About the fundamental human right to curiosity and reason.
How everybody's most basic freedoms are threatened by extremists and their assorted "causes".
Also, seeks to reclaim science and the right to reason as a vital human freedom.
This is a scan of a short article in the Metro newspaper (their copyright but fair use) and this is a link to a more complete version of the article on their website. It is not behind a paywall at the time of writing, but it's obviously not "fair use" to copy anything but the short extract above. That is sufficient, if readers are not disposed to go and read the whole thing, because it contains all that Medawar needed (on top of other sayings and events since 2014) to come up with the following understanding of why these apparent lunatics are saying what they are saying.
They fear "US and Chinese hegemony" because AI is the superpower which Russia will never possess, having missed that particular bus whilst annexing Crimea, bridging the Kerch Straits at great and probably understated expense and driving tanks into Ukraine. They correctly fear that Russia will not be seen as a superpower once AI is seen as more significant, and a more powerful agent of warfare, than nuclear weapons. The obvious solution (in their eyes at least) is to use the nuclear weapons to "win back the world's respect for Russia" (in other words impose a global reign of terror) and in the process, perhaps, destroy the huge data centres currently hosting AIs, making a nuclear arsenal once more the only credential a superpower needs. (It amounts to using nuclear weapons as a way to time-travel back to the lost golden age of Soviet dominance, an excursion likely to deposit any survivors in the stone age.) Some may claim that the "EMP" from nuclear weapons detonated at a great height would destroy data centres as if by magic, with relatively few people killed or cities burned, but the data centres are already adequately hardened against that sort of attack, this being an effect that has been known about for seventy or more years. The protective structures would have to be destroyed, along with their contents. Modern semi-conductors are not only smaller than those of the 1970s: they are somewhat less vulnerable to electromagnetic and electrostatic trauma even when they are not in well-screened protective buildings. What nuclear EMP almost certainly would do, is disable or even ruin any digital devices, including contactless bank or ID cards, on the persons of citizens going about their normal business. Tony Blair please note!
One alternative, which is supposed to prevent US and Chinese hegemony by some sort of magic that will also cause the EU to crumble to dust before Russia's thriving economy, is to retain the world's respect for Russia by using nuclear weapons, right now, to win the war in Ukraine. This is a sign that not even Putin's most fanatical backers now can see Russia being able to win the war in Ukraine without the use of nuclear weapons, and the plural is not a misprint: they would need to make many nuclear strikes to eliminate a Ukrainian war machine that is underground and well-dispersed over a wider landscape than that of the Japanese home islands. Talk of occupying Ukrainian cities afterwards is probably designed to make Putin himself believe that this might be accomplished without the destruction of the cultural heritage which Ukraine and Russia share. It's impossible to see that working: Ukraine and all its heritage would be destroyed, not conquered. Putin would have to be removed from actual power for this to even be attempted. Is that what they plan, one wonders?
The "bad" scenario, bizarrely seen as inherent in any non-use of nuclear weapons, is Russia being "colonised" by 2050. It's not clear what "colonised" means in that context and the intent is probably to make the non-use of nuclear weapons seem unacceptable by playing on the nameless fears of the Russian people. So they can't really spell it out, in case people think it through and either decide it's something they could live with, or that it is something they could prevent by other means: especially if the rest of the world was in a mood to be helpful. A world held at nuclear gunpoint by Russia simply isn't going to rush to Russia's aid.
And all of this was presented at an economic forum, in St Petersburg, designed to showcase Russia to the world as an ideal partner to trade with and invest in. And the fact that two of the "brains" allegedly behind the entirety of the Putin project are quite unable to perceive any drawback in doing this, is the most telling thing of all, because it explains why Russia has never prospered in the way its leaders think it is entitled to, and why it never will unless and until there is a change, not in the personnel at the top, but in the type of people who rise to the top. None of Russia's revolutions and coups has ever really changed the type of person who rules Russia. And they do only rule: nobody actually governs in a kleptocracy, as America will soon discover. China already has.
With this article,
Medawar seeks to correct two widespread and quite natural assumptions
about Steve Wright, and advance a few possibilities for consideration by
readers who may already know things Medawar does not know, which may suddenly make a new kind of sense in combination with the
things which Medawar does know. This sort of thing used to be known
as the scientific method, before “science” became an
unchallengeable statement of absolute "truth" by an official source
using phrases like “I am the science” which really ought to worry
anyone with any experience of psychopaths.
The second part of the
article takes the form of a list of links to existing online articles
from trustworthy sources, with each link preceded by a description of
what kind of knowledge a reader might already have, which stands a
chance of allowing two and two to add up to four.
Correcting the assumptions
The first somewhat
misleading assumption is that because Wikipedia states that Steve Wright
left school in 1974 with no qualifications and then joined the
Merchant Navy, he must have dropped out of school and somehow fell
into the Merchant Navy as a sixteen-year old afterwards. That’s not
the way it normally worked at the time and it’s not necessarily
true in Wright’s case either, but it might look like that to
someone from a younger generation or a more sheltered
background.
The earliest date
for Steve Wright to legally leave full-time education would have been
April 1974; but if joining the Merchant Navy was a planned career
move and not a sort of accident, then it becomes relevant that some
of the maritime colleges used to train cadets and recruits to the
Merchant Navy qualified as providing full-time education within the
meaning of the education act, and others offered training
opportunities to boys who remained in a normal secondary school until
they had sat their O’level or CSE exams. Indeed, there was one
college (in Cumbria) which offered a normal secondary education
alongside training towards entering the merchant navy as a radio
operator, for example. If a boy had made a positive choice to join
the merchant navy, there would have been a planned transition from
school to maritime college rather than a hard cut-off point, and in
many cases boys would have been given leave from school to take
advantage of training opportunities and they would certainly have
been given leave from school to attend the necessary interviews and
tests. And the range of skills required for even the lowliest seaman,
meant that boys would have probably attended more than one training
day at more than one site. A lot of the most basic and essential
training happened and still happens in Bristol Docks,
where there is a large but not very busy non-tidal basin (the dock is
separated from the tidal river Avon by a lock-gate) which allows
trainees to learn how to get from small boat onto a large ship and
back again, and other basic skills like that. Almost regardless of
Wright’s point of origin within the UK, he’d have likely visited
Bristol a few times between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. And
regardless of any lack of academic achievement, failure to master a
fairly challenging skill set would have barred him from service in
the merchant navy in any seagoing capacity. Even stewards have to
know how to get passengers into lifeboats, how to get themselves onto
and off a ship in a boat boat, and generally keep themselves and the
passengers alive.
And mention of
Bristol brings Medawar to the other natural but less than helpful
assumption: that because Steve Wright was born in, often lived in and
was finally arrested for crimes committed in East Anglia, the search
for earlier and indeed his earliest victim, obviously needs to be
focused on East Anglia. Medawar holds, very strongly, that depending
on what happens to latent psychopaths (mostly at home but not always)
between the ages of nine and eleven, they will emerge as active
psychopaths mostly between the ages of thirteen and seventeen and
sometimes but not all frequently into their early twenties. And
between 1974 and 1978, when he was in that phase of life, Steve
Wright was actually all over the place and would have been familiar
with locations, such as Bristol and Milford Haven (where he was
married in 1978), which are as far from East Anglia as Britain gets.
And, as a passing
thought, no-one who served on the P&O liner Queen Elizabeth the
Second would have been a stranger to Southampton or New York &
Atlantic City. That includes Suzy Lamplugh, Steve Wright and Steve
Wright’s second wife, who now claims that he may have killed
several times during their marriage.
Possibilities to
consider:
Those readers who
have experience of, or at least a good knowledge of, Merchant Navy
recruitment and training practices and locations in the 1970s, might like to have
a think about whether or not he could have been present in Clifton,
Bristol, when Glennis Carruthers was strangled to death by a “man”
(seen in darkness as there was a power cut) who walked away when
challenged, but had done nothing to Glennis other than strangling
her. She was not abducted, raped, or moved. Which would fit a first
killing for an emerging offender under seventeen. (Over seventeen,
they might have a car to abduct a victim in.) see:
Anyone who
investigated, knew (or had the misfortune to be married to) Wright
around 1984 and remembers him with a “professional” camera in his
possession, might like to take a thoughtful look at this link here:
Anyone who knows
about Wright (ever) having access to any flat or even utility area in
Foye House, in Leigh Woods, near Bristol, might like to read this
article on this blog:
(The possibility is
not dependent on Wright having access specifically to John Canaan’s
flat there, nor does it depend on him knowing John Canaan at all.
