Lenovo and the reintroduction of switches and buttons

After my disastrous brushes with HP and Toshiba I finally bought a Lenovo laptop V330.  One problem … although the motherboard seems not to be totally messed up on this one and the component parts seem to have actually been assembled correctly … the camera appeared not to work.

After Ava Alexis had read the published manuals for several hours to very little avail as they appeared to be inaccurate or an information black hole we attempted to do a diagnostic on it and found that every time we switched the camera on through the software it switched its self off again.  So something else was conflicting and over-riding the software … after quite a bit of googleing eventually I read somewhere of a physical button on the exterior of the casing.  I couldn’t find it…

And then I looked at the camera its self … and … it is the physical switch – when you slide it left the camera’s off and when you slide it right the cameras on.  Such a shame no one thought to put this information in the manual… but then as we know computers these days are made by throwing all the items in a box as fast as possible and presumably the manuals are constructed in the same casual manner.

After this I ruminated on the mystery of buttons … and the days when it was all button and switches.  There should be more buttons.  Ideally that go click.  Our first colour television in the 1980s was the one of the first appliances to eschew buttons… having instead some kind of panel on the front that claimed to be powered by body heat but I suspected was actually activated by sweat.  Since then it’s all been downhill.  As though machines are designed to avoid even the idea that we should ever have to do as much work as pressing a button ever … when surely telling Alexa to switch your lights on and off is actually more work than pressing a switch ever could be.  And smartphone touchscreens encrusted with dead skin cells and smeared with sweat are actually pretty gross...

Of course switches wear out which is one reason manufacturers eschew them.  My dad had a music centre which after several years would crackle like the electric chair for 10 minutes after being switched on … but they were still fun.

Anyway if you too can’t cope with the fact no one bothered to put in the manual that the Lenovo V330 camera is also a button then hopefully this post will help you in keeping your hair in…

Aviva's Fraud Investigators - making policemen everywhere seem polite...

Last Friday afternoon at work I was rung by a gentleman who I never spoke to because I was working.  He then sent me an email informing me that he was a Fraud Investigator for Aviva and asking me to “give him a call” about my motor insurance.  I rang the number back only to be put on hold.  So I gave up and sent a grumpy email to which I received a perfunctory reply explaining that they wanted to check my claims history.  Later that afternoon I started to worry that I had not filled in my insurance application form correctly.  Had I missed an accident out?   

So when I got home from work I logged into Aviva’s website to check my policy documents and what I had told Aviva.  I was locked out with only a message on the site to contact Aviva… So I spent a huge amount of time trawling through my emails to try to prove to myself that my claims history was right.  It was.  But of course without access to my policy I couldn’t check what I’d told Aviva to reassure myself.  So I emailed the Fraud office again…

Unlike Barton Keyes – the fearsome fraud investigator in Double Indemnity - Aviva’s fraud investigators do not seem to burn the midnight oil or work through lunch hours or at weekends so it was only after a whole weekend of worry that my policy would be cancelled and I would be put on some kind of insurance blacklist that I received another perfunctory reply from Aviva thanking me for the information, saying that I was no longer under investigation and stating that my policy would continue as normal and that I could now download my documents.

It occurred to me later in the week that this is a funny way to conduct a business.  Why if you want to double check someone’s claim history would you loudly announce yourself to them in voicemails and emails as a “Fraud Investigator” or from the “Fraud Department” instead of just saying that you are some kind of underwriter and you are policy checking?  Adding the word “Fraud” into correspondence and conversations is quite accusatory – to the point of bullying.  Furthermore why not just tell me what it is I’ve told them and ask me to confirm it is correct?  The whole thing felt like a bit of a fishing expedition as if they were cross questioning me to see if they could get me to incriminate myself.  Had they simply sold the policy too cheaply?  One even wonders if this is a rouse to put the price up and start renegotiating the policy after sale.  Not that I’m saying that’s what happened by one has to wonder…

It seems someone does not like the photos of ladies with automatic weapons that greet one at Gatwick

The Cat, the Sword and the Bin Men ...

One of my hobbies is googling Danny John-Jules …for whenever the press find out something about him – such as that he had an argument with a co-star on Strictly Come Dancing – they take great glee in reminding us he was given 120 hours’ community service and ordered to pay £350 costs after attacking two men for not emptying his recycling bin. 

