Difficult journey to Ghana Europe snow now here very intermittent connection speedtest 3kbps (sic) when working. Almost impossible post. Ghana Telecom privatised to Vodafone much worse. Try post tomorrow.
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Knowing Ghana – or the Gold Coast as it was originally – it always has been the back end of beyond ever since Nkrumah started its decline.
Did you eat a Banana in Ghana?
Ahoy there! Be well. Stay safe.
Can anyone think of a privatisation which made things better for customers, workers, or indeed for the country as a whole?
“Europe snow now here”
Hope you took your kellywellys.
Glad to know you got there OK, Craig. Have a good time, and return soon.
Now there’s a man with telegram technique. That’s what comes of being an ambassador, I suppose…
Glenn, I have seen privatizations that worked in other countries; but not British ones. As a matter of fact many years ago I was lead consultant on several privatization projects over here.
The problem with the UK is that too often the privatized units were structured in a way that suited cronies who knew how to work (milk) the system, rather than quality managers who knew how to run it. Take British Rail – One couldn’t have structured the privatization it in a stupider way if your objective was to run an efficient rail service. In case I am accused of being a conspiracy theorist, I just pose the question – Why is it that the privatization of British Rail resulted in higher fares, poorer service, and bigger government subsidies that before.
If the internet won’t work, just concentrate on doing good and tell us about it afterwards. Good luck!
Hi Roderick,
the last couple of days weren’t typical of this site; there haven’t been insults flying about today.
I saw a great parody privatisation advertisment – a nuclear reactor dome, with a big crack in the top and a plume of smoke coming out, captioned “Now we can all share in British Nuclear Fuels”.
Roderick: I’m sure it works in some instances, I’m just pushed to think where it might work offhand with core utilities. Governments should run utilities, it seems to me, because I’d rather have an elected person finally responsible for problems that occur, instead of some corporate CEO who only cares about making million in the next couple of years, regardless of the good it does the customers and the company.
We know why utilities were privatised, so that a the well-heeled could make a nice little earner off ludicrously undervalued public offerings (that “we underestimated the appeal” line was trotted out dozens of times by the Tories), while the eventual winners would be the major investors.
What ticks me off as much as anything, is that we used to have civil servants running the water board, electricity provisions and so on, and a fairly decent job they did for a comfortable living. But once privatised, the chairperson, sorry, new CEO was suddenly an immensely important individual, holding sway over a multi-billion pound enterprise, and of course needed commensurate pay and bonuses. So a comfortable living for a competent civil servant became a get-rich-quick scheme making tens of millions a year.
We can see why – for instance – we only have 8 days worth of gas reserves. What CEO would want to tie up 6 months’ worth of income in having 6 months of reserves? That would hurt profits, and that is all they care about. Who wants to pay for a 5-year plan, when the CEO will be elsewhere, on his luxury yacht long before then? And if the CEO _did_ want to pay for reserves/ 5-year plans, the shareholders would substitute him for someone who understood the need for immediate returns on investment. It’s not the individual people who are the problem, it’s the very notion of maximising profits from public infrastructure by privitising.
A truly sad result is that British core infrastructure, built up with a couple of hundred years of taxpayer investment in some cases, has been flogged off at bargain-basement prices largely to foreign investors. And they don’t care a fig about Britain, its people, or what we think of the service they provide.
Craig I can definitely sympathise…. For the last year my internet connection has been 18Kb/sec, but at least mine is stable… Unless the power cuts =P
I thought we had that microwave thingy on top of the office ??
I know an Ex-policeman who is from Ghana, he has two wives. Do you know him?
I wish I had two wives.
While it’s nice and quiet, I thought I’d post this:
— GENERAL WARNING —
In the recent, very heated discussions, various people have accused various others of being paid trolls, ‘shills’, or posting on behalf of ‘black ops’, etc. I have no way of knowing if this really happens; let’s assume that it does.
It seems to me that it is VITAL to NOT accuse people of being paid trolls. Firstly, it makes the accuser look paranoid. Secondly, remember that such people can post either way. You have no way of knowing if I’m trolling, and I don’t know if you are; people who’s opinion you hope to change will just be made to feel alienated if they are accused of being part of a conspiracy.
Consider this also. ‘John’, who believes a mainstream fallacy, is following a discussion between ‘Jim’ and a paid troll, whom I shall call ‘Troll’. ‘Troll’ writes things that ‘John’ innocently believes, ‘cos he saw them on telly. Then ‘Jim’ calls ‘Troll’ a troll. To ‘John’, it seems that ‘Troll’ has been maligned, and that ‘Jim’ is paranoid.
It’s a minefield, isn’t it? But take heart. There IS truth, and sensible, rational argument converges upon it, though not always as quickly as we might wish. This is why I made such efforts to calm things down.
So don’t let your comments become personal. Site original sources. And if you’re ever feeling wound up, take a breather rather than make a mistake.
I just finished the Catholic Orangemen of Togo – brilliant! Keep ’em coming!
I really want to read Murder in Samarkand, but a) I am broke and b) even if I had cash I couldn’t buy it where I am now….
Any kind soul care to email me a PDF copy?
PS, it’s
[email protected]
Many thanks
Neil, you can download it here:
http://tenpercent.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/catholic-orangemen-of-togo.pdf
Neil: sorry, wrong book!
