Who Do We Trust To Run The DNA Database?

The Government’s latest big idea to put its abysmal record on crime and the causes of crime looks no less likely to fail abysmally than all their other initiatives, crackdowns and reorganisations.

The new wheeze is to create a DNA database with a record of everybody in the country’s DNA stored in it. Leaving out the track record of Government I.T. projects (because we will doubtless be returning to that in the future) The question is in view of the fact they have lost control of the streets can we trust the Police to manage something as complex as a DNA Database?

In the past all the government’s efforts to convince us their “war on crime” was succeeding were based on telling blatant lies and backing them up with fraudulent statistics. This has fooled nobody except silly Polly Toynbee, a journalist who is still so gusset-creamingly in love with Tony Blair she insists we have all been taken in by the hysterical reporting of crime favoured by The Daily Mail and other tabloids.

It seems the demands of highbrow socialist journos for “justice for all” define “all” as non white, non British, non straight, non males or asylum seeking, thieving, cheating, human trafficking pikey scum from Eastern Europe (my mate Adil’s description of the latest arrivals in town, not mine.) As for the rest of us, who cares that our gardens have been vandalised, our cars keyed and our sheds torched?
The reality, according to dear Pol is that crime, having fallen at an accelerating rate for a decade is now so low that people are breaking into your house to leave TVs, Video Recorders, jewellery and cash. Crime figures are now negative for all crimes except being nasty to blacks and Asians, women, gays, immigrants (especially asylum seekers) and psychopathic axe murderers.
Its the kind of thing that gets liberalism a bad name, and from such an unlikely source. Polly is a smart, elegant woman, not the type to go around in a dress made from Jilly Cooper’s old curtains and a pair of rope sandals.
Everybody knows there is such a dearth of good new novels these days because all the best fiction writers are employed making up government statistics.

I have written to Polly many times to explain the reason why crime figures fall year on year is because the statistics used are based on crimes reported to the police rather than crimes committed. I don’t know what happens where you live but round here the last thing crime victims want to do is get the police involved. It’s a waste of time and can put people at risk.
Let’s follow what happens. Two or three days after you are mugged, burgled, vandalised etc. the police turn up and while WPC Sillytits explains empathetically that there is little they can do unless they catch the culprit red handed, her colleague PC Dimmock knocks on the door of Mr. Ruthless Bastard, the local fence and drug dealer who has more convictions for ABH and GBH than a beach has grains of sand. P.C. Dimmock says, “ ‘ello ‘ello ello Ruthless Bastard, we’ve got you band to rights this time. Mr. Decent at Number 14 tells us you tried to sell him the stuff what was nicked from his house.
A few days later, following your release from hospital, a victim support officer calls at your house and tries to recruit you for a scheme that involves spying on neighbours and reporting anything suspicious to police so that PC Dimmock can go straight round to Ruthless Bastards house and tell him Mr. Decent saw him handing small bags of white powder to people wearing hoodies in exchange for £20 notes. PC Dimmock’s warning that “we’ll be keeping an eye on you” leaves Ruthless Bastard quaking in his shoes.
Does anybody think this is at all far fetched?
Not so long ago in Burnley there was a case of somebody giving information on a suspect who was arrested but “walked” due to procedural error. The informant later had his home vandalised and his car torched while members of his family were attacked.
So now you know why crime figures look so good, would you trust the Police to manage a DNA Database?

