Category: Crime

Categories
Crime Religion

Ireland overtaken by an evil cult of sexually-disturbed nuns

They sold human hair to English wig shops.

Think about that.

With the collusion of the State, they enslaved young girls, imprisoned them, tore their babies from their breast and imprisoned them.  They called those children the Spawn of Satan. They regimented the children of those poor girls, humiliated them, paraded them in front of the town children, dressed them in smocks and made certain sure that they would never have the slightest shred of dignity.

That was what these fine Christian nuns did.

That was what these Brides of Christ achieved in our fine new Catholic independent republic.

That was exactly what these disturbed, frustrated, demented religious women inflicted on the young people of this fine republic.

How many hundreds of babies were flung into a sewer in Tuam?

I want to puke. I want to throw up. I really want to finally express my revulsion at the sort of state these so-called revolutionaries created, when all they managed to do was put our children in the hands of religious lunatics.

The nuns sold human hair to English wig shops, torn from the heads of the poor girls they imprisoned against the law. The nuns sold babies to America and Australia, against the law. The nuns used girls as slaves in their laundries against the law.

And now those same nuns thumb their noses to the law by refusing to release information about the babies they stole, leaving heartbroken mothers bereft.

It’s time these nuns were dragged before a court to answer for themselves instead of issuing callous, dismissive press statements, but of course, what could one expect from people who have never experienced close personal human relationships?

People who might be experiencing extreme personal anger as a result.

People who might be very damaged and unsuitable to look after anyone else.

 

Categories
Crime Sport

Pro10 – the Olympic ticket distribution company that doesn’t distribute Olympic tickets

Pro10 is the official ticket distribution agent for the Olympic Committee of Ireland (OCI). For some reason, however, another, unauthorised company, THG, ended up distributing the tickets at the Rio Olympics, leading to the almighty balls-up we’re now watching in amused horror. THG is owned by Marcus Paul Bruce Evans, Chairman of Ipswich Town FC.

Coincidentally, the Irishman arrested in Rio, Kevin Mallon, had a Paul Bruce listed in his phone.

A quick glance at the Pro10 company records shows the following:

The company’s legal name is KMEPro. K for Ken Murray, M for Michael Glynn and E for Eamonn Collins, the three directors.

The company trades as Pro10 Sports Management

It was set up on the 28th April 2015.

It lists its activities as Business and Management Consultancy

It doesn’t appear to have any experience in ticket distribution or any capability to carry out such work.

Let me just leave you with this: KMEPro has the same postcode as 121 other companies.

Categories
Crime Society

Why is it harder to buy anti-psychotics than a gun in the USA?

As we recoil once again in disbelief after yet another mass killing in the USA, people across the world (and also in America, let it be acknowledged), are asking how a killer could so easily obtain a weapon of mass destruction.  There’s almost no other country in the world where such a thing would be possible and certainly no country among the developed democracies where it would even be contemplated.

Omar Mateen used an Ar-15 to murder 50 people in Orlando and to destroy the lives of 500 more. He used a weapon that he bought in a shop under Florida’s lax gun laws.

The AR-15 is a fearsome weapon, made famous in these parts by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison when he spoke about the Armalite and the ballot box, and yes, that’s what the AR-15 is. An Armalite. Following modifications that increased its weight, it was adopted by the US military as the M-16, a version many military people regarded as inferior to the original which was light, portable and lethal.

We saw that capability in Orlando where a single shooter was able to massacre so many people on his own but we should not be surprised. This weapon, the AR-15, can fire a small projectile at such a high velocity that anyone struck by a bullet, in any part of their body, will almost certainly die. That was the designer’s intention. This weapon can shoot through walls and still kill you. In fact it will kill you worse, since the flying thing that  hits you will be a mis-shapen lump of high-velocity lead that tears a gaping hole in you.

