By the Strength of Their Character

(Readers may know what a Liberal is, especially if they've ever been bitten by one, but a Transnational Progressivist (or "Tranzi") may require some explanation. So click here, although Medawar doesn't endorse every analysis and sentiment therein. Apply your own judgement to the new ideas, and see below for why that is good.)

It is nearly fifty years since a Southern Baptist minister stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and made a speech, listened to by something like three hundred thousand people in the flesh and millions more on radio and television, that set out a simple recipe for peace and justice.

Nearly always, the Liberal and “Transnational Progressivist” political elite and their media homeboys will refer to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King as a “civil rights leader” and pay some kind of patronising, creeping lip-service before attempting to append his legacy to what is effectively the opposite of what he recommended.

Because Doctor King had a dream, (dreaming a dream is a very Baptist experience), and that dream was that everyone, regardless of their race, should be judged on the strength of their character and not the colour of their skin. In a single sentence, Doctor King destroys the basis of racial politics. But he doesn’t merely destroy racism, or neo-nazism, or nationalism. He destroys the other side of racial politics -and most of liberalism, too.

Firstly, Doctor King did not say, and most definitely did not mean, that black people or any other “oppressed” ethnic group should avoid being judged on their colour, whilst members of the supposed “oppressor” races should still be condemned as oppressors by virtue of their whiteness, or anglo-saxon-ness. He meant that no individual should be judged by the colour of their skin, for either good or bad.

Secondly, he very carefully used words such as “every” and “each” and not “all”. It was very much the individual who should never be judged by the colour of their skin, and it was the individual who should be judged by the strength of their character.

There are two concepts here which Liberals and “Tranzis” will recoil from like a vampire in a crucifix factory: individuals, and strength of character as a measure of worth.

Doctor King’s speech was not just an “anti-racist” soundbite, nor was it merely a generic “Christian” platitude. It was a Baptist sermon of great passion and power and this means that there was far more to it than “anti-racism” or civil rights.

Doctor King wanted to set his people free, but “his people” are, potentially, everyone. And he didn’t just want to set them free from racism: he wanted to set them FREE!

Every and each, embracing the whole human race as individuals. In deciding to judge us by our strength of character, Doctor King requires each of us to have a character. We have to be our own person, form our own view, decide for ourselves what we believe. Ohhhh! That man was a Baptist alright! Being judged, fairly, is freedom. If we are truly slaves, we do nothing by choice, we cannot be judged.

But everything we can be judged on, is a choice we were free to make. If we are to be judged, we have to be free. There is more in that than race: race is the least of it!

We do not, and can not, make the world better by labelling some communities as “oppressed” and, by political machination, moving them around the world until they are living amongst an “oppressor” community who can be made to suffer by way of reparation. Bear-baiting is as deadly to the hounds as to the bear: yet the essentials of the “Transnational Progressivist” concept of racial justice amounts to bear-baiting with whole communities. Always communities, groups, races; Transnational Progressivists cannot see individuals, only masses. Yet they currently “own” (anti-) racism and social justice as issues, which is like Herod the Great owning childcare as a political issue.

No-one will ever find personal freedom in their racial or ethnic identity. Freedom is in their own individual identity. Racial identity is all very well, and perhaps a genetic reality, but unless it is firmly in second place, behind individual identity, it is a barrier to freedom.

If you are a white Liberal, genuinely concerned for the rights and liberties of your black neighbour, the best thing you can do is find out his name and stop thinking of your neighbour as black. If you are a black power activist and very much not a liberal, an equivalent exercise could be very healthy. If you are a Transnational Progressivist, seeing nation states as the source of all evil: you need to see that nations are mostly ideas, not races or geographical entities, and that individuals will stand first with those with whom they can share ideas. If you want an end to nations, it probably is necessary to suppress the individual at every level and in every area of life, and the “Tranzi” movement has set about doing that with a will, but in that case an end to nations means an end to humanity.

What Doctor King set out for us was not “ a way of life” but the way to life. We must see everyone as an individual and not as part of any group, racial or social. We must grant them every freedom as an individual, and we must also hold them to account as individuals. Not on the assumption that all will fail and all are corrupt: Doctor King would not have subscribed to the doctrine of original sin, but because being held to account, being judged for good or bad, is a privilege when it comes with the inherent freedom to be good or bad. And Doctor King spoke in such a godlike way, not because he held any schizophrenic or pathological delusions that he was God, but because he was an obedient servant of God, striving throughout his life to understand God’s will -and then speaking it with an eloquence, simplicity and grace that makes it hard for any but the clinically obtuse to doubt that he spoke as a man inspired.

It wasn’t just the Ku Klux Klan who had reason to be discomforted by Doctor King’s words: the Liberals, Tranzis, Black Power Leaders and almost every known species of extremist would, if they thought about it, find something to hate and fear in that speech from the Lincoln Memorial. Our assumptions, therefore, about what manner of sinister conspiracy must have been behind Doctor King’s cowardly murder several years after that speech, may need to be revisited in the understanding that his words smote a lot more widely than the racist extreme right. In fact, the delay of several years almost certainly means that his killing was commissioned, not by the first and obviously apparent target of his challenge, but by someone who needed to sit and think it through before they understood that here was a man with the power to destroy their movement just by opening his mouth and speaking a single sentence.

New Blog

For those concerned with whether or not one extremist group might be infiltrating and manipulating another, this blog may prove helpful, but it's a long-term proposition as it depends on reader feedback.

Toxic Materials in Stalking.

Medawar invites comments, anonymous ones are probably best, from any reader who knows of instances of stalkers (whether "organized" stalkers or just vanilia-variety nutters) using toxic or noxious chemicals to harass their victims, perhaps to damage their health or simply to enhance the anxiety, stress and associated debilitating effects of being stalked and harassed.

Are there any noxious chemicals that disproportionately affect persons from specific ethnic groups, or are there vulnerabilities in diet and lifestyle (consumption of marine mammal fat?) that would allow an ethnic group to be targeted over time and worn down, without it appearing to any outside observer, or even the victims, that it was being done on purpose?

Medawar would like to be able to post a watch-list, of substances and symptoms, at some point, to allow targeted communities at least a chance of self-defence. However, there's a need to avoid writing a manual on how to do it, when one wants only to put a stop to it.

Medawar has read all the stuff about electromagnetic weapons and knows too much about the subject to believe it can account for all the effects people are complaining of. Something else is happening.

Any reader who doesn't understand what this means: don't worry about it, just move on to the next post.

Mass Extinction and Rolling Back the Human Race

This article in the Science Daily is interesting, once you read the text and find that it's actually giving the opposite impression to the headline!

In short, it finds that the human race caused far more species extinctions, amongst mammals at least, in its pre-civilization phase than it has caused since. This actually makes a lot of sense: a new species has most effect when it first appears, but is the opposite of what most people would assume off the top of their heads.

(This was determined by a study of what happened in the Americas, where humans arrived relatively recently to a clean slate. Uncomfortable reading for those who unthinkingly revere native Americans as wiser custodians of the environment than Europeans. But not actually a reproach to native Americans, who simply did their best to adapt to and survive in, a new environment. Someone is going to post an angry comment about the white men killing all the Bison, or the Passenger Pigeon, but the study is about the disappearance of hundreds and hundreds of species over 2,000 years. In fact, the logic of the situation may be that Native Americans, through managing and changing the environment, helped nature create the remarkable and beautiful prairie system in which bison became so numerous and prevelant, and where one species of pigeon was able to build up to million-strong flocks each autumn. And if they did, that's something to really admire them for, rather than an ignorant supposition that they found everything already perfect, as in Eden, rather than finding a promised land that needed, and would reward, many generations of hard work. The Human race is not an abomination to nature: we are part of nature and our interactions with it are interesting and may, over great spans of time, actually prove constructive.)

There are some extreme environmentalists and animal rights people out there, who argue that, for the sake of other species, the human race needs to be "rolled back" to its pre-civilization condition. This research implies that might do more harm than good in its own terms, even if the requisite slaughter of the human race could be morally justified, which it cannot.

