Liberty, Independence and Prosperity

(Not only has our Kodachrome been taken away, so has our AGFA XRS.
Above is a scanned example of what you could do with the latter.)

The best way to know the state of England in any age, is to look at what her people are putting in their gardens. Under the reign of Elizabeth the First, English gardeners adopted the exquisite "Rosa Mundi", whose very name evokes the world view of a society that had indeed just discovered the concept of a world view, rather than accepting their alloted place at the edge of a Vatican-controlled Europe, as if this were the edge of the known world. Breaking free from Europe under "Gloriana's" reign was to transplant and transform England, from the edge, to the centre. It was under her reign, too, that geographers started to talk of "Britain", even if the act of Union was still a century away.

Under John Major and Anthony Charles Linton Blair, two leaders passionately determined to bury the British nation back under every shackle that Europe might propose, plus quite a few of their own devising for good measure, English gardeners opted for "decking" and covered their gardens in fairly flat (until something warped) areas of sawn and routed Finnish timber.

The emerging trend, under Gordon Brown, is for the decking to be removed to expose the soil once more, to grow vegetables for simple survival. The decking is found in short lengths, stacked ready for a million wood-burning stoves to consume.

Grim times, indeed. But what hope is there, for the future?

Well, grim times bring grim necessity and some very lucid moments.

That is precisely the formula that transformed an uncertain, actually quite frightened, country, whose Queen and whose freedom was hated by the rulers of Europe, into one that fought for her survival because there was nothing else to be done. She won, she survived. Europe remained closed to her, she turned elsewhere -and discovered both Scotland and the world.

The best thing that can happen to Britain now, whether Scotland is still along for the ride or not, is that Europe will once again try and squeeze her out. This will dismay and humiliate Britain's political elite, who will explore alternatives to subjugation only if forced. (Rather like the Hebrews under Pharaoh.) But they will be forced, and the alternatives will be found. And a new political elite will emerge, like Elizabeth's captains, to whom freedom will be exhilarating rather than uncomfortable.

When the Russian people had their taste of freedom, Vladimir Putin was able to persuade them to spit it out. What Gordon Brown, Nicholas Clegg and David Cameron have just six weeks or so left to do, is somehow persuade the British people not, on any account, to put freedom anywhere near their mouths. If they fail, Britain will once again realize that freedom and prosperity are the same thing.

Canvassing, Stalking and the Pimps of Political Corruption

The recent scandal over Members of Parliament and their expenses claims, and lesser scandals (involving much bigger amounts of money!) over funding contributions to political parties at the national level, has served to protect the real core of political corruption in the United Kingdom from public attention. The people in the British Political system who are best placed to improperly enrich themselves are neither ministers nor backbench MPs: it is the Constituency Agents and Constituency Party Chairmen who are in the best seats. Very few laws and regulations specifically apply to them, and those that do are focused on the conduct of elections in the first place and the practical management of the constituency party and any associated clubs in the second. As long as these functions are conducted within the letter and broad spirit of the law, the agent and chairman are almost invisible to the electorate, the returning officer, and electoral commission. Not that returning officers and the electoral commission are really anti-corruption bodies in any case.

MPs and Ministers, on the other hand, are under the public eye, and the eyes of their peers, the whole time, which is why an unwarranted expenses claim of a few hundred pounds is not merely a scandal, but one which can destroy a career. In such an environment, the scope for really serious, million-pound corruption would seem to be almost nil. It is the invisible men who have the freedom. And that's not their only advantage.

Traditionally, there has been one constituency party per constituency, so a 1:1:1 ratio between agents, chairmen and MPs. But with parliamentary boundary changes and a desire to save costs, in some cases one agent may cover two or three constituencies, and the constituency party apparatus itself may be based on the traditional, and not the current, boundary. But assuming that the traditional situation is still normal, and there's one Agent, Party Chairman and MP per constituency, it is almost always the case that the Agent and Chairman have a dozen or so County Councillors and perhaps a couple of dozen District or Borough Councillors under their wing. If one likens the constituency party to a Roman Galley, the Chairman is setting the course, the Councillors are working the oars, the Agent is walking up and down the gangplank, fondling his whip in an overt sort of way -and the MP is the beautifully carved figurehead on the bow script. The vessel is propelled by the wind and the graft of councillors.

