The Art Of Dwina Murphy-Gibb

If the name is not familiar to you, Dwina Murphy married Bee Gee Robin Gibb in 1985. Now sixty-six years old, she has been a widow since May 2012. Dwina was born three years to the day after her famous husband, on December 22, 1952. Their first meeting was purely business, but Robin had recently been divorced from his first wife Molly Hullis, and it soon became clear that the stunning, soft spoken Irish blonde would become his soulmate.

Dwina at home with Robin and son RJ.

Although she has not achieved the same colossal heights of fame, Dwina is an accomplished artist in her own right, winning her first art competition at the age of four, and holding her first exhibition at the age of fourteen. Her literary talents include poetry, novels and plays, but fine art is her major talent, much of her work having a mystical or fantasy element to it.

Born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, she studied at Hornsey Art College in London, an institution that has a long list of famous alumni including Roger Glover of Deep Purple, Ray Davies of the Kinks, and Lynsey de Paul who before her rise to fame as a singer-songwriter was a successful commercial artist.

Dwina’s work includes the critically acclaimed play Last Confessions Of A Scallywag, and illustrating a new translation of the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, which was edited by her close friend and independent scholar Terence DuQuesne, who died in 2014. At DuQuesne’s London funeral service and cremation, at which she spoke, the Bee Gee’s song How Deep Is Your Love was played along with part of Titanic Requiem, the latter of which was composed by Robin with their son RJ.

In addition to her own work, Dwina is also a long time patron of the arts. Her other commitments are her family — she has been a grandmother since 2013 — and keeping alive the legacy of her late husband. This latter is easier done than said; a Bee Gee’s song is said to be played on the radio somewhere in the world every fifteen minutes.

You can check out Dwina’s artwork on her personal website, which is linked to the Bee Gee’s sites.

[The above article was first published on Medium, August 12, 2019.]

MSO — Going Strong At 23

The Mind Sports Olympiad was held late last month, finishing as usual on the Bank Holiday Monday.

MSO was first held in 1997, at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank from August 18–24. After the first five events it moved out of London experiencing some difficult years, the nadir of which was 2007 when it was held in a church hall at Potters Bar, but in 2014 it found what appears to be its permanent home, this year being the sixth in a row it had been held at the JW3 centre in North London. Turn outs have been improving slowly.

The man who started it all, David Levy, was absent this year. Co-founder Tony Buzan died in April, while Tony Corfe who has run the event every year since its inception was holidaying in Africa, so it was left to Etan Ilfeld to head a small but dedicated team. California native Etan entered MSO in the 2008 event at the Royal Horticultural Halls; he came to play and stayed to pray, so to speak. As well as organising and playing since 2010, he came up with the novel event of diving chess, which is held off-site. Another player turned organiser is Josef Kollar, who picked up his first medal way back in 1998.

The 2015 event was overshadowed by the tragic death of chess player Michael Uriely, who was just 9 years old. 2015 also saw the introduction of a learn new games room for competitors, which while of little use to chess or bridge players served to introduce people to especially new games, some of which have actually been around for a while. There was no bridge this year due to technical difficulties, but there was what was called a chess bonanza, including variants. Whether it was the prize money or the prestige, the chess events attracted a particularly strong field. The one-time retired grandmaster Matthew Sadler and Russian expatriate Alexander Cherniaev both picked up gold medals as did Natasha Regan, who at one time seemed to have given up chess for the ancient Chinese game, go.

By Tuesday, veteran David Pearce had claimed his fiftieth gold medal in MSO tournaments, but the big event this year as ever was the Pentamind. Over the years, this has been dominated by individuals. Ken Wilshire won the inaugural tournament followed by Demis Hassabis who won it four times in a row then again in 2003. Italian gamester Dario De Toffoli won in 2002 then again in 2012, an impressive jump. The aforementioned David Pearce won in 2007 & 2008 while chess player Ankush Khandelwal and Andres Kuusk of Estonia shared the 2013 trophy. The following year, Andres won outright, and again in 2016. Last year, Ankush — who has been playing MSO since he was at school — won outright, and this year defended the trophy with Andres runner up and another Estonian player, Martin Hobermagi, winning the bronze.

