Big Brother is watching !

I’ve just watched two police officers clamp a strange object to the lamp post at the bottom of my street, which is a busy ‘T’ junction in a medium size town. This object then proceeded to climb the pole under their direction, then after it had reached a point not far from the top it turned its eye up our street and then down the cross street while the two officers observed from their riot protected van. Clearly it is a surveillance camera, but what the HELL is it doing on our street?

I’m not a criminal, my neighbours are not criminals, not so far as I know anyway, though that bloke at number 159 looks a bit shifty to me. Yet this THING will see me every time I leave my house, and observe everyone who comes to my house. I ask you is this really necessary? Who authorised this invasion of my privacy? And why were we, the residents of this area not informed or consulted?

Some years ago a young black poet asked us ‘Is Britain becoming a Fascist state,..’ and at the time I laughed. Then came Margaret Thatcher and the police beat the living shit out of the miners at her direction, and I wondered. Some time later we got Tony Blair and no one really hated him because he never really did much, then Tony Blair handed the country over to Gordon Brown the penny pincher without a fight. All the time the numbers of cameras on our roads have continued to grow, the numbers of police helicopters in our skies have continued to grow and Gordon Browns management of our economy has led to a worse recession and more unemployment than Margaret Thatcher was ever responsible for. What will it be next, remote operated camera drones peaking in our windows? Gestapo at the bus and rail stations checking our ID passes? Already there are moves to require that we all carry biometric ID cards.

And Gordon Brown sits there unopposed, as everyone knows the Tory wimp  doesn’t stand a chance and after Thatcher we don’t want him anyway. Nobody believes the Third Party has a chance either but Liberal Democracy may be our only way out of this mess if only we could see it. But no, our government swings from left to right to left and so called ‘New Labour’ has turned out to be more conservative than even Thatcher. All the time the numbers of surveillance cameras grow and no one , NO ONE complains!

Caveat Emptor – Let the buyer Beware!

So it’s nearly Christmas right? And money, as usual is tight. So tight that you are looking at any and all ‘special offers’ in order to get the best value for money you can find. Well watch out because many of these ‘Special Offers’ have a sting in the tail!

I was playing this game on Facebook called Mafia Wars, a cool game but it uses a system of ‘reward points’ which make the game easier if you buy stuff they advertise or sign up for ‘special offers’. So inevitably I find myself needing some reward points, well one of the ‘free’ offers was for ‘The Complete Road Dahl children’s Collection’ £4.95 and was worth 100 reward points. I have a niece and this I thought would be an ideal gift. So I clicked.

I was taken to a webpage and I duly entered my details, there was a terms and conditions PDF which I downloaded and a text box with a shipload of text crammed into it which I couldn’t be bothered reading. Gave ‘em my Card details and in short order I had my 100 reward points. A few days later the books arrived and they were as advertised, so I figured I had got a damn good deal,..

Then I started getting emails from ‘Books for Children’ saying I had agreed to take another 4 books and that their ‘editors choice’ would be sent automatically if I didn’t order anything else and on further investigation I discovered that in order to cancel I would have to pay £10 for each book I did not take. The ‘editors choice’ arrived a few weeks later and it was a piece of crap with an invoice for £16.95. I think you can now see where this is going, I phoned them to cancel and had to pay £46.95 in order to do so. To sum up those 100 reward points have cost me ( inc postage and packing ) approximately £60!

I’ve complained to Zynga the makers of Mafia Wars about this so called ‘free’ offer and the advert is no longer there, but when I complained to Trading Standards there was bugger all they could do. Why? Because I hadn’t read the terms and conditions, hadn’t read the crap in their little text box and the webpage I’d signed up on was no longer there! I’d been clobbered by your classic BookClub scam.

They hook you in with an offer that is too good to be true, and in the fine print claw back the real cost of the initial offer by forcing you to take over priced crap you don’t want, and there is bugger all Trading Standards can do about it because ‘The information needed to make an informed decision was all there’.

Well in my book this amounts to ‘Theft by Deception’ but I seriously doubt that a court would agree with me, so next time you are thinking about clicking on a ‘special offer’ remember this : CAVEAT EMPTOR , which is Latin for ‘Let the buyer beware’.