Iain Duncan Smith To Receive Stern Wagging Finger

IDS to be given a good telling-off by Work and Pensions select committee

By Dan Gilbert, our parliamentary correspondent

In a landmark victory for British democracy, the work and pensions select committee has announced that it intends to question Ian Duncan Smith over his misuse of statistics sometime next month-ish.

“IDS claimed that 8,000 people had moved into work as a result of the benefit cap," one parliamentary insider told The Spool today, "in order to give the impression they had simply not been bothered to find work until Uncle Ian told them to pull their socks up.”

Iain Duncan Smith defending his statistics yesterday, before telling the committee he once beat up Saracen from the TV show Gladiators outside a nightclub in Loughborough. 

 “For such a prominent politician to behave in this manner is unbelievable. Any schoolboy aspiring to a political career knows you only bullshit people on things they don't know--that's a wide canvas when you represent this bunch of ignorant plebs--but lying about how fucked they are just won't fly,' he added. "The hapless bastards are living it, for Christ's sake!”

Shit at Lying

Our anonymous source went on to highlight the Conservative party's concerns regarding IDS' competency in general:

 “When it came to implementing technology in the DWP, Ian was a visionary. He devised a system making it impossible for well-meaning individuals working in a job center to help anyone by limiting the information they have access to; departmentalizing all processes and decisions to the point no one can give a dole-dosser any meaningful advice. Or even reasons as to why a given decision had even been made.

 "Indeed, his recent change to council tax benefit--where a late payment of a tenner or so will see your whole benefit mis-allocated and the bill hiked up by 10 times or more--was, to quote Sir Norman Tebbit, fucking inspired. 

"Don't get me wrong," our insider continued, "we know we can't build any of the things we'd like to see while in power, so we're settling for shanking the life out of something we detest--namely, poor people. Ian has undeniably delivered in that respect. But the problem is he's shit at lying, and that's a serious issue for any Tory. It's that whole £53 a week thing all over again...”

(IDS recently came under criticism after claiming he could live on £53 a week, the amount a job seeker could now expect to receive after IDS' reforms).

 “It's like he doesn't get the whole concept of plausibility," our insider said. "Never mind the fact he's probably never spent less than three figures on a pair of shoes in his life, many of the people he's saying this to will have tried to live on that kind of budget. They already know it isn't possible without living like some character in a particularly shabby Kafka novel stuffed with dog hair and 10p cans of beans. You can't piss right in someone's mouth and call it lemonade. You just can't.”

Denial

IDS faces a second rebuke over his decision to lie about the fact he had been caught lying. When questioned by MP Rushanara Ali over the select committees decision to question him, IDS denied that any such decision had taken place. 

“It's like he can't stop,” the Shadow Minister for international development told us earlier this morning.  “He knows he's lying, you know he's lying, he knows you know and all that, but he carries on anyway. We've taken to calling him 'Bullshit Smith' around The Commons. I overheard him talking to David Heath the other day about when he used to jam with Trent Reznor and how they built a rocket-powered skateboard together in his shed. What a wanker.”

Rancid Hopeless Bullshit Merchant 

Little hope is held that IDS will change his ways.

 “When you misrepresent statistics to demonise one section of the populace in the eyes of another there have to be consequences, and we'll be giving him a right dressing down, never fear” Dame Anne Begg MP, Chair of the Select Committee said yesterday.

But few in parliament believe this stringent measure will have much effect, our insider told us:

 “I've tried sitting him down in private with a drink and saying 'Look mate, you've got to stop lying all the time, it's making us look like a pack of arrogant privileged arseholes'. He just gives you this glazed look and denies it all. I caught a peep at an address he's been putting together for the Commons, something about 60% of all benefits being spent on rum, ganga and trance music. 

"We'll probably have to drop him like he was a cat-shit and napalm burrito before the next election. After all, if there's one decent lesson he has taught us it's to shoot the wounded the  moment things get tough. It's only fair we honour him by taking his wisdom to heart.”

JACK ON: A 100 word cyberpunk tale by Dan Gilbert

Jack Maelstrom pulled aside his neon-green hair and plugged the logwire into the data-port at the base of his skull. With a sharp intake of breath, Jack plunged into the DataSphere, his senses momentarily overwhelmed by the 'psynami'; the 'Sphere's sensory deluge.

Flying through the streams of light that represented the myriad servers that made up the DataSphere, Jack made a mental list of likely candidates in the ‘Sphere who could help him. Jack was here for two reasons. First, to find an encryption key for the DataD0ng the Kompany had placed in his skull, and secondly, because he was a massive wanker with no mates.

