Catch and release

“Catch and release” is a term common in game-fishing tournaments. Catch a fish and reel it in, weigh it for the record, and throw it back in the water in order to preserve the stock. In Cayman, the term is also applied, cynically, to our justice system. Catch and try a criminal, take him to court, and throw him back on the streets again.

Sometimes there is a brief time in prison between court and release, but not always. Our Prosecution Service doesn’t always prosecute a bad guy for the correct crime, and doesn’t always prosecute him enthusiastically when it is the correct crime. It’s a small island, and people know people.

Our judges’ sentences are erratic; concurrent terms are the norm instead of consecutive. Only a few convicts seem to serve their full sentences in prison. Parole is readily granted; the Probation Service seems to operate more generously than is warranted. And although Police lock-ups are notoriously dreadful places, the actual prison is not as tough as my old boarding-school used to be.

I don’t know how much help convicts receive when they are released from prison; it’s all pretty hush-hush. Cayman’s governance in general operates on a need-to-know basis, and the public doesn’t need to know much at all, according to our rulers. Policing and justice are secretive, and scarcely monitored. Corruption is universally suspected, and no serious effort is made to dispel that suspicion. Recidivism is rife. So. How can we (our society) get our repeat-criminals off the carousel?

The latest new idea is a day-release program that will (hopefully) persuade selected convicts that they can cope with life after prison. They will become useful members of society, earning an honest living and not go back to their criminal careers and bounce in and out of pokey the rest of their lives.

It hasn’t been decided yet what jobs they will be doing, or how much they will be paid, or – most important – what degree of criminality will be addressed by the program. The public wouldn’t stand for any baby-rapists to be chosen for the list, or violent offenders of any kind, surely. Or seducers of children, or gang members. Drug-dealers would probably be out of consideration, mainly because it’s hard to believe they ever retire from such a lucrative line of business. That leaves only petty thieves, burglars and embezzlers, really.

The voluntary risk-taking employers would have to be very community-minded people indeed, wouldn’t they – very determined to thwart Cayman’s drift towards the development of a permanently lawless underclass. One must wish them well, and their auditors and insurers…

To what extent will our politicians and Civil Servants cooperate? How will the employment of convicts fit into government’s existing labour-policy? Will Caymanian convicts on day-release be given priority over the three thousand supposedly unemployed Caymanians? Some of the latter may be shiftless and lazy, but they are not convicts, or at least not at the moment.

 Will the convicts receive wages at the going rate, or will they have to work for nothing, like slaves? Free labour generally has difficulty competing with slave-labour, for obvious reasons. Would the risk-taking employers be exempted from the Labour Law, and the Minimum Wage law when we have one?

 And another thing… Half of all Cayman’s Civil Servants are reckoned to run private businesses from their desks. Would they favour themselves in the allocation of no-wage convict workers? Damn right they would.

What about government’s permanent immigration policy, which requires that Caymanian citizens be hired and promoted ahead of Work Permit foreigners, regardless of ability? Might employers of convicts be rewarded with extra Work Permits, say one-for-one? Huh. Not likely! So how would they be rewarded? Public approbation, alone?

"No other gods before me"

In a post in January 2012 I speculated on the origin of the Biblical Children of Israel, which came into existence some time around 1500 BC. The names of its gods and legendary heroes suggested that it was an artificial tribe constructed from diverse elements of refugee groups during a clash of empires in northern Phoenicia.

The tribe was created and consolidated over several generations by a ruthless gang (all that unnecessary smiting…) of warrior priests that I called “the Taliban of their day”. A year or so later (February 2013), The Hebrews took the story back to Father Abraham in the city-state of Haran, and in October of that year Noah and Company moved it even further back, to the original homeland of at least some of the ancestors in the vicinity of Ararat.

“Ur of the Chaldees” is more plausibly identified as Ur of the Khaldis in north-eastern Anatolia than as the city on the southern Tigris River. A slow-but-steady tribal-drift (folk-wandering) from Ararat down to Haran is infinitely more likely than a pointless migration down to the Persian Gulf and back, for Abraham and his forebears. (Haran was a focal point of one of the busiest trade-routes in the region, and the legendary Abraham left there a rich man.)

