Tuesday 29 September 2009

Gang Stalking in County Durham?

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

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

How to Scuttle American Drugs Gangs



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

This link explains the official procedure for dealing with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday 22 September 2009

Who Hath Balsam For England's Wounds?



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday 14 September 2009

A Bonfire of the Rotten Apples


(Medawar Thinks that this old post might be of interest to new readers, so he's re-instated it.)
Sometimes, like a forest fungus, corruption in a public service can remain hidden, except for its fruiting bodies. But these only appear under certain conditions, and often at only one spot when the fungus is an underground organism extending fifty yards. Hundreds of such large hidden organisms may be symbiotically linked together into a super-organism the size of the whole forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Saturday 5 September 2009

Butterfly Gallery.

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

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