The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
The evidence from a number of detailed studies shows that countries that opt for rapid action to eliminate community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by transparently engaging the well informed support of their citizens better protect their health, their economies and minimise restrictions on civil liberties compared with those that strive for mitigation aka 'living with the virus'.
1.8 billion people's health and their economies have been spared the ravages inflicted upon the UK, USA, Brazil and the EU.
Importantly, elimination has been framed as a civic solidarity approach that will restore civil liberties the soonest, protect the healthy and the vulnerable and stabilise the economy; this focus on common purpose is frequently neglected in the political debate in these islands.
Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
In the UK and Ireland, and elsewhere, a new variant that is more transmissible, that is showing signs of significant vaccine escape, is surging and there are no mechanisms in place to suppress it.
Why is it that the evidence for elimination strategy is being ignored by Governments, Parliaments and the bulk of News Media?
Are we to endure more death and disease?
To what end does it serve to set the bar at 'living with the virus'?
Why must we gamble with citizens lives in such manner?
Yours sincerely,
Corneilius Crowley
(Address with the Editor.)
It's beyond belief: Dido Harding - the Conservative crony who oversaw the catastrophe of Test and Trace - is applying to run the NHS.
Dr. Rachel Clarke - who has seen first hand what the government did to the NHS and country during the pandemic - beautifully rips apart this absolute affront.
Rachel points out that prior to the Covid19 Epidemic, the NHS waiting lists were in the region of 4 million cases. Also heads up on Michael Gove's plan to rerig the NHS in a top down manner, led by Sajid Javid, the Duetche Bank executive who helped crash the banks in 2008 who has taken over from super spreader Snogger Hancock.
Elimination Strategy is proven to prevent the harms that mitigation strategy has demonstrably caused.
Misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance are types of failure to discharge public obligations existing by common law, custom, or statute. Misconduct in Public Office is a criminal offence in England and Wales.
In a global pandemic, the government of every country has a dual duty of care. Firstly, they must work with the population to stop the spread of the pathogen in order to protect their health and their economies and secondly they must ensure they do not export the pathogen, which is a duty of care they owe to the global community.
Failures
March 2020 :same media, organisation, different headlines, similar policy of mitigation,
elimination strategy rejected, with attendant harms not avoided.
This is incontrovertibly true.
The evidence is there for all to see. On every possible measure, human or systemic, elimination strategy delivers much better outcomes. This is beyond all doubt true.
Evidence suggests that countries that opt for rapid action to eliminate SARS-CoV-2—with the strong support of their inhabitants—also better protect their populations health, their economies and minimise restrictions on civil liberties compared with those that strive for mitigation.
This chart shows the basics
FigureCOVID-19 deaths, GDP growth, and strictness of lockdown measures for OECD countries choosing SARS-CoV-2 elimination versus mitigation
The Lancet report lays out the evidence, fully referenced. Read it. Knowledge is better than belief.
"Among OECD countries, liberties were most severely impacted in those that chose mitigation, whereas swift lockdown measures—in line with elimination—were less strict and of shorter duration (figure). Importantly, elimination has been framed as a civic solidarity approach that will restore civil liberties the soonest; this focus on common purpose is frequently neglected in the political debate.
Evidence suggests that countries that opt for rapid action to eliminate SARS-CoV-2—with the strong support of their inhabitants—also better protect their health and their economies and minimise restrictions on civil liberties compared with those that strive for mitigation"
That this was predicted in January, February and March 2020 is also quite clearly true.
It's not rocket science, it is epidemiology and public health best practice.
It was why Australian State Governments chose elimination strategy and eventually beat down the Australian Federal Government's Mitigation policy choice. They acted wisely in opposing the Morrison/Murdoch policy line.
It was what China had done, and was what Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South and North Korea had all chosen. Protect the population to protect the economy.
Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love
Stop the spread of the virus within the community - track every case, trace all contacts, test all contacts, quarantine contacts, isolate the infected in prepared treatment facilities designed to prevent exacerbation of symptoms and disease - chase the virus until it can find no new hosts.
Maintain a tightly quarantined border - goods can pass, people must be checked, and quarantine monitored.
All of which was done without any Vaccine.
Slow spread is lethal
So I am writing today, from England, as we observe an exponential growth surge of the Delta Variant, a variant only possible because Governments chose to allow the virus to spread and rejected elimination strategy. The English Government are gambling with the lives of the population and with the wealth of the economy.
Malfeasance
They have made a bet with very uncertain odds.
Their bet is that the vaccine will reduce harms to an 'acceptable level'. When just under half of the population is unvaccinated, and of the other half, only half are double dosed, with supplies and delivery systems stretched to their limit, even as a surge of the Delta Variant is under way. That's a very dodgy bet indeed.
'Acceptable Level' is meaningless when already the UK as seen 150,000 excess fatalities, of which 127,000 are directly attributable to COVID19 - a truly frightening and horrific way to die - and in addition we are seeing 2 million cases of Long COVID, with 350,000 cases of severe disease that appears to be chronic.
How much more of this are we to endure? How is any of this 'acceptable'?
Then there's the financial losses incurred by millions of people, entirely driven by Government policy decisions, in a wide range of industries. Is all of that 'acceptable' now?
Who loses, who wins in this casino of health and wealth?
Crony Capitalism is obviously one winner.
The Good Law Project is exposing in court what the Government has kept under wraps, the crony capitalism that is gouging profits from an imperiled population, whilst the pro-Government media is under reporting what should be known in every household in the land. The Government are borrowing on your good name, and their mates are shunting a significant portion of that cash off-shore via private contractors and sub contractors.
Pro Government News Media organisations owned by billionaires are losing money in order to maintain this degree of government support - and none of the leading editorials of any newspaper are calling for elimination strategy, which is what would prevent the harms we see daily.
During the past 16 months the English Billionaire class have seen their wealth increase by more than 1/3rd in 2020-21. The Millionaire Club has seen an expansion too. They can afford to lose money supporting the current English Government because they are raking it in, in spite of the harms to the general population.
Who loses?
There are more children 'qualifying' for Free School Meals. Food bank dependency has grown, food banks in the UK saw a 47% increase in need during the crisis. Unemployment has surged even as the number of millionaires has grown..
Social Support systems are at breaking point after a decade of deliberate cut backs, carried out under the guise of a lie, Austerity, an act of Sado-Monetarism, by a government that is unrepentant and a continuing source of harm.
Women bear the brunt of all this, as carers and frontline staff, as essential key workers and as low income workers who cannot survive on Statuary Sick Pay, and thus cannot afford to isolate if they suspect they are ill, possibly with covid19. There is no immediate economic or moral or emotional support for low income people who really ought to be isolating.
The English government portrays such support as doling out freebees to individuals, rather than as part of a series of actions that protect the whole community. Gaslighting the population, trying to make people feel ashamed of asking for support.
