Film Review of Dr Aseem Malhotra’s First! Do No Pharm

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The film:

This is a documentary by a well-respected senior cardiologist about medical and business ethics and the ways in which both public health and public finances are being damaged by their abandonment. At no point is there a single mention of any “forbidden pandemic topics” and the scale of any ethical problem in the Pharmaceutical sector is measured by the impressive total of the fines ($33 billion and counting) imposed on companies in the sector, by American courts alone in recent years.

Dr Aseem Malhotra's First! Do No Pharm can be downloaded from this link:

https://cerealkillers.gumroad.com/l/nopharmfilm

Following premiers in Leicester Square, London, and at the US Congress, the film is downloadable for a fairly modest fee, which is preferable to a “pay per view” platform where potential reference material is concerned. There is no limit on the number of times it can be viewed and once downloaded it’s very hard to see how it might be censored by any lawful means. It is shocking to find that we live in a world where this should even be a factor where such an important, professional, expert and deeply ethical production is concerned, but that’s where we are and that is proof of a problem in and of itself.

Several different kinds of established and novel drug and other medical interventions are studied and what emerges from this is “regulatory and legislative capture” (by which is meant the establishment by medical-orientated industries of control over those regulatory and professional bodies and even laws intended to keep those industries working within the public interest and not against it). It further follows (and indeed also emerges) that medical journals and the whole process of publishing scientific papers following “peer review” has been captured likewise. Which means that any attempt to question or criticise new “research” or novel drugs and treatments has now been rendered difficult to the point where even to make the attempt constitutes career suicide.

This seems not just scandalous, but also utterly quite incredible, because it means that the business model of all the medical industries (and possibly others, but this is not addressed) is based on scientific fraud, and that the scientific journals are nearly all accomplices to this fraud. Then something else emerges in the film which, within about three sentences, makes all of this not only believable, but entirely credible:

The business model of the scientific journal sector was reformed and redefined by the “controversial” (to use milder language than the satirical paper Private Eye ever did) publishing oligarch and lifelong authoritarian socialist Robert Maxwell! And that business model makes the scientific publishing sector dependent on the sale of reprints of scientific papers to the very companies which sponsored or commissioned the authors’ research. There is no profit, not even a break-even point, in publishing any paper and especially any critical response to a sponsored paper which the research-sponsors do not like. And they are strongly inclined to “not like” anything which might adversely affect the licensing and sale of medical treatments or other products. (I note that it is remarkably hard to criticise offshore wind-turbines, for example.)

That a scientific publishing sector made in the image of a notorious pension-fund fraudster should be involved in a situation where it can be claimed that 70% of all new published scientific papers are fraudulent is not only wholly believable but sadly inevitable. Had the scientific publishing sector been based on the business model of Dick Turpin, Black Tom and Shock Oliver, one might have expected the publication of any scientific paper to be attended by the thunder of galloping horses, cries of “stand and deliver” (your paper, in a lecture theatre, of course) and the fizz-crack! of flintlock horse-pistols.

The treatments and drugs investigated include stents and statins, the painkiller “Vioxx”, anti-depressants (as a class, really), monoclonal antibody treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease and weight-loss drugs (also as a class.) As well as scandalous behaviour over trials for these drugs and treatments, (even the captured regulators do not get to see all the trial data if the sponsoring company wants to withhold it), the film notes a complete lack of any attempt to trial any of these drugs against even other similar drugs, let alone cost-free non-drug interventions such as lifestyle and diet changes. Throughout the film and from several corners of the world, real-world evidence that such interventions can work is presented, and it is quite clear that no healthcare system in the world can continue to ignore such simple solutions in favour of hugely-expensive, “pill every day for life” treatments whose risks and benefits have never been honestly established, without exhausting the ability of the national economy to support it.

Measured criticism of the film:

This is all well and good, but before I get to my list of “further reading” (I know it’s a film, but there are books that need to be read, too) I feel obliged to pick up on a grave risk which those involved in the making of this film seem to have missed, and that concerns the manner in which the weight-loss drugs mostly work. They variously inhibit the movement of food through the alimentary canal, especially the stomach (so the patient is physically prevented from eating very much) and/or they disable the “reward function” in the brain (so the patient feels no urge to eat, and experiences no joy if they eat or do anything else). The film-makers were very concerned about both things, because the latter seems likely to make very many patients dangerously depressed and both approaches lead to an equal loss of muscle mass to match any loss of body fat. There are all sorts of known health benefits to loss of body-fat (up to a point, beyond which it becomes a pathology in its own right), but there are no known health benefits to substantial loss of muscle mass and in the case of patients over fifty years old, that lost muscle mass will be very hard to replace, assuming the patient is ever allowed to stop taking the weight loss drugs. Many of the ways in which old people die involve a lack of strength: they are more likely to fall and less able to get back on their feet if they do, they may find themselves unable to rise from their bed or armchair and thus expire. The film makers are properly worried about this and advocate controlled weight loss through better diet and exercise rather than forced starvation, to consolidate muscle mass rather than lose it, so why do I think they are not worried enough?

Well, it’s like this: the weight loss drugs which stop food leaving the stomach effectively duplicate the impairment of the alimentary canal following wartime German medical treatment of patients with bayonet-inflicted stomach wounds. These patients are more visible to the eye of history than anyone in American or Commonwealth service who “benefited” from such surgery in world war two, because German officers in particular were expected to stay in uniform and perform “non-combat duties” (which could actually mean chasing resistance workers) basically until they died. And almost none of them survived for more than two years, most seem to have died within eighteen months. German army surgeons had two choices: patient gets the surgery or he dies. This is not the case with the weight-loss drugs, which are about to pushed upon tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people who have not been bayoneted, in the absence of good data to show that patients will live beyond the period of the manufacturer’s drug trials, which seems to have been half the time it took German officers to die from their surgery.