This was also the designer’s intention.

ar 15 assault rifle

Now, the National Rifle Association is seen today as the body that does most to promote gun ownership in the United States and perhaps it is. The NRA is seen as the political wing of the American armaments industry and perhaps that’s true too. But if so, this is a very recent development indeed. If so, this is far from the traditional American attitude to ownership of weapons.

In reality the NRA’s support of unlimited access to weapons is less than forty years old. As far back as 1934, it supported the National Firearms Act, introduced to combat organised crime gangs following the Prohibition era. At that time, Karl Frederick, the NRA President stated as follows:

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. … I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.[/dropshadowbox]

Somehow, between the situation we find ourselves in today and the NRA’s  establishment in 1871 as a response to the perceived inadequacies of American military marksmanship, the NRA morphed from a quasi-official research organisation to a full-blown advocate for the major small-arms manufacturers. It was a classic example of a peripheral obscure quango taken over for profit, regardless of the consequences.  Though it had been lobbying since 1934 for a change to the gun ownership law under the the Second Amendment, that lobbying was on behalf of  hunters and competitive marksmen.

Even as  Charlton Heston entered his 50s, his hands not yet dead or cold, the NRA was still opposing widespread ownership of firearms, and it wasn’t until 1977 that it went fully political, becoming a thinly-disguised front for the arms industry.

Why do so many Americans today believe that the Second Amendment conferred the right to carry high-velocity assault rifles? Nobody knows. The National Rifle Association certainly never claimed any such thing until shortly before Ronald Reagan took office. The framers of the amendment never imagined anything more lethal than a muzzle-loading musket and certainly not a high-velocity automatic rifle that one man could use to shoot fifty people dead. Their concern was about keeping a militia available to defend against the return of the colonial power, and any other reading of the amendment is downright perverse.

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.[/dropshadowbox]

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …

The Second Amendment, which is now entirely superseded by history, has to do with maintaining a militia, not with giving a redneck the right to own a bazooka and yet it has been used to foster a national love affair with firearms.

Perhaps this obsession with guns has been fostered through an endless diet of movies and TV series in which the gun has become an object of fetishistic veneration. Perhaps it was aided by the rise of the Western novel towards the end of the nineteenth century or maybe via the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. Maybe it was the war movies of the forties right up to the present day. Who knows?

What does seem to be true is that many Americans firstly believe the gun is the answer to all life’s problems and secondly that the world consists of good guys and bad guys.

Of course, I can’t say that this childish binary mindset was caused by Hollywood. For all I know, reality is the reverse and Hollywood was caused by this childish mindset, but one way or the other it seems to exist and it seems somehow to have dominated the entire world through force of arms and economic muscle, which might not necessarily be two different things in the case of the United States.

What I find baffling is the complete inability of the USA to see that it is not in any sense the leader of the putative “Free World”, and I’m quite sure this is a feeling shared by most people in Europe and elsewhere when Americans refer to their President as our leader. How much self-delusion is required before a nation can believe such nonsense? How much Orwellian indoctrination? How much insularity? How much ignorance?

Only a nation whose citizens have never travelled abroad could possibly convince itself that its President is the leader of some mythical Free World it knows nothing about.

Is America really Hollywood made real or is Hollywood the real America?  I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that this vast, immensely powerful nation has a juvenile understanding of the world that extends right up to its top echelons as we saw with the utterly stupid invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, culminating in the creation of Islamic State, thanks to a complete disregard for other cultures. They were going in to take out the bad guys and that was all that mattered.

Hollywood might not have intended to create the militaristic tendency of the United States, but the military sure as shootin’ bought into the clichés provided by the film industry, just as the Mafia bought into The Godfather. Pretty soon, you’re not sure who’s talkin’ like who or where it all started. Pretty sure, you start to believe the only guys who can save the Earth from an asteroid strike are Bruce Willis and the crew of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Can-Do-Hoo-Ha!

Naturally, those who support access to firearms will argue that guns make people safer which makes it hard to understand why the United States firearms death rate is five times that of Canada, 50% higher than Mexico’s, five times that of Israel (Israel!), ten times the death rate of Germany and fifty times the rate of the United Kingdom, where nobody has a gun.

