Freedom from democratic regulation of externalising costs - the driver of anti-masking ideology.

Observing what has been happening, I have made an assessment that the use of the language of 'restrictions,' if it is deliberate, is most probably designed to trigger the 'my personal freedom from tyranny' emotional hook. Nobody likes to feel restricted. It's a way to nudge an opinion set that dismisses evidence.

In this blog piece I want to explore how that trigger works, why I think it is being exploited for political reasons, what the effects are of such intentional triggering and why I think it is lethal to all our futures. I want to show how it relates to a constellation of problems as a key, as a critically important distraction, deflection, obscurant strategic weapon.
The ability and willingness of certain agencies to exploit this trigger more or less guarantees that this pandemic will run on and on and on causing incrementally more harm, with no end in sight.

I say incrementally causing more harm because the assumptions about the nature of the virus and it's impacts are incorrectly assessed and thus measures to limit those harms - measures to uphold the populations right to health - are conflated with undermining personal liberty, even as this government outlines very real legislation that undermines civil liberties and diminishes Government accountability.

"who will we not save?" as they sought to 'protect the Hoard'..

The effect of saying "We are imposing restrictions" is quite different the effect of "We are implementing preventative public health measures to protect the populations Right to Health."

If the strategy is to allow spread to achieve herd immunity, then it would be useful for the Government to create a scapegoat and exploit that vector to insulate the Government from the costs such a strategy will incur. The Government must not pay the price, and so others will be made to carry the cost. This is an externalised cost exercise.

Non-Essential Travel is Tinder for the Virus.
In the most simplistic terms, if SARSCOV2 cannot meet a new host, it will die out.
Suppression of  transmission of the virus in the community is the most effective strategy in dealing with an epidemic of an infectious pathogen.

Stopping the spread is spreading the love.

However, in global terms this strategy is only as strong as the weakest or least effective implementation of it. Any country that allows spread of the virus will generate variants, and successful variants will select for more efficient replication, transmission. Where we have huge unknowns is the virulence of new variants - we cannot predict future virulence and this means allowing spread is taking a terrible gamble. England has been a significant weak link in terms of global transmission suppression, as has the US and EU.

This takes on another dimension when it is a question of travel between countries or within countries, in the midst of a pandemic of  new highly infectious air borne virus, when we cannot predict long term outcomes, even as we observe short and medium term harms. International Travel, because it always involves enclosed spaces and a mix of people who are exposed to each other for significant periods, operates as a dating app for this virus. This kind of travel is inherently risky for spread of SARSCOV2.

Right to Health.

When powerful lobbies with immense economic interests advocate for their interests at the expense of the whole population, at the expense of the populations Right to Health, we see a conflict of interest, and an externalising of costs occurs. The people pay the price. 

What is one years economic activity in the great scheme of things, compared to many, many years of life lost to death and long term disease?  This kind of question arises in other areas. What is the value of high processed foods industrial economic activity and profit taking that leads directly to dietary disease, compared to the costs of dietary disease?

If we had regulation that limited high processed foods, that removed them from our food shelves, would that be a 'restriction' or a 'public health measure'? New Zealand is going to ban sale of tobacco. 
Is that a restriction? Is it a rational public health measure? Do the 'rights' of Tobacco Company shareholders trump the rights of people vulnerable to addiction who are being exploited?
Here we see the choice of the word 'restrictions' clearly has a political and economic meaning.

Economic liability, externalised costs.

In the case of a loss of business imposed by a Government 'restriction' - an order to cease flights - the Government is liable to some degree for compensation to those adversely affected. 
The affected Business lobby will have a reasonable claim that since the Government is restricting it's ability to function it deserves adequate support for the duration of that limitation.  That was not the case with the travel lobby - they lobbied for continuation of their business, they lobbied for spreading the virus as one outcome of that stance. It was not their intention, yet that is precisely what happened.