Ankush Khandelwal successfully defended his Pentamind title.

The Mind Sports Olympiad has two websites: the official site and Boardability. It has also long had a presence on Facebook, and has been live streaming on YouTube since last year. A documentary specifically on the Pentamind has recently been released.

Although it has not achieved the heady success hoped by David Levy when it was launched, the Mind Sports concept is now worldwide. Events have been held as far afield as South Korea, which especially saw the 2017 Braining Games and MSO World-Korea Championships. There have also been large contingents of Korean players at the UK events.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, September 2, 2019.]

Should Women Get Away With Murder?

 

For some, the above title is a rhetorical question, or even a ridiculous one. Harriet Wistrich in particular has never met a murderess she didn’t like. In 1990, she and her lesbian lover the man-hating Julie Bindel set up the misnamed Justice For Women, which styles itself “a feminist campaigning organisation that supports, and advocates on behalf of, women who have fought back against or killed violent men.”

For those not in the know, feminism is an ideology that can be summed up in the phrase men are the root of all evil. The corollary of this is that women who do bad things, up to and including serial murder, have no agency. Anytime a woman does something bad, the real cause is a man, a type of man, the mythical patriarchy, anything and everything male rather than the perpetrator herself.

A couple of examples will suffice. If you haven’t heard of Karla Homolka, she is Canada’s most hated woman. As a teenager, she met the handsome, dashing Paul Bernardo, who was already a serial rapist. This was one of those relationships in which “sparks fly”, and from the off they were literally all over each other. Karla’s only defect, as far as Paul was concerned, was that she was not a virgin. Karla’s younger sister Tammy was, so Paul asked her for him. And Karla gave Tammy to him, helping him drug and rape her late one night, filming the act for good measure, and even joining in herself. Tammy died from a reaction to the drug, and for whatever reason, an autopsy was not performed.

What did Karla do next? She married this monster, and joined in his depravity, helping him rape other teenage girls. The climax of this horror was the kidnap and murder on two separate occasions of teenagers Leslie Mahaffy and then Kristen French. The girls were tortured before being killed and dismembered. Eventually, Karla left Bernardo, not because she couldn’t stomach this behaviour, indeed she revelled in it, but because he had taken to beating her as well. When finally the police caught up with him, although they had masses of evidence, Karla was given a sweetheart deal which resulted in her being sentenced to a mere twelve years, which she served in full.

What did Karla do next? She married this monster, and joined in his depravity, helping him rape other teenage girls. The climax of this horror was the kidnap and murder on two separate occasions of teenagers Leslie Mahaffy and then Kristen French. The girls were tortured before being killed and dismembered. Eventually, Karla left Bernardo, not because she couldn’t stomach this behaviour, indeed she revelled in it, but because he had taken to beating her as well. When finally the police caught up with him, although they had masses of evidence, Karla was given a sweetheart deal which resulted in her being sentenced to a mere twelve years, which she served in full.

Karla Homolka with her husband and
partner-in-crime Paul Bernardo.

If Marion Boyd could close her eyes to the evil committed wilfully by Karla Homolka, kook academic Phyllis Chesler can see no evil in the female serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Although she was arrested in January 1991, Wuornos was not executed until 2002, a time lag that is nothing exceptional in Florida. In October 1993, Chesler published RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE: The Case Of Aileen Carol Wuornos in a supposedly academic journal, the Criminal Practice Law Report. This article reads exactly as it sounds. It has also been published elsewhere with a slightly variant title; the thrust of Chesler’s argument is that Wuornos was raped by her first victim, a rape that was so traumatic it sent her over the edge. So Richard Mallory, not Wuornos was responsible or largely responsible for her murder spree. While it is true Mallory was no angel, to put it mildly, there is no credible evidence that he raped Wuornos. Chesler’s article is a wonder to read, and it is difficult to credit that any reputable journal would permit such outrageous special pleading to grace its pages.

