Kindness is Political II

Kindness is Political II

Billions of people, old and young, women, men and children behave with kindness and grace, with respect and honesty in trillions of small interactions, pottering around in life, looking after one another, and that extends to many larger actions and wider contexts.  Every second of every minute of every day. A lot more people are being kind than are being cruel.

Kindness.  Sharing some food.

I would like to see a news channel reflect that kindness that happens everywhere, in each country, a 24 hour rolling kindnesses being presented as they are. That would be encouraging. . 

Kindness.  Listening and hearing,

Our ancestral past has been as egalitarian or partnership human communities, in diverse forms of many, many highly functional social organisation systems, from nomad to dweller, from gatherer to gardener. 

The human species is is superbly evolved for egalitarian behaviour.

Bullying is unkind, and quite obviously dysfunctional. Egalitarian peoples do not bully. No one is evolved to be bullied. No one is evolved to be a bully. We are evolved to be kind, co-operative, intelligent, well balanced psychologically, grounded and practical, curious and creative. Being bullied causes disease. Bullying is a behavioural dis-ease.

These -  kindness co-operation, intelligence, well balanced psychologically, grounded and practical, curious and creative are all bio-logical mandates for optimal human health, individually and collectively. 

The evolved, genetic space is there for Human Kindness.

"News of The Kind"

"Kind News"

"The Daily Kindness"

Kindness o'clock.

The decision to be kind is perhaps one of the least energy demanding changes anyone of us can make.

It is just a decision, after all.

The decision to be kind is one decision from which flows a series of decisions, actions with outcomes,  and the need for constant reflection, because the context within which the kindness will be done will contain questions, problems to resolve.

Kindness is taking everything into consideration, without favour or bias.

Kindness would be the News Press and Media and Government making it clear, in the most humane interest of the people of the nation  that there are 11 million adults in the UK with one chronic disease condition, of which 3.8 million are struck with two or more conditions, and there are 1.3 million children who have one or more chronic disease conditions. 

So that is about 4 million people for whom the risk posed by the Corona Virus (sarscov2) is quite significant. Lacking a vaccine or preventative medicine, those 4 million people can only be protected by never , ever meeting the virus.

Stop the spread, Spread the Love. Kindness. Care Homes ought to be the very essence of kindness.

Unclear COVID19 regulations, misinformation and evasion of responsibility combine to usher in 'accidental cruelties' that are not addressed.

Listening this afternoon to Sheela Fogarty on LBC in the UK, the stories of people's experiences with their elder parents and relatives were gut wrenching, one after the other. Detail after detail missed. Pain, trauma, confusion, terror and anger are being caused by Government policy because it is inadequate and impervious to all calls for help, for paying attention to the detail.

 It is unkind that Government practice is to not challenge the spreaders of misinformation, to not lay out the clear evidence led needs, and then fail to provide for them beyond merely adequate. Every effort must be taken to care kindly. DNR notices are a bureaucratic unkindness.

When public news media, politicians and others in the 'wordysphere' - the public domain policy debate arena - use such careless language "that 'some' people are 'more' vulnerable, yes  - and most people will have have no sickness or symptoms, so it's still safe to open up and save the economy." That assessment  is dismissive of the pertinent facts.

That deployment of such a caricature as a general narrative avoids explaining in very clear terms that there is a high risk is to a significant proportion of the UK population, close to 6% of the total, with a medium risk to another 13%.

19% of the population at risk is not 'some people are at risk' is it?

Detail in Kindness.

This is important because life is truly intimate for each of us, it is    equally intense for each and everyone of us and for that lived detail to be blotted out by a caricature publicly disseminated is abusive. One cannot blot out the detail of a person, or the detail, complex as it is, of hundreds of millions of persons, just to make a point.

Well, yes people do, and it is seriously unkind.

It's also living in a dark fantasy dystopian delusion, and completely out of touch with the social material reality of ordinary people, the 7 billion or more of my brothers and sisters born into this.

We are not caricatures, generalisations, stereotypes.

We are people. We mostly do kindness.

Community Transmission.

When the virus is travelling in the community, and the community is not tight, it will find it's way into the vulnerable population. Thus achieving zero community transmission with really effective treatment of any outbreaks or clusters is the most logical, efficacious and proven approach. Yes, it was easier, for example in New Zealand, earlier on, and the UK missed that boat,  yet it is also true that it is not too late to start, now. 

We are nowhere near mythical 'herd immunity'.

Vaccines are a distant horizon, not an assured future with a clear timetable. Work is ongoing, and will continue for some time.

