I’ve Heard Of A Plane Going Missing – But An Entire Airport???

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Bureaucrats lose things because they are incompetent and stupid.

We all know that.

My posts on the debacle at the US government’s Office of Personnel Management, where they lost over 21 million records of government employees and those who had applied for government jobs, was a good example.

I though at the time I read about this and did my blog posts that this would be a tough one to beat as regards stupidity and incompetence.

I was wrong.

 

Enter the Irish.

Irish bureaucrats have lost an entire airport.

And it only cost them €27 million  to do it.

A bargain one might think in terms of bureaucratic faux pas.

Up until last week you could find Ireland’s Shannon Airport, in Shannon, County Clare.

Sounds logical enough. If I was looking for Shannon Airport, Shannon is the first place I would look for it. They have had an airport there for over seventy years.

Now, however, after the introduction of Ireland’s new €27 million postcode system, the ‘Eircode’, you can now find Shannon Airport in – wait for it – a different county, County Limerick.

If that isn’t funny enough, the system also has a ‘mapping’ option which the bureaucrats say can identify the exact latitude and longitude of 2.2 million individual addresses. They’ll most likely be in the wrong latitude and longitude, but at least you know exactly how wrong the location is.

Naturally there are other problems with the ‘Eircode’ postcode system, ranging from other incorrect addresses to data protection concerns, but the airport one is the star of the show.

In typical bureaucratic fashion, despite the fact that the whole thing is an almighty mess, Communications Minister Alex White defended the new national system.

He even claimed it would make postal deliveries much easier in the long run – the ‘long run’ presumably referring to the distance traveled by your mail going to the wrong delivery address and confused users of the system going to all the wrong places.

Not only do the bewildered Irish users of this new system get wrong addresses for their €27 million, but they are only allowed a miserable fifteen searches per day, meaning you would need to persevere with it for more than a week if you were organizing a big event, like a wedding or anniversary do.

There is an option to search for more wrong addresses but the fee for that dubious privilege is between €60 and €180 a year, depending on the number of searches performed.

Good luck with selling that too!

Now where did I put the milk for my coffee?

Ah yes, in the garage next door.

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Can Heads That Have No Brains Handle A No-Brainer?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Time for another rant about the slime of creation, also known as the banksters.

This blog is about highlighting and fighting against stupidity and bureaucracy and there is no better example of this than the banking industry.

Their stupidity is only matched by their arrogance and their greed.

More than five years on from plunging the world into a financial catastrophe, and all of us into debt that will take generations to sort out, they are still at it!

And the governments are still faffing about, afraid to take on those who bribe them with “contributions” to their election campaigns.

For example, the European parliament only reached a “tentative deal” last Wednesday evening to limit bankers’ bonuses at twice the value of their fixed pay. They call it “imposing the toughest limits on pay since the financial crisis”. Gimme strength!!! Of course, the deal, still has to be endorsed formally by governments and lawmakers (i.e., the bureaucrats), and is the result of 18 months of farting around (they call it negotiating).

It’s a start, but a poor and a slow one.

It shows how long it takes for a no-brainer to happen in heads that have no brains!

In timely manner, latest results last week came from Europe, namely the grandly named basket-case Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Lloyds Group, and Spain’s lesser sounding Bankia.

Already more than 80% owned by the British Government (i.e., taxpayers) who stupidly bailed out these idiots to the tune of almost $70 billion, RBoS have announced further losses of around $9 billion!

To make matters worse, $1.6 billion of that was to compensate clients wrongly sold insurance and interest-rate hedging products – which is a nice way of saying they have been caught fleecing their customers and now have to pay back money they cheated their clients out of in the first place.

They called it a “chastening year”.  

Meatime Lloyds chalked up further losses to the tune of more than $2 billion!

And the banksters aren’t any smarter in Spain either. Bankia also this week reported a net loss of €19.06 billion ($25.04 billion) for 2012, by far the largest in Spanish corporate history.

And you know what? Let’s add insult to injury.

These dumb-asses are looking for bonuses for their efforts.