There are 24 flats and the location is strategically placed in
relation to murders committed while Canaan was in jail!)
Leigh Woods, by the
way, is as strategically-placed for the City of Bath as it is for the
City of Bristol. There’s a very famous unsolved abduction and
murder by strangulation connected with Bath. And it cannot be pinned on John Canaan, who was in jail at the time, as he so often was.
This link is about
Steve Wright’s second wife (who know uses the name Diane Cole) and
her concerns about how many victims there might be:
Anyone who has, as a
young woman, had a near miss with an apparent kidnapping, might be
able to bring herself to examine this link (but Medwar would urge
caution and having a friend with them when they do) too:
It shows both that
Wright was extremely determined and willing to spend twenty minutes
in a fairly high risk game of hide and seek with his intended victim,
and that he might have been more successful if he’d had an
accomplice to help him corner his victim. Medawar notes that Suffolk
Police and the CPS have never claimed that he committed all, or even
any, of the Ipswich prostitute murders on his own. Those came seven
years after Emily’s terrifying experience, so perhaps Wright learnt
something from the incident even if the police ignored it at the
time.
See update about David Carrick's early offending at the base of this article.
April Fabb was abducted and presumed murdered in rural Norfolk on the 8th of April 1969, whilst cycling to take a birthday present to her older's sister's fiancé. Her bike was found behind a hedge on a main road, and there were reports of a van in the vicinity at about the right time for that to have played a role in her disappearance. April was fifteen at the time, but her own birthday wasn't long after the date of her disappearance.
People have been trying to make Robert Black fit into the April Fabb case for almost as long as it became known that he'd used his white Fiat van to abduct, or attempt to abduct, abuse and kill girls ranging in age from seven or eight up to fourteen. The reason why the police have made no progress with that line of inquiry is brutally simple: although Black's first "abduction" and sexual assault on a little girl happened in 1958, when he was only eleven years old and he would have been around twenty-two when April disappeared, was that the van and the poster-delivery job which paid him to maintain the van and drive all over Britain and the near continent, was still some years in the future, as was the long-term lodging in an attic bedroom which allowed him the privacy to develop his fantasies and a stable base from which to operate.
In 1969, Black had already offended and was taking jobs which allowed him to photograph young girls at swimming pools etc, and he had, as a teenager committed the abduction of a younger girl and an attempt to keep her captive in an air-raid shelter, which case may have helped trigger the novelist John Fowles into writing "The Collector" once he realised that there were folk tales all over Europe about that sort of story, because it was something that really happened in much the same way in several different countries.
None of Black early offences involved a van, because he was on a bike or public transport, in Scotland the London area and even then in one part of London and had no stable address to keep a motor vehicle at, nor any notion to acquire one, until he was befriended by an un-named but evidently more experienced offender who told him how to get much stronger pornography from the continent, and that he would benefit from having a job which required a van.
Vans make it much easier to contain and transport a captive than a car: that is why the police always prefer to wait for a van to transport a suspect rather than putting them on the back seat of a police car.
In 1969, Black's offending was nasty and dangerous, but he hadn't been exposed to extreme porn, or corrupting advice, at that stage, he did not have a van, nor did he have a job which allowed for and paid for constant travel to a wide variety of locations, often involving drops in several different towns in a single day.
So, to maintain Black as a suspect in the April Fabb case, one has to abandon the van, which is the only reason anyone connects him with the case as a suspect. So, if it was him, there's a really big random element rather than a small one.
But that does not mean that study of Robert Black is of no value to the case.
Exemplar rather than Suspect!
One of the key things about the April Fabb case, was that the rural location limited the pool of potential suspects to a point where the police decided to talk to, and perhaps take blood-type samples from, every male between seventeen and seventy who'd been in the district at the time. (DNA was not a thing at the time, but blood types could be used to sift a group of suspects and eliminate all those who simply couldn't be guilty if stains linked to an offender were found.)
Now, if one looks at Robert Black as a well-documented example of a male who accords with much of what is known scientifically about the emergence of psychopathic traits between the ages of eleven and thirteen, according to whether or not family life was secure and stable for the male between the ages of nine and eleven (Black's life was never secure and stable at any point in his childhood!) one sees him commit his first attempt at a sexually-linked abduction at age eleven!
So, an offender following a similar pattern of offence-development as Robert Black, would have slipped the net used by police in the April Fabb case for the first six years of that development.
Another issue is that the lower age threshold in the police net for their "talk to everyone" policy is based on the age at which a boy might have been legally driving a van on the highway. It was the nineteen-sixties and it was a rural location. Many local boys would have been driving tractors on farms from the age of about thirteen and fifteen-year-olds might even have had jobs driving dumper trucks on a building site up to around the point where the school leaving age was raised to sixteen in 1972. In more recent times, police have stopped stolen cars (after high-speed pursuits) with boys of thirteen or even eleven found at the wheel.
The higher age threshold, where no men over seventy were suspected of any crime with a sexual motive, has since been thoroughly exploded by what is know of the lifelong career of Sidney Cooke, who is still in jail and still seen as a potential risk to little boys at the age of ninety-eight! His physical fitness is as remarkable as his mental unfitness.
So, if one uses Black as an exemplar, between the ages of eleven and sixteen rather than grabbing his victim and driving them away to meet their doom, he is manipulating or forcing little girls to walk to a structure (public toilet in the first instance and an old air-raid shelter in the other) where he has some privacy and attempts to control them. From sixteen onward he is making deliveries on a bicycle for a butcher and assaulting girls nearer his own age if he finds them home alone and they answer the door to accept delivery. It isn't known how often this happened because most of them were unwilling to tell their parents, let alone the police. In his twenties, he was in London and taking casual jobs which allowed him to spy and develop fantasies about young girls: it isn't proven that there were serious assaults but there might have been.
He was twenty-five before he made the life changes which enabled him to commit the crimes he is famous for.
Therefore, although an unknown offender similar to Black would have gone about April Fabb's abduction in several different ways depending on his own development, his access to vehicles and other resources and his practical knowledge of how to go about kidnaps, rape and murder, that very progression can be used to differentiate how different potential suspects would have gone about things given the state of those factors for them personally in the spring of 1969.
A young potential suspect with no access to a van would probably have had to walk (or cycle) April to a structure of some kind where she could be contained.
For a potential suspect to be trusted by an employer to make distant deliveries without any direct supervision, they couldn't, in 1969, have been much younger than Robert Black was in 1972! So for any potential suspect below the seventeen years of age threshold used by the original investigation, a structure in the countryside where April was abducted would have been most likely to be where she was contained and she might still be there for all we know.
A potential suspect above the high threshold of seventy years of age might have had the experience, money and contacts to recruit helpers, as Sidney Cooke did. And that allows not just for multiple suspects, but for the suspect group to be multi-generational.
A different unsolved case:
Medawar suggests that some of the above logic might lead one to think that Glennis Carruthers, who was murdered in the Clifton area of Bristol during a power cut in 1974, could have fallen victim to an emergent psychopath somewhat younger than the police might have been willing to consider. But, as she was a Physical Education student (and students of the College of Physical Education in Bedford were famously fit!) the youthful offender would have needed to be a strong boy and probably at least thirteen or fourteen years of age. A fourteen-year-old schoolboy could have matched her height and body-mass, though, and there was the element of darkness and surprise. And nothing about the offence speaks of any great prowess or experience (or even motive) so it's not unreasonable to suppose it might have been someone's first ever serious offence.
