More Nonsense On Rape

Brian Paddick has come out again, this time in support of rape victims – http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/02/brian-paddick-rape-cases-met .

There is no doubt the investigation of rape is in a mess on all sides.  We are presumably clear on outcomes – we want to reduce the offending to a minimum, see victims treated with care and dignity and offenders put out of harm’s way.  The actual situation is as hopeless as wanting decent conditions of living and full employment for everyone in a genuinely democratic society.

Paddick’s puffery won’t help.  Ambush Predator regularly features “rape victims” who were not victims at all but predators making malevolent false allegations.  False allegations throughout our system cause many problems.  It isn’t easy to tell who is telling the truth and, indeed, so many ‘professionals’ have very inflated notion of their abilities to divine this on a personal basis – all the science says they are as useless as the rest of us, with the possible exception of a few.  Our ‘professionals’ have very little training to stop them stereotyping and covering up and in my experience can’t tell who is telling the truth and are as likely to elevate the claims of false complainers and character assassinate someone telling the truth as do the right thing.  It is far too easy for these ‘professionals’ (who often lack any substantial education and/or experience) to make out they have a false complaint in order to evade doing the work needed.

Much we know should be done is not because it costs money.  There are some superb SAFE centres for victims around the country (Lancashire and Manchester are exemplars), yet in other areas facilities are barely better than 30 years back.  This is not just about providing comfort and care, but also safeguarding forensic evidence.  We just can’t “afford” the right care and investigation depending on post code.  This is a disgrace and not just because of the larger failure of our economic system in which we can’t afford this, that and the other while the rich bury talents in ever deep mineshafts of derivative rip-off.

It is true that some of the serial rapists should be caught earlier (and one has to suspect many are missed), but the majority of rapes are not done by strangers, and anyone running a SAFE centre will tell you the big problem for most concerned is being voluntarily pissed or doped out of their skulls.  I’ve heard many competing stories I could not make end or tail out of.  I’ve also seen colleagues, utterly confounded, taking the ‘wrong side’ in zealous determination..  Our courts are no better and need shaking from their complacency.

Our law on drunkenness (and otherwise pissed) have reached the point at which there is a legal fiction of mens rea to enable convictions when people commit acts whilst pissed, yet a woman is held not to be able to consent when pissed.  This is monor in comparison with the problem of reliance on evidence from people with no clue what they or anyone else was doing at the time, and obvious problems with people waking up with a totally fictional account of their own actions.  Been there to some extent, but the question is why any court ever tries to work out what happened from such accounts.  People need protecting when they are pissed or otherwise vulnerable, but our courts show all kinds of sympathy to a claimed rape victim and yet use the drunkenness itself to convict other people who clearly could not form intent in any normal sense.

The Dutch have some better answers than we do at the moment and we should have copied these years ago.  They ain’t perfect, but trying to think you can sort out a barrel of drunken people not generally the most reliable, making all kinds of claims about each other (something cops may deal with every month in one way or another) is dumb thinking – you can only do so much.  Our standard courts are not the place to sort out these drunken messes.  We need an intermediate solution.

Yet across the board in these areas we find men like DSK and the reciprocal exploitation of their failings and sex for rent people.  The Swedes have reversed some of the standard duties of proof in these areas and maybe we should do that.  If you’re daft enough to use prostitutes you should shoulder the risks and not the poor sod renting the body?

I would consider a false allegation of rape more likely to severely affect me than rape itself (other than in violence).  Yet what is the prosecution rate and conviction success on false accusers and what punishments do they get?  On what I’ve seen they suffer less than the poor sods they accused, and some of them I’ve known were capable of weighing this in the balance before deciding to frame someone.

One thing i would consider would be a statistical offence in which anyone ‘cautioned’ (this wouldn’t be the current kind) over engagement in the mix would be subject to summary sanction on a second and remedial incarceration on a third.

What strikes me as appalling is our “professionals” seem as likely to confuse a victim of a very serious serial offender as a pissed up doxy who ends up in a friend’s bedroom smashed out of her brains and then shouts ‘rape’.  That and the fact we could have done a lot to clear this mess up 30 years ago and still haven’t.  In some countries woman (lacking testes) can’t testify – maybe we should go back to that?  No, not really – but a lot of what needs doing concerns evidence and presumptions.  The allegations against Julian Assange are credulous in the extreme, yet courts are prepared to waste time on them.  Yet we have cops prepared to dismiss the 5th victim of a serial killer.

