Two Foxes with Immunity to the Hounds

Two little predictions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal:

Firstly, lawyers and journalists will now pursue Prince Andrew till the day he dies, and it's very likely that he will eventually go the way of his late sister in law.

Secondly, neither of the two "very famous prime ministers" involved in the scandal will be seriously troubled and they will be left to continue to attempt to return to office, either as Prime Minister of a small Middle-Eastern democracy, or as a Brexit-slaying Titan of Euro politics, clearly destined for much higher glory than the mere premiership of a mere country.

Three Petitions on Hong Kong

This article deals with two Parliamentary Petitions on the UK's Parliamentary Website and one independent petition, apparently on a bespoke platform, which is described, with a link, towards the bottom of this article. The two Parliamentary Petitions differ in their prescriptions for action and although both are arguable and valid, it would be logically consistent for an individual to sign only one of them. The blog author makes no recommendation, but for the reader's information he decided to sign the first one described here. The most likely outcome is that both of these petitions will eventually pass the ten thousand signature threshold to compel a response from the UK government, but only one or the other will go the distance and attain the one hundred thousand signature threshold that would make it eligible for a Parliamentary debate. It is impossible at the time of writing to say which of the two petitions this will be. 

(It is worth noting that in calling for joint action with the EU, the second petition is exposing itself to a probable veto from the Greek Government and other EU member states which are financially heavily indebted to the PRC and have coincidentally vetoed previous EU proposals for taking action against the PRC.)

First Parliamentary Petition:

Voice opposition to the amendments of the Hong Kong Fugitive Offenders Ordinance 

The Hong Kong Government has proposed a bill to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, which will allow the Government to extradite fugitive offenders to countries or regions without Extradition Agreements with Hong Kong, including the rest of the People’s Republic of China.

The Bill will remove the legislature’s power to scruntise extradition arrangements, thereby centralising the decision-making to the executives. The controversial Bill would also allow the authorities in the People’s Republic of China to arrest people in Hong Kong, or even confiscate their properties by issuing Extradition Requests to the Hong Kong Government.

 

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/263408

Second Parliamentary Petition:

Hong Kong Extradition law: Pressure China with economic sanctions

Upon signing the Sino-British treaty the united kingdom gave itself a legal and moral obligation to act when china breaks agreements signed in the treaty. Currently China is clearly interfering in HK government's decisions to dilute Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy with this new extradition law. 

By seeking joint economic sanctions with the EU and the US, the UK can pressure Chinese and Hong Kong governments into revoking this bill which, as can be seen by 15% of the region's population protesting against the bill, the people of Hong Kong do not want and are fearful of as China strengthens its ever tightening grip on Hong Kong and completely obliterates its obligations to maintain a high degree of autonomy in the region which was laid out in the Sino-British declaration in 1997.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/264610

British Citizens and United Kingdom residents can click the above links to sign either Parliamentary petition.

It is not a requirement that UK residents signing these petitions be citizens or on the electoral roll for Parliamentary elections. However, any resident entitled to sign either of the above petitions is probably also entitled to be on the electoral roll for some local elections. See link to begin to exercise this right.

The Parliamentary Website is strict about what use can be made of the details you give it, and if you give your details (name, email and postcode) to sign a petition, that is all they can be used for. They might be checked against whatever IP you use to prevent spamming or flaming of the website by hostile persons, but it's extremely unlikely that the details will be abused.

Extended Reasoning:

The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong is just one of a myriad international treaties, trade agreements, investment agreements and mineral-extraction agreements that the People's Republic of China has signed with various international partners, with a recent focus on developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and even those parts of the EU currently in economic crisis. Many of these documents are not really to the benefit of ordinary citizens in the co-signatory countries even when the PRC is keeping to the letter of the agreement it has signed. (The political elite seem to be happy in nearly every case, however. Except in Botswana, which did not sign anything!)

The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was designed, from the British point of view, primarily to benefit the citizens of Hong Kong, or at least minimise the harm done to them by the (treaty-mandated) handover of Hong Kong back to Chinese rule. The British Government signed this declaration with Communist China (the PRC) in order to honour the treaty it had signed with Imperial China in 1898.

