“More Met Racism”

The story is probably as complete as a newspaper can make it here – http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/05/met-officers-restricted-alleged-racist

I don’t like racism wherever I find it.  The problem is that I find it everywhere.  So do scientific tests.  In the latter we find it in the sub-conscious, underneath what we can pretend in rhetoric.  This is true of criminality, sexism, pornography and whatever to ‘push away’ from polite society (a Freudian concept).  The Internet is a mirror for it all.

I saw “police racism” first hand and its language was colourful (let’s face it, PC is so bad it could even make this ‘pun’ a speech crime).  In the Met this included a threat to set a police dog on ‘the Spade in cell 5’, down to ‘what do you call a nigger with a machine gun?’ and assertions the ‘way to deal with blacks’ was to go in hard, ‘knock them about to show who’s who’ and so on.  In all my time, I never saw and behaviour by officers other than speech to indicate normal impartiality was dropped on race grounds.  There was plenty of other stereotyping and gaming.  It wasn’t a good idea to be young, scuzz-looking and driving a Ford Cortina in the late and early-hours when I was working for that matter (scuzz nicked an awful lot of Ford Cortinas back then).

I’m sure cops take far more abuse than they give out.  I tried not to nick people just on this count, tolerate their drunkenness and so on.  I’m not sure how we have come to operate broken windows policy on “speech” – especially what may be said in heated contexts.  We have little clue on what connects behaviour with speech in common action.  In terms of  real racism in action, it is surely worse that we allow capital flight from Africa (through London) that kills people and keeps them in squalor, than any sloppy racist language can do.  And ‘ethnic’ discrimination is colour-blind – as in the Balkan and Rwandan genocides.

I’m quite happy to see words like ‘wog’, ‘nigger’, ‘Paki’, ‘Gringo’, ‘Jihadist’, ‘Crusader’ and the rest regarded as inappropriate.  That the issues remain untouched is obvious, say, when after several months working with Arabs, they announce you aren’t a Crusader.  From Cyprus to the Balkans you can find friendly, even inter-married neighbours quickly at war on old ‘ethnic’lines and disgusting genocides.  OJ was guilty if you were white, not guilty of you were black.  Even those involved in the Rodney King beating were not convicted of any direct crime, but civil rights abuse (google the video).

I’m much more concerned at the lack of disabled people reading the news or having to throw their wheel-chairs off trains and crawl back into them, or disproportionate numbers of ‘foreign sounding’ men driving taxis rather than a cross-section of the local population than any problems in ‘politically correct speech’ amongst or towards police officers.  This doesn’t make the latter right, but it is an indication that our focus remains on ‘espoused theory’ rather than theory-in-action.  I deeply suspect that those pronouncing on ‘institutional racism’ are deep movers in the institution.

You can’t watch news on Sky now without (especially around tea-time) some grim advert on poverty and deprivation in Africa and children starving.  Yet behind the attempt to get you to give a few quid or dollars, capital flight through the well-dressed and well spoken City and its offshore network is growing.  This is the City of “Blue Arrow” convicted by a jury of us, let off by judges who aren’t.  A few Met cops mouthing the wrong stuff are small beer and should be treated as such – quickly rapped knuckles are in order, not protracted legal non-solutions.  Sticks and stones break bones – words can be hurtful but we should be able to give and take these in a tolerant attitude, and more importantly we need to discredit words in favour of analysis of overall actions.

That cops can still mouth this crap is sad.  Yet nothing like as sad as what banksters do.  That kid you see in the advert has malnutrition – but what is the cause of her not having enough to eat?  The words of a few cops or something much deeper and to do with the institutions of ‘money’ and our failure to focus on what really matters and what is really immoral and should be subject of a moral imposition of the broadly democratic human rights that matter?  Tariq Jahan was capable, under intense stress, of saying the right things, in last year’s riots, and yet could still break another man’s jaw for ‘looking at his wife’.  Police officers who spout racism should not, yet they do less damage in this than those who spout ‘learning lessons’ or are incompetent, and a lot less damage than most of those who might hear their outbursts.  This latest case is encouraging, as it seems other officers have felt able to come forward and complain.  Yet surely there are more important matters they should be able to bring to light and cannot – such as the cover-up on hacking, what really happened in the Nico Bento case, and why white collar crime hardly gets a look in.