We need straight-talking on this stuff instead of the indexed PC crap.  Rape is crap and this needs to be taught, right down to the gutter or most idiot Ivy League locker room or eastern European gutter.  No fucking about – violence and sexual abuse is so piss you disqualify yourself as a human being if you do it.  We obviously allow some considerable numbers of people to believe other than this from statistical evidence.  Efforts need to improve here – yet we also need to take care not to allow the teaching to be some kind of anti-men shit akin to the diversity training insults of the past.

The pissed up, social mess got out of hand stuff needs separating from violent and predatory behaviour, rape and otherwise.  Gawps who go around saying women don’t make false allegations needs to be told they are gawps and forced to read proper accounts of stuff like ritual abuse.  Police and other training needs to be ripped apart to point more at real problems like stereotyping and gossip that makes them vulnerable to  discounting victims (and worse) – this means an end to all kinds of piss done at the moment.  Our courts need upgrading to 21st century and stripped of the ancient rot and privilege and salary capped to allow only average earnings to be made out of them.  IN the ensuing reorganisation we might get some sensible Dutch arbitration courts and we could  always privatise them to get even more value for money, importing Chinese judges as we now import Polish plumbers.  I digress … bored shitless by a set of problems where we have known the answers (admittedly imperfect) for 30 years and done sweet FA.

 

 

Advertisement

Steeping Hill – another case of someone else’s fault?

We have no real idea what has been going on in the Stepping Hill tragedy.  A nurse seems to have been falsely accused on very little evidence and treated badly in the press, much as Mr. Jefferies in the sad case of Ms Yates not long ago.  I no doubt pulled a few in on not much myself, for one reason or another.  None of them were subject to this kind of press idiocy.

As usual, public scrutiny has more or less no facts to work on.  The idea that’s held sway is that material matters should not be discussed other than in court or after a trial.  This is received wisdom – but received wisdom has a poor track record outside of areas like science where everything is open to public scrutiny.

There seems to be some fingerprint evidence, but this is meaningless without context, though a judge has dismissed it for utterly obvious reasons the CPS should have recognised.  This doesn’t make the arrest wrong, but it remains scary that there was a remand in custody as does the notion of a ‘holding charge’.  The real worry is that many of us could be subject to this kind of arrest, if unlucky enough to work at what becomes a crime scene.

One wouldn’t want to second guess the investigation, but I do think the ‘mechanism’ of the crime should be reported for precautions across our hospitals = prevention should be more important than detection.

One might speculate a link (if not in personnel, potential intent) between this crime and that of substituting anti-psychotics for Nurofen – the contamination of low-level medical supplies.  We might even be seeing a new form of direct action terror.

GMP have some really good detectives, but I doubt any of our forces can resource majorl enquiries such as this with no obvious suspects or motivation.  This first questions in nearly all police projects these days are business ones.  I believe this pressurises a fall back to forms of enquiry that are quick and cheap.  This is not incompetent in-itself – that comes in not being able to realise when this is inadequate quickly enough, and that the players don’t conform to stereotype.

In this case one needs to establish ordinary working practice and what is likely to happen in that; and what has been odd and who may have been involved – a massive task.  Given how easy it is to interfere with saline drip bags leaving almost no trace, it is likely to be difficult even to exclude non-employees.  When I’ve been laid up, nurses seemed to be fiddling with drips all the time and it would have been easy enough for me to have interfered with the things, either as a patient or when visiting my partner.  I am diabetic – better stop before I get lined up!  No doubt the personnel records are under intense scrutiny in an attempt to place an individual/s repeatedly where the problems have been found and that an innocently contaminated batch is not at fault etc.

If Ms Leyton is innocent she should be compensated whether police/CPS have been negligent or not – but the underlying incompetence here is the lack of investigation for public scrutiny that is needed to prevent any of us falling foul of such circumstances.  The IPCC should be in now on the basis of public interest and given a remit that includes the CPS.  But the IPCC haven’t even been able to tell us that the shooting that led to the recent riots was righteous weeks afterwards.  My feeling is the secrecy on grounds of later proceedings needs to be changed.  Better the press were reporting evidence than the gossip and personal drivel they do.

Are the rioters now going to call the DPP to sentence appeal hearings?  Our legal system is a mess.

Rioting Side Issues

The Metropolitan Police clearly should have been out in higher strength on Monday night – this is not straight from Captain Hindsight but the fact of the Tottenham riot the night before.  One wonders what ‘Gold’ was up to, especially as they have to foot the bill under an ancient Riot Act.

