Mass Extinction and the Guidestoners

In Georgia, USA, there is a stone monument, upon which is inscribed the manifesto of an anonymous group, rumoured to be the Lucis Trust. In recent years, extremists have developed and spread this manifesto to the point where the UK's anti-extremist intelligence agency "NECTU" has been obliged to classify movements with this or any equivalent agenda as amongst the most serious future threats to what's now called "national security". (But which used to be known as "the Queen's Peace". It is hard to see recent abuses in the name of "national security" being performable in the name of "the Queen's Peace" so perhaps that's why our language has been changed.)

To cut a very long story short, and to step carefully around the plethora of associated conspiracy theories, the Guidestones set up a vision for world government that just happens to necessitate the extermination of ninety percent of the human race, not to mention the end of any kind of national self-determination. In one form or another, "human population control" is becoming very fashionable in "green" circles, although it's usually expressed in a more moderate form, even if the logical implications are extreme. In other words, the difference between Sir David Attenborough's views on the subject and those of someone much more extreme, such as Jonathan Porrit, really boil down to the percentage of the population that needs to go, rather than the principle. It is taken for granted by all those involved in this kind of debate, that "the sacredness of human life" is at best an obsolete religious concept, and at worst a form of arrogance that values human lives above those of animals, or even biospheres. Medawar seeks, therefore, to tackle this one on its own terms and not with moral or theological arguments that might be better made by others.

Population Control, in the minds, and the hands, of those using the term today, means or implies genocide. They are not talking about limiting population growth or movement, they are talking about either massive, or in some cases, nearly total, elimination of populations. The "rational" justification for this is to claim that humanity is causing mass extinction events, and therefore the whole race is "guilty" or at least a deadly threat to the global biosphere, and this requires its removal or neutralization.

Obviously, the removal of 90% of the human race is an extinction event in itself. Probably, however, it wouldn't be possible to neatly remove 90% and leave 10% intact, viable and thriving, so the likelihood is that any attempt to realize the 90% cut in our numbers demanded by the stones, would take the human race perilously close to complete extinction. Currently, and this is the nub of the pro-genocide argument, the human race dominates every single habit in the world. Well, that makes us the dominant species throughout the biosphere.

If one looks at actual mass extinction events throughout the world, and throughout time, there are two mechanisms which recur time and time again. One is the sudden and massive proliferation of a pest species, which is what the Guidestoners believe humans are. "A cancer on the Earth". The other is the precipitate removal of a dominant species, which is not only a huge ecological wrench in itself, but also generally allows the sudden proliferation of another species that proceeds to wipe out all kinds of others. In effect, knocking out one thing makes space for another and ecological balance may not be restored for eons.

So, those looking for the cause of all the dinosaurs dying out, keep looking for huge events that would wipe the Earth clean of all life; except for some plants, insects and a few, Temrec-like, mammals. But all that's required for a mass extinction event is something that kills a few dominant or core species, or groups of species, and creates a vacuum into which something else multiplies, probably to its own ultimate destruction. If one or two types of creature, that were very dominant, were obliterated over a comparatively short period, there would follow a very long period of ecological instability and constant change and interaction, during which practically everything else either adapts, not once, but constantly as everything else changes, or dies out. Removing a dominant species spells long-term doom for thousands of others.

Humans are now THE dominant species, core to every eco-system, whether the Guidestoners like it or not. Our wholesale removal will destroy, not just many species, but probably whole categories of life. A "New World Order" might in the end prove not to be a profound political or humanitarian change, but a taxonomic one, in which the whole basis and pattern of life on Earth became unrecognizable. "New World Phyla" might be more apposite.

There are problems and dangers with the scale and nature of human activity as it is now. But it is wiser, indeed imperative, to address this by the gentle, and consensual, adaptation of human activity, rather than by the ruthless removal of human population.

Political, rather than truly scientific, "ecologists" tell us that we live in a small world of finite and dwindling resources. But cosmologists tell us that we live in an expanding universe. It is physically impossible for the human race, or any other species, to expand so fast that it outruns the space available to it in cosmological terms.