This is true … but it is not the whole truth ... for it is also true that this conviction was turned over at appeal at Harrow Crown Court on March 5^th 2009 for complicated reasons like the whole case was complete balderdash.  When Mr John-Jules said within earshot of the Daily Star that there might be some racist motivation to these events this was reported along the lines of “unlike his laidback character, John- Jules lost his cool and unleashed a bitter tirade about prejudice in the UK…”

Why would he think that the UK is a racist country …? perhaps because fast forwards 9 years to 2018 and the Sun publishes an article “Strictly star Danny John-Jules menaced two bin men with a samurai sword before punching and kicking them to the ground because they wouldn't empty his recycling”.  

Well, all I can say is that it’s good for them that the cat is too cool to sue.  Honestly why would anyone think England racist …?  Interesting that they use quotations from the court case – perhaps because they think that these quotes are protected under the defence of qualified privilege because they were made in court….  Then again perhaps I just over-estimate the intelligence of Sun hacks and the fact is that this is just lazy journalism at its finest and that they simply indulge in because they can get away with it…  

Jeremy Vine used to tell a story about a cat that was left a fortune and a house by its owner.  People from the press regularly visited the house to interview the neighbours and this continued for years and years and decades untill one day the neighbours wrote to him to ask how long it would take for the story to die.  He said never ... for the story had all the elements that touch people's imagination and as such it was a magnet to every lazy hack worldwide...  I guess it is the same with the story of the cat, the sword and the bin men... so I shall now return to my usual position of ignoring anything that might possibly require me to do something or be involved by saying...

That's all folks!

Jill Dando, Madeleine McCann and Jack the Ripper - my journey through cold case TV

This week I have mainly been watching TV shows about failed police investigations.  

First I watched a BBC documentary about Jill Dando.  Being the BBC it spent the first ten minutes telling us how lovely Jill was and how fondly people remembered her because a lot of the general public have forgotten.  Nick Ross told us she always took her high heels off when they were in the same frame so as not to look taller than him.  Eventually the policeman who put away Barry George stood amongst his decision logs trying to explain how they’d got Barry to trial on the basis of one tiny particle of gunshot residue.  The trial lasted 50 days largely due to the paucity of the evidence and the verdict was overturned on appeal.  Of course Barry George could have killed Jill Dando but it’s amazing the thing ever got to trial when they couldn’t do even basic things like place him at the scene.  While they had a photo of George with gun or a replica gun posing as an SAS man in the privacy of his own flat it frankly didn’t seem plausible that a man with Mr George’s limited intelligence should be able to customise the bullet that killed her in broad daylight to reduce the sound as it was ejected from the gun.  The bottom line is however much money was poured into the investigation no one saw the perpetrator, there was no concrete evidence and no one could be placed at the scene so there was never going to be a satisfactory outcome to the case ... but since money is allocated for political reasons a huge amount of money was spent to achieve little except an embarrassing miscarriage of justice…

Next I watched Netflix’s new documentary series on the Madeleine McCann case.  Oh dear… here we are again in the world of endless speculation, too little evidence and too much money.  You can't solve any case with a complete lack of evidence and lots of money but that didn't stop the McCanns having a good go....  aided and frustrated in equal terms by the press creating a circus that probably was more of a hindrance to the investigation than a help. 

The fact is no one saw who abducted Madeleine so no solid conclusions could be made.  With no forensic evidence left at the scene the Portuguese PoPo quickly fell back on the simplest conclusion that the McCanns had done it themselves – that they were trying to cover up an accident.  As with the case of Ms Dando the crime scene had also been contaminated soon after the discovery of the crime making it even harder.  Precious time was lost not doing house to house searches.  The McCanns hired their own PR person and soon the press turned against the Portuguese PoPo which made them ever more suspicious of the McCanns.  Psychological profiling was used to point the finger first at Robert Murat (who lived over the road and did some free translations for the McCanns) and then at a web developer who did some work for him who Murat called on the night (although he can’t remember why).  None of this amounts of a hill of beans but never-the-less both men had their properties raided and reputations trashed by the media to no avail as they were named "augidos". 

Eventually – suspicious of the discrepancies in the stories of the Tapas 7 - the PoPo pulled in the McCanns who did themselves no favours by refusing to answer their questions.  According to the Portuguese PoPo Mrs McCann called them a rude word but who knows?  The Portuguese PoPo were convinced the McCanns were guilty because of the evidence of two sniffer dogs from England – a cadaver dog and a blood dog – but as their handler pointed out … you can’t put a spaniel on the stand.  Scooby Doo Where Are You?  Unfortunately for the Portuguese PoPo they had jumped the gun by not waiting for the thing that every Jeremy Kyle viewer knows one must have - the All Important DNA results.  These showed only an 80 per cent match to Madeleine which meant that the DNA the dogs had found could have come from the parents themselves or Madeleine’s siblings.