On the other hand, if I suffer from a psychotic illness in the United States, while I might not be able to afford the medical care to treat any homicidal tendencies, I can always walk into my local gun store and buy myself an Armalite, with no questions asked.

What was that they said about the  Free World?

____________________

Also on Bock

Orlando murders

The second amendment

Mass murder and the American gun fetish

Gun control in America

 

 

Elsewhere:

New York Times

Categories
Crime

White-collar criminals

I was idly chatting with a friend, as one does, when I remembered a story someone else told me recently.

Two stories, actually, but related to each other. Three, for all I know, or four, or twenty, but let’s keep it down to two for the sake of story-telling.

Last week, I cooked what I can only call an utterly delicious meal worthy of the finest chefs in the land, and I did it for some friends visiting my home.

Here. Have some of this delicious grub, why don’t you? Eat more.  More.  Eat more.

They seemed to like it and I was glad of that because there’s nothing more dispiriting than cooking stuff that people don’t eat. Luckily, my visitors were not only willing to scoff the grub, but happy to take away extra servings which is always a good thing.

What did I make? I’m glad you asked me that.

I made a delicious barbecue sauce for the shoulder of pork we’d been keeping in the freezer, along with baked potatoes in butter and egg-fried rice with shallots. But at the last minute I learned that one of our guests doesn’t eat meat, so I had to cobble together an emergency vegetarian lasagne. I never made a vegetarian lasagne before, but it was good to see how quickly they hoovered it up and even though I made enough to feed the 5th Panzer Division, I handed it out to friends and family, all of whom happily hoovered up the available grub.

Good.

I promise to put up a recipe here soon, although to be honest with you, it’s just a regular lasagne without the meat. With added aubergine, peppers and stuff. And leaves from the bay tree in the garden, bless it. And garden garlic.

Tasty.

As it turns out, the lasagne was extremely tasty, but so was the barbecued pork, gobbled in equal measure by the visitors as we’d like it to be. Why wouldn’t it be?

One of the visitors told us about when he had a flat over the old Eircom building in Henry Street. There was a plant room on the roof and so they lined the walls with shiny fabric, set up some decks and wired it for sound. As one does.

In due course, Eircom sold the building to the Department of Justice and that was how, one night, there came a bang-bang-bang on the door of the plant room as three burly guards stood outside.

Could ye keep it down lads?

What?

Well, you see, the prisoners in the cells are complaining about the noise.

Now, I know you’re thinking exactly the same thing as me. The prisoners in the cells were convicted of nothing and therefore deserved every consideration. I might easily end up a prisoner in one of those cells, should a policeman take a dislike to me.

Be quiet, lads.

Later on, I was telling this story to another friend who wasn’t so forgiving. One time, he said, we were in Jerry O’Dea’s after a funeral, giving it socks, when a prison officer arrived and asked us to keep it down. The lads in the cells were complaining.

Were they now? I thought to myself. Were the poor oppressed skobes upset by people singing? Good.

Yep, he said. We told them to fuck off.

But then it occurred to me that not everyone in prison is a skobe. Some of them are only white-collar criminals.

No, I thought. They’re skobes. Fuck them.

With such ferment going through my mind, I found myself sitting on a bus with an acquaintance who might have more experience of skobes than many of us.

Why was I relying on the bus? Because I was meeting a friend and I calculated, correctly, that there would be a number of beers involved. No driving for Bock.

As we passed the prison, I remarked to my companion that there were worse criminals than skobes.

What? he replied. Are you mad?

Well, I said, the white collar criminals have destroyed the country.

Come here, he said. What would you prefer in the middle of the night? A gang of skobes or a gang of white-collar criminals breaking into your house?

I don’t follow you.

No? If you charge downstairs, would you prefer to meet a skobe in a tracksuit robbing your house or some fucker in expensive loafers?