Intellectually, too, we have at least the potential to live in an expanding universe, where our knowledge of what the possibilities and solutions are, grows faster than the problems we make for ourselves, or for others. But that requires us to see knowledge and wisdom as living things, ever changing, ever growing, never needing to mean exactly the same thing to every beholder, not suffering from different usage and interpretations. If we carve our "wisdom" on granite monuments, we create an idol that can only bring death. That may sound "religious" but it's also scientific: how could we ever hear and understand Einstein, or Feyneman, if Newton's words had been written in stone and made unchallengeable by law?

Why The Whistle Did Not Blow!

The most learned economists in the Kingdom have written to Her Majesty, in belated answer to her question, more pertinent than any raised by her ministers "why did nobody see this (the credit crunch) coming?"

Actually, people did see it coming, years and years ago, but editors wouldn't publish anything that didn't agree with a consensus led by economists who were part of the sub-culture making all the mistakes. See Medawar's previous post.

The sub-culture believed that it had managed to spread the risk throughout the financial system, apparently. Yes, they certainly managed that, alright!

(The photograph shows Bedford's original commercial transport system in tranquil mood.)

Democracy Versus Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau supplied the political dogma, effectively the theology, of the French Revolution and every secular humanist movement since, such as the European Union. This is just a quick post of thoughts on why this kind of movement will end up doing evil, such as organised stalking, harassment, arbitrary public executions, just about every time, no matter how firmly any of these things are opposed in its founding set of principles.

The published thoughts of Rousseau are very many and very long, but the one that does practically all the damage goes something like this:

"If any two men honestly and reasonably contemplate the same issue, they will reach the same conclusion."

Ie: disagree with a follower of Rousseau and he will be serenely confident that you are either a perverse and dishonest person, who secretly knows that you are wrong and he is right, or you are completely irrational and quite incapable of telling right from wrong. That's how they deal with us, how they deal with each other is more interesting still:

They have to agree, and be seen to agree. But they do not know what is in each other's minds, so they can't be totally certain what conclusion they should agree with, until it is voiced. So they are uncertain, but because that uncertainty itself is a sign of dishonesty or unreason, they are frightened to let it show. Fear becomes a sign of dishonesty and unreason: they become afraid of their own fear.

But there's another complication: they think it is cruel and wrong to act other than with the will of the people: acting in the name of the people, or the king, is not enough. The will of the people may be unknown, it is rarely unaminous -and Roussea's theories imply that it has to be unaminous to be the will of the people- and in most cases, even if the will of the people were known, it wouldn't be what Rousseau's disciples believe, from their own inclinations as well as his teachings, should be done.

The whole belief system is under enormous internal tension and will destroy itself as soon as the leadership, in whatever cloying form it is disguised, finds itself publicly at odds with the people, or with itself.

So, if you are Richard the Lionheart, you can effectively say "think what you like, this is what I am going to do." Which may always force your hand, but it doesn't force your frontal lobes. If you are Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher you can say "this is what I'm going to do, if you don't like it, you can vote me out in five years time."

If you are a follower of Rousseau, such as Maximilien Robespierre or Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, you end up saying "The people's will is this" or "The vast majority of the British people want...." Blair never claimed adequate or tolerable support, it always had to be the vast majority, even when he scrapped back into power with the votes of about one third of the electorate! And because there were so obviously many people who opposed him, or contradicted him about the facts, such as Dr David Kelly, they needed to be, not just silenced, but utterly invalidated. They had to be racists, or mad, or dishonest.

This is why those who say that David Kelly was murdered are probably right about the murder, but also perhaps wrong when they seek to identify and expose the great global biowar conspiracy that would perhaps "justify" or at least explain the murder. If the good doctor was murdered by some other great power, particularly Russia, there may well be a need for an overpowering, high-stakes, motive.
(Unless he contradicted some claim or assurance made to the United Nations of the President of the USA by Mr Putin in person, in which case different rules apply.)

But if he was murdered on the orders of Mr Blair or someone close to him, or someone of like mind, there is absolutely no need for there to be any secret at all to be covered up by his killing.