Is snogging an criminal offence?
Matt Hancock is filmed in a sexual embrace with his lover, within his offices and some people call for his resignation. Hancock makes an apology, in writing, but does not present himself in public. Johnson accepts the apology, and says the matter is closed.
I disagree.
I say - arrest Matt Hancock, drag him from his office, bring him to a police station, charge him with Gross Malfeasance or Misconduct in Public Office and Corporate Manslaughter, and place him on remand, in Belmarsh Prison.
Hit The Road Matt
(Hit the road, Matt and don't you come back no more
no more, no more, no more)
(Hit the road, Matt and don't you come back no more)
Woah, Matt, oh Matt, don't treat us so mean
You're the meanest health minister that we've ever seen
because you tel us only lies
virus spread far and wide
chorus
Woah Matt, listen, Matt, don't ya treat us this-a way
we'll be in Court for sure some day
We're really angry with you 'cause it's understood
You ain't got no morals, you just ain't no good
chorus
Woah Matt, Kissing, Matt, it's not a crime to snog you say
Your crony contracts are unlawful. the Courts did say
We're really angry with you 'cause it's understood
You ain't got no morals, you just ain't no good
And because you always lied
a hundred thousand died
Who ever is chosen to take over the role of Health Secretary MUST end this harmful folly of 'mitigation' and 'living with the virus' which is an approach that rushes towards harm rather than avoiding harm. I do not hold much hope that this will happen.
The current Conservative and Unionist Party and indeed, Keirless Starmer's front bench opposition show no signs of ever admitting the evidence that elimination strategy works, is proven and is, in the UK, eminently doable. Undoubtedly more people will die horrific deaths, long COVID will increase as the virus spreads.
We are doomed to 'live with this Government', and must resort to doing our best as individuals to avoid being harmed and to avoid causing harm.
Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
Julian Assange.
I know, I am howling at the moon again. Screaming into the wind. But I cannot stay silent, I cannot and will not recede into mute impotent fury. I much prefer loud impotent fury. Even if my audience is small. Even if I am screaming to myself.
Here's an idea - let's do a prisoner swapsie. Release Julian Assange.
And make room in Belmarsh for Johnson, the entire Cabinet, the culpable Downing Street Cabinet Office advisory teams, the editors of News Media that rejected Elimination Strategy, UsForThem Lobbyists and many others.
Instruct Parliament to form a National Unity Government tasked with implementing elimination strategy and when we finally do eliminate community transmission within the British Isles, let us sit back and enjoy the public trials, and hug one another, freely.
#ArrestMattHancock#FreeJulianAssangeArrest Hancock, set Julian Assange free.
A crazy idea! Totally unrealsitic. Fantasy la la land. Nonetheless Thiis speaks to the venality of the English Ruling Establishment : Blairs Freedom, Assange's persecution, Hancock's pension and resignation fee and the rejection of elimination strategy as the way to manage this epidemic are inextricably linked to Starmer's current position and his support for the English Government, and for Israeli State Military violence, among other things.
To be honest, I wouldn't want Keirlessness Starmer defending me in court. Would you?
Update: The new Health Secretary!
The new Health Secretary is Ayn Rand fan, Sajid Javid, former investment banker, CDO peddler, '08 Crasher, serial short term Cabinet Minister and general right wing neo-Liberal Free Market opportunist.
Richard Murphy outlines the kind of policy position Mr. Javid will bring to the Health portfolio.
"Sajid Javid is now the Health Secretary,and it has to be noted that his prior experience was in trading the financial instruments that crashed the world economy in 2008.
And he was not a minor player. He was a major player at a major bank, worthy of having press releases issued about his career progression. In 2008 he helped bring down the world economy: no one else but bankers did that. Deutsche in London was right in the middle of that.
Now this Ayn Rand reading banker is making the decisions on whether or not the economy will reopen. And he says his I aim is to 'get back to normal'.
What? The normal where people whose only experience is in making a deal on a computer screen, the consequences of which they are utterly indifferent to, is what is defined as normal?"
Should Sajid Javid Rand really be appointed as Health Secretary?
https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/tag/sajid-javid/ apt blog article on Mr. Javid and his attraction to Ayn Rand, a 'thinker' whose 'philosophy' amounts to a rabid justification for absolute selfishness, cited by those who think nothing of using Wealth as a weapon against everything they dislike, despise and fear - for the neo-liberal billionaire freedom is the right to do what you will with your own property, especially as owners of the land and rulers of the people that inhabit it. A conquerors creed.
"So, after Matt Hancock’s humiliating resignation (which preserves his pension and severance pay), our Tory Government has just appointed Sajid Javid as the new Health Secretary?
What we are NOT being told, of course, is that Mr Javid is ideologically committed to the total destruction of the NHS.
"Mr Javid is a dedicated follower of the US “thinker” Ayn Rand (apparently he makes a point of re-reading a key scene from Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” twice a year). Ayn Rand’s system of thought (which styles itself as “Objectivism”) is an extreme form of right wing libertarianism in which selfishness is regarded as the ultimate virtue from which the whole of morality is derived Rand’s ideas are revered by many tax and regulation avoiding, and privatisation loving, billionaires, who then fund think tanks and political parties aiming to quietly promote such ideas the world over.
So now we now have a Health Secretary who is an adherent of this philosophy, who therefore thinks that anyone who needs healthcare, but can’t afford to pay for it, is a “looter”, part of Atlas’s burden, who should perish. Who really opposes socialised healthcare as an evil.
And our Government have made this appointment while we are still fighting a pandemic, and when yet another major reorganisation of the NHS is looming. How late, or non-existent, would our lockdowns have been with Mr Javid in charge? Will Big Business, via the new Integrated Care System boards, essentially now take over the NHS, with all that could imply for moving to a more “American” model?
The Tories are clearly intent on destroying the NHS, and lying while they do it. For most of us and our loved ones, at least those of us who have so far survived Tory austerity and the pandemic, this is literally an existential crisis"
One Mr. Javid's awful attempts at governance was ordering research into the ethnicity of child grooming gangs,as an appeal to right wing Daily Mail voters.rather than researching why grooming gangs exist in every city and in many towns, and remain largely un-challenged.
As Home Secretary Mr. Javid ordered research into why men convicted of grooming-gang sex crimes are disproportionately of Pakistani origin. Mr. Javid said at the time that establishing the “particular characteristics” of the perpetrators was “critical to our understanding” of offending in places including Rotherham, Telford and Newcastle. He made the commitment in a letter to Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who was strongly criticised for stating that the country “has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.
As it turned out, research proved that the majority of such activity in England is perpetrated by white British and White European gangs.
His Randian opportunism outweighed his concern for the welfare of the most vulnerable among our children and our youth.We can expect more from where that came from in the coming months and years, if he remains in post that long. The prospect is awful.
Hit the road, Sajid.
