Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Shocking Rape Statistics

Recently released figures have shown the shockingly low rate of convictions for rape in the UK. The average conviction rate is now 5.29% - this means that for every 100 reported rapes (and remember there are always more rapes occur than are reported) the number of perpetrators found and convicted is 5. To put it another way, the other 95 people rape somebody and get away without facing justice. This is shocking. Really shocking. The rape conviction rate in 1977 was 32%. OK, so there are more rapes reported now than then because of better reporting procedures, but its still shocking. Figures from 2002 showed that the rape conviction rate is lower than any other form of violent crime. But wait, for this area, the news gets worse. In the South West only Wiltshire comes out above (only just) the shockingly low average. The hall of shame is as follows:

  • Wiltshire: 6%
  • Average: 5.29%
  • Avon & Somerset: 4.7%
  • Devon & Cornwall: 4.01%
  • Dorset: 3.6%
  • Gloucestershire: 0.86%

Did you do a double take on the Gloucestershire figure? No, it is that shit. Gloucestershire, out of 116 reported rapes managed one single rape conviction.

Maybe we should stop paying our police tax and the percentage of income tax that pays for this incompetent (or should I say misogynistic?) system until the rates improve?


Further Reading Links:
http://www.rightsofwomen.org.uk/
http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/
http://www.womensaid.org.uk/

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Howl! Howl! Howwwwl! The GoatLab 3 line up is out and it looks amazing. It's going to be amazing! You've got ex-Digital Hardcore & breakcore legend Patric C, the top Mad EP, fresh talent from Glasgow - Acrnym (just signed to Sublight Records). The local side is represented by the excellent Hunting Lodge plus the soild support of Parasite, Ironside, Dub Boy, Atki2 & Nim Chimpsky. Plus! You might notice DJ Ruk, that Parasite's little bro - following in the family tradition!

GoatLab #3 Friday 2nd March 2007 @ Timbuk 2, Small Street, Bristol UK

Here's the line-up (so far):

* Patric Catani aka Candie Hank (EC8OR / Puppetmastaz / A*Class )
* Mad EP (Ad Noiseam / Hymen / Mirex)
* Acrnym (Sublight)
* Hunting Lodge (Farm Girl)
* DJ Ruk
* Gusset (Death$ucker)
* Anakissed (Visuals)
* Parasite (Death$ucker / Peace Off)
* Ironside (P.R.A.N.K / Dissident)
* Dub Boy b2b Atki2 (Ruffnek Diskotek / Shadetek)
* Jay Nom (Death$ucker)
* Nim Chimpski (Bad Planet / Finga Munkie)

Friday 2 March 2007 @ Timbuk 2, Small Street, Bristol BS1. 10pm - 4am.
3 Rooms of Music!!!
£5 in fancy goat wear. £6 b4 11pm, £7 after. Decor by JohnEpainter.com. Room 3 hosted by Descend. Tickets are available from http://DSWAT.net and DMT Records (Stokes Croft).


Thursday, January 18, 2007

More on the Surge

Here is an amazing article on the surge planned by Bu$h - what makes it so powerful is that its author, former special forces solider Stan Geoff, knows a thing or two about war;
For those who are susceptible to the personification of war, that is, the reduction of whole populations to a single leader—as in, “we are going to take out Saddam”—I will remind readers that Sadr City is half men and half women, with 40 percent of the population under 14 years of age. A million children. Sadr City is approximately 33 million square feet. That is a population density of one child per 33 square feet—less than a 6-foot-by-6-foot room. The very smallest lethality radius from so-called precision weapons delivered by aircraft is about 20 meters.

Do the math.

In Fallujah, a mass evacuation was organized before the general assault on the city. The mandatory mass evacuation went through checkpoints in the American cordon sanitaire. While women and children and very old people were allowed out, all “military-aged males” were turned back into the city, which, once the assault started, became a free-fire zone, and those men were dealt with like the Jews of Warsaw. Thousands of people refused to evacuate for a variety of reasons. They were subsequently caught up in the general slaughter. This is the likely operational template for Sadr City.

