Showing posts with label Johnson. Show all posts

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too. UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.

BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?

Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to *peak your interest, dear reader.

*(A dear reader pointed out my spelling error, I used the incorrect word. I ought to have used 'pique' - thank you Bernie Hastie on Facebook...)

I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.

This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'.

To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters.

Reading Mo Stewart's Paper will, I believe, inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.

It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often.

https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf

Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract

"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work.

This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments.

I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.

Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment

Introduction

The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs.

Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).

Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state.

Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.

Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis

The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) .

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).

Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need.

The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...

In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well.

Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms.

I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population.

Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Parliament now needs to investigate claims made by Johnson to sell Brexit & his oven ready deal. Peter Stafanovic

#OafenReady

source : The Guardian
"Parliament now needs to investigate claims made by Johnson to sell Brexit & his oven ready deal." Peter Stafanovic

Johnson's Brexit Lies, a history dating back to 1987... read on, dear reader. We are always living in history, even in the present. We are are made by and are making history...
Johnson the disgraced PM, is alleged to have been given a 'job' writing for the Daily Mail. He has past form as a columnist.

Johnson, who it is alleged harbours a 'persecution mania', believes or presents the position that he is being mistreated, unfairly punished, facing a conspiracy of political factions that seek to destroy his political career. A close friend explains:

It's not that Petronella Wyatt is accurate on everything she says, this is clearly anecdotal information. It is interesting, noentheless.

Will Johnson tearfully toil over a column named 'My Struggle'? Would the series of columns then become a book?

Would Trump have his minions write a similar column, whining about their 'persecution'? 'The Art of The Steal'?

Is this a pattern? History, and lessons and all that.

Boris Goes To Brussels!

I remind readers of what Johnson was doing, in Brussels, writing for The Daily Telegraph, in 1987,on a wage of £250k as a columnist. A professional shit stirrer. Making up absurd claims about the EU, publishing them in England, inflammatory intent, long term plan.
"I saw the whole [European Union] change. It was a wonderful time to be there. The Berlin Wall fell and the French and Germans had to decide how they were going to respond to this event, and what was Europe going to become, and there was this fantastic pressure to create a single polity, to create an answer to the historic German problem, and this produced the most fantastic strains in the Conservative Party, so everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power."
–Boris Johnson
Speaking in an interview with his autobiographer, Andrew Gimson, in who wrote 'Boris : The rise of Boris Johnson'. Pages 220 - 221
Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson (2006) is a biography of Boris Johnson by Andrew Gimson, which discusses why Boris Johnson joined politics and became an MP. An updated edition was later published in 2008 after Johnson was elected Mayor of London.

Political Grooming

Targeting a known bias, fear, insecurity, hatred, lack of knowledge or information to exacerbate the emotional tension associated with that, to heighten emotional reactivity in the target, with suggestive content, driving a behavioural change, 'nudging' activism and voting behaviour along certain lines, maliciously, in order to exploit the target.

This is utterly cruel behaviour, and profoundly toxic to healthy democracy, healthy relationships.

Confession of a political groomer.

So here we have, by his own admission, the confession that he gets a surge of arousal, a power hit, when he sees the effects of his lies, false claims, misleading statements causing emotionally charged rage, hatred, bile amongst the members of the tory party, and others. It gives him arousal.

He gets pleasure from stirring the shit. He was employed to do this professionally. He is still behaving in that manner, because he never stopped, and nobody stopped him when he should have been stopped.

Johnson is a dangerous human being. His sponsors know this.

And he's not the only one.

Lack of accountability of MPs and Government in England is legendary, legion, a lesion on our health and safety as a people. Blair is still unindicted.

Stefanovic is spot on.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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Mass Murder by Economic Violence aka 'Austerity' - the Legacy of Conservatives, Lib Dems and Blairite Labour.

It is not 'trickle down economics', it is economic violence.

'Austerity' is mass murder by deliberate withdrawal of support for vulnerable populations.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23020397.tory-austerity-likely-caused-deaths-covid-academic-says/

The report said there was now a “clear and urgent need ... for such harmful policies to be reversed”, with the authors urging the UK Government to “implement measures to protect the most vulnerable in society”.

These policies, promoted on the back of lies and gaslighting, were intentional actions that the Government of the time was warned against, and they went ahead, fully aware of the likely consequences.

"The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, noted there were 334,327 excess deaths over the expected number in England, Wales and Scotland over the period. This included 237,855 excess deaths among males in England and Wales, with a further 12,735 excess deaths recorded among men in Scotland.

Among women, there were 77,173 excess deaths in England and Wales, and 6564 in Scotland. The research was carried out amid “a stalling of improvement overall” in mortality rates, with increasing death rates among the poorest having been observed across the UK since the early 2010s.

Statistical analysis showed previously improving mortality trends had changed around the period 2011-13 in both Scotland and England, with this occurring following the Tories’ election victory in 2010."