Because the patient is being limited to a small intake of food, regardless of whether the food is nutritionally good or bad, and given that even major essential nutrients such as protein are being assimilated in insufficient amounts to even maintain muscle mass, almost all of the less obvious but vital nutrients are going to be kept out of the patient’s body, too. They may not all die with precisely the same symptoms, but if these drugs are taken for many months, patients may well die in droves and I cannot see a way of preventing this without banning drugs which indiscriminately inhibit food intake or uptake.

Further reading:

(Even the makers of the film need to try reading these, assuming that have not already done so.)

 

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

For those who think they know all about “Big Pharma” and the worst it might do, here is a first-hand account of the worst which Bayer, the original Big Pharma company (which is still amongst the most powerful Pharma companies), actually did as soon as it was handed control of large areas of state policy:

This is available on Kindle, or at least it was. Here is a link to my review, which should link to where the book can be bought from:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2023/05/book-review-of-five-chimneys-by-olga.html

And for those who cry “that’s all we need to know” when they discover that there’s money behind a perverse political agenda: there is no such thing as “all we need to know.” The moment we allow that thought to enter our heads, let alone pass our lips, we are missing something. There is always something else we would benefit from knowing.

In the case of money and political agendas: when you find the money behind the first perverse political agenda, you will usually find that the people supplying that money are serving a different political agenda in their turn, in order to obtain that money in the first place. And so it goes up the chain until you find someone so wealthy that they (and probably their foreseeable descendants) can self-fund their every whim. At this point you have found someone who is driven by their own political agenda rather than that of any other person or group of persons. And if that person wasn’t mad to begin with, they soon will be once they have the whole world at their feet.

Bayer, the definitive Big Pharma company, is now supposedly a stand-alone entity, but was originally part of the I.G. Farben multi-industrial combine which was “Big Everything” and I.G. Farben never hesitated to put all of its financial muscle behind its political agenda, of which both world wars were part.

“Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu

If you accept, or claim in the case of the makers of the film described above, that science has been “captured” by commercial interests, perhaps you need to know how science was first wrested from the non-profit-making hands of amateur (and mostly observational) scientists, many of whom were Christian clergy. Perhaps you also need to pay some attention to who the people who did this were, too. Because they were self-regarding authoritarian elitists to a man. (And to begin with, not one of them was female.) Anti-science and anti-Christianity are not opposites, nor is either of them right. They are what Mr George Galloway MP might describe as “two cheeks of the same posterior” and I would describe as two prongs of the same pitchfork. When the Devil organises a boxing match, both prize-fighters are going to lose, as are all the punters who place bets on the outcome.

My review of this frankly expensive book is here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2024/05/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by.html

Silent Invasion by Clive Hamilton

To help readers better understand how certain fields of governmental function might be “captured” by wealthy companies and what the word “capture” even means in this context, Professor Hamilton describes how the Chinese Communist Party (a political body not without its friends in Big Pharma in the West) set out to capture the Commonwealth of Australia: a work this is still ongoing. Not a part of the government, not even the whole Federal Government and all the State Governments, but the whole continent-spanning nation.

My review of this book is here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/book-review-silent-invasion.html

As well as posting this review on my blog, I have posted it (in slightly edited form to remove links) on the site from which the film was downloaded. It could have been twice as long and I’d still have important things to say, so I make no apologies for it being the way it is.

Matthew K. Spencer

Book review of Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters

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Reading list system for keeping your head (and heart) together.

(this review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

 

After a certain amount of preamble, necessary to explain that the book is to help you to choose books to actually read depending on your condition and position at the time, the reader is presented with a questionnaire so they can self-profile both their own character and their condition of life. This results in a reading list to help the reader at that particular moment.

It’s probably a good idea to go through ALL the questions every time this book is resorted to, because even if a person’s character does not change over time (hopefully it matures) the person’s perception of their own character changes often, especially during an emotional or actual crisis. And sometimes this is going to work better than others.

Reviewing this kind of work is very difficult for a seasoned reviewer, because we might read almost anything without any thought as to whether it is good for our mind, let alone our soul, but the possible lists are mostly fairly sound and in some cases excellent. Almost any reader, at almost any point in their life, is going to benefit from reading “A Long Petal of the Sea” if they haven’t read it already. [That sentence will have to come out before this gets past the Amazon censor-bot!] The exception is a certain amount of selection bias in the list offered to those who might be pondering issues of gender identity. Where the dilemma is more about how to actually do things of a sexual nature, the only perceptible bias is towards encouragement to get on with the job.

There might be readers for whom this could have awkward consequences, but they probably won’t sue.

Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters is published by Harper Collins of the 12^th of September 2024.

Book review of the Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw

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Fighting superstition and injustice with faith and professionalism amidst the English Civil War.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This is an engaging and absorbing historical novel set in a period when political, military and religious differences had separated most factions in England from the counsel of those who might have restored mercy and sanity and the author does a good job of conveying this. Sometimes this makes for an uncomfortable read, but it’s still compelling.

Parliament has the best of the soldiers and it is only they, and the servants and farmers, who supply any degree of professionalism. The Royalist soldiers are more of a rabble and feared by ordinary people. Parliament and the New Model Army will win, in part because they give ordinary people less to fear and resist, but also because they concentrate their efforts on the right objectives.

But members of Parliament and the magistrates acting in their name (but under no effective discipline during this period) have little concept of professionalism whilst the clergy on the side of Parliament are effectively in a bidding war with each other to prove their radicalism and “piety” in order to gain preferment once the war is won. They are all for rooting out evil and hanging it, whilst only a brave minority of Christians and those otherwise at the bottom of the social structure are feeding the poor and comforting the sick. In this splintered society, with “moral” leadership from the incompetent while the men of sense man the ramparts, predators of more than one sort have almost a free run. Except that Master (and former Captain) John Carne was too injured at the battle of Edgehill to man a rampart in the foreseeable future and is obliged to move, with his “strange” and somewhat vulnerable wife, to live in a small Shropshire village and seek employment with the excitable and agenda-driven local magistrate.

