Please Go Petition

Some Cornflakers will have read about the petition on the Downing Street Website, posted by a man from Hitchin, calling on Gordon Brown to resign.

The Guardian had an article about this, but the link was to the Downing Street website in general, and even on the petitions page, you have to know what you're asking for in order to make it find you the petition to ask Mr Brown to resign.

Medawar offers no opinion on whether or not anyone should sign, but did think it was silly for the papers to publicise this and not provide a link that went straight there.

(The photograph is because news about the decline of the British Butterfly population has given Medawar the Chalk Hill Blues.)

PS: the petition now has in excess of 71,300 signatures, placing it in a more prominent position on the Downing Street Website. Medawar thinks that this is why some petitions attract incredibly large numbers of signatures once they pass a certain threshold.

Constructive Spending Cuts

Despite the utterly disastrous state of the UK's national finances, the current political consensus is that “it's wrong to cut public spending in a recession” and that we must wait until “the recovery” before doing anything effective to get public borrowing under control.

Medawar sees two problems with that:

1/ Without resort to state-sponsored astrology, we do not know how long the recovery will be in coming. (The photograph is a striking example of state-sponsored astrology at Hampton Court.)

2/ It will become imperative to make massive cuts the moment the Treasury decrees a "recovery" is underway. Like waiting for chicks to hatch before starting an omelette. Medawar fears the consequences of this even more than he fears the recession.

The reason why all three of the UK's main political parties agree on this, as do America's Democrats, if not entirely the Republicans, is that they know that they lack the competence and wit required to correctly identify what can be cut without worsening the recession. The political consensus is actually a collective admission of inability. Unfortunately, although the Republicans believe that they are competent to make massive spending cuts without cutting America's throat, they probably aren't.

Debt is the cause of the whole thing: we cannot simply let the debts run on out of control “until the recovery comes” because the recovery cannot occur under those conditions. Neither has any economy ever recovered from anything, let alone a record-breaking recession, without something being done about corruption. We cannot simply mark time: we must have a crackdown on corruption in public life and on all actual crime -and we must look for intelligent and immediate economies, rather than allowing debts and unsolved problems to pile up like snow on a mountainside, waiting for spring and a lethal avalanche.

The last time global economic conditions were in anything like their present state, the American government poured huge sums of money into public works, the British government did not, but it did keep up spending on technological research and scientific progress. About the only “science” which America spent significant public funds on during this period, was Eugenics. As if the Potomac somehow flowed into the Rhine. Whilst most of the present generation of British politicians, bizarrely, go misty-eyed over Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal -and variously ignore or despise Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, the latter's policies got the British economy into recovery, FIVE YEARS earlier than Roosevelt's New Deal and the often-stultifying bureaucracy that went with it. If Chamberlain had retired from his position as Chancellor without becoming Prime Minister, he would be in the history books as the greatest British Chancellor. He did spend money, but only on the new.

Historians now know that Churchill ordered British scientists, during the most dangerous years of the Second World War, to simply give the United States dozens of ground-breaking inventions and discoveries, free, gratis and for nothing. Rather fewer realize that America's economic prosperity during the last years of the war and thereafter owed far more to this than to the New Deal, and only a tiny handful of people know that Chamberlain's policies during the thirties directly or indirectly paved the way for just about all of those inventions and discoveries. All of the British aircraft designs, which fought for civilization in Churchill's “finest hour,” were commissioned when Chamberlain was Chancellor.

The key to increasing spending during a recession, therefore, is not to “spend your way out of recession” but to spend on preparing the ground for after the recession. The key to constructively cutting spending during a recession and interwoven debt crisis, is likewise to cut those things that will get in the way of the progress you want to make afterwards. And if you aspire to drive actual crime down, whilst protecting civil liberties and even restoring them, the discipline of a “crudely economic” motive stops you from oppressing the innocent, because that's a pure waste of money!

The Eugenics of the early twenty-first century is “Social Control”. That is, a babbling pseudo-science that's touted as a panacea for every ill, costs (and gets) huge amounts of public money and is completely negative and largely criminal in its application. Eugenics was eagerly seized on by many up and coming politicians, all round the world, in the twenties and thirties; those who were still holding onto it in the late forties ended up facing war crimes tribunals and the gallows!

