The Wolf of Woking

I just couldn’t sleep on my last long-haul flight back into Heathrow. One of the reasons what that they guy next to me, who was a lawyer for one of the big international law firms (and had spent ages marking up a long document with Rothschild written all over it, so not short of a bob or two I would imagine) was watching “The Wolf of Wall Street”. This probably the most socially-irresponsible film to be exhibited to still-forming teenage brains since ‘Rock Around The Clock” had them tearing up the seats in cinemas the length and breadth of the country. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a fraudster who becomes a multi-millionaire building a bogus trading business and eventually gets arrested and sent to jail. His victims were left a couple of hundred million dollars out of pocket. The eponymous hero goes to jail for a few months and is then released to a new life. Propelled in no small measure by the success of the film, he is expected to earn $100m this year from books, speeches, corporate gigs and personal appearances. Once he’s paid back the $50m that is his share of money owed to investors, he will still be quids in. Crime doesn’t pay? Really?

The lawyer was chortling all the way through the film, and my teenage son loved it too. How am I now to persuade him to go off to University to do something socially-useful like engineering or science? The message he got from the film was that cheating people out of money, provided you wear a suit, is excellent fun and delivers girls aplenty.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

In the English film industry, the stunt men work in the accounts department

One of the oddest stories I've seen in the newspaper in months was that of the "fake" film gang who claimed to be making a Hollywood movie in order to obtain some ridiculous sleb-welfare lolly that the (broke) British taxpayer doles out.

The gang submitted claims to HMRC, explaining that they had spent millions of pounds on the film: paying actors and film set managers. Under the tax relief regime for film-makers, they reclaimed £1.5 million in VAT, and nearly £1.3 million in film tax credit claims.

[From Five jailed for fake Hollywood film tax scam - AOL Money UK]

Now, it's absurd that film makers should get this ludicrous subsidy at all. But what's truly absurd about this story is that the film, which went straight to DVD, wasn't that bad! It won a "Silver Ace" award at last year's Las Vegas Film Festival. Compared to an actual British film made with taxpayer money such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men (an unbelievable million quid of funding from the Lottery via the Film Council), it's Citizen Kane.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

Feeling a little blue (helmet)

I see that Iran is ready to contribute to a UN Peacekeeping force to help Britain control its rampaging underclass. Now, normally, the opportunity to have other countries' taxpayers fork out help us would be welcome, but I fear this is one specific idea that I will not support.

Iranian military commanders say that if the United Nations decides to send peacekeepers to the U.K., Iranian troops are ready to go now.

[From Britain Burning: Iran ready to send troops, calls U.K. leaders autocratic oppressors | Blind Bat News]

But in her excellent book Emergency Sex, Heidi Postlewait recounts her time with UN in various places in Europe, Asia and Africa and concludes with a very stark and specific piece of advice (I paraphrase, since I don't have the book to hand) that if some UN chaps with blue helmets arrive at your village and tell you that they are there to protect, grab what you can and run, don't walk, in the opposite direction as fast as you can. So I think we should turn down Iran's kind offer.

However, I can see one area where Iran might be able to provide practical support. Our Prime Minister, David Cameron (Eton, Oxford -- a man well-versed in modern technology and with a Digital Champion to hand in the form of Martha Lane Fox (Westminster, Oxford) who understands modern youth and their use of that technology -- has his finger on the pulse and intends to "crack down" on social media to prevent looting in the future. Now, I understand that in Iran, the revolutionary guards have been forcing suspected troublemakers to log in to their Facebook accounts in front of them so that they can see if the miscreants have been posting counterrevolutionary or blasphemous messages, or if their friends had. Perhaps some Revolutionary Guards could be dispatched to the streets of Hackney, where they could support the Prime Minister's strategy by asking passing youths to log in to Facebook, Twitter and BBM. If they see a message saying something like "Meet at Currys at 3am" then they could execute a citizen's arrest. Job done.

Facebook has been banned in Pakistan for a year or so, and I imagine civil disorder must have fallen substantially in that time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Confused by the news

Internet safety has been back in the news again. Reminds of something I saw a few weeks ago.

The IWF circulates a list to ISPs of sites found to be hosting illegal images of child sexual abuse

[From BBC News - Internet porn block 'not possible' say ISPs]

Is there another list of the sites found to be hosting legal images of child sexual abuse?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The whole "law" thing is very confusing

I am not a lawyer, hence I don't understand the English legal system in the slightest, since the system is constructed by and for them.

There was a fuss among the twitterati, led by Stephen Fry, because a chap twittered that he was going to blow up Nottingham airport. The police, who presumably monitor twitter diligently, arrested him and he was found guilty.

A man who posted a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport is facing a £3,000 bill after losing an appeal against his conviction.

