Pure unadulterated hokum, deeply implausible – in other words a typical Arnie action movie scene. Yet, for all of that, deeply satisfying at that Hercules, Samson, Alfred the Great “against all odds” level….

….and when politeness is repulsed by the intimidating and aggressive swagger of the pig ignorant who better than Sly to offer a master class in the need to show a little respect and good manners.

Hokum = “A stock technique for eliciting a desired response from an audience”…

Yes, we fall for it every time…but why? It isn’t so much the violence although the idea of cruel and vicious people being paid back in their own coin generates a certain degree of schadenfreude. What is of greater significance is that it plays out the triumph of good v evil, a moral imperative that, despite our own flawed behaviour, appears to be a key driver in how we wish to be perceived.

Maybe, in our heart of hearts, most of us would prefer to be Robin Hood. Perhaps the time to worry will be when the majority go for the Sheriff of Nottingham….

Since the eruption of the banking crisis in 2008 and the justifiable public anger in the UK & USA at the amount of taxpayers money that had to be pumped into the subsequent bailouts there has been a marked revival of anti-capitalist, class war rhetoric and a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx.

At the same time the bombastic posturing of the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin who now rules Russia with the help of a gang of vindictive and sticky fingered ex secret policemen seeks to restore the reputation of that archetypal left wing dictator Josef Stalin who spent thirty years claiming to have constructed the world’s very first perfect socialist where all men were equal and where all the means of production were controlled by the workers themselves – or rather, since it would be impossible to run a business dependent on the fluctuating wishes of the masses – controlled by the officials of the Communist Party claiming only they knew the “true” wishes and feelings of the working classes.

Russia and communism are both getting a big media makeover.

Which is why every sane man and woman in the west should read “Child 44” by Tim Rob Smith

Read it and realise the true nature of Russia in the 1930s and early 50s, the society that lay behind the Five Year Plans and People’s Arts festivals and the edifice of lies and hypocrisy that was shored up by the Bolshevik hacks and their brutal enforcers – and the useful idiots in the west who fell hook line and sinker for the whole sham.

It is essentially a crime novel in the police procedural mould, a hunt for a serial killer of children in Russia during the 1940s and early 50s during the latter years of the Stalin regime. Or rather the non hunt because the Communists claimed to have created a new kind of society where poverty and greed had been abolished and therefore crime no longer existed. If crimes were committed they were deliberate anti Soviet counter revolutionary acts, political crimes – therefore almost all policing resources were poured into the political police, the NKVD /MVD. Everyday policing was left to the underfunded and despised Militia. It followed that if an act could not be considered a political crime then it just drifted under the radar.

The novel is about an up and coming NKVD officer who upsets his bosses because he wants to track down a serial killer. He continues this obsession even after he is transferred to a dead end Militia placement.

It is a cold story set against the background of the moral vacuum of Soviet Russia where the only imperative is to survive the dead weight of an oppressive and secretive regime. There are disturbing snapshots of the darkness within the NKVD/MVD – one of the most chilling moments is the description of NKVD “specialists” (i.e.torturers) leaving the Lubianka at the end of their shift, going home to their families after a day of breaking bones and smashing bodies as if they were office commuters.
Read it if you can – then keep it burned in your memory next time you see somebody waving a hammer and sickle claiming to represent “the workers” – or watch Putin posturing on a Russian TV clip….

Same report, different reactions….

Overheard at a Guardianista North London dinner party

Overheard in a pub in South London

Overheard in a golf club in Dorking, Surrey

His girl friend compained that he hadn’t made any garlic bread – so he killed her, stabbing her 30 times.

A man was on the edge of a tower block balcony threatening to jump. Neighbours and police were trying to persuade him to get back but below a crowd gathered shouting “Jump”…they got their wish.

This woman was having a night out with friends and family when she was groped by some guy as she walked across the pub. She slapped his face. He smashed her in the face with a glass, leaving one of her eyes permanently damaged.

A couple were at home when they received a call inviting them to a torture party. They joined in the physical abuse of a young man and enjoyed it so much they invited everyone to take him to their house to make his life even more miserable.

No doubt the BBC/Guardian would blame it on THE CUTS – but old Tom Hobbes would have had a different view of a world where morality is mocked and law is absent from the streets…

no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Obviously over the last few days the great and the good at the BBC have become rather unsettled as control over the urban mob violence and looting narrative began slipping through their fingers.

Shocked by the tsunami of contempt that hit them when they tried to frame the discussion in terms of “protestors”, poverty and/or race the Beeboids and their allies in the left wing media/academic cultural elite have been desperately searching for a way of regaining control of the issue by shifting the parameters of the debate.

The initial attempt was laughably unsubtle. Making much of a bevy of leading police officers, spearheaded by ACPOs big cheese Sir Hugh Orde, the aim was to portray the Cameron government as being out of touch. “Leave it to the boys in blue” became the watchword.

Unfortunately the evidence of a lack of leadership and control from the higher echelons at the Met over the first 2/3 days of mob rule in parts of London was so overwhelming that the utterances of Orde and Co. had a very hollow ring.