Cutting the money we spend on social control not only saves us money: it concentrates the attention of law-enforcement officers on actual crime, which is currently being controlled and driven down only by government statisticians. The often-covert social control agenda, not just of the Blair/Brown government, but of the Major and Thatcher governments, too, has resulted in law enforcement now spending a lot more than half its time -and budget- on things which are nothing to do with actual crime. Every time a policeman interacts in a coercive way with someone who has not committed a crime, civil liberties are eroded -and money is wasted! But every time a policeman interacts effectively with someone who has committed an actual crime, money is saved that would otherwise be drained from the economy -and, more importantly still, the opportunities for legitimate enterprise and expression are protected and expanded. We will never recover from the recession, if innovators and entrepreneurs fear, with reason, that their efforts will be vandalised as soon as they begin, or the fruits of their labour and genius will be stolen.

And social control starts, rather than ends, with the police. It continues across every area of public life, and public spending! There are even non-profit groups and “charities”, such as “Common Purpose” which train public servants in social control. Herein lies both a problem and a golden opportunity for the reconstruction of public finances.

One of the key phrases of the social control movement, and it's a movement of the nature of messianic idolatry, is “Constructive Discomfort” (so far as Medawar knows, the credit for this invention rests on the guileless shoulders of Mister Alistair Campbell). Constructive Discomfort means, in essence, that members of the social control movement within public service (and that's where they tend to be), knowingly and deliberately make things more difficult for other public servants and the public, in the belief that change, and therefore “good”, will come out of the inevitable fear and frustration. It is self-evident that not only is any taxpayer's money spent on such an endeavour wasted, but that every active proponent of the philosophy is placing other public servants under stress and preventing them working in a smooth and efficient way, exercising their own initiative and reason, whilst systematically and routinely preventing the public from doing things which they have a perfect right to do.

That's the problem, the golden opportunity is that the most urgent need in public finance is to limit public sector pensions liability -and none of the social control movement members are on low, or even average, pay! It is inherent in their activities that sacking them will make public services work better instead of worse -and the training that they have received in the techniques of social control and constructive discomfort, all at public expense, means that they can all be quickly and conclusively identified. In effect, the social control movement, exemplified by self-styled “graduates” of Common Purpose and other shadowy training groups, are self-defining candidates for redundancy, whose departure will actually improve the function of public services and, in doing so, raise the morale of the public servants who remain to actually serve the public. It is soul-destroying not to be allowed to do what is obviously necessary and which you are willing and equipped to do!

Recessions like this one aren't just followed by economic recovery, they are usually followed by perceived opportunities for military and political aggression. So, the one thing that should not be cut, either during the recession or afterwards, is defence. Besides, if we cut the fifth column now, we will be under far less pressure to cut defence or any other real service, in years to come.

Communitarianism and the Fall of Civilization

Many people believe that "individual greed" caused the current worldwide financial crisis. This belief tends to go hand in hand with the view, put forward repeatedly by the financial editors of many newspapers, that "nobody saw this coming" or the subtly but significantly different "none of us could have seen this coming."

Well, as long as they were "one of us" that is, part of the financial community and the press and politicians so intimately interwoven with it, it was certainly impossible for them to accept that it was coming, but their faculties as sentient individuals must surely have informed them of the obvious! It was their membership of, and obedience to, that community, which became their perception filter, preventing them from seeing what was clearly there.

But since the crash actually happened, it's become clear that there's not a single culpable institution involved that hasn't gagged and stifled at least one whistle-blower. (Link updated (again) as of August 2025) In other words, anyone within that financial community who failed to accept the gold-tinted perception filter and looked at what was actually there, saw and said the obvious -and was immediately punished for it.

If it had been a case of individual greed alone, then the counsel and opposition of other individuals could have corrected those who were going too far. In every case, there were individuals who saw the problems and tried their best to convince the community that something was wrong. It was the community heedlessness, the harsh and inflexible discipline of the wolf-pack, that allowed individual greed to go unchecked and even, publicly, unremarked. Even within that framework, a lot of the damage was done by people, such as Gordon Brown and Kate Barker, who were not individually greedy, but were pushing ahead with what that gold-tinted perception filter told them was the right thing to do. They could commit this error, because the community heedlessness protected them from anyone who might counsel them otherwise -or actually oppose them! The lesson clearly has not been learned: in the last week, one of Gordon Brown's ministers has said publicly that wind turbines are such a good thing, that no-one should be allowed to object to any scheme to erect them.