If the PRC is allowed to break, and then get away with breaking, the Joint Declaration, this will have an immediate impact on citizens of Hong Kong, of whom there are currently about 7.4 million. However, with a precedent set for the PRC's Communist leadership to break, or even just bend, the vast number of equivalent agreements they have signed elsewhere, the long-term negative consequences would be felt, directly, by a significant proportion of the world's population and, given the preponderance of agreements concerning natural resources and their exploitation, there could well be environmental and climatic consequences that impact on the entire global population.

The logic of this is that if we are not already citizens of the PRC, we are all Hong-Kongers!

Illustrative Links:

This link is to a video presented by a South African who has lived (and married) in the PRC, and describes, briefly given the extent of the subject matter, the impact which the PRC's agreements with African countries are having, across the continent and not just in his home country. If this is what is happening now, what is going to happen when the PRC knows, for sure, that it can get away with breaking the agreements that it has signed?

Perhaps the most galling of the problems which the video presents, is the total abandonment of their own children in Africa by Chinese guest workers. Because the PRC is a Communist country, these workers will have grown up in an educational system which seeks to eliminate ideas of traditional morality as opposed to the "new morality" desired by Karl Marx. People from Hong Kong have not yet had their traditional morality brainwashed out of them and they might one day teach their mainland brethren those values, which would not allow this kind of thing! Provided, of course, that China does not in the meantime impose the mainland's educational system and values on Hong Kong. 

(If anything, this video plays down the environmental damage occasioned by logging: it has been alleged elsewhere that after the trees are felled and carried away, the topsoil is also scraped off the bedrock and exported to China. The presenter is visibly distressed to publish even the material he does, because he loves the Chinese people, but not the actions they are being led into.) 

The second link is to a video interview with a prominent opponent of the Ortega regime in Nicaragua (he's not claiming to lead anything really. He just says his piece, and it's pretty coherent too.) His principle complaint is that legislation to enable a "Nicaragua Canal" to rival the Panama Canal, was at a constitutional rather than an administrative level and effectively sought to put the entire proposed canal zone outside the jurisdiction of all of Nicaragua's existing environmental and property laws, perhaps even its criminal laws too. This comes close to making the canal zone part of the PRC. If the PRC were one day to treat its agreement with the Ortega government the same way it is currently trying to treat the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, "comes close" would turn into the actual reality of a large slice of land, of necessity bisecting South from North America, becoming de-facto Chinese territory. 

(It is also a feature of several development agreements that the PRC has signed in Asia, that zones within the co-signatory country become de-facto Chinese territory. The new Malaysian government is kicking against this, some other governments are not.)

The PRC's strategy for world domination (and People's Liberation Army officers have published academic papers plainly describing it as such) consists of using innumerable small deals, agreements, obscure clauses in contracts and so on, to get governments and companies the world over dancing to the tune of the Chinese Communist Party. We do not have to respond to this with "trade wars", let alone "military confrontation", because these are just the buzz-words which agents and supporters of the PRC will use to try and stop the world from doing anything.

For further information on the PRC's strategy for domination, see Professor Clive Hamilton's book, "Silent Invasion" which is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

What we have to do, is not dance to the PRC's tune! How we don't dance to their tune will have to evolve and be shaped by all the new ways in which they try and make us dance to their tune. Because simple refusal to dance to their tune strikes at the very core of their strategy and by-passes the defences they have built against the approach currently being taken by President Trump.

Another petition on the same subject:

This is a link to a petition "Stand With HK". Which is worthy (worth a read for the background information, too) and which the blog author has signed. However, because it was created by a Hong Kong resident, it is not and cannot be a Parliamentary Petition and this means that the UK Government is not obliged to pay it any attention, even if it garners many signatures. In addition, because it is on a non-government platform it is potentially vulnerable to being shut down, and its results may simply never get published if the account holders on that platform are detained. Which those persons themselves acknowledge to be a real possibility.

If either Parliamentary Petition gets 10,000 signatures, the UK Government has to provide and publish a response, and if it gets 100,000 signatures, an independent Parliamentary Committee will consider it for a debate in the House of Commons. The only normal reason for refusal is if a similar debate has been held already or is pending, in which case: job done! But extra signatures add extra force, regardless of Commons debates. Once published, a Parliamentary Petition is all but impossible to extinguish from the public record and the public domain, which may be very important in this instance.

