Excite a schadenfreude and watch it slobber

Clare Lomas has achieved something quite remarkable for a woman with paralysis following a spinal injury. She has entered the London Marathon

She aims to complete the marathon this week taking 3 miles a day.

The thing that makes this achievement possible is a remarkable invention. The Rewalk suit a strapped on bionic set of battery powered legs that has allowed people with partial paralysis to walk on their own two legs.

So far so remarkable. The Rewalk was invented in Israel, to date I haven’t found a news story that mentions this fact.

Now that’s depressingly unremarkable.

What we did get was for the last few weeks was a lot of footage of a under pressure Israeli officer hitting a Danish activist in the face with a rifle. This would appear to be the only recorded or otherwise observed act of brutality by the IDF in the face of yet another flytilla. Most protestors were quietly put on no fly lists, kept at bay in well controlled protests and generally controlled by the tools of a liberal democracy with an eye for human rights as well as press coverage. And the poor fellow will be returning to Denmark with a few stitches and some interesting stories with which to impress the ladies.

Again so unremarkable.

This coverage isn’t really anti-Semitic, it gives it too much credit to grace it with that name. It’s stupid, it’s unhelpful and ultimately it’s destructive.

It makes abundantly clear that if you’re a democratic, by and large liberal country then expect a full monstering by the press. But if you’re a more vicious dictatorship, then people really don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t turn up on CNN.

When Basher Al Asad had, had enough of the rebellious city of Homs the sign that the fight for the resistance was over. Was when he shelled the building where the journalists were based, leading to deaths and their rapid exit. At which point the resistance fell apart.

Why bother? What the west can’t see, it would appear it also can’t care about.

The lack of coverage of where Rewalk was built is sad but expected. Israel as a power house of research and education is of little interest. Unless it’s about some whizzy new piece of military equipment.

The endless message that allowing in press and protestors will do nothing but make you look worse than the real villains is corrosive.

And only of value to dictators and fearless Danish protestors, who really should spend some time outside the Syrian embassy. If not in the actual country.

In Derek Rickey Gervais plays his perception of what a mildly learning disabled man in modern Britain is like.

To be clear.

1 This is Rickey Gervais’s perception.
2 Derek is meant to be mildly learning disabled or at least to have similar developmental or psychiatric disorder. How ever much he may deny it far too effort has gone into Derek’s head flicks, gurns and faux naive conversation.

Further Derek is a ridiculous and pitiful figure, he moans about not getting a toffee for cutting toe nails, his pratfalls into wet substances and hilariously gaffs asking someone out. He is an idiot, not an innocent or even learning disabled and a risible butt of jokes for that. Learning disabled and stupid is not one and the same.

Bolted on rather awkwardly is a subplot where Derek gets to be; brave, noble, human, heroic, sympathetic (stop me when you’ve reached the right cliché). Because he’s upset that one of the clients at the elder care home he works dies. Not only did this feel bolted on, but involved Derek’s intellect taking a further nose dive.

Derek is supposedly an orphan; he’s worked in a care home for some time. He’s seen death and yet they’re he is putting the dead ladies winnings in her purse, patting his head with her dead hand. C’mon Rickey you missed a few clichés Derek could have filled the room with pigeons (Loving Walter), or gone for a really big run (Forest Gump) or cut his throat (One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest). When Derek is playing sympathetic, he’s an even uglier stereotype then when he’s playing the fool.

Perhaps more depressing than this regrettable pilot is what a backwards step it is. Channel 4 has been showing the undateables (awful title). In which people with disabilities (some learning or on the Autistic Spectrum) try and get dates. They make mistakes, get things wrong and sometimes it works out. Some times their disabilities plays a part and sometimes it doesn’t. They dress, talk, feel and generally are very much like the rest of us. Not special needs, just different needs.

Derek is a collection of negative stereotypes; pitiful, poorly dressed, foolish, clown like. That maybe true for some people with learning disabilities, but certainly not all. In the same way crime dramas have shown young people and black people for years as violent, inarticulate thugs. True for some, not true for all and your choice of cliché says more about the writer, then the reader or the subject.

Things are changing in our society. People with learning disabilities and other conditions are slowly returning to our communities. After years of life in hospitals, residential schools or care homes they’re going to be living alongside you, working and studying alongside. Probably they do already and you haven’t noticed. It would seem sad, tragic even that the perception of people with learning disabilities. Could be influenced by; a 10 year old comic character; more built around the right facial tick and brown jacket then any reality.

Mohammed Merah the Toulose gunman is dead.

But not before murdering 7 people.