I know of someone who flew to Thailand this week, for a holiday. Upon arrival he was tested, and found to be infected, and infectious. It is likely that he picked up the virus just before he flew out, in public transit or at the airport, and was incubating during the flight, totally unaware of his condition.

That person had to quarantine for 12 days and do regular tests. He was without symptoms. He was bored. He tried to bend the rules. He was more concerned with his personal freedom, the irritation he felt because he had to quarantine than he was with protecting the Thai population. His reaction is quite typical among wealthy westerners who think international travel is their right. The sovereign individual. Me, me, me.

It's not his fault, it is the culture that has acculturated him so that he behaves as he did. He could easily have taken a holiday anywhere in the UK. He felt an entitlement to undertake international travel, travel that is spreading the virus, in the middle of a global pandemic. He is one of millions.

Throughout this pandemic there has been no travel lobby seeking to protect the population's Right to Health. The travel lobby is happy to externalise the costs of spreading the virus - the travel lobby was unwilling to share those costs.

Tourist travel spreads the virus
Since February 2020, I have had a sense that something was off about the insistence  upon maintaining tourist and holiday travel - non-essential travel -  because I could not help but notice  how much of a vector of spread of the virus such non-essential travel was, precisely because effective quarantine arrangements were resisted and were not put in place. 
The first two waves of SARSCOV2 spread within the UK are entirely down to the Government's deliberate choice to reject quarantine, to reject precise tracking of where the virus was, to reject mass testing to chase down the virus, to reject support for isolation and to allow open, unchecked borders.

It was that choice more than any other that seeded SARSCOV2 into the UK. The media were full of the narrative 'the China Virus' when by February 2020 it was the Spanish, Italian and Austrian Ski Holiday Virus, even as the East Asian countries were proving that suppression of community transmission is the most effective way to avoid the avoidable harms which the USUK Governments did not avoid - by choice.
Where there were proven suppression of community transmission strategies put in place, community transmission was much more reduced. That's the basic scientific truth here.
Measures designed to reduce harm in an epidemic of infectious disease are more correctly described as preventative public health measures. They are not necessarily restrictions. When viewed in this context they are not sensed as restrictions - even as they do require temporary limitations on behaviour - it is understood that the measures are protective and that they are temporary, and that once the threat has subsided, the measures can be withdrawn, and the limitations thus evaporate as they are no longer necessary.
That protection that could have been organised, and funded if Governments and travel lobbies had put populations right to health at the top of their priorities. The protection evaporated. 
Freedom to trade trumped the Right to Health. 


How selfish, and to be honest, how cruelly reckless.
The Oligarchy are waging a war against democratic legislative regulation of Wealth Extraction grounded in toxic industrial practices which incur costs when they are not cleaned up or prevented. Those costs are kept at a distance. Those costs are externalised from the economic activity of the operations from raw material sourcing through processing, manufacture, distribution, sale, consumption and end of life of product.

The Free Market Fundamentalists and Industry leaders choose to see such regulation as might be required to prevent those costs from being incurred in the first instance, let alone dealt with when they are incurred, as a form of tyranny. "We will not let you restrict our Wealth Extraction by reducing our profitability by demanding we pay all those costs." 
They understand that the demand by a growing and significant cohort of reliable scientists, concerned citizenry, NGOs and some government officials for corrective and adaptive action on climate change, on environmental degradation, pollution of air, land and sea, on species loss and other related matters, including mass poverty, low wages and corrupt influence of legislators represents a threat to their 'liberty' to carry on extracting wealth even as it causes harm and to externalise the costs of that harm. 
Democratic legislative  regulation is deemed to be an enemy of their ability to extract wealth and their capability to and willingness influence legislatures to protect that wealth extraction. Democratic regulation is a threat to their political power, power which stems from their Wealth Extraction.

However they cannot stand in the town hall and make that plain. They must find other ways to protect their interests and this puts them into conflict with our collective interests.

