‘And I saw when the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the Four Beasts saying, “come and see”.’

Revelation 6:1

It’s said the great civilizations of the past didn’t disappear overnight in sudden cataclysms. Instead, they slowly and sadly declined over long years. The Roman Empire, for instance, slipped away through an embrace of decadence and lead piping in its plumbing. A lethargic and slowly lead-poisoned empire was - eventually - too tonto to survive.

And so, like standing in the calm eye of a hurricane, when standing at the centre of a slow-motion apocalypse it can be difficult to tell that anything is wrong. But the signs that we’re doomed can be seen by those who choose to look.

The first seal heralding our own slow demise was opened this week when the media went into febrile paroxysms over the significance of David Cameron’s changing hairstyle. What was the meaning behind Cameron’s switch from a parting on the right to a parting on the left? Articles that didn’t quote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who were as rare as non-piss poor journalism.

Confirming eschatologists’ fears, the total length of column inches devoted to Cameron’s new hair was *exactly* 666 miles. Miles and miles given over to whether the shift of parting was symbolic of Cameron’s political journey. Only mere inches, however, recorded that within days Cameron had changed again to a far more symbolically apposite spiv’s greasy quiff.

Let’s be emphatic about this. David Cameron wants to be the next Prime Minister - one of the world’s most powerful men - and current opinion polls show him having a good chance. Yet the media have so little to say about him that they went to town on his haircut.

He was also given a free ride over his House of Commons speech responding to the Budget. What it lacked in anything meaningful it made up for in endless flaccid jokes about Stalin and Michael Foot, a man anybody born after 1980 has never heard of. Listening was like trying to eat a spare rib with no meat on it but smeared thick with lemon curd. Or as Lib Dem leader Ming Campell cattily put it afterwards, ‘Once again, I am struggling to match the intellectual rigour of the previous speech’.

In the Book of Revelation, when the first seal is opened, a man appears on a white horse. There has been much speculation through the ages as to the man’s identity. Is it Jesus? Is it the Antichrist? More worryingly, we have no idea whatsoever how he wears his hair.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

‘Come in and sit down, Mr Britain,’ the doctor said sympathetically. ‘What can I do for you today?’

‘Well…’ Mr Britain began and proceeded to list his ailments.

It’s true what they say, the doctor thought as he listened, getting old is a cruel and miserable business. He had many elderly patients, but whenever one of them sadly admonished him with ‘don’t ever get old, doctor’, it would never fail to chill his heart by another degree of disquiet.

Just look at old Mr Britain, for example. He was a small, still dapper man, despite the air of a slight threadbareness about him. He’d been a prize fighter in his day, punching above his weight, and there was hardly anywhere in the world he hadn’t visited. He’d done it all. But now the trophies were long dusty and the memories sepia.

‘…and then there’s sex, doctor,’ said the old man.

‘I’m sorry?’ said the doctor, startled from his thoughts.

‘You know,’ said Mr Britain, without a hint of embarrassment. ‘Fucking.’

Here we go again, the doctor thought. The only way to deal with Mr Britain when he was in this mood was to be as equally brazen.

‘Fucking,’ replied the doctor, evenly. ‘We’ve been through this before, haven’t we, Mr Britain. You might have given that German woman a good seeing to but that was a long time ago now, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yes…’ said the old man, his voice trailing off. He knew what was coming next.

‘The only other woman I can recall you expressing an interest in fucking was that Russian lady and the last time you mentioned her was in about 1989. And then it was all about some bizarre threesome with your American friend. I seem to recall the poor Russian woman had some kind of breakdown. Fell to pieces, you could say.’

‘But this Trident you have me on,’ said Britain, ‘it’s helped my performance up until now but I’m not sure it’s working any more. Haven’t you got anything else?’

‘Well, there is a new version in development. Mr Britain. But to be frank with you, if I were to prescribe it to you, who do you have to fuck with? And please don’t say those Middle Eastern ladies you say you’ve been chasing all over the place.’

‘Well, you never know when you might meet somebody,’ Mr Britain said hopefully.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Britain.’ said the doctor, ‘Don’t you think your Casanova days are behind you? And you have other conditions that require more urgent treatment. What about your violent mood swings and your terrible diet?’

