Let’s use more nuts to crack some other nuts #2341

House of Dumb features thoughtful criticism of a man who finds it hard to join the herd when that herd gets all down-their-noses at an everyday misunderstood matricide.

Well…taking a position where you face down the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror all at once either demonstrates the kind of raw courage the SAS look for in their recruits or here’s a man who doesn’t mind cooking his own light suppers for a week or two. Oh, and the suburbs might twitch their lace curtains at him for a while as well. In the chip shops and kebab houses of the inner city, however, I suspect he’ll lose very few of his devoted friends.

“The belief that children are "devils", that they are feral beasts who if they aren't smashing up bus-stops are murdering their mothers, reveals far more about adult fears than it does about actual young people.”

Isn’t the definition of the liberal as someone who accepts the paleontological history of our species - that we’re essentially meat-eating and foraging pack animals from the scrublands of East Africa - yet who denies the possibility that the aggressiveness and potential for violence that for a couple of million years kept blunt-toothed, slow-moving, clawless omnivores alive and flourishing amongst various ambush predators from the savannas to the Arctic Circle did anything other than disappear amongst everyone (except for a few throwbacks) the moment that the ink was dry on first edition of The Social Contract? Really, Mr. O’Neill, where did all those instincts and hormones and genes to mount a counter-attack against lions or polar bears disappear to in the era When Periwigs Ruled the Earth?

For the most part, children who kill are unstable not evil; they are profoundly confused rather than consciously cruel. Yes, they sadly must be removed from society, but ideally for help and education, not in order to be punished or to suffer public ridicule. 

What sort of therapy cures you of human nature, I wonder?

I confess, too, that I suspect him of a little bit of logical confusion when he asserts that removing a child from society (by putting him in prison) holds him up to public ridicule - unless they’re filming a reality TV series down at Tofu Borstal for Boys Who Want to be Girls, or wherever.

The lib meme of that old violence thing; it’s just so everything up until 1762 just keeps on being funny:

It was police and judges, for example, who took the disastrous decision to try the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger for murder in an adult court, riding roughshod over the idea that children under 14 were doli incapax – incapable of crime. It was the judge in that case who decided to release the names and photos of the Bulger killers, because they had committed an act "of unparalleled evil and barbarity". It was a commentator for the erudite Times who said that those two clearly very disturbed 10-year-olds were a "reminder of humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". 

“…humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". And there’s the rub. In Libworld, humanity is a social construct and there are no “ancient instincts”: It’s all superstructure that functions to keep profit margins high and the toffs supping Champers at the Ritz.

Or something.

But seriously folks; what does O’Neill expect The Man to do nowadays? The, ahem, authorities haven’t got the will or the understanding to uphold whatever has worked since Adam was a lad (partly because they reject any book with Adam in it); including the sometimes-reasonable doli incapax. They’ve lost any sense of proportion and discrimination because they’ve thrown wisdom out along with God knows how many babies with the bathwater of all that excessive deference to authority that they wanted to eliminate in the 1960s. In so doing they ditched all the successful socializing (moralizing!) mechanisms upheld by the legitimacy conferred by ancient custom and tradition throughout history down to what every schoolboy knows  - especially not to slaughter Mummy and little kids.  And they did it on purpose. The permissive society trashed millennia-old mechanisms for rearing children not to be sociopaths by breaking the connection (until then held to be central to Western morality) between a moral choice and its consequences.

It acid-bathed the family by easy divorce (mea culpa, my friends: I can’t type this part so easily because of this beam right here); dissolving the moral and economic links between sexual intercourse, child-rearing and fatherhood via child-related welfare payments; and it infantilized parents themselves through an education system that never finds fault or points the finger of blame at any individual or corrects misbehaviour.

Certainly, it’s foolish to treat those too young to understand cause and effect and moral responsibility quite as if they were Jack the Ripper, and we can hope though not expect that imprisoned children might one day have their immorality replaced with morality, but the statist ‘youth’ snuck into the woodpile in the first place thanks to O’Neill’s pals’ mindset.   

How else do you explain this piece Hobbesian  set a sledgehammer to crack another sledge-hammer statist war-of-all-the-bureaucracies-against-all-the-other-bureaucracies?:

Schools which fail to teach pupils to read and write should be fined, an independent panel investigating the causes of last year's riots has said.