5 million lovely people who are at severe risk, with potential adverse health repercussions for another 8 million people. And the unlucky healthy who might contract the full disease, and the long-covid sequalae.

So much detail.

Kindness.

We are learning as we go.

So yes, given that 21% of UK population is way,way more persons, real people than 'some people get ill from CoVid19' that is why we must act with caution. 

Government/State and everyone else ought to be supporting zero community transmission, and quarantine borders, for the duration. We know it can work, and save lives, help communities, businesses and economies work through the 'demic, safely.

Kindly, of course. 

This is no time to panic. 

Calma!

That is I think that why zero community transmission practice (especially  because we know it can work without year long shutdowns) is necessary - start now, why not?

Kindness is honesty and transparency.

I was quite ill with COVDI19, and was fortunate enough to recover. It did frighten me to be that ill, that uncertain. I stayed home, took Vitamin C and D, lots of ginger and lemon, fluids, steam baths, soups etc and I rested and I let the fever run it's course, I lost two stone in 5 weeks, and stayed mostly in bed. I tried to be as kind as I could to myself. Bugger the bills! They can wait! If I am not here, they won't be paid! Wearing a mask seemed like a small effort to help reduce the spread, as I studied the East Asian countries response, the Chinese errors and how they responded and corrected them, how different governments engaged with the people to stop uncontrolled community transmission.

Kindness,  if it is present, is ever present including throughout individual moods, temperament or feelings. Of course we go through moods of grumpy, out of sorts, depressed, angry, sad, teary-ness.

The kindness never goes away.

Kindness could be a culture.

Kindness is Political.

Kindness is de-militarisation.

Kindness is abolishing poverty.

Kindness is ensuring unfettered access to clean water, secure habitation, clean environment, regenerative agriculture, local food security for all our peoples, and environmentally for all others.

Kindness is supporting parents with their babies, infants, toddlers and young children by affirming healthy attachment bonding and emotional development - the community looks after everyone who is a carer, so that are cared for, those who are vulnerable are never unduly stressed. Their condition is already enough to bear. That is kindness.

Kindness is making products that last a generation, kindness is making products that can also be fully recycled or re-used at end of use-life.

Kindness is repairing land that has been poisoned, degraded, destroyed - finally paying those costs the accountants 'externalised' during the last two centuries of industrialised production and profit gouging.

Kindness is creating regenerative, nurturing work that I want to do because I can see the benefit in immediate, short and long term perspectives and I know this work supports all life, and within it all human community. There is much healthy work to be done. I would happily work the food forests of a permaculture project. I would happily assist in cleaning damaged lands. What would you do?

Kindness is abolishing structural poverty and ceasing warfare at the same time, turning the war budget into a regeneration budget, as a gift to future generations.

I think that is a first step in any 'revolution'.

Remove the whip. Stop the fight.

No more wars.

Kindness is paying close attention to disagreements of opinion and fact between friends and associates that become weaponised - our friendships are more important than our opinions, especially about matters very few of us can directly affect.  I get we feel the world we are in, all of us, intensely. All of us.

What to do, to chill?

How do I ease the pressure I feel when I am triggered?

The price of wheat is beyond your remit.  Neither of us can anything about the price of wheat.

The starting and ending of wars is beyond my remit. No one I know has been able to stop a war.

Stopping money laundering is not something a few of us could knock up in a weekend workshop and a media campaign.

True, a well organised political grass roots of working and middle class communities in solidarity could  shift the balance of power. It has been done before. 

Distraction.

Micro-targeting aka Hearts and Minds, psychology as a weapons system.

Everyone online leaves a trace of  their activity - we are broadcasting and receiving and everything is logged, measured, banked.

 Online is an advertising media world, drawing attention to content around which advertisements are embedded.

A bit like rodents and their urine, we make trails we re-use, we leave traces. These trails are also data points. Data points are what marketeers aim at.

I like images of kittens, I like guns and own three, I drive a Ford, I live at a certain address, my income is median range, I  like America, UK and Australia and I am suspicious of Russia, China, India, I eat meat, I wear chino's, I react to images, I get angry in on line chats, I leave the computer on for 24 hours every day,I commute, I shop at Walmart, I use credit card and a debit card, I have a mortgage on a  property worth £500,000, I have blue eye, blonde hair, I wear contact lenses, I like reggae but not folk, I did an online course,  and so on.... thousands of data points that can be used to sell at me. Everyone leaves a trail to be examined and exploited. Because PR marketing is exploitative to it's core.

Micro-targeting is marketeers aiming at your data point or a whole series of data points. A cat on the scent of a particular rat. Or a 'tribe' of rats.