The name of the tribal god Yahweh/Jehovah appears in several guises, notably Noah and Jacob. (n is a vocalisation of h in human speech, so Noah is the same name as the second syllable of Ya-hweh.) All the names and their variants, and all the contemporary legends – were memorized and recited by thirty or forty generations of tribal bards before being written down in later tribal dialects. The writing was done around the time Celtic-speaking tribes were conquering the native peoples of the British Isles.

The huge time-scale provides scope for superficial changes of names and dialects. My speculations are based on the premise that names (holy names in particular) retain their basic structures. The claimed meanings of proper names in all languages, have always been assigned on the basis of folk-etymology; they shouldn’t ever be taken seriously.

The proto-Hebrews carried Yahweh-the-god from the Mountains of Ur down to the Land of Egypt – not in the Egypt of our modern maps, but the part of northern Phoenicia under Egyptian rule at the time. That’s a defensible and legitimate speculation, based on history. But speculations can’t cope with the time before The Flood. The names of Adam’s descendants are mostly the names of regional gods – probably the ancestral gods of the wanderers before they settled on Hebe (and variants), and before their adoption of Yahweh/Jacob.

Every tribe has always had its own god, whose duty was to protect the tribe. The creation of the world was usually not ascribed to tribal gods. Generally, creation-gods did their Big-Bang job and left the stage. The Children of Israel, being an invented tribe and not a traditional one with a long history, and having selected one of their ancestral gods to be their very own, went the extra furlong and declared that their newly-agreed-upon tribal god had actually created the entire world and everything that was in it. Wow!

That declaration didn’t make them monotheists, but it did give their god a great customer-relations boost. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, the god said, and “I am a jealous god”. In effect: Look, I’m number one; the rest of them are make-weights; don’t waste your time with them. The priests who wrote the script were on a winner, with that line - at least for the time being.

But monotheism arrived only with the energetic heresy of the cult of Christianity. That cult’s fervent proselytising among the pagans embraced large numbers of other tribal gods, but its priests (oh, the chutzpah!) refused to acknowledge them as gods. Agents and saints, yes, but not gods. One single god since the beginning of the world – not limited to one tribe – was irresistible. As Christianity (and Islam, later) proved in much of the world.

Yahweh’s original tribe became marginalized. Over the centuries it gained some converts here and there – Berbers in North Africa were the ancestors of the Sephardic Jews, and the mini-empire of the Khazars north and east of the Black Sea produced the Ashkenazi Jews. But in the Levantine homeland, most of the original tribe fell prey to (and converted to) the two major heretical cults. Their descendants are today’s Palestinians.

Captivated by the romance of an ancient tribal ethos, and cynically manipulated by JINOs (Jews In Name Only) the European descendants of converts to the Yahweh cult are currently engaged in the slow-motion conquest of the ancient homeland of their cultural forebears.

But the old tribal ethos demanded the mass slaughter of all who stood in the way of the jealous Yahweh and his people, and mass slaughter is out of fashion now. Even ethnic cleansing is frowned upon, in an age of human-rights. So it’s a futile exercise, strategically – an historical aberration that has nothing to do with the Israelites.

The Gay Marriage thing

Most people in the West are tolerant – if that’s the word – of same-sex sexual relationships, but half of us draw the line at same-sex marriages. Why is that? Most people in the world probably couldn’t care less if siblings live together, but very few approve of sexual goings-on between or among them. Almost all of them would draw the line at sibling marriages. Why is that?

What is so special about marriage? It can’t be all about children, surely, in these sophisticated times. At least, not in the West. Promiscuity is blatant, adoptions are easy, artificial insemination is routine, divorces are simple, surgical sex-changes abound, birth control is everywhere, and serial monogamy is the norm. The old ideal of “the nuclear family” has gone out the window.

Why should we (society) draw the line anywhere, as long as there are no children involved or envisioned? What would be lost, if we scrapped the idea that society needs to formally approve every marriage? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The law governing civil contracts can take care of any children.

