Showing posts with label bullies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bullies. Show all posts

A week of Committees and Hearings, pop-corn delights of bullies in full flow

A week of Committees and Hearings, pop-corn delights of bullies in full flow, their flawed arguments exposed, their tactics revealed, their bile discharged in one case to a patient, calm and willing witness and in the other aimed at a patient, calm and willing Committee.

If you ever need to watch something to remind yourself you are not a bully, that you'd prefer to not have to vote for bullies, the combined 1O hours of public legislative broadcast questioning under oath  of the past few days might have something to offer.

To be honest, I didn't buy any pop-corn, and I watched less than three hours of both combined. Others watched it, and reviewed it so that I, lazily, languidly, did not have to.

To have watched it all, live, would have been too much for heart. Heartbreakers. 

The drama.

Boris Johnson and The House of Commons Privileges Committee.


On one side of 'the pond' we had a High Official ex-Prime Minister being given a chance to speak his defence, facing an allegation he intentionally lied to Parliament.

Johnson, ex-Pm, Brexiteer Virus Spreader, ex-Mayor, of Bridge to Nowhere infamy, Press Pundit Hack blustered and obfuscated and tried to bring in the entire Civil Service as part of his defence as he dished up shared blame by association. Johnson's tactic - "If I can't blind them with brilliance, I must baffle them with bullshit."

And so he tried on the "I'm obviously an idiot." without saying "Obviously, I'm an idiot." ploy. Innocence by virtue of stupidity.

He wagged his fingers, he accused the committee of bias, he opined he would not accept their ruling if it went against him. That and so much else. Raw Sewage in the river.

Apparently expensive treatment advice, piping at 5K£ an hour, to no avail. 

It was exhausting, listening to slippery eel talk - the only thing he didn't do was use a Latin allusion. I might have missed it.

Tik Tok, The US Congressional Hearings and a ban

On the other side of 'pond' we see High Officials of the Government, carrying out a version of The Salem Witch Trials, attacking a patient, composed and willing witness, denying him the chance to fully speak in his own defence, or indeed his companies defence. 

TikTok is being accused, without foundation, of being an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, engaged in nefarious operations designed to undermine The American Way by influencing America's children. They are so accused as a cover for lack of legislative regulatory protection of private data.

TikTok's response is to politely spend 1.5 Billion dollars to store all data on US Soil, under US independent Third Party control, with an all American workforce. And much else that sets a new high bar for regulation of Social Media platforms industry.

Good strategy. A strategy that the likes of Facebook,  Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and a myriad of social on-line interactive user content generation platforms that carry advertising would rather not be put in place.

Surplus Behavioural Data

The real meat of this matter, privacy and the collection of what is known as 'surplus behavioural data' - in short the entire inadvertent on-line activity and behaviour of each and every user - and it's analysis and utilisation is, of course, off the books. Because there's the advertisers alchemical gold - an analysis of current observed and measured human behaviour trails among users of the digital online content creation wannabes, categorised into thousands of very specific characterisations, many of them emotionally charged, easily triggered, vulnerable to manipulation, or for other purposes. A dollar sign on every bias. Advertisers will pay well for that access. Google will never sell it's trove of 'surplus behavioural data'. The other data we create as content, etc, is largely already in the open. All our financials, company info, car licence etc have long been shared, even prior to interwebs.

Personal data, most of which is already available for a fee, is not the issue at the heart of the Internet of Beef.

The Internet of Beef.

The online argument marketing community generating arguments that never resolve into coherence, based on biases, in order to increase engagement so more eyes see more adds. As have done most News papers ever. It's nothing new here.

It was discovered again via the emergence of online Forums and platforms of any and every kind where eyes are on screens and typing to each other, and it very quickly became integrated in to Capitalist dominance of the interwebs as a marketing tool. A dollar on every bias. Hey, people can even design products no one needs, out of toxic materials, that a certain variation on biases might trigger a sale, and make just enough useless stuff to saturate that market, extracting wealth from vulnerability. This is serious stuff, my readers. One cannot look away. This cannot stand unregulated, at any level.

Surplus Behavioural Data allows mass study of specific vulnerabilities, biases, emotional state, psychological state, moods, impulses, fears, triggers, and has led to a categorisation system which the tech companies hold close to their chest. They do not sell that data.

The social media companies sell the ability to target any selection of the thousands of specific categories they have generated by analysing trillions of hours of behavioural data, and send advertisers content to targets presenting with those variable attributes, thus increasing likelihood of a confirmed sales to ad placed ratio. That is their business, the provision of free tools to create content and share it - the user/consumer experience - is their draw.