Update: David Carrick
Here is a link to a BBC report on the recent conviction of the serial rapist, Metropolitan Police Constable and armed Parliamentary Protection Officer, David Carrick, for a series of sexual assaults against a twelve-year old girl, committed from when he was fourteen years of age:
And this link is to an article making clear that the element of persistent sexual persecution against each victim over a period of months, was already present in Carrick's first known offences and was still happening decades later:
It ought to be self-evident that the essentials of such offending patterns are bound to emerge at the same time that any latent psychopathic tendency; though it has to be said that the genetic element of this is a risk rather than a certainty and good parenting and stable home conditions between the ages of about nine and thirteen are remarkably effective at preventing psychosis from emerging. Claims that psychosis has been successfully treated after emergence have all, so far, been mistaken and a symptom of self-delusion in the people administering the "treatment." Even when empathy, kindness and self-discipline are not instinctive because the necessary gene is missing, there is a four-year window in which they may be learned, if they are taught by a suitable role model teaching by persistent and reliable example. The role model does not have to be the biological father, but it does have to be a male if the child is male, and he does have to be present throughout that window of opportunity in the child's development. It's not about sexism: the role model must be someone the child identifies as providing a pattern for his own behaviour and that doesn't work with an authority figure, no matter how excellent, of a different sex.
Long-cold unsolved cases, especially those where the original investigation drew an almost complete blank, let alone an actual complete blank, should all be at least reassessed to see if an unusually but not impossibly young offender might have been responsible.
Shelley Morgan's intention on the day she disappeared in early June, 1984, was to first take her two young children to school and then go to Leigh Woods (just across the Avon Gorge from Bristol via the Clifton Suspension Bridge) to make some sketches and probably also take photographs, for which purpose she took her Olympus OM20 camera with her. As an artist, the photographs might have served as her aide-memoir for the colours in the landscape. Afterwards, she should have returned in good time to collect her children from school and the alarm was raised when she failed to do this. There was a big search in and around Leigh Woods and the investigation continues to this day, but no real trace of Shelley was found until a boy came across her remains in a quite different wooded area in October 1984. She had been stabbed, in the back, more than a dozen times. The camera has never been found but it would have some collector value these days, so the police are still hopeful.
The location where the body was found is still in the Bristol area, but it's not where Shelley intended to go and it's not easy to see how she got there from Leigh Woods without being transported in some vehicle other than a local bus or taxi, whose drivers would certainly have been interviewed at the time. And the fact that her possessions weren't anywhere near the body suggests that's not where she was first attacked.
So the initial search and subsequent investigation put a lot of effort in Leigh Woods and nearby places where Shelley might have gone or her killer might have come from. This would have included Foye House at the time.
And two years later the police returned to arrest John Canaan in his flat at Foye House for the murder of Shirley Banks, who he was convicted of kidnapping, raping and unlawfully imprisoning in his flat before other residents heard a woman screaming in woodlands close to Foye House. Shirley's body, however, was found at a different and fairly distant location. It would have been impossible for anyone who knew about Shelley's case not to think "is there some sort of link here? We searched those woods to oblivion not long ago!"
But, of course, John Canaan was still in prison for an earlier rape when Shelley disappeared in 1984. So it couldn't have been him who took her, even if so much else about Shelley's disappearance prefigured what happened to (was DONE to!) Shirley Banks. Medawar is neither arrogant enough nor patronising enough to suppose that police thoughts about a possible link actually stopped at that point, because "wrong offender" did not necessarily mean "not anything to do with this flat" and John Canaan was not a lone criminal: he was a cog in the organised crime machine and his role to was to provide more important criminals with cars that couldn't be traced to those important criminals but were not so unregistered as to generate an immediate police stop and search if driven on the Queen's Highway.
The police would have looked into the ownership and occupancy of that flat of Caanan's probably all the way back to when it was built, which would only have been a decade or two at that time, to see if any like-minded associate of Canaan's might have had a tenancy or at least access whilst he was still in prison. But, Medawar would suggest that if anyone still working on the Shelley Morgan case reads this article, they should carry on to study the idea presented below, and then go back to any relevant notes from the previous Morgan/Banks investigations to do with Foye House, to see if some once meaningless detail pops out in a new way.
Before we get to the concept of "selection criteria" it's worth noting that the obvious reason why John Canaan moved Shirley Banks's body from the woods where she was killed and Shelley was last known to be, to somewhere else, is because Leigh Woods was where he lived. Many years later, Vincent Tabak would move the body of Joanna Yeats from Bristol to Failands in North Somerset (he almost certainly drove past Foye House in the process!) precisely because he had killed her in the flat next to his own. But whoever killed the Christian folk singer Glenis Carruthers in the Clifton area of Bristol in 1974 (and we still don't know who that was) saw no need to do anything with her dead body except walk away from it and vanish into the shadows. Which might suggest that it was not on his doorstep and he didn't expect to be in Bristol again for quite a while, if at all.
Abductor's selection criteria and Foye House
Foye House is a four-storey residential
building just off Bridge Road in Leigh Woods, which is a community
and beauty spot just across the Avon Gorge from the city of Bristol,
Clifton and Clifton Downs. Foye House itself stands beside the
highway which crosses the Clifton Suspension Bridge to and from
Bristol and is therefore well situated for many purposes, albeit some
distance from the nightlife of the city centre. (The other side of
that coin being far better levels of privacy and environmental
tranquillity.) It is not “skid row” by any reasonable
definition.
Flat numbers in Foye House, as
determined from estate agent's adverts online, run from 1 to 24.
There are three habitable floors in
each of four sections of the building, the ground floor being garages
and presumably utility areas. That seems to translate into two stacks
of three flats for each section, and the ones advertised have two
bedrooms. The feature which makes Foye House different from
most other blocks of flats, not
only in Bristol but in many other towns and cities in England, is
that each stack has up to three separate garages on the ground floor
which, barring private sub-letting agreements, probably translates to
one per flat.
{This
arrangement does present fire-risks, but it also contains them quite
well and in a way conducive to maintaining privacy and security of
tenant's property. In almost all circumstances, privacy and security
are good things and help protect victims from criminals. There are
rare exceptions, though.}
More usual arrangements might be:
A sort of communal basement
car-park on one or more levels, as in some office buildings. These
provide sheltered (from weather and the view of passers-by) access
from where the car is parked to any given flat, but any other
resident might see a resident loading or unloading objects from
their car, never mind decanting a person who didn't want to be there
and might try to attract the attention of any witness.
Open-air parking areas and/or a
group of lock-up single garages a safe distance (from the
fire-officer's point of view) from the residential block itself. The
journey from car to flat is neither sheltered, nor is it in any way
private. A captive person might even have a chance to break free.
Foye House has extra open air parking spaces, directly visible from
the flats. Much less private than the garages!
Most of these blocks have more
floors than Foye House and this creates an imperative to use the
lift, which might stop at any floor and suddenly open the doors on a
potential witness.
On-street parking (often the case
with town houses converted to flats) where no resident is really
guaranteed a specific place to park, but they probably have
resident's sticker which increases their chance of being able to
find a different place each time within a parking zone allotted by
the local council. This yields zero chance of getting anything
substantial (let alone a person) in or out of a flat without risk of
being seen. This also applies to a high proportion of all the
Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in England, and is beginning
to be reapplied to new-builds in order to discourage car-ownership.
This is not relevant to historical cases still to be solved, but is
worth bearing in mind for more recent cases.
Really high-end apartment blocks,
even in the 1980s, tended towards secure underground parking with a
guard, never mind CCTV. About the only person who could get an
abductee up to a flat from one of those parking areas without being
noticed, would be the guard. A totally private lift or staircase
would be rare.
Whilst Foye House clearly does not have
separate entrances for each flat, only a quarter of the residents
(six households?) use any one entrance and the level of privacy in the
individual garage would allow a resident to predict and then verify
when it was safe to transfer an abductee or other contraband upwards
from a car in that garage to their flat, or to make the return journey with whatever was
left.
Foye House is situated on Bridge Road,
a natural route from the city of Bristol to North Somerset and the
city of Bath, even if a 21st-century Satnav system might direct a
motorist to more major roads. Certainly residents of Foye House and
Leigh Woods enjoy fairly direct access to both cities without really
being in either. Even today, the flats are not prohibitively expensive for the level of privacy they provide (none of the flats really
overlooks another) and in the nineteen eighties they would have been
quite affordable for anyone with a reasonable income. Some nearby
houses are expensive though.
Bridge Road is on the X4 and B2 bus
routes, which are used both by locals and by tourists to access the
nearby woods and locations with scenic views of the Avon Gorge and
the landmark Clifton Suspension Bridge. It is an understandably
popular place to walk and make use of the outdoors, and a quiet place
with people strolling about would be one of the things an abductor
might well be seeking. On weekends, there might be chattering crowds,
but during the working week occasional visitors might be more
contemplative, self-absorbed (or concentrating on artistic work) and around for longer. And an abductor
might realise and appreciate that.