Mr Britain clenched his fists and closed his eyes.

Elsewhere, the sun was setting.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

Totally obvious, obviously, and not a patch on Beau or Tim, but I’m bored and avoiding work.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Government announced today that Phase One of its carbon neutral interactive democracy initiative is now complete.

Government statisticians have calculated that the energy saved by 1,460,785 motorists registering their concerns about the forthcoming road charging scheme on the Downing Street e-petition website, instead of taking to the streets or roads, has saved enough energy to fuel a reasonably-priced car for an entire series of ‘Top Gear’.

Indeed, the self-satisfaction measured as being generated by those signing the petition has registered at 2.6 on the Clarkson Scale. Scientists are now looking at how to harness this abundant alternative source of energy.

‘There’s been a long history of popular movements in democracy in this country,’ said cabinet minister, Ruth Kelly. Other ministers have also welcomed this popular movement from the sofa to the PC. On the matter of road pricing, ‘the status quo is not an option,’ added Ms Kelly, herself generating 2.6 gigaclichés - enough energy to provide 13 re-runs of Richard Hammond’s high-speed car crash.

Phase Two of the initiative, announced today, sees another series of exciting innovations introduced into the United Kingdom’s democratic process. Advances in both medical procedures and technology mean that physical interaction with both the environment and the government is no longer necessary.

In a painless procedure, the electorate’s brains will be removed from their bodies and suspended in a liquid nutrient compound. They will be connected to the Downing Street e-petition website via a central information grid.

This way they will be able to register their concerns with only the minimal use of electrical energy. These concerns will then be filed in a secure facility for study by future archivists.

The resources saved by reducing wasteful human interactions, not to mention the exciting biofuel possibilities from the harvested subcutaneous fat and cholesterol, will secure energy reserves for many generations to come.

This innovation is seen as a vindication of the Prime Minister’s vision. ‘Just as science and technology has given us the evidence to measure the danger of climate change, so it can help us find safety from it,’ he said in a 2004 speech on the environment. ‘The potential for innovation, for scientific discovery and hence, of course for business investment and growth, is enormous.’

The public have no cause for concern. Emotional sustenance and entertainment will be provided by a schedule of simulated rape trials, aspirational wish-fulfilment and low-grade pornography which is fed directly into the cerebral cortex.

Please remain in your homes. You will be collected.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

As if we needed another, it looks like BBC2’s new ‘political’ ‘drama’, ‘Party Animals’, is one more harbinger of the new Dark Age that’s poised to flatten all in its path in a tsunami of twattery. With Chris Moyles riding at the forefront like a doughnut-stuffed horseman of the apocalypse, obviously.

Making its debut this week, the show performed the singular feat of simultaneously being an allegory for the old Dark Age that swept through Europe in the early Middle Ages *and* being symptomatic of the cultural cretinism that’s giving birth to the new one.

For those that missed it (which was most of you, it only garnering 1.3 million viewers), ‘Party Animals’, as the title suggests, follows the daily lives of a bunch of young Westminster insiders as they shag, snog and snort their way across the 21st century’s political landscape.

Just as Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated, to its detriment, by young, uneducated princelings, ‘Party Animals’ sees virtue in the country’s political machine being run by twenty-somethings who seemingly know next to nothing. So much so, one of the characters, who is 31 and deemed past it, is killed off in a bloody road accident.

All the elements you’d expect are present and correct: the two cocky work-hard/play-hard lobbyists who, when not subsisting on a nocturnal diet of coke and Jack Daniels in order to clinch their deals, are coming up fresh as daisies the next morning to throw a football to each other in the office; the gorgeous but hard-bitten female reporter; the ball-breaking woman MP with the heart of gold; and the token ethnic character, a female researcher who, naturally, is shagging her married Tory MP boss.

The piéce de resistance, however, and the character we’re supposed to identify with the most, is Danny, the quietly-spoken, slightly clumsy but driven and caring researcher for aforementioned cold-but-gold MP. He’s poorly dressed with greasy hair, geeky specs, drawls in flat Naarthern vaarls, and he moons over the office intern. Like Jarvis Cocker without the machismo.