The "harm" has been done and humans are here. Getting rid of us can only do more harm, it will never restore a cuddly bunny utopia. The fastest way to disrupt and destroy any ecosystem is to remove a dominant species, and humans are now the dominant species. We must take appropriate care with the world, but there is no case whatsoever for getting rid of us!

Suicide with a Small Knife? Mark Weinberger

This article may be of interest to readers who doubt the official line about the death of Dr David Kelly.

A plastic surgeon, wanted for fraud, attempted suicide with a small knife after his arrest. The surgeon botched it and is still alive, even though he was going for a much more major artery in the throat, rather than a minor one in the wrist, as Dr Kelly is supposed to have done.

Suicide by small knife is very, very hard without a hot bath and cuts to several arteries. It is almost always better to put up with being alive.

Tony Blair's Money

This is that rare thing, a Guardian article that everybody should read.

Searching for Alena Gerber

It has crossed Medawar's mind that some people idly google their own names on occasion, to see what comes up. In which case, Miss Gerber is welcome to visit this site, which, unlike some Swiss calender models, has no serious prejudices against comely and buxom young German ladies.

The Persian Caliphate

From time to time, Medawar reads a blog or newspaper column to the effect that, in Iran, "The Revolutionary Guards are increasingly a parallel, separately funded, government."

They observe, but do not understand.

The situation in Iran today is very like that in the earliest stages of the Turkish Republic, where General Mustapha Kemal Attaturk had established a modern, democratic state, but the old Caliphate, which had recently led the Ottoman Empire into tyranny, genocide and disaster, was still levying what amounted to taxes and still passing decrees which were supposed to have the force of law. Parliamentary democracy, which Attaturk was trying to estbalish and stabilize, kept tripping over the remains of the Caliphate at every turn, until Attaturk effectively abolished the shadow government, not in the name of secularism, but with the words "the Caliphate requires Islam, Islam does not require the Caliphate!" In doing so, he not only secured Turkish democracy, but finally set the Arab world free from even theological Turkish rule. This is why, although the Arab league made various resolutions about re-establishing the Caliphate, they've never once been silly enough to actually do it.

But there are two crucial differences between Turkey in the 1920s and Iran in the 2000s -and the first is the direction of travel: Turkey had both a democratic government and a theocracy at the same time, because it was moving from a (awesomely corrupt and venal) theocracy, towards a modern democratic state. Iran has both a constitutional (and almost democratic) government and a theocracy, because it is moving from constitutional government towards an unchecked theocracy. Which leads us to the second difference:

Turkey was the centre of a Sunni Muslim Caliphacy, the Ottoman Empire, which had its cultural and scientific highs, as well as moral lows, such as brutal oppression of Arab nations and the attempted extermination of the Armenian nation: the prototype for Hitler's holocaust.

Iran's theocrats are Shia muslims*, and Caliphacy is, or has been until now, a Sunni Muslim form. The traditions of Sunni Islam and those of the Ottoman Caliphate had evolved together, and for most of the time, those traditions proved a check and a balance on the Caliphacy, which did not otherwise know any explicit limit on its power or freedom of action. Unless Shia Islam invents some appropriate traditions, very smartly, it will find itself with a power structure that it simply doesn't know how to live with -and from which, it simply cannot escape.

A Shia Caliphacy will be a new thing on Earth. Medawar waits to see what it will look like, but not with any sense of eager anticipation!

* Not all Iran's people are Muslims, and not all of the Muslims are Shias. Even if a Caliphacy were the right form of government for Shia muslims, about a third of Iran's population is something other than Shia: there are significant numbers of Sunnis -and a couple of smaller muslim sects and two non-muslim religions were founded in Iran and spread around the world from there. It is very hard to see how a Shia Caliphate can come into being in a country as religiously pluralistic as Iran, unless the pluralism is to go and there is to be genocide, of non-shia muslims as well as non-muslims. And since Hinduism is the offspring of one of the ancient Iranian religions, how far will the theological cleansing go?

Weapons Experts Deserve Inquests, Too.

There are now calls, from a group of six medical experts, for a full and proper inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. There needs to be one into the death of Dr Timothy Hampton, too.
No excuses, no evasions, no "special provisions" just proper lawful inquests by Her Majesty's Coroners for Berkshire and Oxfordshire.

Medawar would caution internet conspiracy theorists, that the furore surrounding Dr Kelly over Iraq's WMDs and the pathological lies of Mr Antony Charles Lynton Blair, may have provided the smokescreen and opportunity for his alleged murder, rather than the motive. The motive might lie a bit further back in his history, as he was the one who exposed Russia's active programme to weaponize the smallpox virus, when all the other UN inspectors were walking through the relevant facility without realizing what it was, simply because the Russians had switched the lights off. Dr Kelly was the only weapons inspector with the presence of mind to take a powerful torch with him on his inspections! There were those in the KGB who hated him for finding what they thought was cunningly hidden in plain sight. Nobody has more form for this kind of murder than the KGB and its successor body, the FSB.

And that little story tells you all just how effective UN weapons inspectors usually are. This is what makes targets of the British ones, who actually roll up their sleeves and genuinely look for wrong-doing. If anyone else was actually looking, there would be no gain in knocking off the Brits.

Austrian Forensic Method: Burn the Evidence, Quickly!

Austrian Police had to be restrained from destroying what may be the only useful forensic evidence left in the "investigation" into the increasingly suspicious death of the British weapons expert, Dr Timothy Hampton, in Vienna.

If Dr Hampton's body can be returned, intact, to England for burial, the relevant county Coroner (Berkshire, probably) can hold an inquest to review the available (unburnt) evidence before a jury. Coroners exist to determine fact rather than guilt or liability; only an authority frightened by the facts would seek to frustrate such an inquest.

To contact Her Majesty's Coroner for the County of Berkshire:

BERKSHIRE CORONER’S DISTRICT
AREA COMPRISING THE CORONER’S JURISDICTION: The whole county of Berkshire.

P J Bedford
Yeomanry House, 131 Castle Hill
Reading
Berkshire
Telephone: 0118 901 5447

(+44) 118 901 5447 if calling from outside the UK or Channel Islands, of course.

Remembrance

The BBC has, properly, made much of the fact that this is the first Armistice day where Great Britain no longer has a living veteran of the Great War to observe the silence, no living link to the conflict itself.

But we've been here before.

In the early eighties, the last two veterans of the battle of Spion Kop died, at a Cheshire Home in Hitchin. Medawar remembers there being a small handful of such men, then just those two, both in bath-chairs having suffered traumatic amputations in the battle, who would attend remembrance day services for the fallen of the Great War, even though this tended, always, to eclipse any memory of their own war. For the rest of the year, while they were still able, they would come into town and bath chairs would be propelled, by hand-cranks, across Market Place to Merrick's sweetshop and tobacconists by the entrance to West's Arcade, to purchase the necessary comforts for that week.

Their regiment, the Middlesex, went on to fight in many more wars, being commanded in both Burma and Kenya by Colonel Rilely Workman. He fell, not in battle, but at the door of his retirement cottage in East Herts, shot by a murderer who remains officially unknown. The gulf between the soldier and the murderer is vast -and murder stains the Earth after the scars of battle have healed.

Medawar remembers, too, a small handful of Great War veterans who'd queue outside W.E Waylett's little barber shop. One of them was permanently blue as a result of his experiences -and gas- and this is a disturbing sight that almost no-one younger than Medawar will have seen, and hopefully those who do not understand that a man can turn blue and stay that way for over fifty years, won't ever be faced with a practical demonstration.

Medawar remembers how many men died at Bluff Cove, because of a ten minute gap in their fighter cover. Which the defence correspondent of the Daily Mail evidently does not bloody remember, even though he was on the Falklands at the time, as he simpers away that cutting RAF fighters and Royal Navy Aircraft Carriers will fund more equipment for the "boots on the ground".