About a fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an 11-year-old or younger, leaving many with no stake in society and no reason to stay out of trouble, the riots communities and victims panel said.

Introducing fines, which would then be used to help bring children up to the required standards, would help ensure the risk of future riots on the scale seen last August was "significantly reduced", it said.

Got that?

Western morality = bad.

Individual responsibility = bad.

Nuclear family = bad.

Blame for and punishment of misbehaviour = bad.

Parental choice in education = bad.

Bureaucracies intended to replace anything nasty with tea and sympathy and understanding = good.

Riots = embarrassing after fifty years of social liberalism.

Solution = let’s punish our own libtard schools by using more dictatorial government power!

Letting parents take their children away from the violent jungles that so many inner city comprehensives have become by allowing other, non-tropical rainforest schools to exist just isn’t on the menu.  

The panel also identified "500,000 forgotten families", citing poor parenting, a sense of hopelessness among young people, no clear path to work, reoffending and a lack of confidence in the police as key reasons behind the riots.

Say, does anyone out there know how reoffending can happen at all in our enlightened world of ASBOs and suspended sentences and community service orders?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

So what actually works? Well, how about more of the same?

Councils across London are working hard to build strong and resilient communities but the key to success lies in more joined-up services with responsibilities and funding available to make it work.Responding to today’s report by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, London Councils – the body representing the capital’s 33 local authorities – said that boroughs need more freedom to ensure there is more sharing of information and funding for local schemes such as projects to tackle youth re-offending and early intervention work.

Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong?

Picture from here.

Mostly charmless

Here’s a charming vignette of life in Yorkshire’s chunk of the public sector, from the ever-reliable Beeb.

Council chief 'made lewd remarks'

A former children's services manager at Barnsley council told a pregnant colleague "it would be easy to have an abortion", a tribunal has heard.

Douglas Adams, (yes, I know) who was assistant director of children's services, also told another woman he could imagine her in a "Miss Whiplash outfit".

The 56-year-old, from Nottingham, is accused by the General Social Care Council (GSCC) of misconduct.

An aside, only, but this is what it takes to discipline social workers or their leaders without national tabloid coverage. It’s not taking children from law-abiding Christian parents; or leaving them with violent drug addicts living in chav ménages a trois and thus exposing them to repeated violent or sexual abuse and eventually murder whilst ignoring all the repeat evidence to the contrary; nor assuming that soldiers are more violent to their children than other people; nor placing them with homosexual couples in preference to their blameless natural grandparents. Insult other social workers, and you’re toast.

The claims relating to four women were listed as a hearing started in London.

Mr Adams allegedly said he knew that Ms D, a junior member of administrative staff, was pregnant because her breasts had become larger.

He told her it would be easy to have an abortion because it was early in her pregnancy, the tribunal heard.

He is also accused of telling the woman her boyfriend was "using her for sex" and that she would lose her figure.

Mr Adams, who did not attend the hearing, is alleged to have said to another colleague, Ms A: "Oh yes, I can see you in a Miss Whiplash outfit with high leather boots taking them [her male colleagues] in hand."

When managers at Barnsley council discussed the matter with him, Mr Adams told them that while he did not accept all the allegations he admitted his remarks to Ms D were inappropriate.

However, he put it into context by describing it as "shock tactics" to discuss her pregnancy.

Mr Adams was suspended on 9 June 2006 before a disciplinary hearing on 26 July.

Mr Larkin said: "He made some admissions but sought to put his remarks into context.

And the context in which it’s okay to suggest abortions to underlings, openly discuss them dressed as dominatrixes and refer to their lactating breasts is…?

"Nonetheless he accepted that his remarks were inappropriate and he expressed regret."

Mr Adams was summarily dismissed from the authority in August 2006 and lost a subsequent appeal.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what sort of recruitment, selection processes, training and peer reviews recruits and promotes to great power and influence an individual as crass and ignorant as Mr. Adams and place him in charge of the people responsible for the vulnerable children of one of England’s most famous toilet-towns, and to speculate about the fate of the defenceless kids under his ‘care.’

