Death by committee...

The case of "Baby P", who died with over 50 deliberately inflicted injuries on his body, is being called "tragic". It's not tragic at all. It's a bloody disgrace.

It's emerging that Baby P's death was occasioned by a catalogue of failure involving too many parties fighting each other, and which left a toddler in the care of people who were deliberately harming him. A foster place was found to take Baby P out of harms way as early as December 2006. He was actually placed in care for a while, but a social worker then returned him to his abusive parents after what ITN calls "a frank exchange of views". That implies office politics. If true, ask yourself who plays office politics with a child known to be being beaten up by his parents?

At a case conference, the police, who wanted Baby P placed in foster care for his own safety, actually allowed themselves to be overruled. They even signed a care plan that sent him home for further abuse. The BBC's "Panorama" programme even discovered documents that show social services had been over-optimistic about his mother's ability to care for Baby P, and had focused on the needs of the parents rather than a child who had been admitted to hospital several times with deliberately inflicted injuries.

There's a full timeline of this poor little sod's short and painful life on the BBC news site. If you can bear it, take a good look at the graphic of his facial injuries.

In the UK, people are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment. While that's a standard that must be upheld in any decent society, I find myself on the brink of hoping the parents get what they bloody well deserve - but also hoping that the people who should have cared for Baby P don't get to walk away from their "mistake". I'm certain I'm not alone.

A code in the dose...

Why is it that I can go for five years without so much as a sniffle, then when I decide to start a blog, I get a real thumper behind the eyeballs? One or two people have been in touch to tell me I haven't posted for a few days. The reason is the streaming cold in the nose I caught at a party.

And why is it that when you have a cold, people ask what you're taking for it? The answer I give is nothing, and here's why: the only thing that slows a cold is keeping warm and sipping warm drinks. Rhinoviruses prefer cold conditions to multiply, so keeping your breathing apparatus temperature up a bit slows them down - sometimes to the degree that your immune system can get a lock on them and start blasting away. When asked a few days ago why I'm not taking a super-strength mega-vitamin, I couldn't resist misquoting a character from the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" - mega-vitamins to treat a cold are just the recipe for very expensive urine.

Our Tesco is so large...

...I bought a branch of Sainsbury's there last week.

In a totalitarian regime, the state owns and controls everything. It sets quotas and prices for goods, services and wages. It owns and controls the means of production and sets the factory gate price of raw materials and finished goods. Everything is controlled to ensure that everything runs according to plan. Totalitarian regimes, unless they're seriously incompetent at all but repressing their own people (as in North Korea and Burma), also tend to be expansionist or at least keen on neutralising their neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that, at least from a capitalist perspective, there's a satirical parallel to be drawn between this and large UK supermarket chains. I'm not suggesting they're anything sinister; they're retail corporations with all that entails. But supermarkets have undeniably grown to become huge, multinational concerns, employing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, and by effectively having the power to set factory gate prices, they control the means of producing food, clothing and so on in a large number of countries.

Supermarkets also have very strong core identities and values. For example, Tesco's corporate description of its values and purpose is enshrined in "The Tesco Way". It's just too obvious to create cheap satire comparing this and those of other supermarkets to "manifestos".

Okay, supermarkets are just shops, and like all retailers they're geared to producing profit, but will there come a time when the only shops, other than those serving niche markets, are predominantly supermarkets? I think we've all seen them move into small towns and gradually strangle much local commerce by providing under one roof all the goods and services traditionally provided by individual retailers. This is simply capitalism, but somehow it feels wrong, even if it is convenient.

When I was a kid and my grandparents visited, I remember my Granddad giving me 50p and saying, "Don't spend it all in the same shop". Increasingly, this is impossible.

Servos...

How sad (by normal standards, anyway) is it that I am gradually falling in love with my Arduino Diecimila robot controller?

I now have 6 tiny little Ultrafly ST-9 micro-servos, which simply plug into the PMW sockets on the Arduino. The Arduino servo library then allows you to simply send an angle to each and the servo whirs into position. How much simpler could this be?

The more I investigate the online Arduino community and discover the strange and interesting libraries people have written, the more I realise that open source hardware is a viable alternative to closed source, propriatary kit. I've long believed that open source software has the potential to become a major force in computing, and to a very great extent that faith is paying off. How long before somoene decides to create a seriously powerful open source computer, I wonder, or even a cluster of them? I'm not holding my breath, but I don't think we'll have to wait an eternity for the first models to appear either.

Taxi Please...