Is it about taxes, pensions or other entitlements? It may be. The last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died in 2003, and the last surviving son of a US Civil War Veteran was still alive just last year. (I would want a DNA test for him, but the relevant US Government agency was still paying his pension of $70 a week.)

It was the custom for young girls to be married off to ancient Veterans specifically in order to inherit their lifetime pensions. Sex was not always required of them. Deathbed marriages were just a way for old codgers to do their friends’ families a favour. Sometimes the favours would be reciprocal. Today’s marriages of convenience are following some fine precedents.

Some private companies will not pay spouses’ lifetime benefits (pension and medical) if the age gap is greater than a designated number of years. It’s a good idea. Why don’t national governments introduce a similar measure? Or, why don’t they simply get out of the marriage-approval business altogether? (Or, busybody-ness, which is what it really is.)

The original purpose of community-approved marriage was to give tribal elders the power to ensure the stability of the ruling classes. In the earliest civilisations, marriages within the nobility had to be carefully monitored to mimimise the likelihood of factional rebellions. Marriages were designed to cement alliances of families, clans and factions.

The serfs were generally left alone to arrange their own marriages, though rulers kept a weather eye out for suspicious alliances. Slave families were deliberately split up in order to remove any temptation to plot against their masters. It happened to the Africans in the Americas, and the provenance is an old one.

The difference with same-sex relationships was the absence of children, but in actuality the ruling classes were less against homosexual marriages than for the traditional form. Long ago, empires in China were largely governed by eunuchs, whose value to emperors was that they could not produce lineages to which they might owe their primary loyalties.

National histories are cluttered with examples of military dynasties jostling for political power. As individual rights have gradually superseded community rights, the reason for the official licensing of marriages has lessened. There is no point in the custom any more, and if it were scrapped altogether, it would be no loss.

Even today, there is occasional deep suspicion by hereditary rulers of a “Pink Mafia” whose members, like Masonic lodges, might be loyal to each other at the expense of loyalty to the community as a whole or to the ruling classes. That kind of loyalty might indeed exist here and there, but formal marriage doesn’t and wouldn’t frustrate it. Some state, somewhere, ought to have the courage to give up on marriage altogether. It doesn’t serve any useful purpose any more.

“The death of Lady Mondegreen”

Things aren’t always what they seem, in the English language. They say (“They”!) that English is the easiest language in the world to be understood in, but one of the hardest to speak well. With only 800 words (They say), a total stranger can get by, but years of practice will usually leave him a bit short of perfection. (Surely German is fifty times more difficult. It’s a wonder anybody speaks it well. And actually, when you think about it, we only have their word for it that anybody does speak it well.)

English spelling is a hodge-podge of folk-etymology and class eccentricities. Who else but the English upper class would identify one’s nightly sleep as a dietary “fast” to the point of calling the first meal of the day “break-fast”, while abbreviating it to “brekkie”? Well, until recent Centuries only upper-class clerics were literate, and claimed to know everything there was to know about the language.

An infinitely more plausible speculation is that the word we pronounce brekfust is but a dialectal variant of Scandinavian frukost, which means a meal comprising fruit (fruk) and cheese (ost). That might be folk-etymology too, but who knows? Fruit and cheese is a man’s brekkie. When we break our “fast” is when we get up in the middle of the night for a pee and raid the fridge on the way back. I know, the Vikings didn’t have fridges, but they would have shared the same nocturnal habits. ***
*** A friend has pointed out that the Scandinavian word may have originated in the German word frueh-kost meaning "early food". This seems a more likely explanation than mine; but, either way, English "break-fast" is nonsense.

It was, reportedly, an 18th-Century Earl of Sandwich who introduced his handy snack to his aristocratic chums at the roulette wheel, but his serfs had been munching pieces of bread with bacon + a wedge of cheese for many generations before. One can picture the chums laughing at his adoption of such peasant fare: “A sarney-wedge, my lord? More of a Sand-wich, what, what? Hahaha!”

Next: why is “cupboard” spelt the way it is? A cupboard is a cubby-hole with a door, and a cubby is simply a variant of a cabi-net. All cupboards have doors. A cupboard without a door is a pantry. A board that you keep cups on is a shelf. Sheesh! The bizarre spelling “cupboard” is folk-etymology deriving from upper-class eccentricity.