What the Cambridge Analytica story revealed was the precision of the techniques, the scope and the adverse effect of the billionaire funded  'industrial political whispering-bullshit-in-someones-ear-at-the-party-to-start-some-shit-we-can-exploit' where 'ear-at-the-party' is our online experience and what we unwittingly expose ourselves to by revealing all this information.

This psychological industrial warfare has expanded over the last 6 years and is some respects has become automated, and it is is widespread. That behaviour, in any setting, is abuse.

Hyper-normalisation. 

Any family with someone behaving like that has to take action.  

So too a culture, or a country. If that level of personal manipulation is being weaponised as a political trigger, and nobody in the legislature or judiciary is moving to stop that then we can say that Democracy is null and void for the duration. Democracy if it exists, is transparent. Lacking transparency, it becomes a toxic mime, where we have no real power to make changes in our legislatures that would prevent abuse and exploitation.

Yes, whispering in the ears of millions of people, knowing  they are triggering peoples fears, frightening and angering these people deliberately so that they can exploit the reaction-addiction is abuse. That's what marketing and news marketing and media marketing and religious marketing do, and it is all cruelty for profit and power. Unkindness.

To deliberately undermine kindness in the community is cruelty. 

Unkindness.

Bullies in power are adept at finding ways through story and narrative to stimulate a persons hormone stasis. Mood control.

"Immigrants!"

This repeat activity then is used to alter behaviour over time through inviting the target to  'debate', to engage, and then feeding contest that suggests 'argument',  tweaking the content, refining it, followed by material that draws in other supporters to generate Social Hatred Opposition Conflict Kink,  us/them polarisation,  all fueled with verbal and visual fight or flight triggering, with most of the targeted, and those who  'oppose' them, all entirely unaware this is happening all around them.

Like someone's in the room stirring the shit in everybody's ears, and it's working, good friends are getting cross at each other, and not wanting to spend time together... not good.

It's been  used in digital marketing for ages to increase traffic.The Internet of Beefs.

 Weaponised and industrialised as a political tool.

Kindness is deciding to act, remembering that context. 

Kindness is  deciding it's ok to turn down the noise, balance up the signal.

So remember 11 million adults, 1.3 million children within the UK are vulnerable, and we all need to look after them, the way they would if we were in need.

Kindness is indeed political.

Kindest regards 

 Corneilius 

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Child Abuse is a cultural marker across all known hierarchy or dominator cultures- Qanon is a political cultural weapon, and does nothing to protect children.

There are abusers - people who exploit and cause harm to other people - in every political party. 

And when it comes to child abuse we know that there are abusers in many, many family homes, many institutional settings, be they left, right, centrist or apolitical. The vast majority of child abuse in perpetrated against children by people they know, often trusted people within their family and community.

Using the issue of child abuse as a partisan political weapon does not help confront the truth of abuse in general and child abuse in particular as it stands within THIS culture. 

I think it inhibits that confrontation. In fact in over 30 years of confronting the abuse I endured, this is really clear. Turning abuse in to a partisan political weapon does nothing to reduce abuse.

The system of power understands that when people stop arguing, and begin to listen to one another, in order to build bridges, to deepen understanding, to learn from each others experience, then the system of power is in trouble.

“If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. 

Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect.

Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy.

And in the meantime, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re all in it together against Lord Voldemort and the House Slytherin.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

So lets look at some of the data, the evidence to discern some of the truth here.

An Epidemiological Overview of Child Sexual Abuse - 2014

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311357/ 

 "The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.[1] 

The Center's for Disease Control and the US Department of Justice conducted a study in the US and reported prevalence of being forced to have sex at some point of time in their lives as 11% and 4% of the high-school girls and boys, respectively.[7] 

 A meta-analysis conducted in the year 2009 analyzed 65 studies in 22 countries and estimated an “overall international figure.” 

 The main findings of the study were:[7] An estimated 7.9% of males and 19.7% of females universally faced sexual abuse before the age of 18 years[7] 

The highest prevalence rate of CSA was seen in Africa (34.4%)[7,8] 

Europe, America, and Asia had prevalence rate of 9.2%, 10.1%, and 23.9%, respectively[7] 

With regards to females, seven countries reported prevalence rates as being more than one fifth i.e., 37.8% in Australia, 32.2% in Costa Rica, 31% in Tanzania, 30.7% in Israel, 28.1% in Sweden, 25.3% in the US, and 24.2% in Switzerland[7] 

The lowest rate observed for males may be imprecise to some extent because of under reporting.[7] 

The study concluded that CSA is an extensive problem and even the lowest prevalence includes a huge number of victims who still need to be considered.[7]" 

The reader can read the paper, and check each of the references for him or herself.