What starts out as an exercise in protecting his employer from embarrassment, soon sees Master Carne trying to protect an innocent from his employer’s desire for a witch-hunt , then solve a very real murder, then several murders, all in a community that would be better served by completing its physical defences against an inevitable Royalist attack. Then his employer, apparently frustrated by Carne’s patient dismantling of the first witch-hunt, comes for someone much closer to Carne. He has to summon his strength, his logic and his faith that his God does not do or countenance such evil, to win the fight.

(The next paragraph may need to be excised in order for this review to pass the Amazon “swim test!”)

At first sight the nonsensical nature of the unchallengeable assertions of fact by authority figures in the witch trials makes their evil seem comfortably far away from us in the 21^st Century, but whilst the legal system now has safeguards against such obvious nonsense, the nonsense that can be presented by prosecution counsel, admitted by the judge and go unchallenged by defence counsel just as long as it’s wrapped up in chants of pseudo-scientific jargon and backed by screens of state-funded power-point charts, is essentially the same. And the effect of baseless accusations backed by “evidence” made unchallengeable by false-science rather than false religious dogma also has EXACTLY the same effect of causing the innocent target of the accusations to doubt their own grip on reality and thus doubt their own innocence. In the 21^st Century as in the 17^th Century, real criminals known just how to exploit this sort of dogma and the madness it brings. This is an historical novel for our own times.

The Witchfinder’s Assistant by Ruth Goldstraw is published in the UK by Harper Collins on the 13^th of September 2024

Book Review of Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift

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Infiltrating the Gestapo and fighting famine.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This historical adventure is set in that part of Northern Holland which remained in German hands after the failure of Operation Market Garden to secure a crossing across the Rhine. The circumstances lead intelligence chiefs in London to base their assessment of future Dutch needs on what is happening in the liberated parts of Holland (there’s all sorts of political battles between different Dutch factions who are supplying lots of information about their own position, which seems to be none of London’s business by this stage) whilst the success of the Gestapo and other NAZI security forces in crushing resistance cells is denying London even the most basic information on the state of things in occupied territory. And things in the occupied territory are almost unimaginably bad and getting steadily worse as the NAZIs punish the Dutch population still under their control for the liberation of the rest of the country.

Agent Ludo, who has been through so many sets of false papers that she’s almost forgotten who she really is, has to flee from a failed operation and is immediately tasked with befriending a senior German officer in the hope of gaining the information needed to rescue a senior resistance figure from custody and probable execution, not so much to continue the fight as to use his respected position with former resistance groups in the liberated territories to get across, to those who might actually do something about it, the crucial fact that the entire civil population of the occupied area is on the brink of starvation in a freezing winter without any fuel.

Everything for Agent Ludo goes from bad to worse, as it does for her fiancé who has embarked on a fairly hare-brained rescue mission despite having no clear idea about where Ludo is or what she is doing. This mirrors the general state of things in Northern Holland and anywhere else the collapsing NAZI regime still holds power. In the end, Ludo and her associates gamble and sacrifice everything, including their own lives in some cases, on the faintest chance of getting food to the starving population.

Ludo loses almost every battle she fights, but her victory is that she keeps coming back for another try until the SS and Gestapo begin to scarper or fold into mental breakdown and the RAF starts to airdrop food, unopposed, but also too late for many. This novel is morally uplifting but emotionally unsparing. A male author would have shied away from this, but it needed to be written.

 

Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift is published in the UK on the 12^th of September 2024 by HQ.

Book Review of Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa.

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A magical year and the triumph of innocence over loss.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This novel is set mainly in the Olympic year of 1972 and this is important because whilst America and the Soviet Union saw the Olympics as a platform from which to present their competing visions for the future of the world, Japan saw the Olympics themselves as a model of the world as they might like it to be and approached the games with wholehearted and innocent enthusiasm.

The story is narrated by a young girl, Tomoko, who has lost her beloved father and has gone to stay at her uncle’s house whilst her mother retrains to be able to support them both by herself. It’s an amazing house with a big garden, complete with pet pygmy hippo, “Pochiko” and there’s a whole household of fascinating characters for Tomoko to get to know. But she’s not “living with her uncle” as she expected, because he’s hardly ever home. Indeed, he only seems to reappear when Tomoko’s asthmatic cousin, Mina, has a health crisis requiring hospitalisation. (This happens several times.)

Mina seems very weak and frail, but also proves to have developed both her intelligence and her imagination to an unusual degree and Tomoko quickly comes to admire Mina and then to love her (she has to make a effort to correct someone who assumes they are sisters). Mina collects matchboxes with little original cartoons on them, and writes a little story inspired by the cartoon on each matchbox. This is an interesting discipline, because there’s a limit on the number of characters she can inscribe on a small matchbox!

The members of the household (including Grandma Rosa, who is German) all pursue their own daily routines, not avoiding each other at all, but not necessarily being interested by the same thing until the two girls develop an interest in volleyball when they realise that some of the Japanese men’s Olympic team are by no means bad-looking! They learn the rules and imagine themselves being able to play (the reality differs a little) and the whole household, like the country, becomes interested in the Olympics and especially the volleyball!

Then the Israeli team are taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists and athletes are killed. This is shocking and a huge disappointment to Japanese sports fans in general, and to Grandma Rosa and her family in general, because her sister’s family died in Auschwitz. (This does not imply she was Jewish herself: about six million Jews and Roma died in the Holocaust; the concentration camp system also claimed the lives of another five million or so people selected on non-racial grounds, or who simply got in the way of the SS.)

It is a tragedy and one which wounds Rosa and her family, but the games resume and continue, and the Japanese volleyball team wins the gold and returns as heroes. Not just because they won, but because they adhered to the spirit of the games throughout.

Tomoko’s uncle continues to be an intermittent presence and the girls continue to have adventures, including a meteor-spotting expedition to a reservoir in the mountains: they take Pochiko with them so she can have a nice nocturnal swim in the lake!