The thing is, without the portraits of politicians that line the corridors the characters are always striding down (the one of David Cameron looks like he’s being obscenely inflated), you could easily forget the show revolves around politics. The ‘Good Behaviour Bond’, a reward for ASBO kids going straight, that Danny and his MP try to get through Parliament is what Alfred Hitchcock called the ‘macguffin’ - a hook on which to hang what passes for the plot. For all its relevance, they could have been sweating over the Arc of the Covenant, a recipe for egg salad or, considering the dramatic tension that was stirred up, a sodding Mars Bar.

In an age where nobody, except for the show’s writers apparently, thinks taking cocaine or swigging tequila from the bottle is particularly ‘edgy’ any more, the whole premise could have been set in a provincial village Rotary Club and had the same impact. Or on a pig farm in 9th century Saxony.

Christ, it was shit.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

Futurama was The Simpsons’ much misunderstood younger cousin, running for four seasons before being being cancelled by dullard Fox Network suits. The show, it would seem however, remains influential.

In the episode, ‘Crimes of the Hot‘, as the planet looks doomed at the hands of global warming, malevolently dweebish scientist Ogden Wernstrom announces:

‘I have placed in orbit a giant mirror that will reflect 40% of the sun’s rays, thus cooling Earth.’

The plan comes unstuck when a piece of space debris hits the mirror, spinning it so it becomes a giant magnifying glass, scorching a furrow across the planet.

I guess the Bush administration turned the episode off before it got to that part:

The US government wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

Of course, if that doesn’t work, they could always go with a Futurama Plan B from the same episode:

‘…we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.’

Sorted.

Update: How US government scientists hope the Earth will look in 2050.

This real time map (via) of disasters happening around the world is terrifying. It reminds me of the map from the Judge Dredd comic showing how the world has gone to shit in the 22nd century.

Watching a biological hazard unfold in New South Wales (the unexplained deaths of thousands of birds), the series of ‘nuclear events’ taking place across America and the sheer number of volcanoes currently erupting around the globe, I have fears for us making it to teatime today let alone 2115.

I wanted to run into the street, without even pausing to wipe, and hurl myself, boggle-eyed, at passers-by, flapping the magazine around, screaming: “HELP! WE’VE LOST OUR MINDS! I HAVE PROOF! I HAVE PROOF.”

But I didn’t. I stayed put; pooing and afraid.

And I thought: Our leaders lie, and we know they have lied, and there is war in our name, and the world kicks and boils itself to death and we do nothing but stare into the tiny grinning faces of people we don’t even know; faces that are, apparently, more “fast, easy and practical” than language itself.

I give us six years, tops.

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One of the clearest messages to come out of this astonishingly long and convoluted document, is that no one in Mr Brown’s department gave a toss whether a lay person could make sense of it or not.

read the rest…

‘Climate change: *Our* green paper’ sneered The Independent’s front-page headline yesterday in its familiar supercilious greener-than-thou style. It offered ‘a more radical’ alternative to what’s expected to be Tony Blair’s ‘toothless’ upcoming climate change legislation.

‘Set annual targets for emission reductions’, ‘Curb road pollution’, ‘Step up the drive for renewable energy’, and ‘Reduce industrial emissions’ were just some of the laudable targets set by the newspaper. But what’s this? ‘Rethink aviation policy’?

‘Unless action is taken to curb the rise in the number of flights,’ it fretted not unreasonably, ‘all other national efforts to reduce emissions will be cancelled out by 2050′.

The thing is, just two clicks of the mouse away from the front page of The Independent’s website, are offers for cheap holidays (flights included) to Naples, Seville, Prague, Barcelona, Budapest, Nice, Monte Carlo, Venice or Rome.