This "we decide what's good and then we do it obsessively" attitude is typical of all Communitarians. They are not the same as Communists; Edward Heath was by no means a Communist, but he was an arch Communitarian before anyone much was using the term. British readers will know what I mean when I say that they are all somewhat like Gordon Brittas, American readers will be baffled. (The article on the link doesn't entirely grasp the Brittas Empire. Brittas behaved like a different historical tyrant in each episode, all of which involved some catastrophe inherent to that personality. Each series, and some individual episodes, tended to end in apocalypse: poolfuls of evangelical Christians would be electrocuted, a marksman who only wanted a refund from the coffee machine would be driven to firing a rifle wildly into the ceiling in frustration, and so on. But whilst being Nero, Hitler, Napoleon or Caligua, Brittas was also always the epitome of the Blair-era minor but locally all-powerful bureaucrat, starting six years before Blair was elected...)

Community heedlessness, or the "herd instinct" or "behaving like lemmings" is the self-destruct mechanism of all human communities and civilizations. Because it is impossible for everybody to see new truths at the same time, nor should they. (The truths might not be true!) In a communitarian society, which is inherently coercive, it isn't just the majority view that prevails and becomes policy, the majority view is the only one which can be spoken, the only one which can be even heard.

Hence the article "The Trillion Dollar Millstone" (see link to post at top of this article,) which was pretty bang-on about the "crunch" ten years beforehand, and which no editor would publish. But as that article is also proof of, every time the community is being heedless and heading towards disaster, there are individuals who can see that and who counsel caution or offer a strategy which allows forward progress to continue in a different form.

Communitarians cannot help but hate such individuals, and they will always attempt to suppress them, whether by stalking, or by arrest or even arbitrary execution, depending entirely on what level of overt power they have managed to achieve and entrench. They hate individuals and their opinions for several reasons, but the main one is this:

The deepest and most genuine survival instinct of the human species is to constantly test situations and information against the individual's power of reason; this is all "science" is when it's being done properly and honestly. But in a Communitarian society, you are punished for not agreeing with the community and especially its leaders. So agreement with what others are doing quickly becomes The survival instinct, and when it displaces the power of individual reason, a communitarian follower is born. He or she will then do anything a communitarian leader orders, even if it's wicked and destructive. It is like a virus: it starts with a little intolerance towards contrary opinions and quickly grows because people can escape that intolerance by agreeing with something that their reason would otherwise reject. As soon as they have rejected their own reason and agreement with the community is their survival mechanism, they start to genuinely fear opinions, ideas and any individual who expresses them. They become increasingly willing to oppress individual thought -and individuals, this makes agreement with the community even more a matter of life and death, the perverse survival instinct becomes more deeply ingrained.

As long as a community tolerates individuals and their opinions, whether these are insights or errors, and allows them to be expressed, then that community has a safety catch firmly applied to its natural self-destruct mechanism. Suppress the individual "for the good of the community" as the minister wants to do by banning all objections to the golden wind-turbines, and you condemn that community to error, terror at its own hands and ultimately destruction.

If it seems that Communitarians cannot manage either economies or leisure centres successfully, Communitarian thinking comes unstuck fastest in the field of ecological management. Mother nature really does not work their way!

You can always smoke out a Communitarian Ecologist, by getting him onto the subject of wolves: eyes will shine, breath will whistle through beard; he will enthuse about the harsh beauty of their efficiency. Really, what he means is that rank and file wolves do what the Alpha Male and Female order, or they die.

When a dozen wolves attack an elk or other large animal, it usually takes half an hour of mauling the prey to and fro before it loses consciousness and dies. When a lone cougar goes for an elk, the prey is probably dead before the observer's brain has registered what his eyes are telling him. Even more so with lynx.

In Croatia, there is a large area in the mountains with many lakes, formed by soil and water chemistry building natural terraces on the mountainsides. Over the years, lakes silt up and become woods, other lakes are formed. In this region there are wolf packs, there are also lynx, which have been reintroduced, both artificially and because some of them apparently made their own way to Croatia from Slovenia. (What wolf would be allowed to make that decision for himself?)

A few years ago, the wolf packs were barely clinging to life, and often reduced to hunting ridiculously small and unrewarding prey, like mice and squirrels. They were not succeeding in raising enough cubs to replace their own natural loses. The wolves could not adapt to changes in the environment and deer populations, partly caused by the recent war, but also because the whole region is in a constant state of natural change. Change is indeed the defining feature of the Croatian lake district. The harsh and beautifully "efficient" wolf packs cannot adapt.
The individualistic lynx are thriving.