Christmas looms and Grandma Rosa takes charge, but there is a forest fire and a tragedy on Christmas day. The moment for Tomoko to go back to live with her mother is also drawing near and, perhaps inspired by the barely perceptible fluttering of an angel, she tracks her uncle’s other address down and, quietly but unmistakably, lets him know that Mina needs and deserves what Tomoko herself cannot have: her father’s presence.

 

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa is published in the UK by Random House on the 15^th of August 2024.

Book Review of The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot

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An unusually consequential cosy Cornish romance.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

First things first: a cosy Cornish romance differs from a cosy Cornish murder mystery in large part by replacing the murderer with a property developer and those two literary devices being interchangeable a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century speaks volumes about Cornish and English culture and where we are all headed. The property developer is seen mostly at a distance and serves to present the more central characters with an ill-defined but looming threat which gets them all (mostly) working together for the common weal. This is all seen through the eyes of one Florence May, who is trying to build a new life after health issues have brought an end to her most important relationship, her hopes of a family and even her ability to voice “audible” books for a living. In the love and hope of her friends, she overcomes all of these issues through a series of hilarious accidents which teach her to accept that she deserves a new life and that others are perfectly willing to share her worst moments as well as her best.

There’s quite a lot of baking, too, and the recipes are all at the back of the book.

The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot is published in the UK as of the 12^th of July 2024 by Harper Collins.

Tacitus, John Bunyan and The Hope Accord

 Here is a link to the "Hope Accord": https://thehopeaccord.org/

The past four years or so have seen quite extraordinary levels of censorship and even officially-sanctioned coercion and gaslighting, to protect certain actions* and the officials responsible for putting them into effect, even from informed scrutiny stopping well short of criticism, never mind opposition or attack. Regardless of whether the reader's stance is to agree with or furiously condemn the principles put forward in the accord, readers might want to read it before coming to either position. And if the reader already has a position on this subject the only thing they have to fear from reading the according (it is not a long or wordy document), is having their mind changed. And it is the fear that people might have their minds changed which lies behind all censorship in the modern world and back, far into history.

* Those actions were pandemic-related in this instance, but alarming precedents were set right across the board.

 There is an article about censorship in the Roman Empire on the following link, which might ring a few bells with any reader familiar with the treatment of those reckless enough to question almost any aspect of the pandemic response, let alone the "natural" origin hypothesis of the completely novel pandemic virus itself:

https://brewminate.com/book-burning-and-censorship-in-the-ancient-roman-empire-and-provincial-roman-egypt/

 From which I have copied, as fair use, this quote of Tacitus which might even be out of copyright by now:

After concluding the speech he gives to Cordus, Tacitus says in his own voice:

The [senate] ordered his books to be burned by the aediles; but copies remained, hidden and afterwards published: a fact which moves you the more to deride the folly of those who believe that by an act of despotism in the present there can be extinguished also the memory of a succeeding age. On the contrary, genius chastised grows in authority; nor have alien kings or the imitators of their cruelty effected more than to crown themselves with ignominy and their victims with renown.

 As the article makes clear, Tacitus believed in freedom of speech for himself and other well-read members of the Roman elite, however dissident they may have been. Perhaps a better (and somewhat more modern) example comes from 1673 AD and the pen of John Bunyan, because no-one can accuse the tinker from Harrowden of being a member of any "privileged elite" and, in consequence, he was arguing not only for the right to speak, but also for the right to a courteous hearing! Which is precisely what members of Parliament, including my own MP, so shamefully and stupidly denied to Mr Andrew Bridgen by running away with hands over their ears in front of TV cameras when he broached those issues related to the Hope Accord in the House Of Commons, whether in the chamber or the committee room and Westminster Hall.

Bunyan wrote this to William Kiffin:

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

Across three and a half centuries, Bunyan addresses our political and medical-scientific establishments on our behalf. Many of those who fled from Mr Bridgen because they feared he might be speaking the truth, have lost their seats now and are indeed crowned with ignominy, but many remain in Parliament. This gives them a chance to doff their crowns of ignominy by giving the Hope Accord a polite hearing, or at least reading it before vilifying, censoring and cancelling its authors and signatories.

Book Review of The Natural History of Crime by Patricia Wiltshire

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Forensic Ecology on the steep and slippery banks of the river Purwell and other cases.

This review is based on a purchased Kindle edition; other formats are available but the Kindle edition is fine.

Professor Wiltshire uses a number of case histories (some more anonymised than others: the sensitivity level is different for each case) to describe and explain a scientific discipline which she helped create. She discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various forensic science disciplines, in the process making it clear that it is quite impossible for any individual scientist to have a working knowledge, still less a command, of all of them, or even more than just a few. She is clear and honest about where she is the expert and where she is not.

Her text is not just technically-informative and fascinating but ethically-informative too. She explains that as the defence has to find funds for its own forensic science work and the Legal Aid authorities won’t often fund this, she works mostly for the prosecution in criminal cases. (In commercial cases there may well be money on both sides.) But this is not as unfair as it seems: in civil commercial cases the plaintiff has to share, with the defence, anything which might help the defence case or undermine the plaintiff’s own case and this obligation is mutual. In criminal cases, the prosecution is supposed to (not quite unilaterally) tell the defence about everything it has got and needs the judge’s permission to even withhold witness address details. Professor Wiltshire’s preference would be for all scientific evidence to be shared and subject to discussion between scientists (“peer review” in other words) and she doesn’t mind the prosecution paying her to find evidence which, if she is impartial and diligent, is going to favour the truth rather than one side or the other. This didn’t used to be a radical idea: the discussion and testing of theories against evidence in order to get to the truth was once the very definition of science. (When did this change and who exactly decided that it would change?)

This book shows what is possible and what is not, what can be done quickly and cheaply to steer an investigation away from pitfalls and blind alleys and how much more detailed and expensive work has to be done to actually prove something in court. There are many people commenting on the current state of the criminal justice systems in many countries who would benefit from reading it. It is as pleasant a read as the subject matter will allow and she refrains from conjuring up images for the reader of certain experiences which understandably caused her great anguish.