Political Grooming Gangsters.
By deploying emotional hooks that conflate emotive notions of individual freedom within existing democratic systems with a vaguely defined Libertarianism, the Oligarchy have been able to enroll the 'Mask is a Muzzle Freedomeers' in a process that is undermining democratic regulation to protect the populations right to health, and this is inextricably linked to the protection of their Wealth Extraction Systems and their toxic industrial practice of Externalised Costs. 
Trump, Brexit and anti-masking, anti-vax, anti border quarantine, open up the economy, let the vulnerable take it on the chin - these are all views that are underpinned with funding and logistical support from the Oligarchy of the Wealth Extracting Industrial giants. They are not emergent concepts, that have popped up from the grass roots of society, as an organic awareness and movement. These ideas have been developed and promoted by the Oligarchy, and seeded into vulnerable parts of the population through a process of political and ideological grooming.

Percentages or persons?
There is a pattern where people opposed to public health measures cite that only a small percentage of people die from Covid - they ignore the reality that a small percentage of a massive population is a lot of people dying avoidable deaths.  The Covid Freedomeers dismissal of the lives of so many vulnerable people is a good example of externalising costs
The vulnerable must pay the price incurred in the strategy of allowing spread of the virus beyond control in order to keep the economy open. The cost is externalised. 
The people who will gain from keeping the economy open in ways that place the vulnerable at greater risk that they ever needed to be placed at, will not pay the price. 
The vulnerable pay the price.

The Covid Freedomeers do not draw attention to how many of any given population have pre-existing conditions, which elevates their risk of death and disease and harm, exponentially. That is why they cite percentages. To evade the human realities.
The vulnerable will pay the price of the Freedomeers ill-advised reckless endangerment.

Then there's the matter of post infection chronic disease, which is rarely discussed in honest detail - as I write close to 2% of the total population of adults across the UK are suffering with varying degrees of Long Covid. 1.3 million people, who did not have this chronic disease burden prior to January 2020. 1.3 million people whose condition could have been avoided.

Not avoiding avoidable harms - externalising costs.
The Freedomeers claim that protecting the vulnerable undermines their Freedom, even though the evidence is that where States and populations have adopted best practice public health measures, and have pursued strategies to suppress transmission of the virus within the territories of the State whilst protecting borders with effective quarantine and screening, both economy and civil liberties fare much, much better - not to mention the right to health of the population is upheld and preserved.
Here's some of the evidence for my observation.
a) www.99-percent.org/what-is-the-market-fundamentalist-agenda/ - a detailed blog examining the ideological stance of the Free Market Fundamentalists, drawing on their own published writings and legislative action.
b) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/ - the same people who orchestrated the vast manipulative targeting operations that 'won' Brexit and Trump's Election are also heavily involved in COVID misinformation and disinformation, and keep the economy open lobby groups with privileged access to senior ministers in the Government.
c) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/01/inside-the-radicalised-anti-vaxxer-network-influencing-government-vaccine-advisory-panel/ an exploration of one of these groups and their direct links to Government, allowing them to influence Government policy without adequate oversight, and with a decidedly malign intent.
d)  https://graphika.com/reports/ants-in-a-web/ - just one example of many, where wealthy billionaires and states operate psychological manipulation campaigns that undermine healthy democracy, and attempt to drive behaviour that can be exploited.

"Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who fled China to evade trial for Corruption, is at the center of a vast network of interrelated media entities which have disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns. The network acts as a prolific producer and amplifier of mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about Covid-19, and QAnon narratives."
e) https://blog.f-secure.com/the-psychology-of-election-hacking/ - a concise blog that looks at psychological targeting operations.

