The Leader of Stalking Gangs is Not Always the Most Prominent Member

Just a link, really, to an article about Sarah Whitehead. Anyone who saw this group's own material and listened to its oral tradition, would have believed that Greg Avery and his (second) wife, Natasha, were the kingpins. They were jailed, everything carried on as before.

Let's just wait and see if it all really stops now that Sarah Whitehead has joined them inside. If it doesn't, then perhaps the police need to look for someone canny enough not to visit the frontline activists at all.

Someone more like Ronnie Lee, John Curtin, Andrew Mann, or Paul Richardson, perhaps?

David Kelly, No Drugs Overdose

An expert has done what the Hutton Inquiry and Home Office Pathologist very glaringly did not do, and calculated how much co-proxamol painkiller Dr Kelly had actually absorbed before he died: approximately two tablets, a normal therapeutic dose.

There is also a strong dislocation between a recently-released pathologist's report, claiming several "hesitation" wounds to his wrist, and the witnesses who found and first attended the body, including two very experienced paramedics, who did not mention multiple wounds and who all dispute that there was much blood spilt at the scene. The report filed by the paramedics is missing: Thames Valley Police requested that the Ambulance Trust send it to them, which they did, and now Thames Valley Police claim that it never arrived.

There still needs to be a proper inquest, to evaluate the glaring difference between the conclusions and observations of official witnesses and expert ones, especially the experts who actually saw the body as it was when discovered.

It's beginning to look as if the scene was being dressed a little more each time anyone turned their back, because the searchers who found the body reported it in a different posture and position from the first policemen and paramedics, and they in turn didn't see the multiple wounds and masses of blood that the pathologist saw a while later, when he examined the body in situ prior to authorizing its removal.

If this was a "text-book case" of suicide, was someone in the woods, with a place-marked textbook, popping out of the trees as people came and went, calmly making sure that the evidence was going to tick all the boxes?

Sounds absurd, yes, but there's not merely a lot of contradictions between successive witnesses: there is a clear and steady progression in all their testimonies, from an ambiguous scene and body, that might have represented murder or even natural death, to one that was "textbook suicide."

It's that progression that seems most peculiar to Medawar. It needs an inquest, with a jury, and most importantly, cross-examination of witnesses under oath, to shake out what they really saw from what they were expected to say.

Judit Nadal, Another of Britain's Experts Falls.

Dr Judit Nadal, who was leading some very important biochemical research at Imperial College, London, has been killed in a car crash. Although news reports make much of the frailty of the "G Wiz" electric car that she was driving (more on that below), it doesn't look as if the other vehicle can possibly have been driven at a speed, or in a fashion, that was legal for that urban road, approaching a junction. So, the police investigation really serves to determine exactly how unlawful her death was; it almost certainly was not an accident unadulterated by criminal action, though it remains to be seen if there was any element of aggression in it, targeted or otherwise. (There are groups in the UK who constantly threaten, plot and occasionally even manage to execute, deliberate harm to researchers in almost any sort of biomedical discipline. Some of them are up for sentencing at Winchester Crown Court this very week.)

But one way or the other, Britain loses an awful lot of its best experts, scientists, economists and, yes, bankers, and yet the only members of society to merit special protection and care, seem to be politicians and "celebrities", some of whom, Peter Doherty, for example, are far more likely to commit violent crime than be a victim of it. More than a dozen armed men guard Antony Charles Lynton Blair (a former prime minister) twenty-four hours a day, lest he strike his foot against a stone. Can't we employ a handful to see our best scientific brains safely home at the end of the working day? When it comes to their relative value to our society, there's no contest at all between Dr Nadal's research and Mr Blair's endless self promotion and "fundraising".

As for the ability of the G Wiz car to withstand a high speed collision:
The problem is not that the G Wiz is very light: so is a Formula One Racing Car, and the drivers of those walk, however unsteadily, away from some quite horrendous crashes. No, the problem with the G Wiz is that the battery pack weighs more than the rest of the car put together, and it forms an immensely strong and incompressible cell just behind the driver's seat.

This means that there's a huge concentration of inertia, and strength, just behind the driver's spine. So any high energy collision sends the rest of the car flying, while the battery pack has the inertia to stay put, cutting the car neatly in half, close to the driver's spine.