The Natural History of Crime by Patricia Wiltshire is published in the UK by John Blake Publishing (Bonnier Books) , 2024.

The Kindle edition is available on this link: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C2H5PR4Y

Print editions are available from other retailers, for example:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-natural-history-of-crime/patricia-wiltshire/9781789466485

Discussion:

The following more detailed discussion breaks some of Amazon’s rules for book reviews (just by being a discussion of a scientific memoir, which is worrying, really) and will not be published there. 

Update: Amazon "couldn't post" even the fully-compliant review above. This is not the first time they have been highly resistant to publishing any intelligent review of a scientific book.

A re-write has been attempted, but since Amazon tells sinners only that they have violated "a guideline" giving no clue as to which guideline has been broken, and many of the guidelines are wide open to subjective interpretation in human hands and completely random rulings at the hands of any AI, the re-write is entirely a matter of guesswork and if it fails, there's no point in trying a third time!

PS: Waterstones just accepted the same review without a quibble and I didn't even buy the book there!

 

The Banks of the “Purwell”

The watercourse in the living room is that the river-based crime scene in question lies downstream of the confluence of the rivers Purwell and Hiz (but just upstream of the confluence with the Oughton) and strictly-speaking it is known as the Hiz until it meets the Ivel near Langford and becomes part of that. However, it’s part of the protocol for Professor Wiltshire to be shown to the scene by the police and then agree with them what questions need to be answered and her area of operations is determined by that, so she admits that she worked out where she actually was afterwards, by looking at a map. And it seems to me that if the professor, in the light of day and being guided by policemen and scene of crime tapes, wasn’t totally clear as to where she was, then the offenders, working more furtively and almost certainly at dusk or in darkness (it was winter), might have been equally confused. Because none of their apparent actions make any sense at all in their actual location, which lies downstream of a bridge/tunnel carrying the Hiz under the East Coast Mainline Railway.

 

When I was exploring this area for completely unconnected reasons in August 2023, before the Professor’s book was finished, let alone published, it quickly became clear that everything about the riverbank between that tunnel and the confluence of the Oughton with the Hiz in a meadow in Ickleford, is difficult and hazardous in good light and in summer. I took ONE photograph of the vegetation where the continuing “Hicca Way” riverbank path was alleged to be, and then packed the camera away and concentrated on not having an accident, because passive security measures between the adjoining scrap metal business and the river made it as impossible for me to leave the riverbank as it would have been for emergency workers to reach me should I manage to summon them.

The offence in this instance involved transporting and then (when things started to go wrong) improvising a way of hiding, the body of a torture-murder victim who had been dead for a week and whose head and hands had been removed prior to transport. Whether you are two men or four, all the straightforward ways of carrying a dead man over unstable ground rely on his still having wrists and ankles to grasp: cutting the hands off in advance deprives the covert undertakers of the wrists. It would have been difficult enough to get the wristless body over obstacles and into the riverbed, getting it up the steep, tangled (at that point) and slippery bank would have been more difficult, and if the objective was to employ the industrial resources of the scrapyard to destroy the body in some way, then getting it over the barbed-wire and corrugated iron fencing from the river would have been quite impossible.

And, yes, the reason I am “speculating” that the objective might have been to utilise industrial resources to utterly destroy the body, as in the James Bond film “Goldfinger”, rather than to simply drop the body in the river and try to cover it with bits of random vegetation, is because the car-crushing scene in Goldfinger was actually filmed in that very same scrapyard, using appropriate filters to make the lighting match that of second-unit footage of locations in Kentucky, with which it was skilfully intercut! The original crusher may have been replaced by a more modern model, but it will still be a modern equivalent of the same thing, in the same place. So, if someone had spent a week or more coming up with a masterplan that would make them a legend within their own gang, it might well have been along those lines. And beyond the scrapyard lie Cadwell Lane, Wallace Way and Wilbury Way offering dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, other industrial premises containing all sorts of other useful resources.

The anomaly the actual location of the body disposal presents, is that it places the maximum possible number of obstacles between where that body was abandoned and an industrial area containing a wide choice of resources which could have reduced the body to slivers, or ash, or an acid or alkali solution. The safer section of the same steep riverbank in the two photographs, below, may have been much closer to where the criminals planned to be than where they actually ended up. It also gives an idea of how much of a struggle the more overgrown section downstream would have been to negotiate with a dead body in tow!

 

The first photograph (taken in August 2023) gives the best impression of the bank, the second a better idea of where the steps are (next to the galvanised steel railings) and this was taken in October 2023 during an exercise to diagnose a fault causing the camera to produce usable images only in deep shade. This fault was not apparent on the earlier visit. It was, therefore, the final legible image of that day.

It is just upstream of the big tunnel, where the riverbank path becomes something of a bugger to follow and because of this there is a convenient flight of wooden steps embedded into the bank, (not photographed) to allow walkers to escape onto Cadwell Lane. Unfortunately, the way onwards from there along the Hicca Way seems to be cut-off by the relatively new railway flyover, intended to get trains from the slow “downtrack” of the East Coast Mainline onto the Cambridge Line without trains on the two fast tracks and the slow uptrack of the ECML needing to be held.

But if the headless and wristless body had made its way up those steps, on a day when no-one much was working on the industrial estate in general and the chosen facility in particular (hence the week’s delay?) it could then have been taken in the front entrance (under a bridge) of the scrapyard, or into any one of dozens of workshops, warehouses and tool-stores in the wider industrial area. The probable reason for not simply driving it to the intended destination would be several dozen security cameras operated by perhaps a dozen different entities. Cars have distinctive shapes if not numberplates: men in dark clothing and hoods can keep to the shadows more easily than road vehicles and are less traceable. The body might have started its journey in Arlesey or Letchworth, too. Perhaps even further afield? Coming across the river might have saved a vehicle from driving through Hitchin town itself, where the number of cameras and witnesses, even at a quiet time for the industrial estate, would have been a deterrent.