This is Murder by Economic Violence, nothing less.

The United Nations has issued two reports in which they asserted that these policies amounted to a breach of the Human Rights of vulnerable people across the UK.

The Labour Files prove, in quite clear evidence, that the Centrist Blairite Brigade, now led by Sir Keir Starmer were in spite of the evidence focussed upon actively opposing, undermining and slandering Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, the Disabled, The Vulnerable, the Unemployed, the Working Poor and Labour's own BAME members and staff from within the Labour Party, using illegal and amoral tactics - rather than pushing hard against these policies, showing a united socialist, humane front that had depth and energy, by joining in the work Corbyn and Momentum and Human Rights groups were and still are engaged in - this is a total betrayal of trust and of all the vulnerable people across the UK, on behalf of the Ruling Oligarchy, the Fossil Fuel Industry and the Military Industrial Complex of the UK.

The Labour Files, and why it matters.

The Labour Files provide plenty of solid evidence of persistent campaigns, nationally and locally, from the very moment Jeremy Corbyn accepted the leadership position, campaigns that included outright lies fabricated to suppress Socialists, false allegations, court cases driven by abusive spouses, Racist and Misogynistic abuse, email hacking, and the weaponisation of Anti-Semitism to undermine Corbyn, and more.

https://www.medialens.org/2022/mass-media-omerta-burying-al-jazeeras-the-labour-files/

"The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, ‘The Labour Files’, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of ‘democracy’ in the UK.

Based on the largest leak in British political history, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has exposed how Labour party officials smeared and intimidated rivals on the left of the party. The leaked data comprises 500 gigabytes of documents, emails, video and audio files from the Labour Party, dating from 1998 to 2021. They reveal:

The weaponisation of antisemitism by the right-wing of the Labour Party to hinder Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of becoming Prime Minister.
A ‘hierarchy of racism’ within the Labour Party disciplinary process which prioritises the investigation of alleged antisemitism cases over other forms of racism.
Shocking examples of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism within Labour.
The crushing of dissent within Labour under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership."

How utterly ugly has the Party formed to represent and protect the interests Workers become since Blairs wars, and the refusal of Labour Party to countenance War Crimes Investigations?

That warlike group within the Labour Party share culpability for these horrific deaths - be it in illegal and amoral psychological warfare against it's own members, or the economic violence of dying by poverty, cold, exacerbated disease, chronic poverty, chronic distress, abandonment and COVID are all utterly awful, awful ways to pass from this life. These are not the peaceful deaths most of would hope for.

The Weapons sent into multiple war zones lead to more violent deaths, always.... and as I have held, ever since the Iraq War, Labour and Parliament remain War Criminal entities, unindicted. Now they are mass murderers of their own constituents.

Labour and Conservative and Unionists and Lib Dems are all soiled by this vast culling, 580,000 awful deaths in the past 12 years, in pursuit of 'growing the economy'.

What then must we do to protect our own people from such harms?

What rights to action do we have?

Do not look to the Labour Party that is adopting a Vaticanesque silence on the false anti-Semitism charges aimed at Corbyn and the entire Socialist peace mongering Left now fully revealed, beyond any possibility of denial or open admission.

Al Jazeera’s ‘The Labour Files’ is a must-watch series. For the state-corporate media, for Labour Executive, for anti-Socialists and for the UK Ruling Class it is a ‘must-ignore’, 'not not mention the war' series.

All four episodes are available on YouTube:

Part 1: The Purge

Part 2: The Crisis

Part 3: The Hierarchy

Part 4: The Spying Game

We, the good and decent people of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland need a new political solidarity that takes on these bullies and gains a majority of seats in the Legislatures, at the ballot box. We have won the argument already.

Kindness is political IV : “Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not."

"Our compassion may be miniscule, but our capacity to help ourselves to taxation revenue to palm off on crony contracts to our mates is a constant thrill!"

Kindness is political. The choice to be kind, considerate and compassionate in the deliberation, design and implementation of policy is a political choice, The choice to be callous, indifferent or cruel is also a political choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Status_of_Refugees#Rights_and_responsibilities_of_parties
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Rights of Refugees, is an international treaty which was ratified by the Government of the UK, which was a choice to protect people, as an act of legal, political, economic and community kindness. It states the rights of Refugees and Asylum Seekers and the responsibilities of receiving countries.

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/asylum-in-the-uk.html - a brief report on Asylum in the United Kingdom.

The thread behind this latest scam is that this is yet another way to pass taxpayer cash to corporate cronies, signing opaque contracts with entities that are responsible for terrible provision of what ever 'service' is being provided,(Test & Trace, PPE is one current example of this kind of behaviour) effectively farming vulnerable people for profits, without no evidence that this action will have the effect of improving their lives, securing their safety and welfare.