"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."
f) https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/15/gb-news-funder-legatum-linked-to-koch-climate-denial-network-us-race-baiting/ - US Free Market Fundamentalists linked to UK News Press Media operations spreading Covid misinfo and climate denialism and other fallacies, designed to divide electorates and thus weaken or impede democratic solidarity to evolve regulation of toxic industries.
g) https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/02/ministry-of-defence-funds-man-behind-great-barrington-declaration/ - Weaponised mass communications in a Covid setting. Government, Military and extreme right wing free marketeers working together.
h) https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/06/grooming-how-it-operates-why-it-works.html my own blog examining how grooming works, why it works, using Brexut as  a case study (not exhaustive) and suggesting ways to prevent profoundly psychologically abusive such campaigns
Cognitive Disssonance Weaponised.
There are a number of internalised conflicts inherent in the Anti-mask Freedom lobby, not least that they are being exploited by the very people they most often claim are engaged in a conspiracy of tyranny - the Oligarchy.
By triggering emotional hooks related to vague notions of personal freedom, they blind the Covid Freedomeers to the Freedom the Oligarchy desires - freedom from rational democratic regulation of Wealth Extraction and Toxic Industrial practices - and enrol the Covid Freedomeers in demolishing rational democratic governance.
Now, to be honest, as much as I find the position of the Covid Freedomeer an irritant, I was myself fully hooked into Conspiracy Theory, New Age Woo and other belief systems that ignored evidence, and that exploited my vulnerability.
I do have deep reservations about the nature of State power as it operates within the current  historical context, understanding as I do, as many of us do, that the origins of The State System are steeped in blood letting, that the evolution of the Rulers localised institutionalised 'right' to  exercise violence, to 'defend' their realms from external and internal enemies and to engage in war fare runs counter to egalitarian principles and usually causes great harm to workers, and rarely do the Ruling Class bear such harms.

Of course, I and many, many people see the potential for healthy democratic development of a truly equitable social power system as it has played out in the past, and  is playing out in the present. 

We are all aware of the potential trajectories of a more democratic system of Governance focused on Justice, Equity and Humanity,  into the future (Power Inquiry 2006, UBI, Blockchain Policy Fora, People's Assemblies, Egalitarian Democracy).

We live within an historical context that is the struggle to end oppression.
Trade unions were an expression of that struggle, as were The Suffragettes, Martin Luther King, the struggle against Apartheid and the struggle of workers to attain decent working conditions, education for their children, health care systems for their communities and much else besides.
In the 21st Century, the Unions of the grass roots will need to expand well beyond the work place and working conditions...
Schools, Hospitals, Care Homes, even our own homes are the new political battle fields, fora for dissent and laying the ground work for collective change, countering oppressive corruption, building healthier democratic systems that serve all our futures, that nurture our world instead of exploiting and damaging our world.
The Grooming Operations are a very important element of the way oppressor class maintains it's hegemonic stance, a very potent weapon and we must understand why so many are vulnerable to that kind of persuasion, because we need to help them and us to break free of that persuasion, in order to build social grass roots solidarity that we need to confront the problems of Power.
https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-industrial-system-is-inherently.html
"The Industrial System is inherently adversarial: it treats those who are harmed by the Industrial System, those who bring attention to the harm, in order to stop the harm, as adversaries. 
Insulate Britain
The custodial sentences imposed on Insulate Britain activists for contempt of court are clearly a contempt of our collective welfare. In the same way that Shell's move from Holland to England is. In both cases, those who drew attention to harm and suggested ways to prevent the harm are being treated as adversaries.
Another way to put it is like this: political power struggles undermine healthy governance - adversarial dynamics inhibit co-operative dynamics. Any relationship that has a power struggle within it is likely going to be toxic.
Industrial political Power is inherently adversarial in that it is profitable only because its foundation for wealth extraction is created by externalising costs.
Those who bear the pain of the costs and bring attention to that pain, and those costs, are considered as adversaries.
When those who are harmed find a voice and become advocates to confront the harm causation, with an eye to stopping the harms, the industrial cult treats them as enemies to be crushed. 
This is a reactionary stance - the cult wishes to preserve the extraction of wealth above all else, and will attack anyone who questions the morality or wisdom of extracting wealth at such a cost. 
It will take every measure available co-opt anyone who proposes solutions in order to control any proposed change.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

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This thing of being alive is lovely - which is why we must confront the bully culture.