Kelly not only dissented, but dissented in a way which invalidated Blair's claims to virtue, reason and honesty. These claims would be convenient to any politician, and they would all resent their loss, but to a Rousseau groupie like Blair, those claims, however shakey they seem to any third party, are utterly core to his self-identity. Medawar isn't merely claiming that this would have been enough to get Kelly murdered, he makes the unfashionable and unsettling assertion that to the Blair-mind, this would be more important than a global conspiracy or cover-up.

What many theorists do not appear to know, especially the American ones, is that there was a little old lady who knew no secrets at all, let alone those of any global conspiracy, who was treated just as viciously and crushingly as David Kelly by the Blair machine. Not because she even opposed him, but simply because she had been forced to wait for hours in a hospital casualty department without treatment, just as Blair claimed that this sort of thing didn't happen. Her experience contradicted Blair's assertion of virtue, the press were swiftly told that she was a racist who'd stubbornly lain on a hospital trolley untreated because of her vicious unreasoning hatred of ethnic minority hospital staff who tried to help her. The reality: she had been taken to hospital, had been too weak to raise a fuss, had been ignored and then forgotten, would have embarrassed but not harmed a genuinely democratic politician, who could have simply said: "it happened, it shouldn't have done, I will personally kick the arse of any hospital manager who lets it happen again."

Blair, being a secret disciple of a creed that believes it brings perfection to the affairs of man, simply could not make any such statement. Everything he does has to be right, everything he does is supported by the vast majority of the people (even when they are hurling bricks at him) every opponent and critic is perverse and probably deeply evil. And everything done by anyone he has hired or appointed, is similarly perfect, which is why the sort of hospital manager who lets little old ladies lie in misery within yards of people capable of treating them, never gets brought to book or sacked under Blair-style regimes.

Rousseau is poison to democracy, and to any practical system of governance, as well as any religion that admits the test of reason to belief. Rousseau forces the state, not just to control people's actions, nor even what they say, but as soon and as far as it becomes practicable to do so, Rousseau forces the state to control thoughts. It is worse than tyranny.

Democracy allows us to adopt a conclusion or follow a course of action without it becoming an article of faith. This means that we only adopt it for as long as it continues to be needed or it continues to make sense. The real strength of democracy is not that it always hits the ideal solution, let alone first go, but that it allows non-working or time-expired solutions a decent burial. Rousseau's people give every one of their solutions a gilt covering and a marble plinth. Believers in Rousseau are mostly lawyers and almost never engineers!

Finance and Perveristy in the UK.

Is there anything that can be done about it?

(Public Finances, that is.)

During her sermon at the millenium new year's day service (January the first, 2000, if you need a date for that) Lucy Winket, one of four Canons at St Paul's Cathedral, London, talked about "all our golden tomorrows." Today, as we face a black hole in public finances and the Liberal Democrats gleefully demanding that New Labour and the Tories "come clean" about the massive cuts they will make to vital services, it doesn't look as if we've even got a tomorrow of tarnished bronze ahead of us. But Medawar can see something gleaming -and although it's hidden and hard to spot, it isn't at the far end of the rainbow.

Firstly, there is no way that the public finances can be put right by defence cuts, no matter how bold, visionary and massive these might be in the eye of the proposer, because the entire defence budget is £39bn and the public finances have gone south to the tune of hundreds of billions. Almost entirely because the New Labour government handed responsibility for bank regulation, from the Bank of England, to the Financial Services Authority, which basically noted all the signs of impending disaster in the banking sector and did precisely nothing about it. Medawar can't say precisely what the Bank of England would have done, but even fierce words of warning, even as late as 2004, could have restricted the damage to something that the financial sector might have sorted out for itself, without the government having to mortgage itself for the foreseeable future. They might also have insisted that major banks were run by chief executives who knew about banking, because much of the damage was done by retail experts, bought in to "grow the business" which they did, without any concept of how to keep that business solvent as it grew. Almost any regulatory action would have been more efficacious than the nothing which the FSA did.

There is also the problem that cuts in services during a recession can make unemployment worse, and cuts in services during an economic recovery, which is what both New Labour and the Conservatives are banking on, to balance the books, will strangle the recovery at birth and create a very long-term depression. It's an impasse: cut now, make it worse. Cut later, make sure it never gets better!