NB: Quote from the second parliamentary petition: "which was laid out in the Sino-British declaration in 1997." The Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was signed on the 19th of December 1984 and came into effect in 1997.

What Lies Behind the Brexit Party's Success?

The seeds of recent success for the new Brexit Party were sown, not merely before it was founded, but before "Brexit" even entered the heads of the electorate as a possibility -which they grasped eagerly because "business as usual" was by then deeply unsatisfactory to many.

During John Major's tenure as Conservative Prime Minister, astute observers began to write "this is a Conservative government that won't conserve ANYTHING!" Many Tory voters were disquieted, especially by the strident insistence (which has never since died away) that mass development of the countryside was not only necessary but highly desirable and that it was somehow perverse and even wicked to object to even the most heavy-handed application of bulldozers to things which symbolise everything that most Tory voters hold dear. Many of them continued to not only vote Tory, but even to raise money and campaign for the Tories, because they couldn't understand why or how the Party they had been bought up to believe in, had become intent on destroying so many things which they loved. Others voted for Tony Blair, under the delusion that a "first couple" whose female half was reputed to "hate grass" (as well as cats) was going to be better.

By the time Tony Blair had run his course, the Cameron government was denouncing loyal Tory voters, fundraisers and canvassers as "NIMBYs" and "Turnip Taliban." This wasn't friendly banter, it was an expression of complete contempt, for the Tory Party's core supporters and everything they loved. Sooner or later, insufferable arrogance, contempt and disdain got through even to people whose families had been loyal Conservatives for generations. Then, Mr Cameron launched, not only a referendum on something that mattered more than anything else to himself and all those like him, but a grossly excessive and totally-one-sided blitz of propaganda and bullying making it clear what result he wanted. Loyal Tories thought about it very carefully and voted to do to Cameron what he had done and was proposing to do to the countryside and social institutions that they loved.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair had turned a Labour Party of peacelovers (not the same connotation as "pacifists") into the party of war. Not just one war, but several. He had also turned the Labour Party of the working man into a party which despised everything the working man held dear and labelled most of it as "bigotry" to be stamped out of its supporters by a largely-middle class leadership cadre. Working class Labour supporters reacted, initially, with the same sort of bewildered denial and desperate hope that all this would pass, as their Tory counterparts had done. Then, especially when several Labour councils were found to have given a free pass to child-rapists in Labour's working class heartlands as part of the crusade against bigotry, they became no less angry than the Tory supporters. Possibly just a tad more angry if anything.

Theresa May promised to deliver the Brexit that disaffected Tory and Labour supporters had voted for, but failed to even try to negotiate a free trade deal that might have mollified them and allowed Brexit to happen -and the Conservative Party's Central Office and most of its MPs did not slacken in their opposition to Brexit and shamelessly conspired with the opposition parties to thwart the democratic mandate.

And that's not all! Under Jeremy Corbyn, lifelong Labour Party members whose grandfathers had fought Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts in the streets to keep fascist thugs out of Jewish neighbourhoods, started to hear, in modernised slang, Mosley's hatred being spouted at Labour Party meetings. Chants of "Zio!" whenever someone believed to be Jewish tried to speak, or even entered the meeting room. Complaints of anti-semitism and outright harassment ignored or dealt with in a derisory manner. Labour became the stridently anti-racist party that hates Jews.

Then came Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party. The Conservative Party leaders who want to build the Oxford-Cambridge Arc (a sort of racially-integrated Soweto for the workers who won't be able to live in London but will have to travel daily to work there) and the HS2 railway upon England's green and pleasant land, and the middle-class Labour Party leaders who play at being Lenin or Stalin and who have alienated any working class person who actually works, immediately made it clear that they regarded Nigel Farage as their worst nightmare. And all the people they had systematically alienated between them, voted for him at the first chance they got .

If Mr Farage wishes to keep their support, however, he must recognise that the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties are not the only totems of the political elite that the people are fed up with: they do not want the hugely expensive and destructive HS2 and the Oxford-Cambridge Arc (and its Expressway) either. They don't want to see hard working Jews hounded, or herded, out of the country. They do not want to see cemeteries vandalised. They do not want drugs pushers and paedophiles to be given a free run at their children. They want Brexit, yes, but only as step one in getting their country back from the elite who have stolen it from them. Mr Farage needs to be here for the long-haul, not just till Halloween or even Christmas.