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Time To Junk Economics

Africa, that well known collection of basket-cases, has long been a net exporter of money even after aid is taken into account.  This is known as capital flight.  These externally held assets are held by a small minority and the countries’ public debt is paid for by everyone else.  A number of university studies have shown this and the sums are in hundreds of billions.

The majority of the world’s wealth is held by very few people and we now regularly hear of the ‘one percent’, but I meet few people who understand much, if anything about how this wealth is amassed inn so few hands and what this form of capital actually does, other than making a few incredibly rich.

I think we can safely assume the wealth of the one percent has little good effect on raising living standards for the many.  It’s been around and getting worse for centuries.  It may be possible to argue that all improvement in this sense may be done to massive improvements in productivity due to increased knowledge and technological innovation, though these may have some link to the focus of wealth (we wouldn’t have science without people otherwise idle enough to do it).

As a scientist, rather than someone who teaches low-level university economics to make a crust, I find economics an intolerable discipline in that it fails to address itself as a history of mistakes and is predicated on ‘world-views’ rather than more modest research programmes.  It is not possible, as a scientist, to think that such issues as capital flight, offshore tax-dodging and other obvious cheating, or such matters as a small number of people needing the motivation of great riches while others starve, can form the core of a research programme.

Sociologists generally don’t like explanations of capitalism as only existing because people are incredibly dumb, but frankly, when one looks at what we are expected to swallow on the needs for mass austerity and to let the rich get even richer, the levels most people can achieve in universal education, widespread scientific illiteracy and global competition really being about depressing wages and conditions of employment, and getting people who aren’t smart to worker smarter (as we import smarter people because this doesn’t work), along with what passes as mass entertainment and research on just how dumb human communities have been in various ecocides and wars … then evading questions about how human dumbness comes about hardly seems scientific.

My thesis is that we are almost chronically dumb and can’t face up to this (none of us is exempt).  In one of my favourite Voyager episodes, Janeway not only refuses to drop her pants to get technology that would get her crew home, but tries to trade the sum total of human literature for it – essentially trying to trade what you’d be stuck with on a desert  island (of the radio show) for technology that shrinks space.  We live with fantasy like this in a world in which women and children are traded to much worse fates and in which we are all traded in an economic system beyond democratic sanction.

My guess is we could know about economics if we studied the issues from a fractal perspective.  I don’t mean the creation of a new set of mathematical wangles that mean ‘there’s nowt down for you Son, ‘cos you can’t do this kind of counting’.  There are structures that seem to repeat themselves in human affairs, including repeated numbskull behaviour by majorities and minorities.

My start is in the non-human and the way bacteria, plants and animals behave.  Much we see as human can be found in this.  Ants ‘take slaves’ by stealing the eggs of other ants, many insects are involved in ‘complex gardening’ using anti-biotics and there is much ‘chemical warfare’ practised – none presumably needing the kind of rational mind we attribute to ourselves.  Chimpanzees act to ‘police’ their societies (so no change there then!).  Many species are now extinct and it’s clear our own almost was.  We need some understanding in economics of how we are borne in evolution and are not in mastery of it.

Human history as it is taught around the world has structures in it.  My guess on these is that the first is that it is taught everywhere inaccurately.  What’s the difference between Jihad and Crusade or the various empires that have hardly graced the Earth?  What’s the difference between the ancient tribe in Peru who ‘mastered’ water supply and died horribly when their claims to deal with ‘water-gods’ was exposed in drought and the current Mob of banksters and their claim we can’t do without them?

Some way into an examination of such structures, come questions on whether competitive advantage is actually ever used in any way we can consider moral?  What other structures might be similar and/or at work – one can think of the bee hive, termite mound and social mice (where Bossmouse keeps his order through the enforced poverty of others).

There is much more to say on structures we might expect to find at different scales in our society.  The fraud we are encouraging in capital flight and investment banking may well just be a structure as surely as that of a set of genes turning on encouraged by the environment (exercise immediately causes gene activity).

Competitions really only work through rules and refereeing.  What one can compete on is restricted or we might say, structured.  We could choose to structure such matters as salary caps across work places from sport to banking.  It’s also possible to see much of the notion of motivation to great wealth as giving up to libidinal structures.

