@brianwhelanhack Shoot your own missiles over east London, flash game - "tomscott.com/olympics/

Anyone whose experience of ODA 'drop-in' style consultations has been one of bitter frustration and disappointment might enjoy letting this 2-hour recording play in the background. Via the Save Leyton Marsh campaign blog, it's really most refreshing! (It perhaps needs an overture, since many times our overtures went unheeded in the past.)

"Hackney WickED Art Festival will not take place in 2012"

Hackney WickED, established in 2008 coinciding with the Beijing Olympics and taking place the last weekend in July since, will not be taking the form of a three day festival this Olympics year. For obvious (if somewhat understated) reasons, they're "adapting to the changing social and built environment".

Anticipating the effect of the Coalition’s Local Housing Allowance reforms

The Government paid out £8bn in Housing Benefit in England in 2009/10, of which £1.5bn was spent in London. In an attempt to reduce this, a number of changes are being introduced to the Local Housing Allowance (LHA), which sets the maximum amount of rent that can be met from Housing Benefit. From 2011 LHA is being reduced from the median level of local rents to the 30th percentile and an absolute limit is being imposed on the allowance. From 2013, LHA will be increased in line with consumer price inflation (CPI) not with rents themselves. Cumulative CPI inflation between 1997/8 and 2007/8, for England, was 20%, compared with 70% for rents.

One way to anticipate the effects of these changes is to consider which neighbourhoods will be ‘largely unaffordable’ as the changes are rolled out: ‘largely unaffordable’ is defined here as when the LHA is lower than the cheapest 25% of neighbourhood rents. This means that someone seeking accommodation will find it hard to find a property that is available, affordable, in adequate condition and offered by a landlord who is willing to let to LHA claimants. Using this definition, the changes from 2011 will immediately reduce the proportion of London neighbourhoods affordable to LHA claimants from 75% to 51%. This falls further to 36% by 2016. Most inner London boroughs are likely to become almost entirely unaffordable to low-income tenants on LHA by 2016. See map below.

London neighbourhoods largely unaffordable to LHA claimants in 2010 and 2016

.: In 2010. Source: Fenton A. (2011)

.: By 2016. Source: Fenton A. (2011)

Moreover, the large clusters of neighbourhoods in outer East, South and West London that will remain affordable in 2016 are likely to house increasing numbers of low-income tenants as a result of the reforms. These areas are already characterised by high rates of multiple deprivation and unemployment among the existing population. Thus the reforms are likely to intensify the spatial concentration of disadvantage, and increase the segregation of poor and better-off households within London.

From: Poverty and Inequality in London: anticipating the effects of tax and benefit reforms, Ruth Lupton LSE
Download: PDF (4 pages)

Anonymous are chatting about the possibilities for engagement, as flagged up in this quite good piece in HuffPo:

I think the pushback against The Dystopian Olympics™, in Cory Doctorow's felicitous phrase, is going to take two forms. The first has already started and consists of leveraging the prominence of Olympic brands to shame those brands on the world stage. Remember Bhopal? Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide after the disaster, would prefer you didn't. But Dow's Olympics sponsorship is a perfect opportunity to refocus world attention on the ongoing atrocity of the failure to address the original tragedy. Most companies that are big enough to sponsor the Olympics are big enough to have socially transgressed royally some place along the way and we can expect militant exposures of the officially-sanctioned sponsors, hoist in full view on their 'official Olympic brand' petard.

The second kind of pushback is going to be new. These Olympics are going have the living daylights hacked out of them. It's a train wreck waiting to happen; how can it be otherwise? It's not just a matter of Anonymous' YouTube threat. Everything the IOC has done, with official London's complicity, paints an irresistible bull's-eye, not only for what has been called, "the paramilitary wing of the internet," but for a much larger cohort.

You might want to check out the "We, the Web Kids..." manifesto that is circulating rapidly around the web to get the fuller flavor. If I had to summarize the salient elements of this 'something much larger', I'd point to despair at the state of the world economy; disgust with the inability of governments to meaningfully address climate and poverty issues; dismay at nationalism, war and corporate greed; distrust of established authority (governmental or corporate); insistence on evaluating people and institutions on their current merits (the "reputation" piece); a dramatic sense of technological empowerment on an individual basis, and a fascination with what Bruce Sterling and others call "the New Aesthetic" (of which London is, by the way, ground zero).

It's rather brilliant, when you think about it, how thoroughly the IOC's approach to brand protection ticks every possible box for infuriating a huge swathe of the public. The IOC has sowed the wind and will reap the whirlwind.

Someone reminded me of this recently from around the time of the 2004 Torch Relay protests on the Millenium Bridge:
Coke Bullets poster image

It seems Danny Boyle plans to celebrate law breaking protest inside the Olympic stadium even as the police and politicians are clamping down on the same outside!

So is the only good (law breaking) protester a dead protester?

"I have tickets to one of the Basketball matches!" joked the judge hearing the application for an injunction by the ODA and LVRPA at the High Court against those protesting the construction of a Basketball Facility.

The Press Association claimed in its report of the hearing: 'No-one objected to him making a decision on the ODA's application.'

Not true. One of the protesters at the hearing told the judge he should stand down as he had an interest in the case. True to form, the judge paid no attention and the Press ignored the protester's comment.

Instead the judge played his part in making local people jump through hoops.