This thing of being alive is lovely. 

Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who  make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."― Aneurin Bevan

The story of how life moved from bacteria to plants, to animals, to forests and plains full of living creatures, all the way to people singing songs, laughing with children as we play and learn together, crying when we hurt, seeing, tasting, hearing, running and sleeping to awaken again, and everything else that emerges from being alive and human and loving and sensitive. How lovely it is to be a warm friendly, loving sensitive humane being! No machine, no invention can ever match that! 

Humour me, and stop right now - gaze at your hand, close it as you take a gentle breath in and as you exhale feel your hand and fingers, breathe into your hand and fingers. Do this again, and close your eyes, and then move, move your fingers gently, and feel how utterly strangely wonderful this ability to use a hand really is. Then grip something tightly, with all your strength and relax to hold it ever so gently, finding your lightest touch possible. Such a range of capability, such potential for finesse. 

Isn't it amazing? 

I do this and I think of the millions of years of evolution that went it to making this possible and I am filled with awe and gratitude. I am excited by this thought, this feeling. I think I did nothing to make this possible. How did I, this consciousness, arrive with this incredible set of capabilities? How lucky am I to be so gifted? Are we not truly blessed?

I am more often than not quietly in awe and gratitude for being alive, even though some days I am deeply depressed, or insanely angry, or confused or frightened, or just meh! A toothache is horrible and there are many other pains that are harder to bear, that take the delight out of the moment.

Justice is rooted in sensitivity

Nonetheless, I know that this thing of being alive is oh so precious, for me and for you and for every baby born, for every person who lives, every being that lives - and this, this feeling is why I detest the bully cult so much - how dare they (whoever they are) intrude upon that feeling, impinge on that sensitive life in others, and disturb it, taint it, trample all over it for their power, wealth and pomp. How dare they! That is the seat of my feeling of injustice, at it's most visceral. Before words, the feeling. Babies know this. Infants and toddlers know this. All young children know this. Innate.

The symptoms of chronic trauma are not a disorder.

People who cause trauma, who deliberately expose others to avoidable harms, are a disorder. People who expose others to chronic stress in order to accumulate wealth and power are a disorder.

Social systems that deny these simple truths are disordered. The symptoms presenting in people who have been harmed are not a disorder. They are symptoms, understandable symptoms.

George Bush and Tony Blair are disordered. As leaders or presenters or spokespersons of the institutions of competing militarised powers, they are a disorder. They are a dysfunctional psychology in action. 

If they were indicted and put on trial, that would probably go a long way to helping all those harmed by their actions come to better terms with their lived experience, especially if the outcome was to prevent future wars.  Most survivors do not want what happened to them to happen to anyone else, ever.

And for me it's not about punishing Blair and Bush et al. although I understand that drive, to hit back, to see that the person who has harmed shares the pain in some way - for me it primarily is about preventing future harms by showing that we, the grass roots, are willing to intervene and forcibly impede those who would initiate and prosecute war or harm causation. Holding them to account and putting them in prison is a matter of health and safety more than it is a matter of punishment. A warning. Don't you dare even think about initiating such action!

It is also true that to indict Bush and Blair is, for so many people, already too late. The vast harm they and those institutions they were embedded has caused is already done, and cannot be undone. Millions are suffering, un-necessarily. Their precious lives have been trampled upon and desecrated. How do we face that? What do we need to do to ease all that suffering?

The past is finished, the future is always unfinished.  

How we move in the present matters because here is where we determine the potential of the future. That we recognise what happened in the past and confront it matters in the present because it must be done in the present, it cannot be put off until tomorrow, or the day after, or next week, next month. It must be done in the present.

Part of the difficulty is a general sense of fatalism. Part of the difficulty is that few, if any, will acknowledge that we live within a violent hierarchy cult that has caused millennia of harm, that is causing immense harm today, that appears to be on a trajectory of more harm into the future, we are led to believe by it's size and ubiquity that it is indeed inevitable, there's a deterministic attitude associated with how this history is regarded, how it is understood. Understandable, from the individual perspective. How can I an impotent single human do anything about this?