Egalitarian cultures do not abuse children. 

Hierarchy cultures do. 

Dominator cultures do.

Traumatised cultures do.

source : www.violence.de

It is that simple.

Only honesty and transparency can resolve this matter.

 Honesty is evidence led, transparency is evidence revealed in the open, without bias.

Everyone using child abuse as a partisan political weapon is being dishonest - political weaponisation of CSA/CSE  is small minded and abusive - and they are dumping all over the work of survivors and their advocates, the people who go to court, who pursue justice diligently.

Those who use CSE/CSA as a political weapon are dumping all over the people who work with survivors to help them 'recover' and regain some semblance of safety and balance and the people who work to prevent child abuse. 

Those who use CSA/CSE as a political weapon are exploiting the survivors, the harm caused and they are inhibiting accurate and honest discourse on this subject.

Dealing with proven abusers.

Everyone who is proven be an abuser needs to be sentenced, and imprisoned, just as everyone who makes and spreads images of child abuse needs to be incarcerated, not as punishment, but as a fundamental societal  health and safety protocol.

Punishment does not prevent abuse. It's already too late by the stage of courts and convictions. It is true that incarcerated abusers are no longer able to abuse children freely. That is a  useful gain in the overall picture. But it is not grass roots prevention. It is important to consider what is needed to prevent child abuse.

 People who abuse children and exploit them are not safe for society. Period. 

 So too with War Criminals.  They are not safe for society.

Tony Blair and George Bush are personally responsible for the murder of at least 250,000 children in Iraq in 2003 -2006, and they are personally responsible for the orphaning of 4 million Iraqi children. 

How does that harm compare with the quantity of harms caused by Epstein or Savile, or any other case of celebrity abusers?   It is certain that in each case of abuse or harm, the harmed child sees little difference. However at the societal level there is a vast difference. This is not to suggest the Saviles and Epsteins get a free pass by comparison.

If, as the allegations suggest, Epstein's operation was about entrapment and exploitation of powerful people as a political weapon, as a whip, then it is ironic that Qanon et al use the abuse as a political weapon. 

 How many more ordinary, non celebrity people rape children, most often their own, or their relatives or friends children? Neither of these questions are posed to afford celebrity abusers any excuse or mitigation. 

Left/Right makes no difference: the abuse can and does happen in any political grouping or affiliation, any religious group or affiliation. 

Honesty and transparency do make a difference. 

 Accurate data and verifiable evidence do make a difference. 

Understanding the issues, the context and the evidence as a whole does make a difference.

Using the issue of abuse as a partisan political weapon does not help confront the truth of abuse as it stands within THIS culture. 

Here's a few resources on this subject.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485398/ - The relationship between egalitarianism, dominance, and violence in intimate relationships

https://sweden.se/society/smacking-banned-since-1979/ - Sweden Bans smacking children

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/ - a study of  our egalitarian past

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/sexual-abuse-and-memory/- A letter to Alice Miller from a Survivor. Alice Miller studied child abuse from a cultural historical perspective.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/connect/crypower/episode8/ - Colm O'Gorman — the Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland — about his own experiences of sexual assault, the world-changing power of individual action, and the extraordinary story of how he sued the Pope.

https://www.oneinfour.org.uk/about-oneinfour/ - One in Four specializes in supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse, and particularly survivors of child sexual abuse and trauma.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/26542319-the-body-keeps-the-score-brain-mind-and-body-in-the-healing-of-trauma - The Body Keeps The Score - A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

www.violence.de - The origins of peace and violence, this site looks at the work of James W Prescott, who with John Bowlby developed the first Attachment Theory back in teh 1960s.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/44171.Judith_Lewis_Herman - Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

https://www.d2l.org/the-issue/statistics/- The statistics and facts below can help you understand what child sexual abuse is, the risk factors and consequences for survivors, and how to identify and report suspected abuse

 Kindest regards 

 Corneilius 

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Children as spreaders of SARSCOV2 - poverty, universal basic income, shopping and billionaires status - get back to work!

It's that time of the year, when children return to school, after the summer holidays..

Except this year there were no 'summer holidays' as schooling has been severely restricted due to the novel SARSCOV2 virus pandemic and the impact of the disease it can cause in some people, which we call COVID19.

And this has impacted tourism hugely, so many 'holiday' assumptions have been put to the most severe test. The coast of Scotland is not quite the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, is it Boris? Midges and Bell tents!

This video looks at evidence relating to children as spreaders of the virus.