The MP may propose, debate and vote on, laws which are of some concern to property developers, public service contractors and the like. But that's only creating an environment common to the vested interests and all their competitors. They might have a desire for this to move in one direction or another, but it's hardly worth a big investment of cash, unless a limited number of MPs are in a position to deliver a drastic change in the outcome of the legislative process. This isn't the normal situation, especially when, as has been the case since 1997, a single party has enjoyed an overwhelming Parliamentary majority.

The Councillors, however, take weekly decisions that implement existing legislation. An MP may be asked to nod through, or vote against, a Parliamentary order that requires local education authorities to designate approved suppliers for schools to purchase consumables from, a Councillor on the LEA gets a vote on which supplier gets that approval. Who do you think a potential supplier will want to bribe? The Councillor? Correct!

MPs vote on the general shape of planning laws, Councillors vote on specific planning applications. Even the limited number of ministers who have a say in planning matters, generally only have authority over outline planning permission for very big or very sensitive developments, and County Structure plans. The minister does not decide whether Mr A gets permission to build a particular trading estate on a particular field next to a motorway junction or not, but the appropriate local Councillors do!

The difficulty facing any vested interest who wants to bribe a councillor, is that councillors are ordinary citizens, often with full-time day jobs, and they are indeed local, whereas the vested interest may be a big developer or a big company, operating nationally. It would be very difficult for such a vested interest to always identify the right councillors to approach: who were on the right committee, didn't already have a strongly-held view on the development, and were the sort to accept an inducement. Unless they work through the Agent and local party Chairman, that is.

The Agent and Chairman know, not only which councillors are on the appropriate committee, which is after all a matter of public record (if you've got time to look!) but also which way they are likely to vote if no inducement is offered. They will know which councillors are corruptible, and which are not. They can advise, firstly, on whether or not the vested interest needs to corrupt anyone to achieve its aim. Then they can advise on how many votes need to be swung, because it never does to overdo things, and it certainly saves the client money if he corrupts the smallest possible number of Councillors on any one issue.

Then they can advise on who to approach, or they can act as intermediaries if direct contact is inadvisable, and they can advise on what sort of inducement each selected Councillor is likely to need. This might not be a cash bribe, but could be help with a pet project. In extreme cases, the Agent and Chairman are well-placed to bully a resistant Councillor into line.

Where the MP is involved in this process at all, will be to create the right climate of opinion for the vote to be swung, or as what the Russians call a "roof" against investigation by central government or other interest authority, such as the police. Again, no matter how moral the MP is, it's unthinkable to go into any election without the Agent and Chairman completely on your side, so they will toe the line, provided that they are never asked to do anything too outrageous. And the way things are structured in the United Kingdom, it never is necessary for the MP to do anything very much, for corruption to thrive in his constituency. All he really needs to do, is stand on the bow script and feel the wind and spray on his wooden features.

The consequences of this can be small, but corrosive. Medawar recently listened to a minor rant from a nice Irish lady who works on the domestic side of a special needs school in East Anglia. The system of preferred suppliers meant that she was obliged to buy food for school dinners, from a "preferred supplier". In a market town surrounded on all sides by market gardens and farms growing vegetables, she was forced to accept battered, tired produce that had travelled from Holland and Spain and looked as if it had already been rejected by supermarket buyers. She was forced to pay £19.95 per bag for potatoes of unknown provenance, when there were half a dozen farms within a five mile radius of the school that would have sold a bag of fresh, undamaged spuds for £5. "I'm being forced to buy shite for the children, at four times the cost of decent food!" was the entirely justified, furious, complaint.

Bribes are not just paid for planning permission to be granted, but for it to be refused, so that a small developer will be forced to abandon his plans and sell on his site to a larger developer. Houses will be built on land prone to flooding, business parks will be built with lorry access straight onto a major road at an awkward junction, or where there are no adequate sewerage works or the power grid is already overworked.

All of this creates problems, and sometimes fatalities, and therefore it creates anger and unease, which some articulate and public spirited citizens might transform into protest and a widespread demand for investigations and a clean-up of local politics. This leads us to the second area where Agents and local party Chairmen have the edge over Members of Parliament:

The Agent and Chairman, at election time, organize the troops and mastermind any canvassing in a constituency. 90% of the work involved in organized canvassing, is identical to the work involved in organized stalking. Much of the information gathered in canvassing, is useful to stalkers. The methods used to find out which way a citizen is thinking of voting, can be used to look into other aspects of his life. A proportion of the people who are willing to go out canvassing at election time, will be willing to go out stalking between elections. That proportion will usually be tiny, but the Agent and the Chairman will know who they are -and what sort of a payoff they will need.