In longer term looks at structures we get laughable stuff like Elliot Waves (his other book was on running a tea-shop), but we rarely look at what has always been promised to society as a whole by putting up with economics and what has actually been delivered (a lot – not much?).  My own country (UK) has failed to produce even all its own medical doctors and steals them from countries that cannot  afford to lose them.  What does this say about working smarter and the role of training and education?    Surely if we could do so much better by getting higher skills we’d not only be producing all our own doctors but also making money hand over fist training those of other countries in our splendid and efficient medical education?  We ain’t.  And now we have kids taking on huge debts to get the “advantage” of a degree to work in a coffee shop.

If education is about employability (it ain’t – but no matter) why do we divorce it so much from the world of work?  Some dork brandishing a business degree from the places I’ve taught in, is no more employable or knowledgeable on business for real than anyone else with a non-numerate degree in anything else, and less employable than someone who sensibly left school at 16 and went to work for Sainsburys (where I know management juniors get a better education than I can offer).  So where are the economists saying we should junk much of higher education and get on with a job-based expansion because you’re only going to learn about work at work and only learn work-skills by using tools and machines?

The economics we have is such junk we have a Chancellor telling us his coming budget will be for growth and work – when it will offer more money to the rich and continue to cut the public sector.  Osbourne is crap – yet if economics is so bad we can’t even see through his jive it needs to be junked.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8713203/Judges-weaken-rules-on-paedophiles.html

Judges have ruled that the Human Rights Act means that pedophiles cannot be prevented from free access to their own children – the link above gives details.

I’m in favour of more human rights being codified in our constitution (if we really had a modern one), but this European piece of crap needs to go.  There are no such thing as inalienable rights for the individual; rather always circumstances in which people need to be treated fairly and proportionately.  Using the term right loosely, children need to be treated in such a manner when parents go criminal or loopy.

I believe the rights issue could be key to a society free of injustice.  Instead we remain medieval.

 

White-collar Crime

Statistical reasoning is part and parcel of my daily routine.  Most people don’t get close to capability in this area and my own abilities soon pale when I meet the mathematical experts in this field.  I’m talking science here, not the much governments and performance management departments churn out.

Bwanking (there is acceptable banking) is an area that makes use of highly complex mathematical scheming, broadly to lie about real positions.  Police statistics and a wad of others from government and local government are also used to lie.  In science, the method is used to explain and manipulate complex interactions and to a fair degree we know we are still dealing with approximation.

We have an obvious problem in social statistics in that the ‘end-user’ is Jane Muggins and she is likely not to be functionally literate and numerate enough to spot flim-flam.  In science, we often start positing stuff like ‘dark energy’ only to find that the equations we are using also work well if we put in numbers from other assumptions such as ‘time slowing down’.  This doesn’t stop engineering being better than not doing it.  Generally, ‘realism keeps us honest’ – though these days scientific realism realises it is structured.

Economics and particularly ‘bwanking and accountwing’ can delay ‘realism’ until its ‘scientists’ have had it away on their toes with our cash and got this invested in the property under our feet; indeed literally taking the ground away from under our feet.  I’ll give one disgusting example (though these are as common as the stories Ambush Predator reveals on our ‘evil poor’ and buffoon laws).  Prestigious US university alumni funds are involved, through a British hedge-fund, in deals as revolting as the Scottish Enclosures, in taking African soil away from its tenant farmers.  One cannot even give money to world wild life funds without risking something like this.

I would just ask you to think about what’s on offer in Dispatches, Panorama and other bits of investigative journalism.  This is not proof and you have tor remember that most people don’t even get this far.

The most forceful contemporary statement of [the instrumental argument fort democracy} is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues, for example, that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press” (Sen 1999, 152). The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor [Sen, A., 1999, Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf.]  What one has to add is that the famines and deaths continue outside the democracies and that the first democracy (Athens) practiced genocide to ensure its own grain supplies and boost its own treasury (found empty despite ‘statistics’).

In the same way that we might posit ‘dark energy’ or ‘time slowing down’, I would like to see far deeper questioning of our economic system through a range of possibilities.

The first of these is to consider ‘economics’ not as a scientific subject, but as cover for white collar crime.  One can also do this in specific areas such as ‘police statistics’ and those on local government performance and supposed financial performance.  I don’t see this as essentially about numbers, but will give a few as a guide.