Still lead investigator (much maligned by the British press as a lazy, fat bastard) Goncalo Amaral remained convinced it was the McCanns (much maligned by the Portuguese press as lazy Colonial child-neglecters-at-best-murderers-at-worst) wot done it and the whole thing reached the level of an international diplomatic incident when Gordon Brown started insisting Mr Amaral be sacked.  He was… but of course that problem didn’t go away because it created an intensely bitter angry ex-PoPo who decided he’d get his own back by writing a book about the McCanns’ “guilt”.  The McCanns sued and won and lost on appeal. 

Eventually the Portuguese PoPo archived the case and everybody stopped being an “aguido” and many libel damages were awarded...  Still, the McCanns through their fundraising now had huge sums of money to perpetually re-investigate the case.  Much of this money came from Everest Windows entrepreneur Brian Kennedy who dispensed his wisdom from within a giant red sofa to underline his conspicuous consumption and I was reminded of a salesman of Everest Windows who once told me replacing my windows would cost £20,000 but “he could give me a discount” … how I resented staying in to talk to that idiot.  Anyway, soon a private investigation firm was hired who scoured the deep web for peados and found many but not a trace of Madeleine … so the McCann trust sacked them only to replace them with a professional con-man.  At one point a police artist was interviewed who said that there should be more to a drawn photofit than the physical geometry of the person in question and that the portrait should reveal something about the person … but unfortunately the person who saw a man carrying a girl (who turned out to be someone else) couldn’t remember what his face had been like anyway… so the police artist lady had a pretty hard time exercising her artistic licence on nothing.  And people wonder why it's so hard for the PoPo to catch anybody with scientific methods like these...

And on and on went on the farce of trying to solve a case without any evidence. If only all this time and money had been spent on some slightly less hopeless cases…

And finally I watched a BBC documentary where a lady in black attempted to identify Jack the Ripper with the help of HOLMES … a much vaunted Home Office computer product which seemed little more than a relational database.  The program ended by telling us who the Ripper was a mere 131 years too late with the certainty that can only come from all the protagonists being long gone.

What all these cases have in common is a large amount of money being spent in the teeth of there not being enough evidence to build a case as if one will ever make up for the other… there’s a moral there but I don’t know what it can be…

The questions Mrs McCann reportedly refused to answer are:

1. On May 3, 2007, around 22:00, when you entered the apartment, what did you see? What did you do? Where did you look? What did you touch?

2. Did you search inside the master bedroom wardrobe?

3. (Shown two photographs of her bedroom wardrobe) Can you describe its contents?

4. Why was the curtain by the sofa near the side window tampered with? Did someone go behind the sofa?

5. How long did your search of the apartment take after you detected Madeleine’s disappearance?

6. Why did you say Madeleine had been abducted?

7. Assuming Madeleine was abducted, why did you leave the twins to go to the ‘Tapas’ and raise the alarm? The supposed abductor could still be in the apartment.

8. Why didn’t you ask the twins then what happened to their sister or why didn’t you ask them later on?

9. When you raised the alarm at the ‘Tapas’ what exactly did you say – what were your exact words?

10. What happened after you raised the alarm there?

11. Why did you go and warn your friends instead of shouting from the verandah?

12. Who contacted the authorities?

13. Who took place in the searches?

14. Did anyone outside the group learn of her disappearance in those following minutes?

15. Did any neighbour offer you help?

16. What does “we let her down” mean?

17. Did Jane Tanner tell you that night she’d seen a man with a child?

18. How were the authorities contacted and which police force was alerted?

19. During the searches, with the police there, where did you search for Maddie, how and in what way?

20. Why did the twins not wake up during that search or when they were taken upstairs?

21. Who did you phone after the occurrence?

22. Did you call Sky News?

23. Did you know the danger of calling the media, because it could influence the abductor?

24. Did you ask for a priest?

25. By what means did you divulge Madeleine’s features, by photographs or by any other means?

26. Is it true that during the searches you remained seated on Maddie’s bed without moving?

27. What was your behaviour that night?

28. Did you manage to sleep?

29. Before travelling to Portugal, did you make any comment about a foreboding or a bad feeling?

30. What was Madeleine’s behaviour like?

31. Did Maddie suffer from any illness or take any medication?

32. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister?

33. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister, friends and school mates?

