Startled by the kindness

Armchair twitter aficionados managed to track down a gang of thugs who had put two victims in hospital after a brutal beating.  Within eight minutes of the police releasing CCTV footage (remarkably clear compared to the usual hazy footage) of the gang walking down a Philadelphia pavement.  The sleuths used Facebook pictures to find the first thug.  Success in tracking down the rest soon followed.  The thugs like all of us post photographs on Facebook of them in large groups celebrating.  This perennial desire to take selfies, share personal information, names and details online became a breadcrumb trail to all the gang members.  The whole thing triggered by a single twitter on the attack.  The police were able to arrest the whole gang swiftly.  A tale of success is a rare event in our online existence.  Usually, online presence is a contributor to bullying, abuse, an invitation to porn, a conduit to online gambling etc none of which have outcomes usually of much benefit to mankind.

My mother’s hometown of Ballymoney in Northern Ireland has spent money buying huge live-like photographs to stick in shop windows in derelict streets.  

It has become all the rage and Belfast etc abounds in these fake shops.  You drive past a camera shop, flower shop, an old fashioned bakery that remind you of villages of childhood. All completely fake.  

Instead of boarded up premises you seem to see quaint country life around you.  Even a fake walled garden with flowers peeping around corners.  One old cinema has for several years had pasted across it an optimistic sign across its front in foot high print proudly boasting “New hotel to be built here 2012”.  No one bothers to change the date so the lie continues to boost of forthcoming non-existing developments.  

I’m not sure why but all of this plunges me into despair.  It reminds me of Catherine the Great’s 18^th century triumphal procession through the streets of Russia.  When fronts of buildings on the route were made to look grand and areas spruced up to create a pleasing spectacle for the Empress as she passed.  These hid from her sight the destitution and poverty that existed (or so the legend goes).

When was it that we learned to shut off our brains to the truth?  That having a pretence of normality was better than acknowledging facts?  In these days when the gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider, the general public’s time is channelled into buying someone else’s rubbish or lining the pockets of the rich via clever schemes.  Our virtual online web placates us while a growing proportion (perhaps 37%-70%) is devoted to porn.  Turn to the local newspaper (tabloid) and find what illuminates the general public today.  They are aimed at those with an average reading age of 11, I kid you not!  The Sun is famous for many tragic covers, but remains the most popular tabloid.  For example “The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in Sheffield on 15 April 1989, in which 96 people died as a result of their injuries, proved to be, as the paper later admitted, the "most terrible" blunder in its history.”  They claimed “ that some fans picked the pockets of crushed victims, that others urinated on members of the emergency services as they tried to help and that some even assaulted a police constable "whilst he was administering the kiss of life to a patient.”  All complete rot but it took over two decades before the truth was allowed to emerge.  Another memorable release was On 17 November 1989, The Sun headlined a page 2 news story titled "STRAIGHT SEX CANNOT GIVE YOU AIDS – OFFICIAL."   

Oh yes, indeed these guys have no morals or squeamishness about publishing complete lies.  The Sun remains popular to this day but in Liverpool because of the Hillsborough coverage it is still not favoured.  The northern populace has a long memory of the Sun’s betrayal of the truth and many newspaper shops to this day refuse to even stock the paper.  Such tabloids brimming with salacious titbits and massive misinformation are I fear unlikely to produce an enlightened populace.

I started this by pointing out how technology was used to solve a crime.  There are things that, with the right call can be used as a force for good in this world.  Behind the curtain of distracting smoke screens, fears, fancies lie millions of good people.  Start talking to someone/anyone in the supermarket, on a train, bus, visiting the hospital and you will be startled by the kindness that is there in almost every heart.  So, I choose to look at all the crap we are awash with in video/print/audio and feel it has become the scum on the surface of society.  It no longer reflects the reality of what lies within but the churned up pollution that floats to the surface.  Just beneath, I want to think there is an ocean of kindness.  Good people all around the world who do their best in spite of a system that seems to play by its own corrupt rules.