Fred Goodwin took more than £30 million (pay, bonus, shares and pension) from RBS in seeing it from a bank lending on the basis of its deposits to utter disaster.  One can only estimate and can only estimate the bank’s losses at, say, £28 billion.  The jobs of maybe a million people may also have been lost because of the ‘necessary’ bail out – the equivalent, perhaps, of the turfing-out of tenant farmers in Africa via greedy funds wanting the mineral rights.

We often hear that bwankers such as this are essential to our economic well-being. Questions arise as to whether Fred was ever worth a bean and whether selection for such roles is remotely correct.  My own view for a long time has been we are ‘choosing’ psychopaths as our management class. Many others in RBS took fortunes from building its collapse.  RBS is only one example in many.

We should be able to command a simple explanation of what has and continues to go on. Generally, finding that an elite group has made loads of money through claiming massive profits only for us to find the cupboard not only bare but full of liabilities, we suspect theft and organised criminality.

Our laws in intent include recklessness.

What ‘ecwonomics and accountwing’ have been providing is a system of denial of responsibility when things go wrong and justification of an enormous cut of the cake on the basis of ‘special skills’ that  are unlikely to exist.  The metaphor is that of betting on all the horses in every race – a surefire way of handing over your money to the bookmakers – but being able to continually defer the losses and live off the winnings.  The key is not to be betting with your own money, unless you can choose to pull out your bets when you are winning.  I will always win money off you on the toss of a coin if I can always double my stake and you can’t leave.  Bookies and casinos don’t allow this.

Imagine what short shrift you would get if you had engaged in such activities with the contents of your firm’s safe,lost the lot and claimed you never intended to defraud anyone, but were really trying to make everyone money using a fool-proof system.  ‘And throw away the key’ seems likely.

How could you advance a defence of no criminality because you believed in the system?  Remember Horace Bachelor?  He sold a worthless pools perm and made money because there were bound to be winners.  He just let a lot of people gamble and took a percentage from the winners.  Simples!  Lots of other people just lost their money.

If we can pin £30 million on Freddy Boy, how much can we pin on the whole process of speculation?  I believe we can build the spreadsheet of this, showing how much is involved and who the winners and losers are.  I believe this would demonstrate a scam very similar to Horace Bachelor writ large.

What we need is a massive social change that we organise.  We are in the hands of organised crime and rigged markets.  This is affecting food, gas and housing prices as surely as the Russian Mafia thug ensuring that traders don’t drop their prices in real markets to protect their margins.  It isn’t capitalism, it’s crime.  They are using our money as surely as if they’ve taken the notes from our mattresses.  It’s all real theft, based on lying about the future and taking money now.  We live in fear of what will happen when the protection racket is broken.

Just when were any of Freddy’s drawings from his business really justified?  The cumulative debt dwarfs anything of the supposed profits.If we add up what’s been taken in inflated salaries, bonuses and options and think what might have been had this been invested in public services  – why don’t we know, why is there no public accounting on the opportunity costs?  The answer is that they want to hide the crime from us.  We’ve been had.

 

 

 

 

Human Rights My Arse in Burton’s Window

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392349/Paedophile-illegal-immigrant-finally-thrown-Britain-claiming-deportation-breach-HIS-human-rights.html is the story of a massive waste of money on a Pakistani paedophile, finally deported.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392273/Burglar-freed-human-rights-look-children-history-violence.html is about a scrote threatening a headmistress and using the HRA to get out of jail.

The Human Rights Act has been around a long time now.  It’s worse than useless and typical of how lawyers make legislation that merely gives lawyers rights to earn fees.  Most of us can’t use it because we can’t afford it – a typical way real human rights are flouted.  We need our own act in order that this European mush wastes away.

The human rights industry cares little for individuals in the normal run of their lives.  We need such protection against monsters foisted in our midst who would be run out of town on a rail if it weren’t for the law.

We are soon going to find that criminals, many of whom ‘hide’ revolting crimes in drugs, prostitution and violence behind ‘family life’, supported by poor police and local authority attitudes and welfare, can rest easier and victims have even more to fear from ‘due process’.

I’m not sure where the ritual involving Burtons came from, but victims may well have to start engaging in it to try and embarrass our clown establishment into action.  This idiot legislation gives nothing to the many, whilst protecting the violators of human rights.