(The photograph is of an orchid growing on a meadow, retrieved from thorny scrubland by conservation management at Sharpenhoe Clappers, near Barton le Clay. Many of the rules attending such work, and certainly the government grant structure which pays for it, are the product of communitarian thinking. This means that you are almost always paid and encouraged to clear scrub, and even forest, to recreate meadows and heaths. And for a few years, these beautiful flowers will reward you. Then they will disappear -and the communitarian mind cannot grasp why! Did we not clear scrub? Is this not good? Surely the community has decided that a meadow with lovely orchids in it is preferable to boring old thorn scrub?
But the ideal environment for these orchids is not a meadow, it is a meadow at a specific stage of its development: between being cleared, by whatever natural or artificial means, and it turning back into scrubland. Then it turns into forest, the trees blocking light to the thorns and clearing them away, before, eventually, fire, plagues of insect pests, landslides, hurricanes or beavers fell the trees. Then you have a clearing, it becomes a meadow -and you get orchids once more. They reproduce by tiny spores, not really seeds, and these germinate only when there are traces of rotting wood in the soil. To some, this means that they "need nutrients from rotting wood" but what's actually happening, is that the presence of those nutrients means also that there's a dead tree and therefore, for a few years, a patch of sunlight in which the orchid can grow. The spore is programmed not to germinate until it receives a chemical signal that there might be a patch of sun and therefore a decent chance.
Likewise, Great Crested Newts, the subject of many a planning and conservation battle in the UK, frustrate all efforts to "conserve their habitat" because their habitat is not a given pond or lake, but a pond or lake at a specific, immature, stage of development, where it harbours newt food, such as fresh water shrimps and small insects, but not newt predators, such as large fish. So, by the time any given planning inquiry has ordered the preservation of any given newt pond, the newts will be found to have moved to another, invariably less natural-looking, body of water. If environmental management could be left in the hands of thinking, reasoning individuals, this kind of thing could be understood and catered for. But if the environment is to be managed by communitarians, the newts, and the orchids, are probably doomed.
If you can see the sense in this, you are probably not a Communitarian.)

Stasi methods.

Medawar recommends that anyone baffled by Eva's comments about organised stalking actually being a NATO conspiracy, should click here.

There are two articles, both worth reading.

The first shows the sort of thing the Stasi did before the fall of communism, the second shows how it is working now, through organised stalking, to make democracy fail as well.

The Stasi was (and evidently still is) a exemplar of the coercive social model. This makes it a natural ally of exponents of the corrupt economic model. Democracy will be their target as much as capitalism. Because in the long run, everyone stops voting for a kleptocracy.

Don't be fooled into thinking that they are trying to "bring down the establishment" or otherwise refresh the wells of goodness: they want to obliterate your rights as an individual, in order to make a blaggard's Arcadia for a privileged very few.

Who Really Shot Jill Dando?

Not a question that Medawar can answer directly, but whether they were Serbs or not, he thinks he knows where they dumped the getaway car -and why.
Cutting from "Bedfordshire on Sunday" August the 8th, 1999:

Readers need to click on the newspaper cutting to make it big enough to be readable, and possibly zoom in, if they can.

The location where this vehicle was abandoned, is a pub in the village of Bromham, at the junction of the old A428 and the A5134, a little way short of the junction with the A422. The A5134 then goes underneath the new A428 (Bromham by-pass) towards Kempston. However, in doing so, it connects with a minor road that goes to the University of Cranfield's very own airport, which boasts a business jet terminal, as well as several general aviation businesses and flying clubs.

Medawar thinks that the hit team, knowing their own plan in advance, cloned the registration plate of a Range Rover local to Bromham, so the vehicle wouldn't attract police attention too quickly when abandoned. He also thinks that the getaway Range Rover headed from Fulham to Bedford via the A1 trunk road, turning off towards Bedford either at Stotfold (to use the A507 and A600) or at Sandy, to use the A603. At which point, if not earlier, it would have been picked up and followed by another car, which would have made sure that the Range Rover was not being followed (for example; by undercover police or MI5), before the drivers of either car acknowledged each other.

If they had thought they were being followed, the other car would have been used to delay the tail, whilst the Range Rover lost itself in Bedford. All being well, the second car would have followed the Range Rover to the Swan Inn, picked up the occupants, and taken them swiftly to Cranfield Airport, just a couple of miles away. The driver of the second car would then have been on his way, so as not to leave any evidence behind at the airport.

