Crimes Fairystories: The Wolf and Three Little Pigs Re-Told - or Felson's versus Sutton's Crime Opportunity Explanations

An opportunity cannot exist for you unless you personally perceive it as the coming together of a set of fortunate or otherwise potentially beneficial circumstances/events upon which you can choose to act. So the entire definition of a personal opportunity is based on the premise that benefits and a person's (or animal's/plant's) capabilities to secure them are in some way perceived by them. And perceived opportunities are always subject to expected or unexpected beneficial or detrimental contingencies. Where crime is concerned, a potential offender can have a pre-crime accident, get injured or otherwise thwarted during a criminal attempt. The capabilities of any guardian can never be fixed (known) in advance of a crime happening. Even the little piggy in the house made of sticks might have leapt out of his demolished house at the very last minute and poked the wolf in the eye with a broken twig. Check out the hundreds of newspaper stories of have-a-go heroes if you doubt this.

And the wolf coming down the chimney in the house made of bricks could have spotted the boiling turpentine and braced his legs above it, bounded over it and ate the piggy. The piggies guardianship capabilities and the wolf's capabilities can never be known (fixed) in advance as the RAT model would have it. They do not exist in a fixed position, like a mountain or a home, until the crime is completed (including the crime of criminal attempt). Criminal opportunities cannot exist unless perceived and are contingent on both the expected and unexpected.

Felson's paradigm of crime opportunity is a mere description of the data of a successfully completed crime or completed attempt. Descriptions can not explain themselves. For that, we need a testable hypothesis that is either right or wrong. Felson's theory s a mere truism masquerading as causality.

Just as even the most elegant description of a fossilized dinosaur found in the geological strata cannot explain why it is there, neither can Felson's RAT model of opportunity explain successful crimes, failed criminal attempts and prevented crimes.

To explain dinosaurs we have Patrick Matthew's theory of macro organic evolution by natural selection (the one Darwin plagiarized). To explain crimes in terms of opportunities, we need a similarly potentially refutable and - if refuted - hard to vary theory. Felson's theorem is not refutable because it's a mere truism in the form of a mere description. In terms of the potential of natural selection to be refuted, we need to find only one case of (for example) a human in the strata below a dinosaur. It's bold ability to be so easily refuted is what makes it such a powerful theory and good explanation.

A barrier to more effective crime reduction knowledge progression has been thrown up by two criminology theories/approaches: Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) and Routine Activities Theory (RAT). The problem is caused by the policy-oriented popularity of SCP and RAT that is likely due in no small part to their simplistic and easily comprehendible, compelling, yet ultimately illogical weird focus upon describing the data of crime in ever more complex ways so that simple truisms about the scenes of successfully completed crimes and failed attempts (crimes of attempting to commit a crime) are placed in the spotlight and presented as a root cause of crime. Felson's simplistic notion of opportunity is, in fact,merely the very data that a true testable theory of causation could explain. 

Click here to read my online article that explains why.

My explanation for why the RAT notion of opportunity (Ratortunity) is a mere truism masquerading as causality is published in a peer-reviewed essay (here).

Felson's theorem is not the opportunity it claims to be.

This is merely a description of some elements of a completed crime. 

Descriptions of things cannot explain themselves. 

 For that, we need a theory, which is capable of being disproven and

that is hard to vary when so disconfirmed by the evidence.

Sutton's Opportunity Hypothesis allows for offender and guardianship perceptions
and for expected and unexpected contingencies at the pre-crime scene and the scene
of attempted crimes

The Crime Substitution Hypothesis

The Real Reason for the crime drop? : http://t.co/psPwaXqufG A really tough hypothesis is crying out for testing! pic.twitter.com/JKlsDImHVV

— Dr Mike Sutton (@Criminotweet) September 23, 2015

Is there, logically, something pathologically psychopathic about homeopathy?

FROM THE BRITISH NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE WEBSITE (here)   

Homeopathy is a 'treatment' based on the use of highly diluted substances, which practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself.

A 2010 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on homeopathy   said that homeopathic remedies perform no better than placebos, and that the principles on which homeopathy is based are "scientifically implausible". This is also the view of the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies.

Does it work?

There has been extensive investigation of the effectiveness of homeopathy. There is no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition (see What can we conclude from the evidence?)   .

