A Healthy Dose

Ann Pettifor was on fine form on The Daily Politics. If there was the money to bail out the banks, then there is the money to fund the NHS.

That is in any case funded by weekly gilt issues on the international capital markets, from which are created the taxpaying jobs of the Health Service's workers.

"Jeremy Corbyn Has Annoyed Everyone In Northern Ireland"?

The people saying this never objected when Margaret Thatcher upset everyone in Northern Ireland. Upsetting everyone in Northern Ireland probably means that you are doing something right.

In any case, who is this "everyone"? In a short speech, Corbyn has annoyed every party in Northern Ireland, not at all a difficult thing to do. But there is no reason to assume that he has annoyed anyone else. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Shot Down

Is Russia trying to bury the MH17 story with its hoaxing of Boris Johnson, a story that Guido Fawkes is pitifully trying to spin in Johnson's favour? No, not really. It is just that, like the Skripals, no one is very interested in MH17 anymore.

Now, if the Russian State tried to murder Yulia Skripal and her father, or even if she merely believes that it did, then why does she want to go back to Russia eventually?

Trial Date Watch: Day 30

More than six weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served three months even of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 85

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Ireland and the "Ensoulment" Myth

Catherine Lafferty writes:

On May 25, Irish citizens will vote on a referendum on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution. The Eighth Amendment, which bans abortion except when the life of the mother is at risk, is the last vestige of Catholic Ireland to be enshrined in law.

The fact that it has survived so long is testament to the strength of the Church’s foundations in that verdant island. The Catholic Church has so totally conditioned attitudes toward abortion in Ireland that in order to smash the Eighth, abortion proponents have had to construct a parody Church—complete with false but plausible doctrine and a false but plausible history.

A false account of the Catholic Church’s historic stance on abortion has been in circulation for decades. There is an astroturf anti-Catholic organization, “Catholics” for Choice, funded by plutocratic foundations, dedicated to its dissemination. Legislators use its briefings, news programs interview its spokespersons, and advertising campaigns carry its expensive posters. A devious blend of fact and fiction, the false history of the Catholic Church and abortion goes like this:

The Catholic Church has not always totally condemned abortion. In the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that male embryos became ensouled at 40 days and female embryos became ensouled at 80 days. The Church came to prohibit abortion only in the nineteenth century.

This lie is peddled frequently by Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for the Irish Times. McGarry has written: “The Catholic Church’s current position on abortion was established only 143 years ago, in 1869[, when] Pope Pius IX outlawed abortion from the moment of conception.” 

On another occasion, McGarry wrote: “For the greater part of its 2,000 year history until 1869, [the Church] taught that no homicide was involved if abortion took place before the foetus was infused with a soul.” 

Again: “Some of the greatest theologians in the Christian tradition … taught that ensoulment took place at ‘quickening,’ when the mother detected the child move inside her womb for the first time.” All this sounds plausible. But it is a tissue of half-truths and falsehoods.

The Catholic Church’s total and constant prohibition on abortion dates back to its earliest days. The Didache, which dates from the first century, contains a stern admonition never to murder a child, born or unborn.

As to the notion that abortion before “ensoulment” was considered licit by the Church: The notion of delayed ensoulment was based on the erroneous biology of Aristotle and a mistranslation of the Old Testament (Exodus 21:22). And no one in Aquinas’s day considered it an argument in favor of early abortion.

Aquinas, like Sts. Augustine and Jerome before him, opposed abortion without exception. Lacking modern medical knowledge, these doctors of the Church did not construe abortion before animation as homicide in the strict sense—but they condemned it as a grave wrong and as akin to homicide.

At the heart of the false history of the Church is the appeal to medieval speculations about the ensoulment of the fetus. This is the reddest of herrings, for ensoulment has never been a teaching of the Church. The utility of the theory in canon law was a matter of separating a gravely sinful action—early abortion—from an excommunicable sinful action—later abortion.

Hence, from 1591 until 1869, the penalty of excommunication applied to abortions procured on an “animated foetus”—that is, a fetus more than 40 days old in the case of males, more than 80 in the case of females. 