So, when the corruption leads to inappropriate and damaging actions, that annoy the public, the Agent and Chairman can organize campaigns to suppress the leaders, or potential leaders, of any protest or grassroots campaign. They can bully the whistle-blowers on the Council's permanent staff: they can protect the vested interest from the consequences of getting something that is not in the public interest. A member of Parliament is a chancy and potentially useless target for corruption, but his Agent and Chairman may, in some cases, offer a one-stop shop service.

Fraud and Stalking

There seems to be a consensus, amongst animal rights activists in the UK, that most, if not all, of the stalking being done by persons associated with that particular cause, is actually being undertaken for money, or to silence/punish some activist who's got in the way of making money by this means, or out of personal spite by the same people who stalk for money. The Animal Protection Party and elements of "SHAC" being the main alleged culprits. Their clients may even be rival "animal abusing" businesses to those being targeted, or millionaires with their own deeply unsavoury personal obsessions, but all that matters is that they are willing to define a target and pay for his or her destruction.

It is very aptly described as "basement-level organised crime."

In other words, people being stalked by animal rights activists, are not necessarily even imagined to be animal abusers, although lies being integral to stalking, this assertion will inevitably be made: they have just been named by a client who wants them stalked for some criminal purpose.

Medawar wonders if this might apply in North America, too, and more especially in Australia and Germany, because in both countries, a famous international animal welfare charity (much given to threatening people to silence criticism) has been accused, by mainstream animal welfare groups and activists, of raising money under false pretences.

There is no-one on Earth more sadistic and relentless than a pathological liar whose lies have been exposed and rejected. Fraud, impure, dirty, nothing but greed, fraud for money, may actually be the underlying "cause" of many a "cause-stalker" or gang-stalker.

From stock adverts of post-earthquake donkeys (actually in Kobe, Japan, in the eighties not Chile, not Haiti, nor Italy,) dragged out to extract funds from a caring public the world over after every natural disaster, to the utterly sickening "SAGE" fraud run in the wake of the Dunblane Massacre, where a con-man from New Jersey, just released from Norwich jail, managed to persuade many of the bereaved parents to become patrons of his "Swiss-based anti-gun crusade", enriching him by at least £4M in the process, society's compassion has regularly been milked by those who have no compassion for anyone, or anything.

Pathological liars are sadists, and they are not compelled to tell outrageous lies, so much as to use emotional manipulation to force people to believe the irrational. (Such as an anti-gun campaign based in a country which makes gun ownership compulsory for adult male citizens!) The lies are mental sadism, but if they are resisted, physical sadism quickly follows, and will not stop until the perpetrators are incarcerated. Using toxic chemicals on people, to undermine both their physical and their mental health, is so sadistic that most policemen and doctors find it much more comfortable to believe that the victim is deluded; which in itself, worsens the victim's plight and is gleefully factored into the stalker's plans for their slow destruction.

Medawar would welcome comments (anonymous, for your own sake) from anyone who can cast light on the people doing this, in the UK, in North America, and, most particularly at the moment, in Australia.

Is the reason for some fairly middle of the road, worthy and utterly inoffensive, animal welfare workers in Australia being hounded by unknown stalkers, anything to do with their having made a justifiable fuss about a certain "charity's" fraud over the donkeys and the Kobe Earthquake in Japan?

This isn't the whole story about all organised stalking, but there is an emerging consensus that it IS the story where supposed animal rights activists are doing it. And it is interesting that Keith Mann gets named, by his fellow animal rights activists, in this connection, because his brother, Andrew, based in Northampton at the time, was , just a few years ago, jailed for a UK-wide government-funded training allowance fraud, where just about everyone in the UK animal rights movement was supposedly receiving "training" through his little scheme. Was this to fund the cause, or the Mann dynasty's lifestyle? Either way, fraud is fraud, is theft. Theft is even harder to justify in a political cause than violence.

PS: When the infamous Kobe donkey advert was run in Australia, not by the genuine Japanese charity that first created it, it raised roughly A$3M. The international animal welfare "charity" that re-ran the advert, without the Japanese charity's prior permission, donated about A$35,000 of this (less than 2%) to the genuine Japanese charity. Since when, the image has been used time and time again, all over the world. You do not save donkeys, or dolphins, by sending money to the box numbers on these adverts. The only charity that actually was helping earthquake-stricken donkeys shown in such adverts, was in Japan, and it never actually wanted to raise funds from outside Japan.