But, as David Vance at Biased BBC noted yesterday, a new editorial line had been adopted by the BBC suits and programmed into the robotic Sarah Montague as she fed the appropriate cues to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, over sentences handed out to looters. Naturally he came back with the appropriate response – “a collective loss of proportion” This triggered Sarah’s circuitry and produced the key phrase we shall be hearing over and over again at this weekend’s North London dinner parties.

Moral panic.

It’s all out of proportion, you see. There’s no real threat but a lot of opportunists have jumped on this bandwagon to further their own political agenda.

Moral panics allegedly arise when an event is perceived as a threat to society and its values. Those who foment the panic are said to be motivated by a fear of losing control. They therefore attempt to channel potentially disruptive energy by portraying another person or group – “folk devils” – as more of a danger than they actually are. So the Sarah Montague/BBC line appears to be that Cameron is using the riots as an opportunity to demonise the disenfranchised and divert attention from his austerity drive and, strangely enough, that was the angle recently taken by The New York Times…..surprise, surprise….

Heavy stuff, indeed…

But wait a minute – “no real threat but a bandwagon to further an agenda”……”folk devils”…..that seems to ring a bell….

Rupert Murdoch, Anders Breivik, bankers, EDL, AGW deniers, Israelis – now there is a collection of folk devils for you, always presented as the symbols of dark forces ever ready to take us back to some Thatcherite nightmare away from sweetness and light.

Moral panics? At the BBC it’s what we do…..

The New York Times, the house journal of the Obama administration, has obviously been given the nod from the White House to convey an important message to UK Prime Minister David Cameron from the Presidential golf course.

You have got it so wrong on the causes of those riots.

Mr. Cameron…..has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subcultures.

That is so naive.

It’s about being POOR, man. The rioting and looting was a cry for help from the blackberries of the penniless, starving hordes of England’s shanty towns as well as a political protest against Cameron’s savage budget cuts.

What’s that? These are scheduled cuts for 2012-2015? Spending for 2011 is still much the same as previous years?

Irrelevant.

It’s the perception,stupid…..the masses trust only the BBC and the BBC has, since May 2010, been constantly warning them about THE CUTS.

That is why the “protesters” (as the BBC preferred to call them) needed all those flat screen TVs. They were to be used as COMMUNITY SCREENS so that the downtrodden could bypass government propaganda and hear the truth from the BBC.

Fortunately President Obama from his years of executive experience in Chicago can redirect Mr Cameron back onto the path of righteousness.

You don’t solve these problems with “draconian punishments” and “excessive sentences”

Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services……..What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting.

That is how it was done in Chicago by Obama – and it is now, presumably, one of the safest cities in the western world.

So there you have it, Mr Cameron. The NYT is telling you to spend more money and ignore the debt and those scaremongers at the credit rating agencies. I am sure they could put you in touch with the Chinese bankers who have been so helpful to President Obama.

On the other hand…..perhaps you could just tell the NYT to STFU……

Just a few days ago in the Pakistan city of Lahore Muhammad Riaz was feeling very depressed. A very friendly and concerned stranger asked him why he was so unhappy. Mr Riaz told him that with no regular income he was desperate for money.

Don’t worry, the man said, I can fix you up with 110,000 Rupees (about £800) by this evening – and all you have to do is sell one of your kidneys to a wealthy Arab. He is ill, but your kidney will save him, you will still have your other kidney plus about four times what you could earn in a year by doing various odd jobs.

To Mr Riaz that was an almost unimaginable sum of money so he followed the man to a house in Street No 6 Block-A of Al-Faisal Town where he was told to lie down on a stretcher while a doctor made preparations for the transplant operation.

But Mr Riaz began to have second thoughts and, just as the doctor was about to inject him he broke free, ran out of the house and sought assistance from passers –by.

Such were the details presented by police to a magistrate who decided there was a case to answer and remanded two doctors and five other men in custody for further investigation. One of the doctors, however, was not very happy. He said the house was not used for organ transplants but merely as a free clinic for poor people. Moreover he claimed that he was beaten up by one of the police officers and told that if he passed over R700,000 the case would be “forgotten”

Who was telling the truth? Police in Pakistan, like police in many other countries, are not averse to a bit of intimidation and bribery. But Lahore has become a major organ bazaar as thousands of poverty stricken locals are driven to sell bits of their bodies to keep the rest of themselves alive – and there is no shortage of customers for these body parts from wealthy families in every continent. Waiting for a legal above board donation can be frustrating and in countries like China, Egypt and Pakistan there is a ready made medical mafia willing and eager to trouser big bucks for no questions asked medical procedures.

Charging the patient £20,000 and paying the “donor” £800 certainly equals a juicy profit margin though part of that might have to be passed to corrupt police officers – the traffic was recently made illegal after a public hue and cry. However passing a law in Pakistan does not guarantee enforcement in what many believe to be a failing state.

The donors are, like Mr Riaz, from the poorest levels of society – usually Punjabi bonded labourers faced with a lifetime of debt. Just as with the drugs cartels in Mexico whenever there is a demand there will always be supply.

And of course there is always a more chilling dimension to the supply side. A donor can survive with only one kidney but there is also a demand for transplanting other organs – and a child with no family could offer a rich harvest for ruthless and greedy criminals with no soul…..

