Gang Stalking in County Durham?

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

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

How to Scuttle American Drugs Gangs

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

This link explains the official procedure for dealing with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Hath Balsam For England's Wounds?



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bonfire of the Rotten Apples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Thing More on Lockerbie

Here's an interesting article, indeed!

Butterfly Gallery.

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

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

Who Else Was To Blame for Lockerbie?

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

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

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

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

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

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.