The Daily Mail reports with some glee that BBC radio presenter Sam Mason has been sacked after calling a taxi for her 14-year-old daughter one afternoon and requesting a non-Asian driver. The conversation was recorded and passed to The Sun. Mason apparently says, "A guy with a turban is going to freak her out. She's not used to Asians." When told that it would not be possible to service her request, she the apparently retorted: "You've managed it before."

Why am I commenting on this story? Well, some of the comments left on the Daily Mail's web page covering the story are interesting to say the least. Here's an example:

"Dont blame her,but in PC UK you have no freedoms any more."

...while having the freedom to say so, it seems. This correspondent's idea of freedom is about the race of the driver not the quality of service he offers.

"More selective discrimination PC rubbish. Bet there wouldn't be this fuss if she'd specifically asked for a female driver."

True, requesting a female driver could be about real fear, whereas this is about the race of the driver. So, why didn't Ms Mason simply ask if a female driver was available? Given that it's just a taxi ride and that the driver is immaterial, how can it be that someone in a turban will "freak out" a 14-year-old in this day and age? Clearly Ms Mason has no qualms about letting her daughter ride with an unknown male taxi driver - just not an "Asian" one.

"If it were me I wouldn't care if it had two heads," Mason is alleged to have said, "but it's my little girl we are talking about."

Black American comedian Reginald D Hunter once said that there are two kinds of racism. There's the racism that's just ignorance and doesn't really affect anyone, and there's the racism has consequences. It stops people getting housing, jobs and so on. She may not realise it, but by denying a fare to a perfectly good taxi driver on grounds of his race (or more accurately, religion), Ms Mason falls (perhaps unwittingly, but very definitely) into the second category. I think, however, I'll leave the last word on this to a twistedly self-rigteous comment left on the Daily Mail web site by someone calling himself "Peter". See if you can guess which of Hunter's categories he's in from what he says:

"What the PC brigade have done and are doing to this country is frightening. You'll find Ms.Harman and her troop at the root of much of it. We all have prejudices and that does not make us racist. Simply she didn't want a chap in a turban for her daughter."

Sainsbury's again...

My post yesterday about Sainsbury's latest TV ad campaign predicted a Christmas instalment where we'd be treated to an insight into the life of a fictitious family. Sure enough, last night there was the advert, introducing us to (if I remember them correctly) the fictitious shop worker's son Billy. We heard about his best friend, Auntie Jen, and even Billy's teacher. Why go to the trouble of inventing so many unseen characters? It's all in aid of nothing more than getting us to buy our mince pies at Sainsbury's and not Tescos. Price alone, it seems, is not enough. We must be made to feel as if we belong to get us spending. I wonder if it's possible to get too schmaltzy in Christmas adverts? With a recession looming and retailers fighting over dwindling disposible incomes, we may not have long to wait until we find out.

Definitely coming in on three engines...

Showbiz gossip site Digitalspy.co.uk is reporting that Salisbury Council has banned the phrase "Singing from the same hymn sheet" in case... wait for it... it offends atheists. I'm an atheist, well, not even an atheist really - I don't think about God enough to qualify - and the only offensive thing about the whole story is the assumption that I need protecting from something so pointlessly inconsequential.

When something as powerful as a local authority is so frightened that their employees may inadvertently cause offence with a common phrase whose meaning is innocent and perfectly well-understood, you have to wonder just how much arbitrary personal power that hands you - without you ever having to lift a finger to earn it. What fun could one have, what resources could one waste using this power for evil? With this kind of pointless language micromanagement and fear-based culture lurking in the coridors of minor elected power, the sky's the limit. It may be double plus non-good, to quote Orwell, but what a ridiculous laugh it would be to use political correctness deliberately against itself to make the point. Pick a phrase in common usage, officially demand that you're offended by it, and stand back to watch the fun.

This reminds me of the short time in 1994 when I worked on the IT support desk of a local water company. I was alone on the early shift one morning when a man from the quality assurance department came in with an apparently urgent need to discuss a few of the support records. This puzzled me. Why were QA looking at the support records. They had no hope of ever understanding them. It turned out that the man was indeed puzzled - about the phrase "the machine is down". I explained that it simply means a machine has locked up or has in some way crashed. The man from QA wanted to know if we could use a different phrase in future. I asked why and he said that "down" sounded a bit sexual. Seriously. No one but the other support staff would ever have cause to read these records, and they all knew what the phrase actually meant, but the man from QA wanted us to use the phrase "rendered inoperable" instead. I referred him to the IT manager, who, if my memory serves me correctly, laughed and asked the man from QA if he had anything better to do. That, perhaps, is the problem. The man from QA was employed to take pointless trivialities seriously, to pursue them and to report back. It was a stupid job, but it paid real money, which in turn paid a real mortgage and real taxes.