The blog author has a novel out, available via Amazon, Smashwords and its affiliates, as both an E-book and a Paperback.

Let's Take The Road NOT Leading to Harrowdown Hill

Image Daily Telegraph

As we face the possible demise of Brexit at the hands of Britain's established political parties, it is only natural that some, like Nigel Farage, want to start a new political party that actually exists to do the will of the British people, and that others with different motives, such as Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, wish to start new political parties of their own, to ensure that the will of the British people never again gets so close to fulfillment as it did with Brexit, before the political establishment managed to run it off the road with the wholehearted cooperation of the civil service and key figures in all the main parties. 

Working from the simple premise that it didn't want what the public wanted, the Establishment proceeded to spend two years redefining the meaning of "Brexit" until it meant something different, something that people were no longer sure they wanted, because every single aspect of it had been sabotaged with deliberate malice. At no point was there ever really a chance that any of the existing major parties would behave honestly, because that isn't in their nature. The existing major parties cater, in some "wing" or other, for just about every possible ideology, but they all have exactly the same character, which denies the British people good government by ensuring that every decision is shaped by prejudice and the rejection of objective evidence and informed debate. Given that the major parties are ostensibly bound by different prejudices, the outcome is quite remarkably uniformly poor.

For any new, honestly-conceived party to do better, requires an understanding of what is wrong with all the existing parties, and for that we need to go back in time sixteen years, to when countless lives, rather than masonic principles, were at stake. We need to go back to the decisions which culminated in Britain's leading microbiologist lying dead on Harrowdown Hill and a war, a WAR, being started on entirely false premises because any objective evidence had been willfully and systematically excluded from the decision-making process. Because the subsequent public inquiry into this prominent decision concluded that, regardless of whether that particular decision was wrong or not, the manner in which it was taken was exactly typical of all decisions taken by the Blair government -and, by extension, the slavishly copycat Cameron Government. If the decision to go to war with Iraq was flawed, so was every other Blair/Cameron decision, from education policy to fish quotas, because objective evidence, alternative views and even the evaluation of possible alternative courses of action, were never considered, even if they weren't always expunged from the record with the absolute ruthlessness shown to David Kelly and his evidence. ("An Inconvenient Death: How The Establishment Covered Up The David Kelly Affair" by Miles Goslet covers this in detail and with a closer attention to the truth than any other published account so far.)

Proponents of ideological parties always claim to be suspicious of non-ideological or "populist" parties, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they? The fact is that ideology, from whatever part of the political spectrum, is always a barrier to sound decision-making because it provides a basis for taking decisions other than an objective look at objective evidence! Suppose, for a moment, that you had a much-loved cat who was feeling poorly, and when you took him to the vet you were told: "never mind the obvious evidence that Budge has worms: I became a vet to rid the world of feline dementia because that's what I firmly believe cats suffer from and I shall be putting Budge down immediately to end his suffering!" Any vet with views like that would be struck off immediately, if not sectioned under the mental health act, but this is what most politicians are like most of the time and their ideological beliefs usually do trump the evidence in front of them. And that's before we even consider the role of corruption in bad decision-making, which may have been a somewhat greater factor in the Blair/Cameron governments than in Mrs May's or Mr Brown's governments.

An important part of this is that, undeniably, the ideological parties have to know what and where the objective evidence is, so that they can avoid having anything to do with it. So there's a powerful element of doublethink: to react to David Kelly with the vicious fury that they did, Anthony Blair and Alistair Campbell had to know that he was basically right, or they could have dealt with any threat he posed to them simply by showing that he was mistaken. The number of other people, challenging Blair's claims and decisions only to find themselves the target of a wide-ranging media smear campaign, is really quite large and illustrates that Blair and Campbell knew quite well what the damaging truths were, which they had to suppress. One cannot exactly say that they always knew they were doing the wrong thing, though, because of their power of self-delusion, but one can say that they had probably encountered all the evidence that they were doing the wrong thing, even if the encounter was only ever on the way to the office shredder.