[From BBC News - Man in Twitter bomb threat against airport loses appeal]

A few days later there was another case, involving the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, following on from some of her typically deranged ranting on the BBC.

A Conservative Birmingham City councillor has been arrested over allegations he called on Twitter for a female writer to be stoned to death.

[From BBC News - Tory councillor arrested over Twitter stoning post]

Now, in both of these cases, the person arrested was clearly joking, although the "joke" was pretty poor. Contrast this with the treatment of some people who don't appear to be joking at all.

On November 12, he wrote: ‘Burn your apartment with your family tied to the couch. And slit your throat, so when you scream, only blood comes out.’

[From Facebook death threats: 5 Muslim boys and white girl excluded from school | Mail Online]

Facebook "is the problem"? Oh please. I couldn't find any reference to this story on the BBC, so I've posted the Daily Mail link instead. But I'm curious: why weren't these people arrested? Could a lawyer please help me to understand the difference between the cases? I really don't want to fall foul of the law, but there is a possibility that I may call for someone to murdered in the future, and i want to make sure that I do it the right way. So am I on safe ground if I tweet that I'm going to cut your throat, but not if I tweet that I'm going to blow you up or stone you?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Connections

There are two stories next to each other in the local paper this week. I wonder if there might be some connection between them? The first was a story about an elderly gentleman who has been burgled repeatedly over the last three years. He was commenting on the most recent theft (of a motorbike) and said that he had given the police detailed descriptions of the thieves, but so far the police had not found either the thieves or the bike. The second story was about a day-long police crackdown on drivers on a particular road. They gave out a couple of speeding tickets, a ticket for using a mobile phone, found someone driving uninsured (and fined him £200 -- much less than the cost of insurance) and a few other minor offences. Quite how many policepersons and time this all took isn't mentioned.

Someone has to make choices about what the police do. I have no idea whether they should spend time looking for motorists without insurance or reducing burglaries -- but I know that I wasn't asked.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Freer enterprise

Suppose you wanted to do an experiment to see what the natural set of economic arrangements in society might be, perhaps curious to see if free enterprise is a self-emergent property of economic systems that lack central co-ordination (as it is in World of Warcraft, for example).

The thing to do would be to go somewhere where there is no government and see. Well, the experiment is underway even as we speak. There is a place where the writ of government does not run and people are free to pursue their dreams. Not in some dreary Welsh commune full of welfare warriors, but in everyone's favourite seaside tropical paradise, Somalia.

In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.

[From Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters]

"Criminal" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but this is exactly what my sons and their friends get up to in World of Warcraft: pool effort and go off and kill people and steal their stuff. Anyway, these enterprising heirs to Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, absent Spanish treasure fleets from South America have been raiding treasure fleets from the new Eldorado, the Gulf. And a pretty profitable business it is too.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

[From Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters]

Yes, it's the Indian Ocean Bubble!

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Looney bins

Here in Gordon Brown's Looking Glass Britain, the Land of Perverse Incentives, there has been a steady shift of focus in law enforcement. While the underclass continue to beat their children to death, while honest citizens are stabbed in the street and gangs of feral youths are allowed to roam free,

Leicester City Council recently began fining residents £100 if their wheelie bins were put out on the wrong day.

[From The laughing policemen: 'Inaccurate' data boosts arrest rate - Crime, UK - The Independent]

The idea that law enforcement is about revenues and targets rather than right and wrong is hateful, but you can't blame the police. The government's plan is clear: criminalise things that middle class homeowners might do (eg, overfill the recycling bin) and then target them to push up the revenues, since they are easy to catch and will always pay up

Householders who fail to nominate a neighbour to turn off their alarm while they are away from home can be breaking the law.

[From Blair's 'frenzied law making' : a new offence for every day spent in office - UK Politics, UK - The Independent]

I notice, by the way, that under the torrent of new laws introduced by the Labour government since 1997, such as the crackdown on the wheelie menaces, it is now an offence to set off nuclear explosion in the United Kingdom.

It is now illegal to sell grey squirrels, impersonate a traffic warden or offer Air Traffic Control services without a licence. Creating a nuclear explosion was outlawed in 1998.

[From Blair's 'frenzied law making' : a new offence for every day spent in office - UK Politics, UK - The Independent]

Presumably, had the Iranians managed to float a fission bomb up the Thames and set it off outside Parliament before 1998, we would have only been able to charge them under some noise abatement regulations or perhaps press a more serious case under environmental protection laws. We can all sleep more safely now, knowing that it is a criminal offence.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

You don't need to make this stuff up

The government is on the verge of denying me one of my few remaining simple pleasures, because it's becoming increasingly more difficult to pluck up the courage to open a newspaper in the bizarre looking-glass world that is Brown's Britain. I fought the phobia this morning and managed to get all the way to page 3 (of the Telegraph, I hasten to ad) before I find a story about a criminal case being dropped because the Crown Prosecution Service, the bastard offspring of the Keystone Cops and the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, had (after six months) not managed to photocopy some document that was required for the case. Why hadn't they photocopied it? Well, it was because the "person responsible for photocopying had been off work for an operation".