In spite of all that it does not have to be this way, at all. It is this way, yet it does not have to be, into the future. The future is unfinished. There are more of the decent folk than there are bullies and barbarians. With solidarity the odds are in our favour.

Who pays the price?

1. Externalised costs means that ALL accumulated wealth from industrial culture is toxic, without exception. In war, who pays the price?

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/08/externalised-costs-much-more-than.html

2. Because of point 1. the bulk of what we call profit is in fact a cultural and social material  deceit. 

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2019/12/profit-and-deceit-stripping-it-down-to.html

3. Governance of the shared commons implies duty of care which in turn demands an evidence based approach to all activity and policy that affects the shared commons.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

Any activist that is not integrating these three elements is failing to address reality as it really is.

Poverty is a weapon system.

It’s an open secret that a lot of people in work mostly think poor people are poor because they are inferior. This is a core component of Industrial Social Conditioning. 

"The Poor Will Always Be With Us."

That is a lie upon which concentrated wealth and power is founded.

It is also built into every hierarchy religion, it is a lie built into mainstream psychiatry, mainstream psychology and mainstream marketing. The only reason 'the poor will always be with us' is because the system mandates that poverty must be maintained as a whip that is used to keep workers working for industries that cause harm as they operate to accumulate wealth and power into the hands of a hegemonic class, the Ruling Class.

And for those of us who are poor we are made to feel a cloud of shame while the others are destroying the environment and looking down on us.

So the problem is clearly laid out.

Life is utterly amazing and precious, bullies undermine that at every turn, it doesn't have to be this way.

We understand it and thus the next question is how do we resolve the problem?

How do we end the culture of bullying?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Suppression vs Mitigation, Acceptable Horror, Externalised Costs - problem solving for whom?

"We need to address the societal well-being of our nation, not just the economic well-being: our people are telling us that politics are not delivering and meeting their expectations. This is not woolly, it’s critical.”  Jacinda Ardern

Amrit Lohia tweeted the following:

Giving everyone "access to water and food" requires socialism. Eradicating SARS-CoV-2 also requires a shift to a socialist model where we recognise our responsibility to protect each other. Tagging in @coreluminous who can probably explain this better than I can.

I replied:  I think you have distilled it into its purest form.

"where we recognise our responsibility to protect each other." 

That is the essence of the situation with regards to COVID, Climate Change, pollution, poverty, environmental degradation, Racism, Misogyny etc.

Then I wrote some more.

I would call it a pro-social model rather than ideological Socialism.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

Management of the shared commons implies duty of care to all who share the commons. This demands that decisions on policy and practical implementation are grounded in equity and mutual aid and are based on evidence rather than upon ideological belief or the opinion of any one group.

Externalised Costs

.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/08/externalised-costs-much-more-than.html

Costs incurred by producers or consumers any other actors acting within the shared commons, that are not resolved, that are passed on to others who bear the burden are anti-social, profoundly so.

This is where I part with existing ideological Socialism which seeks equitable pay and conditions for all, whilst still allowing externalised costs to be accrued. Externalised costs is  the root of all the problems we face, globally. 

Resolution will be of that issue will be complex, that's well understood. 

That said it is attachments to power and status which make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Thus a reckoning with power and status lies ahead, it cannot be avoided.

Does this reckoning have to descend into a power struggle?

Only if those who hold asymmetric power choose to make it so.

Those who hold positions of power and status could choose to share that power, and they could manage it slowly enough to empower the corrective changes required that would protect us all as we move through this phase.

That choice is real.

To recap:

Elimination of community transmission is possible.

It's really simple. Virus needs to date a new human host, or it dies out. It is a complex operation to support a population to do EoCT.  Professor Gabriel Scally is a highly respected, deeply experienced public health professional and scholar. He is in no doubt whatsoever that elimination of community transmission is the best possible strategy under the current circumstances, where in the UK we are still at less than 20% population infected, and globally much less than that. There is an immense amount of harm to prevent, to avoid and it makes no sense to push the global population into harms way.