Apocalypse Cliche (A Flash Fiction)

         Apocalyptic Flash Fiction, #8,467

                       By

            James Worrad and Dan Gilbert

     The Man and the Woman stared through the plexi-glass in the bunker’s wall.  Outside, the mushroom cloud filled the horizon, blotting out the sun.

     No one else had made it to safety.

     ‘This is it, then,’the woman said.‘It finally happened.’

     ‘Guess so,’ said the man.

     The woman shivered.

     ‘I…’ She shook her head. ‘So… what’s your name?’

     ‘Adam,’ the man replied.‘Yours?’

     Eyes wide, she turned and looked at him.

     ‘Why… Eve,’ she said.

     Silent, they gazed at one another.

     BANG! 

     The pair of them were torn in half.  The man and the woman’s bodies slapped onto the concrete floor.

     ‘Bernard,’ said a man with a smoking shotgun in his hands. 

He closed the hatchway behind him and started looking for supplies.  

                          *




(Originally appeared in The Speculator.)

Guest Blog!!! Dan Gilbert: The Future Has Neither Hook-Hand Nor Copyright: Of Piracy and Distribution

High time 20th century-style mass distribution took a hit from the reality-pipe, says Dan Gilbert in this, his second Spool invasion! (BTW- If you Ctrl+C+V this, I will personally hunt you down and skin you. Seriously.).

Piracy on the High Paddling Pool

Piracy is always a fashionable topic in the piss-ridden paddling pools that make up online forums, and the blanket block on the Pirate Bay that came into effect last week sparked a fresh round of flame wars, 'I reckons', and caps lock rants. You can always tell when you're faced with a knotty problem- people will split into two polarized camps before flinging shit at one another, a form of ammunition neither side is ever short of.

The two camps in the piracy issue are equally loathsome. We have the shrill indignant types who tell you piracy will destroy art and media as we know it, and that those who download are stealing from the pockets of producers and genuine consumers alike (bullshit).

Opposing them are the digital freedom fighters, claiming they’re sticking it to The Man and attacking the establishment by watching dodgy copies of The Matrix in their Mum's basement (also bullshit).   

As easy as it is to pour scorn on both sides- and in an effort to make this guest rant at least look like an article- I'll have a stab at highlighting the actual issue, and what we can do about it.

Death to the Unskippable Finger-Wag!

The thing we have to accept is that the internet, and technology in general, dashed ahead of society before most of us even noticed, much less adjusted to it. When I was at school, computers were 'the future'; everyone told you they were going to be huge, and everyone nodded sagely, but most people didn't really give it any more credence than any of the other world-changing things you'd see on Tomorrow's World. 

Computers were the preserve of weird-looking terminal virgins; noisy, clunky, ugly things more likely to piss you off and end up in the bin rather than take over the world. Twenty years later, we have stuff that makes many SF imaginings look quaint.

As far as piracy goes, this has caused two big changes. Digi-swag is now easier and more convenient to get hold of than going to a shop and buying it legitimately, and the end product is often superior to the legitimate one. Previously, a dodgy copy of a film had to be obtained through a mate in the pub or a car-boot sale, and was usually a grainy mess copied VHS to VHS. That, or filmed from the back of a cinema with a pre-digital camcorder; you couldn't see half of the screen and you still had to suffer the noise of some popcorn-munching halfwit one row behind, asking his girlfriend what was going on every ten minutes.

Now I can download a film quicker than it takes to watch it, in DVD quality, and without the unskippable finger-wagging ad claiming piracy is akin to stealing a tank and driving it through an orphanage.

I find myself downloading cracked copies of games I've paid for legitimately because they'll work without the soon to be scratched up/lost/indefinitely borrowed CD. Other times I've downloaded stuff I couldn't afford to buy, and would have just borrowed off a mate anyway. It's not that I don't want to support the people that make the products I love; I just don't want to use antiquated, demonstrably inferior means of acquiring them.

The Future Arrives in Micro-Payments

Many in the gaming industry have demonstrated it is possible to embrace this new technology and still get paid. Turbine, responsible for Dungeons and Dragons online, was looking at shutting shop on the RPG a few years ago due to lack of customers. In a final attempt to keep things going, they switched from the traditional monthly subscription model to a free-to-play one. Essentially, they gave the bulk of the game away, and made cash through 'micro payments', where people could unlock game features quicker than they could through play. How? By throwing cash in Turbine's direction.