So back to TikTok's faux spy trial... and the sophisticated, layered bully tactics routinely deployed de riguer when one is plainly in the wrong, in public. Unapologetically. Self righteously. Legislators? 

Remember Johnson above?  Exactly that.

Tactics

One tactic was for an official to cut short his or her speech, having made and allegation or attribution, so that Mr. Chew could not take time to answer the question, to explore it for better clarity. Bloody rude behaviour anywhere. Mr. Chew was stoic. I think the Congress has bitten off more than it can chew. We'll see why below.

Here's a more moderate instance, there were many more, in quick succession, that were downright repulsive and arrogant.


A staring, glowering semi-circle of angry men and women, nursing a well paid anger, implying that Mr. chew and his company  might well be supporting genocidal , secretly grooming American children for the Chinese Communist Party, to undermine American culture; they accused his company of numerous other wild conspiracy theories. The same group had within it people who did not understand how WiFi works as part of the internet.

Congressman A : "If I have TikTok on my mobile phone, does TikTok have access to my Wifi?"

@cnetdotcom 😳😳😳……… #TikTok #TikTokNews #Congress #TikTokCEO #ShouChew #Wifi #internet #congressionalhearing #TikTokban #tiktokhearing ♬ original sound - CNET


The viewing public : "WTF? Did he really ask that question? Really? OMG!"

Case Closed. Ban TikTok!

Or this?

@djkirstyjay #duet with @The Herman Cain Awards #tiktokhearing #tiktoktrial #tiktoktrials #tiktokusa #algorithmtiktok #algorithm #texas ♬ original sound - The Herman Cain Awards


Knowledgeable they are not.

5 hours of this kind of behaviour, with some attempts by Mr. Chew to present a rational, evidenced case, and irrationality and conspiracy theory being presented as a righteous rebuttal of TikTok's case.

Belief and bile. Bible. Make believe, Mystical World. Fantasy and Imagination. Patience and equity. These are things I think about. A life examined and all that wisdom guff.

The presence of cruelty and bullying eradicates wisdom as the base of the dynamic, which is not restored in full until the cruelty and bullying is stopped, and further harm prevented, with an eye to a long term solution. Prevention is better than the cure, though in the case of FacebookGoogle vs TikTok, what they are preventing is a mature regulatory system for all social media, one that is democratic, transparent and effective. 

Backstory - money cows chased.

Turns out TikTok had taken away a huge share of the US and Global advertising market.  From Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.... Ooops!

A better product gains more users because it is a genuinely better product for sharing social content, in terms of it's ease of use, ability to share, algorithm designed to enable natural virality. The users inadvertently decide what is most popular, most effective. And yes, it is designed, like all social media to draw eyes to advertisements. TikTok intentionally chooses a more democratic content selection, Period.

All the social media platforms sell advertising access. That is the business model. They sell access to users who create content who, whilst viewing content, will see advertisements. Simples.

TikTok's algorithm is much more attuned to emergence, democratisation of content feed, and the deliberate restriction of content that is inciting harm in any way is part of what enables that democratisation.

TikTok has made it clear in their current operations that they are going to set new standards, beyond those in place for the social media industry, to a higher standard. Facebook et al do not want those higher standards turned into commercial legislation.

That's the service that has drawn 15O million US users in. Democratic flow of information. It's what 'the interwebs' was redeployed to do, away from the Military Industrial Complexes hegemony. 

Now who is likely the most pissed off about all of this loss of advertising market share?  Who might want to kill the neighbours golden goose, out of spite and malign business practice? Hmmm... Those who will lose profits, and those who will lose voters might form an alliance in such a situation.

Turns out someone spent a small fortune generating conspiracy theories about TikTok, and making them go viral.

Turns out someone spent a small fortune on a number of political lobbying firms, and donated to certain public representatives.

For profit.

Now, who would that be?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23003168/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory-news-column-campaign-gop

"Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been paying one of the most prominent Republican consulting firms to run a nationwide campaign to sow distrust about one of the company’s top competitors, TikTok, according to a new report from The Washington Post on Wednesday.

The firm, Targeted Victory, reportedly planted op-eds and letters to the editor in major local and regional newspapers across the country. A Targeted Victory director told staff that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to emails obtained by The Post.

“TikTok is the real threat”

News of Facebook’s decision to hire the firm comes only a few weeks after the company declared that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. Meta’s recent earnings report said that Facebook’s active users dropped by almost 500,000 at the end of last year. 