Two people who undoubtedly would are the aforementioned Wistrich and Bindel. Their organisation, a registered charity no less, has had mixed results so far. One of their failures was Jane Andrews, who murdered her lover Thomas Cressman in September 2000.

This case caused quite a stir because Andrews had once worked for the Duchess of York. Her husband divorced her for infidelity, following which she began a relationship with Dmitri Horne, who found her to be if not a Jekyll and Hyde character then someone who could oscillate between extreme moods of pleasantness and violence. After he split with her, she began her relationship with Cressman. She appears to have killed him because he had refused to marry her; he was battered with a cricket bat and stabbed with a kitchen knife while he slept.

Jane Andrews with her victim Thomas Cressman.

After initially denying any involvement in his death and leaving clues that he had been murdered by someone else, albeit half-heartedly, she claimed he had assaulted her. In December 2000, prior to the trial, she was granted bail. Since the abolition of capital punishment, it has been unusual but far from unique for someone accused of murder to be granted bail in Britain.

At trial, her legal team put forward a remarkable five-fold defence:

In the first place, the victim’s death was accidental, failing which she had acted in self-defence, failing which she lacked the intent to kill, failing which she had been provoked, failing which she relied on the well-known legal fiction of diminished responsibility. Unsurprisingly, Andrews was convicted, and received the unusually lenient tariff of twelve years for such a terrible crime.

When Justice For Women came on the scene they peddled the lie that Cressman had sexually abused Andrews, and that this had “triggered” memories of childhood sexual abuse. Fresh psychiatric evidence, so-called, was adduced to that effect. In fact, the claims made by Andrews that she had been sexually abused as a child were not new, she had made a similar claim to Cressman, and he had paid for her to see a mental health professional. The Court Of Appeal rightly declined to accept this contrived new evidence.

This claim is also used by men, including murderers and sex offenders. Richard Caputo who murdered four women claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, so did the odious boxer and double rapist Tony Ayala Junior. In the Andrews case, the lies mushroomed, even so, she was parolled in 2015, but in July 2018, it was reported she had been recalled to prison for harassing a former lover.

Wistrich and Bindel’s crowning success, if she can be called that, was teenage prostitute turned murderess and serial false rape accuser Emma Humphreys. On their website and indeed all over the Internet, you can read about the “Inspiring Legacy” of this toxic temptress, but only The Canonisation Of Emma Humphreys gives the true, undiluted facts, although even Wistrich and Bindel admit that eventually they’d had enough of her. Her spurious appeal should never have been allowed, and Humphreys should not have been released from prison for at least another five years, instead she was parolled in July 1995 and was dead by her own hand almost exactly three years later. Wistrich and Bindel must share part of the responsibility for that.

Their latest lost cause is Sally Challen, who although neither a prostitute nor a drug abuser, is even less appealing as a miscarriage of justice than Humphreys because by the time she murdered her husband, they were no longer living as man and wife.

The facts of this case are set out in her 2011 appeal, which saw her tariff reduced from 22 to 18 years. Georgina Sarah Anne Louise Challen, to give her her full, correct name, had been convicted earlier the same year. After battering Richard Challen to death with a hammer, she resolved to throw herself off Beachy Head, a well-known spot for suicides. Instead, she allowed herself to be talked out of it, and stood trial at Guildford Crown Court.

Her first appeal was against sentence only, but Justice For Women claim to have uncovered new evidence, which is...) that he raped her and b) that she was a victim of coercive control.