Modern, industrial, warfare did not start in 1914, because most of the painful lessons learned then had already been painfully obvious at Spion Kop -and at Gettysburg. It did not end in 1982, either.

We are not into a new phase of history where all wars are about terrorism and counter-insurgency: that was precisely what the US Marine Corps had been trained for, up to 1917-1918 and their eye-watering losses taking Melville Woods from the Germans, who were not Filipino insurgents or terrorists, but an organised and disciplined army with a huge industrial machine behind them. We still live in the same age, in fact, where "terrorism" and insurgencies fill the gaps between major conflicts between industrial powers, not because anyone is consciously using them to keep the troops fresh, but because both are symptoms of the different stresses caused by different phases of the economic cycle.

If we want peace, then we have to remember, causes as well as sacrifice. And we need to sacrifice a bit more money, so we sacrifice fewer lives.

Banknotes Protest

This link shows how Iranian pro-democracy activists are putting slogans on banknotes in general circulation.

Ethically, one has to ensure that one isn't handing a shopkeeper a note that he cannot redeem, otherwise it's equivalent to passing a forgery, but if the notes circulate and are accepted as currency with a little bit of writing on them -and it's long been the practice of banks and businesses to write odd numbers on the notes when totting up- then it's perfectly acceptable. Some of the notes have great long spiels written on, though, and that must make it hard for anyone to use the note as currency.

Medawar likes the idea of inkjetting a little picture of Neda onto every Iranian banknote.
Perhaps Bank of England and Royal Bank of Scotland notes might have a little picture of Dr David Kelly added.

Northern Ireland readers could inkjet Northern Bank notes with thumbnails of all the people murdered by paramilitaries, whose graves have not yet been found. And perhaps British tourists could put a little thumbnail of Madeline McCann on every single Portuguese Euro note that passes through their hands.

Seeing Beyond Political Boundaries

"To see ultra-violet, infra-red and X-rays, beauty to find in so many ways."

(From "The Word" by Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues)

Timothy Hampton and the March of Time

Anyone looking for a motive for the murder, in Vienna, of Dr Timothy Hampton, needs to do much more than look in the right geographical region for the secrets that he might have uncovered, that others wanted covered up again most urgently. They also need to look in the right timeframe:

A few years ago, when sophisticated software was being developed, to continuously scan seismographic sensors and sound alarms when anything resembling a nuclear test was detected, one of the people developing the software argued that there was a lot of perfectly good seismic data in the archives going back to years before the software was even thought of, let alone developed, and it might be a good idea to run the new software over that, as well.

So, what happens when you run the software that Dr Hampton was using in his official, contemporary work, over archive seismic data for the period 1975-1988, for example?
And if you go to a different time, aren't the politically critical parts of the world all different?

PS:
This link is to a document which comment poster, Dave K9, offers as relevant.
Briefly, this document suggests that the second Korean nuclear test might not have been nuclear at all, or the test site had somehow achieved a much better containment of radioactive material than the first test. (Medawar believes that this site is actually a coal mining area: not an ideal choice for containment!) If the "test" was actually a stunt, pulled with thousands of tons of conventional explosives, then the cavity fusing effect that makes underground nuclear explosions self-sealing, wouldn't happen and hundreds of tons of gas would be vented or seep from the site. Medawar thinks this would be forensically detectible, for months, although not by any mechanism in the nuclear test monitoring network.
Depends a little on what conventional explosive used:
ANFO w0uld be the most cost-effective material in the west, and this is fairly clean-burning.
TNT/ammonium-nitrate (Amatol) has been used in very large conventional explosions in the past: this would definitely leave distinctive chemicals in the plume.
More modern RDX/TNT even more so. (But would cost millions: roughly £1 per 1lb.)
Thousands of tons of HMX/TNT (Octal) would be so expensive that a genuine nuclear bomb would be cheaper.

Also, it would be a huge labour to transport thousands of tons of explosives to the same depth as a nuclear device lowered down a shaft that could be drilled like an oil or water well.

However, it's also noteworthy that this document describes and ever-tightening noose of monitoring for nuclear test activity, making it harder by the month, never mind the year, to get away with doing this undetected. This means that any secrets about nuclear tests apply to tests that have already happened some time ago, before doing it in secret became difficult.

And at the same time as doubt is being cast on the technical capabilities of North Korea, it has emerged that Iran has access to a fairly advanced form of nuclear warhead design.

Actually, Medawar thought this had to be the case, a few years ago when inurgents in Southern Iraq suddenly started to use Explosively Formed Penetrator devices in roadside bombs. An EFP and a two-point implosion or "Swan" nuclear device both represent essentially the same technology.

Drug Facts Also Unlikely to Appear on Indymedia Anytime Soon

This link is to some actual facts about cannabis.

The ACMD "top twenty" list of drugs was a form of opinion poll amongst interested scientists and clinicians and was not a rigorous study, as many of Professor Nutt's supporters have assumed. "Look before you lynch" would be good advice to the Home Secretary's more strident critics.

It is also strange that Heroin, a licensed drug, given to thousands of patients every year, should be classed by the ACMD as more dangerous than Cocaine, which is no longer licensed for any medical use. Give a severely wounded person a proper dose of strong opiate, such as heroin, morphine or one of the stronger synthetic opiates, you will buffer them against the shock to some extent and this may give you time to save their life. Give them cocaine and you may make them oblivious to, or at least heedless of, the pain, but the physiological effects of the shock will be magnified and the cocaine will swiftly finish them off. Long term abuse of Cocaine causes aortic anuerisms and these kill, very suddenly, and are well nigh impossible to treat. Cocaine gives its abusers a tremendous feeling of confidence in all their decisions and ideas, even if these are actually quite garbled, and yet the first physical warning the user feels that his habit might be about to kill him, is a sharp pain in the back. He then has about twenty-five minutes to:

A/ Realize something is actually wrong.

B/ Seek help.

C/ Actually reach an operating theatre and a surgical team who know that he's having an anuerism.

D/ Get it successfully repaired.

Cocaine users are often very bad at accepting that something is going wrong, so their chances of making it to the operating table in time are very, very slim. The cocaine-induced death rate may be grossly under-estimated.

Also, Medawar observes that most Heroin addicts know that they have a problem and wish they could stop taking it, whereas most Cannabis users won't accept that there is any problem at all with Cannabis and fly into a furious rage with anyone who even suggests that there might be. Which of those two attitudes evidences the most dangerous delusion?

Don't take heroin or any opiate recreationally. Don't delude yourself, either, that because you are taking Cannabis or Cocaine instead, all is rosy.

If you are taking amphetamines, please try not to drive any sort of motor vehicle -and there's no point in your harbouring any ambitions to have sex with anyone, because it will shrink until it's so small you start having nightmares about it.

If you are taking meth-amphetamines: good bye.

Cocaine Update: If taken with alcohol, Cocaine forms a third drug, cocaethylene, which remains in the liver and is implicated in heart disease. Not that cocaine on its own, isn't. NB: this article comes from the Observer (part of the Guardian group) which rarely troubles its affluent "professional class" readership with anything particularly negative about social drug taking.

Cocaine kills. It can take a few years, and the massive explosion, not just in the number of users, but the amount that each user consumes, is a few years old. Looking on the bright side, anyone wanting to become a Television Producer is about to find an awful lot of vacancies advertised in "Guardian Media" and "Aerial".

Indymedia Censorship

This Link is to the article which Indymedia censored, apparently because it contained facts rather than AR Terrorist Propaganda. Medawar did have the text up here, but there's no need to cause confusion by having it in two places at once.

A Walk in the Woods or a Fall from a Height

It appears that Timothy Hampton, a British Weapons Expert who died in the UN building in Vienna, was probably murdered.

Originally a biologist, Dr Hampton has been working in the field of seismic monitoring for signs of nuclear tests, developing expertise he'd gained in the construction industry. Because of his early background, it's just possible that he needed to be silenced over a matter of biological warfare, but the most likely thing was that he had found seismic evidence of a so-far unreported nuclear test, or that he was able to prove that the presumed characteristics, such as yield, of a test that had been reported, were wrong.