There will be some who say that as long as your ideology is mildly right of centre, then you cannot actually go wrong. Yes you can: you can try to impose a system of local government finance that deliberately takes no notice whatsoever of any household's ability to pay, leading to widespread fury and violent protests on the streets. If you are "centre of centre" like President Macron, you can feel moved to tax the rural poor in order to improve the urban environment with subsidised public transport at no cost whatsoever to the urban elite loudly demanding a low traffic, low pollution environment, leading to widespread fury and very violent protests on the streets. If you are left of centre, like President Xi, you can go wrong by rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent people and working them to death in labour camps, save for the select few whose organs you can sell to desperate transplant patients, leading to a grim silence because nobody then dares to complain about anything. Ideology seems able to supply a catastrophically wrong answer to pretty well every question. Problems (and opportunities!) are addressed by the sprinkling of ideological fairy-dust, and it makes no difference to the real-world effectiveness of this process if the fairy dust comes from right, left or centre ideology.

According to Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, corruption is the root of everything wrong with the economy in South Africa and most other places to boot. He's very nearly right, but corruption is such a blight mainly because ideological parties are inherently incapable of addressing it effectively, here is how the different ideologies fail:

Right-wing parties see corruption entirely as a function of "big government", to which the fairy-dust solution is to simply and dogmatically make the government smaller. They tend to not recognise the possibility of corruption in private enterprise! Unfortunately, corrupt public employees are invariably better at keeping their jobs during a "rationalisation" than honest ones, due in part to their willingness to tell monstrous lies, and to them the contraction of government is merely a golden opportunity to get shot of all the whistle-blowers and more passive honest employees, whom the corrupt will always see as a lurking threat. The net result is the same amount of corruption concentrated (and more secure) in a much smaller government, which consequently performs almost no useful function at all.

Left-wing parties see corruption entirely as a function of class enemies and the fairy-dust solution is the passing of numerous anti-corruption laws and the construction of powerful state institutions dedicated to the destruction of the class enemies, which may include Jews and usually will also include Christians and quite often Muslims: Daoists if the party is very left wing indeed. The "anti-corruption" institutions will inevitably end up processing significant assets from the class enemies who are destroyed and, helped by the reign of terror the same institutions impose, this provides an ideal breeding ground for corruption to grow and flourish as never before.

The ideology of Centre Parties tends to be written around the personal agenda of the leader: becoming the first and greatest head of the world's first superstate in Anthony Blair's case and becoming the first and greatest head of the world's first superstate in the case of Immanuel Macron. (Oh dear, how will they ever work that one out peacefully!) Since the most efficient way to further personal agendas of the global domination variety is to cultivate vested interests very widely and harness them to the cause, the Centrist fairy-dust solution to corruption is to ring round all the known vested interests, seeing who they would trust (and pay for) to investigate themselves for corruption and appoint an anti-corruption commission from the resulting shortlist.

The only way to actually deal with corruption is to reach an objective understanding of what corruption consists of and who is doing it and take, rational and persistent measures to deny the culprits opportunities to receive improper advantages and to determinedly prosecute only those against whom genuine evidence can be obtained from competent, well-resourced investigation. This is very boring -no fairy dust!- and it requires effort, determination and patience as well as objectivity, but it is the only course that stands the least chance of working.

The only viable way to deal with any problem is to analyse it objectively and construct a solution that specifically addresses that problem, without trying to lazily apply ideological generalisations aka fairy dust. 

Decisions have to be taken fairly and on the basis of the available evidence and not a select subset of that evidence. Dissenting voices must be heard, not drowned out by an orchestra, whether that orchestra is the majority view or that of a powerful minority. Evidence must be sought from a variety of sources and not solely those trusted to only forward evidence supportive of one's ideological prejudices or personal agenda. Fairness and propriety must not be seen as vices!

Bullying must not be seen as strength, let alone "cool". 