Can you believe it?

If someone starts a business and it fails, no one gives them a bonus – they lose their business (usually because the banksters force them to close down).

Just how on earth have we allowed the banking industry to create a culture of stupidity to take hold and remain in place after such clear evidence that it is not working. It is completely absurd.

Hit your sales targets, make money for the company and yes sir you can have a bonus and well deserved. Cost the company $ billions and drive it to bankruptcy because of your incompetence and the only bonus you should get is early parole for good behavior.

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That’s Europe taken care of, can’t go without a word about the American banksters too.

Latest news is that they “have discovered” that they wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 members of the military during the housing crisis and seized homes from about two dozen other borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments,

The banks, namely Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, only found the foreclosures after regulators ordered them to examine mortgages as part of a multibillion-dollar federal settlement. Each bank “discovered” around 200 members of the military whose homes were wrongly foreclosed in 2009 and 2010.

So while military personnel are putting themselves in harm’s way to protect and defend the country, the slime in the banks are busy trying to illegally foreclose on their homes.

Incredible!

Not only do these foreclosures violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a federal law requiring banks to obtain court orders before foreclosing on active-duty members, but they violate every common law of decency.

The sooner governments come to their senses and put these banksters out of business the better and cleaner the country will be.

***end rant***

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London 2012, Proof That When You Give Bureaucrats An Olympian Sized Task, They Will Make An Olympian Sized Mess Of It!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The London Olympic Games 2012 will finish later today. I’m interested to see what they have in store for the closing ceremony, bearing in mind that the opening ceremony was good in parts, but confusing in others. 

As for the games themselves, after a shaky start I think you could say they were successful and very enjoyable for the public at large. I certainly enjoyed what I saw of them. 

But what the whole show did illustrate very well was the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the politicians and the bureaucrats. They took a large, but relatively simple event, and made a laughing stock out of themselves.

Why?

Simply because the politicians and bureaucrats thought they could run everything better than people who know about staging events like these. They can’t!

 

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Right from the start the inefficiency was evident in the vast rows of empty seats at the various venues.

It got a little better as the Games went on, but a friend of mine who was there on Thursday evening told me that even for the much heralded Men’s 200 meters showdown featuring the extremely popular Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, there were at least 500 vacant seats in the stadium.

 

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The problem was twofold.

First, a lot of tickets had been allocated to the corporate sector, far more than was necessary.

Second, for the rest of the people there was only one practical way to buy Olympic tickets, and that was through the ‘official’ government/bureaucrat controlled office.

These morons even tried to destroy normal commercial activity by making it a criminal offense for individuals to resell Olympic tickets.

But when you logged on to the government’s official website to try to buy tickets legally, bewildered visitors quickly found out that they had to jump through all sorts of ridiculous hoops to get them.

A bit like an airport arrivals lounge, UK residents were directed to follow one set of procedures; residents of the EU, but not of the UK, had another set of rules; and residents of other countries, yet another set.

Of course, you couldn’t just buy the tickets. First you had to set up an online profile, revealing all sorts of details about yourself that had not the slightest relevance to buying a ticket for the Games.

And when you’d finished all that you could print out your ticket, just like an electronic airline ticket or boarding pass.

Don’t be daft, of course you couldn’t. That would be far too efficient and sensible.

The bureaucrat way, despite the fact that they were directing everyone to use the online system, was to mail your tickets to you  –  hold on, let me repeat that  –  mail as in M-A-I-L, as in snail-mail NOT email – and they could only do that to the legal residency address you gave them in your profile.

Tough luck on “Johnny Foreigner” whose legal residency could have been on the other side of the world, in China, Australia, or New Zealand for example.

There was an alternative, if you could call it that. You could waste a few hours of your life going to one of the ticket offices, the locations of which the bureaucrats had ensured were in the most inconvenient places possible.

And when you eventually made it to the front of the queue you were confronted by a poorly trained and ever more poorly informed individual who had little idea what tickets were available at any given time.