I paused. Nonplussed.

Where’s loafer-man gone? Straight out the door he came in, leaving a trail of quinoa, gluten-free bread and low-fat milk products stolen from your fridge.

Stuck for words, I uttered the only question possible.

What is your point?

My point, young man, he said, is that we need effective gluten-free policing.

I was grateful that he said young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Crime

Paul Murphy free legal aid story deflects from real injustice

Paul Murphy free legal aidThe decision to grant Paul Murphy free legal aid has attracted widespread derision, much of it justified, but it masks a far deeper injustice routinely inflicted on innocent citizens whenever the State moves to prosecute them. Leave aside the fact that Paul Murphy is paid €87 thousand in salary and that his decision to give most of it to a political movement is his own choice. Leave aside the fact that he drew down an enormous amount of money as an MEP from 2011 to 2014. Forget the fact that he’s also in receipt of expenses.

None of that is relevant to the central injustice of the present system.

As matters stand, any person prosecuted by the State suffers an immediate, severe financial penalty regardless of their guilt or otherwise. Why? Because they have to pay for their defence, and the costs can sometimes dwarf any fine a court might impose.

Therefore, simply by taking the case, the State imposes punishment on every person it chooses to prosecute unless that person can demonstrate inability to pay legal fees.

It’s impossible to understand how this can be fair.

It opens the door for every sort of vexatious, capricious and downright oppressive prosecution. It creates conditions where an unscrupulous official is free to inflict severe punishment on innocent people, knowing full well that the State’s case has no merit and will be thrown out by a jury.

Forget about the court granting Paul Murphy free legal aid. His case is just a side-show and in any event he now has his costs covered, even if his argument was somewhat thin.

It seems obvious that, just as in a civil case, if the State brings a prosecution against a person and fails to prove its case, the accused should not be at a financial loss, so what’s the answer?

Simple.

If an accused person is acquitted, the State should be liable for all their costs, whether that person is a billionaire or a pauper. That’s the risk everyone runs when they take a civil case, so why not a prosecution?

What could be more self-evident?

Categories
Murder

Anders Breivik human rights violated in prison

anders breivik

 

Anders Breivik has won his case. The mass murderer persuaded a Norwegian court that his conditions in prison are inhuman and I’m bound to say that I agree with him. His conditions of incarceration are inhuman. The guards wake him at hourly intervals, sometimes strip-searching him. He’s allowed no contact with anyone except prison staff. He spends at least 22 hours a day alone in his cell.

On the other hand, do I think he deserves that sort of treatment? Of course I do. He set off a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people, and then he murdered 69 kids in cold blood on the island of Utøya. If the decision had been left to me, I’d have fed him slowly into the gearbox of a tractor feet first, but luckily the judicial systems of western democracies are not based on the atavistic rage of people like me.

If we’re going to treat convicted criminals worse than a rabid dog, then we need to be honest and just kill them.

Shoot them and get it over with.

We can’t have it both ways. If we claim to have abolished the death penalty but just replaced it with a system of torture then we are hypocrites, and from what we know of Breivik’s confinement, it certainly amounts to torture.

It has often been said, falsely, that hard cases make bad law when the opposite is in fact true: hard cases test good law and cases don’t come any harder than Breivik’s.

He’s vile. He’s an extremist, a terrorist, a heartless killer. His own father rejected him.

In other words, Anders Breivik is a perfect test of democracy. Do we send people to prison as punishment or for punishment? Admittedly, the jury is out on that one since we have developed a class of people for whom prison is a second home but in the absence of an alternative, what is to be done with the likes of Anders Breivik? Should there be some sort of extrajudicial punishment to be administered at the whim of a prison governor? Should that same governor have the right to punish you or me a little bit more if he disapproves, for instance of our not paying a TV licence?

