A judge has sentenced the anal wart Bernie Madoff to 150 years in prison, which sounds about right to me. I'm sure Daily Mail readers would have preferred 300 years, but making sure he'll spend this life and two or three of his afterlives in prison seems to me to be consistent with the scale of his crimes.
To put the length of time into perspective, 150 years ago Charles Darwin published "Origin of the Species", Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister and Isambard Kingdom Brunel died.
I've seen comments to the effect that the victims of Madoff's deceit were rich and stupid, and so somehow less deserving of our pity and the protection of the Law. These are likely to be the same people who think that a rape is less of a rape if the victim was beautiful and friendly.
And anyway, it's not true that the victims were rich and stupid. Many of them were middle-class people whose advisers got suckered. Some of them were exceptional people like Bill Foxton whose response to being wiped out by Madoff was to go to a public park near his home in Southampton, lie on a bench, and shoot himself in the head.
Some of the biggest banks in the world were victims too. Even Yeshiva University was taken for several million dollars. Bernie Madoff was a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange - not some shiny-suited high-pressure salesman.
It really could have happened to any of us. Read the account of the sentencing hearing, which includes the testimony of some of these victims. And then tell me that fraud is a "white collar" crime where the victims had it coming.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Hammers, Spinach and Dairy-Free Cheese
One of the quotations I overuse is
Think of Popeye, whose solution to everything is to eat spinach and hit people hard in the head. It seemed to work for him, but his problems did tend to be rather same-y. Or as Kurt Vonnegut would have it :-
It's a phenomenon I've seen in my Magistrating also. There was one man who had several mental health issues and an industrial-strength case of alcoholism. He had been arrested in the picturesque town square, out of his head on supermarket cider, shouting at the pigeons. This was pretty usual behaviour with him, and the police would usually just have moved him on. But on this occasion, he then decided to urinate against a car, neglected to do his trousers back up and started shouting at the people who were trying very, very hard to pretend he didn't exist.
Magistrates have hammers. Quite a few varieties of them, but all we have is hammers.
This guy hadn't committed any offence serious enough to deserve jail, and in fact our guidelines specifically rule out that option. So we left that hammer alone.
He had no money, so fining him was an exercise in futility.
We could impose all kinds of community penalties - but he was incapable of doing work or abiding by any kind of discipline due to his many mental issues and crushing alcoholism.
We could give him something called a Conditional Discharge which says that if he keeps his nose clean (and his trousers zipped up correctly) then there will be no penalty. But, if he commits this crime again, he'll get sentenced for that matter plus a bit extra. He had committed score of similar offences, and I could see this was a popular choice for the benches who had seen him previously. Didn't seem to be working.
There's also something called an Absolute Discharge, where no penalty is imposed. What you are saying here is that the public interest is not served by imposing any penalties. The offence will be on their record and after you've had a good talking-to by the Chair, you can go home.
We chose this final option. It's not a solution, but one thing you learn quickly as a Magistrate is that we can't solve problems. Because all we have is a bunch of hammers, and sometime hammers just don't get the job done.
***************
On a lighter note, here is Stanetta's guide to what's worth having in her new world of dairy-free food :-
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".This is confidently attributed to Mark Twain in many places around the Internet, but most smart things are. Whoever was responsible for it, it's a profound truth that when all you have is X, then X will be your primary way of getting things done.
Think of Popeye, whose solution to everything is to eat spinach and hit people hard in the head. It seemed to work for him, but his problems did tend to be rather same-y. Or as Kurt Vonnegut would have it :-
"The military men want us to find the bad guys and put bullets through their brains. These are not always the best solutions--particularly in the fields of sewage disposal and birth control."Stanetta has had some abdominal problems - she's been back and forward to hospital. She saw a surgeon - who decided the solution was cutting her appendix out. She saw an Accident & Emergency consultant and got a fistful of drugs. Then she saw her GP, who actually gave the matter some thought and suggested she give up dairy products. Which seems to be working.
It's a phenomenon I've seen in my Magistrating also. There was one man who had several mental health issues and an industrial-strength case of alcoholism. He had been arrested in the picturesque town square, out of his head on supermarket cider, shouting at the pigeons. This was pretty usual behaviour with him, and the police would usually just have moved him on. But on this occasion, he then decided to urinate against a car, neglected to do his trousers back up and started shouting at the people who were trying very, very hard to pretend he didn't exist.
Magistrates have hammers. Quite a few varieties of them, but all we have is hammers.
This guy hadn't committed any offence serious enough to deserve jail, and in fact our guidelines specifically rule out that option. So we left that hammer alone.
He had no money, so fining him was an exercise in futility.
We could impose all kinds of community penalties - but he was incapable of doing work or abiding by any kind of discipline due to his many mental issues and crushing alcoholism.
We could give him something called a Conditional Discharge which says that if he keeps his nose clean (and his trousers zipped up correctly) then there will be no penalty. But, if he commits this crime again, he'll get sentenced for that matter plus a bit extra. He had committed score of similar offences, and I could see this was a popular choice for the benches who had seen him previously. Didn't seem to be working.
