Negative Alpha and the Giant Peach

We slipped into the hands of organised crime some while back.  Remember ‘The Untouchables’, the brilliant anti-mob series in which ‘actors’ auditioned for parts in ‘Stingray’ and ‘Thunderbirds’?  The mobsters variously ran stuff like numbers rackets (lotteries) and other activities now sources of government revenue.  Now fuckwits like Brown sell off our gold reserves discounted at 10% of real value and plan the resurgence of the East Manchester economy through slot machine ventures glossed-up as super casinos.  Like there isn’t enough real need in the world for capital other than gambling?

This lunatic fairy story is justified by the production of Alpha by sharp-suited (I’ll let Brown off on this one) versions of ‘The Count’ from ‘Sesame Street’ who puke numbers and economic abracadabra like priests wafting incense.  The story holds as much water as a sea-going Giant Peach.  The question is whether we can wake from the trance of the story.  I doubt our ability to do this.

Language is now Orwellian.  Gambling losses are now termed negative Alpha, the gambles themselves having been no more than a perm on all the horses in every race, the whizz kids no more than Horace Batchelor able to take a share only from winnings.  Money, in vast quantities, is not stolen but “vapourised” in hectic trading.  Our authorities, like corrupt US police forces, change the law for the new mob by simply not applying basic justice in their case.  We can get done for picking up a fiver from the street floor, yet they can disappear the odd billion or three.

Everyone in this system is bought and paid for.  What would crime statistics look like if all this activity was publicly accounted?

 

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They Are Feeding Us Lies On Police Corruption

http://www.policeoracle.com/news/Senior-Command-Zero-Tolerance-On-Corruption_35749.html

Two police worthies are promising to chase police malpractice to the ends of the earth.  Orde and Stephenson should be sacked immediately for trying this one on!

“Police recorded crime and detections have been wickedly and deliberately manipulated for many years, resulting in millions being paid in performance bonuses to Chief Officers, gross misallocation and direction of fiscal and operational resources and perhaps the worst crime of all, the scurrilous conspiratorial deception of the tax paying public, perpetrated by Chief Officers and previous Home Office ministers that crime fell and detections rose dramatically under their watch.” from thinblueline.

We don’t see any ‘Untouchables-style’ attitudes towards policing in the UK (though in reality Eliot Ness wrote his own myth).  Policing and our wider CJS are corrupt in ways that many of the people working in them can’t see.  The very people making these ‘moral high ground’ statements should be culpable (I don’t mean these two specifically).

What we have is increasing anti-social crime from evil poor sprogs driving disabled people to their deaths to bankers carving us all up.  There is no decrease in crime.  The serious miscarriages going on look as bad as ever, as does the whole structure of police complaints.

We need a great deal off the backs of our cops – not least the management burden and managers who seek to cover up even when there is clear evidence.  There are ways forward, but the current culture allows no change and hasn’t learned any of the real lessons under its rhetoric of the same.

I can find no reports on any of the areas where police have claimed to ‘learn lessons’ or any useful statistics that give us a proper idea of what they are doing and for whom.

I’d like to see much of the involvement of lawyers and courts stripped away from summary offences and replaced by much quicker processes and new forms of case presentation and investigation.  I doubt that civil rights considerations are a block to this, just current vested interests and problems in trusting prosecutions.

Deep lying in the problem is the system of ‘credibility’ we are stuck with in general argument and the courts.  There is no consistency in this and it flies in the face of scientific findings.  The real arguments are quickly lost in a variety of posturing as people take offence.

The Soviet system was notoriously corrupt and there are many similarities in what has been going on here.  Performance management has become a dramaturgical performance and much like banking the actors are allowed to ‘mark to model’ (targets) and not to reality.  One might compare the money we’ve had to find to bail out the banks with the ‘off-balance-sheet’ of anti-social crime in police statistics, and police gaming with bent bank and company accounting.