The ‘lying’ over the shooting incident needs scrutiny now and sackings.  I doubt the shooting was unlawful – our attitudes towards cops dealing with guns needs tuning up, perhaps by more ‘citizens’ representatives’ doing virtual courses and being reminded nothing shoots back on them!  The IPCC should have had something considered to say within a couple of hours.  My suspicious mind wonders where the non-police gun came from – but it is as irresponsible to put that in main media as the usual character assassination of the dead or brutalised that always seems to be put out.  In these circumstances it should be possible to be as clear on the forensics of that gun as the ballistics on the police shooting.

What have we been told, under successive nopolitics govenrments, under the guise of ‘falling crime’?  Across the comparable EU ‘highlight crime’ except drug dealing is down since 2002.  These highlight figures are manipulated in all forces I’ve worked with in research in much the same way.  There is little effort in real detection other than on serious crime and the figures rely on nodding and the other gaming techniques.  Essentially, someone like me years ago spots a ‘likely lad’ or set of the bastards and nicks them with a pair of socks in their pocket or swag in someone else’s car – perhaps after a chase against pursuit rules – or someone’s munter dob’s him in to get rid of his violence – and the resulting body is sweated for further crimes.  98% even of recorded crime is undetected directly and is ‘coughed’.  How many of the coughs are true is a matter of casting dice.  This is part of the reason Bill the Burglar believes his chance of being caught is one in a hundred – though Bill is so thick he can’t work out his real odds.

The figures seem not to have told us about a welter of young men who will pop out and loot.  In Manchester, it seems one family took their car out to do the ‘shopping’ at a Lydl as it was trashed.  The truth here is that police do not have the responsibility to get in amongst these people in community liaison – this is what government should be doing through jobs and a form of National Service.

The call to sweep the scum off our streets seems hapless – one assumes cops have been keeping the lid on until now.  One suspects this approach on its own will only fester more and deeper problems.  We can come up with a scheme to create jobs and decent opportunities – the problem is always the clown economics that has diverted wealth abroad and to the rich in massive percentages.  This is always the sticking point.  The people involved are the most disgusting thieves of all and not only go unpunished but are lauded as “successful”.  Life and business is actually simple.  The rich and political class just make up schemes to divert work effort into their cash, even getting governments to fund their losses.  The occupy the same moral ground as slave owners and feudal barons.  The social contract and work ethic of old farts like me is broken.  Even the fantasy of university and knowledge society work has evaporated.

Police are out in my City Centre, but if there is any sustainability amongst these looters they will soon be down the road instead.  My guess is this is all the fault of my complacent generation – we are at the very least the parents of it.  There has been a way out for 40 years but we refused to learn, preferring nopolitics and now to brand the perpetrators as hooligans – which they are – but also elides our responsibility for them.  These riots have been familiar to many outside their homes over many years.  Are these the kids ‘achieving’ ever better educational standards?  Ever increasing ‘standards’ that leave them with no decent job?

Guff I found particularly ‘clown’ is that tonight’s police finally have the political backing they need – cops don’t need anything political to deal with crime.  Numbers and equipment yes, but ‘political leadership’ is exactly what we don’t want in this area.  They should be fixing the economy.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the appeal courts when sentencing comes along – is it possible to give these scumbags higher tariffs than they could expect for 100 burglaries on mine and yours?  Would this survive appeal?  Can the judicial cosh work?  Who will be the first vigilante prosecuted>  Are the racists ‘planning’ anything?

Above all, how is it we need ‘mindless looting’ to get us talking about sorting the country out?  Newsnight has just produced she guy in a hoodie and mask with more sense than the politicians.  This government, which looks incompetent and lazy, is puking the old fascist tale that it’s all “hooligans” smashing up their own.  This appeals to us all, but is a con. This is a time to support police action, but if this is turned in such a way as to write off this lot as merely criminal behaviour and the reasons crushed as they would be in a police state – then we have another ball game – or rather ‘you’.  I’m off.

They will try joint enterprise prosecutions – something we should see more of in other circumstances – and these may well backfire.  As may the ‘full force of the law’ (which may be has hapless as Gadget predicts) in encouraging the spread of the feeling of unfairness .  ‘Ring leaders’ will be targeted – all rather like political suppression.  I’d be staying if we had democracy – but that would mean we discussed the real issues and could direct action rather than have to engage in ‘direct action’.  Instead, we have remained so ‘tranced’ that most of us conflate household economics with the global picture.