There's also something called an Absolute Discharge, where no penalty is imposed. What you are saying here is that the public interest is not served by imposing any penalties. The offence will be on their record and after you've had a good talking-to by the Chair, you can go home.
We chose this final option. It's not a solution, but one thing you learn quickly as a Magistrate is that we can't solve problems. Because all we have is a bunch of hammers, and sometime hammers just don't get the job done.
***************
On a lighter note, here is Stanetta's guide to what's worth having in her new world of dairy-free food :-
Company | Where found | Product | Rating /5 | Comments |
Provanel organic | Holland and Barret | Soya chocolate flavoured milk | 0/5 | Truly disgusting, tasted like sick |
Sainsbury's free from | Sainsbury’s | Chocolate bar and rice crispies | 5/5 | Yummy! Just like real chocolate |
Sainsbury’s free from | Sainsbury’s | Chocolate bar | 5/5 | Yummy! Just like real chocolate |
Sainsbury’s free from | Sainsbury's | Chocolate brownies | 3/5 | Ok, wouldn’t call them Brownies, more chocolate flavoured stuff... |
Provanel organic | Holland and Barret | Chocolate soya dessert | 1/5 | Went from ok to overly sweet to cardboard to yuck... |
Pure | Holland and Barret | Dairy free butter | 4/5 | It was good- nice and creamy! However, not like the real thing. |
Toffuti | Holland and Barret | Dairy free cheese | 1/5 | Regurgitated cheese anyone? |
Toffuti | Holland and Barret | Dairy free rock and roll ice cream cones | 4/5 | Nice ice cream, the nuts and the soggy cone were a bit of a letdown though |
Alpro soya | Sainsbury's | Unsweetened soya milk | 3/5 | Ok, not like real milk, like cold custard. NB not good with scrambled egg |
Monday, June 22, 2009
Free Stan's Radio
The medium of writing was most possibly invented six thousand years ago in what is now Iraq. Presumably "reading" was invented around about the same time.
The medium of singing was invented much earlier when a caveman dropped a big boulder on their foot and the rest of tribe had such great fun copying the noise he made.
This of course was the birth of Rock music.
Radio is a much more recent invention, being just a tad more than a century old. Unlike writing and music, it hasn't changed all that much since it was invented, mostly because it just works. Now some spanner (sorry, I meant to say "His Lordship, Lord Carter of Barnes") wants to force us to scrap our various radios and go buy some of these new fangled DAB digital sets.
Digital radio is rather excellent. Apart from the expense of the equipment. And the electrical power it needs. And the totally hopeless reception you get.
Actually, come to think of it, digital radio is completely hopeless. I could use a bent coathanger as an aerial on my analog set and pick up Radio 4 in perfect stereo. On my DAB set, if the wind blows or if someone in the room moves, the signal disappears.
You see, it's like forcing every cyclist in the country to scrap their bicycles and get motor bikes instead. Expensive, badly-tuned bulky motorbikes with terrible fuel economy at that. How do these people not understand that some of us don't want over-engineered solutions to problems we haven't got ?!
Don't read the whole report - you will lose the will to live and when you close your eyes you will dream in management jargon and pseudo-scientific technobabble. The chapter on the future of radio is here for those who want to see what the fuss is about.
A final piece of advice : the only people who talk about "platforms" that are worth listening to are railway announcers. Lord Carter mentions the word five times in the first page of that chapter. He doesn't work in a railway station.
The medium of singing was invented much earlier when a caveman dropped a big boulder on their foot and the rest of tribe had such great fun copying the noise he made.
This of course was the birth of Rock music.
Radio is a much more recent invention, being just a tad more than a century old. Unlike writing and music, it hasn't changed all that much since it was invented, mostly because it just works. Now some spanner (sorry, I meant to say "His Lordship, Lord Carter of Barnes") wants to force us to scrap our various radios and go buy some of these new fangled DAB digital sets.
Digital radio is rather excellent. Apart from the expense of the equipment. And the electrical power it needs. And the totally hopeless reception you get.
Actually, come to think of it, digital radio is completely hopeless. I could use a bent coathanger as an aerial on my analog set and pick up Radio 4 in perfect stereo. On my DAB set, if the wind blows or if someone in the room moves, the signal disappears.
You see, it's like forcing every cyclist in the country to scrap their bicycles and get motor bikes instead. Expensive, badly-tuned bulky motorbikes with terrible fuel economy at that. How do these people not understand that some of us don't want over-engineered solutions to problems we haven't got ?!
Don't read the whole report - you will lose the will to live and when you close your eyes you will dream in management jargon and pseudo-scientific technobabble. The chapter on the future of radio is here for those who want to see what the fuss is about.
A final piece of advice : the only people who talk about "platforms" that are worth listening to are railway announcers. Lord Carter mentions the word five times in the first page of that chapter. He doesn't work in a railway station.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Exposed
- "Merrily the feast I'll make.
- Today I'll brew, tomorrow bake;
- Merrily I'll dance and sing,
- For next day will a stranger bring.
- Little does my lady dream
- Rumpelstiltskin is my name!"