The other selection criterion, and this is most important, is availability! As soon as one thinks past "did this have anything to do with John Canaan" to "perhaps it was someone with the same intent making similar choices" then, although one loses the direct mental association which detectives like and which journalists can't really function without, one gains a twenty-fourfold improvement in probability, because any of the flats in Foye House would be equally suitable! And that means there might have been rather more than one chance in any given year for an offender to score a tenancy in an optimal location for that sort of crime.
This is a link to a BBC article, in which the BBC attempts, without any conclusive success, to track down a persistent trader in child-abuse images via payments made to him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq587wv4d5go
When they do trace the relevant bank account(s) to a physical address, in Jakarta, they confront a man who says that he opened the account some time before, simply to take a one-of mortgage transaction, and hasn't used it since. The BBC is unable to disprove this and has no interest in attempting to prove the claim to be true, so it is left hanging. However, the man's claim coincides pretty much to what would have to be true in order for such a persistent trader in illegal material to evade arrest. The trader also replaces stopped bank accounts in a matter of hours, which must indicate ready access to a significant relevant resource.
The trade in child-abuse images is not the only organised criminal activity where the key enabler is a safe payment pathway. Everything from bribing a local council planning official to hiring a professional killer, needs a way for the client to pay the supplier of goods or services in a way which exposes neither of them to significant risk. Even kidnappers and blackmailers need to help their victims pay them off in a way which is safe for both parties.
Now then, some of these illegal activities attract much more attention than others, due to the huge volume of transactions and their obvious evil, others are rarer but represent much more important players playing for very high stakes, and, generally-speaking, the professional killers and kidnappers are the criminals who need to hide the most because governments tend to prioritise crimes affecting the rich and powerful over those affecting the poor and vulnerable.
Many years ago, before the internet was "invented" (like all great inventions it actually evolved in natural stages as the components became available) and its predecessors linked only university science departments, but computerised banking was already a thing, Medawar was treated to a very strange monologue by a person who he now believes to have been, or since become, a professional killer.
Most of this was the speaker expounding an ideology, which the young Medawar had not heard before (he's heard it again, a lot more, more recently) to the effect that it was in the best interests of humans as a species for strong individuals (like the speaker) to take not only what they needed, but anything they wanted, by whatever means they found convenient, and regardless of all laws created by "weak" people to protect their own pathetic interests. He also specifically stated that if he "needed" to trade in child pornography, he would do so.
The ideology was what is now described by the FBI as "accelerationist" and accelerationist terrorist groups such as "764" and "O9A" set out to use the internet and other means to promote child abuse, child rape, extreme pornography, drug use (even where this is legalised, they continue to promote it) misogynistic violence aimed at women and girls (most recent "non-terrorist" attacks since the death of Osama bin Laden have targeted women and little girls, the Manchester Arena bombing being the first really obvious example) as part of a long-term plot to destroy ALL the pillars of modern civilisation, such as family structures, democracy, organised religion, financial structures and even money itself.
The accelerationists are where the robotic mantra of "follow the money" will lead you mostly in circles, because they plan to abolish money in favour of forced labour and simply taking goods by force. In a sense, their aims are furthered both by the illegal activities enabled by safe payment pathways as well as any and all of the actions governments and international authorities take to stop up those safe payment pathways. (The Devil in folklore is associated with the two or three-pronged pitchfork as his weapon of choice.)
Even without the involvement of the accelerationists (and they are involved in almost everything bad because that is their philosophy, which is not exactly a philosophy of life) the safe payment pathways must be organised and that by definition must involve the higher levels of organised crime. And the consequence of that will be that the safe payment pathways will be used to provide layers of protection for the most important crimes and criminals, using intractably-large numbers of child abuse-transactions (children are traded as well as images) to hide smaller numbers of more important matters, which are themselves used as extra layers of cover for even more important high-level crimes.
Viewed from one angle, the structure is a fortress of concentric defences around a central tower or "keep." Viewed from another angle, it will be a pyramid with the most dangerous and guiding intelligence at the top.
The child-abuse image traders are really just the outermost perimeter of barbed wire, intended to slow-down and entangle investigators. Abusers are used by organised crime as much as they are users. And the wall of child abusers has great deterrent value if governments fear that some of their own members might be exposed if they allow the police, or the BBC, to look too hard even at the outermost ring of the fortress or the base of the pyramid, depending on how you look at it.
In detail, serious organised crime figures only NEED child abuse images and other illegal pornography to be widely traded in order to provide an intractable number of suspects (at all levels of society) for police to chase and an intractable volume of transactions in which to hide their really key payments. They can achieve this without ever having direct contact with the abuse material by acting not as the kiddie-porn trader's gophers, but as his bankers. If a pornographer or child-trafficker needs a disposable bank account, they can probably sell him the details of a dormant account in almost any country or city he might name, but a huge and fast-growing city like Jakarta might be preferred over Shropshire or Central Texas.
What most of organised crime wants ("money for nothing and your chicks for free") differs markedly from what the accelerationists want, but at the same time the higher up the pyramidal hierarchy of crime one looks, the more one sees accelerationist attitudes and even actual accelerationist philosophy.
Here is a link to the petition in question, and below that a few reasons why it might well be worth the bother of signing it, because doing so may produce interesting results on a surprising number of fronts. Medawar will also offer a suggestion for an alternative petition that might be tried, either if this one fails or, more usefully, as a concurrent effort to attract powerful attention in another quarter;
Andrew Tate faces 21 known charges in England, brought by Bedfordshire Police and Devon and Cornwall Police. In the past there have been criminal investigations into similar charges in Hertfordshire, these were not progressed as criminal cases but are now the subject of a civil lawsuit being brought by four victims.
For the tax-related charges brought by Devon and Cornwall Police, the investigating authority will be the HMRC (concerning documents filed with their Exeter Office) and the Economic Crime Unit in Newton Abbot. There is an unnamed third person facing charges: a "Tax Agent" for the Tate Brothers. If this is who Medawar thinks it is, the ECU people in Newton Abbot know him well and he's always willing to act for those unable or unwilling to visit his premises and check him out.
For the rape, assault, coercion, trafficking and Modern Slavery charges brought by Bedfordshire Police, the actual investigative body may have been the Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire Major Crimes Unit, though it would be possible, but a little odd, for Bedfordshire Police to have proceeded entirely independently. This has not been made clear in media reports, but that may be due to prevailing poor journalistic standards as much as any policy issue. The historical case, which is now before the High Court as a civil claim, had victims of rape and false imprisonment, coercion etc. in both Hitchin (in Hertfordshire) and Luton (in Bedfordshire), so there would have to be a compelling reason for the joint Major Crimes Unit for those counties NOT to be involved.
Due to interventions by "The Trump Administration" (which do not seem to have been instigated by President Trump, who professed almost complete ignorance about the Tates when asked by a reporter he trusted) Andrew and Tristan Tate currently enjoy the right of free international travel to countries they see as safe, whilst awaiting trial in Romania under "house arrest" even if the house is in Florida or Dubai. The Governor of Florida does not agree with this and is doing everything he can to deter the Tates from returning to his State, other than to face criminal or civil proceedings there. Mr DeSantis does not share the Trump Administration's view of the Tates as saintly prisoners of conscience, largely because he does not share President Trump's ignorance about their openly-promoted extreme ideology and alleged violent, coercive personal conduct. That ideology, BTW if you take all their extreme positions together, adds up to Accelerationism. As with Mr DeSantis, an overwhelming number of Mr Trump's ordinary supporters would be appalled if they knew and understood that this is FBI-speak for "Satanism!"
Here is a link to a Wikipedia article about the main Accelerationist (dis)organisation for adults:
And below is a link to a Wikipedia article for the youth/online wing "764", largely based in Texas. Texas seems to be where the money for extreme ideology comes from in many cases.
Now, a lot of people have interpreted President Trump's determination to give liberal demons such as Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt as unconditional support! Indeed, both Putin and Netanyahu themselves were so convinced that they "owned" Trump that they started to openly play him for a fool by blandly asserting things which he knew to be untrue ("there are no starving children in Gaza" for example). Playing Trump for a fool is a grave miscalculation born of arrogance and if there's anyone else on the planet as arrogant as Putin and Netanyahu, Andrew Tate is it! And, yes, by using his supporters within the Trump Administration to further his career, Andrew Tate is also playing Trump for a fool.