One of the main reasons why Barry George became a suspect, was charged and wrongly convicted, of Miss Dando's murder, was because the Metropolitan Police apparently failed to find what they thought was the getaway car for a professional hit. They then turned to other theories, with an infamous and ill-advised appeal, on Crimewatch, for the public to nominate the gun-club member of their own choice. The theory being that even if this didn't solve the case, having a go at gun clubs never does a senior policeman any harm in the eyes of the Home Office and ACPO.

Not only was the getaway car available to be found, it was sitting exactly where one might expect it to be if the killer and his spotter had fled the country through Cranfield Airport and wanted to delay discovery of this fact until after they had time to disappear at the other end of their journey. The only flaw was that it was so ideally placed for this purpose, that it rather gives it away. But only with hindsight, Medawar supposes.

To reach the Swan car park, one has to pass over a long, stone bridge, over the river Great Ouse and its associated flood plain. It is possible to guess roughly where the unconventional firearm used to kill Miss Dando, might have been ditched.

ALF Terrorists in Costa Rica: Why?

The ALF and the "Earth Liberation Front" are essentially the same thing, and seek an end to all industrial society -and a world with the irreducible minimum human population.

Yet, two ALF (alleged) terrorists, resident and active in California, were arrested by the FBI in Charlotte, North Carolina -re-entering the USA after a visit to Costa Rica.

Given that Costa Rica has both Pacific and Caribbean coasts, North Carolina doesn't represent all that direct a route home to California, which raises interesting questions in itself.

The ALF rarely goes anywhere without a target in mind, so what targets are there in Costa Rica, the destruction of which might contribute to the fall of modern industrial society?

Corruption, Coercion and Poverty

For British readers, it's been two centuries since the slave trade was abolished. American readers won't see that anniversary for two generations yet, but read on. Even within British jurisdiction (throughout the world), it was a generation after the trade was abolished, that slavery itself finally went, when the Baptist Missionary Society finally drove a stake through the heart of the monster, which was first assailed by Adam Smith and the economists, then waylaid by Quakers, who went a lot of the way towards total abolition, but then found other fish to fry. When correctly targeted, single-mindedness is the defining virtue of Baptists. At no stage in the struggle did the Roman Catholic Church actually help, preaching slavery as an evil only once it was a thing of the past and not a present reality of the global power structure. The Anglican Church eventually went in the right direction shortly before the last minute, as it often does, when Baptists and Quakers effectively grabbed an ear each and marched.

It will seem very odd to some that Medawar commences an article about the present and future economy of the Western world with a reference to non-conformist Christians of centuries past. But read it again: the Neremiah of the generation before Josiah Wedgewood, was Adam Smith, the Scottish economist. Who wanted to break the chains more than a century before the idea commended itself to Abraham Lincoln. As we try and shelter from the fallout of what some see as the collapse of Western Capitalism, there is no concept harder for us to grasp than that of economics as a moral science and capitalism as a mechanism for improvement of the human condition. But an educated man from Adam Smith's generation, would see naught but madness in an age where an "ethical" investment fund can shun all investment in aerospace companies because of a mere association with the arms trade -and quite happily put its client's money into a wind-turbine company that lies to its investors about its long-term viability, lies to taxpayers about the benefits (or electricity) they will get for the subsidies they are being asked for, and lies to regulators about the harm being done by the wind-turbines to the environment.

Flying isn't "ethical", lying, apparently, is.

In Adam Smith's time, capitalism meant a probity-based economic model. The word "capitalism"wasn't around in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War, but the thing was. It was created, not by idle and evil rich men, but by Baptists and Quakers dealing with a corrupt world as they wanted it to be, not as it was. They changed it thereby. In Tony Blair's time, the same word is applied to a corruption-based economic model that is causing us serious problems. Not just because the bottom has fallen out of the banking system, but because corruption cannot exist apart from coercion.

No-one of their own free will, puts their savings into a company that lies to them and is patently not going to deliver what it promises. But government can take their money and put it into the dodgy company on their behalf, extremists can set fire to their homes in "protest" at their putting their money into some other company, on whatever revolving pretext presents itself. Banks can hire "advisors" to harry account holders to put their money into schemes: coercion is applied.