What complicates it are matters of power, wealth and status. That much is clear.

1. there's a world of difference between eradication and elimination of community transmission.

https://scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2108/S00021/the-meaning-of-elimination-of-covid-19.htm

2. New Zealand is not in complete isolation from the rest of the world. Tourism is not an essential human activity. Quarantine can manage necessary travel.

3. Proof of concept is 1.8 billion people who were not faced with multiple national level lockdowns, health care and economic harms over extended periods. 

4. Proof of concept is variants from areas that rejected elimination strategy arriving and breaking through quarantine systems.

5. Australia’s official COVID-19 strategy, suppression, doesn’t have an epidemiological definition. 

“Suppression isn’t a known technical term,” says epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre, head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute and Professor of Global Biosecurity.

6. “It’s either elimination or disease control.”

‘Disease control’ means reducing the number of cases to a locally acceptable level, but community transmission may still occur. 

7. In England that successful disease control is defined by Johnson as being 1000 deaths by Covid19 per week. No mention of the acceptable number of cases of chronic disease, Long Covid.

https://inews.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-privately-accepts-up-to-50000-annual-covid-deaths-as-an-acceptable-level-1170069

8. So, if I was one of those 'acceptable deaths' would I agree with Johnson?

If you or your beloved, or your son or daughter was one of those 'acceptable deaths' would you agree with Johnson?

9.  And the other more harsh reality of each death by covid is this:

These are truly awful, horrific deaths. Really, really grim.

https://vox.com/2021/2/20/22280817/covid-19-deaths-us-nursing-home-icu-ventilator

Oxygen depletion, organ failure, death. Terror, despair and horror over the course of ten days or so. One thousand times every week. Thousands of families. Hundreds of ICU teams

Who decides these deaths are acceptable? On what metric?

10. In another context, how many terrorist bombings would be considered an acceptable level?

Is it the case that the 241,000 Afghani deaths of the past 20 years are acceptable to UK citizens, but the 404 combat deaths of troops are not? 

11. Who makes these calls about policy and public health strategy, which have such immense impact the shared commons, and on what basis? 

12. Is there a need now for urgent collective decision making and collective action to prevent further avoidable harm, when we are in a situation that affects us all?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Climate Change, COVID19 and Externalised Costs: Letter to Media

To the Editor

All  industrial and political systems currently operating rely upon externalised costs at every stage from extraction of raw materials through production, consumption and on to end of life disposal, as the primary source of their profitability.

The top 20 Industrial sectors would be 'loss leaders' if they paid for the 'natural capital' they exploit.

Somebody else or some other organism or environmental system pays the price, often with a degraded quality of their lives, often with their lives, of the profits accrued.

All the harms we see are - water pollution, environmental degradation, air toxicity, climate change - are largely the accumulated externalised costs of the existing Industrial Political System.

Until we acknowledge this and then legislate to prevent externalised costs, and legislate to encourage regenerative practices, we are adding on more harm, and these problems will continue to grow. 

We can resolve this situation, and we should.

 It's not Rocket Science. It is Behavioural Science. It is Economic Science. 

The short term costs of correcting the error are well below the long term costs of allowing the error to continue.

Yours Sincerely

Corneilius Crowley
London

Published : https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/yourview/arid-40358324.html



What Climate Change, Air Pollution, Plastic Pollution and COVID19 all tell us is this :  they carry the same message - the only reliable way to protect the shared environment, the people and our economies is to co-operate across all sectors, openly, honestly, transparently and work with the available tested reliable evidence to solve problems and develop healthier behaviours.

Every moment of division, every moment of denial and every act of exploitation is lethal. No question.

*Please feel free to copy, and  post (email it to your local media, your local politicians and government officials, places of worship, schools etc)..

Kindest regards


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