The One That Got Away

Abraham Wald, was a gentle kind-hearted man with a genius that was breathtaking.  He was born in Hungary in 1902 and was the son of a Jewish baker.  Fascinated with equations he studied hard and became a graduate student at the University of Vienna.  His mentor was the great mathematician Karl Menger.  Karl Menger had attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Vienna where two of his fellow students were Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1938 ) and Richard Kuhn (Nobel Prize for Physics in 1945).  It is perverse that in just one city during a short period of time so many great minds began their careers.

Menger would pose problems to the young Wald, problems that stumped great minds across academia.  Wald would spend time reflecting on his given task and invariably return within a month with a solution to the problem and an urgent request for another to solve.  His hunger for problems and ability to solve them became known to mathematicians in the US.  When the Nazi threat grew this mathematical prodigy was able to flee, albeit reluctantly, to the US from Vienna.  It was a timely move.  His entire family of nine members, bar one single brother, died in the extermination camp Auschwitz.

Wald was put to work in the US on the Applied Mathematics Panel.  This group was posed questions by the military and they would use their mathematical ability to answer the query.  For example, the navy was trying to shoot torpedoes against Japanese vessels  The panel was able to work out the speed of the ship from the distance between the crests of waves.  They then had to factor in some adjustments to take into account the turning motion of the ship but once they had the equations their predictions matched real life experience and proved invaluable in targeting ships.  At times what appeared real life observations could be the thing that gives you a totally wrong answer. 

The World War 2 bombing crews would limp back home peppered by bullet holes.  So high were the losses, the military examined the planes that returned to see what particular areas on the plane needed reinforced with steel plates.  It would be impossible to reinforce the entire plane as they could not fly with such weight.  After careful investigation they noticed that the bullet holes were found mostly along the wings, down the centre of the body and in the tail.  The military wanted to put the armour on the areas where holes appeared to be clustered.  Wald with his usual insightful genius stated that putting the armour there would be of no benefit at all.  He had instantly recognised that the holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still make it home.  The armour should be put on the areas where there were no bullet holes, the engine, stabilisers etc.  Any bullet hitting those would never have made it home.  He could see the survivor bias that was derailing the statistical analysis the military was so proud of.

This quiet likeable genius was an inspired problem solver.  It was his passion and his talent.  Wald published papers on geometry which were described, by his mentor Menger, as:-

... deep, beautiful and of fundamental importance.

He was an excellent teacher who was renown for being

“ a master at deriving complicated results in amazingly simple ways”.

He died in his late forties while on a lecture tour in India in a plane crash.  Having saved so many who flew, with his mathematical genius, it is strangely disturbing that it was a plane that ended his life.

A Restless Soul

A Restless Soul

To tread the path beneath

A restless soul upon this earth

Searching, listening ever alert

To find new vistas and thoughts

The four walls a cage that consumes

The fire within

Designed to burn in ecstasy

At the magnificence of this world

No fire breaks of deadening routine

To block this furnace of the soul

The wind whipping it along

Seeking fresh fuel to speed its progress

Never content to be indoors

A captive of the box

We gild, decorate and own

Not realising all this, owns us

There is a hunger here

That is not about possessions

To have, to lose, to gloat

The void cannot be filled

No trinket, no clothes or food or drink

No designer palace, or wide screen TV

No youtube video or TV series or person

Can fill the cavity, rotting within

You heart longs for a the pad of feet

Outside beating a age old rhythm

Of fresh air against skin

The reassuring resistance of the ground

Soon we will rest beneath this soil

Time for stillness, when encased

In our wooden armour

Riveted in place

our meagre portion of time gone

To act, a call to arms
to implement change, a hope of life
so I pound these pavements
searching progress, fighting stagnation

Some moments you die for
a glimpse of the beauty without
resonating with the longing within
filling that space with aching joy

When killing is the best option

Murderers are a breed apart, one thinks.  Who in their right mind would take the life of another person?  Are they monsters? Do they not appreciate the preciousness of life, any life.  Yesterday, I had no sympathy whatsoever for those who take way that most fundamental human right, existence.

What changed my mind?  An incredible film entitled, ‘Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father’.  It is a documentary that chronicles the appalling confusion that followed the murder of a young doctor by an ex-girlfriend.  It is a film that touches your heart on so many levels and you know right from the start it will have no happy ending.  However, there is a scene where the victim’s father berates himself that he did not murder the ex-girlfriend.  He described how he planned it, thought through the method, how he would carry it off.  Instead of being appalled you, like me, will find yourself also regretting he did not carry out the killing.  On so many levels, it would have been just.  It would have saved yet another innocent life, apart from his son’s, it would have left him incarcerated for murder but undoubtedly it would have been the right thing to do.  His anguish comes from the fact that he did not commit a murder.

