Austrian Forensic Method: Burn the Evidence, Quickly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembrance

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

But we've been here before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banknotes Protest

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

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

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

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

Seeing Beyond Political Boundaries

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

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

Timothy Hampton and the March of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drug Facts Also Unlikely to Appear on Indymedia Anytime Soon

This link is to some actual facts about cannabis.

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

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

A/ Realize something is actually wrong.

B/ Seek help.

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

D/ Get it successfully repaired.

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

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

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

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

If you are taking meth-amphetamines: good bye.

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

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

Indymedia Censorship

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

A Walk in the Woods or a Fall from a Height

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

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

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

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

Animal Rights and Neo-Nazis

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment and Tyranny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Bunyan replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is where we actually have a choice:

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

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

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

Dangers of Being a UK Weapons Expert

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

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

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

Exodus of the Gummerites!

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

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

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

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