In 1869, Pius IX imposed the penalty of excommunication for abortions procured at any point, from conception onward. Prior to 1869, however, abortions procured prior to 40 or 80 days had still been considered gravely sinful. As St. Basil put it, “the woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder; with us there is no hairsplitting distinction as to its being formed or unformed.” 

The “ensoulment” myth is an example of false history and one well suited to our times—disseminated by the mendacious and relied upon by Catholics who want to have their cake and eat it too. Its persistence tells us a great deal about modern preoccupations, and nothing at all about the past.

Yulia Skripal and the Salisbury WUT

Craig Murray writes:

It was happy to see Yulia alive and looking reasonably well yesterday, if understandably stressed. Notably, and in sharp contrast to Litvinenko, she levelled no accusations at Russia or anybody else for her poisoning.

In Russian she spoke quite naturally. Of the Russian Embassy she said very simply “I am not ready, I do not want their help”. Strangely this is again translated in the Reuters subtitles by the strangulated officialese of “I do not wish to avail myself of their services”, as originally stated in the unnatural Metropolitan Police statement issued on her behalf weeks ago. 

“I do not wish to avail myself of their services” is simply not a translation of what she says in Russian and totally misses the “I am not ready” opening phrase of that sentence. My conclusion is that Yulia’s statement was written by a British official and then translated to Russian for her to speak, rather than the other way round. Also that rather than translate what she said in Russian themselves for the subtitles, Reuters have subtitled using a British government script they have been given.

It would of course have been much more convincing had Sergei also been present. Duress cannot be ruled out when he is held by the British authorities. I remain extremely suspicious that, at the very first chance she got in hospital, Yulia managed to get hold of a telephone (we don’t know how, it was not her own and she has not had access to one since) and phone her cousin Viktoria, yet since then the Skripals have made no attempt to contact their family in Russia.

That includes no contact to Sergei’s aged mum, Yulia’s grandmother, who Viktoria cares for. Sergei normally calls his mother – who is 89 – regularly. This lack of contact is a worrying sign that the Skripals may be prevented from free communication to the outside world. Yulia’s controlled and scripted performance makes that more rather than less likely.

It is to me particularly concerning that Yulia does not seem to have social media access. The security services have the ability to give her internet risk free through impenetrable VPN. But they appear not to have done that. 

We know a little more about the Salisbury attack now:

Nobody – not Porton Down, not the OPCW – has been able to state that the nerve agent found was of Russian manufacture, a fact which the MSM continues to disgracefully fudge with “developed in Russia” phrasing.

As is now well known and was reported by Iran in scientific literature, Iran synthesised five novichoks recently. More importantly, the German spying agency BND obtained novichok in the 1990s and it was studied and synthesised in several NATO countries, almost certainly including the UK and USA. 

In 1998, chemical formulae for novichok were introduced into the United States NIST National Institute of Standards and Technologies Mass Spectrometry Library database by U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical and Biological Defense Command, but the entry was later deleted. In 2009 Hillary Clinton instructed US diplomats to feign ignorance of novichoks, as revealed by the last paragraph of this Wikileaks released diplomatic cable.

Most telling was the Sky News interview with the head of Porton Down. Interviewer Paul Kelso repeatedly pressed Aitkenhead directly on whether the novichok could have come from Porton Down. Aitkenhead replies “There is no way, anything like that could…leave these four walls. We deal with a number of toxic substances in the work that we do, we’ve got the highest levels of security and controls”.

Asked again twice, he each times says the security is so tight “the substance” could not have come from Porton Down. What Aitkenhead does NOT say is “of course it could not have come from here, we have never made it”. Indeed Aitkenhead’s repeated assertion that the security would never have let it out, is tantamount to an admission Porton Down does produce novichok. 

If somebody asked you whether the lion that savaged somebody came from your garden, would you reply “Don’t be stupid, I don’t have a lion in my garden” or would you say, repeatedly, “Of course not, I have a very strong lion cage?”. Here you can see Mr Aitkenhead explain repeatedly he has a big lion cage, from 2’25” in.