In effect, this Government are taking over the business of trafficking vulnerable people. Competition in the 'free market'. And as it happens, this plan will not stop the illegal trafficking from France across the English Channel.

Trafficking preys upon vulnerable people.

As it happens the UK's international ambassador for human rights Rita French in July 2021 expressed “regret” that Rwanda was not conducting “transparent, credible and independent investigations into allegations of human rights violations including deaths in custody and torture”. The claim that Rwanda is a safe place to send vulnerable people is baseless.

This misGovernment knows this.

The Kafkaesque difficulty of Ukrainian Refugees seeking refuge in Britain.

Listening to the radio this morning, I heard one caller tell of a story of a heavily pregnant Ukrainian mother who was trying to make her way to the UK. She was told when applying for her visa to enter the UK from Poland, a slow and unfriendly process (hostile environment, a coalition policy) where she was now a refugee, was told that if her baby was born before she entered the UK, the baby would need his or her own visa as well, or not be allowed to enter the UK.
The unfortunate woman was so distressed by the delays and obstruction she faced that she decided to return to Ukraine. To a country being invaded and destroyed by a cruel and vile Russian Military commanded to do so by Mr. Vlad 'The Invader' Putin. A Russian Oligarch.

This pregnant mother-to-be decided the lack of compassion - the political choice - of the English Government was a worse option than returning home to a war torn country in the midst of a horrific, disgusting war which appears to be escalating.

This is just one story, among many, many thousands of heart-wrenching and traumatic cases. UK is the only country demanding visas for Ukrainian Refugees as a condition of entry. Every other state is allowing entry, with visa application to be made once the refugees are safe.

Boris Johnson spoke to day, and this is what he said : “We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system. Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not."
Infinite Capacity to help people?

When it comes to 'sustaining a parallel illegal system', it is the precisely the deliberate closure of previously available safe and official routes for Asylum Seekers and Refugees to reach the UK that created the fertile ground for the 'parallel illegal system'.

When it comes to helping people the blatant corruption of the Governments Crony Contracts for PPE, Test and Trace, and other policy choices that minted thousands on new millionaires shows exactly where this Governments priorities really lie.
He, and Priti Patel are such promiscuous and unapologetic liars, they are bullies, they are wholly inadequate to the social responsibilities of the High Office they occupy, sponsored by Oligarchs whose interest the represent.

A Government of Wealth Extraction, sponsored by Oligarchs, imposing policy generated in think tanks funded by Oligarchs, cannot represent the democratic electorate of England.
They do not represent us at all.

They do not represent the people of England, the vast majority of whom are decent, kind law abiding persons, who do, as it happens, appear to host an almost infinite compassion if one looks ate the totality of the community voluntary sector and support for charities helping the most vulnerable people of our communities.
Infinite Compassion?
"Let the bodies pile high!"
Eternal Peace after a horrific and terrifying death.
"1000 deaths a week is a valid cost benefit analysis!"
More like infinite greed.
Johnson was having an adulterous affair another woman, whilst his wife was enduring Cancer Treatment, betraying her and their children, behind her back while she was suffering.
Compassion? More like infinite, selfishness and grim lust.
"Some people say, that maybe, we should let it tip, let the people take it on the chin!"
Compassion?
More like infinite disdain for the population.
COVID case reporting in the UK
Government figures on new cases Wednesday 13 April 35,926
ZOE symptom tracker new cases Wednesday 13 April 275,993
Deaths this past week : 651, and for the past week : 1,951
List of the dates of parties we know about, the dates of the lies Johnson uttered and the deaths on those dark, dark days. People were being harmed by Government policy, and the policy makers partied! Compassion?
The Tory Government Party Season!
#torydeathparties
May 15 2020 – Cheese & Wine Garden Party – 421 deaths that day
May 20 2020 - "BYOB" party in No 10 garden – 353 deaths that day
May 23 2020 – Cummings Barnard Castle story breaks – 284 deaths that day
June 18 2020 – Cabinet Office leaving event – 90 deaths that day
June 19 – Johnson’s birthday party – 88 deaths that day
Nov 13 2020 – No 10 flat party – 450 deaths that day
Nov 25 2020 - Treasury drinks party – 499 deaths that day
Nov 27 2020 - Johnson speaks at Watson’s leaving party – 460 deaths that day
Dec 10 – Gavin Williamson’s D of E party – 496 deaths that day
Dec 11 2020 – the No 10 ‘wine fridge’ party – 491 deaths that day
Dec 14 2020 – Conservative HQ drinks party – 506 deaths that day Dec 15 2020 – Johnson’s quiz party – 507 deaths that day
Dec 16 2020 – Grant Shapps party – 484 deaths that day
Dec 17 2020 – Cabinet Office party – 567 deaths that day
Dec 18 2020 – Downing Street Party – 586 deaths that day
Jan 14 2021 – No 10 prosecco leaving party – 1338 deaths that day!
April 16 2021 (day before Prince Phillip’s funeral) – two boozy parties at No 10 - 32 deaths that day
June 26 2021 – Hancock forced to resign after kissing aide – 17 deaths that day
Dec 1 2021 – Johnson lies to Parliament about all advice being followed – 136 deaths that day
Dec 7 2021 – Johnson lies to Parliament about rules being observed – 129 deaths that day
Dec 8 2021 – Johnson lies that rules have not been broken – 128 deaths that day
Dec 13 2021 – Johnson lies that he broke no rules – 110 deaths that day
Dec 20 2021 – Johnson lies that photos of party were ‘people at work’ – 133 deaths that day
Jan 10 2022 – Johnson refuses to answer if he was at parties – 235 deaths that day
Jan 12 2022 – Johnson still argues that ‘technically’ he broke no rules – 236 deaths that day
Jan 31 2022 – Sue Gray’s report only partially published, Johnson finally says sorry for ‘things they didn’t get right’ – 198 deaths that day
April 13 2022 - Johnson says he paid the fine, and and he said: 'humbly accepts I made a mistake'. There are more fines to be issued to Johnson. - 658 deaths that day
A total of 171,000 deaths attributed to COVID since March 2020, with many more excess deaths due to lack of treatment, as the NHS struggled with repeated and entirely avoidable waves of Infection, illness and death.
Compassion?