However, it's only an impasse because there's a kind of public spending, and a kind of tax concession, which all the main political parties are blind to, because it is part of their reason for being. That is, spending and subsidies which actually make the country's overall problems worse, but which serve the interests of some group or another, which one party or the other has needed in order to gain and keep support at some stage. These are "perverse subsidies" and they are the real reason why we, as a country, cannot pay our way. Other forms of spending may appear to serve the interests of particular groups, but are not perverse if they at least do no harm, or actually do some general good.

That is, some pressure group that doesn't like policemen might regard their local police authority budget as a perverse subsidy for "fascist pigs", but there's no actual evidence that policemen are inherently damaging to the economy or society. (Corrupt policemen are quite another matter.) But if a small minority of people were getting taxpayer's money to make the rural housing shortage worse, that would be the very definition of perverse subsidy.

It might seem that a right wing government would cut away all the perverse subsidies which a left-wing government used to gain and maintain power, and the left wing government would take a scythe to all the right-winger's public subsidies, leading to there only be so much perverse subsidy at any one time. There are two reasons why this does not happen perverse subsidy has become an ever-growing cancer:

Both parties are usually winning or losing power on the turn of supporters who have no ideological committment either way. In the UK, these would be floating voters, in Israel, for example, these would be small parties that always get a particular vote, and then barter their way into a coalition government.

And it is very important that readers understand that dictatorships do not solve this problem, either, because when you rule by force, the people who apply that force on your behalf require several gravy trains, each.

The second reason is this: those minorities who benefit from perverse subsidies are neither ignorant of their position, nor mere passive recipients of passing fortune. They usually campaigned to get the perverse subsidy in the first place, and without exception they campaign to keep it, often with great ruthlessness and a great deal of "art and craft". The recipients of perverse subsidy are constantly playing the established major parties off against each other. During the Thatcher boom years, for which we are now paying, property developers and speculators were all firmly Tory. When John Major's government started to look wobbly, they began to cultivate their contacts in New Labour, and when it looked as if Tony Blair was playing the Dunblane Massacre card successfully, they defected en-mass. They are now shamelessly lining up for readmission to the Tory fold, and fully expect to pick up control of Tory housing and planning policy even as their control of New Labour's housing and planning policy passes from relevance.

So, no matter which perverse subsidy we are talking about, the only chance of getting rid of it, is by way of a thunderbolt that short-circuits the usual "democratic" process of all the vested interests alternately tilting the raft of state to one side or the other. But it has to be a democratic thunderbolt, because dictatorships are slaves to both the coercive social model and the corrupt economic model that goes with it.

To get rid of perverse subsidy, you need an elected party, new to power or comparatively new to power, which draws support from across the whole electorate rather than from a "core vote" of ideological supporters and whatever vested interest groups can be won at auction from the other parties trying the same thing. This doesn't describe the United Kingdom Independence Party as it now is, but it is a description of what it could become (and it needs to be done in less than four months) if it is to really serve this country rather than just make a point or two, however valid those points might be. Medawar doesn't insult UKIP when he wishes there was more choice than this: for most of the past seventy years we haven't had any choice at all!

So, rather than wanting to support UKIP, Medawar thinks that someone will have to take UKIP by the balls and force it to be the non-racist, consensual reformist party that the country needs, rather than the single-issue campaign which it started as and to some extent still wants to remain.

But the chance is there, not just for a way out of the Labour/Tory impasse of when to cut something vital, like Defence or Education, but for a way to a golden future where we finance those vital things by cutting all the perverse subsidies and tax-breaks that actually create and exacerbate the country's deepest problems.

We can have Lucy Winket's golden tomorrows.

A few examples of perverse subsidy:

Council Tax concessions make it artificially cheap for rich people and speculators to buy second, or even sixth, homes. This makes it artificially expensive for those who can only afford, and only aspire to, buying or renting one home. Then we're told that even more money must be spent redressing the shortage of affordable housing that this feeds -and planning controls on greenfield developments must be heavily compromised into the bargain. It goes further than that, second homes may be in "holiday homes" areas of the country, but most of them are speculative investments, and all manner of trickery is engaged in, so that the speculator can claim a capital gains tax exemption on more than one house. There has been a scandal about Members of Parliament "flipping" which of their homes is defined as their main residence for tax purposes, but they were only copying what they saw a particular vested interest group doing. This also makes it hard to say how much public revenue is being wasted and denied this way, but it's hundreds of millions of pounds at the least, and probably several billions.

