Three days ago we posted a piece linking to an article by Luke Salkeld for the Daily Mail, concerning Yasmin Thomas, the 21-year-old estate agent who was spared a custodial sentence after being convicted of her 18th case of assault and battery. In the latest case she smashed a glass into the face of 24-year-old Ronnie Lee in a bar. He was lucky not to have lost an eye.

In today’s paper there’s another article by Luke Salkeld, on the same topic – here. A key extract:

Yesterday Mr Lee said he was disgusted at the leniency of the sentence, which includes an anger management course. He said:

‘If it was the other way around and I did that to her, I would be going straight to jail. What happens next time if she does something and it’s life threatening? She could end up killing someone. She’s got 18 convictions already. She’s a danger to herself and others around her.

‘If someone had the number of convictions she’s got I would think for at least one of them there would be a lesson learnt. I don’t think the justice system has provided a judgment that set will set an example.’

When Boko Haram kidnapped a large number of Nigerian schoolgirls some months ago, David Cameron, Barrack Obama, and other leaders, along with many celebrities, made public statements about the matter. Collectively they’ve said nothing publicly about the many killings of Nigerian men and boys in recent years. and they’ll say nothing publicly about the latest kidnapping of men and boys – 97 of them.

The article’s headline fails to identify the gender of those kidnapped – inconceivable if women and/or girls has been kidnapped – and the article states that 28 ‘people’ were killed. In this context, we can be virtually certain that ‘people’ means men and boys.

In 2010 the Coalition Agreement committed the ensuing government to restoring anonymity for people accused of sexual assaults. The government reneged on the commitment once in office, predictably, so due to a CPS now led by a hatchet-faced feminist, Alison Saunders, we’re seeing a series of allegations against prominent elderly men alleged to have committed sexual assaults up to 50 years ago. Elderly women, prominent or otherwise, are never targeted in this way.

Many of the accused men have been cleared on all counts, but their reputations lie in tatters, and some have come close to bankruptcy after paying crippling legal costs. The latest suspect is Sir Cliff Richard, who the police haven’t even questioned yet.

14 months ago a man made an allegation to the police (for the first time) that he’d been abused by Cliff Richard at a Christian rally in 1985 – 29 years ago – when he was under 16. For 29 years he’d remained silent. The police colluded with the BBC – it’s about time it was renamed the Feminist Broadcasting Corporation – to film from a helicopter the police raid on one of Cliff Richard’s homes. A report on the matter in the Daily Telegraph. An extract:

Sir Cliff, 73, believes the high-profile raid was no more than a “fishing expedition” designed to generate publicity and encourage people to “come out of the woodwork”. He has been warned that as a result of the new information which police will now have to follow up, it may be “weeks” or even longer before detectives are ready to speak to him, leaving him in limbo for a lengthy period of time.

This was posted on AVfM two days ago. Paul Elam’s response to Amanda Marcotte’s ‘offer’ was right on the money, needless to say – and we loved Angry Harry’s two comments. The first has already attracted 94 upvotes, and we agree strongly with his position:

I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, negotiate with those revolting feminists.

His second comment has attracted 56 upvotes:

That felt so good, I upvoted myself.

A new article from Ali – insightful and powerful, as always. I recall a BBC documentary in which soldiers were putting their lives at risk in an area of Afghanistan largely controlled by the Taliban. Female ‘soldiers’ were being transported to villages to teach Afghani women and girls about the evils of the ‘patriarchy’. Occasionally they were in firefights with the Taliban. One female ‘soldier’ was asked what she did during the firefights. She cheerfully retorted, ‘I hit the deck and let the boys sort things out!’ We can be sure these female soldiers were on the same salaries as the men who were risking their lives to protect them whilst they spread their poisonous feminist ideology. Meanwhile their sons and brothers, some as young as 12, members of the supposed ‘oppressor class’, were in the fields armed with rifles in a desperate effort to protect their villages from Taliban raids.

Our thanks to Ian for pointing us to this article about life in Wormwood Scrubs. Anyone who believes prison is ‘soft’ for male inmates should read it, and we’ll be covering prison conditions in our election manifesto. Selected extracts:

The Scrubs, a Victorian jail completed in 1891, houses nearly 1,300 inmates. The atmosphere in its five wings has seriously deteriorated in the past year, and is anything but relaxed.

Drug abuse and bullying are rife. The huge number of mentally ill, drug-addicted, alcoholic and foreign prisoners — around 40 per cent of its population are from overseas — adds to the phenomenal burden…

Staff shortages mean inmates are often locked up in cells for up to 23 hours a day. That is why the place often felt like a simmering pressure cooker. Turmoil was never far from the surface, with physical assaults part of life…

I recognised many inmates came from difficult backgrounds, and large numbers had been brought up in dysfunctional or criminal families, but an equally significant issue was the number with mental health problems.

It has been estimated that 72 per cent of male prisoners in Britain have at least two mental disorders. [our emphasis] At Wormwood Scrubs, the number of registered mental health prisoners regularly reached 700 a month. If the mentally unwell had been taken out, the prison would have been far less dangerous and overcrowded…

Poor hygiene was also an issue. Convicted prisoners are only officially allowed one shower and one change of prison-issue tracksuit and bed linen a week. The lack of adequate staff for the prison laundry meant clean clothes were not always available.

Nor, for security reasons, were cell windows adequate for proper ventilation. A hot summer was particularly difficult for prisoners in the upper landings where temperatures could soar unbearably. Animals would not be allowed to be confined in such uncomfortable conditions, but I was told there was little that could be done, since electric fans were regarded as too expensive and potentially dangerous weapons if taken apart…

Much of the physical structure, like the antiquated heating system, is outdated, and half the kitchen ovens were usually out of action.