My personal term for this sort of rot is “muster-bin”. The imagined origins of English surnames present a long list of muster-bin falsehoods. The first person bearing the surname Smith must ha’ bin a smith by trade. The first Mr Brown must ha’ bin brown in skin or hair or eyes. The first Jones and Johnson were the sons of men named John. And so on. They simply must have been. Actually, as we say in the Caribbean, “they don’t must.” There are more plausible alternative explanations for those names. But plausibility finds it hard to beat out facile assumptions.

To Lady Mondegreen, now. Not quite a folk-etymology, because it was invented by a child who grew up to be a writer – one Sylvia Wright. In 1954, she published an essay on a verse her mother used to read to her from an 18th-Century collection of ballads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, 
Oh, where have ye been? 
They have slain the Earl o' Moray, 
And Lady Mondegreen.

The little girl felt desperately sad for the poor lady who died with one of Scotland’s famous martyrs, and resented the poet’s failure to mention her again in his story. Decades passed before the adult Sylvia Wright actually read the poem for herself, and learned that the killers of the Earl o’ Moray had in fact laid him on the green. Unaccompanied.

Wikipedia tells the story, and gives other examples of what are today called Mondegreens. We all have our favourites. Bob Dylan sang “the ants are my friends”, Creedence in Bad Moon Rising sang “there’s a bathroom on the right”. And, at Number One, for me, the last verse of Psalm 23, which begins “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”.

In memory of Rachel Corrie

March 16th is the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a young American girl (aged 23) run down by an Israeli Army bulldozer in occupied Palestine while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes.

All those of us who care about human rights should make a point of remembering her, and of respecting her physical bravery in defence of those rights. It takes a special degree of bravery to step outside the protection of one’s tribal and ethnic loyalties, in defence of members of some foreign community.

Often, there is a large element of naivety to physical bravery. Victoria Cross winners in war zones aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. Mostly, they seem to have the same mind-set as suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots – prepared to die for the sake of their fellows.

Military personnel in hospitals and ambulances, and individual medics who retrieve wounded soldiers from free-fire zones, often (usually?) presume “the enemy” won’t target them. Amazingly brave, and naïve. That describes young Rachel to a T. She seems to have believed that she would be protected by both her US citizenship and Israel’s notional human-rights ideals. Instead, a Los Angeles gang would have given her as much help.

I tend to bracket her name with that of Bradley Manning, the naïve young US Army clerk who blew the whistle on a war-crime committed in occupied Iraq by an Army helicopter crew. The killers were deemed to be acting in the best interests of the USA and were let off with a caution. Bradley was jailed for 35 years without parole, for putting a higher value on the lives of defenceless foreign civilians than on the gratification of his tribal fellows. How dare he!

During the US occupation of Vietnam, the unarmed civilian villagers of My Lai – mostly old folk and children – were hacked down en masse by an Army platoon, in the perceived best interests of the American people. Those killers, too, were let off with a caution. (I don’t know what happened to the whistle-blower of that atrocity; he probably fell out of a tall building somewhere…)

The theme common to all three incidents is the easy victory of tribal solidarity over universal human rights. One has to wonder why national leaders who condone such blatant flouting of the human-rights ideal even bother to pretend they care about the ideal. Is anybody ever taken in by the hypocrisy?

Western MSM (main-stream media) organs are currently reporting the US President’s hesitation in ordering the assassination of some obscure US citizen in Yemen. Hey, come on, man! The CIA has promised that the victim is a terrorist, a traitor, a Muslim, and a jobless layabout who picks his nose at the dinner-table. Is that not enough? Anyway, when sustained physical torture is such an everyday occurrence in the American gulag, why hesitate for an instant?

Perhaps there exists a skerrick of tribal solidarity in the President’s mind and the minds of his advisors. There certainly isn’t any sense of mercy there, or compassion. They will gladly order the slaughter of housefuls of innocents, as long as they are not fellow-citizens. I wonder how long that exemption will survive, though.