The similarities between the riots and scene from Grand Theft Auto (SA) are remarkable.  These lads come from this generation.  Have we heard any sensible material on their plight or what it is to grow up poor with no prospects – let alone any action by us to fix the global economic idiocy that has led to massive increases in the wealth of the rich and the creation of a new kind of poor class  – and no democratic means to contest this because the the rich and their banksters are ‘global’ – a term which translates into protection racket jargon of screwing any country that wants to provide public services and structured routes out of poverty.

The events were “unprecedented” (actually there is historic precedent) – and they were in a reasonable sense before Tottenham – but surely not the night afterwards!

The immediate ‘search’ for some rational reason under the riots flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour – that it is hardly ever rational.  A better metaphor might be how this boil built up and how it burst.  Our most politically uneducated have been out smashing things up, but they presumably know they are small mushrooms in the trickle-down fertilizer society we have created.  We should not compare the greed of some hoodie with a T-shirt and cd-player with Madoff and his mates as yet not caught (or our greed in wanting Ponzi-level returns bound to be too good to be true).

I’ve just seen Horriet Harmoon and Gove the Gory whacking each other over the deficit and other bulldung.  The actual issue is about not having people live in the kind of poverty amongst celebrity affluence we have developed (which has returned Britain to 1900) without either big government Sino-Soviet style (which we have now because we are governed by a bankster politburo) or a collapse in motivation to do anything.  This means getting to grips with the fact that we are massively capable and productive – but also gullible in the extreme as witnessed in Nopolitics and ADMASS.  There are reasons we can’t condone criminality – but just as terrorists become freedom-fighters when someone else gets to write history these lads may be written-up rather differently than in current knee-jerk.  Trying to write them up as merely criminal seems as irresponsible as their own actions.

As for cops claiming they haven’t got enough confidence or powers to deal effectively with any of this – why didn’t they say so long before where it might matter?  And all the others who have claimed crime was falling for some bonus or political purpose?  It seems reasonable to suppose that the current boot boys are the same as those causing the anti-social crime police have been doing more or less nothing about (sometimes not for want of effort) outside our homes.  That was crime and not ‘politically motivated behaviour’ too.

Manchester has had a bad night tonight.  Looking at some of the clowns involved, I can see little difference between them and the ones dismissed as ‘just kids, no crime’ for so long until we got a new chief constable.  This isn’t ‘la revolucion’ – but it could be if we could wake up.  I’ll be stuck doing another year for pension catch-up as the stock market plunges (though most of mine is now elsewhere).  I just take a ‘grubbing by’ position.  My guess is the media will convince us robust policing has sorted the matter out by the time I make my escape.  Water cannons will just be another symbol of the banana republic I leave.  It’s 10 years know since an Iraqi colleague explained he had left London to work in Bahrain to get away from uncontrolled streets and this kind of juvenile thug.  They keep a substantial body of their people poor and there is looting behind their actually political-religious riots.  They fairly randomly lock up as much as 10% of their male Shia population.  We have relied on a different model, but have equally left a substantial proportion of our people in hopelessness and a small number with nearly all the wealth.

In respect of this, I’m always told that the top people in our organisations only take a small part of the budget.  This looks true – but the message in preparing a taken-over company was always ‘find the LOMBARDS’ (loads of money but are right dicks) and get rid of them – broadly so the company or part of it could be put up for sale without their wage and on costs.  This had many names – delayering, right-sizing, business process re-engineering and kwality – and it continues everywhere in offering packages to get rid of your experienced people and replace them with cheaper ones.  All sorts of people supposedly vital sparks turn out not to be needed at all and often turn out to have been utterly unproductive doing non-existent management functions and drawing double and triple the salary of someone doing the actual work.  If our promotion systems are this bad, imagine what the truth behind bankers’ claims to be so much better and so much in need of mega-bonus motivation.  Ask yourself too how the rich got so much richer as wages collapsed from around 1979 to now – one might have thought it would become more difficult to get rich if earnings were suppressed.  They ran the world as a richman’s ckub is how, able to invest abroad to take advantage of serf-labour and in the gambling club running Ponzi schemes we have just paid for (only in part).

That we have a legal system out of date and out of order can be seen in the berating of the street-scum and their horrible behaviour and the lack of demand to do anything about the rich and their hoods.  500 riots like these over the last few nights does not make one Madoff.