He is totally the wrong person in the wrong government to manage our health care systems in the midst of this epidemic/pandemic, if we wanted it to be managed well.
They all are.That much is obvious.
Hit the road, predaTory Party, it is understood, you ain't got no morals and you ain't no good, you are amoral, callous, avaricious, power mad bullies and cowards.- why do we have to live with you?
I am not able to do live gigs in England, where I live, and have not been earning much in the last 16 months, what with live music events being scuppered, and as a result I have pretty much hit rock bottom in terms of finances.
We Are All Family
Me performing my song 'We are all Family', my anthemic ballad about humanity as one family, made of many ethnicities, nations, languages, lands.
I am seeking your help, your support in financial form via Patreon, inviting folk to donate the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a pint to support me every month, so that I can continue to write this blog, continue to write and produce new songs, perform and maintain my body of work without stressing too much on the financial front.
With adequate support I would expect to be able to concentrate even more effort into my work as a writer, commentator and live performer on line.
So right now, every little donation could make a big difference, and lots of donations would have a huge impact on my ability to continue to do my work and would be really deeply appreciated.
I currently run one live show every week, on Wednesday, on Facebook from this account:
I hope to improve and enhance my live broadcast kit, and to be able to broadcast on multiple platforms in HD and in quality stereo, because my music has many layers and is very much spatially arranged. With that in mind I aim to move to a Mac platform, with better quality soundcards, cameras and disk storage.
I want to deliver a really best quality show, presenting my guitar skills and vocal harmonies to their best advantage,
I hope to be able to return to live gigs in the future, and to be able to travel to locations where my patrons can attended unique and special live events.
What I can offer now is live performances on line, and access to my music, in mp3 or CD quality, which I have always offered for free.
It is PRECISELY because most people think of Racism as a personal flaw, a petty hatred, a weakness rather than as the social weapon system created by the Ruling Class, that Racism persists within Western Democracies.
We need to up our game.
#ToryRacism
Here's why.
MP Kim Johnson sat on the Education Select Committee, which issued it's report this week.
First Report: The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it
"In the name of championing the white working class, the Tory-led Education Select Committee report released this week picks up the mantle of the government’s highly discredited Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
The report calls for public bodies – including schools and charities – to ‘seriously consider their responsibilities’ when promoting the term ‘White Privilege’.
This was watered down from the preferred recommendation from some committee members, which called for financial penalties for public bodies doing this work. It was taken off the table after legal advice that it would contravene human rights legislation by having a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
It’s a shameful attempt to limit the freedoms of ethnic minorities to articulate their experiences of racism, and to stoke the culture war by scapegoating them for the poverty endemic in ‘left behind’ communities.
The report also pushes a free schools agenda, despite plenty of evidence to suggest that academies do not reduce the attainment gap for disadvantaged children in comparison to local authority-run schools.
Since 2010 there have been 92 Education Committee reports and only two of these reports have explicitly focused on a named ethnic group – both on white pupils.
Instead of focusing on the multitude of evidence that shows that cuts, lack of investment and stark poverty has on the opportunities of so many communities, the Tories once again take the cowards way out by pointing the finger at the red herring of ethnic minority communities.
The use of data and language is highly selective in the report, allowing it to make misleading assertions that the white working class as a whole is achieving less than disadvantaged ethnic minority students."
In short, the English Government are trying to assert that efforts to address Racism and Misogyny are the root cause of the difficulties of poor white schoolchildren living in areas where unemployment, low wages and cuts to funding for social programs are contributing to poverty. The English Government are using skin tone and gender as weapons to sow social discord and prevent grass roots solidarity emerging.
They are broadcasting this via vexatious abuse of their majority in parliament and it's select committees, and they are quite deliberately targeting the alt-right amidst those impoverished by 12 years of Austerity who are on low incomes or are dependent on benefits, the poorer sector of the English population, 14 million strong and growing due to callous Conservative policy. They are saying to those people that the difficulties their children face are being caused by too much concern about Racism and Misogyny and not enough concern about them and their condition.
They omit that Austerity has harmed children of every ethnicity in England.
The recent Sewell Report which asserted that there was no such thing as Institutional Racism in England is part of this campaign. Denial and then the allegation that those who seek to address the 'non existent Institutional Racism' are creating a distraction that is harming poor white children.
This is using Race as a weapon. Which is how Racism was invented in the 1600s, by the British Colonial plantation owners and ruling class, as a device to thwart emergent worker solidarity, which they perceived as a mortal threat to their power, privilege and status. The legalisation and Institutionalisation of Racial discrimination was a grooming operation that took 4 decades to engineer, and the ill effects are with us still 400 years later.
I have written a song to articulate this. Race is a Weapon in The Class War - a brief historical outline
Australian Aboriginals - Genocidal Racism Exported by The British Empire
The Curse of Ham was taken as the basis of the definition of Race, and Superiority in Colonial America.
England's Players were booed for making a public anti-Racist symbolic gesture
A new song, fresh from the studio. As usual, a rough mix.
Race is a weapon, in the class war.
This is the story of the co-opting of Biblical myth, and the re-invention of Race and skin colour as a tool of discrimination and then the crafting of legalised Racism, in the British Colonies, in the 1600s.
Prior to this period, discrimination was largely religious or cultural, and rooted in war fare, with slavery as part of the 'booty' of war.
The conquered of the colonies would be enslaved by the conquerors, although it often turned out that native peoples were unsuited to enslavement and they mostly died out rapidly, burned out by the trauma of conquest. They did not have much to live for.
This was why the Spanish Empire started to import slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and to South America. They basically genocided the local populations through over working them as slaves.
In the British Colonies it was different : the development of indentured worker systems which included free citizens, usually too poor to pay their way, who worked for a contract that paid their passage, and convict workers, imported from Europe and from Africa, was dominant in the early period. There were also cases of Africans who had been enslaved by the Spanish, and were on board Spanish ships which were attacked by English Privateers. The English would bring the Africans to the colonies, and they would be sold as indentured workers, who would be freed at the end of their contract, and allowed to enter into society as free people, equal citizens, they could own land, develop businesses and so on.
This was a time in the British Colonies when African and European indentured workers worked side by side on plantations, and were routinely freed at the end of their indenture, and given land and tools to develop their own futures as equals. They formed villages, towns and communities, inter marriage was common enough.
It was not multicultural in as much as it was not an issue because they were all part of the same culture, a new culture growing in the colonies. Pioneers. Breaking new land together. There were various languages spoken, there were enclaves of various European ethnicities. Irish people, Dutch, Germans would live close to each other.
Life was incredibly harsh. Many, many people died during their indenture, and from time to time, the indentured 'rebelled' and took out their frustration and pain on their 'employers'.
It was this that frighted the Plantation owners - that the working class - indentured and free - might unite, and together in solidarity, undo them, take them down from their positions of absolute power as a reaction to the owners cruelty and oppression. The owners needed a plan to protect their long term prospects, a plan for many generations.