In any matters pertaining to North Korea, it's very unlikely that the use of nuclear weapons would be separated from the use of biological and bio-chemical weapons, especially fusella toxins, so a biologist with nuclear and seismic expertise might well see a "big picture" not apparent to his colleagues or his political superiors -and need to be silenced before he managed to get his concerns across. The same might be true, also, of Iran, but so far all the international attention has been concentrated on that country's nuclear programme. There has been no reported Iranian nuclear test, so far.

Dr Hampton's wife is a nuclear inspector in her own right, with a different organization, but she was away in the Far East at the time of his death. It is possible that Dr Hampton knew something that his wife might have communicated to higher levels of authority, so he'd have to be done in before she got home.

Animal Rights and Neo-Nazis

This article should be read by those who like to pretend that the animal rights movement is an heroic enemy of extreme right and racist groups in the UK.

The opposite it true, the AR movement is just a stalking horse for the neo-nazis.

This goes right back to the start of the ALF, in the early seventies, and probably long before.

This link is to an article (recovered by Wayback Machine) where Troy Southgate, a racist animal rights activist, interviews Richard Hunt, a non-racist (but otherwise remarkably extreme) anarchist whose agenda sort of crosses over the animal rights one. (It doesn't start the same, but ends up with a very small human population living by the law of the jungle.)
The fascinating thing, is the reply to Mr Hunt, suggesting that Racial Nationalism is the only way to fight "internationalism".

This is very revealing and Medawar can see why it was taken offline and needed to be retrieved!
If the link stops working, leave a comment to tell me and I'll try and put it up again. It is so helpful to know how the other half thinks.

Enlightenment and Tyranny

It's hardly an original idea, that the 18th century "Enlightenment" degenerated into 20th century fascism, because any movement which basically relies on using social pressure to make all society's intellectuals appear to agree about everything, is waiting only for the name of fascism to be invented and bestowed upon it. The question which this begs is this: where did the legacy of Enlightenment take us, after it had taken us to Belsen and camp 731?

Although it's often presented as an age when reason replaced superstition and tradition in the affairs of man, that would better describe the flood of new ideas, creeds and innovations, that followed the English Civil War a century earlier. Some of these ideas were lunatic, and nobody except Tony Benn and Billy Bragg still believes in them, others, particularly the concepts of religious and therefore, inevitably, political, freedom, have become so basic to our way of life and our values that we struggle to understand that we didn't always enjoy them. The right of the Humanists to relentlessly insult and abuse Baptists and other Christians, was the work of non-conformist preachers, such as John Bunyan. Before Bunyan's followers gathered at night in Wain Wood, just South of Hitchin, to hear him preach, anyone writing regular letters to the broadsheets declaiming Christianity as an absurdity or a re-hash of a pagan superstition, would have been bunged in the madhouse if lucky, and publicly executed in a particularly brutal fashion if not.

As well as a great deal of death and misery, the Civil War gave England a tremendous breakthrough, much more important than the switch to Parliamentary government, which, in absence of anything resembling straight and democratic election until the reign of William the Fourth in the early nineteenth century, changed the world a lot less than Parliamentary tub-thumpers would like us to think. The breakthrough wasn't any constitutional change, it was the simple realisation that the winning side had won, not through the uniformity and purity of its followers' commitment to any winning ideology, but because the winning side actually encompassed every view possible except those of King Charles the First -and the Pope.

England's new parliamentary rulers didn't entirely get this message at the time, and they made several attempts, some exceptionally brutal, to suppress free thinking and diversity. However, after the Monarchy had been restored and with it a certain amount of political balance, requiring Parliament to have a measure of public support in order to challenge the Sovereign, foreign wars, mainly against the Dutch, reinforced the message until it did get through: England was stronger if everyone was allowed to speak, because then Parliament and the Sovereign represented everyone -and almost everyone would then be willing to push in the same direction.

To comprehend this, one has to be able to accept that there isn't always, or even often, a single "right" idea about anything. John Bunyan and George Fox did not entirely share the same religious views: they fought on the same side in the Civil War, however, and would thereafter have been perfectly willing to fight for the other's right to believe what they themselves did not.

Some people find this baffling, others find it frightening, both these camps eventually end up insisting that "any two honest men, carefully considering the same matter, must reach the same conclusion". The Enlightenment, far from being the source of reason and new thinking, was actually a frightened reaction to the concept that no amount of learned debate could always reveal what was best, and sometimes they had to live with two different views, or two different ways of doing things. (Like Troy pounds and pounds Avoirdupois. A Troy pound isn't wrong because it's not Avoirdupois, let alone metric, it's a Troy pound.)

First of all, debate had to be limited to the right sort of person -and this started to happen even in Bunyan's time. When William Kiffin refused to even discuss certain matters with him, using these words:

"I had not meddled with the controversy at all, had I found any of parts that would divert themselves to take notice of YOU"


Bunyan replied:

What need you, before you have showed me one syllable of a reasonable argument in opposition to what I assert, thus trample my person, my gifts and graces, have I any, so disdainfully under your feet? What kind of a YOU am I? And why is MY rank so mean, that the most gracious and godly among you may not duly and soberly consider of what I have said?

It isn't necessary to know what the matter actually was: only certain people were supposed to engage in debates and form opinions. But in all the centuries since then, has anyone ever made a better argument for both freedom of speech and ordinary gentle courtesy? Has anyone ever needed to?

By the time the composer, Hadyn, was spending his holidays in Vienna, a couple of centuries later, the Enlightenment was in full swing, even in Austria. Hadyn was obliged to write a fairly grovelling letter asking to join a particular masonic lodge, where intellectual debates were held. In practice, unless one was admitted to that lodge, Viennese society wouldn't allow one to talk about any sort of radical or new idea. Hadyn, one of the most creative minds there has ever been, was forced to write some tosh about how having ideas by oneself would lead to discord, whereas if one had ideas in the right company (the lodge or social gatherings staged by its members) new ideas would all be harmonious, like a well-orchestrated piece of music. Medawar suspects that Hadyn didn't actually believe this, as he only ever actually attended the one meeting which inducted him to the lodge, but because he'd done that, he was allowed to have ideas!

Interestingly, for those interested in how far back organized stalking might go, Hadyn's private diaries tend to reflect what he was officially supposed to believe, so it appears he wrote even his personal journal with a view to it being read by officers of either his lodge master, or even the Austro-Hungarian Emperor! Keeping a diary in a code that these interlopers could not read, would have been a suicide note.

The Enlightenment didn't promote new ideas, it controlled them and only allowed out, those which intellectuals agreed upon. (This is not necessarily a mechanism for being right all the time.) This did not die with Hitler, because during the post-war career of Professor Richard Feynman, he found himself being asked to join very high-powered, intellectual debating societies, whose main preoccupation was deciding who else should be allowed to join. Ie: the restriction which Hadyn had encountered in Vienna during the Enlightenment, was heavily present in late twentieth century physics in the United States of America. Feynman was a genius, knew it, didn't really care what anyone thought of him -and was perfectly willing to discuss almost anything with anyone prepared to listen or with something intelligent or genuine to say. He willingly gave ordinary people the courtesy that Bunyan had demanded of his "betters".

The Enlightenment was not a masonic plot, the masons just happened to be a useful way of organising it in some places. In England, a number of Royal Societies were established with pretty much the same aim as Viennese Masonry, you just didn't have to roll your trousers up and swear loyalty to Jaballon to get in.

So, after all that diversion, if that's what it is, through the past, how to answer the original question: where's the Enlightenment taking us after Belsen and Camp 731? After Fascism, Thascism and Blairism, what next?