The inefficiency of the availability of information was so staggering that an event that had been deemed ‘sold out’ at 10am, could turn out to have hundreds of seats available an hour or two later.

That was why there were thousands of empty seats. The bungling bureaucrats hadn’t even the wit to assign them to the soldiers who had been drafted in at the last minute because of another foul-up in employing a private security firm who had not the manpower to do the job.

So could you get tickets by other “illegal” means?

Well, of course you could. The bureaucrats desire for total control is as inefficient as everything else they do. The ticket touts were doing business as usual, but as usual they were charging two or three times the face value of the tickets. Whether that practice is right or wrong is a question for another time. But they couldn’t have done it had the idiots in charge not made such a hash of the whole thing.

I’m looking forward to see how they cope in Rio in 2016. My feeling is they should study what happened in London and do the complete opposite!

 

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Are The Banksters Guilty Of Treason Against The Nation?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

 

“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” 

Ovid / Sir John Harrington

 

When I first though about this subject for a post on my blog, I had America mainly in my mind, I suppose because that is where the rot started to show. But when I though about it a little more I quickly realized that the same charge could equally be brought against the banksters in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France and in fact the entire European Union.

They took money that was not theirs, that was placed in trust with them for safe and responsible stewardship, and they gambled it and lost it. 

Then they used their influence on stupid politicians to steal the honest taxpayer’s money to fill up their coffers again. They were apparently too big to fail – what an utter load of nonsense!

They promised when they were stealing OUR money that they would use it to make loans to businesses and thereby stimulate and reactivate the economy that they themselves had brought to a standstill when they lost OUR original cash in stupid and foolhardy deals that no one with any brains or any sense of responsibility to their clients would have dared to go near.

They lied.

 

The banksters lied to us

 

They took OUR money for the second time and kept it for themselves. A lot of it went on bonuses, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars. A reward to themselves for staggering incompetence.

In any other industry, if you were so bad at your job as to bankrupt your company, you would not only be fired but stand a good chance of being charged with fraud or negligence or something. But if you are a bankster and have successfully sold the lie that you are “too big to fail”, then you get away with it. It doesn’t hurt if you have a few politicians in your pocket either! 

And, apart from paying yourself huge bonuses for losing OUR money the first time, what do you do with the proceeds of stealing OUR money the second time? Well, of course, first you give yourself another big pay rise, and then you gamble again and lose even more of OUR money.

Remember the J P Morgan $2billion loss – er, make that a $9billion loss would you. Just as Hillary Clinton “mis-spoke” when she lied to the public, J P Morgan “mis-counted” the first time they declared the extent of their incompetence! We probably have not heard the truth yet.

Banksters – the best we have???

And President Obama has the gall to tell the world that these morons and liars are “the best we have”! Seriously? Do you really expect the people to believe that? I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.

But the J P Morgan $2billion loss turning out to be a $9billion loss is just the tip of a colossal  iceberg. This one is a hell of a lot bigger than the one that sank the Titanic  –  it’s threatening to sink entire countries.

 

Banksters Motto: Greed Before Country

The public and even the various governments have not been made aware of the full extent of the catastrophic losses these idiots (remember the best we have) have made. All the big banks, whether in the US, or Britain, or Spain or France or wherever are furiously cooking their books and have been for the last five years. Their companies are insolvent, they are bankrupt, but they are hiding the truth from everyone.  

This is fraud.

In fact, because of the power that they have, and the impact their stupidity inevitably has on the entire national economy, what they have done and are continuing to do is commit treason.

In a country run by Joe Stalin or Saddam Hussein (perhaps proving that not everyone is all bad all of the time) these treacherous banksters would have been put up against a wall and shot. That may be a bit extreme for us, but at the very least they should lose their jobs, have their stashes of personal wealth confiscated, and be thrown into jail. If it was good enough for a thief like ponzi king, Madoff, it should be good enough for thieves like them.

End rant, cue a few videos on the subject.

Enjoy!

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A view from Britain

 

A view from Ireland

 

 The best government money can buy

 

Understanding The Financial Crisis–For Kids and Grownups