A blog of mine back in October 2012 (The war on women) speculated that those veteran soldiers and drone pilots who are not kept awake every night by their guilty consciences are well suited to become the torturers and executioners of our children and grandchildren, in a dystopian Big Brother society. Those who are kept awake by their memories are, by default, the hope of mankind. At least for as long as they manage not to kill themselves out of remorse. Ain’t that the truth?

Turning left at Galveston

Everybody’s life has turning-points, and it’s a fascinating study. If one had taken a different bus, or visited a different house, or met a different person, one’s life today might have been quite, quite, different. Turning-points galore! But there is usually only one incident that actually defines one’s life, and it can be fun searching for it.

In my blog called Turning Point in November last year, I reported that the famous American author Mark Twain identified his personal turning point as when he contracted measles (deliberately) at the age of twelve. The incident changed the entire course of his life.

I identified my own personal turning point as having occurred at age 26, when I baulked at the prospect of a long wait to be interviewed by the US Immigration Office in London. With a long time to wait until my number would be called, I hurried around to the Canadian Consulate to see whether Canada’s queue was more manageable. They saw me right away, and I never went back.

Leaving Australia to “see the world” was always my ambition, from when I was a boy. It never occurred to me not to go, so my eventual departure can’t be claimed as a turning point. Catching a boat to London was one of Linda’s turning points, although it was the thing to do for young Aussies in those days, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Actually, she was all set to marry a stolid chap from her home town, until a domestic tiff persuaded her to put the wedding on hold. She went off on a cruise to Fiji, came back and planned the wedding again, had second thoughts (or was it third thoughts?), cancelled it altogether, and booked her passage.

In London she answered Louise’s ad on an Earl’s Court notice-board for a travelling companion in Europe. That deal lasted until a blazing row one night in Greece prompted her to storm out and hitch a ride to the nearest Youth Hostel. That was her life’s true turning-point. There happened to be an English-language movie playing at the local cinema, and – well, I wrote about that in Zorba the Greek in January 2012. It wasn’t love at first sight for us, but I was a more compatible travelling companion than Louise, apparently.

Our son Ross’s turning point has been harder to identify. There was never a chance that he would stay in Cayman. Local success is much too easy to achieve. There are no challenges to win, only money to be made, and he is even less interested in money than I am. We both feel a compulsion to do things the hard way.  

A Scuba instructor, a submarine pilot taking tourists 800 feet down into the local trench, a mechanic on the bigger submarine… boring, boring! Bumming around Australia for a couple of years… unfulfilling. So back home in Cayman, aged 24, he hitched a ride with some American yachties to Galveston, Texas, and that was his turning point. That was the re-set button.

Turning left at Galveston, he drifted along the Gulf Coast, working odd jobs in exchange for bed and board. While cleaning car engines for a dollar an hour in Mexico City, he lucked into a career modelling clothes and doing TV commercials for a hundred dollars an hour. Pride of place in my bedroom today hangs Coca Cola’s calendar for the year 2000, with Ross on the page for July. But easy money couldn’t compete with the lure of a hippies’ life in Guatemala and points south. 

One of the hippy communes in the region had attracted an adventurous Norwegian girl and her toddler, and they attracted Ross. Another child was conceived in Ecuador, and the tender trap sprang shut. 

At age 38, his life is still a work in progress. Fatherhood has slowed him down and focused his attention, but it would be rash to conclude it has stopped him. I don’t know where he’ll go from here, or if there will be another major turning-point. In theory, he still owns a tree-house in Guatemala [Not the Swiss Family Robinson, August 2013], so who knows?

Might the US Dollar collapse?

Actually, it has been slowly collapsing for many years. Better questions are: is the collapse speeding up, and where might the collapse end? Could the buck in your pocket ever become as worthless as the Zimbabwe Dollar, for instance?

Prices are always going up and down, as we know. Houses are falling, at the moment, in the West; supermarket items are rising. Currency prices are volatile. One US Dollar buys a lot more Jamaican Dollars than it did ten years ago, but not quite as many Japanese Yen, and not as much gold or silver.