Not as crass, we’ll admit, as the time the Independent’s front page screamed of a possible three degree rise in global temperatures putting ‘100 million at risk’ while offering the chance to win air tickets to New York (have a look) but showing, nonetheless, the same kind of joined up thinking that says you can liberate countries with cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

We’re not saying some members of the Government are fat, but road protesters are once again taking to the trees and digging tunnels to prevent a bypass being built around the Cabinet’s meeting room. John Prescott is now so large that spacetime curves around him and small objects cannot escape his gravitational pull. He’s orbited by a set of rings - like Saturn - made up of pork pie crumbs, brown ale bottle tops and stray peanuts that missed his slack, stupid gob. Between him and the Lord Chancellor Charlie ‘Accidentally Locked In A Tuck Shop As A Boy’ Falconer, Gordon ‘chocolate fudge’ Brown and John ‘that’s what you get for packing in the fags’ Reid, cabinet meetings are now cheek by jowl by jowl by jowl with Tessa Jowell.

Needless to say, a slender government minister - the newly-designated ‘Minister for Fitness’, Caroline Flint - was wheeled out this week to tell Britain to get off its collective arse and get some exercise. Although the mental image of Prescott, Falconer, Brown and Reid shame-facedly attempting to launch a fitness campaign on national television is an immensely pleasing one, unfortunately there are limits to hypocrisy that even New Labour can’t break.

(more…)

Having been a de facto free-fire zone for the best part of week, it now looks like southern Lebanon is about to become the formalised, real deal:

Israel drops leaflets warning any civilians remaining in southern Lebanon to leave immediately

It’s a technique the American’s used disastrously on a city-wide scale in Falluja in Iraq last year:

Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja’s 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be “terrorists”.

Three weeks after the attack was launched last November, the Americans claimed victory. They say they killed about 1,300 people; one week into the siege, a BBC reporter put the unofficial death toll at 2,000. But details of what happened and who the dead were remain obscure. Were many unarmed civilians, as Baghdad-based human rights groups report? Even if they were trying to defend their homes by fighting the Americans, does that make them “terrorists”?

It looks like we’re about to see the experiment repeated in a wider theatre; expanded by an order of magnitude. If, as seems to have happened in Fallujah, many people chose to ignore the warnings, underestimated the danger or stayed to defend their homes and possessions, things can only get much, much worse. They’re already filling mass graves in Tyre. In the same report, we have:

“May God destroy Israel,” said Kamel Abdallah, 35, whose pregnant wife, five children and father were killed in an air strike on the border village of Marwaheen.

And so it goes. Will that grief fuel some counter-atrocity? What about the grief being stockpiled in Haifa?

I’m reading Steven Poole’s Unspeak at the minute. It’s a rattling good read and a pretty good primer for anyone looking to sift the crud insultingly served up as political debate in this country and elsewhere. It’s also not a bad refresher for those of us who think we’ve heard it all.

Early on in the book, Poole quotes Ron Suskind’s essay, ‘Without a Doubt‘ (it’s the famous one that relates the story, among other things, of Bush confusing Switzerland with Sweden). Suskind has a meeting with a ’senior advisor to Bush’:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Anybody who’s read more than one than one of my posts will know why this struck a chord with me. In fact, the whole essay is worth (re)reading. It’s still chillingly apposite (it’s getting on for two years old), particularly in view of the events in the Middle East in the last few weeks.

And I know this is something of a cliche but you could do a find and replace of ‘Bush’ to ‘Blair’ and a lot of it would still scan accurately. I’ve certainly seen Blair described as a Calvinist this week, as Bush is in Suskind’s essay.

The Prime Minister felt the hand of history on his shoulder once again this week. Take a look at this photograph from Wednesday’s
Independent.

There he stands, inspecting an offshore windfarm in Kent, every inch the concerned statesman.

(more…)

Was it only a week since Britain’s journal of the counter-Enlightenment crowed its victory over nonces and the ineptitude of the Home Office? Thanks to the benevolent marriage of public ignorance and an insatiable thirst for sales, the News of the World was able to boast that it had:

SHUNTED 60 child abusers out to less risky locations away from vulnerable youngsters

And we all slept better in our beds. Until…

Observer: Reid ‘has left abusers without supervision’
A Home Office source told The Observer that many of the 70 sex offenders moved out of 11 hostels near to schools and nurseries were now being housed either in voluntary hostels run by church groups or in bed and breakfast accommodation. ‘There’s little option because of a shortage of specialist accommodation units,’ the source said.