H/T to Pakistan press: Dawn, Express Tribune, Daily Times

Bruce McQuain at Hot Air posted an eloquent and powerful deconstruction of a recent decision of the Indiana Supreme Court

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
The author of the story reporting this is right – somehow the ISC managed, in one fell swoop, to overturn almost 900 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry. [emphasis mine]

Although Magna Carta (1215) did not stop subsequent medieval kings of England from sometimes acting in a coercive way it was important in that, for the first time, an English king signed a document publicly recognising that his powers were limited by the law.
Of course the barons and prelates who gathered on Runnymede to force King John to sign were mindful of their own privileges and had little concern for the ordinary folk. Nevertheless, from the 16th century, as the position of the commons in parliament became more influential, the rights enshrined in Magna Carta began to have greater resonance. By the time of the early 17th century, in the decades leading up to the English Civil War between King and Parliament the document had assumed a degree of symbolic significance far beyond the original intentions of the baronial clique that had authored it.

Most of the original clauses no longer remain statute law, having been replaced or updated as an adaption to changing circumstances but three clauses still remain as statutes, including this, probably one of the most stirring and majestic proclamations of freedom of all time – not because it burns with fierce oratory but it’s plain matter of fact bluntness in setting out the boundaries of executive authority

No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his free tenement or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go against such a man or send against him save by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell or deny of delay right or justice.

Perhaps a visit to Runnymede would give the justices of the Indiana Supreme Court an opportunity to reflect on the reason why the framers of the US constitution were men who had the imagery of Magna Carta burnt into their very souls…

Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede

….because the British press will stitch you up and hang you out to dry.

25 year old Jo Yeates was last seen in Bristol on December 17th. Two days later her boy friend returned from a visit to relatives and reported her missing. On Christmas morning dog walkers discovered her body three miles from the flat which she and her boy friend rented from Christopher Jefferies.

On December 30th Jefferies was arrested by police on suspicion of murdering Miss Yeates.

Within a matter of hours his picture was on the front page of almost every British newspaper

. He was described as “weird”, “lewd”, “strange”, “creepy”, “angry”, “odd”, “disturbing”, “eccentric”, “a loner” and “unusual” in the course of just one article. That the former English teacher should have liked the classic Oscar Wilde poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was described by one article as “Chris Jefferies’ favourite poem was about killing wife”. That the teacher should have taught pupils about the horror of the Holocaust and a classic novel by Wilkie Collins was described as him being “obsessed with death”. He was accused of being a ‘peeping tom’ by people who never made a complaint to police about his activities.

The tabloids (The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail etc) took the lead on this but the upmarket Daily Telegraph pushed a similar nudge/nudge, wink/wink storyline.

In the 1970s he began teaching English at Clifton College in Bristol, a £9,000-a-term public school, and quickly made waves with his flamboyant style and passion for poetry. A lifelong bachelor, colleagues speculated that he may be homosexual. Former pupils recalled that he preferred the verse of Percy Shelley, the Romantic poet known for his dark, Gothic themes, to the plays of Shakespeare.
To some pupils, he was an inspiration and part of the “fabric of the school”. Others, however, nicknamed him “The Strange Mr Jefferies”, and remembered him for his short temper and autocratic style. One of his students said: “He was a stickler for discipline and was very traditional. He used to get very angry and shout and throw books and pens across the room.
“He used to touch people’s hands and he’d say, ‘Oh you’re very sweaty. That means you’re sexually active’. He was very flamboyant, the way he talked, walked and acted. I think the girls were more creeped out than the boys. He was weird.” Mr Jefferies began a film society at the school, with a particular focus on international cinema. James Alvis, a sports teacher and student at Clifton College in the 1980s, said: “He showed some dark films, he was particularly keen on French films.”

Lifelong bachelor, passion for poetry, short tempered, flamboyant, keen on French films….notice how these phrases are carefully crafted to present an image of sinister intent.

Jefferies was questioned for two days then released on police bail.

Three weeks later a Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak, 33, also a tenant of Christopher Jefferies, was charged with her murder. At the beginning of May he pleaded guilty at a preliminary hearing with a trial set probably for October.

So the case has moved on but Jefferies remains embittered by his treatment by the police and the media and has announced his intention to sue both Avon & Somerset Police and several neswpapers.

Good for him.

Even better news

The High Court today granted the Attorney General’s Office permission to bring contempt of court proceedings against The Sun and the Daily Mirror over their coverage of murdered architect Joanna Yeates and her landlord Chris Jefferies.
The Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC claims the publication of two reports by the Mirror and one by The Sun following Jefferies’ arrest last year created a risk of prejudicing any future trial.

At the very moment the rich and powerful are using expensive lawyers to secure superinjunctions against anybody reporting their alleged misdeeds a completely private individual’s reputation has been indelibly smeared by media innuendo merely for being a rather eccentric loner.

Scared off by the wealthy and their gold hungry legal hacks but contemptuous of ordinary folk without influence – that’s the UK media.

Editors in jail? Millions in fines? Possible but not likely.

Still one can always hope……