Staff shortages — particularly after cuts kicked in last October — meant wings regularly went into lock down, so prisoners cannot attend the library, or training courses or workshops, which are all meant to be part of their rehabilitation…

The jail’s catering budget, for example, amounts to just £1.87 per prisoner per day, yet for that sum the kitchens have to produce three meals a day, with five choices of main course at dinner to meet all cultural requirements, including religious festivals, vegetarianism and medical conditions like coeliac intolerance…

After ten years as a member of the Independent Monitoring Board, the last three as Chair, I felt mounting despair. The heavy cuts imposedby the Ministry of Justice have diminished staff levels and worsened conditions.

This is not only inhumane but also counter-productive, for it reinforces the cycle of offending: 60 per cent of ex-prisoners are re-convicted within two years of their release.

For the sake of our society, there has to be a better way, which protects the community but also makes prisoners want to change. The long-term warehousing of the mentally-ill must stop, and they should be kept to specialist jails. [our emphasis]

It is sometimes said that we can judge a civilisation by how it treats its prisoners. On that criterion, we are failing badly.

We recently published a post about the first female commander of a British warship being sent back to the UK after allegedly having an affair with a married (male) officer. Our thanks to Martin for pointing us to another article about the consequences of mixed gender crews, from another warship, USS Cowpens.

The Chinese military top brass must be delighted every time they read stories like these, which demonstrate the West is more concerned with driving gender equality initiatives than ensuring military effectiveness. The key extracts from the article:

The weirdness started when Cowpens arrived back home under the leadership not of her captain or her executive officer — her Number One — but of a relatively junior officer. The skipper had taken ill and confined himself to quarters. There was no executive officer. The previous one had departed for other duty and his relief was delayed en route. That left the chief engineer, a department head with 11 years’ experience, to oversee not just the engineering plant — a big enough job in itself, trust me — but also the operations and administration of one of America’s premier surface warships.

The weirdness continued when the relationship between the (male) skipper and (female) chief-engineer-cum-acting-captain came to light. The engineer, it appears, more or less moved in with the captain, cooking him dinner five or six times per week.

For reasons that remain a mystery, the navy inquiry that established the salient facts and meted out judgment balked at finding the two culpable for fraternization. But the weirdness climaxed with this nugget: apparently no one in Cowpens‘ organizational chain of command had any inkling about this state of affairs until the vessel moored back home. No officer, no senior enlisted, no crewman dispatched an email or other communique alerting the brass.

Not for nothing does Larter term this a scene from The Twilight Zone. Where’s Rod Serling when you need him? A few takeaways from the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. One, ships are still islands — in effect self-contained societies — once they cast off all lines.

This is less true than in the days before wireless communication, to be sure. Far less. Crewmen can avail themselves of modern communications unless the command restricts emissions — as ships sometimes do to avoid detection. For the most part, though, remaining silent is no longer a brute fact of life. It’s a matter of choice. Why no Cowpens crewman chose to report the outlandish circumstances remains an open question.

Sal’s candidate explanation — misplaced loyalty to individuals rather than to the service — seems as plausible as any. Occam’s Razor applies.

Two, if ships remain islands, commanding officers remain their tribal chieftains. Authors from Herman Melville to Mark Twain attest to the autonomy and near-absolute rule afforded naval and merchant skippers on the high seas. Richard McKenna (a navy enlisted man and author, of Sand Pebbles fame) wrote an undergraduate paper at the University of North Carolina assessing the sociology of his ship out in the Pacific. One wonders what McKenna would’ve made of Cowpens, her absentee potentate, and the wardroom’s and crew’s efforts to make shift. Methinks it wouldn’t be pretty: McKenna had a sharp pen.

Three, leaderless societies often come to grief. Sal sees a silver lining lining the dark cloud around Cowpens. Namely, that a relatively junior officer rallied the crew and brought the ship through its journey without major mishap. And indeed, this would be a quasi-heartwarming tale had the crew, minus its doughty skipper, brought Cowpens home in fighting trim. But the navy inquisitors faulted the crew for neglecting the ship’s material condition and, more troublingly, for “gundecking” personnel qualifications. The flight deck, for instance, had deteriorated to a point where it was unsafe to operate helicopters. Good upkeep signifies professional excellence, slipshod upkeep something worrisome.

Gundecking — faking, in other words — qualifications is another symptom of cultural decay aboard ship.

Our thanks to Ian for another of his contributions to our ever-expanding ‘You couldn’t make this s*** up’ file. If the map leads to feminists staying away from the Grand Union Canal in Berkhamsted, the local residents will surely be happier, local house prices will rise sharply…

Perhaps the whole canal and its footpaths could be designated the UK’s first feminist-free zone? A small step on the way to making the whole country feminist-free, perhaps. Now wouldn’t that make for a more contended, less dysfunctional country to live in? Here’s the map.

It was such a pleasure meeting Karen Straughan and other female anti-feminists at the Detroit conference. This is her presentation to the conference, both the video and the associated transcript. I was far from alone in crying with laughter in the final few minutes, when Karen spoke about the famous Honey Badger video, which you can access through this link.

Not only do we ‘need’ more women in boardrooms – one consequence is corporate financial decline, but who cares other than Campaign for Merit in Business? – we ‘need’ more women to be judges, engineers, MPs, airline pilots etc. What could possibly go wrong? From the article:

Air traffic controllers in Ankara had to issue an emergency warning to the co-pilot on duty, who the paper said “did not notice that the aircraft had lost altitude” because she was using her tablet computer at the time.

We ‘need’ more women in highly-paid desirable jobs in the same way we ‘need’ more white sprinters in the men’s 100 metres Olympic final. ManWomanMyth produced a famous video on that very subject. Enjoy.