Here is where we actually have a choice:

If we allow the progression to continue, we will find ourselves in a state where ideas no longer need to be repressed or controlled, because they are no longer being had. In this, Tony Blair and Abu Hanza are brothers. Already, we have a situation where only ideas had in "think tanks" stand even the slightest chance of being commended to policy-makers, indeed, it's probable that there's not a government minister in England who's read an unfiltered idea from an ordinary member of the public since he took office. If it isn't quite true, yet, that's clearly the next intended destination. Once you have confined the having of ideas to the think-tanks, you can tell the think tanks not to bother anymore until they are asked. At which moment, the whole human race, including its rulers, becomes useless.

If we chose, instead, to respect differences of opinion, even when two sane and reasonable men honestly consider the same matter, and we duly and soberly consider of what others say, which is simple courtesy and all that John Bunyan asked, then different ideas can co-exist and new ideas can grow, not always from one "right" idea beating another idea and proving it "wrong" but from two different ideas side by side allowing us to see a third -and a fourth and more thereafter.

(The photograph is from a point near to Wain Wood, looking towards where Bunyan would actually have come from, when travelling to the spot from Bedford Jail. Ie: not straight to the Charlton/Preston area from Bedford, via Shefford and Hitchin, but actually via Ampthill and Shillington. This may be why he was never actually caught. He often returned home (to the jail!) via Potton and Sandy Heath, then a genuine wilderness. Medawar's photograph album produces yet another obscure triumph!)

Dangers of Being a UK Weapons Expert

This would seem to be a dangerous occupation indeed.
Apart from Dr Kelly, there were all the sonar experts chucked into the Avon Gorge by suicide-fakers unknown; although it's hard to find a better suspect for that than the KGB.

On a lighter note, the nuclear fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield once failed a safety inspection: Inspectors took all their readings, checked every procedure, were basically happy. One of them shinned up a ladder for a last look at something fairly important, fell off, broke leg, scrawled "failed" on his notes even as the paramedics were splinting his leg ready to take him to hospital.

Update: Austrian police think there might have been foul play.

Exodus of the Gummerites!

C of E loses responsibility for several thousand "fundamentalists."

Medawar doubts that much sleep will be lost in either Canterbury or York.

The C of E is at its best when expressing a form of quiet, undogmatic faith that has a great deal of support from the Bible, but which singularly fails to feed the cravings of power-worshippers. Those who cannot see or feel that quiet faith and its genuine power, which cannot be so easily abused as the hierarchical and purely political power structure of the Roman Church, will always wander off, eventually. Rome has many, many more divisions than Stalin ever had, and also many rulers -and terrorists- under its mantle. The C of E often appears only to have cakes and flower-festivals, but then, Angels have appeared and baked cakes to sustain prophets in the desert, and "Solomon, in all his splendour, was not robed as one of these." Let John Selwyn Gummer and Antony Charles Lynton Blair hie off to Rome if they must, but they are following and seeking something purely political -and in doing so, they demonstrate that they have missed the point of God, most utterly.

Of course, the C of E could usefully adopt the priesthood of all the believers, and probably one day it will be able to, once all those who need a druid-replacement at the altar have thrown their kneelers out of the pram in a huff.

What Was the True Purpose of the STASI?

These days, the STASI is forgotten by most people, conveniently so by many German politicians and the British ones who negotiate treaties with them that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but the STASI hasn't really gone away. It has transformed itself into something that certain investigative journalists in Germany (an endangered species, really) refer to as the "Deutschland-Clan".

This is an organized crime network, carrying a lot of clout within the German criminal justice system as former STASI personnel forge new careers in the Federal Police and public prosecutor's offices. It also appears to have both the management and trades unions in its pocket in two areas of strategic communications: German Railways and German Telecommunications. -It also played a role in German and Austrian companies getting impressive contracts from American Railroad companies for signalling and communications gear. (Always less emotive and less publicized than surrendering rolling stock to foreign suppliers, although Railtrack has been happy to do this in the UK.)

Now, it seems very unlikely that the new organised crime network, based on the STASI infrastructure of terror, would be seeking a return of the old communist German state, which would be pointless, or communist world revolution, which would be over-ambitious. But what was the STASI's purpose in the first place: could this provide a clue as to what, apart from make money and terrorize people, the Deutschland Clan is likely to do?

The STASI was formed by negotiation between Gestapo officers and agents captured by the Russians, and NKVD officers tasked with creating a functional communist state from the social chaos left by the Red Army's officially-sanctioned orgy of organized rape, which was Stalin's deliberate punishment for the German people for having turned against him. Essentially, the NKVD offered to let the Gestapo off for war crimes, provided that they agreed to ignore the massive war crime of organized rape, and to make East Germany run for the communists. The deal was struck, and the released Gestapo duly started to enforce order, repair the country's social structure (always, only to a limited extent) and enforce obedience to the new Communist puppets. (But never the same widespread belief that the Nazis had enjoyed.)

So, the STASI, to begin with at least, was a sub-set of the Gestapo, minus the ones who chose to go to the West and do a deal, or Argentina and do no deal. (This depended on whether their "nest egg" was information, which MI6 or the American OSS actually wanted, or whether they already had money. If they had money, they went to Argentina or Paraguay without delay or a single thought to any deal with Western Intelligence, if they had information, they traded that -and then went to Argentina without much in the way of backward glances.) In a sense, the STASI was the Gestapo in purer form, free of the pro-western element or those who had successfully feathered their own nests. Far from being communists, these were the NAZI Taliban, the utter hard core of true believers.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in practice, East Germany functioned like the Nazi state, not as it had been during the Holocaust (there wasn't an ethnic minority of any size available in any case!) but as it was between 1933 and 1939. Towards the end, they even had new death-camps built, although the Russians pulled the plug before these could be used. They weren't big enough to "process" a whole ethnic group, just political dissidents, which is precisely what the original NAZI camps were designed to do, before successful territorial conquests left them with more Jews corralled into ghettos than they knew what to do with.

Faced with the chaos and ruined state left behind by Stalin's rapine and revenge, the NKVD had done a deal with the devil and created a survival capsule for Nazism.

Which brings us to the much neglected question of what the NAZI party itself was supposed to be -and for whom?

In 1919, after the Armistice and the punishment of Germany via the Treaty of Versailles, there were several odd little political parties like the NAZIs, all testing out the waters with different bits of the political spectrum. Adolf Hitler, upon his release from hospital, was recruited by German Military intelligence, based on very positive comments about his courage that were on file from his (Jewish) former Commanding Officer, as an agent who would go and infiltrate these subversives. Strangely, for a spy, he ended up as figurehead of the worker's party that he'd been sent to infiltrate. Stranger still, they originally tried out a version of Marxist class warfare, before finding that this found no favour with their potential supporters (bottles were thrown at Himmler when he made a speech saying the Party's ideology was close to Lenin's) and racial politics only emerged as plan B after this riot.

The Nazis engaged in street scuffles and political trials of strength with several other broadly similar parties, (for all we know, German Military intelligence had agents like Hitler in all of these parties) and eventually, after some farcical false starts, the NAZIs got going and started to emerge as the strongest of all the radical new parties. At which point, they suddenly came into the money, from all the industrial combines and big banks that had backed Lubendorf's regime under the Kaiser's rule for the consolidation of Germany and the attempted empire-building that led to the Great War.

Germany seems to us like a fixture, but when the Nazi party started, it hadn't been a united nation all that long and there was still a fond memory of the smaller states that had been there, so much more peacefully, before. There was a distinct possibility in the air, that defeat and austerity would transform German nationalism back into Bavarian and Prussian nationalism, and that the whole thing would revert to its pre-Bismark condition. In those circumstances, the NAZI party acted as a survival capsule, not just for German Imperialism and the industrial combines behind that imperialism (they wanted a worldwide market for their goods, simple as that!) -but for the whole concept of Germany as a nation, rather than as a group of nations sharing a language with Austria and parts of Switzerland and odd bits of other neighbouring states. But Germany as a nation was as much a marketing concept for the big industrial combines as it was a political concept.