What Stalkers Want to Stop

Medawar would like his readers to see the sort of work that "Gangstalking-Australia" is being stopped from producing anymore, by stalkers. Their reasons are unknown and quite possibly incomprehensible anyway. What matters is that all stalker inflict similar destruction: the victim is very often someone of an artistic temperament, but it can be a journalist, community leader or an engineer, too. And in every case, the stalking is notable for two things: the human misery that it inflicts, and the work that it prevents from being done.

Stalking is never, ever, noted for the good that it does. Stalkers have no virtue to their name, they are marked only by the voids they create in human culture, achievement and aspiration. They deserve only eternal oblivion.

Transport Infrastructure

Very nicely restored railway signal box, a little way inland from Felixstowe.

The Guns That Didn't Bark

The assassinations of Jill Dando (BBC TV Presenter) and Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister) actually have one, strikingly anomalous, thing in common: A .380" ACP calibre pistol that didn't make anything like enough noise.

When Mr Rabin was shot, in the middle of a large crowd, there was confusion, even amongst security personnel, because the shots didn't sound loud enough to be real. (And the Israeli public fires probably handguns more often than any other population, except, possibly that of Finland.)

When Jill Dando was shot, a man, working (at a drawing board?) at the front upstairs window of the house opposite, didn't hear a thing, even though he glanced out just before, and just after, the shooting. Gowan Avenue may be fairly "upmarket" by London standards, but it is not a wide boulevard with mansions either side with sweeping drives and acres of front lawn. The houses are Victorian Terraces, albeit fairly large, the front gardens are just a couple of paces wide, and the slightly-recessed front doorway of Miss Dando's house ought, if anything, to have focused the sound of the shot right at the man working opposite.

The .380" ACP (also known as 9mm Browning Short) does make a bang. Years of Gun Magazine articles comparing it against more powerful calibres, such as the 9mm Nato, .38" Colt Super and .357" Remington Magnum (revolver) cartridge may have created an impression of it being relatively less powerful, but it produces almost exactly the same muzzle energy as the .38/200 revolver round that was standard Commonwealth military issue duringthe second world war, and Medawar has never heard anyone describe that as "quiet".

The .380" ACP, in its standard form, projects a 95-grain bullet at 955 feet per second, the .38/200 fires a 200 grain bullet at around 650 feet per second: energy the same. If anything, the .380" ACP makes a sharper noise as the lighter bullet is moving more quickly. This helps to make the .380" ACP accurate, although the close-range "stopping power" of the heavier bullet is well established. The powder charge in a .380" ACP cartridge is between 3 and 4 grains of a fast-burning smokeless propellant.

(A grain is a unit of weight, common to both the Troy and Avoirdupois scales. A Troy pound is 5760 grains and a pound Avoirdupois is 7,000 grains. Troy pounds divide into twelve ounces of 480 grains, a pound Avoirdupois divides into sixteen ounces of 437.5 grains.)

Although the .380" ACP or 9mm Short was a common service cartridge during the Second World War and with European Police Forces thereafter, and has been used in quite a lot of crime over the years, especially in the past, it hasn't been used in all that many professional killings in recent years. To some extent it is being displaced as firearms manufacturers find solutions to the difficulties of making smaller pistols compatible with the higher-pressure 9mm NATO ammunition. After the NAZIs captured the Polish Radom factory, making an improved version of the Walther PPK of James Bond fame, the .380" ACP version of the Radom pistol became standard issue for the Gestapo and other Nazi intelligence agencies. The .380" Radom was about the most powerful, accurate and reliable handgun available at the time that would fit reasonably unobtrusively inside smart civilian clothes of the thirties and forties, although Savage, in Canada, made a similar pistol. (Bond's PPK would have been the smaller .32" version, the Metropolitan Police did issue the .380" Version to some detectives and protection officers in the seventies and eighties.)

So, a generic .380" ACP pistol is probably a sound enough choice for an assassination, mainly, normally, because it is powerful and accurate for its size. It is pretty loud for its size, too. The ammunition used to kill Miss Dando is known to have been customised in some way, presumably to reduce the noise. What was done in Mr Rabin's case isn't publicly known, but many witnesses didn't think the gun was real because the noise wasn't much at all.