Everything is relative. “The Dollar” (everybody’s Dollar) has collapsed relative to goods and services that have increased in price. Those items haven’t necessarily increased in value – except when measured against the currency in which you pay for them, and when. In terms of the 1971 Dollar, a lot; in 2011 Dollars, not so much.

On the other hand, The Dollar is booming relative to things that have decreased in price, such as houses. Given all the goods and services produced by the USA, and all the assets held there, how could the US Dollar conceivably collapse? Against what benchmark could a currency resting on a base so fantastically strong and comprehensive possibly collapse? The short answer is: the accumulated debt of the Federal government, that financed its huge overseas empire.

This is not a new problem. Ancient Rome ran into financial problems when the expense of expanding and securing its empire became too much for its tax base. Its government, too, borrowed more than it could service. Its lenders lost confidence in its ability to repay its loans at all. No more loans were available, and taxes were already at a maximum. What to do?

 It had to either cut back on government expenditure (mainly, the imperial army) OR devalue its currency against its benchmark – which, back then, comprised certain weights of pure gold and pure silver. What Rome did was surreptitiously reduce the proportion of silver and gold in its coins and add cheaper metals into the mix. Then it paid off its loans with the adulterated coins. What a swindle!

These days, governments issue IOUs called “currency notes”, rather than coins – and those notes are issued against no specific security at all. In effect, the governments have adopted single-entry bookkeeping. They simply think of a figure and write it on their cheque-stubs, and draw cheques like there’s no tomorrow. When they reckon the total of cheques drawn reaches the thought-up figure, they think of another figure and write that on the stub and draw more cheques.

 In theory, the thought-up figures are deferred Public Revenue – tax-revenue that will be paid by taxpayers in forty years’ time, or a hundred and forty, or... whenever. In theory, national governments that commit this sort of swindle are insolvent – just as individuals would be. But individuals would be defrauding the banks whose cheque-books they were using, whereas governments are only defrauding their taxpayers with the consent of those same taxpayers, who keep voting the fraudsters back in. Why? Because the fraudsters are sweet-talkin’ rogues, that's why.

 It’s a handy way for a country to pay its bills, as long as its suppliers continue to accept the cheques. Of course, sooner or later the irresponsible creation of credit (all those thought-up figures) will lead to a collapse of confidence in the cheques and the currency they’re drawn in. When that happens, the suppliers will switch to other mediums of exchange – other forms of money.

At worst, the spurned currency goes out of use, like the Zimbabwe Dollar did in recent times. The US Dollar itself? Yes, its slow collapse could suddenly accelerate; a loaf of bread could cost ten dollars, then fifty, then a hundred, and so on. Wages would have to rise, to allow people to buy the bread; then the price of bread would rise again – and so on.

Well, paper currency began as IOUs for pure gold and silver kept in warehouses, and the world might have to revert to that practice one day soon. It could be anything else kept in warehouses, as long as the item wasn’t readily available all over the place. You wouldn’t get far trying to use warehouse receipts for cans of soup as money. Soup isn’t rare. Everybody’s Mum could cook up a pot of soup-money every morning.

Wal-Mart wouldn’t give you much in exchange for a can-of-soup certificate, or a “you can trust me” certificate from some crooked Central Banker. A gold certificate? Ah, that’ll do nicely, sir.

All the gold there is in Fort Knox

There’s a lot of chatter on the financial blogs about people’s declining confidence in the US Dollar (USD) as an international currency. For the past sixty years or so the US Dollar has been the world’s “reserve currency” – that is, the currency in which most international trade contracts are settled.

Now, in the face of the US Government’s reckless inflation of its money supply (creating credit out of thin air), some nations and multinational companies are beginning to look at what other currencies might be suitable. The Chinese, Russian and European currencies are the chief candidates.

Gold is also under consideration, because the total quantity of gold in the world is limited and not easily augmented – in stark contrast to paper currencies. Contracts can be priced in terms of gold whenever the contracting parties agree on its value. That value is not easily discernable these days, because there is no free market in gold. The market is manipulated daily, with unidentified buyers buying for no money down, and sellers selling gold they don’t own. The fraudsters are in charge.