If the petition, above, generates any publicity at all, and if people sign it, it will, then sooner or later the truth will penetrate Trump's information bubble and he will know that not only Andrew Tate, but people in his administration that he trusted to keep him informed, have been playing him towards an end that most of his supporters will loathe.
A supplementary or follow-on petition might usefully address President Trump directly and ask him to require FBI agents with direct experience of investigating Accelerationist terrorism act as lead agents in a re-evaluation of what the US Federal Government and its law enforcement and intelligence agencies thinks of the Tate Brothers, their online output and the likely and intended outcomes of the lifestyle choices they are promoting so vigorously on a global scale.
Neither of these are
going to please either the conspiracy theorists, or those diehards
insisting that they have seen (or been told about) dozens of items of
undisclosed evidence offering cast-iron proof that Barry George
really was guilty and his supporters deluded or wicked.
However, Medawar has
taken and interest in the case from when he first heard about Jill
Dando’s murder, on the Easter Monday in 1999 when it happened,
right up today. In all that time, they are the only two theories that
Medawar has heard of which are supported by any information he has
come across by his own efforts rather than having it shouted at him
by one of the warring factions or another. Both theories have been
discarded, one of them officially disparaged and the other simply
vanished as soon as it appeared and has never, ever, been mentioned
since, by any of the parties to the case or any of the conspiracy
theorists who have fed off the case for a quarter of a century. The
two theories are not mutually exclusive either, but BOTH of them
proving to be correct does open a Pandora’s box of motives based on
Accelerationist ideology. There appears to have been a policy
decision not to tell the general public about the Accelerationists,
which is a pity because it would help the public to understand why,
much more recently, Daniel Clarke, Nicolas Prosper and Axel
Rudakubana (to name but three) did what they did. Either one of these
theories could be found to be true without opening that Pandora’s
box, so here goes:
“Some sort of link
between Jill’s murder and the abduction and presumed murder of her
fellow bright, cheerful blonde, blue-eyed TV News presenter Jodi
Huisentruit in Iowa, in June 1995.”
This was one of the
first ideas to be hurriedly discarded and we were told that there was
no possible link, and in any case the two crimes were on different
continents. (As if the airliner had never been invented, really.
Medawar fully accepts the official Metropolitan Police version to be
credible and true and now believes that he must have once walked to
Abu Dhabi and back in a single weekend, and that he has swam to and
from Guernsey and the IoM several times over the years.)
There is no link
known to Medawar, other than that both broadcasters and journalists
would have reported on the still-unsolved abduction and murder of a
young mother from Iowa (where Jodi spent most of her career) near
Bristol (the part of the world where Jill’s career began) just as
Jill was transitioning from being a newspaper reporter to a news
presenter on local radio and local television, also in South West
England. It is hard to see how those investigating Jill’s murder
were able to state, with such commanding authority, that there was no
link, when those investigating Jodi’s death haven’t seen any
evidence that enables them to rule out links between her abduction
and other cases (and there seem to be quite a lot of these, in fact.)
“Jill confided in
a close female colleague that a young female journalist she had
mentored at the BBC, had moved to Florida and then to Texas, where she had
fallen afoul of a group of well-connected orthopaedic surgeons over a
badly botched operation on her hand. Ignoring threats of serious
retribution if she want to law, Jill’s protegeé went ahead and
filed a civil lawsuit (in Austin, as it turns out) and was rammed off
the road as she drove to court to formally commence her claim, This
hit and run collision put her in a coma, leaving Jill as the only
person still expressing any interest in the case. The lawsuit was of
course never formally opened.”
This was the first
theory which Medawar ever saw in print (and it was the only theory (it's more of an observation in a way) he
has ever seen about Jill’s murder which is both highly specific and totally coherent). Apparently triggered by the appearance of a senior male
colleague of Jill’s on Newsnight on the day of Jill's murder, to state
very firmly for the benefit of the police, public and especially BBC
colleagues, that Jill’s death was not a professional killing,
Jill’s female colleague, who seems to have been a lot closer to Jill
than the male authority figure ever was, wrote a good and fairly
detailed article which Medawar read in one of the broadsheets the
weekend following the murder. Because it was so clear, coherent and
specific, Medawar foolishly expect this to be the start of a lengthy
investigation by both police and press and there would be much more
to come. To his eternal regret, he managed not to keep the article,
but it was probably the Times on the Saturday, or the Sunday Times.
It might just have been the Telegraph but that’s doubtful, and
there’s no way The Guardian or Observer would have given space to a
BBC employee contradicting the BBC’s official line.
This theory was not
officially discounted, debunked or acknowledged in any way. It simply
vanished without trace and has never been mentioned since. Medawar
knows nothing about the fate of the lady who wrote the article, but
it is pretty clear that any BBC employee who doubts the guilt of
Barry George is an unperson. Perhaps she, too, is in a coma and on
life support somewhere?
Accelerationists
and why they hate
and murder “Nazerenes” a hate-speech term for caring Christian
young women who try to help victims of crime or malpractice:
Here is a link to an
article on Wikipedia; let’s see how long that link lasts, shall
we?
It is very strange that this group has never made the front pages, but although it apparently started in Staffordshire and The Fens, the youth wing "764" is based in Texas (see above) and there are a number of politicians in that state who seem to lean towards Acclerationism and O9A seem to have as much money as they actually need, which isn't true of many political movements funded solely from within the UK.
It would be nice to firmly believe, regardless of the two theories mentioned above, that the Accelerationists don't actually exist, but that would be flying in the face of the evidence. The Home Office does seem prepared to fly in the face of a lot of evidence at times.
“How do
Professional Hitmen Know so Much About Their Victims?”
In truth, “killers for hire” (the correct legal term in England
and Wales) don’t necessarily need to know very much at all, but
their need for some reliable information, often in very small key
snippets, is one of several reasons why their relationship with
organised crime is both intimate and somewhat at arm’s length, like
bi-curious schoolgirls really. The killer needs to know who the
customer wants killed and the customer needs to know (or specify
within fairly broad limits) when and where he cannot afford to be.
There’s a certain amount of danger in the killer and customer even
knowing who the other is and that’s another reason why organised
crime is there for them both. And then there is the money: the killer
benefits from having a third party pay his fee by a route the
customer does not know and the customer does actually benefit by that
fee being a different amount (perhaps a very different amount) from
what he has paid out. The killer won’t stand for his fee being
shaved merely to camouflage it, but it is acceptable for organised
crime to deduct monies for tasks which the killer is better off not
doing for himself, and gathering necessary information on the target
and their movements is something the killer cannot do at all safely
in most cases.
But, even more importantly, organised crime is Organised with a
capital “O” for a reason and information is, and always has been,
its primary commodity. More valuable than rubies precisely because
information can always be smuggled, and in many cases it can be
obtained without much effort and without breaking any laws. Indeed,
the structure of organised crime has evolved to harvest information
as a side-hustle to every other hustle. So, there’s a
good chance that any competent organised crime gang will already
know much, perhaps all, of the things which the killer would
otherwise have to take risks to find out. There’s also a risk that
if the customer passes on all the information, perhaps
even privileged information, that they have, the killing itself will
acquire a signature which points back to them! (That’s what the
murders of Barry and Honey Sherman look like to Medawar, BTW.) This
is why an experienced killer for hire might improvise around a
dataset which a semi-professional killer would find inadequate. And
semi-professionals do exist: they are often quite well off without
killing people and it’s more like a self-funding hobby for them.
Sometimes they are former military personnel who want to feel they
are still “professional” and “in the game” but there are a
lot of military instincts they will need to suppress to get away with
it for any length of time, and always building a “proper” dataset
is one of them!
In effect, organised crime can launder the killer’s fee in the same
action as it launders the information he needs, supplying him only
with facts he can use but which can’t be traced back to any
particular source. And within the hierarchy, information, like money,
generally flows upwards. Organised crime is a pyramid with a very
broad base and at the bottom are people who are not “members” of
any gang, but who will take the precaution of sounding out someone
who is a member about anything “big” they might be planning, just
in case it’s something the gang wants to tax, or even forbid. Some
of the people at the bottom of the pyramid commit no crime other than
talking about their lawful work and their clients. They might be the
handymen and gardeners, even the dustmen and postmen, local
shopkeepers. They definitely will include mini-cab and
courier van drivers! There will be policemen and other officials,
too, but their information runs the risk of being traceable and all
public servants will come under routine scrutiny from time to time.