The allegation of rape and other alleged abuse should not be admitted because it is not fresh evidence and there is no legitimate reason such allegations could not have been raised at the time. Coercive control is a very recent addition to the statute books, but it certainly does exist. Perhaps the most outrageous such case was that of Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum. Nussbaum was a highly intelligent, educated woman, and it beggars belief that she could have allowed Steinberg to do what he did to her. Coercive control can also be exercised over people of low intelligence and those who are dependent on others. It is not always a man on woman or sexual thing. Challen’s problem is that she was not living with her estranged husband, was with him voluntarily on the day of the murder, and to suggest he could have controlled her coercively from a distance would mean validating telepathy.

Smirking murderess Sally Challen.

In addition to that, it was she who left him, she who initiated divorce proceedings, and she who asked a neighbour to spy on him, as well as hacking his e-mails and voice messages. Indeed, when all this is considered, her case has less in common with Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum than with Travis Alexander and Jodi Arias. The Challens had two sons, and one of them is actively supporting her appeal. In a sense this is understandable, having lost one parent is bad enough, but Challen’s legal team have a mountain to climb, and hopefully they will not succeed. Second wave feminism in the form of Wistrich and Bindel and now the pathetic victim narrative that is third wave feminism, have gone much too far; it is time the courts began reigning in this madness.

A woman who kills a man in cold blood is a murderess, not a victim, especially if the crime is premeditated, and even if she claims to have been suffering from some mental aberration. Women are not helpless damsels, they can and should walk away from bad relationships, and like men they can and should be held responsible for their bad acts.

[The above article was first published on Medium, January 8, 2019. One error has not been corrected. The full title of the Phyllis Chesler article is actually A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE: The Case Of Aileen Carol Wuornos; a link has been provided to the article, archived just for you! I should point out that the very first sentence of this article is ludicrous. Wuornos was far from the first female serial killer ever to stand trial in the United States, and far from the worst; angel of death Jane Toppan is but one example.]

The Sin Toyers

Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and elsewhere are calling for the release of a convicted murderess. Read this before you sign one of their deceitful petitions.

Cyntoia Brown — the murderess in pigtails.

One such petition, so typical of the petitions, articles and YouTube videos made in support of Cyntoia Brown, is the one started by “festa federica” of Italy. Addressed to Donald Trump, no less, it closed with 963 Change Dot Org signatures. Many have attracted considerably more.

According to our Italian correspondent:

“Imagine at the age of 16 being sex-trafficked by a pimp named ‘Cut-throat’.-After days of being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men you were purchased by a 43 year old child predator who took you to his house to use you for sex. You end up finding enough courage to fight back and shoot and kill him. You are arrested as result, tried and convicted as an adult sentenced to life in prison. This is the story of Cyntoia Brown. She will be eligible for parole when she is 69 years old.”

This is the well-worn sex trafficking narrative with presumed child sexual abuse thrown in. It is also a tissue of distortions and outright lies. The current media obsession with Brown can be traced to a celebrity known as Rihanna, and to a non-celebrity who will remain nameless.

Before examining what really happened when Brown murdered Johnny Allen, a few words about sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is the new narrative for the oldest profession. Traditionally, a prostitute was a “fallen woman”. In the 1970s, the odious Catherine McKinnon and other second wave feminists began equating prostitution with actual rape. Prostitutes and others working in the rapidly expanding sex industry fought back with the claim that “sex work is real work” and lobbied to both legalise and destigmatise it. Feminists and their allies have now come up with a fourth narrative: sex workers are victims; women have no agency when they are selling sex, and the bad men who buy it from them must be punished.

There is actually room here for both the sex work is real work narrative and the sex trafficking one; sex acts involving coercion or minors can rightly be proscribed by law, and whores can also make an honest living.

Cyntoia Brown was a denizen of Tennessee, where the age of consent is a whopping eighteen, so technically a man of forty-three who has sex with a sixteen year old is committing statutory rape. With that caveat, most people would not regard what happened between Allen and Brown as immoral, and neither should our Italian correspondent, because the age of consent in Italy is fourteen!