34. As for your professional life, in how many and which hospitals have you worked?

35. What is your medical speciality?

36. Have you ever done shift work in any emergency services or other services?

37. Did you work every day?

38. At a certain point you stopped working. Why?

39. Are the twins difficult to get to sleep? Are they restless and does that cause you uneasiness?

40. Is it true sometimes you despaired at your children’s behaviour and it left you feeling very uneasy?

41. Is it true that in England you even considered handing over Madeleine’s custody to a relative?

42. In England, did you medicate your children? What type of medication?

43. In the case files, you were shown canine forensic testing films. After watching them, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

44. When the sniffer dog also marked human blood behind the sofa, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

45. When the sniffer dog marked the scent of corpse coming from the vehicle you hired a month after the disappearance, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

46. When human blood was marked in the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

47. When confronted with the results of Maddie’s DNA, carried out in a British lab, collected from behind the sofa and the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

48. Did you have any responsibility or intervention in your daughter’s disappearance?

More Petrol Station Glamour and Shell's Drivers Club Closure

A while ago I wrote an article about petrol station glamour (which for reasons I don't understand is the most read page on this site) and included a swipe or two at Shell's loyalty card scheme under which I have now amassed only 442 points...

...over what must be at least 5 years despite driving nearly 6000 miles a year.  Clearly disturbed to learn that at any day I might reach the 500 points needed to qualify for a £2.50 fuel voucher Shell have immediately abandoned the scheme ... but tell me not to worry...

... because existing points will be converted to vouchers until August 2019.  This means I have to fill up 4 times - nearly a full tank each time to finally get myself over the the coveted 500 point threshold.  However, I calculate that given their fuel is up to 10 per cent more expensive than at grubbier looking fuel stations getting this prized voucher would acually cost me about £8.  Therefore the voucher is in fact a potential debt of £5.50 and ... I think I'll give that a miss thanks...

 
Interestingly I also learn from my Shell Drivers Club statement that every time the attendent scans my card after I purchase a piece of confectionary the process has been completely pointless as if it's not petrol one is awarded...

...nil points.

He Said I know what it's like to be dead...

Angels are not all female...

I was watching a Panorama last night on Trans children and one interviewee said that they knew they were trans from when they were at school and the teacher told them they could not be an Angel in the the navity play because "Angels are Girls".  This is offensive on so many levels ...but particularly to Angels ... mainly because as far as I know most of the named Angels in the Bible are boys.  So for culturally ignorant teachers everywhere here is your quick guide to Judeo-Christian Angels for when putting on Nativity plays.

Your Angel characters are...

1 Gabriel

Gabriel is a boy - Well, I think he's a boy anyway although he looks a bit androgynous in this depiction by by Jan van Eyck from 1434.  He also appears to have wings made from the LGBTQAlphabet flag...  Gabriel appears to Zacharias's wife Elizabeth and tells her that despite the fact she's getting on a bit she is pregnant with John the Baptist ... later he appears to Mary and tells her that God has made her pregnant with Jesus.  Later when these stories got a bit old Islam gave Gabriel a reboot and changed his back story considerably...

2 Michael

St Michael the Archangel is the one who had a war in heaven and sent Satan to Hell.  Later St Michael branched out with his own underwear label which was licenced under exclusive contract to Marks and Spenser.  St Micheal was chosen as the brand name for MandS underpants because he is a  the only Saint in the Old Testament - largely because as an Angel he manages to exist outside of time.  There's a lot of business with Michael, Abraham, Lot and Soddom which I don't have time to go into but suffice to say Michael is sort of Abraham's Jeeves.

3 Raphael

Raphael has a bust up with a Devil - perhaps the Devil - in the book of Enoch.  "Bind Azazel ...

...hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there for ever, and cover his face that he may not see light. And on the day of the great judgment he shall be cast into the fire."  

He also appears in the book of Tobit.  Tobit is a Jew who is deported to Naphtali where he spends a lot of time in exile for reasons which are too tedious to relate.  Tobit and Raphael have lots of adventures together in which Raphael feeling a bit conspicuous about his wings assumes the false identity of Azariah with hilarious consequences.  Tobit recieves lots of good advice from Raphael about his lady friends and how to use a fish's liver and heart to drive away demons ...

4 Uriel

Uriel is very much the Pete Best of Angels.  His main claim to fame being that he was the one who told Noah about the flood.  Uriel does a lot of watching.  Uriel has a lot to do with sorting out the messy business of Angels who have fallen and decided to take human mates creating Angel-Human hybrids called Nephilim...

 ...which is kind of how we know Angels have sexuals...