And the people who decide what information to sell and how much it
will cost, will be much higher up the pyramid than the source. They
will look to their own security first, the customer’s and killer’s
needs second and then the devil takes the hindmost.
This all adds up to any detectable dataset building on a murder
victim being a signature of the semi-professional, and should
organised crime have a commission where such a thing is actually
necessary, the really smart thing to do would be to pass the job on
to the semi-professionals and save their actual professionals for
less amateurish capers.
So, given all that, the question really is: “how might a
semi-professional murder for hire gang, perhaps including or advised
by ex-military or US Federal Agents, go about building a dataset on a
target?”
Below this article is an embedded video by the YouTuber, former US
Army soldier and SIGINT specialist, Ryan McBeth, in which he uses the
public’s prurient interest in the Jeffery Epstein scandal to
enlighten us as to how Human Intelligence (or “human engineering”)
techniques might be used to harvest even quite specific intelligence
and, in particular, something he calls “Elicitation.” Unlike
blackmail, bugging and torture, elicitation is not illicit and this
makes it extra-useful for those seeking to get persons close to a
target to volunteer the information needed to kill that
target. Had those persons been the subject of coercion or illegal
hacking, they would have a “victim card” to play that might
embolden them to come forward and come clean once the worst has
happened and someone has been murdered. Elicitation is the process of
approaching and cultivating a friendly, supportive relationship with
a “person of usefulness” to tease out, very gently and with no
pressure at all, information about an object, subject or person of
interest.
(By explaining that’s all Epstein needed to do in order to fulfill his operational goals, Mr McBeth indirectly but convincingly implies
that the mansion full of hot and cold running fourteen year-olds was
either unnecessary or simply something that Epstein’s guests would
have expected to be available more or less anywhere they went
to relax! Either way, the sexual exploitation was
gratuitous.)
There are all sorts of ways a person of usefulness (friend, neighbour
or colleague to the target) might be approached; either through their
professional or personal life. They might find a distant or
previously-unknown relative getting in touch (and this might not even
be a scam because any of us might connect to someone known to a
criminal gang at one remove or another) or they might be asked to
mentor a junior colleague. If the person of usefulness were a junior,
they might find someone gratifyingly senior mentoring them! A new
face might turn up at a hobby-related club which the person of
usefulness attends.
If the person of usefulness has a strong professional profile, they
might be invited to join all sorts of prestigious bodies (perhaps as
an Honorary Fellow of a Royal College outside their own field?) and
the people they meet there would be so irreproachable as to be
trusted with almost any information that really should not have been
divulged.
In such a case, whereby the person of usefulness finds it unthinkable
that they might have been, or even must have been the
source of the information used to kill someone close to them, they
will seek mental and emotional refuge in not thinking
the thought, and indeed in promoting some alternative theory, up to
and beyond the point where that theory becomes wholly ridiculous to
objective and rational observers, especially their junior colleagues
who will be much better at smelling a rat than a senior colleague’s
peers.
And rather than being a willing and useful witness in any murder
investigation, the person of usefulness would have a strong
subconscious compulsion, or even a conscious determination, to
misdirect that investigation. Sooner or later, such compulsion must
surely become so obvious that even the most charitable investigators
will be unable to ignore it.
Knowing that one has been the target of effective human engineering can be as a bad as a physical assault, perhaps worse. But there could be cases where that knowledge, publicly-aired, might be a fitting punishment for arrogance.
There have been a
few assassinations in Europe, where the victim has been shot with a
single round of .380” Auto aka 9mm Browning short ammunition.
Because European police and judges aren’t always obliged to publicise
technical details of evidence, it’s difficult to say just how many
times this has happened, but it’s happened more than two or three
times and in more than one country. In one case, four Serbia-linked
suspects were convicted and then acquitted at appeal, thus muddying
the waters to the advantage of more or less everyone except the
law-abiding public.
Generally, the
recovered bullet has not been engraved by rifling, so it is assumed
(especially where that assumption is convenient) that a “low
quality” improvised smooth-bore gun “which no professional hitman
would ever touch” has been used, such as a blank-firing replica
bored out to fire live ammunition. (One snag with that assumption is
that most of the replicas of “9mm” guns are carefully designed to
fire only 8mm blanks and NONE of the internal components is of a
strength or diameter allowing a simple boring-out job to work. Even
if not tampered with, 8mm blank-firers tend to break before the user
has got through the 50-round tin of blanks which comes with the gun.
The metal is very poor and this is not an accident, but a policy on
the part of the manufacturer.) That convenient assumption may have
compromised more than one investigation leading to at least one
miscarriage of justice.
Not infrequently
there are indentations around the mouth of the spent cartridge case,
for which there are several possible explanations, the convenient one
again being a low-quality improvised weapon and home-made ammunition
consistent with a “lone lunatic” offender. The trouble with that
one is that the ammunition is NOT home-made but commercial and of
good quality and the cartridge case, bullet, priming cap and as far
as it can be ascertained, the powder charge, have not in fact been
altered or swapped. The indentations prove only that the crimp was
made tighter at some point: it is impossible to say if the bullet was
actually “pulled” and replaced, or if the user simply wanted the
crimp to be tighter for some specific technical reason. (Again,
inconvenient because it would rule out a lone lunatic offender. If
the multiple jurisdictions involved didn’t do that already.)
The reason why it is
possible to fire .380” ACP ammunition, also known as 9mm Browning
short or 9x17mm in a standard Soviet service pistol chambered for the
standard Soviet 9x18mm round (widely known as 9mm Makarov) has to do
with the latter being an indirect development of the former, via the
Luftwaffe’s wartime “9mm Ultra” project which largely fell into
Soviet hands. However, as the video embedded will prove should the
reader be patient with it, this mismatch of ammunition works much
better than one would expect. It certainly functions and “feeds”
a lot better than the video-maker appears to have anticipated!
There are reasons
why this sort of stunt might not work for any two slightly
dissimilar cartridges and might even be dangerous, but in this
instance it DOES work and with quite decent
reliability. None of the technical issues pose a significant risk of
damage to the gun within the number of rounds fired in the video
demonstration, nor any danger to the shooter. The most interesting of
the technical issues explains why this mismatch of ammunition is safe
enough (but only this way round: if it proved possible to fire a 9mm
“Makarov” round in pistol (such as a Colt 1903 pocket model)
chambered for the .380” ACP it would be dangerous because not only
is the 9mm Makarov loaded with a stronger powder charge than the
.380” ACP, it also has a slightly larger diameter bullet, which
would cause excessive breech pressures by itself even if the powder
charge were identical. But there’s much more to it than that -and
this really is important enough to be worth the bother of
understanding it! It lies in the reason for the bullet diameter being
changed in the first place:
The Bolshevik
regime, which brought the Soviet Union into being, inherited not only
an archaic system of measurements from Czarist Russia, but also what
appeared to be an irrational and inconsistent system of definitions.
So, not only were metric designations the new order of the day, there
was a relatively simple set of rules about how one defined certain
things, including calibre. So, a Soviet “9mm” designation would
define a cartridge designed to be fired through a barrel with a bore
diameter (measured across the lands rather than between two
opposing rifling grooves) of exactly 9mm.
The .380” ACP aka
“9mm Browning Short” by contrast was defined by having a bullet
of (more or less) exactly 9mm diameter. But in a modern rifled
firearm with “inside lubricated” bullets, the bullet has to be
made to fit the groove diameter of the barrel and not
the bore (or land) diameter. This means that when the bullet is
forced into the bore by the ignition of the powder, it really does
have to be forced and this “engraves” the rifling into the
bullet, which gives it enough grip to make it spin and leaves a
permanent record of the rifling on the bullet, as long as it’s not
destroyed on impact with tough materials such as metal or brick.
Because the
difference in diameters comes about by a swap of what dimension is
defining the calibre, a rifled 9mm Makarov barrel is
closely equivalent to a smooth-bore barrel actually intended to fire
.380” ACP ammunition. Now, no smooth-bore barrel is ever really
ideal for a bullet that needs to spin to remain stable in flight, but
when the bullet isn’t going to travel very far and accuracy is a
moot point, this doesn’t matter all that much.
