Wednesday, July 18, 2012

All hail our new Olympic overlords

It's all been fun news for the Olympics. We've had builders stopped from buying chips from anywhere except the official sponsor; until a specific exemption was worked out. Areas around the venues will suddenly find themselves restricted as to what and how they can advertise themselves.

Lanes in London have been closed off to the public by Temporary Traffic Regulation Orders which are supposedly enforced by the police except they don't hand out fines which themselves have been bumped up from level 3 (as mandated by the Road Traffic Offenders Act Sch 2) to level 5 via it's own special London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 s15.

Missile sites have been located on rooftops and legal challenges shot down (oh sorry) on the grounds of "national security".

In the same vein security will be enforcing restrictions even more draconian than those required to board a aeroplane including prohibition of "political" clothing or wearing overt commercial identification; presumably it's okay if it's a logo of a sponsor.

Anything more oh yeah the BBC has had it's dramatisation about the London riots mysteriously pulled by a court on the orders of... oh wait we're not allowed to know. Gee no idea why that would be.

And finally we have to love the careful tip-toeing of the investigation into security staffing in which both groups (not naming names) seem to have an implicit agreement not to drop each other in it.

All hail the Olympics; a catch-all terms that's allowed our government to impose the sort of rule beyond even shouting "terrorism" at the public.

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