For decades, gold certificates (certificates representing named quantities of pure gold) have been traded on the world’s major commodity exchanges; but those certificates’ claim to be backed by actual physical quantities of gold are often false. It has been a shell-game. Despite all the supposed concern about money-laundering, tax-dodging, terrorist financing and the like, the major world trading corporations and banks have fiddled their books with the full approval of the world’s major governments.

The world’s largest inventory of gold bullion is in Fort Knox, Kentucky – at least in theory. However, there has been no independent audit of the inventory since 1953, or even inspection! The US government flat refuses to allow such an audit, and everybody knows how unreliable unaudited figures are. Most objective critics believe that the advertised quantity and quality of gold in Fort Knox are false.

Actually, there may be no gold there at all. The former inventory may have been leased or sold to carefully selected banks that are owned and/or managed by political cronies; or it may have been replaced or adulterated by cheaper metals.

Remember: there has been no independent check at all for sixty years. None. Remember too that the US government has long been in the hands of arguably the most corrupt lobbyists, administrators and politicians the US has ever seen. Those carefully selected banks may have sold or leased every bar of it to lesser banks and brokers, and corrupt companies and individuals. All the favoured banks would have sold or lent it to their clients, including quoted investment funds.

Sometimes the sales will have been of physical bullion, sometimes of certificates (“paper gold”). Sometimes the banks will have sold certificates for the same bars of gold several times over. Each gold bar in Fort Knox used to be individually numbered and allocated to the relevant specific owner. Not any more.

When, last year, the government of Germany wanted to withdraw its specific numbered and allocated gold bars (about two per cent of the total amount claimed to be held in all US depositories), the most that could be cobbled together by the USA was a bare tenth of the requested amount, with the rest promised in seven years’ time. Dear God! And, all the bars that were grudgingly given back were unnumbered (generic), probably melted down from ingots hastily recovered from the banks, or stolen from Libya by the NATO invaders.

The fate of the gold bars may have been the same as the fate of the multi-trillion-dollars’ worth of bonds, contracts, insurance policies, etc, that were cut and bundled over and over again without audit or accountability until nobody could tell who owned what. That worldwide “derivatives market” may never be unravelled.

 America’s gold inventory may never be accounted for, either. Whoever does physically hold the gold bars (whether legally or illegally may never be proved) will one day be in a position to set its price.

Cayman’s boat-people

This blog began in 2010 as an offshoot of my weekly newspaper columns. For a while, they ran parallel – often sharing a topic although they were written separately. The newspaper had gone off-line, and an anonymous fan kindly set up this blog.

The most popular recurring subjects of the newspaper columns were unskilled migrant workers and Cuban boat-people. By the time the blog began, those crusades had pretty much run out of steam. They actually hadn’t achieved much, in the face of hostility from our local politicians and bureaucrats.

Domestic servants have always been shamefully exploited by some employers and the Immigration authorities, who regard them as little better than slaves. By law, they are indentured servants – voluntary ones, but highly vulnerable to exploitation. Employers have the legal power to short-pay them and steal from them, and deport them if they complain about that or anything else. Countless crimes go unprosecuted because witnesses have been deported.

Only a small proportion of employers are guilty of such things, but those who do are not held accountable. The guilty ones form a formidable voting bloc, and politicians are always afraid of formidable voting blocs. Jamaican female domestic servants call their conditions of employment “near slavery”, and my columns popularized the term. The Immigration authorities and the exploiters have cleaned up their act somewhat since then, but there are still too many holdouts.

Cuban refugees on ramshackle rafts and boats cross Cayman waters on their way to Honduras, where they join a long-established underground railway up to the USA. To please the Cuban government, our British police force impounds those who physically land in Cayman, and flies them to Havana. There they are excluded from the workforce, so many of the returnees must try their luck again on the next ramshackle craft they can find.

Our Police refuse help to those who pass by – however unlikely they may be to reach Honduras alive. Denying water, food, fuel and medicine to unseaworthy boats contravenes the international law of the sea – a law that saved countless native Caymanians in the islands’ seafaring days. Police boats fend off freelance rescue-attempts; policemen onshore confiscate water etc brought down to the boats, and arrest the guilty parties.