Regardless of whether “the plan” involved the scrapyard or other industrial premises, and even regardless of whether the intended direction of travel was into the industrial area or out of it, it is perhaps reasonable to assume that the person conceiving that plan and giving the necessary orders expected the journey to involve the convenient flight of steps between the river and Cadwell Lane, rather than the assault-course route it actually took.

Barry George and Bayesian Analysis.

Towards the end of her memoir, Professor Wiltshire suggests that, far from the belated acquittal of Barry George being occasioned by a legal loophole, corrupt or looney-leftie lawyers, unfair exclusion of “perfectly-valid” single-particle evidence and all the other things which allow much of the Metropolitan Police and senior BBC figures to maintain the Barry George is and always will be the only possible suspect in the murder of Jill Dando, that the appeal and subsequent acquittal was actually founded on a comprehensive Bayesian Analysis of ALL the known available evidence, which determined that it was extremely unlikely that Barry George had anything to do with the murder at all.

It makes sense that this is true, though I have NEVER seen a mainstream media source even mention this analysis, because “reasonable doubt” only applies in criminal law during the initial trial. To get a verdict overturned at a later date requires not just new evidence, but for that evidence to be extremely strong. None of the accusations levelled at Mr George’s legal team by those party to his wrongful conviction can actually be true, because if they were true the appeal would have been dismissed in much the same way that a senior BBC figure brusquely and impudently instructed three appeal court judges to dismiss it in a notorious letter which he sent under separate covers to all three.

Far from benefiting from “reasonable doubt” Barry George has already had his innocence proved to a scientific standard exceeding any normal legal threshold of proof.

One last thought:

Many people, even some barristers, refer to the balance of probabilities used in civil cases and trials of fact, as a “lower” standard of proof than “proof beyond reasonable doubt” as required in any Crown Court criminal trial. This is scientifically illiterate. Probability can be calculated, these days by advanced techniques with great precision if the input data is good. If there is any equation or algorithm for calculating “doubt” can someone please tell me what it is?

The balance of probability has to be used in civil cases because their one and only purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence, nor to lay blame, but to apportion liability. In the first instance between the plaintiff and the defendant, and in the second place between those defendants if there’s more than one of them. Apportioning something is a process of calculation and in this case the probabilities being balanced are inseparable from that.

Book Review of The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch

 * * * *

The latest novel in a series of “cosy murder mysteries”

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

 

A twice-retired detective sergeant attends, mainly in order to sell meat pies, a music festival site accompanied by her teenage daughter, her mother, her dog, and her fiancé who is a serving detective chief inspector. The festival is well-described and comes across as a cheerful Cornish parody of the larger, grander, much more earnest and hippy-infested, Glastonbury festival in neighbouring Somerset. It is almost certainly meant to and has much gentle fun with this theme.

There then ensues a murder (of course) a drink-spiking, a kidnap and unlawful imprisonment.

There are some (very) faded rock stars, adults bravely taking an enlightened view of teenage soft drug consumption whilst consuming rather more meat pies than enlightened medical opinion would countenance these days, an obvious suspect whom no-one really wants to be guilty and a motive hidden in the mists of time and on the other side of the Atlantic. These are good ingredients for a good story, and this is.

The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harpur Collins on the 28^th of June, 2024.

 

Book review: “Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu.

 

* * * * *

How the “Conflict Thesis” threatens both Christianity and Science.

 

 (The review is based on a purchased copy.)

The authors set out both the history of the Conflict Thesis and the historical reality behind the version of history behind that thesis (that Christianity is, and always has been, the regressive enemy of Science and all progress, enlightenment and freedom) and they do this by researching and publishing rather more actual facts than the authors of that thesis, Draper and White, ever did. In doing so, they find (and go a long way towards proving) that not only did Draper and White misrepresent Christianity to the modern world, they also sold the world’s intellectuals a version of history itself that is not only untrue, but ludicrous. To take just one example of this: the idea that when Christians ruled in the Middle Ages, the streets were all ankle or even knee-deep in human and animal excrement. As George Orwell (who kept a lot of farm animals and planted a lot of fruit-trees in his time) would probably observe: to believe that one you really do need to be an intellectual and not a farmer. Because not even Hutchings and Ungureanu seem to fully grasp just how idiotic that “factoid” which so many clever people believe and endlessly repeat, actually is:

Prior to the invention of super-phosphate fertilizers, human and animal excrement (and bones) were too important to agriculture to be wasted in this manner. Even in the 19^th century, there were dung-piles near the Glasgow tenements, so that the dung could be efficiently collected and removed to the fields outside the city where it was needed! And the great clean Victorian clean-up with all its undoubted health benefits, of the Glasgow dung-heaps and the river Thames in London, only happened AFTER the availability of industrial fertilizers allowed it. If it had happened prior, too many nutrients would have been lost and there would eventually have been crop failures. This is also why we do NOT find huge numbers of graves full of bodies from great historical battles before about 1840: the dead went into mass graves until they had rotted to bones and bones were dug up again and ground to fertilizer. (French local authorities sold licences to mine the battlefield of Waterloo for bonemeal.)

That factoid is just one of a whole barrage of non-truths which Draper and White (and, importantly, their supporters) laid down to sustain their thesis. Actually, they did this so systematically and consistently that it is hard to believe that they had very many actual truths at their disposal to support their case! Now, Draper and White were not actually working together as such and they had different motives for doing what they did. The consistency comes from those who chose to support them, to recommend and promote the books that they wrote and the talks that they gave.

The determining factor behind the consistency was (and still is) an agenda, which both philosophies and institutions were created to serve.

Of Popes and Unicorns is Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.

Book Review of The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud

 

* * * *

Memoir of a real-life decision influenced by the spirit of a landscape.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher, via Net Galley UK)

Initially at sea in (not-very) rural England where she is driven by the need for affordable living space, Clover has adapted to the life, even though her partner is largely absent, travelling abroad and increasingly working in the United States, to pay the bills incurred by bringing up their five children. One might note at this point that a house-price boom which consistently outpaces even the cost of living crisis is the G7’s version of the Chinese Communist Party’s demographically-catastrophic “One Child” policy, now abandoned as one BILLION unlived-in apartments are being blown up to make space for new building which is also not needed by the dwindling population.