The Screws’ lead story today, under the headline “Monsters at Work“, is about a couple of nonces videoing kids in a park. “This highlights the scandal of predatory sex offenders released into the community in ill-supervised hostels,” it notes, not unreasonably. No doubt it was just a question of lack of space that prevented it from adding that, through a coupling of it chasing an agenda on which it has no expertise and the panicked thrashings of a rudderless Home Secretary reeling from one incompetence to the next and desperate to be seen doing something right even if he isn’t, the number of monsters at work may have just increased by up to 70. Can’t we send them to Algeria or something? And the nonces as well?

An idiot could have predicted this had the potential to end badly. Maybe it’s because “Dr” John Reid likes to think he isn’t an idiot that it didn’t occur to him. Clearly there’s nothing about dealing with nonces in the books of Gramsci or whichever intellectual figleaf Reid is using to mask his insecurity and parade his vanity this week.

Look at him performing his elaborate fan dance with a heavy edition of political philosophy in each hand. He twirls, sweating and huffing, the books a blur as they flit from posterior to pudenda, from breasts to brow. The tabloid editors throw fivers during the act but make thinly veiled threats of violence at the bar afterwards. John looks around in vain for his friends to come and rescue him. They, however, sit in the furthest corner, studiously examining their drinks, occasionally glancing up nervously out of the corners of their eyes. After all, to get involved is to invite trouble.

This year’s unofficial ‘Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Children’ week was a huge success. First up, on Sunday, the News of the World and the Home Office agreed that Britain is better off with its ‘child sex beasts’ out of sight and out of mind, instead of in plain sight where we can see what they’re up to. Under orders from Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, the Home Secretary ordered 60 of said beasts to be moved from 11 hostels adjacent to schools. Fortunately for the safety of our children, the child abuser is a naturally stupid creature and is unable to drive a car.

Next up was Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, leader of Britain’s four million Roman Catholics, calling for the 24-week upper limit on abortions to be lowered. It was brave of the Cardinal to thrust himself into the news while Paedomania is sweeping the nation once more. You have to say he timed his run to perfection in a week where child abusers are being moved on to who knows where, him being something of an expert at moving paedophiles on himself. In 1985, while Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, he transferred a known paedophile, Father Michael Hill, to a parish despite advice that Hill would continue to assault children. This Hill did, including altar boys and a child with learning difficulties. He was jailed in 1997 after pleading guilty to nine charges of indecent assault.

(more…)

As Chris points out, Gordon Brown’s looking to put some steam in his strides and the increasingly desperate Chancellor reckons a rocket in his pocket just might make people pleased to see him.

“In an insecure world we must and we will always have the strength to take all necessary long term decisions to ensure both stability and security,” said Gordon, leaving us in no doubt of the size of his manhood. But once Gordon’s got himself in the mood and it’s all systems go, who will be treated to his amorous attentions?

Difficult to say. This is from Parliamentary written answers, May 24 2006:

Norman Baker (Lewes, Liberal Democrat): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence against which countries the UK nuclear deterrent has been targeted since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Des Browne (Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence): Since May 1994, the UK’s nuclear missiles have not been targeted at any country.

Not having a regular squeeze maybe Gordon’ll just jump out and expose himself to random passers-by like a provincial town flasher.

It seems however, in this regard at least, the Government has remembered its manners: it’s rude to point.

Heads up, true believers!

BBC News: Clarke takes action to keep job

Police and immigration officers have embarked on a series of raids to detain some of the hundreds of freed foreign prisoners who were not deported.

They have been ordered by the home secretary, who faces further pressure to resign as it emerged five freed criminals had gone on to commit crimes.

Criminals beware! You may have served your time. You may have paid your debt. Your conviction may be spent. But that won’t stop Charles. He’s coming to get you. Your reign of terror is at an end. Going straight? Why bother? If you get between Charles and his comforts, as between a lioness and her cubs, don’t be surprised if you get mauled.