Chapter 20 of the Book of Enoch also mentions Raguel (the Angel of Justice) and Saraqâêl/Sariel but since not much known about either of them we'll skip them and end with everyone's favourite...

5 Satan

He's the one who has all the best tunes...

Forgive me pedestrians for I have sinned...

Gentle Reader , I must admit I have been a bad boy. 

I jumped the red lights at Tulse Hill.  Or at least that is what a letter I received from the PoPo said.  They didn’t send me any photos or evidence but invited me on an AA Drivetech Course.  This took place in a large hotel in Bromley. 

Being nosey I had a good look round the hotel while the respectable citizens sat waiting where the receptionists told them to.  Eventually I found the room by following the signs rather than talking to people and a woman we shall call Ms B invited me in and told me that the hotel had originally all been a large mansion.  “It must have been wonderful in its day,” she said.  I cast my eye round the room and mentally noted who’d been smart enough to find the room from the signs and not from talking to anyone.  Eventually the rest of the sinners were hearded in.

Ms B and her co-compere who we shall call Mr R told us that we should all switch off our mobile phones (not put them on silent) in the name of “Privacy”… justice these days is executed not just without showing one all the evidence but also in secret.  I have read that the purpose of these courses is “education not punishment” but coming from the era of corporal punishment in schools and having spent much of my school career in a never-ending series of detentions I was never able to quite separate out education from punishment.  Sure enough Ms B and Mr R made much of the course lasting 4 hours, regularly underlined how long 4 hours was and made us all feel as if we were in detention once again.

People could, said Ms B, be on the course for any number of road traffic violations which I cannot now remember but when asked most people turned out to be there for traffic light offences.  When Ms B asked why I was there I said I didn’t know exactly because although the PoPo would tell me the set of lights I must have passed them more than once that day and couldn’t exactly remember where I was now.  She said there was one camera at those lights – the one on the yellow poll pointing south but that didn’t make much sense to me as I recon I was going north.  “Did you ask the police for evidence?” she said.  “No,” I replied, “I was worried they might remove their offer to settle.”

At this point a small Greek Chorus from the audience chimed in that they too had all been caught at exactly the same set of lights and started on about how this seemed statistically odd.  “So has my son,” Ms B said in an attempt to win her audience back.  But “It’s a trap,” said one woman – a thought she continued to punctuate the afternoon with at random intervals.  And gradually, just like when I was at school, I started to make mental notes on who the naughty kids in the class were.  After all, in detention you’ve got to make your own entertainment. 

Recording was banned, of course, but fortunately they did give us a logbook to fill out which they were “not going to mark” so I decided to look industrious by filling it up with short character descriptions of the participants and from those notes I have written this piece … bless the police they think of everything. 

We were supposed, of course, to actively participate so we discussed things in tables and in pairs that we were put into by the course tutors.  I was paired with a young black man who we will call Mr K and to be fair to us myself and Mr K got 100 per cent on all the questions – although this may have been something to do with me realising that the answers to most of the questions were in the copy of the highway code we’d been given.  We both felt very intelligent for deducing this.

As time progressed Ms B’s narrative that speed cameras and traffic light cameras were only there as a last resort started to become unpopular with a certain element of the audience.  Ms B and Mr R’s nemesis was a man called Roger.  Roger insisted that there were cameras everywhere these days watching us.  “There’s probably even one in here,” he said.  And indeed there may well have been.

At the comfort break (about 1 hour 55 minutes in) during which we were allowed to buy a coffee (there was a proper bar in the hotel but no one seemed to want to buy a pint for some reason) Roger remarked that the course was “quite informative” to two young women “but they could easily lop off an hour and get their point over better –it’s too long, isn’t it?”  I couldn’t decide if Roger was being ironic or he just didn’t get that boredom was the punishment.  The ladies sagely agreed.  “I’ve been on three of these now,” said Roger.  “I’m a repeat offender.”  How wonderful it was to have this Fletcher of the roads to show us all the ropes.  The ladies gave Roger a look as if to say…

…no, I don't want your number

No, I don't want to give you mine and

No, I don't want to meet you nowhere

No, I don't want none of your time and…

After the intermission Roger’s heckling became more vociferous and Ms B and Mr R fell back on that time old chestnut used by all teachers since the dawn of time – threatening that they’d have to keep us there longer if we (or any individual) made progress through the syllabus slower.  The threat of detention on top of detention split the room between those who believed this threat and those who took no notice.  A small corner of mothers pretended at disinterest but occasionally broke out in glares at Roger…

Tempers flared again when the thorny issue of traffic light phasing came up and people asked why some traffic lights changed very quickly and others very slowly.  The anticipated answer that we should anticipate the lights changing was given but it was not universally popular.  Ms B told us sternly that there were no excuses for running a red light and my inner Horace Rumple said “rubbish there are loads of mitigating arguments” but for some reason I didn’t verbalise this. 