Clover’s partner, Pete, finds himself unable to make a good-enough living to support his partner and offspring outside of a corporate setting in Washington DC (only those in elite jobs can afford to reproduce) so he wants Clover and the children to abandon the life they have, in order to join him in making a new life there. Clover has come to love the landscape of the English-Welsh borders which she initially found very alien, but she’s still desperate to live with Pete full-time, so she is torn and even frightened by his plans to move the family to America.

The thing is, in that landscape she is surrounded by people making very much less money than Pete, who somehow manage anyway: mostly by doing things of such direct practical value to others that the others are willing to pay cash-in-hand for them! The gulf between Pete and the people Clover deals with on a daily basis is a great deal wider than the great circle route from Swindon to Washington DC.

Not only does he feel that he needs much more money, he can only hope to earn that money within a business model that separates him from most contact with or awareness of those at the base of the economic pyramid: the people who help Clover every day and care for her and about her.

Just as Pete cannot make his way in rural England, it is very unlikely that Clover’s friends who can manage that without much complaint, would last long in Pete’s world. Perhaps Clover’s friends and neighbours cope by lacking the same sense of entitlement which Pete NEEDS in order to survive in a more privileged, but cut-throat and rule-bound, corporate environment?

Clover manages to say goodbye to the landscape she has come to love and takes her youngest children to be with the man she can’t stop loving. The two older children seem to be left to make their own choice and make their own way.

The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud is published in the UK as of the 9^th of May 2024 by Random House

Parliamentary Petition to "review" the MHRA: it isn't just about Covid!

 Firstly, here is a link, not just to the petition to request a review of the MHRA's performance and fitness to meet the nation's future needs, but also to the Government's infuriating mandatory "response" to that petition once it reached the first milestone of 10,000 signatures.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652008

The response manages to be arrogant, smug, dismissive, amazingly complacent and alarmingly ignorant, all at the same time! Gentle Reader, if, previously, you weren't convinced of the need to at least review how well the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority has been working in recent years (even ignoring the pandemic era as some sort of special case even though emergencies tend to punish rather than reward shortcuts) then simply reading the government's official response, and afterwards considering that this is how the UK government sees the MHRA after a long and steady stream of healthcare scandals with medicines, other products or procedures all regulated by the MHRA, might very well cause you to have another think, if for no other reason than to test whether even the government really believes its own position!

Failures of healthcare product regulation in the UK go back to the nineteen seventies and the contaminated blood products scandal, the origins of which predate the MHRA in its current form, but the cover-up and fallout from that scandal overlap with the MHRA as it is now constituted and the government is still determined to delay compensation to the victims until such time as nearly all, or perhaps even every last one, is dead.

In the meantime, numerous other dangerous products (pelvic mesh implants, for example) have slipped through the MHRA; there probably are too many instances to list them all. However, and this is crucial: no-one is publishing any data which links all the separate victim-led campaigns and class-action lawsuits together in a statistical manner which might allow Parliament or the public any insight into how well the MHRA does its job. Which begs the important question: if there is no data available to Parliament and the public allowing the performance of the MHRA to be scientifically measured in terms of how often patients are harmed by products it has approved, how can the UK government possibly know that everything is rosy in the MHRA garden?

Book review of Expired: Covid the untold story by Dr Clare Craig

 * * * * *

This a self-published, deeply-researched book which this reviewer purchased out of the household cat-food budget on the recommendation of Dr John Campbell. 

It can be found at this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C9FNHYTV/

Dr Craig communicates, with evidence, the failings of those who took decisions without it.

This is a SOLID book, in the sense that everything the author says is backed up by something! It is also compelling. The way the elite managed, first of all, to redefine an outbreak as a pandemic, and then to turn that outbreak into a global panic before inflicting massive social and economic damage whilst actually making everyone less healthy in the name of public health, makes for an hypnotic read.
I can sum it up in pretty well one sentence:

In order for a grave situation to be graspable by "the masses" the elite feel compelled to simplify it to the point where they themselves fail to understand it well enough to make ANY right decisions, legislating instead to make their many wrong decisions unchallengeable.

But for you the reader to see the truth both in my summary and in Dr Craig's presentation, it will be necessary for you to read the book itself and not just my review. 

Here is a link to this review on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2CXN8NLWCTK00/

Book Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

 * * * * *

Historical novel in which an Irish Priest seeks to outwit a senior NAZI official with a fascination for the Roman Emperor Caligula.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This sort of thing, which fictionalises real events and real people, using their real names, needs to be done with care and in this novel it is. The subject matter has been covered before, but not as well, and most treatments keep well away from the way that the NAZI official, Paul Hauptmann, placed in charge of Rome when the NAZI’s occupied it in late summer 1943, turned a museum dedicated to archaeological discoveries connected to the Roman Emperor Caligula into his own private palace, guarded by crack troops and indeed minefields. The author of this novel does not give the issue undue prominence, but he doesn’t let the reader escape knowing that there were two important mirrors in the story:

Hauptmann and the Pope both had private enclaves guarded by private armies, which they tried to hold inviolable. And the struggle between the Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty and Hauptmann in Rome and the Vatican City in the modern age could be read as a re-enactment of the relationship between the early Christian Church and Caligula, who wasn’t the only Roman Emperor to resemble the Antichrist but he could have won handsome prizes for doing so, were any to be handed out.

This isn’t prominent enough in the plot to trouble the atheistic reader in the slightest and it enhances, rather than distracts from the adventure inherent in a good man and his loyal friends taking on a very powerful man who isn’t even friends with his own wife and children and is friends with his Fuhrer only in his dreams. This is an adversary who personifies evil by standing alone, but O’Flaherty and his friends simply serve good and certainly don’t presume to personify it.