You see, whole days can pass when I don't give a thought to blogging or magistration. I listen to music, I do a job, my daughter beats me at Mario Kart (and most other things in fact).
When I do mention my JP activities, I'm very careful to disguise any distinguishing features. Genders are bended and time is warped so that the head of guy who was up for a public order offence last month is likely to end up on the body of a woman I saw on a speeding charge two weeks ago.
Not all bloggers are this careful, and it seems that the award winning (but indiscrete) police blogger NightJack was one of them.
Nevertheless, I'm spitting mad with the Times for outing him. How can they possibly justify doing something quite so at odds with Rule 1 of journalism : "Protect Your Sources"? All I can think is that they are pig sick of The Telegraph getting all the juicy MPs' Expenses stories and couldn't resist a rare exclusive of their own.
Like NightJack, I write anonymously. Well, as anonymously as you can be after writing several hundred thousand words about your life over three years. In actual fact, a good journalist or a mediocre Home Office spook could probably work who I am without breaking a sweat. But why would they ?
Totally changing the subject ... Something odd happened yesterday. According to my weblog someone in London with a PlusNet/Force9 internet connection downloaded 141 of my blog postings to their Windows Vista PC in 23 minutes, which rather skewed the statistics for the blog:-
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I'll probably never know. This is a good thing, and the way things should be. People should be able to read what they want online.
However, in a more repressive regime, the combination of IP address, name of the Internet Service Provider and time of day would be enough for government to track down that person.
The point I'm making here is that there is a slippery slope. It starts with the likes of NightJack, who wrote some disreputable things and were exposed. The next step is for people who haven't written anything bad to be exposed, for fun or profit. The ultimate step is for people to be exposed just for reading something online.
There is nothing wrong with anonymity, we all rely on it in various ways every single day of our lives. I'm finding it very hard to comprehend that as of yesterday, the law does not protect this right.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Clueless No More
It's a stream of feeble puns, older even than the outdated format of the show. The chairman didn't really get into his stride and three quarters of the panel trotted out the same material they've been overusing for half a century.
To summarise - in my honest opinion, the first episode of the new series of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" was by some margin the best programme on TV or radio this year. An absolute delight, and I'm still smirking like am imbecile as I type this.
If you're new to the programme then you've missed fifty series of the best semi-improvised verbal playfulness the world has ever seen. There are running gags, scattergun punning and the groaningest end-of-the-pier innuendo known to man. There are fictional games and invisible sexy assistants. And now there's even Victoria Wood.
For just about all of the fifty previous series the chairman had been the great Humphrey Lyttleton, who brought a jazzman's sense of comic timing to the role. Stephen Fry was the chairman tonight, and although he is a formidable intellect and a considerable comedian, I was disappointed that he didn't really put across any kind of "voice" like he does when he's chairing "QI". On that programme he's geeky, unworldly Fry of Queen's College, Cambridge and it works well there. But it took 6 years of that show to get that voice right, so it is expecting a lot for him to shine on his first day in this job. And by the way, we're talking about a job that the last guy did for thirty years and I swear he was still improving right up to the end.
So why was it my favourite programme of this year when I am so critical of it?
It's simply because I feared the show was dead and that there would be no more of it. For me, this new series was like seeing an old friend in the street - one that I believed was dead. They might not seem quite themselves at the moment, but that doesn't stop you wanting to rush up and give them a huge hug and thank your choice of deity or muppet that they still live.
So, thanks be to Kermit; "Clue" is back ! It's a great comfort to know that I'm guaranteed at least a smile, a groan and a chuckle on Monday evenings.
To summarise - in my honest opinion, the first episode of the new series of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" was by some margin the best programme on TV or radio this year. An absolute delight, and I'm still smirking like am imbecile as I type this.
If you're new to the programme then you've missed fifty series of the best semi-improvised verbal playfulness the world has ever seen. There are running gags, scattergun punning and the groaningest end-of-the-pier innuendo known to man. There are fictional games and invisible sexy assistants. And now there's even Victoria Wood.
For just about all of the fifty previous series the chairman had been the great Humphrey Lyttleton, who brought a jazzman's sense of comic timing to the role. Stephen Fry was the chairman tonight, and although he is a formidable intellect and a considerable comedian, I was disappointed that he didn't really put across any kind of "voice" like he does when he's chairing "QI". On that programme he's geeky, unworldly Fry of Queen's College, Cambridge and it works well there. But it took 6 years of that show to get that voice right, so it is expecting a lot for him to shine on his first day in this job. And by the way, we're talking about a job that the last guy did for thirty years and I swear he was still improving right up to the end.
So why was it my favourite programme of this year when I am so critical of it?
It's simply because I feared the show was dead and that there would be no more of it. For me, this new series was like seeing an old friend in the street - one that I believed was dead. They might not seem quite themselves at the moment, but that doesn't stop you wanting to rush up and give them a huge hug and thank your choice of deity or muppet that they still live.
So, thanks be to Kermit; "Clue" is back ! It's a great comfort to know that I'm guaranteed at least a smile, a groan and a chuckle on Monday evenings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)