Disciplined National Service (whatever the work done – it needn’t be military) is the answer – but we can’t afford it because the rich want their money (how was it ‘earned’) invested in China, Indonesia and so on – or some hedge fund betting on global collapse – the top 20% own about 70% (these are people with £350,000 or a lot more) and the bottom 10% don’t even register for any (HMIRC figures).

Our politicians should be implementing an emergency wealth tax across the developed world to be invested at home.  But these politicians are all up to their necks in the existing fraud – countries even cheat on stuff like a gold standard against very clear rules.  ACPOs who find their integrity challenged should know the main figures of integrity at the Bank of England (etc.) cheat.  There is no other solution that will not destroy hard-earned freedoms – and I suspect this is what is at stake.

Just imagine teaching our ‘new revolutionaries’!  And remember they have been produced as educational standards have risen year on year just as crime has fallen year on year.  Like get real!  From 1979 to 1999 personal wealth in Britain went from £500 billion to£2,752billion (figures that just happen to be at hand). I for one was more content then. Soon, I fear, they will be knocking on the door to render such memories seditious! This said, these crimes are crimes and I hope the knocks come where they are deserved.

It’s long been rumored that Manchester’s city centre was rebuilt with Russian Mafia money and this increased the drug trade (etc.), but I guess the thought the hoodies were trying to make a statement on this is as daft as imagining the IRA was ever really Marxist-Leninist!  Might be worth remembering that the peaceful civil rights marches got not much of a response in NI.  Thank goodness they’ve cancelled the soccer friendly and not thew Test!

The generation of “Grand Theft Auto Revolutionarses” is the spoiled generation of recent social-psychological speculation.  I have no doubt they have been dumped on, but they have not known the poverty of my youth.  They have ‘grown’ without corporal punishment and the kind of authority we had.  The ones I speak to are generally clueless – you just hope they are toilet-trained.  Even their brighter cousins I’ve been forced to teach at 18 are dire – we commonly say we are the first people they encounter who say ‘no’ to them.  The idea they know anything is frankly unbelievable and these are the ones with GCSEs and some kind of A levels.  Most of them demand spoon-feeding and then claim it’s boring.  We now vie for the evening classes once avoided in order to miss these young, idle dorks – only to find them spoiling things for mature students once they realise (it takes time) they don’t have to get up in the morning if they crash the evening option.  We should be failing them in droves – but guess what – it’s career suicide.

Now some gawp is saying parents should dob their own kids in to be ‘true Mancunians’.  Those of us who might consider that before dismissing it already know where our kids were.  If this lot are criminals their parents are already not surprised when new equipment comes into the house.  These looters have just upped their thieving from my garden or front room to the high street.  Who and what they are isn’t the issue (except in due process).  What kind of home isn’t bothered when its pre-teens and teenagers aren’t in by 9 p.m. ?  One that ain’t bothered when one of them lugs in a new hoover for Mum.  And our cops are not cracking down on that kind of “home” and we have housing and social workers doing sod all about them too.  If I have a theory it’s that the police and other agencies who should have done something for Fiona Pilkington (and I suspect any poor sod living near these scum and victim of them) have been sitting on an iceberg of this stuff pretending kit wasn’t there.  More lying in performance management and even worse (I suspect a widespread character assassination of victims, even to the point of conspiracies to blame and prosecute them) – these scum are foisted on decent people in denial by authorities on what they do – imagine living next door.  The riots are just the problems of police and related agency failures to tell the truth and get these scum out of other people’s lives.  The reason is resourcing (the rich again) and a fatal nexus of senior bureaucrats and politicians.  Anyone offering space next door for the scum youth you’ve seen?  Not likely is it, but they live near someone and that’s all right as long as it’s someone else.

We’re all guilty – but there was no outcry about the bastards who nearly drove me and my partner insane, killed the Pilkingtons and another dozen cases I’ve uncovered (I know it’s thousands) involving murder, arson and drugs.  What does anyone imagine these bastards do when they aren’t rioting — deliver meals on wheels?  A family like this could be dumped near you tomorrow.  I’d have them machine-gunned simply to save others from having them nearby.  Yet the real problem is the rich.

 

IPCC ‘Investigate’ A Bare Cupboard

Police and court records appear to be destroyed as a matter of routine in a fairly short space of time.  A case in Manchester saw Mr Zengeya convicted in 2001.  He seemed to have used stolen credit cards to pay for a shipment, presumably over the phone.  He claimed ‘some other guy did it’ and named him.  This was to settle a debt between them.  He named the other guy, who was found and arrested – but not charged and later appeared as a prosecution witness.