Thus the concepts of Race and then Racism were developed over time slowly, bit by bit, to divide the working class of the colonies. A political grooming operation over a 40 year period, starting from the Pulpit, concocting themes to marginalise, dehumanise and then legalise the oppression of freed black folk, culminating in the legalisation of Slavery of African people, with conversion to Christianity offered as a 'mercy' to those who were enslaved, for life.
A mercy denied the Native peoples, who were ethnically cleansed, in a multi-century genocide.
Race and Racism, Xenophobia and Religious bigotry continues to split the working class across the Earth, and all of these protects the Oligarchy, the owner class, even still, and will continue until the working class as a whole figure this out - honest history is crucial to effective political organisation and action.
From the initial back breaking toil of clearing of land by hand, through to planting, harvesting and processing sugar, tobacco. coffee, cotton and other materials that generated the first immense merchant fortunes and Oligarchy networks which became political power centers in their own right, to the first investments into factories and the development and expansion of the factory system, Racism and class continues through to the present as a thread of oppression and extraction upon which the wealth of Europe and America is founded, with European and American controlled colonial assets protected by military and political dominance. This is why England and America and France, and others, are engaged in combat operations continuously .
YOU WERE GOOD NEIGHBOURS, YOU WORKED YOUR OWN FIELDS
YOU WERE HOPING FOR A FUTURE, A FUTURE YEILD
YOU FELLED TREES, YOU DUG WELLS, YOU SHAPED STONE
YOU BUILT FARMS, VILLAGES, TOWNS, AND YOU BUILT HOMES
YOU OPENED SHOPS, BLACK SMITHS, CHURCHES AND HALLS
AFRICAN,EUROPEAN FREED WORKERS ALL
BUT IT WAS NOT ALWAYS EASY, THE LIFE WAS VERY HARSH
THE MASTERS WERE CRUEL, THEY MADE CRUELTY AN ART
MANY NEVER MADE IT THROUGH, MANY FELL, MANY DIED
THE CONDITIONS WERE AWFUL, HOW YOUR HEARTS CRIED
TREAT US LIKE PEOPLE, TREAT US WITH RESPECT
DON'T HOPE TO EXHAUST US, TO KILL US WITH NEGLECT
SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO FREE US, GIVE US OUR AWARD
LISTEN TO OUR COMPLAINT, HEAR OUR HONEST WORDS
WHEN THE MASTERS DID NOT LISTEN, TURNED THEIR HEARTS AWAY
THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT FOR THE WORKERS TO SAY
THEY TOOK UP THEIR TOOLS, THEY STOLE THE MASTERS GUNS
THEY FOUGHT FOR THEIR LIVES, THEY MADE THE MASTERS RUN
AFTER BACONS REBELLION, THE MASTERS MADE A PLAN
ELEVATE THE EUROPEAN TO OPPRESS THE AFRICAN
THIS DIVIDED THE WORKERS, THEY WOULD PROTECT THEIR PLACE
AS LORDS OF THIS LAND THAT'S WHY THEY INVENTED RACE.
THEY MISUSED THE BIBLE, SPUN THE STORY OF HAM
SET THE WHITE RACE AS SUPERIOR TO THE AFRICAN
MADE LAWS AGAINST THE FREE BLACKS, APARTHEID VERSION ONE
THEN THEY LEGALISED SLAVERY, THAT'S HOW THE JOB WAS DONE!
~~
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
SO WHEN YOU ARE BOOING AS THE TEAM TAKES THE KNEE
KNOW YOU ARE WAGING WAR ON BEHALF OF THE ELITE
THE OWNERS HAVE CONVINCED YOU TO TAKE THEIR SIDE
USING THE LIE THAT BLACK IS INFERIOR TO WHITE
THEY SOLD YOU A LIE
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
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The issue of the Delta Variant aka #JohnsonVariant aka #ModiVariant is not a singular event.
It is part of a whole.
The whole is the deliberate policy choice to ignore the evidence, reject the epidemiology, set aside the best practice Public Health and allow the spread of this virus no matter what the outcomes are, only taking action to stop exponential spread when the adverse affects cause the NHS to be be overwhelmed with active cases and fatalities, a situation that threatens the optics of the political position of the English Government.
Update 20th June on the impact of the Delta Variant in the UK:
10% of all #COVID19 hospitalizations last week were among fully vaccinated, despite >50% adults fully vaccinated in the UK— ➡️ this is the #DeltaVariant, which is 99% of all 🇬🇧 cases. I’m a big 2-dose vaccine advocate—but we still need strong precaution.🧵https://t.co/zeelo0BLhvpic.twitter.com/0W1WHXagrQ
One more example of a repeated and thus a deliberate policy choice that runs against the evidence, in spite of ample warnings, is the recent Governments order to eschew masks in School settings across England, when it was established that aerosol transmission is a primary path of spread of infection, when no funding or advisory has been made available to schools to improve ventilation, reduce class sizes or enact a number of proven protocols that reduce risk of spread of the virus.
What we can see is an attitude that reveals an approach that accepts externalised costs, accepts collateral damage where others (the population) pay the price - as long as the ruling faction retains Power, and can therefore continue to pursue policy objectives that are proven, beyond doubt, to absolutely undermine the fundamental duty of care and the trust inherent in genuine democratic Governance.
Elimination strategy is proven beyond any doubt, incontrovertibly, to deliver better outcomes for the population and the economy on every measure used. This Lancet report summarises the evidence quite well.
However, elimination strategy precludes cornyism, grift, corruption and dogged enhancement of political hegemony because at root it is a co-operative strategy - government and people working openly and transparently together to stop transmission of the virus, to prevent variants emerging, to protect health systems.
"Serco Group raised its 2021 profit outlook on Monday by 15 million pounds to about 200 million pounds ($282.18 million) as the British outsourcer expects stronger demand for its COVID-19 services in the UK.
The company has outperformed the wider UK outsourcing space, benefiting from its focus on the public sector, including the country's national test and trace programme related to the pandemic.
Serco said its testing and tracing contracts volumes in the UK have continued to be strong and expects demand for these services to continue for longer in the second half than previously anticipated."
Profits made operating a failed contact tracing system, a failed testing system, within which off shore contractors are channeling our taxes away to evade taxation, when back in February 2020 the NHS had an efficient, trained contact tracing hub that could have been expanded locally but that was shut down by the English Government even as the virus was being seeded into England from Northern Italy and Spain, via Ski Tourists!
And then this travesty of an operation was contracted out to SERCO, via Dido Harding and other inexperienced cronies.
What is that?
We are subjected daily to a deliberate policy choice that ignores the evidence, and is being maintained even as the experts advise all governments globally to assume elimination of community transmission, because they know that elimination strategy is working for 1.8 billion people and their economies across East Asia and Oceania, in Nordic Europe and elsewhere.