However, as they say, there’s a larger point here which is: just how low can the public sector go?

This case has got me thinking about the conduct of public servants (please don’t snort – it’s undignified).

I’ve had twentyish jobs, both temporary and ‘permanent’, since leaving school thirty-odd years ago and about a quarter of them have been in the public sector, and the behaviour, manners and morality of those at the public trough are, on reflection, way worse than their private sector neighbours.

Don’t get me wrong. This is no libertarian screed about the essential morality of the market compared with the productive sector. The pursuit of profits is no guarantee of goodness; but it is a pretty fine indicator of politeness and respectful behaviour between colleagues. Now, I’ve worked under sales managers who could never quite get the hang of halting their ‘sell more’ monologues when making speeches at birthday parties and leaving celebrations, and a couple of proprietors were rather slower at handing out pay increases than I’d have liked. And you have to work on a large sales team or in the newspaper industry to know just how foul-mouthed civilised people can be.

But O! my gentles; how insensitive are the tax-collectors and how rude the troughers!

Right now I have a relative whose largish provincial government section of about sixty staff includes; one never-married single mother who goes around complaining at the expense of war-widows’ tiny extra benefits for ethno-religious reasons while running down the British Army that protects her freedoms and her generous tax credits and who abuses Christianity throughout the entire office in a foul-mouthed and high-decibel way without a word of rebuke from management. She is managed by someone so crass as to place her in close proximity to a couple of known Christians – and this is out of forty peers amongst whom she could be placed. There is a socialist consensus so thick and the Labour ‘culture’ so prevalent that allegedly professional suit-wearing types can gleefully and obscenely anticipate the death of The Fatcher right in front of their few known Tory underlings and expect to get away with it. He has a colleague who openly boasts of family support for terrorism, and another manager who was so openly and frequently rude to her subordinates that she was banished to a make-work job to keep her away from any personal contact with other human beings – but only after years of her bullying ways being tolerated by all the levels of leadership above her.

All this in a service which, during an ongoing pay review, saw managers openly running down their subordinates’ roles and responsibilities in order to inflate their own importance and pay grades, and others colluding with the wholesale corruption of the assessment process in order to promote favoured specialisms and personally concocted sinecures.

You have to have worked in the ‘education’ system - or have been brought up by people who worked in it, - to know just how back-biting, clique-ridden and bitchy human beings can be to their neighbours in peacetime.

I have a friend who, when he was feeling excluded from company and support in the staff room of a small country school, was told by his union rep to get the hell out of Dodge and find a nice sink-hole city pre-comprehensive instead as he himself had been reduced to eating his lunch in the car rather than suffer the cold shoulder from the cellulite-clad rural harpies with whom he worked.

Then there’s this other friend who works in a particular, not very big, section of a local authority whose boss is shacked up with the Head of Service, and who has an inordinately hefty percentage of her staff out on disciplinary charges or suspension (and full pay, O taxpayer) on the most spurious and baseless (and indeed evidence-free) of accusations. This situation has lasted for years and yet she seems to be immune to the most basic of employee rights processes and there’s no end in sight for the victims but feigning sickness and resignations for her helpless staff and eventually legal action that will cost – guess who? – a packet whether successful or not.

Don’t get me wrong here either about favouritism. Private sector mangers can show it; especially in sales and other jobs with production quotas; but I only ever recall favouritism shown as lavish praise and some smallish office privileges to the top-level achievers. They were never allowed to be abusive to their peers – at least not without being slapped down by the selfsame colleagues when they got too cocky.

Mister Adams would be out on his ear in no time.

As far as I can see, public sector nepotism and favouritism just go beyond a joke. My first colleague’s boss has made a practice of refusing any and every shop-floor or middle-management suggestions to improve the service they provide, while shunting personnel round regardless of their specialisms and experience at will, and thus wasting talent, experience and training along with your money.

I’ve never known a businessman: director, sole proprietor, franchisee or hired hand supervisor who actively sabotages the daily working practices of their best staff by such micromanagement. Sure, they make big mistakes that annoy and temporarily slow stuff down, but they see the light when the bottom line is pointed out to them – but they don’t email their entire staffs instructing them to never publicly criticise any aspect of an entire Ministry or local authority’s working and costs. Ever.