Not to worry Roger was there to verbalise these thoughts for me.  “Class clown,” muttered a bearded disabled man at the back but I couldn’t help laughing at Roger’s antics precisely because Ms B and Mr R seemed such wonderful straight men/women for him to play against.  And really who can blame Roger for being the class clown?  I dare say after I’ve published this a load of open mic acts will be running red lights all over London just because it will guarantee them a full room of people to try material out on without the inconvenience of having to bring a mate to a bringer or become their own promoter…

Eventually we got onto the consequences of bad driving such as injury and having to testify in court.  A lady said she’d been to Court as a witness to a road traffic accident and been made to look a complete idiot by a Barrister who “twisted everything”.  This caused a retired Barrister to pipe up that she shouldn’t be intimidated because it was for the Judge to decide on the facts of the case.  Which was odd because my inner Horace Rumpole said that actually it should be up to the jury – but then again if everything went to jury trial what would happen to Ms B and Mr R?  Actually I expect most such cases are just heard in the Magistrate’s Court. 

This reminded me of a story about how I was once a witness to a hit and rush crash and got myself into a state of paranoia about potentially being asked by the PoPo to give a witness statement against a professional criminal.  So I told it …rather well I thought and with a self-depreciating punchline that got a nice laugh.  There’s something in it … just needs tightening.  Well, why should Roger get all the stage time?  Although 4 hours is a bit long to test 1 gag.  Then again it wasn’t as boring as some of the open mic “stayer” nights I’ve sat through…

Eventually the 4 hours moved inevitably to a close and despite not having got all of the syllabus over just most of it Ms B and Mr R decided to end on time.  And just like school everybody scrammed out of there as fast as their legs could carry them…I doubt I will see any of them ever again.  Although part of me worries that Roger and I may meet again some day…

Still, a thoroughly entertaining 4 hours.  For me at least… of course, I could tell you all about road traffic things, psychological biases and road death stats and how the junction at Tulse Hill has an unusal number of fatalities/accidents but I don’t see why I should give that kind of information away for free.  If you want to find out that badly …

…run a red light.

Yeah ...wish you'd got a blog too now ..., eh?

Facebook is down

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18264092/facebook-instagram-down-partially-post-messages-profile-loading

Here is hope...

Another day another Croydon Council missed bin collection

I have given up trying to get the Council to empty my bins and am now storing rubbish in the garage.  This will solve the problem till 2025.  I offered to meet the Council half way and bring my rubbish round their offices which are half way between me and the dump but no answer as yet...

Is Zionism Racist or is it Racist to say Zionism is Racist? I would ask the United Nations but...

This month I have been wondering some more about Tracy Ann Oberman and Rachel Riley (what you get when you make Carol Vorderman redundant) suing everyone.  I have now found what they are suing over but I can’t link to it because that could be repeating a libel.  So I pootled over to Ms Riley’s twitter feel to find out what she thought in general and found a soundcloud speech by Dr Dave Rich of the CST pinned to it.

Dr Rich starts off with a few of the worst cases of anti-semitism and then goes onto the deductive leap that the Labour party is “institutionally anti-semitic”and full of people who are unable to relate to “Jews and anti-semitism and Israel as they actually are..” which kind of compounds Judeism with Israel.  Ignoring the fact that there are Jews (Neturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim) who do not see Israel as “the promised land” and, of course, who reject the Jewish religion almost entirely (okay that’s just Alexei Sayle).   Still, it has to be said that Zionism is a relatively modern political obsession dating from the 19^th century when Theodor Herzl invented it ...  

following the Dreyfus affair... 

That said the idea of returning to the (or a) “promised land” has always existed since the seige of Jerusalem in 70AD but it didn’t peak in popularity since the early 20^th Century.  