Very lightweight electric vehicles may never be especially safe until battery technology, whether nickel-hydride, lithium, or more exotic, such as poly-acetylene, gives way to super-capacitor technology, as being developed at the Universities of Cranfield and Cambridge, that can be integrated into the whole structure of the vehicle. Then, in the absence of any built-in inertial chopping block, it should be possible to build an affordable electric car with crash-worthiness as good, if not better, than a Formula One Racing Car. The power storage device would add strength, rather than provide an instant mechanism for compromising it. You would have a car that bounced, not one that sliced easily in half, executing its occupants.

Update:
Inquest has now been held, and some fairly shallow conclusions drawn abotu what is wrong with the Gee Whiz car. See new post on this subject.
Medawar has ntoiced that most reader searches for "Judit Nadal" are taking them to this post and not the latest one, for whatever reason.

Beauty Behind the Hedgerow

For once, an echo of Richard Jefferies rather than George Orwell.

The photograph is of a wild rose (or "Dog Rose") in an English rural hedgerow. It's not a rare thing, nobody specially planted it and it might one day be hacked back by a tractor-mounted hedge flail or make a meal for a Roe Deer. (NB: Given the choice, Roe Deer will take carefully bred and nurtured garden roses over wild ones, every time.)

It is, however, a little bit of beauty, sitting there waiting to be noticed. But this kind of thing is only noticed by those with an interest in the world as it is, the world around them, what's really there. People blinded by ideology, greed, material things, fear and aggression, can pass this kind of ordinary beauty by a million times and never notice once. That's not the only thing they never notice, either.

Those who cannot perceive plain, ordinary beauty in the world around them, are usually quite incapable of perceiving ugliness, especially in their own actions. Those who are not interested in what might behind the hedgerow, or further down the lane, cannot be custodians of lane and hedgerow. If they are disinterested, they have no stake in England.

Some extreme right groups have latched onto June Tabor's rendition of the alternative national anthem, "A Place Called England", which proves Medawar's argument twice over, because not only does that song define the English as "anyone who loves the English Earth" but they used the song, completely oblivious, never noticing that line or thinking about what it meant. They see and see, but cannot perceive.

The stunning, all pervading absence of perception of what England is, what matters about it, what it stands for, disqualifies the British National Party and the English Defence League from any claim to be English other than by the limited virtue of a dog-eared birth certificate for some members.

But if we are to disqualify from Englishness, anyone who is ignorant and unperceptive of what matters about this place, huge swathes of our mainstream politicians are out on their ear, too.

Antony Charles Lynton Blair, who isn't even legally entitled to the dog-eared birth certificate, having been born in Scotland. This was no shame, but it's not what he told the electors in his constituency and certainly not what his parents told the Durham Cathedral Chorister's School when they got him his place. Many a proud Scotsman has loved England more than Blair does, so why the very peculiar lie?

David Cameron, so ignorant of England that he thought that Great Britain was America's junior partner in the fight against NAZIsm in 1940 (when America's great and good were debating which side they were on, with a near-majority including Henry Ford and Joe Kennedy in favour of siding with Hitler).

William Hague and George Osborne, who think that if we have a sufficiently unfastidious foreign policy, we need spend little or nothing on defence.

Nick Clegg, whose hope and ambition is that England one day will become "A little bit of Spain or France", just like one of Elizabeth the First's less successful advisors.

They are not English, or capable of becoming English, anymore than the shaven-headed thugs of the BNP and EDL are. They are a foreign power, utterly alien in heart and mind to this country.

Everyone who has ever taken a quiet thrill in looking behind the hedge to see what's there, has already come to loathe Antony Charles Lynton Blair and all his works. Sooner or later, these others will give them equal cause for loathing, because they just cannot perceive what it is about this country that we value.

Elizabeth the First inherited a kingdom brought to the brink of ruin by her sister's ideology and extreme violence against free speech and tolerance, the life-blood of the country.
Rather than bend with the many fierce winds of European politics, which was the only course of action the materialists were able to perceive, she stood against them, and risked her own life and that of the nation to stand against what she knew was wrong and for what she believed to be right. She did not lead the nation to ruin by this reckless stubbornness, her reign became known as the golden age. She increased the military power of the realm, not to bully the world, but simply so that nobody could force her to do wrong.

If you glance behind the hedgerow, out of interest to see what's there, you are, or can be, English. If you look beyond the hedge only to dream how you can impose, by force, some memorial to yourself upon the landscape, you cannot be, however cunningly Mummy and Daddy spoke to the Durham registrar to persuade him to make a false entry.