But there is some small amount of hope to be drawn from his tragic actions. His first targets were African and Arabic French soldier. As a terrorist he didn’t see allies he saw enemies. And he died alone in a flat with no supporters, to hide him or smuggle him out. Supposedly he was comissioned by Al Quaeda, but that means little more than an email and some money.

As long as people like him view our society and see enemies not allies.

Then though it may take a while, we’re winning.

There’s a famous story about Stephen King being invited to give a talk at a university. As part of the students tribute to the great writer one of them read a disitation on “Children of the Corn,” a rather hokey and very short story about some kids who killed all the grown ups in their town. And are now setting about any oldster foolish enough to enter their town.

The student gave a brilliant and lengthy disertation. Taking in classic literature, the Vietnam war and Watergate. Finding symbolism at every turn,

King said more or less. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was just a hokey story about some kids killing oldies.

There is one great truth about truly great literature. The reader will find more in the book then the author put there.

Which is the case of Kasi Ishigoro’s Never Let Me Go. This low key scifi epic set in an England somehow always 1955. Describes a school(Hailsham) where the children are educated by caring “guardians” taught about the arts, literature to be kind and expressive. The twist in the book is these children will never grow up. A darker fate awaits them that their guardians can only prepare them for, certainly not save them from.

Sardonicus doesn’t think any one who works in care can read this book and not have an uncomfortable twinge. Doing all you can to help and prepare those you look after to be all they can be in an essentially unfair world. A world ultimately you can’t protect them from.

And these days more so than ever. The government has decided that those with disabilitie should work, no more issolation on bnenefits. So people are to be assessed on their ability to work. And those who can must find paying work. Those who can’t find work will join work orientation groups. The pyramids were built by people in a similar position.

The problem is no one asssessed the employers ability to employ. And as a final insult it seems Remploy has finally closed. Remploy was a charity that employed people with a wide spectrum of disabilities. It needed generous subsidies and in some respects was something of a ghetto. But atleast unlike most other employers it took people on.

And now in this brave, brave new world people with disabilities are the same as everyone else. Unecumbered by extra benefits, unpatronised by specialist employers. They can join us.

In the end Hailsham closed, the staff sadly like so many people saying they did their best. That model seems to be apt to this anology all to soon.
This is one sided negotiation. And like the staff at Hailsham those of us working in care can watch on and do the best we can to support those we care for. In a hard world we are too complicit in.

Remploy was a noble effort to offer an alternative to an uninterested job market. And now it’s gone. Like so many little projects who don’t effect the majority with their fears about child benefit and all the other little bribes.

In the end Hailsham closed. It’s staff uncertainly thinking that some how they did the right thing and without them things would only get worse. Looking at the ease that these cuts are slipping throug, I understand the sentiment.

You might have passed him in the street. Might have sat next to him on the tube, maybe even shared a seminar group with him.
But the man (or woman) who will detonate a nuclear device in a Western city is out there.
He’s probably never been to a camp in Pakistan or attended a lecture at the Finsbury Park Mosque.
He might not even be a Muslim or not born one.
If he’s on any terrorist watch list he’s on the bottom of it.

He’s an ordinary man (or woman). But he probably watched one too many news broadcasts on the US complaining about Syria. How they torture activists in dungeons the US was renditioning them to just a scant couple of years ago. Or how they plan to bomb the rotten caliphate of Iran and ignore the Kingdom of Saud. Perhaps he just got depressed watching footage of the low war drums for Somalia being banged already (when really all the poor Somalis want is to keep their fish and maybe a bit of rent for use of their sea lanes). But he isn’t an especially angry man, atleast not yet. He may even be Chinese and Muslim, quietly embittered about a relative the Chinese executed under that all pervading banner of the war of terror.

The war on terror, if Al Quaeda came up with a brand for terrorism. The war on terror was the brand for opression the world over. Does our man or woman smile at Syrian and Lybian politicians eranestly repeating the words.
“We are fighting Al Quaeda and Islamist infiltrators.”
Was Bin Ladens last thought, “I never realised I was so succesful?”

The security agencies we think are so busily working to defend us from the likes of him. Are after easy wins; flashy interests of scary types with beards. Or when budgets need to be renewed , not above tempting the foolish and naieve into becoming pretend terrorists. Neatily wrapped up and ready for arrest.

Our calm man or woman turns up on nobodies list. His predecessors may have and paid with their lives. But terrorism is swiftly Darwinian. The loud and foolish replaced all too often by the quiet and patient.