I’ve worked in fast-food outlets on freezing nights and on production lines on heat-wave sweltering days and been more considerately treated and more politely addressed by potty-mouthed and tattooed dole-class escapees than by the letters-after-their-names suits who rule my little section of Government Hell. You can imagine how good we all are at our jobs with that lot to wade through. Its not that I expect productive sector workers to be sympathetic to the plight of a minor bureaucrat like me, but just think what this does to cost effectiveness and where it all sends your tax pounds.

All this in the most heavily unionized workplaces in the country.

Either they’re putting something in the water in the public sector or the power that comes from monopoly and monopsony; the lack of responsibility; or any sense of ownership of the resources involved leads me to believe that this whole ‘caring public service’ thing is just a tick box talking-point.

Kiss your taxes goodbye – they’re not even making the pen-pushers happy.

Picture from here.

Easy does it

They’re killing us by accident. Mostly.

Stan and Julia both post about the off-duty policeman who followed a mother who chastised her kid in public, and who then caused officers to visit her home, and warn her about her child-rearing methods and to warn her that she was now on the local authority’s list for years to come.

As Julia points out, they don’t seem to be so keen to follow up real cases of persistent child abuse from people who just might kick off in court, or in police stations, or on their doorsteps if police ask them how they’re bringing up their kids. Thanks to The Ranting Penguin, we learn that this one got away with arson. Baby P was seen often and his awful plight ignored but there are many cases of officialdom picking on the law-abiding, but it’s not only because they’re Gramscian Marxists, but because they are officials.

It’s not deadly, yet. What happens is that, if officials aren’t kept to their duties; to the idea that some conduct is wrong; that there are duties as well as rights that their ‘customers’ have, then anything is seen to go, and eventually the loudest and the nastiest will prevail – out of bureaucratic inertia.

This is so true in the whacky world of welfare benefits. Those who politely ask how their benefit claim is coming on because the bills are mounting up are told that their claim will be paid in chronological order. Please wait your turn. Take a number. All in due course. Those who ring or visit every single day are helped faster because otherwise their harassment of officials will waste even more time. Screamers go straight to the head of the queue, and will have their cases looked at again and again even though they are not entitled or are only minimally entitled because they’ve got enough money already. We put up with under-age kids who say they’ll get pregnant if they don’t get the accommodation they want – and not report them to the police. What manager wants the fuss of the Data Protection ‘issues’ that would arrive on his or her desk a week later? We fail to report to Social Services families who are clearly having too many children for their meagre accommodation to be safe or well-rested – let alone to get any homework done, ever.

Don’t rock the boat, don’t tick the boxes marked ‘refer’ or ‘call security.’ It’s just too much trouble.

So the irresponsible breeders and the drunks and the junkies who can come into the office and raise merry hell or to keep our phone lines busy and keep other work undone get a free pass and the red carpet treatment. We’re taught to be customer–friendly, non-judgemental, and diverse. We mustn’t think of them as scum or ever allude to their misdeeds (that’s never stated openly – it’s just part of ‘customer service.’)

So the Baby Ps it kills by inertia, and the seven kids squeezed into a housing association terrace built for four people, tops, whilst the parents trouser the benefits intended to buy more for them, and they’re well on their way to uneducated criminality, addiction and knife fighting to pas the time. The Reds are right in this one: poor housing kills because it creates poor human beings who kill or die young.

All this lacks malice and conspiracy on officialdom’s part – but still people die.

It gets worse, as Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips point out.

Once extreme political correctness is added to the amoral moral equivalence of state bureaucracies everywhere, then the biggest fuss-makers and the biggest kickers-off of all get a free pass for years - until the get the message and decide to spread the word big-time.

And then the innocent die in handfuls.

The Milky Bar Kid

Gordon Brown must stay on because there is still much work to do. Such as dealing with this little beauty….

There are certain combinations of words and phrases which, when they’re placed together in a single sentence, somehow always manage to make my heart sink towards the earth’s fiery and demon-haunted core.

Specially extended and Jane Austen season are a typical pairing. Interrupt our regular programming and semi-finals form another; as indeed do premature and flaccid.