Brown’s supporters have drenched the media with sob stories about how she was allegedly raped by her boyfriend/pimp, a man known by the nom de guerre Kut-Throat (spelling varies). His real name is the rather less sinister Garion McGlothen. Some people proselytising this case have claimed Allen was her pimp and that he was known as Kut-Throat. There is really no excuse for such ignorance in the cyber-age.

Whatever the relationship between Brown and McGlothen, she was not a sex trafficking victim; she was a teenage prostitute. One can argue, indeed one should, that this is no life for a teenager, but it was a choice she made freely after running away from the home of her exemplary adoptive mother Ellenette Brown.

On that fatal August 2004 night, she was soliciting when Johnny Allen picked her up in his truck. The most reliable account of what happened next is detailed by the Court Of Criminal Appeals Of Tennessee in its March 11, 2014 judgment. Initially, Brown denied she was a prostitute, denied having sex with Allen, and claimed she went to his house simply to keep him company. She would later admit he propositioned her, she told him her price was $200, he offered $100, and they split the difference.

As far as anything this manipulative psychopath says can be believed, it is clear Allen wanted female company as much as if not more than sex. They did have sex, of that we can be certain, then while he was sleeping, Brown shot him in the back of the head, showered, stole money, and his truck. It would be difficult to imagine a more cruel act of murder against a total stranger who had showed her no harm, had invited her into his home, had paid her for her services, and might at a push have become her protector. And what kind of sex trafficked “victim” carries a revolver in her purse?

Brown was quickly arrested, and was taken to court wearing pigtails, which made her look thirteen whereas before she had clearly made herself up to look older. This and similar tactics are well known, and are best described as damselling.

She was rightly tried as an adult in a state where murder can be capital, although the death penalty is used very sparingly, and it was never on the table for her. She was advised not to testify, probably because her story about killing Allen in self-defence was a tissue of lies refuted by the forensic evidence. On her inevitable conviction, she received a tariff of fifty-one years.

In prison she was given every opportunity to better herself, which she has done, and now we are told she should be released because...

In addition to the lies of Brown herself and her amen corner, we are now told that she should not be held culpable or at least not that culpable due to her suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome. This is a very real condition which can have profound psychological effects as well as physical ones, but one which begs the question, if it led her to kill Johnny Allen then, will it lead her to kill someone else in the future?

In the United States, Governors may grant clemency to prisoners under certain conditions. Recently, the outgoing Governor of Tennessee granted clemency to no fewer than eleven prisoners. Thankfully, Brown was not one of them.

Will she be released one day? Very likely, but regardless of this, we should never forget who is the real victim here. Yes, a sixteen year old should not be judged by the same yardstick as an adult, but every sixteen year old with an IQ of 80, every twelve year old, knows and understands murder is wrong. Brown is said to have an IQ of 134. Whether or not that has been grossly inflated, she has still not faced up to her guilt, and until she does she deserves to remain incarcerated. If she wants to show true remorse she can begin by disavowing the lies that have been peddled about her victim on her behalf. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

[The above article was first published on Medium, December 25, 2018.]

The Mind Sports Olympiad Goes Live

The Mind Sports Olympiad was held in August this year. If you missed it, you can catch up with it on YouTube.

The 2018 Mind Sports was held at JW3 in North London. This was the fifth year in a row it has been held in what now looks like its permanent home. New games are a regular feature of MSO, but this year there was a new feature: livestreaming on YouTube, the video hub of the world.

When I arrived on the Tuesday, in the morning, the livestream was just being set up. Paco Garcia de la Banda was present; the 2010 Pentamind champion and a regular gamester, he told me to my surprise he was not playing but was commentating.

The office has been run by chess organiser Tony Corfe since the inception of MSO in 1997; he looked in this year, but the admin work was carried out by Ben Ross and Carmel Black. Also lending a hand were Etan Ilfeld (the inventor of diving chess), Josef Kollar, and others.