It does matter to
some extent, though, and at the end of the video below the
video-creator explains why: the bullet is designed to be effective by
hitting nose-on and staying nose-on. Evidence to support what he
claims lies in the fact that Greener’s .38” Calibre Humane
Killer, designed to be fired (by hitting the back of the firing pin
with a separate hammer that came with the gun) with the barrel in
hard contact with a horse’s head, actually has about 1&1/2
inches of rifled barrel! There’s no possible accuracy issue with a
humane killer, but it had rifling non-the-less.
The one way in which
the Makarov barrel differs from a smoothbore barrel of appropriate
diameter, is that the bullet does not seal the rifling grooves and
enough propellent gas leaks past the .380” ACP bullet to reduce the
power of that bullet below what it achieves in a similar gun with a
barrel of the same length as the Makarov, but properly rifled and
dimensioned for the .380” ACP. Again, this is something which is
demonstrated in the video. Along with miserable accuracy at any
useful combat range using .380” ACP in a Makarov.
And there is an
advantage to that reduction in power, even when using unmodified
commercial .380” ACP ammunition, if the .380” ACP round
will only be fired in hard contact with the target, like a humane
killer. Firing a gun with the muzzle hard up against
something solid can cause excess back-pressure, and for this reason
Greeners offered, and their customers purchased, special .38”
cartridges for its humane killer, even though as a fairly short,
rimmed .38” round it might seem that almost any .38” revolver
cartridge that was short enough to fit would do.
If a hitman’s plot
to take his victim by surprise and dispatch them with a single shot
in hard contact (to suppress noise, flash etc. and to make sure the
victim died) went wrong, a Makarov pistol loaded with .380” ACP
bullets that were hopelessly unstable at a distance, wouldn’t win
him any gunfights with police or unexpected bodyguards. But a
completely unmodified, standard Makarov service pistols with a
magazine of eight standard 9mm Makarov rounds would be a powerful
asset in expert hands, and all the hitman would need to do is ensure
that the first round fired would be a .380” ACP.
By yet another
fortunate turn of events, the majority of 9mm Makarov cartridges have
a lacquered steel cartridge case, whilst there are no known sources
of steel-cased .380” ACP rounds, most of which have traditional
brass or perhaps cupro-nickel cartridge case, both quite different in
appearance to lacquered steel. The hitman would single-load a (shiny)
.380” ACP round into the chamber, either directly or by putting in
a magazine with just one round in, into the gun and working the
slide. He would then “decock” the gun and on the Makarov this is
accomplished simply by applying the safety catch. All he need do then
is put in a full magazine of (dull, off-grey) 9mm Makarov rounds and
it’s good to go.
The Makarov pistol
has a double/single-action trigger where, if the gun is not already
cocked by working the slide or a previous round being fired, pulling
the trigger over a fairly long distance against quite heavy
resistance cocks the hammer and fires whatever round is in the
chamber. Subsequent shots require only a shorter pull against less
resistance, which makes for best accuracy and allows a marksman to
maintain a comfortable hold on the gun.
The downside is that
the first shot, if fired by the double-action trigger, is inherently
less accurate. That’s not an issue if the first shot is fired in
hard contact with the victim’s head, of course. If all goes to
plan, the follow-up shots will not be needed and since the gun
decocks itself when the safety catch is used, there’s no need to
unload the weapon before pocketing it, but letting the fumes clear
from the barrel for a moment or two might stop the gun giving itself
away by the smell. Witnesses might well see a man leave the scene
with something still in his hand, this would go into a pocket or a
bum-bag once it had time to stop smoking.
If things do go
wrong, then the hitman has eight very effective shots with which to
solve any immediate problems and there’s nothing to stop him
reloading if he has a spare magazine.
Now, one of the
things which might worry a hitman who spends a lot of time listening
to received wisdom, is that by firing a cartridge in a barrel which
offers little initial resistance to the bullet’s travel, he’d be
taking a risk on the bullet moving so easily that the pressure
necessary to fully-ignite the gunpowder is not achieved and the
bullet then barely clears the muzzle, followed by a cloud of unburnt powder grains. This is known as a “blooper” and it is another
“obvious problem” which conspicuously fails to occur in the video
demonstration. But a perfectionist with time on his hands might just
try to tighten up the crimp on a few .380” ACP rounds just to be
sure. That’s not the only possible explanation for the indentations
around the fired cartridge case mouth and Medawar has toyed with
several of them over the years, but it’s as good as any and, unlike
all the others, it’s really quite specific to the .380” ACP
ammunition being used in a completely unmodified Makarov service
pistol which would be an asset to an expert in any unplanned fight
following a carefully-planned hit.
Since there is a quantifiable advantage to using this methodology,
and the means to implement it as widespread as a standard service
pistol made by the million, there is no actual necessity for different
crimes committed by such a method to have anything in common other
than the method. Even any perceived link to Serbia might be purely
logistical, in that both standard Makarov-type pistols and ammunition
were made there, with commercial .380” ACP ammunition being widely
available throughout Western Europe as it works in an even larger
number of both service and commercial pistols which have been in
production, which still continues, since 1903. Any belief that the
exact same gun, or even the exact same hitman, might be involved in
multiple crimes may prove to be unfounded, unless the evidence is
personalised in some way, such the probably-unnecessary indentations
around the mouth of the spent cartridge.
Here is the embedded video, by “8mm Mauser Guy” and it’s
followed by a few of Medawar’s observations on what’s going
on. The strength of this video, incidentally, is that it was meant
just as a homage to the popular firearms expert Paul Harrell, who
went before us a little while after the video was published. This
means that whilst it echoes all of Mr Harrell’s quirks and
mannerisms, it also echoes his determination to find out what
actually happens rather than attempting to prove or disprove any
particular theory, or any particular legal case.
The (non-live) link:
https://youtu.be/9_wJsE0rwlk?si=dMb61BgVxpxVKUPd
Observations on what the video's findings
.380 ACP in 9mm Makarov pistol: this WORKS (surprisingly well,
really); velocities are lower than one might expect from a proper
.380" ACP barrel the same length, as the bullet does not seal
the rifling grooves though it pretty much seals the bore. The
velocities are already subsonic and the .380" aka 9mx17mm
ammunition would need no modification to achieve this, but that
doesn't mean that it wouldn't be modified, either superfluously or
for some technical reason known only to the person who did it.
Nor does it engage the rifling, so bullets may tumble after only a
few feet and will NOT be engraved with rifling marks.
The ejected cartridge cases bulge only SOME of the time: this may
depend on how they sit in the 0.8mm longer and 0.2mm wider chamber at
the moment of firing. The above video shows two such cases being
picked out out of approximately thirty fired.
(The true length of the .380" ACP cartridge case is 17.3mm and that of the 9mm Makarov 18.1mm)
Postscript
Medawar is confident that the Home Office would greatly prefer it if Michelle Diskin and/or her lawyers would refrain from reading this article or watching the video.
A follow-up article, coming soon, will explain how hitmen use human engineering, just like hackers do, in order to find out things "which a professional hitman (backed up an organised crime gang) could not possibly have known about the target's habits and whereabouts." That may discommode a national broadcaster more than the Home Office, should Ms Diskin or her lawyers be so perverse as to take an interest.
The article after that may ruffle feathers quite widely.
Medawar begs his readers' pardon for largely ignoring "The Great Replacement" and his reasons for doing so lie not in that being a conspiracy theory so much as the awkward fact that he cannot see the Global Elite bothering to kill off a large swathe of the "useless" human population of the Elite's world only to replace them with other "useless people" they would inevitably despise just as much. Population reduction, should it be happening and it does begin to look as if it is, is almost certainly an end in itself rather than an attempt to make a better world, because the Elite's narrow definition of "better" or "useful" equates to "for the benefit of the Elite."
During the past several days of extraordinary vitriol, contempt, bullying and even threats of armed invasion against America's closest allies expressed by President Trump and an assortment of loyal mouthpieces, it has emerged that Ukraine might just be allowed to escape defeat and subsequent linguistic if not ethnic cleansing were President Zelensky to sign a "minerals agreement" with the United States.