Adjusting the ammunition in this way takes a certain amount of expertise (and Miss Dando's alleged and then acquitted killer is mentally retarded) and it's the specific expertise which Medawar sees as a link between two crimes with, otherwise, nothing much to connect them. Certainly not motive.

Unless, of course, one starts looking at Jewish Extremist groups (Mr Rabin's convicted killer was a Jewish Extremist) and what they want to achieve. Everything they, or their financial supporters, want to achieve.

Everyone knows, Jewish Extremist Groups are against any sort of peace deal that surrenders any territory to Palestinians in return for peace, but there is actually a much longer list of things, about which they have very rigid views. More work needs to be done, on what it is they are after, apart from being beastly to Arabs.

It would be bitterly ironic if any conspiracy to murder a prime minister of Israel, was able to hide behind claims that any investigation or debate about it was anti-semetic. Mr Rabin's murder, and with it the denial of any chance for the peace that so many Israeli jews crave, was one of the most anti-semetic acts for a generation.

Who Needs the Aegean?

Brilliant sunshine, lake a deep turquoise; all the characteristics of a nice winter holiday in Croatia. Except that this is East Anglia and the sparkling expanse is not exactly fluid...

Frank Olson, The Original Faller From A Great Height

Anyone wondering if Timothy Hampton or David Kelly were murdered, and it seems very likely that Dr Hampton was, should consider the case of Colonel Frank Olson, who very probably was murdered, although that only became known following a second post-mortem more than twenty years after his death.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Frank Olson, many of them, to Medawar's knowledge, wrong to a greater or lesser extent. So here goes with what Medawar believes to be the true story, as briefly as possible.

Frank Olson was a US Army researcher, whose main career goal was to improve the protection of American soldiers against unconventional weapons on the battlefield. Anyone who has studied the history of unconventional warfare, including chemical and biological warfare, knows that it is military suicide to deploy, let alone use, unconventional weapons unless you first have some form of defence against them for your own soldiers. Failing to do this, with poison gas, was one of the mechanisms by which Imperial Germany helped defeat itself during the First World War, and it's also how the US Army Chemical Corps came dangerously close to inflicting similar disaster on American soldiers and particularly the US Marine Corps, in the same conflict. (The Americans were hastily loaned effective British and French gas masks until the Chemical Corps caught up with reality and started to produce adequate protective gear and training as well as huge amounts of offensive gas munitions.)

Imperial Germany, after lobbying at the highest levels by the Nobel Laureate Fritz Harbur, was the first to use poison gas in the First World War. British troops somehow held on, had improvised protection within about a day, and then later counter-attacked with hastily-produced gas weapons of their own, against which German troops still had no effective protection of any kind. Because the British devised a more effective method of delivering poison gas accurately onto enemy positions, Germany always suffered more than it gained from gas warfare, throughout the war. Some historians describe Hitler's reluctance to use the "vastly superior" nerve poisons available to Nazi Germany in the second world war as "irrational" but Medawar sees it more as a case of a madman having a very lucid moment, based on his own nightmare experiences.

Olson, therefore, for the most grounded, objective and rational of reasons, believed that there was no military advantage in novel means of warfare unless you possessed the means to stop the enemy using them to greater effect than your own side could. He was also active as a researcher during the early cold war period, when the US Army Chemical Corps set about repeating its mistakes of the first world war, on a scale terrifying not just because of the physical dangers of vast poison gas stockpiles, far outstripping progress in protective equipment, but also in the huge sums of taxpayer's money being wasted in the process. Atomic bombs, each costing about what it took to build, man and deploy a single B-29 bomber, seemed cost-effective compared to achieving the same results through carpet-bombing with a thousand or so bombers at a time, many of which might be lost to enemy defences or pure accident in crowded skies. What the chemical corps was doing in the late forties and early fifties, looked cost-effective only when compared to Caligula's palace construction programme.