The Nazi party was a survival capsule for the global ambitions of German Industrialists, just as Imperial Germany had been their first, overt expression of global ambition. The political ideology of the Nazis was chosen by a mixture of competition and experiment: the party tried different ideologies before it settled on the "Nazi" one that we can recognize -and it competed with other "radical" groups with a suspiciously similar provenance, all based around disgruntled ex-soldiers. (Not something Germany was short of after 1918!) It was a brilliant marketing man's exercise in determining how to sell industrial ambition once more to the rustically-inclined German people, even immediately after that ambition had brought the ringing disaster of military defeat upon them, and the even worse disaster of the punitive Versailles treaty.

All the STASI ever was, was a temporary vehicle for the same seed of ambition that the Nazis had carried. It was only ever waiting for the Soviet ruler to depart, but in the meantime, it was so rooted in the mechanism of social coercion that the Soviets needed in order to rule their part of Germany, that there was no prospect of the NKVD and the KGB routing it out, because that would have yielded control of East Germany to the West. In return for propping up a puppet communist regime, the STASI could keep the embers of NAZIsm alive -and there was nothing Moscow could do about it, although the KGB must have known the nature of the deal which their NKVD predecessors had struck.

Now the Deutschland Clan has spread out from East Germany, to the whole of a united Germany, has tendrils in Austria and in the ethnic German communities of the United States, Canada and Argentina. Being a Mafia organization, it has contact with the Russian and Polish Mafias, but the master servant relationship that appeared to exist between the KGB and the STASI, is reversed between the Deutschland Clan and the Russian Mafia. Tail wags dog.

The Deutschland Clan represents a direct threat to democracy, not just in Germany and Austria, but also in the United States, Canada and Argentina. The danger here is very real and very great. It may also be very imminent, but this is harder to gauge.

Gang Stalking in County Durham?

This blog is both interesting and disturbing, in that Tony Blair's constituency agent is presented as, at the very least, covering up for stalkers and belittling their victims.

Update: Oh, look! There's one house in the constituency which hasn't had its resale value deliberately wrecked by an organized campaign of vandalism and harassment!

How to Scuttle American Drugs Gangs

Medawar has come across several Americans who have become embroiled in, and threatened by, American organized crime gangs and stalking gangs, who all tend to say that they cannot go to the police, or even the FBI, because the gang includes members of their local FBI field office, or that the gang is run by ex-CIA men with "connections."

This link explains the official procedure for dealing with this.

It's worth a read. But you have to make up your own mind if it will work for you, in your circumstances.

However, if you know anything at all, even if it's a snippet which seems useless on its own, about the movement of drugs and other contraband, or the proceeds of crime, in and out of the United States, or between two other countries, that involves the people who are threatening or harming you, (or their associates) then you can try this link here. This is worth a try, because:

It's hosted in the UK, and is secure. None of the people running it are impressed or frightened by rogue redneck FBI agents and their buddies.
The people running it have very powerful computers and lots of other snippets of information, so even a tiny piece (which no-one could trace back to you anyway) might fit someone else's info and make a breakthrough.

Nearly all of America's organised crime gangs run contraband through the waters of UK-protected countries, allowing the Royal Navy to intervene. Regardless of whether the FBI and DEA really want them to or not! Those who don't run actual goods through British-patrolled waters, tend to run money through banks in British-controlled jurisdictions, such as the Virgin Islands or Gibraltar. British customs authorities can get cooperation out of countries, such as Cuba, that would never cooperate with the "Feds" in a million years.

It gives you, if your information is genuine, a chance to torpedo (perhaps literally) the gang making your life hell. And these gangs have a lot of internal tension, because everybody is breaking the law and depends for their life on liberty on other corrupt people they don't really trust in the dark anyway.

Once the gang's activities get exposed, perhaps by a maritime stop and search that bent FBI agents are powerless to prevent, your tip-offs about it through the "proper channels" in the first link will be pushing at an open door, rather than a brick wall!

One of the reasons why the druggies had it their own way in Columbia for so many years, was that American authorities had a monopoly on the intelligence war there. British agencies such as SOCA, HMRC and even MI6, are running agents in Columbia now, and because these agencies aren't actually run by ex-CIA men using drugs deals as a pension fund, they are having an effect.
Anything you post on the HMRC secure hotline page will get to these agencies in due course.
There is a page of instructions, worth reading, although some of it's about tax, VAT and duty, which probably doesn't affect you, and then there's a secure form for giving information.

Give it a whirl. It isn't guaranteed to save your life, but it might give the criminals something to worry about other than you, and it might just unravel the gang in time to help you, after all. And if not, there's still a chance that you might be avenged.

Who Hath Balsam For England's Wounds?



It is now apparent that the United Kingdom will pay the price for ten years of Antony Charles Lynton Blair's rule, with an entire generation of austerity. It is also quite clear, that England will pay a deeper price, and for longer, than Scotland, even though it was the recklessness of Scottish banking institutions that precipitated and amplified the financial crisis.

England's economic wounds won't be healed by Scottish Independence, even though Scottish banks and Scottish politicians, such as Mr Blair and Mr Brown, played such a major part in her downfall, because their weapon was an asset bubble formed by the inflow of entirely speculative foriegn capital into largely English assets. Having created an asset bubble in England, they then borrowed against it to buy massively into the highest risk debt, secured against America's own asset bubble. In effect, HBOS and RBS tried to make Scotland a major world banking power by abducting the English property sector and ransoming it.

Icelandic banks also attempted to become world players by exploiting strict (and asinine) H.M. Treasury rules (let's not bother to say who drafted these) that obliged British public institutions to "invest" their reserves in accounts offering the "best" (ie: highest) interest rate, almost regardless of risk. A great many English (and Dutch) savers put their money where they could see dozens of British public bodies and charities putting theirs, assuming that this had to be safe enough! There was no way, of course, that the Icelandic banks could even hope to pay the interest rates offered, without re-investing the deposits in derivative products as risky, or worse, than those taken on by RBS and HBOS.

Meanwhile, within the public sector, something even nastier was happening, and this still hasn't been widely-enough recognised or understood.

Under cover of some high-blown, smarmy and completely insincere rhetoric about "investment" for the future, especialy the future of the children now destined to spend the whole of their working lives paying for Mr Blair's project, public spending not only escalated sharply, but also changed deeply in nature. Instead of public spending paying for the construction of an asset, such as a hospital, school, or a military training base, public spending pays a "private finance initiative consortium" to provide the use of that asset for a specified period of time, after which the asset, whatever it is now worth, usually still belongs to the consortium and not the taxpayer. During that period of time, the amount the taxpayer pays for merely using that asset, invariably amounts to the cost of creating and operating it, a profit margin on top of that, and compound interest at a rate far above the base-rate, on top even of the profit margin. There are several known cases of such PFI assets costing the taxpayer several times what it would cost if the government had simply borrowed money at market rates to pay for them outright, and then paid the loans and interest off. And at least at the end of that, the taxpayer would have owned the assets. PFI can be fairly compared to:
buying a house using your credit card rather than a bank mortgage AND, fifteen to twenty-five years later, giving the house back to the credit card company as soon as you've finally cleared the debt.

Invented by Kenneth Clarke as what he saw as a temporary and slightly embarrassing expedient to close a budget gap over a few months, PFI has become the primary form of long-term "public investment" under Blair and Brown.

Now, the scale of Britain's PFI debt (and that's what it is) may have since been dwarfed by the scale of public borrowing to bail out the banking system, but PFI debt is far more toxic to the country than the banking bail out, and not just in financial terms.

Firstly, PFI delivers huge amounts of money to platoons of mediocre businessmen, for very little effort. As Samuel Pepys discovered when he was at the Admiralty, if you're not careful, people really will try and sell you old rope -and this drives out of business anyone trying to make good, new rope that the King's sailors can actually depend on. In 18th and 19th Century Britain, businessmen made huge amounts of money for devising ways to make greater quantities of better and cheaper goods. Any public resentment of their wealth was tempered by tangible evidence that they'd delivered what people had paid for, and it was either something that hadn't existed before, or something that previously only a few had been able to afford. What usually distinguishes a Blairite entrepreneur from a Georgian or Victorian one, is the utter worthlessness of what he sells. And, simply by creating conditions in which mediocre businessmen thrive and proliferate, Blairism tips the ecological balance against those who actually produce something useful, better, new or genuinely cheaper.