Corruption destroys wealth: the dishonest shilling triumphs over the honest pound. For a few individuals to become rich under a corruption-based economic model, everybody else has to become ever poorer, one way or another. If the same individuals became as rich under a probity-based economic model, everybody else might become more prosperous in their wake. Sounds like a fantasy? Well, yes: to one conditioned by currently-accepted thinking, it does. But for three centuries, that was how the British economy did work. There were ups and downs, but the economic trend was upwards, the social trend was towards improvement -and the political trend was towards ever greater freedom, and ever more accountability. If the civil war era had been a nadir, where something had to start getting better, the centuries afterwards were a slow climb up from the pit -and probity supplied guidance when the way towards "better" could not be defined any other way.

The ultimate expression of the corruption-based economic model and the coercion-based social model, is chiseled onto the many faces of the "Georgia Guidestones" and runs throughout the genocidal dogmas of the animal rights movement. That is, for people to live better, nine-tenths of them have to stop living. Just as for a few Blairite and Putinista Olgliarchs to become and remain billionaires, millions must be sold into mortgage slavery in a price bubble and literally billions in developing countries must be betrayed to a worse fate still.

Communism is just as much a corruption-based economic model as Blairite/Brownite Capitalism; indeed, it's hard to define a difference between the two. There is no rescue for us there, and the green extremists will save us by killing of nine out of ten of us, to make more space for rats and locusts. (No, don't try to imagine, just look: at Zimbabwe. Mugabe said, years ago, that he had been advised to reduce the population!)

The situation in the world today is dire. But it is no worse, and perhaps a bit better, than in England after a Civil War that transferred power without responsibility from the King, to a Parliament that then suffered no meaningful elections or accountability.

We can start making progress upwards again. We can fix the system. But we cannot consign poverty to the same unconsecrated grave as slavery, unless we slay corruption and its partner, coercion.

We must be intolerant of corruption, but that means we must stamp out bullying, whether by individuals, gangs or institutions. We cannot put up with an ever-tightening noose of state control, not because it simply makes us less free, but because it makes us poor -and that means that some of us are squeezed out of life altogether.
We cannot make a stand against corruption and do nothing about bullying, intimidation, gang-stalking and the spread of official coercion into even banal areas of public policy, because these evils are the same thing, just as reason and justice are, at one primal moment, the same particle.

Probity and freedom are the same thing, too. The greatest and most effective lie of all the lies that have driven this generation astray, is that probity is somehow a restriction, a fuddy-duddy lack of freedom. The truth it that without probity, nobody is free, in business or anywhere else. Freedom is the freedom to follow our most basic survival instinct: to test whether things are good or bad by applying reason to them. Corruption and coercion means that we do things for reasons other than that they are best. It is inevitable that corruption and coercion will make us do the wrong thing, therefore.

So, we mustn't be deflected by those who say that this global problem, or another, is so dire and serious that reason and persuasion must be laid aside, in favour of coercion. The more important the matter is, the more dangerous coercion becomes, because it is a guarantee of society doing the wrong thing.

The small Avro airliner in the photograph is a very direct descendant of the one visible in the background to all the photographs of Neville Chamberlain waving his bit of paper and proclaiming that there would be "peace in our time". This is known as "appeasement" to those of the generation that fought the inevitable subsequent world war, but even they forget that Chamberlain didn't only appease Hitler and the Nazis, because Hitler was in alliance with Joseph Stalin at the time -and he enjoyed considerable support in the United States of America from the likes of Henry Ford and many (but not all) members of the Kennedy Clan. Chamberlain wasn't just appeasing Hitler, he was trying to appease the collected forces of corruption and coercion as they appeared in the world at the time. Within a year, he had to fight anyway, within three, the United States had to fight against something which so many of its most powerful citizens actually supported.

Tonight, Medawar learns that "European Leaders," including Tony Blair, who, incidently, holds no elected post or constitutional position in any country, want to build a new global order out of the current economic crisis, which they did so much to create. This will be a global order of the corruption-based economic model and its attendant coercive social model. We will fight this because we have no choice: there is no route to human survival if we do not.

The Milk of Human Sadism

On the 23rd of September, it was reported that the animal rights group "PETA" had sent a message to the management of Ben and Gerry's Homemade Inc (an American icecream company) to the effect that they must abandon the use of cow's milk in their products and, instead, use human breast milk to make ice cream for sale on a commercial basis. Any suggestion of PETA's (a law-abiding institution, so it says) is habitually backed up by the threats and violence of the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia, "Earth First!" and the Earth Liberation Front, all of which make a virtue of breaking laws in what they deem to be a good cause.

Medawar's previous post "Science is a Freedom" stated that the cruelest thing you can do to someone, is force them to accept something that their reason wishes to reject.