That evidence is incontrovertible. It cannot be denied. To deny it is insanity or psychopathy.
"The trade-off between different objectives is at the heart of political decision making. Public health, economic growth, democratic solidarity, and civil liberties are important factors when evaluating pandemic responses.
There is mounting evidence that these objectives do not need to be in conflict in the COVID-19 response. Countries that consistently aim for elimination—ie, maximum action to control SARS-CoV-2 and stop community transmission as quickly as possible—have generally fared better than countries that opt for mitigation—ie, action increased in a stepwise, targeted way to reduce cases so as not to overwhelm health-care systems."
Figure : COVID-19 deaths, GDP growth, and strictness of lockdown measures for OECD countries choosing SARS-CoV-2 elimination versus mitigation.
Clearly, on every measure, elimination strategies produce better outcomes, they reduce harms and they generate fewer variants.
What we see here in the behaviour of the English Government is the deliberate applied, studied practice of public lies, misinformation, disinformation, gaslighting, scapegoating, evasion, cronyism, corrupt contracting and more deceitful practices from within the English Government and echoed and supported by British News Media, in print and in broadcast.
In essence a wave of orchestrated avoidance that allows the adverse policy which is causing so much harm to be sustained.
How much more of this will we allow?
How many more deaths, each one an horrific event, on top of the 150,000 already recorded?
How many more cases of chronic disease, Long Covid, on top of the 1 million already recorded?
How many more shutdown/open up/shutdown cycles that destroy businesses, exhausts workers, disrupts Education at all levels?
We are allowing this to happen, make no mistake.
The position of Power of this Government is not inevitable.
What will it take?
Call for a general strike, a mortgage and rent strike?
Arrest them all for Malfeasance in Public Office, we have the evidence - place them on remand so that they cannot do any more harm - and install a government of National Unity, with those in SNP, Labour, Plaid, Greens and others who are willing to operate on the basis of evidence, who will put a sound elimination strategy into place, and when it is working, hold an Inquiry, and then let us hold an election.
Grenfell Towers
This week is the anniversary of the Grenfell Fire, a catastrophic fire that was forewarned, a fire that happened because officials aligned with the Government ignored residents calls to look at shoddy work, inadequate provision of fire safety resources.
72 people were burned alive, some jumped to their deaths from the towering inferno.
Hundreds of families were made homeless, men, women and children who were traumatised and then treated with contempt by officialdom in the aftermath, as the officials sought to protect themselves. Hillsborough, Orgreaves, Iraq. The same dynamic where the powerful protect their interests and the ordinary citizens are forced to pay the price.
The image, status and reputation must be protected above all other considerations.
4 years ago we woke up to the terrible news that Grenfell Tower was on fire. For years before, residents had been raising the alarm that the building was unsafe.
They were ignored. The result was that 72 people lost their lives. It still breaks my heart.pic.twitter.com/nigLovsGnz
So once again, we are facing a surge of a new variant, a surge that absolutely could have been prevented at a number of points, where warnings were given and ignored, and we are left with inadequate mechanisms to control and eliminate community transmission and facing the possibility that this variant will have significant vaccine escape, we are unprotected.
We are looking at the likelihood of a serious surge of infection that will impact the NHS and other services, in a repetition of Government inaction that 'goes beyond what is medically rational' to quote an infamous speech, given by Johnson on February 3rd 2020.
We are face with the consequences of gross reckless behaviour of Government, which can best be described as lethal malfeasance in public office, and it would appear that no one in positions of power or responsibility will take any measure to attenuate the situation.
What is the point of Parliament, The Opposition, the Judiciary, the News Media, the Police, The Church of England or even The Crown in this situation?
Head line : ‘It got vile very quickly’: how Alex Jones turned a tragedy into a battleground
"Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed spent four years following the circus created by the rightwing TV host after he claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting never happened.
There is a statistic dropped into the middle of the new HBO documentary about Alex Jones and his conspiracy-theory-laden campaign to deny the Sandy Hook school massacre that is so startling it changes the complexion of the film.
It’s tempting to see the blustering alt-right Infowars host as little more than a charlatan selling snake oil conspiracy theories to the fringes of American society.
But then The Truth vs Alex Jones tells us that one in four Americans believes Jones’s claim that the 2012 murder of 20 small children and six staff at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened.
Within hours of the massacre, Jones was on air describing the killings as a “false flag” operation by the government to justify restrictions on gun ownership. The families grieving over unimaginable loss are made out to be actors. Their children are portrayed as imaginary or alive and well or anything but dead.
What followed for the families was a decade of torture on top of the horror of losing their children as ever more Americans said they were frauds. Some parents were recognised in the street and told to their faces that their grief was a lie. Jones and Infowars did more than anyone to push that fiction but it turned out that the victims were not as broken or powerless as he imagined.
The film-maker, Dan Reed, spent four years following two sets of parents who turned to the one place where most Americans still believe they might find truth – the courts. By the end of this fascinating and powerful documentary, the real Alex Jones is laid bare. A grifter who knows it’s all made up is left snivelling to the bereaved parents he has spent years torturing that he didn’t mean it, only to return to his monstrous ways when he is back behind the microphone."
~
These people who do this, Alex Jones, the Cognitive Warfare Industrial Complex, Disinformation and Misinformation peddlars always do this for profit, and as far as I am concerned they are criminal in mind, body, heart and action. Brexit is one of those operations. The failure of our Legislature to recognise this is deeply, deeply concerning.
We have laws that criminalise psychological abuse within Domestic Violence - I think there's a good case for a Law defining grooming as 'targeting known vulnerabilities in order to exacerbate emotional reactivity so as to position the target for exploitation' which amounts to psychological abuse on so many levels.
I think of the hormone cascades that flow from such interactions, and the adverse health impacts, I think of the rage, anger, sleeplessness, anxiety and then there's the impulse to act driven by such a state.
I see it as inherently cruel on three levels.
1. Once we know someone is vulnerable we are duty bound to protect them.
2. To exacerbate their vulnerability is cruelty, even if it is just for 'fun'... or kicks.
3. To then exploit that exacerbated state in any material way is repugnant and assuredly criminal and it is also cruelty because it maintains the vulnerability.
"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."
Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.
Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)
“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)
example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.
example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU
example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate
example : Brexit!
example : Covid masks are Muzzles!
~
this blog post is about Brexit, and that have called the practice of political grooming.
~
behavioural surplus : data you are not aware that you provide, data which reveals more about your vulnerabilities, biases and psychological state than you yourself are aware of.
A rough and ready flow chart outlining the flow of behavioural, personal and situational data collected by the commercial surveillance systems, across the digital commons, a system that has given rise to Surveillance Capitalism, which is also being leveraged by entities intent upon manipulation and psychological grooming for adverse political, ideological and economic exploitation of the targeted populations.
In Brief, regarding Facebook (applicable to every online platform)
It's quite simple.