How To Get The Little Darlings Reading

Some big social problems are brewing, quite simply because of the number of kids, mainly boys, who leave school unable to read adequately or in too many cases, unable to read at all.
The first part of a three part documentary was shown on Channel 4 earlier this week, not television stations will make a documentary about anything these days to fill the schedules, but a three part documentary, that’s serious.
Being unable to read in modern society is a mega disadvantage, you can’t get a decent job in a call centre, fill in claim forms to get jobseeker’s allowance or check the programme listings for your 200 channel Sky Plus subscription. Hell, you can’t even put the stuff you’ve nicked on e-bay for auction. People who can’t read are losers, which is why most people in our prisons have reading difficulties.
What are the causes?
Progressive education is a big factor. In the past thirty years the idea that children do not need to be taught to read by phonetics has led to thousands being failed by the education system. The lucky ones like myself and fatsally made sure our children were well on the way to reading by the time they started school, teaching tem as our parents and grandparents had taught us. Many of our readers here will have done the same, reading stories to the kids is not a chore, it is a pleasure. Progressive educationalists resent such enthusiastic parenting though, progressive education is based on the philosophy of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits: “Give me the child to seven and I will give you the person for life.”
One has to wonder if ideas such as “just leave books lying around and children will learn to read from curiosity,” conceals a sinister hidden agenda. Leave books lying around and children who have never been read to will find innovative ways of using them as weapons with which to attack each other. So are progressive methods of teaching reading just a way of furthering dumbing down. After all, an illiterate population is a biddable population.
Another contributing factor of course is Margaret Thatcher’s systematic unravelling of the fabric of society (sorry fatsally, but I’m not letting go of this one until the Conservatives have either disassociated themselves from The Grantham Gorgon or lost their last seat in Parliament – yes, Blair’s Premiership was every bit as bad but Blair himself was a shallow pastiche of The Creature from the Abyss.) Before Thatcher’s “freeing” of the economy – the destruction of employment rights, the casualisation of labour, the export of proper jobs to low labour cost nations – and creation of a debt –slave economy, most per school children learned language skills through interaction with Mums, Grandparents, Aunts. Learning the first level of reading was a game. Kuh – ah – tuh. Cat.
Now mothers only exist for six months before they are remorphed into economic units whose purpose is to create a surplus in the labour market thus holding down wages and keeping the lower class in their place. Don’t argue with me here, my knowledge of this topic goes back to the national adoption of the Speenhamland Poor Relief system. It caused economic chaos then too, ending in hundreds of homeless and destitute people starving to death. There is nothing new about Thatcherism. There is nothing about it that works either.
The third factor in the decline of reading skills is Political Correctness. Why are school reading books all so worthy and effing boring. What six year old cares that Sophie lives with her mummy and a lady who wears dungarees and has cropped hair. In any group of three children you are not bound to find one is black or Asian. Give them Thomas the Tank Engine (better sill Ian Dury’s version, it rhymes. Kids love rhyme.
And then for boys whose problems persist to puberty, put Girl With A One Track Mind on the curriculum. That would get the buggers well into reading.

Call Girls: God’s and Secret Diaries

Billie Piper’s silly simulations of sex continue to stir the wrath of feminists. I have not watched The Secret Diary of a Call Girl yet, and probably will not as its slot on Thursday evenings now clashes with something I recorded earlier. Well OK, I’ll tell the truth, those too often trailed clips of bouncy bouncy sex reminded me so much of 1960s Britsex flicks like Confessions Of A Really Bad Actor not even the prospect of Ms. Piper pouting her beestung lips and fluttering the lashes of her doe – eyes as she pranced about in exotic lingerie could tempt me to watch.

I might just start though, if only to swell the viewing figures a little more and piss off the feminists a little more. I am sick of being told what I ought to think:

I do not need “government experts” to advise me on diet or on how much I can safely drink. All such advice is twaddle anyway, dietary needs and alcohol tolerance vary so much from person to person it is impossible to define a limit.

I do not need Gordon Brown to tell me to switch off my tele rather than leaving it on standby. What I and you and everyone on the planet need is for our political leaders to say “Oi, Free Enterprise, Nooooo! We need generation and distribution of electricity, gas and water to be prized out of the hands of the Free Enterprise thieves and taken into public ownership. Bumbling and inefficient maybe, but at least money invested in improving services will not go straight into the offshore bank accounts of senior executives.

I do not need Hampstead feminists and theier crony crones to tell me prostitution is a crime against women in which all men are complicit. I could just as well say Christian marriage is a crime against women that all in which and most women are complicit. And at least my statement would have the distinction of being more than half true.

About a year ago I was writing stroppy articles about the way the tabloid purveyors of overt moral outrage and tacit titillation were handling the story of young women murdered in Ipswich. So I am aware there is a nasty, brutal, exploitative side to prostitution. That is not the whole picture though. I have only ever known one prostitute, or escort as she would prefer.