PETA have previously campaigned for children to drink beer instead of milk, now, ice-cream makers are supposed to accept the theory that it's "healthier" for commercial icecream to be made from "donated" human breast milk.

They also strive to make people believe that cows milk makes people unhealthy (despite the historical evidence to the contrary, see especially "The Englishman's Food" by J.C Drummond and Anne Wilbraham (Jonathan Cape Ltd) which shows how many diseases were banished by the improved availability of fresh dairy products in English towns from the 18th century onwards.) Cows are now also to be blamed for global warming, with the idea that pastures can be converted into croplands.

The last time pastures were systematically converted into arable lands as a matter of public policy on any great scale, was in the Mid-Western United States in the early years of the 20th century. By the nineteen-twenties, this had caused the greatest ecological disaster in American history: the "Dustbowl". Because permanent pasture has a deeper root system even than most forests, it can withstand cyclical droughts in a way that arable land and even forestry plantations, cannot. Nearly all of the pasture lands which PETA would like to see converted (to growing soyabeans, presumably) in the USA, Canada and Argentina, are subject to cyclical droughts every twenty or thirty years. So, you can get away with arable farming for a decade, maybe two, and then you have a disaster and a sterile moonscape that won't grow anything in a hurry, even when the rains return.

Reason tells me that getting children to drink beer instead of milk, is very bad for them.
Reason tells me that dairy products, far from being dangerous to human health, are actually essential to avoid problems such as rickets and many opthalmic ailments.
Reason tells me that the commercial exploitation of human breast milk for ice-cream, is a deliberate lunacy which is being put forward for the following reasons:

Pathological liars are not compelled to tell plausible lies: they are compelled to force people to accept things which are not plausible, things which their reason wants to reject. Pathological lying is a species of sadism: they do it because the irrational lies which they force people to accept destroy the core of the victim's being. It is a way of stealing someone's sanity by force. Your reason wants to reject the idea of women being bullied into "donating" breast milk to icecream makers, so that pastures can be ploughed for soya production? Well, tough: PETA wants to make you accept the idea, precisely because it makes your reason scream with pain.

Then the whole concept deliberately reverses the position of woman and beast: women are, if anything less than beasts in PETA's eyes. And not only that, they want to force humanity to accept that status. Like the Cathars of Medievil Europe, successfully brainwashing people to sign over their wealth to the Cathars and then starve themselves to death. That, too, was an institution based on pathological lying.

It is ludicrous, but it is deliberately ludicrous. They cannot express their contempt and hatred for humanity in reasoned concepts, so they put forward ludicrous ones, instead, and then set about making people "believe" the most ludicrous of lies. Pathological lying of this order, is linked to the deepest and darkest forms of sadism.

Be very afraid of the sort of mind that can put this sort of idea forward, not quite in a spirit of seriousness, but in a spirit of mocking contempt for the human race. Here is something a thousand times more dangerous than any Islamist's hymn of hate, because it is born of hatred, not for any regional, ethnic or ideological grouping, but of hatred for the human form itself.

You might want to laugh out loud, but it's a statement of intent: when the people behind PETA rule, we will all have to publicly affirm our acceptance of this kind of madness, or we will suffer very violent consequences indeed. They laughed at Hitler, in 1923. By 1933, they were all shouting seig Heil! like the best of them, in case they got singled out. So, laugh at them for now, but get ready for the fight.

Science is a Freedom

These days, many people have been taught to fear that scientists are "destroying the world" or are engaged in a conspiracy (with a variety of faceless entities, such as "big Pharma") to enslave ordinary people and make them serfs, of whatever it is out there.

There are two points here:
Some of them are confusing "scientists" with "psychiatrists" and these have been two divergent species ever since the latter profession chose to follow Freud. A scientist either tests his own conclusions or allows someone else to test them, a psychiatrist only ever tests or questions someone else's assumptions, never his own. Even making that statement has caused all the psychiatrists reading this to assume...

Science is not an anti-nature thing, nor an anti-human thing. It is simply a formalized expression of something very fundamental to our natures, and at the deepest level, it is allied to what we call "justice".

Science comes from the very beginning of Humanity's emergence, not as a species (because there was more than one "species" that we'd recognize as being as human as we are) but as something slightly more than that. It isn't even what distinguishes us from other primates, because there's an echo of the scientist in what many wild primates, not to mention ravens, do in order to survive.