It is quite clearly callous cruelty, reckless endangerment.

Fight for the Right to Party - a Satire Song about Johnson

Rwanda, as a destination venue for the vulnerable seeking refuge and safety?

This new 'policy' regarding Refugees, Asylum Seekers and others choosing the desperate and dangerous path towards the UK and safety, seeking freedom from brutality, oppression and war, via small dinghies slowly chugging across the English Channel is a disgusting dog whistle policy designed to take attention away from the immediate issue of the Tory Death Parties.
If Parliament passes this legislation, then it is complicit in the cruelty of this atrocity engendering 'policy'.

This issue and any, many others are all linked together in that they form part of a totality of deliberate, calculated, misGovernment that rejects the path of avoiding avoidable harms.
Yet another example of the flaws of English Democracy highlighted in The Power Inquiry, 2006. An executive political power that despises the people, exploits bigotry and bias and does so to enrich the Oligarchy that sponsors this Government.
When will the English people take the only action that can counter this horrendous, Machiavellian monstrous misGovernment?
A general strike, a refusal to pay mortgages, rents and utility bills until parliament is dissolved and a general election is held to put into place a Government by the people.

Kindest regards
Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

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Letter to New Zealand From London : hold your course, be courageous

Letter to New Zealand From London, Plague Island, Exporter of Variants

Dear New Zealand,
I have been watching you, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Japan and others do your level best to suppress community transmission of the SARSCOV2 Virus and it's variants.
I watched as you did so to protect your peoples Right to Health, which you correctly and humanely set as critical to the health of your economy. Avoiding avoidable death and disease is the duty of the whole of the nation. Upholding a populations Right to Health is the legal and moral duty of every Government.
I watched as others chose not to take the same approach, chose not to adopt that sane attitude. And I watched as they did not avoid the avoidable harms you did avoid. I cried, along with others, as the human costs of that failure mounted, and continue to mount. The pain is immense. My heart aches for the loss of life, the additional disease, the missed treatments, the education disrupted, the broken businesses, the shattered lives.
On every measure, your populations health and your economy's are in better shape than those who wilfully allowed the virus to spread, to mutate and to wreak havoc.
Now, as Omicron reaches into your community, I note that Media in England is not urging your success. Pundits are writing articles whose subtext is hoping that you fail, hoping that you too will succumb, hoping that you will 'be more like us'. It ranges from outright hatred of your success to subtle hints that the 'inevitable' has finally arrived. Spite and fatalism abound.
Ignore them. They are callous, and wilful and ignorant. Their cowardice has cost us dearly.

Comparing Johnson to Ardern is impossible - two entirely different cultures, one a vulture, the other a dove of peace. A nuclear super power, and a nuclear dissident.
My advice, my prayer to you is that you maintain your diligent care for your population's right to health, in spite of these odious monsters that Rule in England and elsewhere. Be courageous.
The Virus is telling us we must work together to look after each other as human beings. Climate Change carries the same message. World poverty likewise urges we look after one another. Mike Ryan of the WHO constantly reiterates these two obvious messages.
We are all in this together, in this life.
My kindest regards
Corneilius
London

---

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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Tory Death Parties - celebrating not avoiding avoidable harms. Indict them all - seriously. We must indict them.

We must never forget: this is how Johnson started the Westminster misGovernment 'Strategy' on dealing with an infectious virus. 'Herd Immunity, taking it on the chin!'

#torydeathparties

They did die, because this Government rejected suppression of community transmission in favour of 'Herd Immunity'.

Making an error, and repeating it? Deliberate policy. "Who will we not save?"