One of my consultancy contracts involved “working from home” on Mondays, which meant I spread a few hours work over the weekend and caught an early evening train down to London. A fellow traveller was a smart, sophisticated Jewish woman. It was about the third time we met on that train she revealed she was a prostitute, or escort. Realising this expressed a level of trust I simply remarked that it was not something one comes across every day on the Inter City. She told me there were a few women from the Manchester area travelled down to work in the same line but most went later in the week as they worked the more lucrative weekends. Monique (her professional name) had children in boarding school and so kept her weekends free.

Once I dared ask how family and friends would react if they knew of her business.

“I’m not going to make a public announcement,” she said, “but frankly I don’t give a shit what people think. For ten years I was a good Jewish wife; a whore, housemaid, cook, sophisticated hostess, mother, I pandered to his mother, flirted with his business friends, and I was always under his control. Now though I have many clients, I only perform one service and nobody calls the tune. What I do, I do for me.”

So that is another side to the sex trade.

The reason I recalled Monique is that recently I read a book titled “God’s Call Girl” by Carla van Raay. This writer, now in her late sixties told how at sixteen she had entered a Roman Catholic convent to escape the oppression, violence and sexual abuse of a strict Roman Catholic home in Southern Holland.

’s funny how many times I read of devoutly Christian Dad’s who think its perfectly OK to shag their daughters. Oh well, everybody knows my views on Christianity.

Back to the theme however. Carla van Raay spent over ten years in holy orders and experienced at the hands of the Nuns greater cruelty than she had received from her father, greater indifference to her humanity than she had known from her cold, aloof mother, and all done “in the name of Jesus”. So badly was she treated that eventually she left the order and ran away, marrying the first man who showed an interests in her.
The marriage, predictably, was a disaster and Carla, now with a child to look after and unable to get a job teaching because though she had qualified while in the convent, the order refused her a reference, learned massage and turned to the sex trade. She liked sex but did not care much for men.
Carla was a sex worker into her fifties, she was always in control of her life, something she had never been before she was a prostitute.

It was not my kind of book, my wife bought it; she has an interest in Catholic girls who lapse even more spectacularly than she did. I prefer a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, but God’s Call Girl opened my eyes, coming as it did on the heels of the film Magdalene Sisters, a story set in Ireland in the 1950s relating the abuses suffered by “wayward girls” handed over to the Nuns, sometimes for nothing worse than holding hands with a boy.

There are fewer women working now in the way Monique and Carla van Raay did according to the very unreliable information available. The irony is that liberal feminists are far more responsible than any of Monique’s clients for the change in the sex industry. A few years ago they were wringing their hands about the Government’s shabby treatment of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe, political activists and dissidents who would surely be murdered if they were returned to their homeland.

A lot of these asylum seekers, many of whom did not pursue their application for citizenship but simply disappeared out of the system, were not political activists on the run from covert agencies loyal to tyrants. There were very bad people who were on the run from even badder people from whom they had stolen money, or from rival gangsters or militia leaders whose supporters they had murdered.

These are the people who are driving the sex trade evermore downmarket. So now, thanks to our zeal for being “nice” we have the sex trade increasingly controlled by people to whom a woman’s life and dignity have less significance than that of a goat.

If I believed in any sort of God I would probably pray that it protect us from the stupdity of the self righteous.

The Pissed Parishoners of Harrogate

You would be forgiven for thinking Harrogate, Yorks, is a sleepy spa town with the faded elegance of its Georgian Architechture and inhabitants slipping into genteel decay. Such is the image presented in novels and TV drama. They and you are wong however. Its all happening in Harrogate according to the government’s latest healthcare health scare.
Gangs of pissed up middle aged people and pensioners are roaming the streets scaring the shite out of teenagers who only want to enjoy a quiet bingw with their mates.
The Government has named Harrogate as one of the centres of “hazardous drinking.” This is not binge drinking or even alcoholism, but the civilised, quiet, responsible consumption of a glass or two of wine with dinner. Such behaviou puts you at risk according to Super Nanny State. Hazardous Drinking in Harrogate is a bigger threat than obesity or climate change you might think. Do not get involved, you will be at risk!

At risk of what? Getting a life? Having something that too closely resembles fun? Aiding and abetting the Euro rats of Brussels in their effort to undermine British sovereignty?