Against this background, Frank Olson was seconded to work on project "MK Naomi" a sort of sister project to (but quite not the same thing as) the CIA's "MK Ultra". MK Naomi was intended to produce drugs and psychoactive chemical weapons, for battlefield use and for interrogation of enemy spies who might have time-sensitive information of the highest importance. Those at the top of both projects followed Chemical Corps tradition and massively oversold their projects to the newly-built Pentagon and to the White House. Almost from the outset, there was an unbridgeable gulf between what they were capable of achieving and what those voting the funds had been led to expect, and those funds were, by the standards of the day, very substantial. (The Truman and Eisenhower Administrations desperately hoped that throwing money at miracle weapons would save them from having to do a proper job of post-war re-armament with up-to-date tanks and jet fighters. A small legion of charlatans, including several German scientists who'd successfully conned the Third Reich into giving them carte-blanche and millions of Marks, promptly set up shop. American Intelligence Officers were baffled as to why their British counterparts had been so slow and unwilling to snap up all the hundreds of ex-Nazi scientists that were on the market in 1945-47, but there was a reason. The sole genuinely-competent aerodynamicist amongst them suddenly found himself working for Handley Page, the rest were mostly passed over in favour of home-grown British and Commonwealth talent.)

Once at MK Naomi, Olson quickly found that he was in a scientific bunko booth and that most of the work being done was either scientifically impossible, being falsely presented as successful when this was far from clear, or was a personal hobby-horse of one senior "scientist" (most of them were actually psychiatrists and not rigorously scientific at all) and thus perhaps of interest, but not at all obviously of military value. Olson could see enough unmet need for better chemical and biological warfare protection for American soldiers, to greatly resent the diversion of money and effort away from that need. He was not a subversive or a troublemaker, nor a faint-hearted pinko: he was a patriot who wanted the US Army and Marines to be properly, preferably superbly, equipped for the perils of modern warfare.

It has been stated that Olson was working with Porton Down to test psychoactive weapons. This is a serious misrepresentation:

He was ordered to work with some UK experimental psychiatrists, from the University of Sussex, not Porton Down, who had already been refused a licence by the Medical Research Council (in 1947) to experiment on mentally-ill patients with such mind-altering drugs as LSD. The independent experts (then at University College, London) who evaluated the toxicity of LSD in a report for the MRC, which led to the licence being emphatically refused, had worked at Porton during the war and subsequently returned there. They had, in fact, also recommended to the Home Secretary that possession and manufacture of LSD should be banned before anyone popularised its recreational use! They described it as a toxin rather than a drug.

The University of Sussex Psychiatrists got wind of MK Ultra and MK Naomi and realized, like all the CIA's ex-Nazis, that this was an opportunity to obtain funds and experiment at their whim, outside the control of the boring old Medical Research Council. In effect, they went to the Pentagon and the CIA over the heads of the UK's own research watchdogs and sought to use the secret military programme to recreate their own purely medical (but not very rational) research project, despite this having been banned by the proper authority as unethical, dangerous and unlikely to yield any medically useful result. The probability that it was equally unlikely to yield a militarily useful result, was ignored.

Because it was now a "secret" and "military" project, and because the farm that the University of Sussex had been using had no safe facilities for storing, let alone experimentally dispersing, potentially toxic gas, the team was granted access to facilities at Porton Down. This does not make their project a Porton Project, it's just that this was the only safe place for certain of their experiments to happen. (The same is true of most of the controversial tests of nerve agents on army volunteers. They happened at Porton, but were done by army doctors from elsewhere, who were often alarmingly inexpert and reckless. Porton's indigenous population had too much respect for nerve gas to be reckless with it.)

So, in the middle of a nightmare where he was surrounding by charlatans doing dangerous, unethical and, to his way of thinking, militarily useless, experiments, Olson had to make trips to Porton to use facilities that didn't exist elsewhere. In the process, he met genuine scientists who were doing precisely the work that he wanted to do, that would one day actually protect soldiers from all the nightmares that his erstwhile colleagues were cooking up in figurative, if not literal, witch's cauldrons. Now, Porton Down isn't a holiday resort, anyone who saw it as an escape route has to have been in a pretty desperate place! But Olson did see it as a way out of MK Naomi, and he asked the President to allow him to leave direct US Army employment and go to work there, on protective measures for soldiers, against everything from nerve gas and biological weapons, to, perhaps, the mind control and psychoactive chemical warfare of MK Ultra and MK Naomi.