It reminded of an old joke -- which I think may have been on Spitting Image, but I can't really remember -- about Prince Charles and Lady Diana at the breakfast table. Prince Charles is staring blankly at an envelope and then says to her "where's the letter opener", Lady Diana replies "it's his day off".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The exams get easier, but are they learning any more?

Our criminals are pretty rubbish, which is why the jails are stuffed full. The ones who are any good go and work for banks, whereas the ones who are hopeless are left to terrorise the citizenry with little reward. I notice that Japan, always a go-ahead sort of place, has introduced a sort of 11-plus for criminals. This makes obvious sense: the ones who pass can be sent on the fast track to business school or to some politician's office, whereas the ones who fail can be schooled in practical, day-to-day thuggery.

Japan's largest and most notorious organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is forcing members to take a "gangster exam" in order to reduce costly damages suits, police have discovered.

[From Yakuza group forcing members to take 'gangster exam' - The Mainichi Daily News]

I'm sure that their mechanism for avoiding grade inflation might be seen as a little harsh, but I bet they'll work to keep the standards up.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Working on a chain letter

Cycling along a couple of days ago, I was enjoying a traditional English rural scene. Picking my way round broken glass on the canal towpath, admiring the group of drunken tramps who inhabit the green behind the magistrate's court, I was watching an eclectic collection of rubbish floating by: plastic bags, empty lager cans and a couple of discarded soft drink bottles as normal, but also some bits of wood that looked like a part assembled piece of Ikea furniture and something unidentifiable thing with string trailing behind it. I suddenly wondered why in all the time I have been taking this route (more than a year) I had never seen chain-gangs of young offenders cleaning the mess up, which I thought I had been promised by get-tough no-nonsense pinnacle of probity Hazel Blears when she was a Home Office minister. It turns out that she'd just made it up, there was no such policy, disappointingly.

The move towards US-style chain gangs was suggested by a Home Office minister, Hazel Blears, who said it would improve confidence in the criminal justice system.

[From Community chain-gang plan 'a cheap gimmick' - Crime, UK - The Independent]

This may well have been the only sensible policy that she has ever proposed, but anyway it never happened. It turns out that our tough-on-crime Commissariat opted for more drastic action, requiring young offenders to carry out between 10 and 42 minutes of community service PER WEEK. No wonder our streets are safe again.

Under joint guidance from the Ministry of Justice, Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Youth Justice Board, young criminals may only have to do limited community work.

[From Teenage offenders could do just ten minutes community work a week - Telegraph]

Well, "limited" is one way to put it I suppose.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

News and not news

Settled down on the train after a long day in town and picked up a couple of discarded newspapers to leaf through, thought I'd catch up on the news. Let's see... Doctor kicked to death by muggers near Buckingham palace... Father beaten to death by yobs in own front garden... Members of feral underclass beat to death yet another of their own children (this only happens once a week on average, so I shouldn't exaggerate), the usual kind of thing in a city where you are now seven times more likely to be a crime victim in New York. These stories are hardly news any more.

When I was in Texas last, I remember seeing a story in a local paper about a man who had shot dead someone who trying to rob him. Rather than a prosecution under health & safety regulations, he got some sort of prize from a community association. Needless to say, my brother-in-law's family, who live in Dallas, do not live in fear of yobs beating them up in their front garden or making their lives hell in the town centre on a Friday. I used the think that the American solution -- of segregating the middle class from the underclass -- was primitive and unsustainable, but our alternative (providing generous welfare to the underclass as a kind of danegeld) doesn't seem to be working. I'm racking my brain for a third way.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

They're on drugs, and we're still losing

I see the war on drugs has been going well.

A Royal Navy frigate has seized cocaine with an estimated wholesale value of £33 million from a speedboat off the coast of South America.

[From Royal Navy seize £33m of cocaine from speedboat - Telegraph]

£33 million? Peanuts, a (very literally) a drop in the ocean which won't make the slightest difference to the price of drugs on the street in the UK. Meanwhile, a few miles to the north.

Federal and state agents have arrested 83 people accused of growing more than $1.2 billion worth of marijuana in a crackdown on illegal pot gardens in California's Sierra Nevada range.

[From $1.2 billion worth of pot seized in Calif. - Crime & courts- msnbc.com]

This is a "war" against economics, not against drugs, and is doomed to the same tragic trajectory as other attempts to put the laws of economics into abeyance (cf noted Scottish marxist history lecturer, Gordon Brown).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]