I reckon by now you are shocked that I am recommending murder as a just action.  Can there be any justification for such a step?  Well, think about it.  Imagine someone you loved, God forbid, was horrifically viciously killed at the hand of a sadistic killer.  Conjure up not only the unbearable loss of the person who makes this world joyous, but also factor in that the one who snuffed out that precious life is walking around free.   Perhaps you will even meet them in the supermarket.  You will have to wait from 1- 6 years (an average of four) before even the nightmare trial occurs.  Every day they walk free upon the earth while your loved one rots beneath it, lash upon your soul.  The justice system expects you to be civilised and await the cogs of justice to turn, to give them their sentence.  Meanwhile you must weigh up if you can swallow the impossible, endure what cannot be born, be patient and long suffering.  

Well, the honest news is you probably will do your best.  No one likes vigilantes.  Society requires laws.  The framework that upholds civil society and stops a chaotic free for all.   The even greater loss of life that revenge killing triggers.  Just because someone takes a life does not justify a reciprocal action.  The difficulty is those rational arguments will struggle with your own heart stopping pain.  If it becomes unbearable you will crack.

In my local town, in N Ireland, a young grammar school boy was playing in the school grounds when two older teenagers jumped the wall and beat him so badly he was left permanently brain damaged.  He had done nothing to instigate the attack, no provocation, no history of ill feeling.  Just two vicious thugs who thought it would be fun to beat the uniformed boy to a pulp.  They were subsequently sentenced to 6 months in juvenile detention.  A year later, the father of the severely disabled schoolboy met the two attackers giggling as they passed him in the main street of the town.  He went home and wept his pain, howled his anger to the skies but took no revenge.  Would you be able to do the same?

Years ago a friend of mine was subjected to horrific domestic abuse on the Greek island where we lived.  When she left to find sanctuary her husband was so enraged he punched me through my car window.  Filling assault charges in the local police station, availed nothing.  It would be years (and was) before it would be heard in court.  Meanwhile my friend and my family were vulnerable to this local bully.  Talking on the phone to my seventy-year-old mother in NI she became very concerned about the seriousness of the situation.  She also was alarmed that my young children might be targeted in his tactics of intimidation.  She then announced that if he killed me, she would be on the next flight to take him out.  I was amused at the venom in this tiny white haired ex-teacher who had never even committed a traffic offence.  I took her statement purely as an expression of her love and concern.  So it was startling this summer, when I found myself during a visit questioning her on whether she would have indeed carried out the murder.  My now, eighty two year old mother confirmed that there was absolutely no doubt about her carrying out the killing.  She was deadly serious!  I found it disconcerting because she is a warm loving righteous person.  So, if such a person can contemplate murder how many good souls rot in prison because the intolerable happened to them and killing became an easier option that letting a perpetrator live?

If our justice system acted efficiently and promptly such issues would rarely arise.  The shocking truth is that murder trials take years and in those years there are often more deaths and more pain.  

In Belgium, Marc Dutroux was convicted for car theft, muggings and drug dealing.  This was only the start of his criminal career.  He went on to the abducting and raping five young girls.  He liked to torture his victims and keep them in cages in his home.  When convicted for this crime he got a prison sentence of thirteen years.  Unbelievably, he was released, wait for it, for good behaviour after serving only three years.  This despite his own mother writing to the prison director to say he would continue to kidnap young girls if released.  Which, of course he did.  Inevitably, he kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six more girls from 1995 to 1996, ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom he murdered.  The incompetence of the judicial system and the police in their handling of the killer brought 300,000 people onto the streets of Brussels in protest.  Despite the public call for judicial reform, Dutroux was held in prison without trial for a further 8 years!  He claimed he was part of an elite paedophile ring involving judges, police and parliamentarians.  Not bringing him to trial would obviously protect those other shadowy characters.  However, he was a killer and how much can we trust this vile man?  The delay was so long there was a discussion that Dutroux might have to be released as his human rights had been denied him.  Okay, are you feeling murderous yet?  Imagine how the parents of those violated, tortured children felt?  To rub salt in the wound, in 1998, Dutroux while was being moved from prison he managed to escape police custody for several hours.  Right by now even the gentle soul among you must be boiling in rage about now?  Fortunately, he was caught and is back behind bars.  His wife is free.  She who was told by Dutroux to feed two caged girls in their home and their dogs, while he was in prison.  She decided to feed the dogs but not the girls and they starved to death.  She now walks the streets of Brussels and those parents who have lost their innocent children know it.  Do you begin to feel the red mist of rage descend?  