An American friend of Medawar's recently offered the fascinating insight that the heavy emphasis on Ukraine signing the minerals agreement, far from being evidence that Mr Putin had pulled the wool over Mr Trump's eyes as practically all of America's allies currently believe, almost certainly means that Mr Trump has already got Mr Putin's penciled initials on a similar, if not identical, agreement. Some observers claim that Putin desperately needs to retire before he dies in office, but if he leaves power without a safe place to hide, he'll be dead in days. Putin might be no more able to say no to Trump than Zelensky.
Now, the media is being infuriatingly unspecific about which "minerals" are involved, but it is possible to deduce, from ALL the places being done over by the Trump administration, that the mineral of most interest is Scandium and that anything else will be icing on the cake or a red herring, depending on one's choice of food-related metaphor. And this is what arouses Medawar's interest, because Scandium has relatively few uses where there are no substitutes. And given the frenetic rate at which Mr Trump is burning America's bridges with pretty well all of her most loyal and important allies and nearest neighbours, Scandium must have a particular importance to those responsible for engineering and bankrolling Mr Trump's return to power. And yet, Scandium isn't of such importance to the wider American economy or the security of the American people that America needs to control the greater part of the world supply of this metal! A great deal is being done, at significant cost to America's previously excellent standing with her allies and perhaps even to her own narrow economic interests, to secure something which only matters greatly to the private plans of a very few. Neither is it possible to see what Mr Trump might gain by serving those few rather than the very many people who recently voted him back into office.
Any debate as to whether Mr Trump is betrayer or betrayed needs to be left until Medawar has conveyed his suspicions as to whose interests are being looked after here, because it's certainly not Mr Trump's natural constituency of the Christian Right, nor is it even their bitter foes on the "Liberal" left. To understand who might need Scandium, we need to understand what Scandium is in the first place:
Relevant quotes:
"Dislocation theory is immensely complicated and, after all, perhaps mainly of interest to dislocation experts" Professor J.E. Gordon "The New Science of Strong Materials" page 218. https://amzn.eu/d/41qairv
"The world's most influential scientists are those who control the research grants of lesser scientists and they acquired that influence after realising that politicians and oligarchs are much more interested in magic than science. Whilst in science, as in faith, there is always an alternative to everything if you look hard enough, alternatives are anathema to magical practices and 'influential scientists' are ever alert to suppress alternatives" {this is a relatively recent realisation on the part of Medawar, worth quoting here.}
Note that in 2003, the
three mines producing significant (bearing in mind global supply was about twenty tons per annum) amounts of Scandium
were in Russia's Kola Peninsular, Zhovti Vody in Ukraine and Bayan Obo in
China. Other potential sources would include Finland, Sweden and possibly Norway. Finland and Sweden were openly threatened with invasion at the same time that Ukraine was invaded, and again threatened if they joined NATO, or attempted to protect themselves against mischief to sea-bed infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, etc, etc. Threat, threat, threat from Russia, followed by threat, threat, threat from Trump.
The video conveys a lot which the Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia also states that the "only" industrial use for Scandium is to make high-performance alloys with aluminium, but actually, Medawar knows of, but will not identify, another important use which seems to be classified information these days, but was in the public domain ten or fifteen years ago. Suffice to say that the total requirement for Scandium created by US military needs for the whole of the Cold War was probably around a tenth of a single month's global production at 2003 levels. So, Wikipedia is right in the sense that turning aluminium into an easier-to work substitute for titanium in some applications accounts for practically all Scandium usage by weight, but it's not the only important use. But the US Government is in no danger of running out of Scandium for that other use and probably holds more of it than it needs as older systems are retired and recycled.
The demonstration in the video, where a fairly big chunk of Scandium metal floats on liquid bromine (without any obvious chemical reaction until water is used to wash the bromine off afterwards) not only conveys an understanding of how light Scandium is and therefore that twenty tons per annum is actually a lot in some ways, but also how different it is from aluminium, because aluminium foil catches fire when exposed to bromine fumes at room temperature! Finely-divided Scandium also burns in a bunsen flame with a very brilliant flash. Sadly, it is too expensive for fireworks!
Suggestion:
At the behest of a South African Tech oligarch and would-be spacefarer whose childhood friends may well include South African mining oligarchs, President Trump has bartered America's integrity and diplomatic standing for the Russian people's birthright, to which deal President Putin was and remains a willing party. They commit atrocity in and to Ukraine primarily because they seek an effective monopoly not just of Scandium production but also its utilisation and conquering Ukraine might have seemed an easier prospect than conquering Communist China! New sources are being developed in the Philippines as well. The Americans HOPE to develop a domestic source in Nebraska but this project is currently aspirational rather than actual.
And who REALLY wants Scandium?
Well these people might: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles Scandium is a 'magic ingredient' to those avowed Satanists who dream of an "Aeon of Fire" in which their descendants will build a Galactic Empire, because aluminium-scandium alloys MIGHT allow a spaceship to be fabricated with industrial resources that will fit inside a preceding spaceship of feasible size, allowing spaceships to replicate themselves as they spread from one planet to another. For this to happen with titanium, someone would have to think hard enough to greatly simplify the process of exploiting found titanium ore with an equally-great reduction in the amount of energy involved. It is probably not going to happen with beryllium either, unless dislocation theory is wrong in a most unlikely way.
Now, in the real universe (and that's not where these people live a lot of the time) building a Galactic civilisation might perhaps be done by sending out self-replicating spaceships with a set of values in their cargo so sensible and so durable over time that colonists and the colonised might see the sense in voluntarily keeping those values. But an Empire in the sense of something centrally-controlled and ruling by lethal force, even at thousand-year intervals, let alone real-time, is a non-starter.
Another obstacle in the path of the desired Galactic Empire is that any journey even as far as Mars may, if organised by Elon Musk, turn out to be more Voortrek than Startrek.
But the greatest problem (and the very real danger) is that the Satanists of the O9A believe that in order for the Aeon of Fire to begin, they have to destroy our existing civilisation and risk taking with it the entire industrial base and all the knowledge and competencies which interplanetary, let alone interstellar, travel might require. And their strategy for destroying our present civilisation: the deliberate perversion and destruction of the moral codes which hold our society and civilisation together and allow it to function, by encouraging rape, all levels of physical, mental and emotional violence against women and the sexual abuse and murder of children, looks increasingly like a viable method of bringing about just such a destruction, although it is far from guaranteed that this will involve the survival of the human race, let alone a new Aeon or historical era of any sort. The most likely outcome will be the end of humanity. And given that the alternative route to a galactic culture or civilisation might be something growing out of our existing civilisation and therefore based on the "Nazarene" Abrahamic religions the Satanists hate so much, it is not implausible that they might even prefer total extinction to a galactic fellowship ruled by love rather than force.
And the current obsession with securing global supplies of Scandium and perhaps other "magic ingredients" is not the only sign that the O9A might have friends, or at least puppets, in very high places, in Europe, Russia and many other places outside as well as inside the United States, even though Texas seems to be a key stronghold at the moment.
Ever since US Special Forces managed to kill Osama bin Laden, there has been an obvious shift in the nature of terroristic violence; towards women and children, especially little girls, as targets, and away from Islam as a clearly-identifiable source of motivation, even though most of the training material and practical methodology still comes from "Islamic" sources. O9A "associates" are free to study practice and even promote any of the Abrahamic religions including Islam, the C of E, or, according to preference, any sort of Nazism or Paganism, and even some (fairly twisted) varieties of Buddhism. Because if if they caught committing rape, murder, child murder and paedophilia, that simply rebounds on the cover religion or ideology and not on the O9A. Even were it to be proved in court and widely-reported that O9A was responsible for the actions of "non-terrorist" mass killers as diverse as Jake Davison and Axel Rudakubana, the associates of and potential recruits to O9A would find it all pretty cool and even encouraging.
Which is probably why, even though anti-terrorist officers and increasing numbers of crime reporters and other journalists worry about all this between themselves, O9A, which is now present globally, continues to be completely disregarded at the political, senior law enforcement command and media editorial level, globally. There is a very ancient piece of wisdom which says that: "Anyone who ignores the attacks of the enemy, makes the enemy stronger."
We cannot possibly produce an effective plan against a danger nobody dares to mention, for fear of ridicule, or violence, or blackmail or any of the other forms of coercion and manipulation which the O9A and its "764" youth wing are increasingly proficient at.
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