Forex Exchange

This article should be read by those who like to pretend that the animal rights movement is an heroic enemy of extreme right and racist groups in the UK. The opposite it true, the AR movement is just a stalking horse for the neo-nazis. This goes right back to the start of the ALF, in the early seventies, and probably long before. This link is to an article (recovered by Wayback Machine) where Troy Southgate, a racist animal rights activist, interviews Richard Hunt, a non-racist (but otherwise remarkably extreme) anarchist whose agenda sort of crosses over the animal rights one. (It doesn't start the same, but ends up with a very small human population living by the law of the jungle.) The fascinating thing, is the reply to Mr Hunt, suggesting that Racial Nationalism is the only way to fight "internationalism". This is very revealing and Medawar can see why it was taken offline and needed to be retrieved! If the link stops working, leave a comment to tell me and I...

Just a link , really, to an article about Sarah Whitehead. Anyone who saw this group's own material and listened to its oral tradition, would have believed that Greg Avery and his (second) wife, Natasha, were the kingpins. They were jailed, everything carried on as before. Let's just wait and see if it all really stops now that Sarah Whitehead has joined them inside. If it doesn't, then perhaps the police need to look for someone canny enough not to visit the frontline activists at all. Someone more like Ronnie Lee, John Curtin, Andrew Mann, or Paul Richardson, perhaps?

An expert has done what the Hutton Inquiry and Home Office Pathologist very glaringly did not do, and calculated how much co-proxamol painkiller Dr Kelly had actually absorbed before he died: approximately two tablets, a normal therapeutic dose. There is also a strong dislocation between a recently-released pathologist's report, claiming several "hesitation" wounds to his wrist, and the witnesses who found and first attended the body, including two very experienced paramedics, who did not mention multiple wounds and who all dispute that there was much blood spilt at the scene. The report filed by the paramedics is missing: Thames Valley Police requested that the Ambulance Trust send it to them, which they did, and now Thames Valley Police claim that it never arrived. There still needs to be a proper inquest, to evaluate the glaring difference between the conclusions and observations of official witnesses and expert ones, especially the experts who actually saw the body a...

This is a link to an article by Stephen Glover which needs no further expansion from Medawar.

It's hardly an original idea, that the 18 th century "Enlightenment" degenerated into 20 th century fascism, because any movement which basically relies on using social pressure to make all society's intellectuals appear to agree about everything, is waiting only for the name of fascism to be invented and bestowed upon it. The question which this begs is this: where did the legacy of Enlightenment take us, after it had taken us to Belsen and camp 731? Although it's often presented as an age when reason replaced superstition and tradition in the affairs of man, that would better describe the flood of new ideas, creeds and innovations, that followed the English Civil War a century earlier. Some of these ideas were lunatic, and nobody except Tony Benn and Billy Bragg still believes in them, others, particularly the concepts of religious and therefore, inevitably, political, freedom, have become so basic to our way of life and our values that we struggle to under...

Dr Judit Nadal, who was leading some very important biochemical research at Imperial College, London, has been killed in a car crash. Although news reports make much of the frailty of the "G Wiz" electric car that she was driving (more on that below), it doesn't look as if the other vehicle can possibly have been driven at a speed, or in a fashion, that was legal for that urban road, approaching a junction. So, the police investigation really serves to determine exactly how unlawful her death was; it almost certainly was not an accident unadulterated by criminal action, though it remains to be seen if there was any element of aggression in it, targeted or otherwise. (There are groups in the UK who constantly threaten, plot and occasionally even manage to execute, deliberate harm to researchers in almost any sort of biomedical discipline. Some of them are up for sentencing at Winchester Crown Court this very week.) But one way or the other, Britain loses an awful lot of ...

This would seem to be a dangerous occupation indeed. Apart from Dr Kelly, there were all the sonar experts chucked into the Avon Gorge by suicide-fakers unknown; although it's hard to find a better suspect for that than the KGB. On a lighter note, the nuclear fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield once failed a safety inspection: Inspectors took all their readings, checked every procedure, were basically happy. One of them shinned up a ladder for a last look at something fairly important, fell off, broke leg, scrawled "failed" on his notes even as the paramedics were splinting his leg ready to take him to hospital. Update : Austrian police think there might have been foul play.

Various American bloggers have written, in terms ranging from concern to outrage, about the increasing militarisation of the DHS , especially its recent order for around 3,000 mineproof armoured personnel carriers. Most of them explain this in terms of President Obama's alleged intention to impose communism on the American people by force, though a few years ago, many of them were as wary of President Bush and a "fascist" agenda. Seeing the nation's shiny new secret police force tooling up for war, rather than policing, understandably tends to feed any unease that people happen to have. But what the DHS is doing, and what the bureaucracy was doing by getting the politicians to create the DHS in the first place, is indeed to prepare for civil war, because civil war is what happens when a political system fails. The bureaucracy has probably been able to sense impending failure in the American political system for a couple of decades, even if the possibility has only daw...