Well, my point here is not to enrage you but to allow you to see that all of us are capable of murder under the right circumstances.  Whether that is driven by fanatical prejudice, a desire for revenge, to protect those you love – the list is endless.  The worrying point is when the good in our midst become murderers.  Our justice system (flawed as it can be), can handle a small percentage of vile vicious killers (albeit taking forever to do it) and it can imprison those who would take other’s lives (though the US tally of 2.4 million prisoners is extraordinary). When the system is so flawed and incompetent that the victim’s relatives can find no real sense of justice you have a system that instead of imprisoning killers actually contributes to the making of more!  The bad are ever with us, but when our judicial system makes even the good and long suffering bad, what exactly is its point?

There are no easy answers.  Of course the law must be upheld.  Caracas, Venezuela is an example where ‘tit for tat’ gang killings have tortured an entire city.  In wars killing becomes the main agenda and those whose joy is to hurt, control and destroy come into their own.  In a civilised society the structure is upheld by two pillars reward and punishment.  Those who take a life need to be severely punished and it should happen quickly and efficiently.  The legal system should not be allowed to draw the whole business out into a veritable cash cow.  The urgency of justice should not sacrifice the right of defence.  Even the guilty deserve their day in court.  But the innocent need the reward of an effective court system that respects their rights too.  The dead victims and their families too often end up bit players in a main show that crucifies them slowly and methodically week after week, month after month and even year after year.

If good people begin to kill there is something very wrong.  Our legal system should be designed to deal with those who break the law, commit a crime.  It should not take the innocent and twist them until they crack and become the killers the system is designed to take off our streets.

‘Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father’ is an extraordinary film and I urge everyone to watch it.  Be influenced by it and seek to change a badly flawed system.  The wonderful parents shown in the film forge their love and pain into a cry for justice for others.  They deserve to be heard.

Recording rancid rants in roasting rage

I fear I melt

Like an enormous unwanted ice cream

Dripping sweat

Beyond the ken of tissues or towels

Stewing in the juice

Of exertion

Head lifted to hunt for the breeze

Mechanically engineered from above

Down air ducts

Tucked away unseen

Useless tubes that are ineffectual

Because the doors to the balcony are open

Here in this airless café

The air conditioner wrestles

To cool all of Malta

Instead of hot melting me

I sit outraged

That steaming helps vegetables

Keep fresh and crisp

But reduces me to a sodden mass

Baked outside

Beaten within

The doors are automatic

Beyond my ability to close

Like much of life

We have very little control

Except to record our vitriol

Our objections to it all

To sit in silent sullen sogginess

Recording rancid rants in roasting rage

Dandelion Children - appreciate their extraordinary hardy beauty

Recent research has talked of ‘orchid children’ – those who without special nurturing and attention fail to bloom.  They have the potential to achieve a lot but with improper care can spiral downwards into addiction, self-abuse, depression etc.  There have been many articles on these orchid children – how to identify, help and encourage them flourish.  Parent’s websites and magazines abound in strategies to help them.

However, the 'dandelion children', those who thrive despite hardships tend to creep under the radar.  This piece is designed to celebrate these little rays of sunshine that make the world brighter despite being given an incredibly hard start in life.

Dandelion children they call you

No rare orchid sensitive to water and light

A resilient hardy species

Whose ugly roots go deep beneath the surface.

Through hardship they must dig deep.

Burrowing painfully in dark places.

Enduring pain and suffering

Not nurturing and kindness.

All that digging bears fruit

The bright-headed dandelion has roots

Fragrant flowers would die for.

Cheerfully resilient they are found everywhere!