It’s been covered here by Craig before, but during the commercial break, I suggest everyone pops off to The Register to read this excellent article about the stoking of an irrational fear of terrorism. Bloody spot-on, very much from the Bruce Schneier school of thought.
“Trouser-bomb clown attacks – how much should we laugh?”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/08/mutallab_comment/
Does Craig really mean 3Kbps? I thought mine was bad enough. A test just now – Download Speed 2.35Mbps Upload Speed 0.74Mbps – and I pay BT TotalCon for up to 8Mbps.
3Kbps is a dial-up modem sort of speed, though slow even for that.
I get 3Mbps which is quite fast enough for me, but then I don’t often download huge files. I download Linux LiveCD images (600 megabyte or so); one of those takes well under an hour.
Low speeds handle text OK.
Craig wrote ‘intermittent connection’, so he probably kept his post short so that it would transmit between failures!
Craig did say “3kbps (sic)” – which of course is vastly worse than 3kBps – 8 times worse, in fact. bps = bits per second, Bps= Bytes per second. 8 bits to a Byte. So loading a very modest 10KB page, at 3kbps, would take about half a minute. Uggh!
Jon,
thanks for The Register article. A good laugh.
I hope you are in good spirits Craig. While Craig is temporarily absent I would urge everyone to read this:
‘Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, outlined a plan for the government to infiltrate conspiracy groups in order to undermine them via postings on chat rooms and social networks, as well as real meetings, according to a recently uncovered article Sunstein wrote for the Journal of Political Philosophy.
As we have often warned, chat rooms, social networks and particularly article comment sections are routinely “gamed” by trolls, many of whom pose as numerous different people in order to create a fake consensus, who attempt to debunk whatever information is being discussed, no matter how credible and well documented. We have seen this on our own websites for years and although some of those individuals were acting of their own accord, a significant number appeared to be working in shifts, routinely posting the same talking points over and over again.
It is a firmly established fact that the military-industrial complex which also owns the corporate media networks in the United States has numerous programs aimed at infiltrating prominent Internet sites and spreading propaganda to counter the truth about the misdeeds of the government and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2006 CENTCOM, the United States Central Command, announced that a team of employees would be hired to engage “bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information,” about the so-called war on terror.
In May 2008, it was revealed that the Pentagon was expanding “Information Operations” on the Internet by setting up fake foreign news websites, designed to look like independent media sources but in reality carrying direct military propaganda.
Countries like Israel have also admitted to creating an army of online trolls whose job it is to infiltrate anti-war websites and act as apologists for the Zionist state’s war crimes.
In January last year, the US Air Force announced a “counter-blog” response plan aimed at fielding and reacting to material from bloggers who have “negative opinions about the US government and the Air Force.”
The plan, created by the public affairs arm of the Air Force, includes a detailed twelve-point “counter blogging” flow-chart that dictates how officers should tackle what are described as “trolls,” “ragers,” and “misguided” online writers.
New revelations highlight the fact that the Obama administration is deliberately targeting “conspiracy groups” as part of a Cointelpro style effort to silence what have become the government’s most vociferous and influential critics.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
In a 2008 article published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Obama information czar Cass Sunstein outlined a plan for the government to stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.
The aim of the program would be to “(break) up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories,” wrote Sunstein, with particular reference to 9/11 truth organizations.
Sunstein pointed out that simply having people in government refute conspiracy theories wouldn’t work because they are inherently untrustworthy, making it necessary to “Enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts,” he wrote.
“Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy,” writes Marc Estrin.
“It’s easy to destroy groups with “cognitive diversity.” You just take up meeting time with arguments to the point where people don’t come back. You make protest signs which alienate 90% of colleagues. You demand revolutionary violence from pacifist groups.”
This is what Sunstein is advocating when he writes of the need to infiltrate conspiracy groups and sow seeds of distrust amongst members in order to stifle the number of new recruits. This is classic “provocateur” style infiltration that came to the fore during the Cointelpro years, an FBI program from 1956-1971 that was focused around disrupting, marginalizing and neutralizing political dissidents.
“Sunstein argued that “government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories.” He suggested that “government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action,” reports Raw Story.
Sunstein has also called for making websites liable for comments posted in response to articles. His book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some as “a blueprint for online censorship.”
The Infowars office has been visited on numerous occasions by the FBI as a result of people posting violent comments in response to articles. Since the government now employs people to post such comments in an attempt to undermine conspiracy websites, if a law were passed making websites accountable, Sunstein’s program would allow the government to obliterate such sites from the web merely by having their own hired goons post threats against public figures.
The fact that the government is being forced to hire armies of trolls in an effort to silence the truth shows how worried they are about the effect we are having in waking up millions of people to their tyranny.’
And then read this:
‘”The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.
Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.
On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.
1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.
2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.
That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?
And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.
The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.
Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.
But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.
To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.
Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ‘solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.
“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.
No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.
The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.
That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.”
(source: Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010)’
It looks like they are all crawling out of the woodwork and into the sunlight now. Don’t be shy with the sunscreen little kiddies… 😉
“Sunstein has also called for making websites liable for comments posted in response to articles”
🙂
They’re furious that they can’t (yet anyway) control the internet. They have the MSM pretty much wrapped up. You may have seen the 2009 Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders:
http://www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html
Perhaps it will soon be illegal to claim that Nero was responsible for the burning of Rome in 64 AD, or that Iraq had WMD.
or perhaps not.