Lies and Gaslighting, a CDO salesman takes over responsibility for the populations Right to Health and thrashes it.

@corneiliusmusic Tory Death Parties #torycorruption #torydeathparties ♬ original sound - corneiliusmusic

Have we seen how people die of COVID? Our News Media has not shown us much of that reality - but NHS staff are forced to deal with this every day.
Have we seen how people who are afflicted with Long COVID suffer, day in day out, from a Vascular Disease? Yes, it's not the 'Flu - it is a vascular disease that attacks every organ of the human body, and lingers. We do not know the long term implications of infection into future decades and we cannot say with any confidence there are none.

Do we know people whose businesses have been destroyed?

Do we know how many overnight millionaires have been minted by unlawful crony contracts in the midst of all this harm?
Do we fully understand the realities of the harms imposed upon the population of the UK by the manner in which this misGovernment deliberately engineered their Herd Immunity strategic stance, since February 2020?

Indictments are deserved.
Johnson must not be allowed to resign - he must be indicted for Misconduct in Public Office, Malfeasance, Corporate Manslaughter by deliberate negligence and, of course, he must be indicted for corruption. It is written on the wallpaper.
He and the entire Cabinet, and the Corona Virus Recovery Group of Conservative and Unionist MPs and their sponsors must be indicted for Misconduct in Public Office, Malfeasance, Corporate Manslaughter by deliberate negligence.
They are all intimately involved in promoting and advocating the policy of allowing the virus to spread in the community, and rejecting any concerted attempt at Suppression of Community Transmission of the virus. They are all involved in peddling dangerous misinformation that has killed and maimed many, many innocent and vulnerable people.

They are culpable and should be made liable.
They are all culpable.
The parties are small beer. A stale, sour beer. They are indicative of the character of this misGovernment.
The massive toll of avoidable harms deliberately not avoided is the main course.
The entire media sphere is studiously avoiding detailing the reality of the main course. They helped set the toxic table upon which it was served, so it's no surprise they are generally mute on this. Those who enabled misinformation to percolate are culpable for the harms that has caused.
This Government misused furlough.

When they should have been chasing the virus down, protecting our borders with quarantine so that the virus is neither imported nor exported, enhancing NHS capabilities, recruiting more NHS Staff, enhancing NHS Test and Trace by funding it from an expert base, when they should have been localising the Test & Trace workforce, providing economic support to anyone exposed to the virus so that they could safely and comfortably isolate and not be forced to return to work, and take the risk of spreading the virus, when they should have been mandating PPF2 masks, alerting the population to the realities of COVID as an aerosol transmitted risk, when they should have been noting the understanding that COVID is also vascular disease in order to inform people of the long haul risks of infection with SARSCOV2, be they symptomatic or asymptomatic - they did none of this.

They also neglected the 3 million 'excluded' from any form of economic or moral assistance. Furlough was designed to protect the employers interests, rather that the populations right to health. Getting people back to work in offices even as the virus was among us was about the rents the property developers and owners were concerned with.

The removal of the paltry 'Covid Uplift' by Sunak plunged more people into poverty and reliance on food banks and will expose millions of people to increased fuel poverty as a direct result. It was a spiteful move. Especially when one considers that every penny of that uplift would be put into the economy, rather than extracted from the economy and hoarded in off shore facilities, much of it to be used as a Free Market political weapon.

Their abandonment of mitigations in our schools is an appalling deliberate failure. Using children as super spreaders to generate booster infections in the adult vaccinated population? Yes, they did that too. 'Herd Immunity' was/is their 'objective' in spite of it's mythical status. Look at the death and disease rates among their teachers.
Everything they did impose upon us all was designed to look like help and designed to allow the virus to transmit, with the tactical calculation involved in trying to maintain the harms at a level below the collapse of NHS and other services, to remain below radar of polling and electoral loss of popularity, as they pursued 'Herd Immunity' - an imaginary state for a virus that mutates as rapidly and as unpredictably as this virus has been proven to do.
Every measure they undertook was designed to extract wealth from the Public Purse, and pass it to cronies and allies. Their profit, our loss. Pretending to help us they raided the kitty.

Herd Immunity, Endemicity, Vaccines
There is no such thing as endemicity with this Virus whilst the entire world is struggling with a Pandemic.

IndependentSAGE hosted a brief chat on what endemic really means. Malaria is endemic, and it kills millions every year. Many other diseases are endemic, and not at all 'mild'. There are global programs to reduce all of those diseases. We do not accept that people must simply 'live with them'.

This Government opposes waiving Intellectual Property rights on Vaccines which undermines global populations Right to Health and increases the risk of variants of concern becoming variants that cause even more harm. Omicron is not 'mild'. The Vaccines are doing a decent job of reducing the harm of Omicron, but the increased infections are increasing hospitalisation, deaths and other adverse impacts.