Medawar knows for certain that in the months immediately before his death, Frank Olson was shown around the actual research laboratories at both sides of "Porton Down" that is The "Chemical Defence Establishment (Salisbury)" and the "Microbiological Research Department" which is what starred in Alistair Maclean's novel "The Satan Bug." He was introduced to researchers as "Frank, he is going to be working with us now" and he seemed very pleased to have found a new career home. At Porton, he was neither depressed nor in any way unbalanced, just relieved and optimistic. He was the first American ever to have been into some parts of the facility, perhaps the only one to this day. This would not have happened if his employment was not sought by the director and endorsed by the responsible minister, Duncan Sands. It's unlikely that the UK Cabinet would have let Sands employ a top American scientist from a highly classified project, unless the US President had approved Olson's request to leave MK Naomi and move to Wiltshire, outside nominal US jurisdiction. (Which is the legal reason why he had to ask, as a serving officer and not a private citizen.)

The rats (and their friends) must have objected to the cat jumping ship.
The charlatans running MK Ultra and MK Naomi, appear to have even had groupies, fascinated by the idea of mind control and forcing people to do things against their will. This is an inherently sadistic aspiration, simply not holdable by a normal, sane person. Faced by someone who was not only calling their bluff and blowing the gaffe, but was determined to demonstrate an alternative direction for the Pentagon's chemical and biological warfare research funding to take, the charlatans, and perhaps even more so their groupies, may have acted vengefully and murderously.

In New York, Colonel Olson was struck on the head, a high window was broken, and then he was pushed through it afterwards, with no glass lacerations to his body.

Blair's Mantra

Whenever Tony Blair wanted to justify some erosion or outright demolition of liberty, he and the party members who used to be organised to write letters to newspapers, local and national, on his behalf, all used to chant variations on "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide."

So why are they hiding all the medical evidence about the death of Doctor David Kelly, then?

It behoves us all to be jolly careful whilst taking walks in the woods, or working in the UN buildings in Vienna for that matter.

Incidentally: anyone covering up a crime they were not responsible for, perhaps out of fear of uncontrollable political consequences, becomes an accessory to that crime, even if they do not share the original criminal's purpose and intent. They also commit the fresh offence of "perverting the course of justice" or "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice" if charged in their native Scotland.

Identifiable Nutters Behind Organized Stalking

A Canadian lady suggests that a millionaire (and pathological liar) with intelligence and police contacts, has been in the organized stalking game for thirty five years. This, incidentally, makes her the first blogger on the subject ever to posit a timeframe that accorded with Medawar's experience of stalking. (Since in the early seventies, extreme right wing and animal rights groups tended to have many members in common, it's still hard to say exactly where it was all coming from.)

That would fit, in a way, because very often stalking involves the use of police and intelligence resources, but it is turned to such a destructive and destabilizing end as to be completely at odds with the reason and purpose of any institution of state security.

Intelligence and Security services are, if anything, reactionary. Now, Liberals have made the word "reactionary" a shorthand for all evil, but it does what it says on the tin, and persecuting people who do not break the law is not a reactionary act: it is subversive.

See also Medawar's Comment on Terri Hansen's Article.

It would be very nice to know if "Cyril R." has anything to do with animal rights groups, some of which have a great deal of power in Canada, although they are currently in retreat in the UK due to universal revulsion at campaigns including grave-robbing and arson as well as an awful lot of stalking. Medawar wonders if "Cyril R." has ever given money to SHAC, PETA or IFAW, for instance?

Medawar's Extremist Linkages.

Medawar2 has now fixed the problem that caused readers of Medawar's Extremist Linkages to spend their precious time writing comments, only to have them obliterated by the (not-working) blogger default option comments page.

Please accept his apologies and please try again!

By the Strength of Their Character

(Readers may know what a Liberal is, especially if they've ever been bitten by one, but a Transnational Progressivist (or "Tranzi") may require some explanation. So click here, although Medawar doesn't endorse every analysis and sentiment therein. Apply your own judgement to the new ideas, and see below for why that is good.)

It is nearly fifty years since a Southern Baptist minister stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and made a speech, listened to by something like three hundred thousand people in the flesh and millions more on radio and television, that set out a simple recipe for peace and justice.

Nearly always, the Liberal and “Transnational Progressivist” political elite and their media homeboys will refer to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King as a “civil rights leader” and pay some kind of patronising, creeping lip-service before attempting to append his legacy to what is effectively the opposite of what he recommended.

Because Doctor King had a dream, (dreaming a dream is a very Baptist experience), and that dream was that everyone, regardless of their race, should be judged on the strength of their character and not the colour of their skin. In a single sentence, Doctor King destroys the basis of racial politics. But he doesn’t merely destroy racism, or neo-nazism, or nationalism. He destroys the other side of racial politics -and most of liberalism, too.