Mr Zengeya went through a few appeals with no luck and then to the CCRC.  They sent the matter to appeal and the conviction was quashed in 2009.   Mr Zengeya got 9 months, which he presumably served.  The interesting thing is that the Appeal Court, notoriously difficult to convince of anything, found enough evidence to conclude there was not a fair trial.  This is very strange in view of the IPCC ‘investigation’ into a complaint about the cop who dealt with the case, now Supt. Hassall.  They seem only to have scraps to have a go at as all the main evidence of court records and the like and, of course, the GMP file, have been destroyed.

So what did the CCRC and the Court of Appeal work on then?  And why was vital evidence destroyed when an appeal was in progress – or was it all destroyed after the appeal in case a complaint followed?

The appeal was granted on the basis of disclosure rules.  It’s impossible from the poor IPCC report to make out if they contacted the court for the evidence presented to them, only to note the cupboard was empty where they looked and they avoid saying when it was emptied.  You might think a case in which an innocent man was found guilty (or the opposite) would be sealed in some way so we could find out what really happened and prevent the same thing happening again.  Or that an ‘independent’ commissioner would be asking very open questions as to why evidence vital to this purpose can be routinely destroyed.  No ‘learning lessons’ from this one then  – unless the system has already learned burning the books is the lesson to learn!  The case is equally appalling if a guilty man can rely on the evidence going up in smoke and then appeal.  Dismal.  All we can say here is at least one guilty man walked free.  The Guardian reported the following:

A commission report found that the police officer investigating the case, Steve Hassall, then a detective sergeant and now a detective superintendent for Greater Manchester police (GMP), failed to disclose certain important pieces of evidence, relating to Usman, which should have been put before the jury.

The commission found the failure to give full and proper disclosure of material relating to the credibility of the key prosecution witness rendered the conviction unsafe.

“Hassall’s witness statement was clearly misleading in that he said Usman was interviewed in relation to ‘unconnected offences of obtaining services by deception’ whereas the records of his police interviews clearly showed that he was interviewed as a suspect and also, as regards items found in his house, as a potential fraudster,” the commission’s report said.

If the CCRC was able to conclude this, what standard of evidence is it using in comparison with the IPCC who couldn’t find anything?  The CCRC mention being able to compare the officer’s statement and police records, yet this was something the IPCC could not do.

Another feature of this is that only the poor cop is subject to investigation – why not the lawyers and judge?

As part of the CCRC investigation both the defence and prosecution barrister
argued they did not believe they had been aware of Mr A's arrest prior to the
start of the trial. Both opined that Supt Hassall's statement to the court was
"misleading" in that it didn't specifically state that Mr A had been arrested for
the specific offence that Mr Zengeya was charged with. In particular the use of
the term "unconnected offences" was believed to be most misleading.
However Mr Zengeya's defence barrister also opined to the IPCC
investigators that it did appear the arrest of Mr A had been disclosed during
evidence and therefore the allegedly misleading statement could not have
undermined the case.

On the basis of the above from the IPCC report I wonder what use these lawyers and the trial judge are.  The question seems to be whether Mr.Z did it, Mr. U did it or whether they acted together.  We need to know why the system was so piss poor this was not thrashed out in court at the time.  All that we can be sure of is that documents from which lessons could be learned are being destroyed.  And Mr. Z’s defence lawyer was no good.

The Appeal Court judgement is not available.  Shouldn’t the CCRC do something to stop records being ‘routinely’ destroyed like this?

Big Answers To Social Problems

Big answers are not things like Marxism that allow one to carp knowledgeably as crap continues.  If we’d had a better grasp of how humans tick we’d never have had anything like the feudal structures of today’s economics in the first place.  We need to re-address this level of the crap through what we know now through science.

In the meantime, we need big answers of another kind, and first to recognise we need them.  We shouldn’t have to work out high-level theory.

Look at cases that keep cropping up.

Do they get fixed or keep cropping up?  Victoria Climbie – Baby P sort of thing.  Do teenage toe-rags ever go away, or evil poor families.  I suggest not.  I’ve seen no sign in academic literature or official statistics that things are getting better, though we are living longer and stuff like that.  ‘Progress’ still needs scare quotations.

Once we establish problems that aren’t going away, we should try to think big on them.  This is a political act, because you come up against all kinds of vested interests and small thinking that protects them.  We should really have our politicians thinking big and public dialogue; but vested interests are so powerful we do not.