A more detailed, nuance charge sheet.
The People's Covid Inquiry has, in addition to all of the above, laid out the charge sheet that this Government abrogated their duty to protect the population's Right to Health.

Here's the legal requirements of a Government faced with a public health threat:

1. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948 Article 25);
2. The Constitutional provisions of the World Health Organisation (WHO)
3. Constitution of the World Health Assembly International Health Regulations (IHR 2005).
4. 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights* (ICESCR).
Article 12 by which the government must act in a manner compatible with the
5. European Convention Articles (ECHR), for example Art 2, the Right to Life.
6. National Health Service Act 2006 section 2A - which imposes a duty to protect public health from diseases and other dangers to public health, and indicates appropriate steps which may be taken.
*(1) and (2) read:‘The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest standard of physical and mental health.The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right SHALL include those necessary for ... (c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases.’
Corruption, Anti-Democratic legislation.
And then we come to the corruption, the lies and gaslighting by Johnson and every senior minister, and much of the Press and Broadcast Media and the on-line grooming operations that push conspiracy hypotheses that are intimately linked to the CRG and the ERG.

Then there's the anti-democratic legislation criminalising democratic protest, endangering our elections in order to retain power, removing independent electoral oversight, criminalising the entire Traveller community for their way of life, (an established and acknowledged ethnic group and way of life - 'first they came for....') and much else besides, as blatant a political power grab as any by Hitler, Stalin, Trump or Mao.

A Home Secretary whose wet dream is Capital Punishment bodes ill for this nation.

A decade imprisonment for defacing a Statue, less than the Tariff for many much more egregious crimes that cause harm to the person, their body or mind - Rape, for example draws a 5 year sentence.

Death Parties.
The 'Work' Parties at Downing Street and across Government Offices, to give them their correct status, were Death Parties. They were celebrating their work - look at the outcomes of that work.
160 thousand deaths by Covid, millions of operations cancelled, 1.3 million cases of Long Covid, an economy in deep distress, enhanced poverty for 14 million households whilst British Billionaires added to their number, and increased their wealth by £150 billion.
And here we are into the third year of this Pandemic and there is no end in sight.
How many times have this atrocious misGovernment claimed that they had beaten the virus?

Gaslighting, pretending to act, deliberate negligence.
How many times have this Government said - "we must not waste the success of our efforts to quell the virus"? How many times have they cited the harms they caused as reasons to drive even worse policy, such as sending our children into unsafe schools as a method of delivering a booster of infection to a vaccinated adult population, as a tactic in their overall strategic stance - 'protect the hoard, let the herd take it on the chin'?
How many more must they kill, maim and and how many businesses and social institutions must they distress and degrade before the English people understand the true nature of these awful, callous, grubby, greedy, nasty men and women who are abusing the power invested in their official positions, by a trusting electorate, a vulnerable population?

Who will rid us of this dangerous Government?
Johnson and the entire cabinet must be indicted. Resignation that allows them to walk away from the criminality of their political action is not adequate to the situation.

We need a national unity parliament, where our legislators set aside their current adversarial dynamic with regards to the Pandemic. Indeed the pandemic is, it could be said, a training run for the co-operation and mutual aid that will be necessary in dealing with Climate Change, Pollution and Poverty all of which looms as even greater causation of mass harm in the years ahead.

This is an appeal to all decent MPS, councillors and others tasked with good governance - step up to plate.
We need a Leveson II to regulate and rein in the Press and Broadcast Media that supported this odious misGovernment at every turn.
The Spectator ought to be closed down - spreading misinformation is not Free Speech, it is a deliberate abuse of Free Speech. Free Speech has, since the inception of the concept, been understood best as a matter of speaking truth to power, of speaking honestly, of taking full responsibility in the public domain to uphold integrity and probity to counter political lies and gaslighting.
The Sun must be shut down. Murdoch and his minions must be indicted for the vast harm their misinformation operations have caused to the public perception of this virus, the disease and the pandemic in general. Their track record on Racism and Misogyny is likewise grim.

Revolution?
If the general public were to go on a general strike, and then took the path of a 'revolution' and dragged these awful men and women out of Parliament, and put them in the stocks, to be pelted with rotten fruit and humiliated in public, it would be wrong - that said the anger the population feels suggests such a reactionary move would be partially understandable, given the harms this misGovernment has deliberately caused to the English people themselves.

Luckily, for the misGovernment, the English people are not so violent, not so indecent, not so easily led down paths of political violence - and correctly so. The point of indictments is not punishment, it is accountability and the prevention of future harms. A deterrent to future politicians behaving in such harmful manner.

Given the choice, I imagine anyone would probably much prefer to be pelted with rotten fruit than endure death by COVID, no matter how humiliating the experience.

The most important thing we can do is uphold the Law to it's fullest extent, in the most honest manner possible, so that probity, honesty, integrity are restored to Parliament and the Civil Service.