The blog author has recently published, on Amazon, a novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row" in both Kindle E-book and paperback formats. The relevant author's pages are Amazon.com:

link

and 

Amazon.co.uk

link

A Smashwords edition is now available in multiple E-book formats from this link

Book Review: Silent Invasion

Silent Invasion by Professor Clive Hamilton is available via this link:

It describes, at length and in detail and with scrupulous care, how the Chinese Communist Party is exerting ever tightening control over Australian politics and public life, with the express aim of suppressing, not only criticism of China, but democracy, academic freedom, free inquiry, free speech and other traditions of Australian life which the CCP finds disagreeable and which it wants to see abolished, worldwide. It is strongly reminiscent of George Orwell's essays about the craven support of many British politicians and the massed ranks of the intelligentsia for: first Hitler and then Stalin. The fact that whilst most of Orwell's essays were five to twenty pages long, Professor Hamilton's book is far weightier (376 pages and 7422 Kindle locations) is explained by the sheer breadth and depth and the CCP's ambitions in Australia and the extent of the sellout which Australia's politicians and intelligentsia have contrived -and the patient thoroughness with which Prof. Hamilton has investigated these matters. 

It shows how Australia is being isolated from the United States and other allies (that the Commonwealth is not mentioned by Prof. Hamilton shows how successful that part of the strategy has been!) and how Australians are being told that "China is our future". Sooner or later, every country will be told that, because the CCP intends to dominate, not just Australasia, but the whole world, harking back to a mythical time when China ruled "everything under heaven". (It is mythical because Chinese emperors uniformly pretended that countries outside their control did not exist, or were already obedient to their rule. The arrival of the first British Ambassador was a rude shock, from which the CCP has evidently not recovered.)

The book is also at great pains to point out that Chinese Australians are the primary victims of all this, because the CCP aims to control their thoughts and deeds as if they were in Communist China, and many "Chinese" Australians either fled to Australia from Communist China, or were born in other, non-Communist, Chinese communities, such as Singapore. The CCP does not accept that any of them have a right to dissent in any way from CCP rule and doctrine. The CCP makes all ethnic Chinese into its shock-troops, but claims that EVERY act of resistance or even criticism is "racist". Even when the critic is himself Chinese!

Though the book is written from an entirely Australian viewpoint, it needs to be read outside Australia, because Communist China's ambitions extend beyond Australia and Australia and New Zealand are the CCP's chosen test case for controlling and subjugating free Western cultures. Or free Asian cultures, or free African cultures. (As the president of Botswana has already perceived!)

Although some of Prof. Hamilton's allies (eg: "China Uncensored") have decried "Brexit" as a tragedy and a case of Britain somehow selling the pass to the CCP, the book itself describes the transition which Greece has made, to CCP client state status, whilst remaining in the EU, with the effect that Greece now vetoes any attempt by the EU to take any ACTION at all against the CCP's human rights abuses. The implication of that is that the only way Britain will be able to make any protest about human rights abuses, or even territorial abuses, by the CCP, is from outside the EU. The CCP controls only one EU country: that is proving quite sufficient to shut the EU off as a world power critical of China!

The CCP was able to secure a veto on EU foreign policy simply by buying dockyards in Greece at fire-sale prices. This was a pretty cheap deal, and the veto will last as long as the EU does.

So, read this book, because it's in your interests to know what's going down -and the kindle version is less than half the price of the print version, so buy that- but expect to be appalled rather than enthralled. Alarm calls are never welcome, but they are infinitely better than burning to death!

Salman Ramadan Abedi: the Manchester Arena Bomber

This short post follows up on arguments put forward in an earlier post on Adrian Elms, the Westminster Bridge Killer. 

Gleaning from different reports across several newspapers: Mr Abedi's former schoolfriends say that he was a good footballer, but very short tempered and very gullible. His classmates were able to manipulate him into believing improbable things and even carrying out foolish actions, for their amusement. Short temper and gullibility can be subtle signs of brain damage, in fact. Minor brain damage is now known to be a distinct possibility when heading footballs, especially when intercepting a hard kick at goal, and there are those who would like to see deliberate headers eliminated from the game.

His more recent friends and acquaintances seem to differ on whether or not he attended the mosque frequently, but the Iman of his local mosque says that he did come, but then gave the Iman a "look of hate" when he preached against ISIS, and attended much less frequently after that. His neighbours say that Mr Abedi had taken to praying very loudly in the street in the weeks prior to the attack on the Manchester Arena. 