There are three data sets.
The general data set, that includes your insurance, your driving licence, your loans, mortgages, any court judgements, what cars you have owned, where you went to school university, what grades you got, what you buy on your debit card or credit car - these are external to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, and can be bought by anyone with the funds to pay for it.
The data sets that Facebook has are two fold.
1. One part is the content you create. That is the bit you part own.
2. The other part is their records of our total online behaviour - everything we have liked, everything we have been angry at, or sad, or caring, those buttons. Every ad we responded to. Every ad on every other web page we responded to. How long it took us to respond. Every page we ever visited. How long we spent on each page, what time of the day. Where our eyes lingered on that page. everything we buy. everything we search for. how we react to content that is presented and represented in slightly different forms to see which one triggers a response or a reaction. Every quiz, survey or competition. Every game we played.
All this and more. Facebook owns it. You do not. You cannot access it, ever. You have no rights over any of it.
Facebook never sells that data. That's it's golden egg.
In essence they hold enough behavioural data to know our psychology better than we do and they hope that they can use that data to predict our future behaviour better than we ourselves could.
That is what they sell to their advertisers. That prediction. What you will do or buy, next, after they have targeted you with ads.
3. What Facebook sells is an advertising system that categorises all that information into thousands of data points that advertisers can aim at, and then gives the advertiser real time ability to tweak ad content, to test it to see what gets the best results.
Predicting behaviour is the game, modifying behaviour is the game, in order to make more sales from advertising more accurately.
4. The harsh part is that this is also exploited by entities with seriously malign intent. The political grooming gangsters on all sides.
Because there are no Laws defining grooming, it's the wild west.
"Is it ok to manipulate people to extract their money, just not for politics?
But there are also clear shortcomings. Focusing on disinformation itself as a target for regulation brings an obvious problem. By calling for interventions based on ‘harmful’ content, the report asks the Government to step into the dangerous territory of regulating lawful political conversations between people. Are private companies to be mandated to police these communications on the Government’s behalf? There are numerous good reasons why this is deeply undesirable (not to mention incompatible with human rights laws).
The biggest oversight, however, is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.
‘Surveillance capitalism’, as it’s known, involves gathering as much data as possible about as many people as possible doing as many things as possible from as many sources as possible. These huge datasets are then algorithmically analysed so as to spot patterns and correlations from which future behaviour can be predicted. A personalised, highly dynamic, and responsive form of behavioural nudging then seeks to influence that future behaviour to drive engagement and profit for platforms and advertisers. These targeted behaviour modification tools rely on triggering cognitive biases and known short-cuts in human decision-making. Platforms and advertisers extensively experiment to find the most effective way to influence behaviour."
Cambridge Analytica unapologetically laying out how they did it.
apt youtube comments: "F**ing amazing. She talks about mind-f**ing us as if it's the most normal thing."
and
"This is disturbingly Orwellian. And rather like Trump, sociopathic. Plus an example of business, I suspect, unaffected by ethics or principle."
Hence the relative ease with which Brexit was sold as a blow for English citizen's 'freedom', the relative ease with which Trump was portrayed as a Saviour who would clean out corruption, the relative ease with which Corbyn was painted as a communist terrorist loving economic disaster zone, the relative ease with which COVID portrayed as a hoax, and the manner in which Vaccination for COVID19 slandered as as a global sterilisation project, and much else besides.
These are all examples of deliberate grooming campaigns that were aimed at a small percentage of the population to trigger behavioural changes such as voting for Brexit, without understand the implications, or not voting at all, or refusing to wear a mask or wearing a yellow star and believing in each case that the person targeted was taking independent sovereign action that is political activism at it's best and highest.
Then those small groups are given prominence in media and used as scapegoats, and the rest of the population targets their dismay at those who were groomed, rather than turn on the groomers and their masters. I think that is a quite basic yet solid explanation of what is being done.
Here's a little more detail.
Influence and indoctrination has always been and will always remain a key component of all Hierarchy of Power and Violence Systems. A key task of all rulers is to habituate the populations being ruled to being ruled, to thwart emergence of an evidence based, critical analysis that grounds a popular solidarity that might be effective enough to dislodge the ruling class through occupying the available democratic legislatures and passing Laws that regulate Wealth and Industry, and that seek to prevent the harms they often cause.
The many are potentially more potent than the few.
The Wealth Party is a minority political and economic Hegemon that must habituate the much larger general population to accepting the dominant position of Wealth, without the population fully understanding what that really means. Indeed they must misunderstand the situation. I use the term 'grooming'' to define and outline this practice. This 20 minute video from a Channel 4 documentary explores some of the tactics of political grooming with real world examples.
Political grooming and sexual grooming, ideological and religious grooming, gang grooming, cult grooming - it is all the same activity, in different arenas. As a society seeking to build a genuinely healthy politic, we need to protect the groomed and confront and disarm the groomers.
Grooming is a tool that predators use to gain the trust of a target, and ultimately to manipulate that trust to gain sexual, monetary, political, emotional, psychological or other advantages.
Adults can and do groom other adults. Sometimes adults may use other adults to help them in their grooming. It is a much more common behaviour than most will admit.
Grooming almost always involves leveraging a power disparity. The target may or may not be aware of or perceive that power disparity.
Grooming usually involves the close study of existing vulnerabilities in the target. The groomer must understand in some detail the nature of the vulnerability, the ways in which the target behaves due to that vulnerability.
The groomer has to be able to trigger the vulnerability, and adjust the triggers according to the desired outcome. To do that the groomer must understand the target better than the target understands him or her self. That alone implies a power disparity.
Exacerbating or heightening fears, insecurities, lack of knowledge, hatreds is the second stage of the grooming process. The first is identifying people afflicted with any of these vulnerabilities.
This is doubly cruel - rather than help people recover, they worsen the condition in order to further exploit the person.
Other power disparities that come into play are wealth, reach, access to or control of resources, social position, position in an existing hierarchy, position within a group, command of a group of people.
We have seen in recent and not so recent history the techniques that what we call propaganda. Propaganda is political grooming, and it has operated via mass media, or pamphlets, where news papers publish opinion, with a twisted or spun narrative to distort, misinform, trigger or other wise mislead and manipulate whole demographic groups - the targeting was not individualised.
Now with digital media, the targeting can be much more focused, to a small group of individuals via smart phones and computers, in any given geographical area, even to a given individual, in ways the people being targeted cannot perceive. Individualised targeting.
The same people who operated global psychological micro targeting grooming operations in 100 elections, across 68 Democracies to bolster right wing political entities are directly involved in COVID19 misinformation and disinformation.
"The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website.
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
This is organised, institutionalized psychological abuse - to exploit, exacerbate and maintain neurosis for political gain. There is no other way to describe it more accurately without delving in deeper, and looking at the evidence of how this dynamic operates.
"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."