Police chiefs and scheme are right in there, too.

This is from the Blackpool Citizen.

POLICE bosses are offering officers a month’s supply of free chocolate in a new incentive scheme.
An MP has criticised the ‘staggering’ offer which he said amounted to ‘bribery’.
But police chiefs heralded the scheme as a success for getting people talking about the new policing pledge.
Posters, featuring a doctored Cadbury’s Wispa bar, have gone up in police stations across Lancashire promoting the offer.
They are designed to encourage officers to read the details of the new Government-led pledge on a intranet site, which sets out the force’s promises to the public.
It says: “Give us a taste of what the pledge means to you and win a month’s supply of chocolate!”
Those who take part are asked to read the 10 points contained in the pledge and then answer questions on the internal staff website.
The winner takes a chocolate bar of their choice a day for a month.

Ho ho ho. We can all giggle at the PC absurdity of this, and there’s more that I recommend you read. Now, maybe the police need a bit of fun, a bit of off-the wall trivia to keep themselves cheerful and enthusiastic in these dark days. Inspector Gadget and others look like their dedication could do with the odd sugar rush as they try to keep the lid on it and live to tell the tale.

The offer has split opinion in Lancashire police stations, with some praising it and others labelling it childish....
One officer wrote: “If you want to bribe people into reading the policing pledge then you should not be offering chocolate.”
Another queried the cost and time of putting up the posters, while a third wrote: “I'm sick and tired of seeing these damn chocolate bars all over the police station.”
But another posting, claiming to be from the department behind the plan, said the campaign had worked because it got staff talking and denied it was ‘childish and unprofessional’.
It added: “We often get criticised for churning out the same old corporate stuff from HQ, so when we stray away from the norm to try and get some attention on an issue that is vitally important for the force.
"I am disappointed that some people can't support this approach.

Cut to the chase #1

“The campaign is aimed at getting staff talking about the pledge within the constabulary and logging onto our intranet site to find out more and plenty of people have.

Pledge? What pledge is that? The Drinkers in Blue have got off the Paddy Wagon and up on the water wagon, perhaps?

Cut to the chase # 2.

This pledge, dear reader; The Policing Pledge, (not to be confused with the much more serious-minded The Sorting Hat.

Just in case you still believe that the officer who wrote The campaign is aimed at getting staff talking about the pledge within the constabulary was the stupidest public sector employee since records began, someone on a Civil Service pension actually tried to draw attention to it and to justify it. It’s here. On the DirectGov website; HMG’s Window for the World.

‘All police forces across the whole of the England and Wales have signed up to provide the same level of service to their communities. This means that it will be easier to have your say on how they police your local area, and guarantees that wherever you live, you can expect the same, high level of service.’

Here comes the Pledge…

THE POLICE SERVICE IN ENGLAND AND WALES WILL SUPPORT LAW
ABIDING CITIZENS AND PURSUE CRIMINALS RELENTLESSLY TO KEEP
YOU AND YOUR NEIGHBOURHOODS SAFE FROM HARM. WE WILL:

1. Always treat you fairly with dignity and respect ensuring you have fair access to our services at a time that is
reasonable and suitable for you.
2. Provide you with information so you know who your dedicated Neighbourhood Policing Team is, wherethey are based, how to contact them and how to work with them.
3. Ensure your Neighbourhood Policing Team and other police patrols are visible and on your patch at timeswhen they will be most effective and when you tell us you most need them. We will ensure your team are not taken away from neighbourhood business more than is absolutely necessary. They will spend at least 80% of their time visibly working in your neighbourhood, tackling your priorities. Staff turnover will be minimised.
4. Respond to every message directed to your Neighbourhood Policing Team within 24 hours and, where necessary, provide a more detailed response as soon as we can.
5. Aim to answer 999 calls within 10 seconds, deploying to emergencies immediately giving an estimated time of arrival, getting to you safely, and as quickly as possible. In urban areas, we will aim to get to you within 15 minutes and in rural areas within 20 minutes.
6. Answer all non-emergency calls promptly. If attendance is needed, send a patrol giving you an estimated time of arrival, and:
• If you are vulnerable or upset aim to be with you within 60 minutes.
• If you are calling about an issue that we have agreed with your community will be a neighbourhood
priority and attendance is required, we will aim to be with you within 60 minutes.
• Alternatively, if appropriate, we will make an appointment to see you at a time that fits in with your life and within 48 hours.
• If agreed that attendance is not necessary we will give you advice, answer your questions and/or put
you in touch with someone who can help.
7. Arrange regular public meetings to agree your priorities, at least once a month, giving you a chance to meetyour local team with other members of your community. These will include opportunities such as surgeries,street briefings and mobile police station visits which will be arranged to meet local needs and requirements.
8. Provide monthly updates on progress, and on local crime and policing issues. This will include the provision of crime maps, information on specific crimes and what happened to those brought to justice, details ofwhat action we and our partners are taking to make your neighbourhood safer and information on how your force is performing.
9. If you have been a victim of crime agree with you how often you would like to be kept informed of
progress in your case and for how long. You have the right to be kept informed at least every month if you wish and for as long as is reasonable.
10. Acknowledge any dissatisfaction with the service you have received within 24 hours of reporting it to us. To help us fully resolve the matter, discuss with you how it will be handled, give you an opportunity to talk in person to someone about your concerns and agree with you what will be done about them and how quickly.
We want to do our best for you but if we fail to met our Pledge we wil always explain why it has not ben posible on that ocasion to deliver the high standards to which we aspire and you deserve.


Good Lord.

This has to be the final victory of the Bureaucratic Borg Mentality standing triumphant over a cringing and utterly defeated Planet Reality.

Shorn of its 21st Century touch-feely jargon and despite Her Majesty’s Government’s unwillingness to employ spin doctors who can use a spell-checker – and how well does that run in ordering pharmaceuticals for the NHS, or armoured personnel carriers for the Armed Forces, I wonder? -, and boiled down to remove the obvious middle-management beaulieux, pardon my French, and the terrible response-time targets, how different is the above Pledge from something like old-fashioned street policing from local coppers who knew their jobs and working out of a local nick?

What has it taken; what folly, what waste of resources, what politically-motivated squandering of common sense and policing experience, what abandonment of long-evolved training routines and a century and a half of police force organization and good practice to produce a Home Office/MinJust prepared to boast about its promise to encourage police forces to read a document that commits the officers concerned to think really hard about doing their jobs?

Is that the villain of the piece? Is it that the leaders now have to shove chocolate goodness at policemen because they need to remind them what other leaders have trained and indoctrinated and personel-managementally developed and ignored reality and neglected out of them? Read the blogs above - I don’t think that you’ll think that all duty and sense and dedication have gone from below the famous blue helmet…


Maybe it is needful despite that, but in another way.
Maybe they’re busy doing something else – maybe they’re being directed to do something other than supporting law abiding citizens and pursue criminals relentlessly to keep them and their neighbourhoods safe from harm when they missed out on slamming these two known maniacs back in the slammer.

Dano Sonnex and Nigel Farmer have been jailed for life for the murders of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez…
Police failed to enforce an arrest warrant for 16 days, despite Sonnex being notorious in the local community, while officers passed his case file from desk-to-desk.

The police weren’t all alone in this litany of failure, missing documents, and non-existent communication - far from it as other agencies and individuals were involved all along the line - but some police officers (and quite senior ones I’d guess) would have been given fancy titles and desks and PCs and ‘resources’ to organize, plan, record, oversee,and add value to the police input into probation cases. And they didn’t do their jobs.

Maybe they were writing pledges.
Or handing out chocolate bars.


So maybe the Chief Paymaster of ten years, and for the past two years The Great Leader: the All-seeing Statesman, Brilliant Economist, Supreme Diplomat: Unequalled Scholar; Mighty Poet and Landscape Gardener and Father Of His People might look up from his perfect position atop our economy where he is planning even now bring Britain out of its foreign-made recession and consider the possibility of thinking about inviting some senior coppers to enable their front-line officers to have the chance to put into place forward-looking strategies to sometimes prevent know psychos from slaughtering students.



Who knows – do you think it might be Gordie's last chance of an approving place in the history-books?




No. Me neither.

The Bible's shortest verse

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I just love that last slogan.

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