There is another calculation associated with these kinds of “surge” operations: the aftermath. Muqtada al-Sadr has been effectively demonized in the U.S., but he is wildly popular and influential in Iraq, especially in southeastern Iraq, which has heretofore shown the least resistance to the Anglo-American occupation. In an attack on Sadr City, according to powerful rumors, Kurdish peshmerga troops will be used to do some of the fighting, an insane political gambit. If the Americans proceed with what appears to be a cruel and mindless plan (surely emanating from Dick Cheney’s lair) there will be a possibility of igniting the Mother of All Tactical Nightmares for the U.S.: a general armed Shiite uprising in the southeast.
A must read.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The Tal Afar Plan

So in Iraq, Bu$h plans to 'surge'. The plan is supposed to be based on the 'victory' of Tal Afar. The victory refers to the second assault on the city where it was surrounded by a kind of wall/moat thing and people only allowed in via check points and with ID cards. As with Fallujah, Tal Afar was a pyhrric victory and the violence has returned. After the victory in September 2005, there have been plenty of attacks including suicide bombings and IEDs. Such assaults only ever lead to a temporary victory because insurgent warfare is not about territory, like conventional war, its about a subtler undercurrent of control.

Not only that, as with all the US assaults in Iraq, as with Falujah, there is a heavy civilian cost which the media often glosses over with the thrill of the military hardware;

In the wake of a savage US offensive on the city of Tal Afar, residents have begun returning home, only to find that their houses destroyed, no water available and that they must generate their own electricity if they want the luxury of power... following the ferocious US bombing and shelling that lasted for days on end. Many families have been forced to live in tents pitched atop the mounds of rubble that once were their homes.

The image below, to illustrate this cost, shows a girl, covered in her parents blood, who were shot and killed as a US check point outside Tal Afar;

The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.



Its sickening to think that our dear leaders are looking to widen the war, rattling their swords at Iran and Syria while Iraq continues with it brutal civil war - a civil war our leaders are dragging us into deeper and deeper.

What sickens me most is this is going on while our court system wastes money and resources trying to prosecute somebody who did the best any individual could do to stop this insane slaughter. Josh, the last of the Fairford Five, is a principled and moral individual who far from being in court should be given the highest civic honour we have. It is Bliar, the war criminal, who should be on trial, not Josh. I hope to see they day when the events in More4's drama 'The Trial of Tony Blair' come to pass.

It does make you think that Michael T.Klare is correct when he states that 'Energo-Fascism is our Future' - think of the amount of oil those bombers based at Fairford took to build, maintain, fly over here then arm and fly to Iraq to bomb people? Short answer is lots; 'the Pentagon is itself one of the world's great oil guzzlers, consuming 134 million barrels of oil in 2005, as much as the entire nation of Sweden.' We also know that all this oil was spent to secure more oil in Iraq. Investing oil to gain oil - this is why the state needs to try Josh - he tired to interrupt the global oil Jihad, and so must pay the price.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Surge to Victory

For the third time in Iraq, Bu$h is going to try the 'surge' option. I can't see why this time it will work. Here's a good essay on why it is going to fail;
In fact, there is no way forward that does not lead out. This, because the mission itself is founded on strategic error. The error resides not simply in the administration's "strategy for victory" in Iraq but, more broadly, in its national security strategy. It is evident as well in the President's rejection of what is best in the Iraq Study Group report: the proposal to diplomatically engage Syria and Iran regarding the Iraq prospect. Indeed, the President's proposal to pump-up Operation Iraqi Freedom with more money and troops is a direct counter-point to the diplomatic path.
So how will it end?
...it will be the Iraqis who end the war. It will be the Iraqis who eventually kill enough Americans to break the U.S. political will, and it will be the Iraqis who sweep away the ruins of the Maliki government to replace it with an anti-American, anti-U.S.- occupation government in Iraq. That is basically how the war in Vietnam ended, and it wasn't pretty.
But, perhaps, just perhaps, the surge and the recent raid on the Iranian Consulate, is just part of the plan to widen the war into one with Iran in the hope that will end the war in Iraq? Sounds crazy, but then the surge is!