the line instead of renting it??? Imagine the fuss and wailing in the Daily Mail if weren’t allowed to buy a house or a car? And why is renting the line so expensive anyway?

And why, for a PHONE company, is it impossible to ever speak to anyone?

Anyway, calming down a bit, we’re opting out of this electronic mugging and switching to the Post Office. Who knows what it’s like but it looks a lot cheaper than the BT option. There certainly can’t be the same advertising costs as the adverts for the Post Office are so bad that until recently I thought the service was only for pensioners.

I await next week with anticipation when the great switch over occurs.

Then there is the internet as a primary historical source. This is the writing of history using the internet; the capture of historical views, opinions, interpretations and facts. And this perhaps is writing history in a new way; Macauley, Trotsky, Thompson would write books which would then become part of a series; others might write in response. This would be a relatively slow process and open to those with the resources and ability to write book length historical narratives. With the development of web based histories, the writing of history is open to much large numbers of people, and history can be written in small pieces, in collaboration with other people. The development of hypertext means that relationships between content can be established in virtual environments in a way that comes closer to reflecting those relationships in physical environments. If this is done in particular ways, it will change the way history is written, and also the way in which history is percieved and understood.

In the past two decades General Motors has sold 170 million vehicles (many of them those wretched SUVs that cause untold environmental and physical damage). Selling these 170 million vehicles generated $3,300 billion in revenue. But also ‘wracked up cumulative losses of $55bn’.

So despite selling all those cars, and making all that money, the company still made a phenomenal loss. Did I hear someone mention the falling rate of profit? Well not in the mainstream media I didn’t.

If any ‘facts’ sum up the credit crunch then these ones do. And if this is the general picture across economic activity and if the problem is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the collapse of value, and overproduction, then simply pouring money into the banking system isn’t going to make much, if any difference.

Which raises at least four questions.

The first is an information technology one. With all the growth of ‘business intelligence’ systems, ‘knowledge management’ ‘efficiency savings’ (*cough*) and ‘business analytics’ how come no one saw this coming? If I was in the financial sector and had invested millions of pounds in the past two decades on information systems, I would want my money back.

(I’ve not heard much about efficiency savings recently. I wonder how this will be applied to the banking sector? No, of course not, efficiency savings must only apply to hospitals and public services. If some one helps create billions of pounds worth of toxic debt it is efficient to retire them on a pension of £700,000 a year. How can it not be so?)

Next; perhaps it isn’t to do with information systems at all, but the re-alignment with the real world (of production) with the artificial virtual world. Hey, we’ve got HD TV, social networking, twitter, advices on places to eat on our mobile phones – this must be the post-modern nirvana promised by the end of history of brigade; remember? The triumph of capitalism and all that stuff. ‘No longer will the world be about moving atoms but about moving bits and bytes’. Hmm…ever tried eating bits and bytes?

And then the problem of ’solution’. Well Gordon Brown (the prudent chancellor who quite happily – nay encouraged – out of control lending) hinted that perhaps the Chinese working class might work harder to pull the world out of recession. This is tricky as many Chinese workers already work over 90 hours a week for scant pay and in conditions that would have the animal rights brigade in the West chaining themselves to railings in protest. Those Chinese workers who were being sold a capitalist dream are now finding themselves out of work in their millions with little to show for so much hard work. Welcome to the world of the international proletariat. Instead of heading towards a Chinese version of the ‘never had it so good’ 1960s, the whole country is rapidly approaching a Russia 1905 moment; rapid industrialisation, intense dislocation, disaffected peasantry, arbitary justice as the nascent capitalists smash up the existing moral economy. Oh, and overseeing all of this a military dictatorship.

And then the issue of alternatives must be raised. The government is culpable in much of the mess we face. They did sod all to restrain the banks, they’ve encouraged the mad spiral of debt and created the environment where the whole country might be bankrupted in the very near future. They are also culpable in lacking any form of imagination whatsoever.

If General Motors have sold 170 million cars and still made a huge loss then maybe it’s not just bits of the banking system that are a problem but the whole system of production itself. Do we need more cars? More mobile phones? More ticky tacky rubbish, most of which ends up in landfill? No we damn well don’t in most cases. What the *world* as a place needs is not more consumer trash but proper infrastructure; sanitation, clean water, sewage systems, schools, equipment in schools, medical equipment, care of the young, sick and disabled, care of the eldery.

Here’s a story on the BBC today about how a blind man can see again after being fitted with a bionic eye

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7919645.stm

Here’s a suggestion. Rather than General Motors continuing to build SUVs at a huge loss and expect the tax payer to bail them out, re-tool the entire factories to make artificial eyes for people. That way it would be a direct benefit to tax payers, it would save jobs and it would help arrest the development of an ever more selfish, alienated and atomisted society. And instead of closing down factories and plants in Britain and Europe, re-tool them to build sanitation systems for the world’s slum dwellers. And rather than have construction workers fighting over the crumbs of a few jobs on power stations, guarantee a job for any construction worker who wants one in re-building the collapsed industrial cities of Britain and the inner city areas. Whole areas could be bulldozed and re-build in style. It would provide employment for generations.

I  don’t have the maths to hand but I intuitively believe this would be more ‘efficient’ and cost effective than giving billions of pounds to a system that clearly isn’t working and has no certain chance of recovery.

http://thesaurus.english-heritage.org.uk/