All us affluent, middle aged people must up our alcohol consumption now in order the nip this in the bud. If we fail to do so, what innocent pleasures will they target next?

Depravity in Devonshire?

Group sex in Guildford?

Calling All Poets – Poetry Life And Times Joins Us Here

I can’t seem to find time to get on top of Little Nicky Machiavelli’s blog just now, so I will use it to introduce to shy poets on my friends list (and I know you are there Ros, Banana, Lee, Msfullphat, LaSpice, Shaz the Prole and others) the arrival at blog.co.uk of Britains foremost online poetry mag, Poetry Life and Times

If you want a recommendation my friend Sugarburn has already been published in PLT and will tell you it doesn’t hurt a bit.

Visit the page, Meet editor Robin Ouzman Hislop, sign him up as a friend and join the PLT gang.

See you there.

Whose Life Is It Anyway>

Yet another about turn on government guidelines regarding health. Today NICE has produced draft guidelines stating that after the first three months of pregnancy there is no evidence to show that drinking up to 1.5 units of alcohol a day causes any damage to unborn children, contradicting earlier advice from the Department of Health.
Of course fifteen to twenty years ago and beyond women were actively encouraged to drink alcohol, particularly stout as this helped to prevent anaemia, quite common in the later stages of pregnancy.
Who listens to this advice anyway, certainly not alcoholics whose babies are the ones at risk of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome.
It’s the same with all government advice. Eat five pieces of fruit a day. Why five? Where did that figure come from? If you eat more is it bad for you? If you eat less will you still be at risk of heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure and an early death? Is it quantifiable, if you only eat three pieces of fruit a day will you live two fiths less long that someone who eats five? Will vegetarians live forever?
Take more exercise. What counts as exercise? According to a recent campaign anything active no matter how moderate, a gentle stroll, gardening, sex – this featuring an older couple, can they really actively bonk for thirty minutes or does foreplay count which isn’t really that active, just hands and mouths?
How many people are now more active than they were before the smoking ban because they have to go outside for a fag? Does that count?
The government continually identifies a problem, which may or may not be transient and/or confined to a small section of society and then berates everybody with expensive advertising campaigns. This leads to a general trend to
a) ignore government advice on the grounds that its so bloody obvious and we do it anyway,
b) take it to heart and try to follow the guidelines strictly, resulting in guilt and stress, contributing to high blood pressure, heart disease etc. or
c) ignore it because everybody is always banging on at you anyway.
Shouldn’t the advisory bodies be targetting the specific groups that need help, doctors and midwives offering help and support to those pregnant women who do have a problem with alcohol for instance, whilst encouraging those that are more than capable of making their own choices to do so?
Giving peple responsibility makes them more responsible whilst taking away accountability seems to encourage the idea that somebody else will do it for you.

Safeguard Your Identity

It would be quite a nasty shock if debt collectors turned up on your doostep demanding settlement of arrears on a loan you knew nothing about and producing a court document authorising them to take away your stuff if payment was not forthcoming. It has happened to some people.

Now most of us think those badly written letters from ridiculously named gentlemen in West Africa, such as Mr. Chuckawamba Segodo who recently wrote to me, are a bit of a laugh. Very few people are naive enough to send provide the bank details Mr. Segodo needs in order to pay millions of pounds into the accounts of people who respond to him, but many of us will be tempted to send off a jokey reply.
DON’T!
Any reply you send will contain enough information in the file header to enabe cyber criminals to install on your computer a trojan horse malware program which will open the “back door” (one of the 64,000 logical ports on your network interface) throgh whick spyware can be installed. The favourite spyware used by criminals are key loggers. These log every keystroke to a temporary file and next time you start your machine a record of everything you have done is sent to a data centre, located we dare to hope, in the magma chamber of an extinct volcano. Be warned, these cyber criminals may appear to be hellbent on world domination but they are nowhere near as charming as your average Bond villain. Any you may have unwitthingly given them enough information to open bank accounts, buy property, take out loans and start fraudulent companies in your name.

Maxing out your cedit cards after stealing your card number is small stuff by comparison.