It can’t happen. You’re either in jail or you’re not and no matter how repellent we might find Anders Breivik, he has been found guilty and sentenced but he was not sentenced to torture, much though we all might have wished for that. He was not sentenced to solitary confinement, without the possibility that he might meet a civilised individual in prison, a person who might perhaps help him to understand the enormity of his actions.

Can it be beyond the wit of man to have Anders Breivik mixing with prisoners who are not Nazis, not white supremacists, not adherents to an ideology that will reinforce his beliefs? Would it not make sense to expose Breivik to intellectual challenge from people who do not fear him, mentally or physically?

After all, if he isn’t in prison for rehabilitation, why not just kill him now? None of us would lose a wink of sleep over it.

________________

Elsewhere

Utøya survivors too often clam up

We survived the Breivik massacre

Categories
Crime

Criminals welcome High Court ruling on suspended sentences

The body representing Irish criminals has welcomed a High Court ruling that suspended sentences are unconstitutional.

In a statement on behalf of the Association of Irish Criminals (AIC), spokesman Barry Smallbore said This is a historic day for criminal rights in Ireland.

Speaking outside the High Court, Mr Smallbore pointed out that Irish criminals deserve protection under the equality  laws.

Our members are the most oppressed minority in Ireland, said Mr Smallbore. Irish criminals are probably the minority most harassed by the police. If our members were African or Muslim, we’d be entitled to equality and it’s not our fault that Africans and Muslims aren’t committing enough crimes to qualify for membership of the AIC.

The only reason the Gardai are oppressing our members  is because we are criminals, and that’s simply not on.

Responding to questions about the High Court decision to strike down the law permitting imprisonment of people who commit a further crime while serving a suspended sentence, Mr Smallbore was direct.

Let me say this.  There are people right now in jail solely on the basis that they are criminals. For no other reason. Are you going to tell their wives, their children, their mothers and grandmothers that they should be in jail just for being criminals?

We in the Association of Irish Criminals welcome the High Court decision and we look forward to the Supreme Court confirming the judgement. Nobody should be in jail solely due to membership of a minority. Criminals deserve the same respect as any other oppressed group in our society.

Categories
Crime Politics

Israeli company helps FBI to crack iPhone

Apple-iPhone-5SCall me innocent if you want to, but I just assumed that the FBI, the CIA and Mossad are able to see everything my electronic devices are doing. I thought Homeland Security knew how many times I boiled my kettle — which is why I use a gas stove (clever or what?) — and I thought they were able to count the number of shirts I iron every week. That would probably explain the extremely bored and overweight CIA shirtwatcher waiting to detect ironing activity chez moi while his career goes nowhere. No promotions in Bock ironing duty.

Yes, I must be naive. I thought every gadget made in the world had a back door built into it as a matter of course so that the FBI wouldn’t have to take Apple to court just because they needed to unlock an iPhone. And failing that, why didn’t the FBI just bring the phone to one of the many Pakistani shops that specialise in unlocking phones? They’re very good at what they do, you know, but maybe the Americans were a bit too invested in profiling and didn’t think it was a good plan to be involving people from the Indian sub-continent in such sensitive matters. After all, it was only this week that a disabled man had his payment bounced by a US bank because his dog was called Dash. The ever-vigilant teller detected that this sounded a lot like Daesh, the contemptuous acronym for ISIS (if it had been written in Arabic) and decided he was a potential terrorist threat. Because of course, a member of Islamic State is going to approach an American bank using a name that ISIS absolutely hates.

You can never be too careful, or too stupid.

Ok. It’s Murica and they aren’t going to use some Pakistani guy in a corner shop to unlock their iPhone, just in case he turns out to be, well, Pakistani and they have to put his name before Obama for the morning kill list.

Are we sending in a drone, Mr President? Huh? Are we?

What did he do?

Well, he fixed the phone while being Pakistani.

Isn’t that like being sort of Afghan?

Yes, Mr President.

Let me get back to you after my early-morning volleyball tango session.