Five livestreams were uploaded by MSO, the first on August 19. The award ceremony was uploaded as a regular video two days after the event had closed. Livestreams were also uploaded by the event sponsor, Bondora. Another sponsor was five times Pentamind winner Demis Hassabis.

The Pentamind is of course the big meta-event, and was won this year by Ankush Khandelwal who turned up on crutches and obviously in pain after an horrific accident on the football field. Runner up was Andres Kuusk. The two men were actually joint winners in 2013, with Andres winning outright in 2011, 2014 and 2016. Ankush is a veteran who has been playing MSO since he was a schoolboy; Andres is a relative newcomer, but like Paco he has not simply been playing games, he has been training the next generation.

Turnout was up this year, including many young players, and now with the added publicity of the YouTube livestream plus sound sponsorship, the future of MSO seems secure.

You can also find MSO on its dedicated website msoworld.com; the results website boardability.com (a couple of years behind); and on Facebook.

The 2018 Pentamind winners.

[The above article was first published on Medium, October 26, 2018.]

The UK Parole Board Has Lost Its Collective Mind

If you thought Friday The Thirteenth was an American film franchise, think again. Seven years before the release of the first film so named, Britain had its own Friday The Thirteenth. On Friday, April 13, 1973, David McGreavy was babysitting for Clive Ralph, the man who had taken him in after his own parents threw him out. Clive and his wife Elsie had not only an eight month old baby girl but another two year old daughter and a four year old son.

Elsie was working a shift at a local public house; the Ralphs were saving for a home of their own; McGreavy had babysat for them before, and there was of course not the slightest indication of the horror that was to come. McGreavy had been drinking, and, annoyed that the baby would not stop crying, he battered her skull in, cut the throat of her sister, and strangled their brother. Then, as if that were not enough, he mutilated all three bodies with a pickaxe handle, and finally impaled them on the railings outside the house.

Proud mother Elsie Ralph (later Urry) with the only extant photograph of her young family.

McGreavy stood trial at Worcester Crown Court on July 30, but as he pleaded guilty there was no trial as such, only a sentencing hearing. Capital punishment had been abolished in England, in practice if not in theory, only seven years earlier, so the judge, Mr Justice Ashworth, gave him the mandatory life sentence with a tariff of twenty years. If the latter sounds unduly lenient, it is doubtful if he believed McGreavy would ever be released. Incidentally, nine years earlier, the same judge had presided over the trial of Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen, the last men to be hanged in Britain. They were executed simultaneously at different prisons.

Mr Justice Ashworth died in 1975; McGreavy was seriously assaulted in prison the same year, but by 1995 he had been transferred to an open prison. Broadly speaking there are two types of prisoners who are sent to open prisons: low risk, non-violent offenders, and longer term prisoners, including murderers. With the abolition of capital punishment, those murderers who are considered safe to be released are sensibly walked back into society gradually, including open prison, day release, and perhaps a half-way house. But surely the authorities could not be considering releasing a man who had butchered three human beings, babies, under such circumstances, or indeed any circumstances? Guess again! In 2006, McGreavy was allowed out of prison unescorted. Clearly someone at the Home Office or elsewhere in the civil service was outraged, and tipped off a tabloid newspaper. After McGreavy was photographed walking the streets of Merseyside, the balloon went up. He is now believed to be back in a closed prison, certainly he was after 2006, but incredibly the Parole Board is again considering his release.

There are a number of petitions on Change Dot Org that have been set up hopefully to stop this. The one at this link

https://www.change.org/p/uk-parliament-triple-child-killer-david-mcgreavy-should-never-be-released-from-prison

has attracted the most support, but to date far fewer than the petition to keep the Black Cab Rapist behind bars. But for considerable public pressure, John Worboys would have been released after serving only ten years, but earlier this year, the High Court quashed the Parole Board’s decision, and Worboys will now remain behind bars for the foreseeable future.