My friends may have gained the impression I am no great fan of the World Wide Web. Too right I’m bloody not. At its inception the www inherited from its forbears a number of insecurities. That did not matter on the old networks because every user needed an account number and password and those were not issued until the user had been authenticated, usually by the organisation they worked for. Many people have said many times the problems with the web all stem from the fact it was never designed for the uses it is being put to. It was not fit for purpose because nobody could predict what purpose it would have to be fit for.

Sadly, in the years the web has existed, none of the problems have been properly addressed simply because it would not be in the interests of Microsoft and a few other big players to start fixing them.
(People who get tetchy when I attack free enterprise here should remember that the web, with its thriving market in kiddie porn, its cacophony of inane chatter, expanding trade in the tools of cyber crime, climate of bullying and the dumbing down effect it is having on the young, is the ultimate product of unbridled free enterprise.) The web’s popularity was built on the ridiculous notion that we would all get rich by being part of a community where everything was free. The second economic bubble (surely the greatest ever triumph of hope over experience) to be infalted by the hot air from this fallacy is now in the process of imploding. No big names hve gone yet simply because their backers cannot be seen to have made the same mistake twice in les than a decade.

To get back to our point about identity theft though, the frustrating thing is nobody needs to be a victim. A little common sense and a few simple actions will safeguard you.
First look at your Internet settings from Control Panel and make sure you have set the computer to Delete Temporary Internet Files. This file is where key loggers will store the information to be transmitted so by getting rid of the files at the end of every session you stop your data from leaving your computer.
Having done that, a couple of free dowloads will help a lot. Win Patrol is a free program that works by warning you if anybody is trying to change your startup procedures to run a malware program each time you start the computer.
Asquared free is a monitor that works rather like anti virus software in that it scans incoming data or files on your hard drive for known Trojans, worms and netbots. Be careful when exploring the site, emisoft do not make the free download easy to find, but it is worth the effort.
Between Win Patrol and this you will have enhanced security a lot.

Now a few common sense rules.

(1) If you have not asked for it you do not want it
(2) When a message tells you the latest version of Flash player is needed to view a file be suspicious. Genuine web developers will always take care to ensure their web pages are accessible to a wide audience. Genuine flash players are fine but cyber criminals push “cracked” versions into which all sorts of nasties have been added.
(3) You don’t need Quick Time. Much as I dislike Microsoft, Windows Media Player is an excellent piece of software and will render most popular filetypes to your screen.
(4) When somebody you do not know is keed to do you a big favour, ask yourself why.

All these things are ruses to get past your firewall. Yes, you say, I want to load a new flash player. And WHAMMY, you have invited a hacker right past all your security.

So online indentity theft need not be the ogre some people suggest. Remember, there ae fortunes to be made out of selling the kind of information I have just given you.

Corporate Censorship Killing Free Speech

There has been a gradual erosion of the rights we used to take for granted since the War On Terror kicked off and one of the casualities is freedom of speech. Not only is it more difficult to criticise government and the security forces now though, but manipulatioon of the legal system under the cover of anti terrorist measures has made it easier for corporate interests to draw the Cloak of Invisibility over many of their activities.

Funny, but I though the job of government was to manage the nation for the benefit of its citizens, not the shareholders in offshore corporations. Why are we letting unelected bodies exercise censorship on matters of public interest?