He can’t be bargained with. He can’t be reasoned with. He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are on a plane.

Needless to say, British murderers, rapists and nonces can sleep soundly. Don’t worry, Little Englanders, nobody kicked in Jonathan King’s door at dawn this morning.

I just had a nasty thought. If Charlie Two Lunches decides to spend more time with the sweet trolley over the foreign prisoner affair, who would replace him?

Step forward John Reid.

I’m giving some thought to building a survivalist compound in the Brecon Beacons. Who’s with me?

Obviously, panics like that over Bird Flu sells papers and boost viewing figures which is why the media are currently in such a froth about it.

Personally, I think there is only one way to be if/when the pandemic finally arrives: a stoic, a realist, a fatalist. We can deduce, through the bitter experience of the many examples of incompetence and the cavalier attitude to human life displayed by our current masters, that, should Bird Flu mutate into a human-to-human strain, many people will die needlessly.

The early precedents aren’t good. It’s reported that the swan killed by HN51 in Scotland lay unattended for 16 hours after its presence was reported to DEFRA. So you can imagine the worst: inadequate plans will fall short, water and gas will be cut off (except to Government bunkers) as key workers fail to show up for work, the officious will stop food and supplies crossing quaratine checkpoints and so on.

One suspects that there is already a figure of acceptable losses, not - idiotically - recorded on a piece of paper that can later be leaked, but firmly lodged in the minds of those who will be first in the queue for Tamiflu. “Just think of them as a slice of the cake you dropped on the floor, old boy,” you can imagine some Sir Humphrey figure whispering to his minister. You’re an infantryman at the Somme and Tony Blair is Sir Douglas Haig.

With that in mind, why worry about it? Relax. There’s nothing you can do about Bird Flu and even less you can do to mitigate against the attitudes of contempt and fecklessness of Government ministers. Maybe put a few cases of bottled water in the attic along with the odd tin of beans. Maybe print off from the internet a way of making it quick and painless if it gets too much for your kids.

Talk of a Bird Flu bodycount is like the talk about a New Labour meltdown at the local elections. You suspect that it’s New Labour activists talking up the party getting a right hammering on May 4 so that it if turns out to be not that bad they can say it was a good result because everybody was expecting a meltdown.

So it’s the same with these stories of a “worst case scenario” of up to 320,000 people dying in the UK in a Bird Flu pandemic. If the final body count comes in under that number, New Labour can rebuff accusations of an incompetence that cost lives by saying: “Look, everybody was talking about 320,000 deaths. In the event only 200,000 died. It could have been much, much worse.”

Of course, the deaths of so many people will no doubt be put down to “more cock-up than conspiracy” in any subsequent soft-pedalled Today programme interview (forget about a public inquiry), which is the platitude of choice these days for Government ministers trying to explain away their serial stupidity - which surely must be the excuse if our leaders deny being calculating and mendacious. Try it the next time you make a mistake at work. If you still lose your job, try telling the employment tribunal. Failing that, appeal to your favourite cabinet minister. I’m sure they’ll empathise.

And there’s more (via Tom) - this time it’s the Libra magistrates system that was designed to “replace the magistrates’ courts existing information technology systems with a single, modern, national infrastructure and case and accounts management system”.

The Public Accounts Committee said of the system:

This is one of the worst PFI deals that we have seen. The Department procured a contract to provide services to 42 Magistrates’ Courts Committees over which it did not have real authority or control. It ran a poor competition, attracting only one bidder, and it failed to take decisive action when ICL did not deliver what was required. For its part, ICL did not understand the Department’s requirements, took on excessive risk and underpriced its bid. It performed poorly throughout and could not meet the target dates for delivery of the core application. As a result of these failures the cost of the project has more than doubled in just four years to almost £400 million and magistrates’ courts still do not have the IT systems they need to manage their workload properly.

The contract for the system was taken away from the cack-handed ICL/Fujitsu and given to Accenture who were responsible for the botched Inland Revenue National Insurance system but lost that contract when it was given to Capgemini.