Big answers of the kind I mean may be ridiculous.  One of my favourites involves curing crime by chaining persistent offenders to senior police officers, magistrates, judges, politicians and other stuffed-shirts.  This, sadly, is not meant as a real answer, but questions the size and nature of the problem.  If we can’t afford to jail the crap forced on us Mr. Clarke, how about putting it in a trailer outside your house?

Most people can’t  really get into problem-definition of this kind, anymore than they could connect Relativity and jumping off a cliff.  Some are so stupid they take it as a serious practical suggestion.  We should perhaps let me teach them Relativity through the view from having jumped off a cliff, and let me set a practical experiment!

Teenage scumbags don’t go away because we always get one year older and they don’t.  If it was any better when we were kids, I suspect this was because some of them:

ran away to sea

joined our large armed services

did National Service

could work in factories at decent rates of pay

shaped up and got training in factories very different from skewl

got clobbered by a local “warden” or house-holder with no police action

worked on construction sites

somehow understood not thieving, fouling others’ space and so on and that angry guy’s fist-size

You may be able to add more.  What is thrown up today, by politicians who must know they are lying (if not they would be so brainless to make it statistically impossible for them to have survived crossing streets), is more skewelling and university for everyone, despite it clearly being useless to a quarter of kids in Manchester and at least a fifth in all areas of the UK.

One can see that they didn’t think this crap through because we’ve now got tuition fees, meaning “graduates” have debts of about £50K after subsistence is included, or may be £120K down from where they might be if they’d worked and lived with mum and dad.  These latter kids would also be more employable as employers value experience not skewl.  And anyway, “graduates” often cant write, spell, add up or act sensibly (universities don’t teach these, primary school should have).  So we couldn’t afford all these kids going to uni after all!

Instead of this baloney (which claims to make silk purses out of sows’ ears – yet really takes resources from the ‘worst’ kids), we should look to let those who can’t-won’t do skewl into disciplined work and a new form of National Service from 14 to 21.  Genuinely non-academic forms of learning and assessment would be encouraged in this format.  There would be no dole for drop outs, immigrant children would be opted in. {psst! amazingly enough, non-academic learning with teachers about is nearly always really academic learning without exams – they think you don’t know – keep it to yourself}

I would expect our major companies to go along with this and provide places, though just think of what your average 14 year old is like these days!  They are weedy, clumsy and indolent.  My guess is we’d have to create a lot of places in shipping and other transport and low skill areas.  Much less cruel to do this than force them to sit in classrooms where any learning that happens is so short-term it can’t be tested.  This way, they’d at least be learning to get by.

I would expect the demand for university places to drop like a stone if there were opportunities other than dole available.  My argument in full is that skewl is responsible for many social ills.

Those who just can’t get over ejukation being a “good” should examine their self-interests.  It is a cruel imposition on the many for the benefit of a few – and most of these evade what the rest get through Public School and Russell Group University.

My system would be much cheaper and without the massive social costs of the current system of ‘real education (which means to make like a Duke) only for the rich’.  If your kid is bright enough in academic areas (which is about 5% of what you can be intelligent in), hesheorit can make it from the back-streets like me, if we stop the current nonsense, which makes it less possible (check the figures on social mobility).

When Newton popped-off to Cambridge at 18, he was older than most of his peers, many packed-off away from home to debauch at 14 (parents have always known about teenagers).  Most of us would benefit from university if we went as adults because we wanted to.  The current herding is nonsensical and it leaves behind the very children who need most help.

I must say I believe we don’t address work properly in terms of decisions we can now take rationally about our societies, and that we have it all wrong on wealth.  You can get monkeys to work for peanuts, but not when they can see other monkeys working for grapes, or for grapes when they can see others working for bananas.  It’s not for nothing that who is getting what for doing what is so hidden from our view.  Our society is actually being de-skilled in all this ejukation, which also makes us less smart than monkeys.

The slogans of our political parties should be stuff like ‘send your kid to a third-rate university while the thicker ones learn to steal with local Romanians’ – even the politicians know enough not to say this and can rely on no one really making the links.  You see, ejukation has made you think small.  Me?  They’ve had me working on ideas of how to to get monkeys used to peanuts to eat boiled grass …

Currently, employers create jobs like serving coffee (not long ago 40% of UK ‘entrepreneurs’ wanted to open a coffee shop) for graduates – though since we went into recession and drink less coffee it seems this wasn’t so creative after all.  They might have to work harder to attract staff from my scheme.