At least, they used to do. They are more observant now of their human-rights obligations – ever since the visit (at my invitation) of a representative from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A sympathetic reporter and I met her off the plane, and told her the truth of the situation before any government officials could get to her and lie to her. Today, our authorities turn a blind eye to breaches of the formal Memorandum of Understanding with Cuba as often as not. Ours was a meagre victory, but better than nothing.

 At the time of the IOM visit, I was a member of a government-appointed Human Rights Committee. I did what I could there, always well aware that they had appointed me purely to keep me quiet. The other appointees blocked my every attempt to improve the lot of the boat people and the migrants in indentured service. As ordered, they concentrated on trivialities and technicalities. In the end, I quit in a burst of publicity.

 There is a Human Rights Commission, now, that operates under the same terms of reference that the Committees did. It pretends to care, but doesn’t advance the cause. Ah well, what can you do? Cayman is the regional headquarters of MI6 (Britain’s CIA), so human rights aren’t much of a priority for our colonial administrators back in London.

Inside the rabbit-proof fence

As a boy I once watched a bull being killed at my uncle-in-law’s cattle station in Central Queensland. I have never forgotten the shock. A very large beast, it was, in a pen maybe thirty feet in diameter; a couple of dozen employees and their families leaned against the fence and watched the show.

A man with a rifle – an old Enfield .303 – waited patiently on the fence for the beast to stand still and in the right place, then shot it in the forehead. To my surprise, nothing happened. The man lowered his rifle; the bull stood immobile, as did the spectators. It was eerie. After five seconds – maybe seven or eight – the front knees wobbled slightly, then it collapsed in slow motion in a cloud of dust.

I blogged a while back [The Man from Snowy River, November 2012] about how my Dad used to kill a sheep every ten days, for meat. Dad carefully scraped out the brains – a finicky job that he hated. In my post I noted the difference in attitude between townies and bushies towards the lives and deaths of animals. There are few vegetarians in the bush.

The men of the district organized dingo drives once in a while, and occasionally took potshots at kangaroos. Dingoes were hated because they would kill or cripple sheep for fun (seemingly), and sheep were our livelihood. Kangaroos are classed as a pest – cute though they undoubtedly are – because they nibble the grass too close to the ground and leave none for the sheep. So do rabbits, which were a tremendous pest (though cute, of course) and had to be poisoned en masse in the 1950s because there were too many to shoot.

By rights there shouldn’t have been any dingoes or rabbits on the Darling Downs in Queensland. My Dad’s little patch of five thousand acres was inside both the official rabbit-proof fence and the dingo fence that stretched a thousand miles or so across the State. The whole purpose of the fences (erected and maintained by the State government to this day) was to keep the vermin out of where we lived, so I don’t understand why our men’s dingo-drives were necessary. Mind you, I never saw any bodies, though they talked of finding one or two each time.

The only other things killed in any quantity were snakes. Few of them in our neighbourhood were deadly (unless there was no antidote handy), but all were poisonous to some degree. We boys weren’t allowed to play beneath our house, which sat on two-foot stumps with tin caps over them to frustrate snakes’ attempts to get upstairs.

None ever did, to the best of my knowledge, although I used to imagine a nest of them underneath my bed at night. I slept with a sheet over my head, which I must have been just stupid enough to believe would save me.

Mum was a city-girl, who wasn’t raised to kill snakes. Her job was to pour boiling water on any she found inside the yard and wait till Dad got home. He would break their backs with a length of cable that he mysteriously called “the Kelly”. He had a good eye for snakes, and would watch them carefully while we boys ran and fetched him the Kelly.

If he hit the snake amidships, it couldn’t spring back on him. He was pretty good at it. Only once did he have to resort to shooting one. He never kept a shotgun or a rifle, but he dug out his .45 revolver issued to him during The War (along with a box of bullets) to fight off the expected Japanese invasion.

At dusk one day a snake wriggled under the tilted barrel of chook-food and hid there. Pop lay on the ground and carefully fired six shots into the darkness. Three of them hit, which impressed us immensely. We’d never seen him shoot before, and never even knew he had the gun. What a kick that thing had. POW!