Consider a hunter-gather, traditionally called "Og" or perhaps, nowadays: "Ray Mears".
When he gathers fruit and berries in order to survive, how does he differ from a bear?
The bear stands upright (when required) and systematically gathers as much as he can, from that which he recognizes, by instinct or experience, to be good. From a distance, it is difficult to distinguish him, by his actions, from Mr Mears.

Well, the bear gathers as much of the good stuff as he can and eats as much as his stomach will stand (which tends to be a great deal.)

Mr Mears gathers as much as he thinks he can deal with, either by eating, or by processing the fruit and berries so that they might be transported, stored, or serve some function other than simple nutrition. He knows all sorts of ways of doing these things. Not simply because he has learned them from older generations of Mears, but because he himself, like all his ancestors, has been curious all his life, and that curiosity, guided by the facility of reason, has allowed him to invent and experiment with, new ways of using things that he can gather. This helps Mr Mears to survive and prosper, because he can find ways of processing food that is not good to eat immediately it is gathered, and which the bear must leave alone. It allows him to take food with him when he travels, or to store it by means other than eating it and growing fat.
That is all science is: a combination of curiosity and reason that is so important to our survival, since so unimaginably long ago, that it is part of our natures, perhaps the very core.

If our curiosity and reason are suppressed, we do not feel happy, we do not even feel well. Even the psychiatrists (or at least the forensic psychologists) will admit that sadists and pathological liars are often only millimetres apart. The cruelest thing you can do to someone, is to force them to accept something, which their reason wishes to reject. The pathological liar does not seek to tell plausible lies: he delights to manipulate, or coerce, people into accepting things which no reasonable person, a safer distance from the liar, would accept. That does not mean that the victim, who is forced to acknowledge the lie as truth, is not a reasonable person. It means that great violence is being done to their power of reason -and that power of reason has become, over millenia of human struggle, more important to their identity than their lives.

Being commanded by a liar to believe something that our reason rejects, is the greatest violence we can suffer. This is the primeval point where justice and science are the same thing. Like primitive atomic particles and forces just after the big bang, they grow apart and into very complex and distinct things, but in their origins, justice and science are the same: the core of our being.

Freedom is the freedom to look at things, to wonder about them, to imagine how they can change, to try it and see. That is science, but it is also how we tell good from evil, guilt from innocence, wisdom from folly.

If we regain our power of reason, and reject those who are telling us what we ought to think, we are already free in the sense that matters most.

The photograph is of a Westland Lysander. Designed to observe battlefields, it was also used to take secret agents to and from Nazi-occpied France during world war two. Nazism was a system of lies and coercion: pathological lying, formalised and inherently sadistic. On numerous occasions, agents fleeing the Gestapo, would have to run after a Lysander as it briefly touched down and taxied into position for an immediate take-off; grabbing the bottom rung of the fixed ladder, which you can just see in the photograph, below the RAF roundel, meant the difference, not just between physical safety and danger, but also between being able to keep their own power of reason and being forced to surrender it, under interrogation, to the Nazis.

Medawar doesn't seek to make a casual comparison between the Nazis and the modern anti-science movements, such as the Animal Liberation Front. There is a direct and real equivalence, suggested by all of his experience of the past thirty-odd years and tested, time and again, by his curiosity and power of reason. Gentle Reader, it isn't scientists who threaten your freedom, happiness and well-being, it's the liars.

Introduction

This blog is intended to deal with issues involving both science and human freedom.
"Medawar's" central belief is that freedom of inquiry is as important to the human condition as the freedom to protest or state political beliefs.
Indeed, most of our current concepts of political freedom stem from two roots:
the work of religious innovators and dissidents; for example, John Bunyan, who had to fight for the right to preach and pray as their conscience and intellect demanded -and those scientists who had to fight for the fight to study and theorize as their intellect demanded.

The modern world is full of forces which seek to suppress not simply our "political freedoms", "civil rights" or even "human rights", but the very basic right of curiosity and the use of reason which led to all of these.

Enemies of the basic right to curiousity and reason range from neo-nazi groups, such as the "November the Ninth Society" via the Animal Liberation Front, to Organised Crime and other entities which appear vague and shapeless, not to say nameless, to the majority of people, but which have a real and negative impact on some people's lives.

The Orange Dahlia, above, has been chosen because it's intensely beautiful, but it's the product, not solely of nature, but of nature and man's curiousity and reason working together. That makes it a symbol of everything which many extremists and little Hitlers are trying to suppress.

More posts will follow, but this sets out the stall!