Here is an interesting article at Huffington Post

Not Proud To Be British

Not Proud To Be British

Again a senior politician is calling for a national debate on “What it means to be British.” This is an obvious attempt to capitalise on fears about immigration that have been stirred up by increasingly hysterical media reports that Britain is being swamped by a tide of migration from the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe.
Any attempt to define Britishness is doomed to fail of course, it will only accentuate the differences in wealth, living standards and culture within this small but heavily populated nation. We should be holding a debate on the negative effect of outmoded values like patriotism on a modern, cosmopolitan society.
Never having been slow to step forward I will kick it off by saying I am NOT nor have I ever been proud to be British. In fact I think the whole idea of being proud to be whatever nationality we happen to be is a nonsense. I am happy to be British, I like our landscape, food, grubby cities, surly waiters, our culture and heritage, but to be proud of being British would be to suggest to anybody non – British that the accident of being born in these islands makes be somehow better than they.
It would be foolish to expect people from France, Germany, Jordan or India to agree with my views on the superiority of most things British, in fact when an American friend recently wrote of being quite shocked by the low opinion most non – Americans have of her homeland I had to explain that too many Americans abroad have an unfortunate way of telling natives of the place they are visiting that “the good ol’ US of A is the best country in the world and expecting agreement in response. Why would the Dutch not think Holland is wonderful, or the Germans point to their nation’s many achievements in the arts, science and technology and make the case for their land being as fine as any? All nation states, large or small, have things to recommend them and many, often the most powerful and prosperous have shameful episodes in their history. I have to be honest and say my own nation is one of the foremost in this category. The number of deaths the British were responsible for in India makes Hitler’s holocaust look small beer.
Logically then, to proclaim that I am proud to be British would imply I expect other nationalities to acknowledge the superiority of Britain. Once we set out on that road, it is only a short journey to the drum beating, flag waving, my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism that has caused as many wars and as much waste of life as religion. So why are politicians and conservatively minded people so easily seduced by it?
Most people who have been at the sharp end of a real, blood and guts war soon change their mind about the value of patriotism as a virtue. The poets of World War 1 are an example. Poems glorifying acts of patriotism and lauding sacrifice were in the main written by elderly former soldiers who had only seen action against untrained, ill-equipped tribesmen (and ought to have been chastened by those experiences, particularly in Zululand and Afghanistan.) The front line poets, those like Wilfred Owen who joined the millions of young men taken in by what Owen called The Old Lie marched off to the battlefields of France and Belgium. They were prod to be British and prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, only to find that Britain did not give a damn about them as they were mown down in their thousands. Their leaders, unable to devise a strategy to advance their cause, simply ordered whole regiments to march, bayonets fixed, against the enemy machine guns.
In his best known poem Wilfred Owen wrote of that Charnel House war: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / to children ardent for some desperate glory / the old lie, dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori. (it is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country)
Thus was the pressure put on, patriotism was the greatest virtue, pragmatism the greatest sin. Early in the twentieth century it took real bravery to say, “I do not wish to die for my country,” such a selfish attitude was viewed with the same kind of suspicion as showing an unhealthy level of interest in children is today. It would however have been more noble to say, “I choose to live for my country, to speak out against the warmongering rulers, my fight will be a fight for equality among my countrymen and justice for everybody, I choose to contribute to the life of my country, not the deaths of many people who are not its true enemies.
I have never understood why we should be made proud by an accident of geography. England and Scotland were deadly enemies until about three hundred and fifty years ago. Go to the borders now, as ever, walk away from the roads into open country and who would know when we cross from one land to another. The same applies to Canada and U.S.A. China and India anywhere and its neighbour. So what we are asked to believe is that an imaginary demarcation, a line drawn on a map, should be the thing we are most proud of? Ought we not to derive most of our personal pride and self esteem from the things we do, from our work, roles as partner, parent, brother or sister, friend; from sporting or intellectual accomplishments, artistic talent or simply from being a wholehearted member of our community, from doing our best? These things are the sum of all that makes us what we are. Would Shakespeare have been a lesser writer had he been born in Spain and moved from there, rather than from Stratford to London? Cultural reference points and life experience might have made him a different writer, but mere location would not have changed the essence of the man.
Nationality is nothing but an accident of Geography and patriotism a facile ploy beloved of shoddy politicians to exploit primitive fears of that which is different. It is time to dispense forever with the politics of fear and embrace the politics of hope. We have nothing to fear from migration be it from Eastern Europe, Asia or South America. There must be controls of course to ensure the infrastructure can cope, but migrants do not threaten our lifestyle or culture any more than terrorists. Migrants wish to share our lifestyle not destroy it and terrorists do not want to kill every last one of us as the more hysterical advocates of patriotism claim. Terror is about disrupting not killing.
What does threaten our lifestyle in the west and what we must resist if we are to preserve what is best of our civilisation is the relentless corporate – led push to increase consumption.
The real patriots today are not supporters of the patriot – game playing politicians whose phoney wars only distract attention from the real danger but those who are strong enough to ignore the drum beating, anthem singing and flag waving , to rise above the politics of fear and the ranting of religionists and to take up the struggle against the dark forces of conservatism and the suicidal lunacies of free market economics.

Read the poem Songs of War