Our man is busy spending his nights pouring over complex circuit diagrams with a few friends. He’s read up on how simple the Los Alamos Devices were, how South Africa recreated them on the cheap in just a couple of years. He’s read about the US DOE experiments in the 1970s in how 2 bright physicists came up with the design for a bomb in just year. And he knows where in Russia the Graphite reactos still make unlogges weaponable materials because it’s too expensive to turn them off.

Eventually he sits in a garrage before his device. It probably ressembles a sea crate with crude welding and wires sticking out.

He attaches one lead to a car battery.

Maybe he prays, maybe he smiles, maybe he doesn’t really know why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Then he attaches.

Then the world changes.

This is all of course avoidable.

David Cameron is planning to privatise large areas of the NHS and take them out of direct governmental control.

And he’s right.

Ouch that was particularly difficult to type. But well he is, the UK has for a long time had a bit of an anomally an entriely state run and direct tax funded health service. The result has been spiralling costs, poor results comparatively when UN figures are compared. The NHS is exactly as bad as the US system which is pretty much entirely private (with a few exceptions for elderly, ex servicemen and the very poor).

When the NHS is held upto the comparatively superior French and Dutch systems. An awkward fact comes out. These systems are both based almost entirely on private insurance companies. They’re not nationalised health services. Rather care is provided by private companies, paid for by insurance. The government works as an umpire to make sure no one gets scalped or excluded. And of course these companies make lots of money. It was this system that Barrack Obama was unsuccesfully trying to implement in the US.

Sweden has a nationalised health system that works, but only at a crippling cost. There is a painful fact and that is governments are better at supervising and judging the work of others, rather than doing said work them selves.

An existing example is the care system in the UK for those with disabilities. From the 1940s to the 1980s if you were learning disabled, mentally ill or physically diasbled. Then the choice was a stark one between nothing and life (and I do mean life) in a stark hospital with frequent injections, locked doors and you didn’t even get to keep your own clothes. Abuse both of the careless institutional nature and the direct sadistic variety was rampant.

Mrs Thatcher of all people started a process that began with Care in the Community. Carried on through Valuing People and Direct Payments. And ended up with people paying for services from government funds from generally private or charitable providers today.

The improvement in the quality of some of the most vulnerable peoples lives has been imeasurable. And the system of checks and inspections inplace actually genuinely works most of the time. Providers that can not keep their registration or satisfy their clients or their carers lose their business and quietly fold.

One of the things that struck Sardonicus from a doucmentary on the subject (the Silent Minority). Was the NHS was still grimly building long stay mental health/learning disabilities in the 1980s. Oh sure better modern. With smaller dormitories, less chemical coshes and a little more dignity.

So ultimately Cameron is right. Sorry. A system of private provision will probably work better than a system of direct provision. Providing of course the government is willing to to do the thankless job of umpiring it. Of course that’s not the end of the matter. We must make sure the compromises that make the US system so unfair are never allowed to bed down. Nor that it becomes an excuse for whole sale cuts.

But it’s worthwhile remembering that 30 years ago some surprisingly humane people. Campaigned and lobbied that the vulnerable should be locked away from society and treated with great cruelty.

Simply because they didn’t imagine the private sector could do a job better than the government was failing at.
It was the wrong fight.

you’re being bribed!

One of the reasons the UK is going broke is bribery. There is a massive well organised and completely public programme of voter bribery. Involving all major parties.

You, your mum, your dad, potentially even your silver haired nan are part of this, and it is bankrupting our nation. Not only that but it is denying support to the most vulnerable.

These bribes have names like child benefit, winter fuel allowance and Disability Living Allowance.

The problem is they are not means tested. When a person who would be destitute, cold or trapped without them receives them, then they are a benefit. When they are received by somebody who doesn’t, then they’re a bribe.

The government is rapidly finding that hundreds of thousands may receive incapacity benefit and millions receive job seekers allowance. But the number receiving child benefit or winter fuel allowance stretches into the tens of millions. So the benefits which stop people starving or living on the street are cut back or ever more carefully tested. whilst The bribes that are just handed out once you can prove you have a kid or you’re old are not. Of course here and there, there are the occasional family who score a hundred thousand in benefits. But they are a tiny minority against those living on a pound a day per person. It Is now easier for a 60 year old, mobile, employed person to get a freedom pass. than it is for someone who cannot walk more than a few hundred yards.

If you need help with your personal care, which in all likelIhood you want be able to afford,. the welfare pot is so scraped that all you get is two portions of 15 minutes a day. at that point that bribe starts to look a little foolish,

This is silly, this is wasteful and most of all it isinsulting.

It’s insulting that our leaders view us as being so venal, we’ll vote because we’re handed a bribe for being over a certain age or for having kids.