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

This link is to an article revealing interesting information about the role of former Chief Superintendent Ray Adams in the recruitment of hackers (the actual job title!) for the Murdoch company, NDS, based in Israel. Readers who have read the Brown Moses blog article, might then want to re-read this article , from Medawar's Cornflakes. And then perhaps this article , too. It is worth noting that Saad Al Hilli, too, was an expert in many technical subjects, including the rather specialist field of encryption of satellite communications, which is the very discipline for which Mr Adams was so busy recruiting hackers for NDS in the late nineties. This link is to a recent Daily Mail article about the brutal murder of Mr Al Hilli, his wife and mother-in-law, and the attempted murder of his older daughter. (Not to mention the ordeal suffered by his younger daughter, who spent hours hiding under her mother's dead body.)

For once, an echo of Richard Jefferies rather than George Orwell. The photograph is of a wild rose (or "Dog Rose") in an English rural hedgerow. It's not a rare thing, nobody specially planted it and it might one day be hacked back by a tractor-mounted hedge flail or make a meal for a Roe Deer. (NB: Given the choice, Roe Deer will take carefully bred and nurtured garden roses over wild ones, every time.) It is, however, a little bit of beauty, sitting there waiting to be noticed. But this kind of thing is only noticed by those with an interest in the world as it is, the world around them, what's really there. People blinded by ideology, greed, material things, fear and aggression, can pass this kind of ordinary beauty by a million times and never notice once. That's not the only thing they never notice, either. Those who cannot perceive plain, ordinary beauty in the world around them, are usually quite incapable of perceiving ugliness, especially in their own acti...

The Connors family from Leighton Buzzard, convicted a while ago of keeping vulnerable men in servitude as slaves, have been the subject of a court hearing under the Proceeds Of Crime Act. They must pay a total of £360,000 to the authorities or serve extra prison terms. It isn't clear if this sum fully reflects the gains which the Connors family made from keeping several slaves for many years, or not. But it is money the court thinks that they still have access to and can pay. There are a couple more similar cases going through the courts at the moment, one of which involves someone from Luton (only about twenty minutes drive from Leighton Buzzard) allegedly being responsible for a number of slaves discovered in Southampton. The Home Office now estimates that there are about 6,000 persons being kept as slaves in the UK, which shows that much more effort is needed as well as new, tougher legislation which is in the works. This will bring in possible life sentences to avoid the absur...

These days, the STASI is forgotten by most people, conveniently so by many German politicians and the British ones who negotiate treaties with them that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but the STASI hasn't really gone away. It has transformed itself into something that certain investigative journalists in Germany (an endangered species, really) refer to as the " Deutschland -Clan". This is an organized crime network, carrying a lot of clout within the German criminal justice system as former STASI personnel forge new careers in the Federal Police and public prosecutor's offices. It also appears to have both the management and trades unions in its pocket in two areas of strategic communications: German Railways and German Telecommunications. -It also played a role in German and Austrian companies getting impressive contracts from American Railroad companies for signalling and communications gear. (Always less emotive and less publicized than surr...

Now that there's nothing about the Meredith Kercher case which would be defined as sub judice under English Law (no-one facing an unresolved criminal charge) it may last be safe to point out a painfully obvious probability, and pose the one question which Italian Police and Prosecutors notably failed to ask: In the two or three months before Miss Kercher was murdered in the cottage she shared with Miss Knox, did anyone in Northern Italy (not necessarily Perugia itself), systematically research the financial means of families of foreign students studying or due to study in Perugia ? The Knox family in particular, but it wouldn't be confined to them, at least not in the early phases. Someone would have found out the names of foreign students, found out where they came from, then narrowed their sights a bit onto those who seemed to come from prosperous communities. These would have been researched a bit more deeply, until a shortlist was drawn up, of students with caring fa...

Medawar has written this article on behalf of the blog owner at "Victims of Organized Crime in Central Texas" , who is currently being harassed very intensely, in part to stop her telling her story in public, but mainly to prevent her making effective preparations for what may be a crucial court hearing in the middle of October. The court hearing is part of a long-running attempt by a property developer and attorney in Fredericksburg, Texas, to deprive the blog owner of her home. Some of those assisting and advising on the harassment, are former Secret Service agents who live in houses provided for them, on very generous terms, by the same property developer. They are breaking not only State and Federal laws, but also their oaths, and they are doing so in order to deny an innocent and law-abiding citizen precisely the thing they have been rewarded with for their connivance: a home. Throughout their careers, they were paid a reasonable salary and they now enjoy pensions secure...