Of course there was the Holocaust which may have explained why interest in Zionism picked up a bit in the 1940s.... But I digress … Dr Rich then goes on a personal attack against Jeremy Corbyn.  Inviting Hezbollah and Hamas to parliament and calling them his friends…

 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10153074175846939

…, supporting campaigns to re-name Holocaust Memorial Day as Genesis Memorial day, supporting a talk entitled “never again from Auschwitz to Gaza” , the anti-semitic mural, the wreath at the Munich Olympic massacre, appearing on Press TV, being mates with a Hamas terrorist etc… saying Zionists have no sense of English irony.  He then goes on to say that there’s a tradition of anti-semitism on the left – although he does qualify this that it isn’t a universal tradition.  He states that Corbyn exhibits a pattern of anti-semitic behaviour and that one doesn’t observe him making similar gaffes in other areas – clearly this man is too young to remember the GLC’s embarrassing dalliances with the IRA…

...which is funny because the Tories spent enough money at the last election reminding everyone about this... but let's not go over all that again... suffice to say branding Corbyn an IRA sympathiser didn't seem to stop him at the ballot box...

One of the problems I find about discussing anti-semitism is the whole Judeism being a religion / Jews being a race thing.  Unique in religions (as far as I know) Judeism claims that that the Jews are God’s chosen people.  This is laid out many times in the Torah – most notably in Deuteronomy 14:2.  However, what exactly the Jews are chosen by God for remains somewhat unclear.   

Indeed when God says to Amos (3:2) “You only have I singled out of all the families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities,” it doesn’t seem as though there are many advantages to being Jewish.   All the same it seems to me that the idea is that … Jews are supposed to inter-marry Jews.  Of course non-Jews can convert to Judeism … but Jewishness is (according to Orthodox teachings) passed down through the mother.   And for anyone who has the time to convert to Judeism who's male well, ... there’s also the quite testing problem for male adults wanting to become Jewish of having to have one's foreskin removed.  

Circumcision is painful for both babies and adults but babies at least won’t remember it.  There are not for some reason a lot of adult males who are very keen on having their foreskin lopped off…
but anyway ... The point I’m driving at, I think, is that the Jewish religion makes the DNA of the Jewish people a central issue.  If you think this isn’t a big deal maybe it isn’t but … when Benjamin Netanyahu's son dated a lady who was not Jewish The PM’s brother-in-law said he was spitting on his grandparent’s graves. 

 “From my point of view, if he does such a thing, I personally won't allow him to get near their graves… This is the most awful thing that is threatening and was a threat throughout the history of the Jewish people. More awful than leaving Israel is marriage with a gentile. If this happens, God forbid, I'll bury myself I don't know where. I'll walk in the streets and tear off my hair - and here this is happening.”

Of course it could be argued that having all Jewish people in one place actually removes the impetus of the disapora to stay relatively genetically exclusive and that ultimately everyone in Israel and Palestine will inter-marry and the whole thing will be destroyed by sex… but this argument is probably anti-semitic.   Still there’s no polite way of saying that the perpetuation of Jewish DNA is a primary purpose of Judeism – it then follows that it is very difficult to discuss Judeism without making comments about Jewish racial identity. This is because it’s in scripture.  Then again would they have lasted over 1800 years in a sparsely spread out diaspora without these restrictions…? By the way ... if you’re wondering who is and is not a Jew this is (legally) the province within Israel of the Chief Rabbinate who looks like this...

It should be pointed out however that just because Dr Rich seems to purport that Israel is the Home of all Jews and just because Israel employs a public official to decide who is and who is not a Jew does not mean we can hold Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
At least I think that's what one of the 9 IHRA examples of antisemitism says.  Just thought I'd make that clear.

Dr Dave Rich does quite well in cataloguing all the Labour party’s failures in fighting anti-semitism (going all the way back to a magazine Keir Hardy edited once) but I must admit to some confusion when we get onto United Nations Resolution 3379. 

In the early days of Israel the country had a completely open immigration policy for diaspora Jews and this resulted in a bit of a problem which was solved by expansionist policies that would seem to be somewhat at odds with Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of National Self-Determination which was the foundation of the League of Nations after WWI and the UN after WWII…

Defenders of the Zionist project argue that their right to Self Determination (note not “National Self Determination”) allows them to move back onto land they were ejected from some 1800 years ago whereas everyone else thought that the idea was you were supposed to own the land in the present time not just rock up and claim it.  Of course early settlers did buy land but ... not all of it with the result that Israel has been explicitly officially condemned at least 45 times by the UN.  There are more UN resolutions about Israelthan anything else ever.  The reason for most of these condemnations is Israel’s occupation of the “occupied territories” obtained in the “pre-emptive” 6 days war of 1967 (let’s not go back to the 40s and the Nakba or we’ll be here all year).  

I expect this graph is wrong too... Sorry, I'm too lazy to fact check everything...