  So the question of where the nerve agent was made remains unresolved. The MSM has continually attempted to lie about this and affirm that all novichok is Russian made. The worst of corporate and state journalism in the UK was exposed when they took the OPCW’s report that it confirmed the findings of Porton Down and presented that as confirming the Johnson/May assertion that it was Russia, whereas the findings of Porton Down were actually – as the Aitkenhead interview stated categorically – that they could not say where it was made. 

The other relatively new development is the knowledge that Skripal had not retired but was active for MI6 on gigs briefing overseas intelligence agencies about Russia. This did not increase his threat to Russia, as he told everything he knows a decade ago. But it could provide an element of annoyance that would indeed increase Russian official desire to punish him further.

But the fact he was still very much active has a far greater significance. The government slapped a D(SMA) noticeon the identity of Pablo Miller, Skripal’s former MI6 handler who lives close by in Salisbury and who worked for Christopher Steele’s Orbis Intelligence at the time that Orbis produced the extremely unreliable dossier on Trump/Russia. The fact that Skripal had not retired but was still briefing on Russia, to me raises to a near certainty the likelihood that Skripal worked with Miller on the Trump dossier.

I have to say that, as a former Ambassador in the former Soviet Union trained in intelligence analysis and familiar with MI6 intelligence out of Moscow, I agree with every word of this professional dissection of the Orbis Trump dossier by Paul Roderick Gregory, irrespective of Gregory’s politics. In particular this paragraph, which Gregory wrote more than a year before the Salisbury attack, certainly applies to much of the dossier.

I have picked out just a few excerpts from the Orbis report. It was written, in my opinion, not by an ex British intelligence officer but by a Russian trained in the KGB tradition. It is full of names, dates, meetings, quarrels, and events that are hearsay (one an overheard conversation). It is a collection of “this important person” said this to “another important person.” There is no record; no informant is identified by name or by more than a generic title. The report appears to fail the veracity test in the one instance of a purported meeting in which names, dates, and location are provided. Some of the stories are so bizarre (the Rosneft bribe) that they fail the laugh test. Yet, there appears to be a desire on the part of some media and Trump opponents on both sides of the aisle to picture the Orbis report as genuine but unverifiable.

The Russian ex-intelligence officer who we know was in extremely close contact with Orbis at the time the report was written, was Sergei Skripal.

The Orbis report is mince. Skripal knew it was mince and how it was written. Skripal has a history of selling secrets to the highest bidder. The Trump camp has a lot of money. My opinion is that as the Mueller investigation stutters towards ignominious failure, Skripal became a loose end that Orbis/MI6/CIA/Clinton (take your pick) wanted tied off. That seems to me at least as likely as a Russian state assassination. To say Russia is the only possible suspect is nonsense.

The Incompetence Factor 

The contradiction between the claim that the nerve agent was so pure it could only be manufactured by a state agent, and yet that it failed because it was administered in an amateur and incompetent fashion, does not bother the mainstream media. Boris Johnson claimed that the UK had evidence that Russia had a ten year programme of stockpiling secret novichok and he had a copy of a Russian assassination manual specifying administration by doorknob.

Yet we are asked to believe that the Russians failed to notice that administration by doorknob does not actually work, especially in the rain. How two people both touched the doorknob in closing the door is also unexplained, as is how one policeman became poisoned by the doorknob but numerous others did not.

The explanations by establishment stooges of how this “ten times more powerful than VX” nerve agent only works very slowly, but then very quickly, if it touches the skin, and still does not actually kill you, have struck me as simply desperate. They make May’s ringing claims of a weapon of mass destruction being used on British soil appear somewhat unjustified. Weapon of Upset Tummy does not sound quite so exciting.

To paint a doorknob with something that if it touches you can kill you requires great care and much protective gear. That no strangely dressed individual has been identified by the investigation – which seems to be getting nowhere in identifying the culprit – is the key fact here. None of us know who did this. The finger-pointing at Russia by corporate and state interests seeking to stoke the Cold War is disgusting.