Most of the ejukation done at undergraduate level has been (OU) or should be put on television with Internet links, not gobbed out through death-by-Powerpoint harpies.  You shouldn’t be learning about Hamlet at university, but how to act and produce plays through doing it.  The idea of ejukation as an aim in itself was a fucked dead donkey long ago.  That would only apply in a sorted society which we’ll have to challenge the real rich to get.  Most of our students don’t know who Groucho was now and I have to teach some of mine what is funny in The Simpsons, let alone what ‘cun’ tends to mean in the Bard.  The worst have clearly been exhausted carrying worthless skewl qualifications about – that sound like the ones I had to work hard for.

I’m not some elitist get, sneering.  I still cry and drink myself to sleep in the vault from time to time.  My grandson has ‘discalcula’ and autism-related problems.  If I could really help 24/7 I would – just give up to help him.  He’s due what I can do in the next few months.  I’m dumb enough to do it for anyone’s kid in principle and used to run such a class with some success.  I know what I can do is limited, not like some Government-connected jerk claiming she could raise every kid to university level (this is utter lying cruelty).  I value the bloke who serves my beer, fishes the seas and myself alike (all women are now necessarily superior of course!).  The dolt and dullard the same – and I don’t avoid them all the time either.

They have us crapping on our own.  The biggest rise I’ve noticed in the last 20 years is in sneering from all sectors.  Try working for a living, not being given one extends to far more than any idle unemployed.  We’ve been ejukated out of work and into false notions of what we are.  Soylent Green?  Too expensive, if you’re interested … I’m being told to use it raw!

“Romanian Criminality” and Magisterial Idiocy

Ambush Predator(http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/) is carrying a story that’s around on other blogs today.  It’s about an immigrant lad that a court won’t name because it’s not in the ‘public interest’.  The lad is Romanian, clearly recidivist and also living in a family given £420 a week in benefits – more than the brilliant immigrant family living next to me get net with both parents working.  It must be in everyone but this Romanian family’s interest that the court proceedings be published.

We have a lot of State-sponsored crime in the UK and this is clearly a case of its import.  There is no rational argument I can think up that justifies the decision of this Manchester court.  The one’s given by the court are fatuous, for reasons given in AP’s style.  The only viable start concerns whether open publicity would lead to ‘revenge or vigilante’ attacks on the boy and family.  I doubt this would put the chances up, as nearly all this stuff starts in gossip locally in any case.

Our courts are supposed to act in such a way as to make us feel justice is being done, partly so we won’t take our own actions.  This court had magistrates so far out of touch, they managed to make things worse in what they said to defend their judgement.  Naming the lad might affect ‘future rehabilitation should it be necessary’ – when rehabilitation is long overdue.

This lad probably needs to be taken away from this family as surely as Baby P – at least, this would be the case if we could be sure that ‘care’ works at all and could find the ‘money’ to do it.  He is very likely to continue his criminal career if this is not done, just as so many of our own kids.  Given the prospects of kids about to leave care, it looks as though the system fails even when we can use it.  They are bleak.

Whilst I’m sickened to think of the resources this immigrant family is using up, when we have our own young short of housing and life chances, the real issues are about our dud politics not even offering potential solutions, other than ‘education’ (of a kind most can’t benefit from and already corrupted by elite lines through it), dud public sector jobs or probably even worse ones in the private sector cavalry.

I live in Greater Manchester and job prospects here are bleak.  Quite how a family can be given £420 a week and probably housing for doing nothing (and no doubt a lot of negative) when most jobs here are minimum wage, I really don’t know, other than that the plot was lost long ago.  Why these recidivist thieves and worse are so easily harboured amongst decent people is another conundrum.  It all has a great deal to do with a lack of manufacturing jobs that do not require great skill – but for that matter we also seem to have failed to notice that the great industries in which so much skill was nurtured could not come back in that form.

25 adults you see walking in Greater Manchester are functionally innumerate and illiterate in every hundred.  Yet we also have the largest university population per capita in the UK.  It’s time we started to find out if we could improve the lot of this bottom 25% in our schools by sending them all to Public School – thinking I said, I know the practice is impossible.

My own belief is that thieves like this kid (and our own) should be in ‘disciplined work’ from 14.  I’m an educationalist who wants as many as possible to benefit (benefit I said, not ‘go’) from university – yet I’m as sure as I can be that keeping at least half of our kids in school after 14 is cruel.  I can lay out a detailed framework and cost it.  The point really is that our politics is so piss, nothing new has been put in front of us that I can remember since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (MPs had a lot of self-interest in that one).