As if it wasn’t awkward enough occupying someone else’s lands to "protect yourself" Israel has long exacerbated this situation by not just occupying lands but by placing its own settlements in them which is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (it's also a violation Eighth Commandment if anyone needs a Jewish argument against it).  The peak of Israel's run-ins with the United Nations was almost certainly Resolution 3379 which broadly concluded that Zionism was essentially racist.  

But to make matters more complicated United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86 later over-turned this and stated that Zionism is not a form of racism after all.  Everyone was most relived ...and some people were somewhat confused.

Then again what is racism?   The Macpherson Report defined a racist incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.  Patricia Bidol defined racism as "prejudice plus institutional power".  And the dictionary says "Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior" but who reads that anymore...

So is Zionism racist or was it at one time?  

Well, the great peacemaker and diplomat that is George W Bush, said at the time…

“UNGA Resolution 3379, the so-called "Zionism is racism" resolution, mocks this pledge and the principles upon which the United Nations was founded. And I call now for its repeal. Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations.”

Fair enough I suppose… but you really can't blame people too much for thinking Zionism racist when this was the official policy of UN for well over a decade until it decided it wasn't true any more and conversely condemning Zionism as racist is racist.

But even when people accept Zionism as not racist this seems to be not quite enough…?  For what Dr Rich seems to want is not just acceptance for Israel but for people to accept that the creation of Israel raised no difficult issues and forget that force was used to establish significant chunks of it.  Well, let's just say that would be easier for more people if Israel gave some of its occupied territories back...?  Just an idea... whether it is an anti-semitic idea is something one would have to refer to the UN and then hope they don't decide they've clearly got it wrong and do a U-turn some time later...

When I was a student Leeds University Union used to have a general policy of a complete ban on any discussion of the Israel / Palestine question in order to keep the peace which I think it would be wise to observe here in future for virtually everything is disputed including this map which doesn’t mention that the Golan Hights are technically part of Syria not Israel or Palestine.

Anyway, I can’t tell you much more because I dozed off at this point…but let’s say I’m keeping my options open in case the UN changes its mind again… Mind you I believe saying Zionism is racist is soon to be made illegal in France so I guess we will all have to agree eventually.

Whenever I see an argument on twitter about anything these days someone always says something like "didn't your mother teach you that if you've got nothing nice to say to say nothing?"  To which the answer is "No, that's why I get good customer service".  However, if there is an arena in which it is wise to say nothing it is the Israel/Palenstine issue... so ... I'll shut up now before this blog goes the way of Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner's play about Rachel Corrie... 

Rubbish Post

Dear Ms Jones & Mr Newman,

Please can someone empty my bins - I cannot contact the Council via the website ...it doesn't work
It doesn't relate to my flat anyway as it's a walk up flat with a different bin collection cycle.
I can't ring the Council they never answer the phone.
I can't possibly take it all down the dump.

If nobody resolves this I may be reduced to taking matters into my own hands
and fly tipping it in the foyer of the Council's offices

Thank you

Anthony Miller

Note: This post is now several years old and remains mysteriously one of the most read on the website.  I have to report that I did not in fact fly tip my rubbish at the Council Offices ...although I'm not sure if this would have been a crime since it is actually theirs?  And the problem resolved.  And my garage is now empty of rubbish.  And the website seems to work now too.  There's still one one answers the phone though ...19/12/21  

The Information Comissioner Writes Incomprehensible Letter

I think what they're saying is that you can ask about existing data you can't ask if data exists...

Dear Mr Miller

I write further to my email of 20 December 2018 regarding this matter.

I have been in touch with Lambeth Council since that email to discuss whether all of your requests are valid requests for information under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR). In other words, whether parts of your email to Lambeth should have been dealt with as normal course of business enquiries rather than as requests for information.

This is because under the EIR applicants are only able to ask for recorded information held by a public authority. Consequently, some enquiries/questions will not generally be valid requests for information under the EIR.

Following my queries, Lambeth agreed to respond to some of your enquiries as part of its normal course of business. I understand Lambeth provided their response to you on 26 February.

The remaining parts of your email in relation to the leaseholders and their properties are valid requests for information under the EIR. However, I remain of the view that Lambeth was entitled to neither confirm nor deny whether it held the requested information on the basis of the exception at regulation 13(5)(A) of the EIR (personal data).

I will arrange for a decision notice to be issued to you upholding the application of regulation 13(5)(A) of the EIR unless you are now happy to withdraw your complaint.

I will assume you would like a decision notice if I have not heard from you by Wednesday 6 March 2019.

Yours Sincerely
Terna Waya
Senior Case Officer