Firstly, Doctor King did not say, and most definitely did not mean, that black people or any other “oppressed” ethnic group should avoid being judged on their colour, whilst members of the supposed “oppressor” races should still be condemned as oppressors by virtue of their whiteness, or anglo-saxon-ness. He meant that no individual should be judged by the colour of their skin, for either good or bad.

Secondly, he very carefully used words such as “every” and “each” and not “all”. It was very much the individual who should never be judged by the colour of their skin, and it was the individual who should be judged by the strength of their character.

There are two concepts here which Liberals and “Tranzis” will recoil from like a vampire in a crucifix factory: individuals, and strength of character as a measure of worth.

Doctor King’s speech was not just an “anti-racist” soundbite, nor was it merely a generic “Christian” platitude. It was a Baptist sermon of great passion and power and this means that there was far more to it than “anti-racism” or civil rights.

Doctor King wanted to set his people free, but “his people” are, potentially, everyone. And he didn’t just want to set them free from racism: he wanted to set them FREE!

Every and each, embracing the whole human race as individuals. In deciding to judge us by our strength of character, Doctor King requires each of us to have a character. We have to be our own person, form our own view, decide for ourselves what we believe. Ohhhh! That man was a Baptist alright! Being judged, fairly, is freedom. If we are truly slaves, we do nothing by choice, we cannot be judged.

But everything we can be judged on, is a choice we were free to make. If we are to be judged, we have to be free. There is more in that than race: race is the least of it!

We do not, and can not, make the world better by labelling some communities as “oppressed” and, by political machination, moving them around the world until they are living amongst an “oppressor” community who can be made to suffer by way of reparation. Bear-baiting is as deadly to the hounds as to the bear: yet the essentials of the “Transnational Progressivist” concept of racial justice amounts to bear-baiting with whole communities. Always communities, groups, races; Transnational Progressivists cannot see individuals, only masses. Yet they currently “own” (anti-) racism and social justice as issues, which is like Herod the Great owning childcare as a political issue.

No-one will ever find personal freedom in their racial or ethnic identity. Freedom is in their own individual identity. Racial identity is all very well, and perhaps a genetic reality, but unless it is firmly in second place, behind individual identity, it is a barrier to freedom.

If you are a white Liberal, genuinely concerned for the rights and liberties of your black neighbour, the best thing you can do is find out his name and stop thinking of your neighbour as black. If you are a black power activist and very much not a liberal, an equivalent exercise could be very healthy. If you are a Transnational Progressivist, seeing nation states as the source of all evil: you need to see that nations are mostly ideas, not races or geographical entities, and that individuals will stand first with those with whom they can share ideas. If you want an end to nations, it probably is necessary to suppress the individual at every level and in every area of life, and the “Tranzi” movement has set about doing that with a will, but in that case an end to nations means an end to humanity.

What Doctor King set out for us was not “ a way of life” but the way to life. We must see everyone as an individual and not as part of any group, racial or social. We must grant them every freedom as an individual, and we must also hold them to account as individuals. Not on the assumption that all will fail and all are corrupt: Doctor King would not have subscribed to the doctrine of original sin, but because being held to account, being judged for good or bad, is a privilege when it comes with the inherent freedom to be good or bad. And Doctor King spoke in such a godlike way, not because he held any schizophrenic or pathological delusions that he was God, but because he was an obedient servant of God, striving throughout his life to understand God’s will -and then speaking it with an eloquence, simplicity and grace that makes it hard for any but the clinically obtuse to doubt that he spoke as a man inspired.

It wasn’t just the Ku Klux Klan who had reason to be discomforted by Doctor King’s words: the Liberals, Tranzis, Black Power Leaders and almost every known species of extremist would, if they thought about it, find something to hate and fear in that speech from the Lincoln Memorial. Our assumptions, therefore, about what manner of sinister conspiracy must have been behind Doctor King’s cowardly murder several years after that speech, may need to be revisited in the understanding that his words smote a lot more widely than the racist extreme right. In fact, the delay of several years almost certainly means that his killing was commissioned, not by the first and obviously apparent target of his challenge, but by someone who needed to sit and think it through before they understood that here was a man with the power to destroy their movement just by opening his mouth and speaking a single sentence.