Elements of grooming
Friendship-forming: The groomer will work to determine a target’s candidacy by asking questions about the target’s life and gauging their vulnerability, seeking contact information such as social media handles, email addresses or phone numbers.
The undertaking research, accessing any available data about the target in order to build a multi point profile of the target all form part of this stage - the object is to find points of interest to pretend to share and to then form bonds around that 'shared interest'. This is all designed to form a link into the target's psyche at some level.
Relationship-forming: The predator works to gain the targets trust, often through sharing interest, n concerns or by fulfilling an apparent need. The predator may also share information that “only the wise can know. The 'you are not a 'sheeple' play. "I know what others do not know, and now so do you. We are linked by what we know that others do not. We are special, you are special."
Getting the target to take some action is part of strengthening the relationship. Share this information, attend a meeting, spread the word and get positive feed back for doing so. Indeed the positive feedback can be manufactured to encourage the target to do more.
Threat-gauging: The predator will engage in a risk assessment to determine how accessible the victim truly is - the predator will check a target’s relationship strength with friends, family, and roommates, colleagues, associates and avoid overt contact where others might intervene, or alternatively to start to undermine those relationships. One of the difficulties of the digital domain is that an individuals feed can be tailored to exclude others who might be protective of the target. The echo chamber or bubble effect can come into play. Two people in the same room on different laptops seeing entirely different feeds of information or misinformation. The groomer might be able to see both laptops, aware of their differences and then be able to use that to drive them apart, or bring them closer together, which ever suits the groomers agenda.
Isolation: The predator will begin distancing the target from friends or family, from social groups, from previous affiliations. This can be done in multiple ways, including surprisingly positive methods such as compliments and favors. The predator may tell the intended victim that they feel an especially strong connection to them, or that they understand each other in a special way that no one else can get. Control is the predator’s intent. By appearing calm and concerning, the predator is seeking to increase their influence over the victim to advance their agenda. The use of 'shared fear' follows this pattern too. Presenting with false empathy is another tactic in this play book.
Exploitation: In this phase, the predator will start to use the target to meet their needs. Predators will solicit victims for money, will ask them to accomplish morally questionable things for the project, just to fill an emotional need, the political groomer will suggest the target might vote in a particular way, or engage in harassment of the opposition, to pile on to approved targets online. Predators can suggest meet-ups, and propose actions to be taken. Like mobbing a public building, or wearing a yellow star - the groomer will of course frame those as 'liberation activism', as an act of courage and commitment.
Maintenance: Once the victim is doing what the predator wants, the predator will work to keep them under control through various means. These methods can include gas-lighting (telling the victim their feelings are crazy or unreasonable), destroying the victim’s self-esteem, or continuing the isolate the victim from their loved ones.
Grooming is more common than most understand.
Grooming is a common tool for con-men, pedophiles, political leaders, cult leaders, and those with a narcissistic personality disorder. The results to a victim can be catastrophic, in terms of loss of self-esteem and personal safety, psychological trauma, and harm to the victim’s financial resources and personal wealth.
Groomers can also incite their targets to engage in harm causation behaviour. The Genocide in Rwanda is one extreme and horrific example. Groomers operating for extremist groups such as the KKK the British National Party or ISIS and all such extremist groups groom targets in order to use them for their activities and they call it 'recruitment.'
Emotional Hi-Jacking.
This is a simple example of what emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman calls an emotional hijacking (or hijack): a situation in which emotions overrule our typical thinking processes. Part of the tactical tool kit of the groomer is to trigger emotional hijacks, or amygdala hacks.
Someone bumps into me in a supermarket, spills me items on the floor and keeps moving on, and I react, angrily or someone makes a snide comment about my post on a thread I are following and I react, without thinking and fire off a nasty comment.
What happens is that the amygdala, a pair of almond shaped brain organs that sit between brain stem and cortex inhibit the cortext because they are triggered by a sense of threat, and they cause fight or flight hormonal cascades that ready the body for action.
We might liken the amygdala's action here to an emergency override of the mind, springing into action whenever we feel anxious or threatened and activating our fight, flight, or freeze response. As the amygdala is activated the person then interprets the event or trigger as a threat, and it stimulates a hormone cascade that prepares the body and brain for an immediate and aggressive reaction or a freezing reaction. Either way the reaction is quicker than thinking it out.
The reaction of the amygdala is not entirely innate - the default setting is trust - however it is profoundly influenced by experience, not least trauma; unresolved trauma has chronic influence, influence that may be life long until the person resolves the issue or learns to feel safe again.
Emotional hijacks can work to our advantage or disadvantage.
In the case of a real emergency, the amygdala response can produced a hormone cascade that will energise a person's body to present with the courage to defend loved ones against an attacker who's bigger or stronger - the effect of the cascade is to reduce thinking about the risks, increase immediate readiness to act, which means the thinking part of the brain goes offline, and a direct perception takes over that is much quicker than thought.
"I did not think about the risk, I just jumped into the situation and took the attacker down, and stopped the assault on my partner. It was only afterwards when I thought about it that I saw the risk, and then I felt shock and terror."
However, when it is being deliberately triggered by an agency that is grooming the target, it can also move the target to engage in risky, irrational, and even dangerous behavior in everyday situations.
An advertisement or piece of content that angers a person, or attracts them and stimulates them to press a provided link, often known as click bait, is an example of how amygdala hacking is often deployed in neural marketing.
How grooming happened in the Brexit Campaign
Here is a rather useful tweet that outlines some of the dynamics of the grooming operation what was run by Leave.EU, funded by Aaron Banks, and run by Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ. I suggest you go read it through before continuing to read this piece. It is just one small part of the whole, and it serves as an indicator - extrapolate this activity to hundreds of thousands of people and one can see societally impactfull outcomes emerging.
1. Lots of people use social media -Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and many others. Most people are linked to a number of friends, many people are linked to other accounts, some of which are real, some of which are bots through casual friend acquisition, adding, taking part in groups and so on. All these accounts are linked.
2. Anyone who wanted to gather data can do so by issuing an App that might be a questionnaire, a quiz, a game all offering a reward of some kind, where participation demands or implies an acceptance of Terms and Conditions - those terms and conditions contain permissions to gather data, the targets data and the data of the targets connections. Who ever reads the Ts & Cs? Nobody does.
And example : Targeting football enthusiasts:
This is a graphic from an app used to gather data from the target, and by the permissions the target did not read, it accessed the data from the targets connected accounts.
There are literally hundreds of ways to attract bees to the flower. Quizzes, competitions, games, surveys etc can all be used to scrape data from people's online accounts. Anything that asks for a click and acceptance of terms and conditions is potentially a data scraping tool.
3. The data gathered would be the name, images, likes, dislikes and various other activity data that can be linked to other external data sets that are available commercially, and when combined all these datasets can draw a portrait of any given social media user.