Rotten fruit will not do that. Nor will riots of any kind.
Indictments for Misconduct in Public Office would be the correct method of addressing the criminality and negligence of this misGovernment.
Have you seen how people die of COVID?

Look at that, if you have not done so. Our NHS staff have had to witness that awful, horrific, terrifying process, day in day out. The relatives of those who died were blocked from seeing that intense traumatic and blocked from attending to loved one's in their final moments. Let that inform your view on this matter.

Celebrating their work? Death Parties one and all.

Every Friday, a piss up to bolster the troops?

Death Parties.

PS: PS: 'Austerity' was and remains a deliberate policy of collective punishment, imposing a stress position to break the community that cares for the vulnerable.

Cruel, deliberate lethality.

The 'savings' of Austerity, de-staffing the NHS as 'efficiency', the reduction in beds as 'efficiency', knowing full well they were implemented by managers ordered to do so to get their annual funding allocations. "No new cash, if you don't make these 'savings'."
'Externalised costs' - the costs in ill health, distress, staff exhaustion and deaths are ignored, set aside in favour of the 'savings'. It's truly appalling and profoundly amoral.

Those who cause such harm run scared from the truth revealed. Allowing lies to adversely afflict and cause such serious harm to a population is unacceptable.

The truth sets us free. Lies imprison us all.

Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a false dichotomy. Here's why.

First thing to make clear is that there are billions of people who don't have access to vaccines. Vaccine equity is not happening at the scale needed to protect all those people.

Second, epidemiological and public health strategies to suppress community transmission of the virus to minimal levels are not being followed across the major developed states and that puts everyone else at risk - we have seen repeated cycles of transmission getting out of control because under the guise of 'protecting the economy' community transmission is being allowed to occur at 'low levels' - defined as not overwhelming Health Services, but allowing constant extra stress on existing Health Services - and that guarantees surges will happen and variants will emerge.

So what populations ought to be united in demanding is support to reduce the transmission in the community to the minimum, and certainly quarantine at borders to limit export/import of the virus. The techniques to do this can be supportive rather than 'draconian'. It can be done.

The vax vs unvaxxed adversarial narrative - essentially a concocted angry argument - is obscuring clarity on what needs to be done. So here's an exploration of why this matters.

Beefs.

There's an industrial scale practice of starting endless arguments, between people imbued with a belief, opinion, bias or bigotry in order to exploit their activity.

It is known as The Internet of Beefs.

It started out as a tactic to drive up traffic to a page that carried advertising, in order to generate income from the page. Start an argument, get believers on board, troll them, get them angry and sit back as more pile on to argue to win.

Start an argument, divide the room.

What is a 'beef'?

Venkatesh Rao the creator of Ribbon Farm Website wrote really informative piece where he coined the term 'beef-only thinking.'

"You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking.

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs."

source: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

Continuous conflict. Facebook algorithms that increase 'engagement' are rooted in this dynamic. Fight or flight hormone cascades drive the internal urge to win the unwinnable. Addiction patterns of behaviour becoming habitual. Rational discourse becomes almost impossible, and those who try to maintain a rational stance become exhausted.

Many of the online arguments that rage are rooted in this practice. Brexit was an example of this practice being deployed online and in News Media in order to seed irrational divisions across the electorate.

How rapidly the English democratic debate descended into Leave vs Remain as an endless argument largely void of rationality. How quickly previously calm folk became enraged, enervated, to the degree of poisoning familial relationships!

The Vaccinated against The un-Vaccinated against The Vaccinated.

We must protect vaccinated and unvaccinated populations equally, in order to bring this pandemic down to safe and managed levels that prevent avoidable harms. This is critically important given the inequity of global Vaccine distribution, unwillingness to share Intellectual Property rights and technology, which is rendering billions of people vulnerable to SARSCOV2, it's variants and the adverse outcomes associated with it.

Pitting one against the other is toxic and is a large part of the misinformation activity that impedes the preservation of our Right to Health within the specific context of the Pandemic.

image source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-july-2021/ - a study of attitudes which reveals the potency of misinformation, political grooming and adversarial messaging in influencing sectors of the population, in generating lateral distrust and social incoherence, preventing social solidarity at a time when it is quite clearly needed. Question: who has the most to fear from social solidarity?

what effective suppression of community transmission of the virus using non-pharmaceutical interventions and social solidarity in a population of 1.4 billion people looks like.

Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a false dichotomy.
First off we are all human beings, deserving of care and the preservation of our Right to Health. Secondly, the vaccinations are superb, and they do offer some reduction in helping to avoid some of the avoidable harms, but not all. Thirdly, there is no real dichotomy in being vaccinated vs not being vaccinated.

That adversarial narrative is a concoction, a logical fallacy, or at least the adversarial aspect of this narrative is a logical fallacy.
It is part of the weaponization of words and ideas that is part of the wider political grooming operations underway.