The friends also say he was a cannabis user: this seems to be a non-negotiable requirement before one can become a jihadee. Cannabis not only makes people paranoid: frequent use, and even the casual use of strong cannabis (skunk), seems to break down the natural barriers in the human mind against killing a fellow human being. This isn't exactly news: the "Assassins" from Persia in the middle ages, were fed strong hashish on the orders of the Sultan who controlled them. The link between cannabis and lethal violence is well established on the basis of centuries of evidence, and foolishly ignored by those, such as Liberal Democrats and the American "Alt. Right", who want to legalize its abuse.

Unlike driving a car into a crowd, making a bomb that works requires some technical skill, especially if the explosives have to be made from basic raw materials. (Welsh Nationalist terrorists, for example, used, exclusively, gelignite stolen from mines and quarries, and it took a few years for Irish Nationalists to fully master the art of making explosives from ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Even then, they generally used commercially-manufactured Semtex explosive to initiate their "co-op mix".) ISIS would want any member who actually had that explosive-making skill, to carry out more than one attack before becoming a martyr, so it is very unlikely that Mr Abedi actually made the bomb that he carried into the foyer of the Manchester Arena. At least, not alone.

If Mr Abedi was selected by a less expendable jihadee, to carry the bomb, then it seems reasonable to suppose that he wasn't picked at random, over the internet, but instead nominated and recruited by somebody who knew him quite well, perhaps a former classmate who remembered how unusually gullible and easily manipulated he had been at school. 

There are probably two or three bomb-makers/organizers, and perhaps several mentally-ill and drug-addicted "bomb mules," still to find. The experience from Palestine, is that suicide bombers can be heavily manipulated, or coerced, into carrying out attacks, but it's always going to be the mentally or socially susceptible ones who will be chosen for this purpose. Coerced suicide bombers frequently surrender to Israeli forces at the last moment, rather than kill innocent people.

It has just emerged that Mr Abedi had expressed pro-terrorist views at college, and that at least two people had telephoned the anti-terrorist hotline about him a few years ago.

Update: 25/5/2017  It is becoming apparent that if anyone was manipulating Salman Abedi into adopting terrorist ideology and carrying out a terrorist act, it was his father and brothers, who are now all in custody in Tripoli and Manchester. There's probably not the slightest chance that they would have carried out a suicide attack themselves.

Update: 4/5/2017  The bomb that Salman Abedi used, was the same design as that used by the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade De France in Paris many months earlier, it is not true to say that he acted completely alone.

Slingshot Channel: Reuploaded

The video which caused the Mail on Sunday to (somewhat foolishly and with gross misrepresentation) attack the Slingshot Channel, has been lightly re-edited on the advice of You Tube officials and re-uploaded. See this link for this blog's original article on that subject.

The main body of the video hasn't been changed, however, and it is clear from watching it, that it was always intended to be a consumer test of a "stab vest" that was being sold via Amazon to the general public, and that actual police stab vests are probably an order of magnitude tougher. It is also obvious that the aluminium plates which are the vest's main form of protection, are not hardened in any way. The vest is priced at around e70 and very cheaply made.

It was an outright and deliberate lie that "it was the same type of vest that PC Palmer wore when he was murdered." It is also the case that Adrian Elms made no attempt to penetrate the vest that PC Palmer wore: he stabbed PC Palmer in places where the vest offered no protection in the first place. It is further worth noting that a lot of bladed weapon murders have been carried out with a stab to the groin to sever the femoral artery (one such was the murder of someone the blog author knew) and almost no police or civilian body armour in widespread use protects against that.

About the only body armour that does protect the femoral artery to some extent is the sort that the late Princess Diana wore in the famous "minefield" photographs taken in Angola. It has a separate plate hanging down to protect the groin area. (From landmine shrapnel in this instance, but the hardened plate would deflect a blade.)

Picture Credit: Reuters

This kind of protection is essential where anti-personnel mines are concerned, because many of them are designed to direct shrapnel at the groin area precisely in order to attack the femoral artery, but there's very little point in "stab-proof" armour that doesn't protect against the sort of wound that killed, for example: Stephen Lawrence, Frank Cox and Damilola Taylor. (In both the Cox and Taylor cases, defendants were able to successfully argue that the directly fatal wound was "accidental", something which simply isn't believed by either victim's families. Vocational criminals, even teenage ones, generally do know to stab for the femoral artery in order to kill. It was a move well known to 18th century duelists.)