External datasets include credit scoring, credit purchases, marital status, DVLA data, Insurance Data, Health Data and lots more.
Data scraped from the app might include name, status, work/unemployed, likes football, does not like football, likes dog jokes, does not like cat jokes, posts about TV, posts about Environment, buys books online, buys clothes online and much else - pretty much everything that person does online is available.
Mixing the online data and external data and matching can build reliable profiles, user profile information, or UPI.
4. Then the data can be examined, sorted, categorised, and thus very specific characteristics to be targeted can be drawn up.
There is a psychometric or psychology type categorising system called OCEAN which is used to lay out a spectrum of behavioural characteristics around 5 broad categories.
Each of these represents a spectrum, thus openness can also describes lack of openness, as a minus scoring - or as a range between 0 and 10, with 5 being the median, 0 being the least open, 10 being the most open.
5. Now the more precise targeting can begin, and be refined to hit specific characteristic groupings which might be associated with various political or apolitical positions, including contradictions..
This tweet provides an example. It is the same tweet I posted above.
Vote leave overspent by £675 000. Aaron Banks contributed £8 million in money he can't account for.
The purpose of this thread though is more focused on the £675 000 as it's easier to show how this money was used.
6. In thinking about this one has to be aware that the organisations gathering data are huge corporations with near limitless budgets for computer power and man power to orchestrate their activity. They have every interest in protecting, enhancing and maintaining their revenue generating activities - giving advertisers precision tools to advertise at targeted groups with predictable outcomes - by harvesting and instrumentalising the targets behavioural characteristics and activity patterns as a resource, with which they gain the leverage to generate the tools to give to the advertisers to access our psyches in the pursuit of sales.
Immediately obvious is the power disparity between these media companies, the advertisers and you or I, the individual regular users.
7. They make their income not by selling the data we create or the behavioural data that they hold about us, but by giving advertisers powerful tools to target specified characteristics contained, itemised and cataegorised within that data they hold about us, that they hold about any sizeable group of people.
Those tools allow the advertisers to be able to watch in real time the effect of their content as it is sent out and is reacted to, and to be able to tweak that content and refine it so that they are getting better results all the time, until they can predict outcomes based on what they know.
8. Facebook or Google or Apple will never sell your data, that is their golden egg - but they will not allow you to protect that egg, or claim ownership of the contents of the egg, or even get rid of your specific egg, because the data is not the content that you create, it is what your activity indicates about your behavioural psychology, the behavioural trail and scent you leave as you use the platform. It was known as behavioural exhaust, a side dish from your online activity.
It includes a range of data, such as eye tracking, how quickly you respond//react to different content, what you searched for, what you did when you found what you searched for, how long you remained at that destination - all of which provides clues to your psychological and behavioural characteristics, which can be used to predict what you will do when presented with advertising content aimed at you.
Thus the current situation is that Facebook and other platforms allow grooming operations to function with ever greater precision because there is no legislation that protects you or I from grooming.
Facebook, Google etc are not necessarily the problem, but as things stand they are enabling the grooming, they are enabling advertisers to exacerbate vulnerabilities in people in order to modify behaviour in order to generate sales or voting pattern shifts.
This grooming is given a false protection behind 'Free Speech' - the grooming is defined as 'advertising' - which generates revenue for the social media platform, which funds the free usage by us the users, enabling our free speech rights.
It is not a genuine legal protection, it is a deliberately misleading argument.
Free Market Libertarians have used it to protect the 'rights of Corporations' since the late 1990s.
How to disarm the weapon
The best defence is two fold a) an audience that understands grooming and how it works, who can individually and collectively disarm the grooming and then b) legislation that defines grooming for exploitation that would prevent such activity on any platform.
Which brings us to this : the core problem, the problem that existed before Google and Facebook and the digital platforms arrived - organised, institutional grooming - was already a serious problem, dating back to the Bible, and probably further back.
The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Guardian or what ever News Media is in your region - there's a range of opinion, often reflecting established political polarities, and rarely wholly honest, and always selling advertising space.
Honesty sets us free. knowledge maintains freedom.
Here are a few web pages that I think are useful in helping to scope this domain out a bit more.
"Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal.
When the news about the French election hacking broke, many recognized the timing was due to French legislation. The leaks happened just moments before the legally enforceable election silence started, making it impossible for the media to report on, and for the campaign staff to correct any falsehoods and disinformation.
But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. In fact, the leaks during the election campaigns both in the U.S and in France are textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation.
Psychological operations generally have two purposes: to change people’s behavior and make them react, or to have them not react. These reactions are largely based on emotions, which have always been at the core of all information-psychological influence."
Grooming is a tool that predators use to gain the trust of a target, and ultimately manipulate that trust to gain sexual, monetary, or other advantages. You may have heard the term as it applies to children, but adults can also groom other adults. In fact, some adults may use other adults, and particularly women, to help them in their grooming.
As with other forms of manipulation, grooming is not a simple cut-and-dry technique. It plays on an individual’s insecurities and, even in a strong-minded person, can wreak havoc psychologically."
"Using unwarranted criticism and threats, the bully tries to control their target and subjugate them, without a thought for that persons’ contributions, reputation, well-being, health or self confidence. Sooner or later this person – the bully’s target – realises that they are not only being “managed” but bullied, and they will start to show signs of resistance to that. Often, anything said in the target’s self-defence will be distorted and used by the bully, too. Gaslighting involves attempts to either negate or redefine a target’s experiences, and abusers often use this method."
"I propose a legal definition of behaviour that we are all too familiar with.
Organised operations that target people’s cognitive biases, their social woundedness, their insecurities, prejudices and worries, their misunderstandings, cultural conditioning and fears, and do that through public and social media, through marketing, propaganda and media campaigns operating on an industrial scale, manipulating vulnerable people for ideological, religious, political or economic advantage.
This behaviour is grooming.
If we had legislation defining this and criminalising it, then media platforms would be unable to allow such behaviour to be allowed on their platforms as a revenue stream."
"Misinformation can also be intentionally suggested by “just asking questions”; a technique that allows
provocateurs to hint at falsehoods or conspiracies while maintaining a facade of respectability.
For example, in
one study, merely presenting questions that hinted at a conspiracy relating to the Zika virus induced significant
belief in the conspiracy .
Likewise, if you do not read past a headline such as “Are aliens amongst us?” you might
walk away with the wrong idea.
Where does misinformation come from?
Misinformation ranges from outdated news initially thought to be true and disseminated in good faith,
to technically-true but misleading half-truths, to entirely fabricated disinformation spread intentionally
to mislead or confuse the public.
People can even acquire misconceptions from obviously fictional
materials. Hyper-partisan news sources frequently produce misinformation, which is then circulated
by partisan networks. Misinformation has been shown to set the political agenda."
And yes, I have written a song about this.
"we know how to groom you" performed live, from my studio
also available on Reverbnation, as an .MP3 Download