Secondly, PFI has been used on a scale large enough to create a whole economic sector that depends on it. This not only displaces other economic activity which might employ workers to more useful ends, it creates a power-base which can only survive by preserving the PFI system. This is a recipe for endemic political corruption.

But PFI contracts only account for the "investment" side of Blair and Brown's massive increase in public spending. There has been a huge increase in the number of people, the percentage of the workforce, employed in the public sector. And, yes, yet again, there is a profound and toxic change in the nature of those jobs. There's a certain point where, however "nice" the objective of a public service, it needs to be stopped from taking too many people away from the rest of the economy. It does more harm, faster, than the state simply taking money away, if the state takes away the people who earn that money for the national economy in the first place. But even within that, there are good forms of public employment (only a bad thing if they exceed the need for a service or starve more vital bits of the economy of skilled labour) and perverse forms of public employment, which are good in no circumstances at all.

Perverse public employment can take the form of a layer of management within an otherwise necessary and good public service, which has no purpose other than to employ a client class of the ruling party, or to impose one party's ideology on the delivery of that service after it has been removed from office by an election. It can also take the form of whole public bodies which exist for no real reason other than to employ (and enrich) the political client class and to impose a party's ideology on the country, as well as to guide decisions to the client class's financial favour, regardless of who might hold elected office thereafter.

"Eastern England", that is, East Anglia plus Bedfordshire and much of Hertfordshire, has a Regional Development Authority, which has no purpose other than to over-ride the planning decisions of elected County and Borough Councils in the region. (This is a region which almost never votes Labour and votes Liberal only if it absolutely has to.) Every penny spent on the RDA is doubly perverse, because it's not simply money wasted, but money spent ensuring that voters have to live with the opposite of what they voted for. If PFIs are incentives towards anti-democratic behaviour, RDAs are purpose-designed tools of anti-democracy. There is no compelling difference in purpose or character between the East of England Regional Development Authority and the European Commission. The real difference is the continent-wide reach of the latter.

For every public employee in an outright perverse body, there are several others embedded within genuine and necessary public services, feeding off them whilst being employed primarily towards perverse (usually anti-democratic) ends. "Standards" departments are no longer things that ensure that the job gets done properly, but things that restrict what elected representatives of the public are allowed to say, what matters they may consider, even what decisions they may reach. Some of them even attempt to discipline private citizens for their opinions. Something that should not be done at all, let alone at the public's expense! There are dozens and dozens of these boards and sub-departments (they are not all "Quangos") employing many thousands of people. One interesting way of distinguishing a perverse public body from a legitimate one, is to compare the average renumeration of those within that body, with the prevailing renumeration across public service as a whole. The perverse ones tend to pay well above the average, because actual service delivery requires front line workers on basic wages and the perverse bodies do very little of this. Doing this for perversely-employed individuals and sub-departments within a legitimate department is far harder, although they do tend not to be on the minimum wage!

A more sophisticated approach is required, looking at how much of that individual's time is spent on "training" and "development" and, most especially, casting an educated and knowing eye over the bodies which deliver that training and development. For example, someone works in the fire service and they go for a month's training. Is this at the fire service college, or a seminar run by some designer of fire-fighting equipment, or is it run by some outside training company or "charity" with a peculiar name, utilizing country hotels and sporting clubs as its training sites? By asking this kind of question, you can soon tell the difference between a fireman employed by the fire service, and a political client, there for reasons other than putting out fires and retrieving kittens from trees. Sacking the latter will not only save money, some of which can be spent on better-equipping the former, it will also deprive the anti-democratic tendency in this country of another little power-base. Abolishing entire perverse departments, will save huge amounts of public money and blast great holes in the ranks of the anti-democratic tendency.

And as for the banking bail out. Huge amounts of money are being risked, but they are being risked against assets whose worth is capable of recovery, in which case, the taxpayer will have the benefit of those assets. (Which isn't the case with the PFI "investments".) The PFI debt is being wasted, and in a way which is doing active harm to the well being of the country and its democratic institutions in particular. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted by the banking crisis and the public spending deficit that it has caused, rather we should harness the necessity of spending cuts that it creates, to concentrate our minds, and the fall of the axe, on PFIs and other perverse spending.

The way to heal England's economic wounds, is to clean those wounds and make the country an environment in which healing is possible. This is where the Conservative Party and the Liberal-Democrats are currently showing a profound unsuitability for the task of nursing a wounded country back to health, because they are currently proposing every sort of spending cut, except to the really perverse spending that's doing us positive harm and where spending cuts will make everything work better. Preferring, instead, to deprive us of public services and proper defence of the realm. The reason for this is simple: Conservatives and Liberals do not want to root out and destroy Mr Blair's network of corrupt political clients, they merely want it to change sides.
(PS: and here they go!)

A Bonfire of the Rotten Apples

(Medawar Thinks that this old post might be of interest to new readers, so he's re-instated it.)

Sometimes, like a forest fungus, corruption in a public service can remain hidden, except for its fruiting bodies. But these only appear under certain conditions, and often at only one spot when the fungus is an underground organism extending fifty yards. Hundreds of such large hidden organisms may be symbiotically linked together into a super-organism the size of the whole forest.

The difference, of course, is that corrupt officials and police officers do not have a legitimate ecological function: they are pathogenic. And, like all criminals, the harm they do is not limited to the amount they take, because every criminal enterprise destroys or suppresses the opportunities for several legitimate ones. There is no scientific evidence to define the ratio of legitimate income lost versus criminal income taken, but the proverb about criminals preferring "a dishonest shilling to an honest pound" should be borne in mind. (Twenty to one, for the young people, or Americans.)

It seems such an obvious thing: to make the mainstream economy work better (or these days, at all) and to everyone's benefit, we first need to clean up the black economy and get rid of the thugs who intimidate, embezzle, extort , dope and vandalise legitimate business, out of business. Well, why can't we do this simple and obvious thing? Because of corruption. That's what makes the corruption super-organism pathogenic: it hides and protects all the things which are killing our society.

In a very similar way, in fact, to the way some viruses manage to evade or even manipulate the immune reactions that might get rid of them. Medawar wonders if there's a way of copying some of the more recent vaccine-creation strategies, and applying them to the task of chasing corruption out of British and American society.

The key to all of these, is a safe way of distinguishing infected cells, or corrupt individuals, so that they can be targeted without harming any healthy cells or honest individuals.

If we do this behaviourally, we look for something that nearly all corrupt policemen, planning officers, politicians, mortgage compliance officers etc. do, and honest ones do not.

Build big and expensive additions (extensions) to their house? Well, possibly, but so do people who've simply worked a lot of overtime, or mortgaged themselves to the hilt.

Go on holiday a lot? Well, the same applies. In fact, for all the "fruits of criminal activity" angles, there is a danger of sucking in innocent individuals, one way or another. Besides, with the fungus, the fruiting bodies don't tell you very much about the multi-stranded underground organism.

What we need is a distinguishing activity that identifies and lays bare all the little underground threads. All the connections between the fungal system on the roots of one tree and that on another. The links between HIV in white blood cells and in brain tissue. Something fundamental to corruption itself.

We need to apply our minds to the most basic characteristic of corruption: why does it exist at all, what is it for?

When a mobster corrupts a policeman, he may arrange for the policeman to get money, or to have sex with an under-age prostitute (without paying, naturally) or he might get the policeman's cousin an easy but well-paid job. But in his heart, the mobster doesn't really want the policeman to enjoy any of these delights, and he'd much prefer that the policeman met a sticky end, perhaps cycling down the A6 Barton by-pass, or hadn't been born. (The ironic Russian phrase for an unexpected moment of golden hush translates as "A policeman is being born.")