Byline Times have published a few insightful and damning articles on misinformation networks linked to the Covid Recovery Group and The Great Barrington Declaration.
Here's why.
Given that the vaccinations were never touted as stopping transmission, only as reducing severity of symptoms, and incidence of fatalities, to function as a cushion for entire populations that reduces systemic stress to lower levels, giving us resource space. and time, to suppress the transmission of the virus in the community, locally, nationally and globally, the issue of vax vs non vax as an adversarial dynamic or narrative is a deflection of focus away from the deliberate failure to suppress transmission, and is therefore yet another way to obscure the public discourse on what is needed to manage this pandemic.
Suppression of transmission must be the global over-riding strategic protocol, because we know it damn well works. I and others have written millions of words on this, drawing from the lived experience and the available evidence. Allowing spread guarantees the emergence of unpredictable variants, some of which may result in greater harm. The only bulwark against that under the current situation is luck. We cannot afford to throw such a dice.
Mis-use of the Vaccine.
In the UK, which is where I live, (I can speak to the experience here) the Johnson regime abused or exploited the vaccine to lower hospitalisations/deaths knowing full well that their policy options enabled and allowed spread of the virus. They talked a lot about slowing the spread, they never talked about suppressing community transmission to lowest possible levels, except to dismiss it. Instead they spoke and wrote about 'acceptable; levels - which means that avoidable harms continue, at a lower yet still socially significant rate, the '1000 deaths a week' as a 'cost-benefit rationalisation' of allowing spread to continue since July 19th.

Epidemiological recklessness. Emotional blindness.

75 seconds to describe Johnson Regimes opening up in July 2021

The point of the vaccines then, from Johnson's perspective, the perspective of those who wish to hold onto their existing almost completely hegemonic power, is to protect their power: because they sense that hospital, health care and social care systemic collapse would threaten their position. They fear that if and when public ire becomes too intense, support would evaporate and the people would demand their complete removal, to be replaced by a government of national unity tasked with suppression of community transmission (which has never been attempted yet in the UK) and so it was never about protecting the NHS, it was about protecting those in Power.

That stance is by definition an evil stance.
So when they called on us all to 'protect the NHs, save lives', they were gaslighting in full flow. It was all about them, not about us.

Certainly their concern was not about the welfare of all NHS staff, who were denied the pay raises they so clearly deserved. Certainly not about the millions of people receiving paltry state assistance. Furlough protected the large corporate employers for the most part, 3 million small business people were excluded from financial support. Certainly their concern was not for the health and safety of all our children.

Trust.
Mike Ryan at WHO is someone I trust. He made it plain in March, April, May, June and July 2021, and ever since that the vaccines on their own were not the way out, that they were a cushion, and that the elimination or reduction to lowest possible levels of community transmission had to be the global strategy to protect whole populations, locally, nationally and globally and to start to bring an end to the pandemic. He was and is still correct. Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love.

Why not spread the Love?
The reason USUK and EU chose to not do elimination is because to do it you must support the population in ways that amount to Socialist policy. Using central State funding to empower local authorities to do effective elimination strategy, confronting misinformation and political grooming head on with clear, evidence based communications so that the population is clear as to what needs to be done, and why, providing financial support that enables people to isolate, businesses to stay viable via grants, furlough and other protective measures are all socialistic policies. Those who argue they have tried ignore the facts. Test and Trace is a failure, PPE provision was handed to profiteers, the virus is spreading at a significant rate, people are dying, Long Covid is afflicting millions of people. That is not a success story by any measure.
The Wealth Extraction ideologues, the Neoliberal/Free Marketeers and others detest this approach - suppression of community transmission - because it shifts power away from the Executive to the Community, away from individualism, to the collective, and they know that if a population experiences beneficial collectivism, their reign, in philosophical terms, is practically over. The NeoLiberal ideology of the Sovereign Individual competing with others would be over, finished, dealt a death blow by experience. They will never let that happen.

We must make it happen to bring this pandemic to safe closure.
And it becomes more obvious when we understand that the same applies to climate, poverty, war and other issues- that the lived experience of working together to adapt to a problem and resolve it would inspire a huge perceptual shift, away from core individualism, (there is no such thing as society) towards collectivism. We are all in this together and we are only as safe as the least safe among us.
Democracy at it's very best is consensual collectivism.

The Wealth Extractors will never cede this point, because it destroys their foundation and sense of entitlement to power.
We are all in this together. Vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
The Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a deliberate gaslighting, a false dichotomy designed to protect the established power system.
It really frustrates me, that almost no-one sees this for what it is.
Sometimes I feel utterly alone in this perception, and while I have some doubts, I think the evidence supports it, as it explains what is being done better than any other thesis I have come across. By miles.
I hope more of you will recognise the validity in the essence this perception, and add to it and I hope, fervently, that it will lead towards more effective action, locally, nationally and globally.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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