At this stage the understanding is that the disease has worst impacts on older folk, and especially those with multiple chronic disease conditions that undermine immune system response. 

In essence it means this is a virus that has greater impact on older health-vulnerable people than on young, healthy people. Everyone at any age can 'get' a cold or 'flu, and show pretty severe symptoms, enough to require lots of rest, sleep, fluids and a healthy immune system and recover within a week or so. 

Most will recover. Flu can push some people with existing conditions into the most severe condition, exacerbating the situation and causing death.

With SARSCOV2 the recovery rate of disease level symptoms reduces with age and co-morbidity. 

Younger people who are infected can and do experience no symptoms or very mild symptoms and this has lead to certain assumptions about the disease spread with regards to children.

The first being that it does not affect children so much. The data supports this so far.

However, that assumption is also being used to suggest that school ought to press ahead, that it is 

'safe' for children to do so.

This policy ignores the risk of children as super spreaders and  is being driven by 'we need parents to get back to work to protect the economy' which is being driven by Hedge Funds and billionaires whose fortunes rest on the shopping of workers.

These are not public health considerations.

Children are potentially super spreaders. That is the suggestion in this video. It is well known that children spread flu and colds, that such minor illnesses spread rapidly within schools and families. Even if the virus has minimal impact on children, it can be spread by children to older folk who are vulnerable. That is a real risk.

Everything we do to reduce community transmission makes sense as public health policy.

At the present the most effective measures are physical distancing, mask wearing in crowded indoor areas, personal hygiene, avoiding large gatherings of any kind. These all impact a range of activities, including consumer shopping, education, live performance for audiences, public transport, air travel and of course the operations of health care systems.

Shut downs are an essential tool where community transmission is out of control.

They limit the spread. The only causation reason for shut downs is inadequate action taken to limit the spread of the infection. Shut downs have no other driver. Shut downs can be avoided with effective action - personal hygiene, hand washing, mask wearing, physical distancing.

That said, the economic impact of shutting down a community  is intense. Businesses cannot operate as they have done, and for many small and medium businesses this is catastrophic. Therefore Government, having a duty of care to the people, has to support the shut down, and guarantee people's incomes for the duration of the shutdown.

Pushing people to work  in ways that increase risk of uncontrolled community transmission so that billionaires and hedge funds stability and wealth creation opportunity is  preserved is not a public health consideration. 

 It is a wealth accrual issue. It is also a political power issue because billionaires have undue influence in Government in order to protect their interests over the interests of the whole community and the commons.

Ensuring workers can pay rent, buy food and stay home, safely is a public health consideration.

If we look at workers income as a public health issue the first and most obvious insight is that poverty undermines health and sanity - thus the correct response is to abolish poverty.  No amount of medical care can avoid the chronic stress health outcomes of poverty as efficaciously as abolishing poverty. 

Universal Basic Income.

Not a popular project within Industrialised Countries or among those who are wealthy, and especially those whose wealth is built on workers shopping. The resistance to Universal Basic Income - a living wage for doing nothing other than being alive - is immense. But it is not coming from ordinary folk. The resistance to that concept is coming from all those who earn lots of money from low wage, shitty, boring, mundane, dangerous and physically stressful work of hundreds of thousands, of millions of workers.

Picking vegetables. Assembling mobile phones. Combat troops on active duty. Dustbin collectors. McDonalds staff. Security guards. Cleaners and porters.

Because structural poverty is a whip - it pushes you out your front door, every day, to avoid eviction, starvation, energy poverty, chronic stress, depression, insanity, and ultimately a very painful, terrifying unhappy death. You will do any shitty job, and put up with being bullied and exploited, in order to not die of lack of food, lack of water, lack of shelter. Fair enough. 

But is it just that you are forced into that situation by deliberate structures of economic power?

Who does the economy truly serve?

Who does the school system serve?

COVID19 raises a lot of very interesting questions - it also reveals that people are kinder than their Governments.

Keep your children safe. Watch carefully what happens. Check and double check what schools are doing to reduce transmission of the virus, and if they do not satisfy the science,  they are not doing the work they ought to be doing. Better that  they have no children, than children are put in a position of causing harm, inadvertently, to their relatives, and to the wider community.

A position that is wholly avoidable. Without doing full shut down.

Remote tuition, smaller classes, less frequent classes, home learning are all proven effective. Children in school one day a week, to reduce or prevent spread of the virus, is totally doable. Many families are seeing benefits, and some experience problems - these can be resolved with careful attention to the detail in each case. 

Gavin Williamson.

