A NATION OF CRIMINALS

Here’s a little known fact to interest you.  EVERYTHING on St Helena is a Criminal Offence.

Elsewhere there are Crimes (murder, rape, theft, etc.) and Civil Offences -the Americans call them “misdemeanours”, which are less important things like being drunk in public, improper parking and speeding.

But not here.

On St Helena even minor offences gets you a criminal record.  Being caught doing 35 mph in a 30 zone gets you a Criminal record. Being caught peeing in the street gets you a criminal record.  On St Helena Trespassers CAN be prosecuted (elsewhere it’s a civil offence).

These ‘criminal’ offences have to go to court, with all the due process this entails.  Cases have to be made.  Defences have to be constructed.  Lay Advocates and prosecutors have to stand up and say their pieces.  Magistrates have to rule.  Records must be kept.  All of this is a ridiculous waste of time (and money) for the judicial system. 

It also results in people being declared ‘criminals’ for minor offences that no other jurisdiction would care about.  In the UK you get caught speeding: a few points on your licence for a short period and its forgotten.  Here you become a criminal, in the same bracket as a child-molester.

Does anybody benefit from this?  Maybe the police want it because then they can then point to the vast number of ‘criminals’ here to justify the large numbers of police officers they employ?  Maybe the justice system wants it because if they only had to deal with real crimes they would be mostly unemployed?  Whatever the reason, that doesn’t make it any less stupid!

If St Helena has any plans to become a modern society it needs to address this issue.  It needs the same dual-system used in other 21^st Century jurisdictions.  It will require some work, but it will create vast savings in police and judicial system costs that will more than repay the initial outlay.  And it will stop people who are caught relieving themselves in a back alley while on their way home from the pub from being branded as criminals together with rapists, thugs and thieves.

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

Scientists have a problem with their theories. They want one set of laws that explains everything, but big things like planets operate to different physical laws to tiny things like sub-atomic particles.  There isn’t as much matter in the universe as there should be unless you invent “dark matter” which you can’t find. Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead? Heisenberg says we can never know where a sub-atomic particle was before we observed it and therefore moved it.

I have the answer, and it isn’t God. It’s Sod’s Law.

Planets do not behave like sub-atomic particles out of sheer cussedness. That’s also why so much of the matter in the universe is hiding.  If you want Schrödinger’s cat to be alive, it will be dead (and vice-versa). And wherever you want Heisenberg ‘s sub-atomic particle to be, it will be somewhere else.

From buttered toast falling buttered-side down to meeting red traffic lights when you’re in a hurry, Sod’s Law explains absolutely everything in the observable universe.

Watch for my paper at the next international physics symposium. (Which I won’t be able to present because the plane will be delayed.)