Why not just do away with the pretence? Let your local MP hand out £50 notes on election day?

Because right now the cuts are landing where they hurt the most and can be afforded least. Today the government announced the scrapping of the Social Fund. This was a benefit of last resort. It existed for those with no bank account and no access to credit and only benefits as income. It was a small bridging loan from giro to giro. It was helpful if you had been mugged or your fridge failed. It wasn’t expensive nationally. It cost one hundred and seventy eight million pounds. But for that money there’s going to be several thousand people with absolutely no where to go and no money in their pockets. People only bribe you, as a away of taking something even more valuable later.

Things are tough aren’t they?
Sardonicus’s left leg can tell a story about NHS cuts.

About 5 years ago Sardo got an ulcer on his left leg. Ouch not nice; the nice nurse at his surgery dressed it. When he needed it looked it and couldn’t get an appointment he popped into an NHS walk in clinic. And when it started to get better he was prescribed dressings and took care of it himself.

It came back a couple of times, as these things do. Only a couple of years later NHS walkin clinics stopped treating wounds, then dressings stopped getting prescribed without increasingly tight monitoring.
So the last time Sardonicus’s leg used up scarce resources at his clinic, cost him hours of work waiting to be seen. And took longer to heal.

A little example granted. But the withering cuts are there for everyone to see. If you work in autism the damage from parents not getting the most basic advice from speech and language therapists. Or people moving from diagnoses of asperger’s syndrome to more sever psychiatric conditions because even the most basic support isn’t there.

28% cuts in care and health as we all live longer and survive more are there for all to see. Quickly we are becoming a sicker, harder more fearful society.

Of course there needs to be cuts, we’re not as rich as we once were and the economy is sick.
But are we all contributing we should? Cuts would be more bearable if everyone was paying their way.
There’s too many people in this country with too much money, paying too little tax. But what to do? When the tax avoider can pay his accountant ten times what the government can, it’s only ever going to go one way.
No there is only one person who can sort this out. And in the unlikely chance you’re reading this Queen Liz, it’s you know. No Sardo isn’t suggesting beheading them or seizing their lands (well maybe Fred the Shred).

No there is one thing even the most dispecable crook seeks and that’s respectability. So you’re Queeness next time you get asked to knight some captain of industry or CEO ask the following question.
Does he or she pay your tax collectors 25% of their disposable income? That’s pretty much what everyone else pays.

You’ll need a copy of the Times Rich List, their P60 (and/or tax return) and a calculator.
If they don’t knight them, don’t patron their charities (giving thousands to charity whilst dodging tax millions in tax is a swizz). Don’t have them at your palace.

Because if you squeeze them hard enough that the cuts are only 26% not 28% it’ll make such a huge difference to thousands.
Not least of all Sardonicus’s leg.

Gary Glitter signed onto Twitter last week.
Shock horror.
Except it wasn’t Gary Glitter it was a netvigilante pretending to be Gary Glitter to reveal the dangers of netpervs getting access to your kids!

After about half an hour of such brilliant posts as “I’m Gary Glitter I like soup” or “You want to be in my gang? Oh I see that was one of my hits.”
Fake Glitter was rumbled. And was a chance for comics to dig out all their old paedo gags (now disguised as ironic protests at him). And some hilarious threats of violence from premier league footballers (albeit surprisingly well spelled).

This was a protest about the easy access paedos can get to the Internet. So no need to worry about a big glittery, twittery van to turn up like a glam rock pide paedo and snatch your kids away. It was all a big attention seeking exercise. Oops I mean a cogent protest.

Poor old Glitter even channel 4 hanged him last year. If he wasn’t a sinister sex offender one could quite sympathise with him.

Monitoring sex offenders online is a great idea. And it’s terribly remiss of the government not to do it.
But the government can’t even stop convicted murderers having twitter pages whilst in maximum-security prison. And selling photos of themselves stabbing other notorious but less popular crims to the tabloids.

6 year olds seem to dodge most parental safeguards, as can those with moderate learning disabilities. In a world where a second hand blackberry, false ID and pay as you go 3g contract; will cost you less than a bowl of cockroach porridge will at one of Heston Blumenthal’s new happy chef’s (about £200).

Technology isn’t going to do it. Not unless you want SOPA or PIPA (is this the law with the best ass in the world?) and even then they won’t work.

The police, probation service should monitor the internet usage of manipulative criminals. But isolating and stigmatising criminals just makes them identify with their criminal identity and other crooks. Education and commonsense for users is the only route.

Remember stop, look and don’t post photos of your genitals.