In a previous blog I looked at the presentation by Gavin Williamson urging children back to school in mid May 2020. I detailed the tactical grooming devices Williamson deployed to push parents, teachers and bystanders into emotionally blackmailed positions in order to reopen schools so that working parents could return to work, saving on furlough, and generating profits for his hedge fund sponsors.

Gavin Williamson in that presentation was being a really horrible human being. He was bullying the people, the teachers, the children, their parents, for ideological reasons.  Duty of care to the children, their families and teaching staff was thrown out of the window, bath, baby and towelling.

Using the effects of badly designed shut down on already existing conditions, where the bad design of the the policy is exacerbating the existing condition, as levers to persuade people to adopt further inadequate policies is manipulative bullying. That a public official would stoop so low ought to serve as a red flag for abusive behaviour which we tax payers are funding.

Calling mask wearers cowards is narrative warfare. Calling mask refusers idiots is narrative warfare. 

And it is not all bad news, is it?

Dr. John Campbell looks at latest papers on immunity and it is looking good.






Kindest regards

 Corneilius

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Facebook is looking more like The Vatican with every passing day.

Political Grooming Gangs are undermining our democracies, escalating social tensions and disrupting our communities.

Facebook's 'apology'  is looking more like The Vatican's 'apology' with every passing day.

Knowing that abuse is happening, paying lip service to addressing the situation (even as the abuse continues with no meaningful remedial action being taken) in order to preserve public status, image and income is dysfunctional behaviour and it causes more harm.

Knowing that serial egregious abusers operate within its jurisdiction, causing harm to millions of wholly innocent people, and masking any responsibility for that behaviour within one's jurisdiction or institutional setting in order to maintain status and income.

— corneilius (@coreluminous) July 11, 2020

I don't buy the apology, until I see behaviour that confronts the harms in full.

Apology is oft taken as meaning remorse, when in fact what we see with powerful institutions that it is a line of defence, a public relations exercise.

The etymology of the word 'apology' is revealing : "defense, justification," from L.L. apologia, from Gk. apologia "a speech in defense," from apologeisthai "to speak in one's defense," from apologos "an account, story," from apo- "from, off" (see apo-) + logos "speech".

The original English sense of "self-justification" yielded a meaning "frank expression of regret for wrong done," first recorded 1590's, but it was not the main sense until the 18th Century. The old sense tends to emerge in Latin form apologia (first attested 1784), especially since J.H. Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (1864).

Thus when The Church or The State apologises, it is most often adopting a position that defends it's current image, status and power. Truth and Reconciliation processes are likewise marred by competing institutional interests and the wish to avoid the most honest accounting of harms caused, the parties culpable seeking always to mitigate the costs of facing the truth, addressing the harms, accepting the punishment.

Make no mistake about this - powerful Institutions of all kinds understand the intent and the meaning of the words they use, for both State and Church and Corporation are the source of all legal language, and this language and it's use allows these and other institutions to continue to maintain their status and power. Apologies most often avoid the necessary full accounting of the consequences of their actions. Polluters pollute. get caught, are fined and continue business without ever fully confronting the externalised costs dynamics of their industries. The Vatican fights every case, yet withholds information on thousands of untried cases. Facebook was fined, and their stock rose.

Sorry, but not sorry: they paid the fine, it is a business expense.

We see this is so with the way both Church and State in Australia  have responded to the emergence of living witness evidence with regard to Residential School Systems in which poor and Aboriginal children have been incarcerated by force and brutally harmed in systemic fashion, over long periods of time.

We see it in terms of  Institutions defence of themselves against the interests of Survivors  and the genuine demands for Justice within every State on Earth.

It is a pattern of behaviour.

Saying 'I am sorry' or 'We are sorry' has no meaning unless there is material action to back it up, unless there is a clear indication that whatever transgression occurred will not occur again and that any perpetrators will be made to account for the harms they have caused.

And in cases where the harm caused is beyond remediation, then corrective legal punitive measures against Institutions,  and judicial incarceration  of individuals who have caused harm must follow, to protect from any future harm and to provide a meaningful deterrent.

In the case of The Vatican, and Facebook, there has been no internal driven action to correct the situation where known abusers operate within and through their structures. They resist rather than putting their hands up, and admitting responsibility.

To be fair, they are not the only institutions feigning apology for allowing abusers to operate within their systems. It is a standard behavioural pattern within in every powerful institution, every gang,  every dysfunctional family - to protect their status, image and ability to operate, at all costs.

Facebook, Masks, Brexit and Donald Trump

Facebook permits micro-targeting of content that absolutely has caused harm, is causing harm and will continue to cause harm - for example, the current issue of anti-mask wearing freedom conTheory content.  We know that activists are using Facebook and other social media to organise protests and live events.