Again, for those of us opposed to ID cards and the National Identity Register, it’s cockle warming to know that all these corporate clowns (except, strangely, former Government favourite, Accenture) are on the supplier list for the ID card system. As are, as Tom points out, several weapons manufacturers including BAE systems, providers of venues for Foreign Secretaries trying to show a girl a good time.

For these companies, it’s like a huge game of Pass The Parcel where, as the parcel is ripped from your grasp by the greedy child on your right, the weeping child on your left is forced to hand you another parcel. Ad infinitum, like MC Escher’s stairs. Unfortunately, when the parcels are opened at the end of the game, the prizes are revealed to be gaudily spray-painted dog turds.

From the Government’s and tax payers’ point of view, the whole process of trying to get a decent computer system out of these pirates is like playing on one of those funfair grabber machines. You shovel in pound after pound trying to snatch a prize and in the rare event you do manage to snag an electric pink teddy bear or a plasticky digital watch, it’s worth about a tenth of the cash you put in.

I know this is going to sound frightfully liberal - sandal-wearing or whatever witty epithet we’re using at the minute - but this kind of thing bothers me:

BBC News: ‘Dog whistle’ to control youths
A high-pitched “dog whistle” device is to be used by police in north Staffordshire to stop groups of nuisance youths hanging around shops.

I suppose it’s cheaper than a water cannon or a barrage of rubber bullets. It’s literally the 21st Century’s clip round the ear - it (hopefully) won’t do them any harm. Most of the news outlets are treating this as a gleefully sadistic “and finally…” story. The fact is, this is yet another of those “tough on crime” while not giving a toss about “the causes of crime”.

The inventor of the device was on PM on Radio 4 last night and he actually said, “…what about the human rights of the shopkeepers?” He’ll go far that one, A New Labour peerage can’t be far away. What about the nice children and their rights? What about the A-grade, never-said-boo-to-goose, model child sent out for a pint of milk?

Once upon a time latchkey kids were something to be pitied, now they’re a control group for technocratic social engineering. Never mind why these children are hanging about, let’s just corral them like animals. Why not give them collars that explode if they stray into a designated area as in the movie Battle Royale?

Adults can’t hear the siren, although I bet the technology could be adapted to drive off, oh I don’t know, let’s say unauthorised protesters around Parliament. I wonder how easy it would be adapt the technology so that instead of emitting a high-pitched whistle it sent messages, “CONSUME. OBEY. PROCREATE. BE CONTENT.”

We’ve been shown, most recently in the Tory leadership campaign, that age and experience are embarrassing liabilities. We’re also told to fear the youth - hooded, rutting, drug addicts that they are. It seems the only age worthy of respect is complacent, condescending, comfortable, careerist middle age. And yet look at the carnage the forty- and fifty-somethings have caused since 1997. Won’t anybody think of the children?

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.

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From Slinging Ink, on the naughty cartoon apocalypse:

We therefore call on free-thinking bloggers everywhere to post the images on their sites and, through sheer weight of numbers, defeat those who would deny us our right to freedom of expression. We also request the that the companies that host these blogs do not capitulate to this 21st century inquisition. In particular we expect the British government to respect the vote that was passed in the House of Commons not two days ago.

I’ll provide links to the cartoons but I’m not going to reproduce them here, for the same reason I don’t post Bernard Manning jokes: I think they’re shit.

Some of these cartoons barely pass as art let alone satire. Some of them, in my opinion, are making no other point than attempting to be deliberately inciteful. It’s a taste thing, I suppose. If they’d been clever and made me laugh I’d have posted them.

This whole thing is the equivalent of Little Johnny being given detention because he drew a knob on his pencil case (which is actually funnier than these cartoons). It’s childish, it’s puerile but the seas didn’t boil and the skies didn’t rain blood. The people who drew some these cartoons are arseholes but, in what we laughingly call our liberal society, we must defend their right to be arseholes. So scribble away lads, somebody, somewhere must find you funny.

And, whatever your faith, if it’s not up to withstanding a few rubbish drawings or a sweary opera, then your god clearly isn’t as great and powerful as you keep telling us he is. What exactly are you frightened of? Get a bloody grip, eh?