So far so good, because the NHS accepts homeopathy does not work.

The telling question then is why in the name of Veracity is it prescribed by their paid employees as a medical treatment on medical treatment premises paid for by British tax payers?

From the NHS website   :

It is available on the NHS?

Homeopathy is not available on the NHS in all areas of the country, but there are several NHS homeopathic hospitals and some GP [general medical practice] practices also offer homeopathic treatment.

The sham treatment shame of it!

The Royal Society is Nought but a Darwin and Wallace Glee Club

Sir Gavin de Beer (FRS) wrote in the Wilkins Lecture for the Royal Society (de Beer 1962 on page 333):

"...William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew were predecessors who had actually published the principle of natural selection in obscure places where their works remained completely unnoticed until Darwin and Wallace reawakened interest in the subject.'

What the expert Royal Society member Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer, British evolutionary embryologist, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), President of the Linnean Society, and receiver of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal for his studies on evolution never knew - that I have uniquely discovered (see Nullius in Verba) - is that  at least 25 people actually cited Matthew's (1831) book before Darwin's and Wallace's papers, which replicated Matthew's original ideas and explanatory examples, were read before the Linnean Society in 1858, seven of them were naturalists, four known to Darwin and two to Wallace.

Royal Society Darwin Medal

So where's my Darwin Medal for being proven a better scholar than de Beer on his own subject?

Perhaps the Royal Society needs to improve the quality of its membership and medal winners? Linnean society too. The pseudo-scholarly Darwin glee-club shame of it! 

Visit PatrickMatthew.com to learn the truth about the discovery of natural selection.

The New Crisis in Darwinism

Progress in search engine technology facilitated original research in Google's Library Project of over 30 million searchable books and other publications.That research led to game changing discoveries, which have transformed the unique anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's claimed dual independent discoveries of Matthew's prior-published original ideas. That old anomaly was changed by the New Data in 2014 from a vexation into a crisis of credulous deifying Darwinist belief in the double occurrence of paradoxical immaculate conceptions by Darwin and Wallace, miraculously occurring as each logically must, whilst they were surrounded by naturalists who they knew, who influenced them, and whose minds were fertile with Matthew's ideas, having read and then cited the book decades before Wallace (1855) Darwin and Wallace (1858) and Darwin (1842, 1844 and 1859) replicated the work within it, and decades before Darwin fallaciously claimed no naturalist had read it before 1860.

Consequently, the issue of Patrick Mathew's priority over Darwin and Wallace for his own prior-published and cited discovery is not something that the history of scientific discovery can ethically or sensibly continue to choose to ignore if it is to be of any use in helping us to understand how the discovery of natural selection occurred. Such knowledge is important, because it is fundamental in developing ways to increase the chances of making other great discoveries in the future.

Read more on the Patrick Matthew Website Here

Is Primary School Attendance Obsession Likely to Kill Children ?

Last year my five year daughter caught chicken pox. We kept her off school until the point at which she was no longer infectious, which is when all the spots had scabbed over. That took ten days. Then we received a letter form the school insisting we meet personally with the headmistress because our daughter's attendance had fallen below their target for all children. A visit to the school sorted that out, but then three weeks ago we received another standard letter - threatening us with consequences unspecified -  after we kept her away from school for three days because she vomited in the classroom and we were asked to collect her. The reason for the second letter - she had been out of school too long when those three days were added to the earlier ten! The morning of the vomiting episode she had complained of a painful tummy. We sent her into school  because of the school pressure and because she was not rolling around in apparent agony.

Here is just one example of the obsession with attendance in primary schools - this is not my daughter's school - but the thinking is the same - Example.

Done for all the right reasons, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

It seems to me that this is a recipe for disaster. Surely this obsessive policy is likely to lead overambitious, or fearful, good parents to send in a poorly child to school who may be in the first stages of flu, meningitis or heaven knows what other highly contagious illness leading to the unnecessary death of theirs and other children!  Does that have to happen before this ridiculous unthinking obsession with attendance is bought to a summary halt by government policy?

The Gabriel Woods Nottingham Art Collection

The Eleventh Commandment

Norman 2

Amble

Berlin Idol

You Are Leaving

String Measure

Ice 1

Ice 2

Nprman

Lianne

After the Fire

Auf'n Bahnsteig

Israel Flares over Gaza

Immaculate Deception