The end result was a 500% increase in profits, and a player base that doesn't exclude people who can't afford it. This model can't be applied to all forms of media (or even all genres of games), but it does suggest the problem lies more with our increasingly out of date business models, rather than a desire to get something for nothing.

Another example is 'Barely Political', which started out as one chap and a few mates posting parody pop songs and comedy sketches on You Tube – now they have a budget, access to studios and still maintain complete control over what they do.  No TV contract or DVD sales required (though they do sell T-shirts and other tat if that's your thing).

Down Sails, Up Periscope.

While I don't have all the answers as to what these new models will be, the one thing we can say for sure is a lot of people in-between the producers of media and their audience will no longer be required. I can't help but suspect this is the real reason for resistance to abandoning the old ways of doing things. 

It's no different from any other industry that's become obsolete, and while I don't relish the idea of putting people out of a job (most of them, anyway), if we can put more control in the hands of  people actually creating the stuff we like- and make distribution cheaper, more convenient and less demanding on resources- shouldn't we give it a go?

As for Pirate Bay, the unsinkable ship has become a submarine, and a quick search on Google will show you how to circumvent the block with about as much tech know-how as it took you to log on in the first place, a fact that has seen Pirate Bay's number of users increase since the ban. If that doesn't make you think we need to find new ways of doing things, well...  you probably manufacture and distribute DVDs for a living.

Guest Post!!! Dan Gilbert: The Yes Men cometh in my inbox

 Until I visited the US, I'd never heard of The Bank of America. Then I did. Then they treated me like a dick. So, imagine how overjoyed I was to receive this post from gad-about-Leicester (and Mievillacrum#2), Dan Gilbert, detailing how hoaxers had shown that, no, Bank of America are the dicks! Ha! As I suspected...

If there's one thing my inbox can be relied upon to do, it's attract massive fibbers. I've got Russian girls looking for me (sounds more like a threat than a promise), an African Prince hoping to borrow fifty quid in order to access his millions, a copy of my CV; that kind of stuff. I actually quite like my inbox this way- if it was even half as relentlessly grounded in reality as the filth the electric company shove through my letterbox, I'd never sign in again.

I got one the other day that stands out more than the 12” todger some Doctor in the Philippines reckons he can endow me with. The email claimed to originate from The Bank Of America, entitled 'Bank of America Announces Partnership with Taxpayers to Revamp U.S. Banking‏.' which you can read here...

http://yeslab.org/yourbofa-announce

My finely-tuned brain spotted this as nonsense straight away; partly because of the content, but mostly because I couldn't get my head around the idea of a US bank seeking the opinions of some Limey shit-muncher who isn't above recycling cigarettes from the ashtray. Sure enough, the originating website was promptly exposed as a fake by the actual Bank Of America, denouncing it as the phishing scam it wasn't: a self-serving half-truth far more in line with the kind of stuff I expect from bankers and pointless middle-men in general.

A further example of their infuriatingly unconscious arrogance dropped into my inbox shortly after, entitled 'Bank of America Denounces Hoax, Will Not Need Bailout, Warns Public Not To Be Confused By “YourBofA.com” Fraud-

http://yeslab.org/yourbofa-retort

Now there's the greedy whoremongers lefty teens get so annoyingly earnest about! I sent off a sarky comment, went back to shooting podgy adolescents in the face on Battlefield Heroes, and thought no more about it.

The plot, it turns out, was to thicken like the tinned stodge that passes for my diet these days. A third email showed up (accompanied by one from my internet provider suggesting I pay them money or forget all about receiving a fourth)-

http://yeslab.org/yourbofa

A bit of a shock, I don't mind telling you. As a long-standing trader in utter bullshit, I was a little irked some had managed to get past me- even if it was on the second attempt- and from such illustrious bullshit artists as the Yes Men.  Apparently they decided to release a hoax denouncing their hoax to ensure no journalists were fooled for very long. I reckon they were worried they'd cause a financial meltdown, not unrealistic when you look at what their Bhopal jape on the BBC did to Dow Chemical's share prices.

You can piece together all the details from their website, but the long and short of it is they wanted to get people talking about what kind of banking system they'd like to have, which is definitely a step up from the usual 'tear it all down and replace it with, er, something better' line you often get. 

It's also a great way to get people that would otherwise write it off as wishful thinking involved; a bit like getting a kid to cry by giving it sweeties then taking them away (much fun in it's own right, of course).   

Anyone interested in getting involved in this kind of japery can do so by reading more on the YesLab website- you might change the world, but more importantly, you'll get to wind up some humourless suits with more money and less practical use than you.