The author is well equipped to put a lot of interesting language in the mouths of his Irish characters: “rats you could saddle” and “drunk as a boiled owl” do tend to stick in the memory, but his English characters are as good and the Italian ones nearly so.

It is all about an escape line for prisoners of war who managed to slip out of their prison camps, but this only comes about because O’Flaherty is forbidden, by the Pope himself, from interfering in the inhuman way those prisons were run. That prohibition stems from the Pope’s fear that, if provoked, the NAZIs will indeed return Rome and the Vatican: the heart of Christianity as the Pope sees it, to the days of Caligula or Nero and the reign of the beast. The rift between the Pope and O’Flaherty, who recognises the Pope’s authority and understands his reasoning, comes about because O’Flaherty realises, especially after his first personal encounter with Hauptmann, that the man does not need to be provoked before he will commit the most appalling crimes!

The title comes from the promise which Jesus made to his disciples “in my Father’s house, there are many rooms” (in some translations it is “mansions” rather than rooms). The Vatican City, where O’Flaherty hides his escapees and his own activities, is a vast, crumbling and untidy collection of forgotten rooms and passages crammed into a very small geographical space. Hauptmann’s own private Arcadia is tidy, uncluttered and expansive. Order prevails, on pain of death. O’Flaherty, living and operating in his Father’s house, simply tries to muddle through and live. Their methodologies are as opposed as their beliefs.

 

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is published by Random House on the 26^th of January 2024.

Book Review of Munich Wolf by Rory Clements

* * * * *

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

An excellent murder and survival thriller set in Munich while Bavaria was still the centre of NAZI power.

The author has set several novels before, during and after WW2 and this is one of his best so far. Partly because the hero is trying to avoid heroism at all costs.

A criminal detective and a political policeman find themselves in conflict with each other even before either knows who the other is, then they are required to work with each other whilst being alert to every opportunity to destroy each other. (This really is the way NAZI Germany worked, right up to the top. Even within Hitler’s inner circle, his preferred method was to make his associates fight each other until a clear winner emerged. This selects the plan with the strongest advocate rather than the strongest plan and the chances of success dwindle with each reiteration of the challenge process.)

Neither Inspector Sebastian Wolff nor Sergeant Hans Winter have any intention of challenging the regime as such: they are both really only trying to survive but it takes a while for them to perceive each other correctly. Constant manipulation of their actions and the general situation by those so disproportionately more powerful than their actual superiors creates a storm that they can only survive by helping each other -and in a fascist State that’s actually more subversive than blowing up railway lines.

What makes this well-researched and well-written novel most interesting is quite nuanced, in that Hitler isn’t shown as holding power by being the most extreme candidate (at least, not in 1935 when the story is set); there are others in or close to the party MUCH further round the bend, but all in one particular direction or another. This story revolves around the Thule Society, but there were other factions and sects within the Party. Even in an “extreme right” party there are left and right wings and in terms of economic policy the National Socialists were actually the hard left. In such a situation, powerful individuals oppose the rival they fear the most. The left-leaning ones fear what the right-leaning ones might do and the right-leaning ones fear what the left-leanings might do. So they agree on someone who’s not clearly right or left. The problem is that the centre-standing candidate might do almost anything and he often does. Both Stalin and Hitler came to lead their respective parties through the same mechanism.

The neo-pagan murderer in this story turns out to be so deranged that the “highest authority” in Germany comes to regret trying to cover for him. This raises the unsettling idea that the Third Reich contained and could even have been led by such a person rather than Hitler. There was potential for evil beyond even the Holocaust.

Munich Wolf by Roy Clements is published by Bonnier Books UK on the 18^th of January 2024

Book Review of the Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson

 * * * *

(Book 3 of the Vinland Viking Saga.)

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is an historical novel about a clash of cultures between Norsemen (whose own culture was largely based around clashing with other cultures) and native American “Red Men” (who started without a concept of any culture which behaved in fundamentally different ways to their own). The two cultures had many things in common: family, clan and “tribe” meant pretty much the same things and whilst nationhood meant nothing to the Red Men, it didn’t really register on the Norse list of priorities either: the two Norse leaders (“helmsmen”) in the story may piously hope for some sort of reward from the King of Norway for claiming “Vinland” for him, but at no point does either behave as if the King might hold them accountable for their treacherous and violent conduct in pursuit of his favour. In this lies the explanation for why Norsemen ventured both far (Vinland) and near (Scotland) for people and lands to exploit and conquer: they were far too dangerous to each other to make remaining quietly at home a sustainable lifestyle choice.

The Red Men, though, having no previous experience of men with different measures of honour and, more especially, no respect for creation and straight dealing, suffer very badly for taking the Norsemen on trust in the expectation that they will act in good faith. (Although, part of the trouble is the Norse faith in an afterlife that rewards warriors more than hunters or fishermen.) Once the Red Men understand that they have been cheated and played for fools, their anger is great and so is their determination to punish the Norse, but Norse culture is based on the need to WIN the sort of conflict which Red Men can hardly believe is happening.

The Bjorn of this story has a Norse mother and has been brought up by a Red Man stepfather. This gives him a foot in both camps (there’s a remarkably expressive word in Afrikaans for this, which I decline to use here.) Bjorn spends most of the story attempting the impossible, which is to obey the honour codes of both cultures at the same time, and he’s also struggling against his own inadequacies in that not only is he dwarfed by the human factors which are in conflict: he’s also pretty inconsequential in the face of natural forces which the Red Men have to interact with for so much of their lives that they don’t have much to spare time in which to fight other men.

Only when everything goes wrong and all Bjorn can do is save his own life and that of his wife by doing a deal with the man he hates the most, does he realise that the forces in conflict between nature, Red Men and Norsemen are so great that living long enough to go somewhere else and try something else is not only the best that he can do: it’s the only salvation for any of the protagonists still alive at that point.

This is a good read, but it’s not a quick nor an easy read.

The Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson was published by Harper Collins (One More Chapter) on the 1^st of December 2023.