The mobster wants the policeman to do something, and even at that, it has to be something that the mobster's own henchmen and relatives cannot do for him. To begin with, the newly-corrupted policeman may indeed carry packages or handle money, but these are things the mobster would prefer a non-policeman to do, and they are done solely to test the policeman out and get him throughly implicated in crime and therefore reliable.

But then we get to what the mobster needs, specifically, a policeman for. And it is these things:

1/ Keeping tabs on people: following them around if necessary, noting who they meet, what they buy, who they buy things from. A policeman is provided with all kinds of resources that make this activity easier for him, than for the mobster's other employees.

2/ Threatening people. This is something that policeman are good at. After all, if someone is being threatened by the police, who they gonna call?

3/ Harassing people. Policemen are paid to be out and about, to patrol a given area. They are well placed to harass people, and the fact that it's a policeman doing it, makes the harassment much more frightening and minimises the risk of the victim being able to get any sort of help.

4/ Identifying specific types of people, such as witnesses and complainants. As well as emerging rival mobsters. And threatening or harassing them.

If we're talking about a corrupt planning officer instead of a policeman, then he's corrupted, usually, by a property developer rather than a mobster (there isn't always a clear difference) but the list of activities is broadly similar.

Apart from facilitating any planning application by his property developer, the bent planning officer will provide intelligence on rival developers and on members of the public who object to the developer being given planning permission. He will probably try and sabotage applications by the developer's rivals, and members of the public who object to controversial schemes will be harassed if there's any applicable way to do it. (Such as pretending that objections are based on race or homophobia, or something else equally un-PC.)

Likewise, the bent bank officer who clears loans for the developer's projects, or helps hide the mobster's drugs profits, will also be engaged in providing intelligence on the affairs of rivals and potential victims, witnesses or complainants.

This is where we get from organised crime, to organised stalking.
Because once you define what is common to the behaviour of corrupt police officers and other public officials, regardless of precisely who they are corrupted by or what that person's business is, you have a working definition of the phenomenon of "Organised Stalking" aka "Gangstalking" or "Community-based Harassment". Only some of those involved in this kind of organised stalking will be policemen or officials, but pretty well all corrupt policemen, or corrupt bank officers, or corrupt public officials, will engage in activities that will fall within a broad definition of organised stalking, simply because that's the whole and only point of corrupting them in the first place.

Now, until very recently, it has been standard police practice in both the United Kingdom and the United States, to maintain that there is no such thing as organised stalking and that any complaints of it are evidence of delusions. However, last week, at Winchester Crown Court, a large group of ALF terrorists, were convicted of crimes which fell comfortably within any definition of organised stalking, and both Kent Police and the national anti-extremism intelligence body of "NECTU" claimed due credit for their arrest and conviction. There's still a reluctance to look into organised stalking when it isn't totally clear from the outset that it's being done by animal rights terrorists, perhaps because there's such a strong likelihood of netting a policeman or two, but there shouldn't be.

Medawar expects that no policeman or public official will take part in organised stalking as a sadistic hobby, although some of the civilians involved might very well be doing precisely that. No, if you investigate a stalking gang and find a policeman, the litmus paper turns bright red and you have got a corrupt policeman. At which point you have three golden opportunities, rather than a problem:

1/ The primary difficulty with anti-corruption investigations within the police, is that they end up angering and even implicating, policemen who are either completely innocent, or largely innocent. Quite often, the bent officers plant evidence on straight officers. You need a way of sorting out the really bent ones from the crowd and of targetting them and them alone. Bent officers taking part in organised stalking, does this for you, really.

2/ As soon as you've got a policeman or public official, amongst the dozens of other odds and sods with conflicting and confusing versions of why they were stalking and harassing someone in the first place, you know that you have someone who will connect directly to the people behind that particular organised stalking gang. That will either be an organised crime boss, an urban terrorist such as the recently convicted master gangstalker Greg Avery, or a conman or pathological liar whose game it is to get a group of people, including policemen, dancing to his increasingly weird and sadistic tune. That will often be someone whom the police need off the streets as a matter of great urgency.

3/ You can actually stop the organised stalking activity in a given location, or against a given set of victims. This is actually a worthwhile and important payoff, because the single biggest factor in growing and nearly universal public distrust and disillusionment with the police, is that witnesses, complainants and victims of crime, tend to get harassed and the police are all too often, very visibly, seen not to do anything to help.

In other words, far from being a delusion, which can be ignored to save both police resources and face, organised stalking offers a short cut to dealing with corruption in public office, and that leads to better government, better business, a better-functioning economy and society.

Ignore all the "secret" and "classified" reasons why senior officers should tell junior ones to leave a case of organised stalking alone: these are merely lies and excuses. They are the conmen and liars talking. There is no national interest in letting it go on, but there is a profound national interest, in both America and Britain, in tackling the issue and rooting out all those behind it.

Medawar can think of members of Parliament, who appear to behave like organised stalkers. If his theory is correct, these will turn out to be the really bent ones, whose unmasking will get to the source of who is corrupting politicians these days and why, so much more than those who merely fiddle their expenses or fail to register the odd donation. Yes, it's wrong, but the really wrong ones will be doing some form of stalking, even within Parliament.

There will be no economic recovery at all, in any country that cannot drastically reduce the levels of corruption in public office and organised crime. Organised stalking is not a delusion, although those blighted by it, under stress, will offer confused explanations for the inexplicable things which are done, for reasons unknown to them, to torment and destroy their lives. Organised stalking is the achilles heel of those who are in the way of our economic recovery and social reconcilliation. Time to sow spikes in its path.

One Thing More on Lockerbie

Here's an interesting article, indeed!

Butterfly Gallery.

This article in the Independent has a link to a gallery of all the UK's butterflies, which is interesting.

The Purple Hairstreak is present in treetops near Bedford's Manton Lane Industrial Estate.
They are rarely seen at ground level, Bedfordshire Natural History Society hire a cherry-picker every so often to check that they are still there.

Who Else Was To Blame for Lockerbie?

Perhaps, after all the furore over the compassionate release of the only (Libyan) man convicted in connection with the Lockerbie Bombing, we can get back to considering who played the more major roles in the conspiracy?

Even assuming that the Libyan was guilty, there is only evidence of his supplying a suitcase full of clothes and other personal items, to whoever it was who made the bomb.

Frankfurt Police found that a Palestinian terrorist cell was in the process of building several very similar bombs at the time, and, given Iranian sponsorship of extremist Palestinian groups through the "Quds Militia" offshoot of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, that would make a sensible connection to the only state that actually WANTED to destroy an American Civil Airliner in 1988.

Again, even if the Libyan was guilty, no-one takes seriously the idea that he acted on his own, or indeed as anything other than an accessory to a larger plot. Medawar's view is that he was more involved than either he or the Libyan government wants to pretend, but might well have been conned or coerced into what he did. After all, there was no forensic evidence at all, save for that which traced directly to him, through a Tailor's shop in Malta.

(Interestingly, this Tailor's shop was situated next to "CEL Travel". Which has no connection other than its name, to the scientific instrument maker "Lucas CEL Instruments Ltd" whose North American sales agent was on Pan Am Flight 103, along with several boxes of CEL Instruments sales literature and instruction manuals. So, as the police and FBI searched a debris field that stretched almost across Scotland, they probably found a bit of paper with "CEL" on every hundred yards or so. Medawar wonders if this accidentally brainwashed dozens of investigators to seize on links connected with "CEL". This doesn't mean that the Malta link isn't real or valid, it just means that it got picked out of the soup when perhaps other things didn't, simply because there were so many objects and people to trace. The one thing that really MUST happen now, is a re-investigation, with up-to-date cross-referencing database technology as well as modern forensics, because it is clear that several very guilty men are so far free and clear. Only by finding and trying those who actually made the bomb, planted it, and commissioned the whole operation, can we either understand Libya's role (or otherwise) and put it into context of what other states and organizations may have done.)