We pay people to scrap old cars in return for buying a new "greener" car, even though more pollution is released making a car than in running it for five years, or more in some cases.

We pay billions to create showcase high-speed rail-links, which benefit only a few travellers, a little, and which carry no freight whatsoever, when the most pressing transport need in the United Kingdom is for the railways to take more freight off the roads and deliver it to more of the country, faster. The second most pressing need is to carry commuters relatively short distances to work, reliably and on time and in as much confort as we can, so that they can do their jobs. Instead they are packed into sardine cans as gleaming Eurostars whizz past on prestige routes so expensive that it would probably be both cheaper and less polluting to fly the passengers there instead. In general, both freight and commuter services could be transformed by re-instating third and fourth tracks on routes where these were removed in the sixties and seventies, as part of a perverse subsidy for the road-building and road-haulage lobbies. This isn't glamorous, but it can be immediately and spectacularly effective at making things work better.

(There are currently demands for a high speed rail link to Scotland, which would be the third major railway line to Scotland. Today, the government arranged to take one of the existing two back into public ownership because there weren't enough long-distance passengers to make the service viable. Yes, people have to go to Scotland sometimes, but hardly anyone needs to go there on a daily basis, from London.)

The government has a huge advertising budget, which serves the advertising industry rather than the general good. In effect, New Labour has exchanged the support of the nation's "professional communicators" for hundreds of millions of pounds worth of adverts that largely just confuse and annoy the public and make advertising for normal businesses, more expensive.

Most of the other perverse subsidies are much smaller, or much better hidden, than this. But there are many hundreds of them and it's probably worth the bother of hunting them down and finishing them off. Because they don't just cost money, they harm the general good.

And New Labour's twenty-four hour licensing hours (for sale and consumption of alcoholic liquor on the premises) may not look like a perverse subsidy, because what the government does is give a favoured sector of the alcohol trade a licence to make money at everyone else's expense. But since this loads completely open-ended extra costs on:
The police, the national health service, local councils and any other business within a few hundred yards of a 24-hour drinking den (insurance costs, customers being too frightened to approach, etc.) And it's wiping small alcohol retailers and brewers out at the rate of several a day-

-it's forcing society as a whole to pay billions of pounds, one way or another, for a sub-section of one industry to make huge profits, in a way which makes it very hard for the police and the health service to do their normal jobs. The licensing arrangements were a direct sacrifice of the public good, for the support (and especially advertising muscle) of the biggest players in the booze trade.

Medawar knows that this needs to be dealt with, but for the Tory party to do it, would require them to turn away and reject, vested interests which many Tories see as a natural part of their constituency. UKIP may be our only choice, simply because it has yet to acquire the support of any particular clique and its support is pretty well distributed across every race, region and demographic. This may equip it to tackle vested interests that threaten to turn a future Tory government into a continuation of the New Labour disaster. Since the Liberal Democrats are the only "main" party to have run an openly racist election campaign in recent years (Cheltenham, 1992) Medawar simply isn't prepared to contemplate supporting them, no matter how much the Editor of the Daily Mail says the pavements brighten as Vince Cable scampers past.

Democracy and Justice

There is deadly danger in the current scandal over Members of Parliament and their expenses: just at the moment when the British people desperately need Parliament to assert itself again over both the executive (Ministers like Gordon Brown) and those shadowy others who, holding no elected office in the first place, cannot be disposed of or even inconvenienced by elections, Parliament manages to render itself almost unspeakable, never mind unpopular.