That content is helping spread the SARSCOV2 virus within the United Kingdom and The United States of America. That is causing harm.

We know that military grade disinformation and disruption campaigns are being waged on Facebook, and that Facebook is earning billions from this activity.

"Emma Briant, a scholar of propaganda at Bard College who has spent years studying SCL, says the company’s mix of work demonstrates how military-funded psychological research can be exploited to wage domestic political warfare, establishing a dangerous template for political campaigning. During elections, tactics intended for battlefields could be used to foment division and extremism or discourage voters."

We know for certain that Brexit was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.

"Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings — now a special advisor to the UK prime minister — wrote in 2017 that the winning recipe for the leave campaign was data science. And, more specifically, spending 98% of its marketing budget on “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts”.

Targeted at Facebook users."

We know for certain that Trumps election in 2016 was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.

Facebook's position is similar to the Vatican knowing that pedophiles and adults who beat and bullied children were operating within their ranks, and yet it did all it could to preserve it's external image and income revenue stream.

2020 US Presidential Election

Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) was Nixon's baby. I remember reading Hunter S. Thompson's scathing writings on that odious little man and that disgusting campaign.

Nixon, Johnson and Trump are not too far apart in morality.

'Making the economy scream' so it hurts the people.

Now it is online micro-targeting and political grooming gangsterism.  News media are part of the corruption.

Trumps re-election campaign has a $1 billion dollar 'advertising' budget just for Facebook in the coming months.

And it is already well under way.

"Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise."

What the writer is describing is grooming. 

Studying populations to source vulnerable people who are then targeted with content that exploits cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns in order to exploit them at the ballot box, by triggering and re-inforcing those biases. Truly evil behaviour and activity.

Zucked! and MindF*ck.

I have just finished reading two important books - Zucked! about Facebook and MindF*ck about Cambridge Analytica

Here's a few pertinent quotes from Mindf*ck!

“In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.”

and

“We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders. It felt bizarre—unreal—to be observing what people were watching on a tiny, faraway island, somehow more like we were playing a video game than intruding on the private lives of actual people. Even today, thinking back on it, Trinidad seems more like a dream than something we actually did. But we did do it. The Trinidad project was the first time I got sucked into a situation that was grossly unethical, and, frankly, it triggered in me a state of denial”

and

“perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates”

So notice the terminology - psychological warfare, notice the anger and abuse that is being 'stimulated', notice the irrationality of the to and fro of online 'debate' - that is warfare!

When we have well funded, well organised entities observing people as they are manipulating content being broadcast to the people they are observing,  and when they are refining the manipulation of that content in real time to better exploit the reactions of the targeted people, all the time actively working to undermine the perceptual dynamic of an entire population, person by person, intimacy at scale, in order to exploit the people for political advantage, we have a huge problem.

Political grooming gangsterism, no less.

I had not read these two books when I wrote my first blog pieces on Political Grooming Gangsters.

Even back then I was exactly on the money in terms of the dynamics, the influence, the covert nature of the manipulation.

Now I know a little bit more, I have some extra detail, I have some witness testimony and all I can say is this - our social systems and our democracies are being undermined and harmed by the most abusive grooming type behaviours imaginable and the grooming is operating at scale. To be fair, it's not like there were not problems before this micro-targeting emerged. The dynamic of propaganda is old. It is the way that the digital online tech has created intimate access to people's psyche at scale that is new, and extra harmful.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg are allowing this to happen on their Facebook platform, and Amazon and Google likewise and others - and I cannot say it is just for the cash, because if any of them took action to prevent this abuse happening (and they could) they would make immeasurable gains in reputation, and that would translate into long term business stability, and therefore I have my questions about why they are allowing this to happen.

I cannot see into their minds nor would I want to.

That they are allowing this to happen is a best feeble, greedy and arrogant and at worst, it is truly evil.

Here's the thing, if you -,the user - know and understand what is being done you can counter it. If you do not know, then you can be influenced by this activity.

At the collective level, across a society there needs to be regulation, and intense, legal or law enforcement level active opposition to political grooming gangster activity. We need both. Now.

Wear a mask when you are out and about and in shared public spaces. Stop the spread, spread the Love.

Wear a mucking fask,

Not so much to ask,

Stop the spread,

Spread the Love,

Because 

when push

comes to shove

It's you I am caring for,

My brother

You I am caring for,

My sister.

Yes! its you

I care for -

care for me too.

Why don't you?

I masking for you

are a friend,

who ever you are..