Needing no brush to help them fertilise

No tender handling for efficient growth

Tear them out, eradicate with determination.

These deep roots will send shoots

Of new growth towards the light.

Dam them, enjoy them, endure them

They will out.

Once spent in their blazing brightness

They multiple a hundred fold

Scattering their off spring

With sweet abandon.

Knowing that these are a breed apart

Using every obstacle as a stepping stone

All setbacks an opportunity

To inwardly reflect

On lessons to be learned.

Steeled against philosophical circular ponderings

Or self-conscious preoccupation.

They've learned not to blame

What cannot be changed.

The dandelion children state their claim on life

Painting their happy sunshine colour

Prosaically common

Outshining the pretty and the rare.

Hounded to death by the corrupt - Aaron Swartz a warning to future coders

The government has decided to re-haul our education system and as well as banning a lot of US authors from the English syllabus (what the hell?) they have also decreed that all school kids should be able to write computer code.  This, of course, is in the hope that, like Estonia, a bunch of these youngsters will come up with something like Skype and bring riches to the nation’s coffers.  Their present attempts to get their hands on the pensions of so many workers (See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326105/Teachers-NHS-staff-pension-income-slashed-third.html) continues unabated but such tinkering with the education system has not a good history.  Educational reforms usually end badly.  Throwing away phonetics eventually spelt illiteracy (forgive my pun), not requiring times tables left innumeracy in its wake.  So what about code writing?  Would creating a generation of programming geniuses end well? 

Jonathan James was an exceptional programmer and became a hacker.  He was caught up in a raid by the US secret service involved in an identity theft scam of TJX.  It is unsure if he had any involvement but probably, some of his older acquaintances did.  Being raided was a big thing, as was the threat of prosecution.  Suddenly, the cool skills he’d cultivated got him in deep trouble.  It seems, behind a console, hackers like so many of us, feel that the boundaries between make believe and real life blur.  Most of us would never dream of stealing but a high percentage of us will happily download a favourite series/film and feel secretly smug and not as guilty as we should.  This weird virtual world of the web has its own laws but the general public has yet to register that this ‘anything goes’ frontier has no go areas.  Downloading the wrong images can lead to imprisonment at a time when most of the public has a naïve attitude to kids and friends using their computers, fail to install effective firewalls and have loads of unsolicited files on their hard drives they are totally unaware of.

Back to Jonathan, two weeks after that raid by the secret service, he took his own life and left a suicide note which read,

“I honestly, honestly had nothing to do with TJX.  I have no faith in the justice system.  Perhaps my actions today will send a stronger message to the public.  Either way, I have lost control over this situation and this is my only way to gain control.”

Of course Massachusetts Assistant US Attorney Stephan Heyman, who pursued Jonathan, was also the one who hounded Aaron Swartz until he too took his own life on Jan 11 in 2013.

Aaron, like Jonathan, was a technological genius.  At the age of 14 he authored the RSS web syndication, at 19 he co programmed the social news and entertainment website Reddit.  He founded Demand Progress, a group advocating against Internet censorship bills.  By the age of 24, Swartz was a Harvard research fellow conducting studies on political corruption.  One colleague spoke of Aaron’s motivation,

“What kind of millionaire founder of a tech website chooses to spend time sitting in a congressional office (as Aaron did) to really understand the work flow?  No one.  That doesn't happen.  He was a basic technocratic liberal who thought that if you worked really hard and approached a problem with openness and curiosity, then it was possible you could make life better for people.”

It was in pursuance of that goal that he downloaded academic journals from a JSTOR database in MIT.  This crime, and it is undoubtedly a crime, did not justify the 35 years and 1 million dollar fine that the US Attorney Stephen Heyman sought.

Aaron Swartz once he knew imprisonment was inevitable took his own life.  To be frank MIT/JSTOR are left tainted along with the US Justice system.  Another young coder dead, at the hands of a system that needs honest self-examination.  As long as governments enthuse about the possibility of young coders they should also be honest about the deadly big stick awaiting brilliant nerds that step out of line.  The ‘over the top’ reaction becomes even more obscene when one realises, in hindsight, that these institutions are often frighteningly more corrupt than those they hound to death. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/gallery/massachusetts_indicted_politicians/