But seriously, I thought they could control everything. I thought nothing in this world was made without a back door and it turns out I was right, but the back door is only for some people. The FBI might not have this access, and the CIA might not have this access. Homeland Security still don’t know how much tea I make and they still believe I iron 18.2 shirts a week. The White House might not have this access, and nor might the Pentagon, but somebody does.

Somebody is able to achieve a feat that the FBI can’t manage and yet nobody in the US security fraternity seems concerned about this fact.

Somebody out there is able to unlock an iPhone without losing its data and this person or body is referred to only as a Third Party.

To explain: the FBI has withdrawn its legal action against Apple since they have been able, with the assistance of what they describe as a third party, to unlock the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter.

According to their status report submitted to the US District Court

The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Faroook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. …

And who might this Third party be? We’re all wondering about that, but informed sources are suggesting that it might be a company located in a country that proudly describes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Now. Won’t it  make you feel a lot more secure tonight as you snuggle into your bed, knowing that the self-proclaimed only democracy in the Middle East has more technological savvy than the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world?

Apple might well be re-examining precisely where its manufacturing contracts are going, who is handling the manufacturing and who exactly has a say in the construction of its products but meanwhile, Bibi’s been reading your texts, Barack.

Stick to that BlackBerry.

Categories
Crime

Damien Dempsey defends Love/Hate actor Stephen Clinch

Stephen Clinch put a loaded gun to a man’s head.

Imagine having a loaded gun put to your head. What would that do to you?  I know that I personally would probably be all right, because I’ve been in many dangerous situations during the course of my life, but I also know that other people would be far more vulnerable. Some people would be scarred for life by such an experience and anyway it doesn’t matter. Nobody should be threatened with death.

Nobody has the right to threaten another person with death as Stephen Clinch did when he put a loaded gun to the cheek of an honest worker transporting money for his employer.

Nobody has the right to punch another man in the face, as Stephen Clinch did when an astonishingly brave worker intervened and prevented him from making off with a bag of money.

Stephen Clinch is a violent robber and it doesn’t matter that he appeared in the successful RTE drama Love/Hate. It doesn’t matter that he spent nine years free of heroin. That’s his own business and his own personal failure. All that matters is that he terrified the life out of two innocent men going about their honest work by threatening them with death.

Why would anyone feel sorry for a man with 17 convictions for robbery and 13 for burglary who got a second chance in life and yet who decided to put a man in fear of his life by placing a loaded gun in his face?

So what if Damien Dempsey said he knew Clinch all his life? So what if Dempsey thinks Clinch was always a friendly face around Donaghmede? So what if Clinch had guided local people into music and acting and warned them about the horrors of addiction?

Stephen Clinch deliberately put a man in fear of his life. He terrorised at least 30 other people with his robberies and his burglaries.

No sympathy here.

He had his chance and he blew it.

Categories
Crime

Burglar caught by his own footprints in flour from neighbour’s apartment

Anthony Rudkin Weston Super Mare burglar flourYou have to love idiot criminals, don’t you?

Here’s a thundering fool called Anthony Rudkin, who waited until his neighbour went out to work and then robbed his flat in Weston-Super-Mare.  Fully equipped for burglary, even bringing a pair of rubber gloves to make sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints, Rudkin crept across the hallway, broke into his neighbour’s home, stealing jewellery and a Playstation and crept back to his own hovel.

The perfect crime, you might say, except that the fool didn’t notice one crucial fact.

Rudkin’s neighbour had dropped a bag of flour on the floor, for reasons yet to be explained, and the idiot robber left a perfect trail of footprints back to his own front door for the police to follow half an hour later when the victim alerted them.

Hmm. A half-baked crime, you’re probably saying. On interrogation, Rudkin’s answers were a trifle tart but in the end his defence crumbled and even though he was using his loaf by owning up quickly, his prompt confession still took the biscuit.

I did it, said Rudkin who’s now facing a jail term of two and a half years.

People say he’ll get out within weeks but there isn’t a grain of truth in that. This guy is toast.