Wear a mucking fask!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

The Arts and the Creative Industries in the UK, amidst a UK Government Policy of Herd Immunity, Voiceless.

What on earth is our government thinking??? pic.twitter.com/qUD0wptJsN

— Rob Brydon (@RobBrydon) July 3, 2020

The outcome of current UK Government policy is placing producers, singers, dancers, booking staff, sound engineers, riggers, buskers, hospitality staff, writers, choreographers, lighting engineers, technicians, set designers, graphic artists, poets, copy writers, actors, musicians, empresarios, directors, hosts, comedians, cameramen, cleaning staff, ushers, set painters, make up artists, wardrobe directors, tour managers, security staff, catering staff, poster makes, printers, flyer distributors and  many, many others - the Creative Arts Industry - in a stress position where we will, due to impending economic poverty  as a direct result of lack of adequate support be forced to demand to be able to return to work in unsafe situations.

This will without doubt increase the risk of spreading the virus, and then we and our customers will be blamed for spreading the virus, for our lack of 'common sense', and then our businesses, theatres, recording studios, clubs, halls, festivals and pubs will be shut down a second time, and there will be no furlough offered - everyone will be expected to move onto Universal Credit.

Then the Industry will be ripe for a business take over.

The Creative Industries are a potential bonanza for those with the cash to buy up existing yet struggling enterprises at knock down prices.

Those who have cash reserves will be in a position to buy up what ever is left, at very low prices, to be held until the economy opens up again, and then make investment gains for the purchasers as those assets regain value. The kinds of people who bet against industries failing, and make a lot of money doing so.

Jacob Ress Mogg and Pater,  aspirant minnows among that shark infested pool of avarice.  Government issuing muti-million pound contracts to tiny companies with little experience, no staff, minimal turnover. Clearly the shock doctrine opportunists are in full flow.

European countries have seen this threat and are taking steps to protect their native Arts and Creative Industries. Not the UK. They have abandoned the Arts and Creative Industry.

When what was needed, and what is still is needed, is to pay everyone to stay home, to be able to be comfortable enough to stay safe for 12 weeks, to follow the proven eliminate the virus from community transmission protocols,  which includes, of course ,strict quarantine of incoming travel, as have other states done, as Scotland's First Minister will have to do very soon to protect her people, those she genuinely serves.

Then, when the country is made safe, we can return then return to work, to live and to play in a happy State, having succeeded has New Zealand has, in eliminating community transmission, with secure quarantined borders (taking back control) and with vigilant systems in place in case of any outbreaks. This is all eminently feasible, and necessary - with the UK population of 67 million still only at under 5% infected, there is 95% and more to play for.

Bearing in mind that elimination of community transmission will protect people and the economy and make the wait for a vaccine so much less burdensome and frightening.

Rather than making the economy scream so that Hedge Funds and others can game the situation, which is the existing policy stance of the Johnson Government - they are not the UK Government, they are the Hedge Fund Mining Giants Government in occupation.

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/07/03/sagegate-how-government-neutered-science-to-save-the-economy-and-chase-the-ghost-of-herd-immunity/

An interesting article on what is known as Sage Gate. The gaming of a novel infectious viral disease.

One Voice

With that in mind, I feel a deep and painful frustration, a pain in my heart that is heavy with dismay and disillusionment, as I look at the 70,000+ excess deaths that have 'happened', each and everyone avoidable.

How can the Arts community stand to look at itself in the mirror, aware as we all are of so much avoidable death and taking notice of the lack of a voice in the UK and in Ireland, a clear speaking voice, a creative communicative voice grounded in the evidence of epidemiology, virology, public health, social care and economics, a hearty voice speaking out for the suppression of infection rate leading to eliminating community transmission of the virus within the island population of England,  Wales, Scotland and Ireland as a whole bloc as the most appropriate policy to protect both people and economy alike.

What is Art if it is not a voice? Mere entertainment? If so, then the typification of the role of artist as non-essential is a correct typification, for we can all entertain ourselves if push comes to shove. Boredom is always a choice.

Why is the Arts and Creative Industries collective unable to find a common voice, unable to use it's vast talents to speak up for the vulnerable, the disabled, the teachers, the students and the parents who are all being placed at great risk by this governments odious behaviour?

When any figure has a public voice, and there exists a verified threat to the public, to the commons, then it behoves that voice to speak up.

The sound of silence is deafening.

So I wrote these a while ago, trying to suggest we push for the kind of policies New Zealand have proven. Why not? Otherwise it's just more death, sadness, greed and gas-lighting? What have we go to lose?

coreluminous · Jacinda and The Little Bugs

and

coreluminous · Be Alert!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to Universe.