David McGreavy — Friday The Thirteenth for real.

If you think the David McGreavy case was an anomaly and Worboys pulled the wool over the Parole Board’s eyes, think again. Two years ago, Colin Pitchfork was recommended for parole, and has even been allowed out of prison on day release. If the name is not familiar to you, Pitchfork was the first murderer to be brought to book by DNA profiling. In November 1983, he raped and strangled the underage teenager Lynda Mann. In July 1986, another teen was given the same treatment. His other crimes include allowing a none-too-bright teenager to take the rap for the second murder. Pitchfork was convicted in 1988.

Then there is the case of Jane Andrews. She attracted considerable media attention on account of having once worked for a member of the Royal Family. In September 2000, she battered and stabbed her lover to death while he was asleep. In trying to avoid or minimise her responsibility for the crime, she lied persistently, but was convicted the following year. By 2009, when she was already being groomed for release, she absconded from an open prison. In spite of this, she was paroled in 2015, but was recalled to prison this year after harassing a former lover.

To lock up a man or a woman for one year or even one month, is a terrible thing, and to do so for decades on end is unthinkable, but what is the alternative? Clearly the Parole Board believes that at some point even the most depraved of killers should be unleashed on society.

There is though yet another reason the Pitchforks and McGreavys of this world should not be released, that is the sheer cost, because such men will always be the targets for vigilante attacks, not from the families of their victims but from the type of people who think justice should be done properly, or from those simply out to make a name for themselves. Although they are also at risk in prison, it is easier to prevent this sort of thing there by keeping them separated from other inmates.

Should McGreavy in particular be released, he would need to be given a new identity. When rapist and would-be murderer Larry Singleton was paroled after only eight years, the locals were so outraged that he was forced to live in a trailer in the grounds of San Quentin Prison until his parole ended. After that, he moved back to his native Florida where seven years later he stabbed a woman to death.

Rather than face the cost of supplying McGreavy and people like him with new identities then monitoring them closely just in case, the Ministry Of Justice would do much better to spend this scarce money on the rehabilitation of ordinary prisoners, most of whom are selfish or weak rather than simply evil. In the United States, the Trump Administration is doing this. A man who is released from prison with no family ties, no home and scant worldly possessions is already half-way to serving a life sentence on the installment plan, and that’s before we begin talking about drug problems, literacy, work skills, etc.

If the Parole Board does not recognise this simple truth, it should be abolished and replaced with a new institution, or staffed with people who do. Another factor that should be considered is Legal Aid. Pitchfork was granted Legal Aid to challenge his tariff. At a time when the Legal Aid budget is being cut to the bone, double child killers should be sent to the back of a very long queue. Not every reprobate deserves a second chance.

[The above was originally published on Medium, December 6, 2018.]

Diaspora Dudes Are Not Dindus, Colin

Hey Colin, forget about da hood for a moment, the braindead black commentators who parrot their drivel about white supremacy, and the talking heads of all races who give their vacuous pronouncements uncritical support. Take a look at some of the fellas and their lovely ladies who are making it in Japan, Singapore, and similar exotic places.

Do you notice anything different about them, Colin? Like they’re intelligent, literate, highly educated, and not unduly obsessed with playing the race card?

Why don’t you see any of these types in da hood, Colin? Is it because this race thing isn’t really a race thing at all? Surely you’ve read Thomas Sowell; he’s read you, after all, and if you haven’t read any of his books, you must at least have seen him on YouTube discoursing on the old days when it was safe for white folks to walk around Harlem at night. And you are pals with Jesse Lee Peterson, aren’t you, Colin? Does he think this is purely a race thing?

Open your eyes, Colin, and see the bigger picture, especially when law and order issues are raised, but one word of warning, Colin, don’t you go making the blue kids angry, because if you do, you’ll realise just what wonderful people the fellas and their lovely ladies really are.