It didn't have to be this way: the Parliamentary Official responsible for MPs' expenses claims, Andrew Walker, first started to protest to Speaker Martin about claims moving from the cynical to the openly abusive, five years ago. Speaker Martin seems to have bullied Mr Walker into silence for a couple of years, then accepted him back into the inner circle of Parliamentary Officialdom after he'd been broken and cowed. (Absolutely classic gang-stalker behaviour!) The scale of the scandal and crisis has its genesis right there:

When Mr Walker first protested, the most blatant abuse was confined to a handful of Members of Parliament. Had the Speaker allowed Mr Walker to curb their excesses then, relatively quietly, the situation wouldn't have got worse, and the majority of MPs wouldn't have been tempted to commit the same error. If it had become public at that stage, it would have been a scandal, but only for those MPs who were the first to stick their hands in the till. The others, who hadn't thus far even thought of acting so basely, would never have thought of it before it became such an obviously bad idea that they never would.

But Speaker Martin didn't allow Mr Walker to stop the corruption then, he insisted that nothing be done. This didn't merely allow it to continue at the same level, which the institution of Parliament might have survived; the temptation became more compelling the longer it went unchecked, the more times honest MPs saw crooked ones fill their pockets with not a word being said, the harder it was to stay honest. Yes, they should have stayed honest, and some of them even have, but it's called corruption because it corrupts and spreads -and that's why it needs to be rooted out, even if it seems to be happening at a low and tolerable level. Because if you allow corruption at all, it never, ever, stays at a low and tolerable level.

Now we have a situation where the Leader of the biggest opposition party, David Cameron, durst not say a single word against the governing party on the issue of corruption, and he appears genuinely unable to understand that the public are absolutely boiling mad about what has happened. The leader of the next biggest opposition party, Nick Clegg, is scoring a few trite points off the governing party (he is a Liberal Democrat and they can never eschew this entirely) but even he is being so visibly careful about where he treads, that you just know his party has a problem as well!

In short, the whole institution of Parliament is corrupted now, and the public is in a mood to see it disposed of. Many of the MPs who are now guilty and unworthy of their office, were capable of serving and retiring with honour, if they hadn't been so immersed in corruption by the Speaker's omission, that they felt they had to swim in that sea or drown.

One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist, wildly claiming that all this has been plotted and contrived by a sinister shadow organization of some kind, to see that there's an abundance of unsavoury and dangerous political groups and cults out there, who will seize on this in a flash and exploit it, no matter if it's a pure accident of history or the culmination of a multi-generational masonic conspiracy. It has happened, and it has happened at the most inopportune moment for such a thing in a few centuries of British history. It is a gift to fascists and communitarians of every stamp: they will milk it for all it is worth.

It looks as if a majority of Members of Parliament are now unworthy of their democratic mandate. But they do still have that mandate and are ultimately ruled and bound by it. We are in grave danger of being ruled, instead, by people whose names we're not even expected to know, who have no democratic mandate, do not intend to seek one, ever, and regard the whole concept of democracy, or even the doctrine of a government bound by laws, with sneering disdain.

We must elect a new Parliament and back it to the hilt, against the rising tide of attempts to impose social control by executives and officials acting outside their powers and lawful authority and with no mandate from us. But that new Parliament can only contain those members of the existing one who have resisted temptation, no matter how overwhelming it might have been, and who recognise and acknowledge that a wrong has been done to the country, by its erstwhile rulers. Since the Tory leader fails this last test, no matter who squeaky clean he may be on the first, Medawar does not believe that David Cameron should be returned to Parliament, let alone become Prime Minister. Boris Johnson may yet have to leave his plough! (Boris, Elisha was called from his plough a long time before any Roman was!)

Stop Press: David Cameron dimly realises that Parliament has done something wrong!

And quite a few members of Parliament need to be dealt with in the courts, (and why not some of them in the one that dealt with James Hanratty?) for what they have done.

But when the press have had their day, and the police have had their fun arresting a few MPs and bringing them to court, we must all remember that the one, armed and powerful institution, which has not had any sort of anti-corruption probe or inquiry in decades, is the Metropolitan Police Service. Medawar has been told, that "there are very senior officers who have, quite literally, got away with murder."

If we value human life, as well as our freedom, we must assign Metropolitan Police corruption a priority in our attentions proportionate to crimes allegedly including murder and an open contempt for democracy, whilst not forgetting to assign MPs' corruption a priority proportionate to crimes including fiddling mortgage payments and the odd grocery receipt.

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.