Several of Targeted Victory’s op-eds contained links to negative news coverage about TikTok and were often bylined by influential community figures and politicians, including Democrats. The Post reported that none of the columns disclosed their connection to the Facebook-funded firm.

Over the last few years, Facebook has been under fire by Congress for allegedly holding an illegal monopoly in the social media industry. During a 2020 hearing with tech CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, lawmakers cited internal company documents suggesting that Zuckerberg would go “destroy mode” if Instagram, a then-nascent competitor, refused to be sold to the social media giant. "

Anyway, that's so not speculative. This is all well documented. It's an interesting story indeed. How they do it.

And of course, Meta contributed donated funding to Democrats and Republicans alike to help make their case water tight, and carefully built their political combat troops, up, to fight for their Freedom from healthy competition.

Free Market my arse!

In any setting if bullying is happening and not being stopped, Freedom has ended. Period.

So what I think about these two visual overloads of bullies in action is this - in both cases we see what bullies do when they internalise political power as if it was a part of themselves, at which point it becomes blind entitlement. The freedom to make false accusations in public, to repeat known falsehoods set out as rumours as if they are true in public as their natural, God given right. The freedom to shout down the person representing TikTok, caricaturing him as a Chinese Communist Party asset for the public gallery since there is no verifiable, reliable evidence supporting that claim at all.

The Freedom to bully, using language to bully, to incite more bullying. Without consequence. By right.

Indict Putin and Blair and Bush?

That said, the matter of Johnson is minor compared to the outstanding matter of Blair, the War Criminal. Seeing as no indication that Parliament will indict Blair exists, and certainly StarmerFriedLabour won't, Parliament and the parties involved remain as unindicted War Criminals. Make of that what you will.

It's a mess. The whole hierarchy cult of wealth, power and might is a mess, and it's causing so much harm.

Whatever you may think, the fact is that I didn't mess it up, and you probably didn't mess it up, and there are those who are messing it up, big time.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog. I sincerely hope it makes some sense, and is informative, for you.

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

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Psychological Climate Change : Hierarchy of Violence Culture is the Problem.



A God that can send you to Hell is a violent God. A God that says he, she or it  loves you and can still send you to Hell, is a gaslighting God. Such Gods are always, always projections of violent people. 

Hierarchies  of Wealth, Power and Violence are cults, they are mafia cults.



I have written much about Hierarchy of Violence as a cult, a culture - in opposition to Humanity as a species that evolved through co-operative alloparenting and mutual aid. The culture is the probem, not the species. 

I know this much, I am not the problem. Me not fitting into this society is a healthy response.

Would we or could we do things differently if we were trauma informed?

"I argued then that the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. I predicted that our field would continue to be beset by controversy, no matter how solid its empirical foundation, because the same historical forces that in the past have consigned major discoveries to oblivion continue to operate in the world. I argued, finally, that only an ongoing connection with a global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things." ~ Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery

The News is not helping, is it?

The news media is full of a myriad of stories, images and  narratives - more commonly biased and less so objective - and we see that violence erupts once more as Israeli State Mechanised Warplanes bomb the prison of Gaza, where people have nowhere to run to, for safety; we see the outcome of reckless policy on COVID19 in UK, USA, Brazil and India as wave after wave of infection surges; we are all aware of the intrusion into and colonisation of 'undeveloped lands inhabited by older indigenous cultures; Myanmar's youth resist the Military oppression of their new-born democracy... there's a lot going on.

The truth is not being told.

Meanwhile, for 1.8 billion people, across East Asia, Oceania and elsewhere zero community transmission strategy is protecting their lives and livelihoods in large measure.

What is the climate within which all this is happening, and can we change that?

Music helps me ground myself when facing all of this. Here's two songs in particular, that emerge from the Irish experience, that I find particularly resonant. They humanity of both songs, and of their writers is a beauty to me.
~

Fergus O'Farrel with Interference sings 'American Townland'




Lyrics:

"American townland
Snow in Iceland
Russian farmland
And the sword of Islam
The state of new Israel
Remembers Belsen
Now there's sand for Palestine
And grass for Israel

Won't you settle down, stop fighting for your gods...
Oh, settle down, stop fighting for your gods.
They can't hear you now, not with the noise of your guns.
Once were towering steeples
Now there's a soaring eagle
A crescent moon and a rising sun
Our prayers ascending, but what good will they bring?
If all that's willin' is more and more killin'
Won't you settle down, stop fighting for your gods...
Oh, settle down, stop fighting for your gods.
They can't hear you now, not with the noise of your guns.
The mountains of Mourne
The county Cork I was born in
This dirty old town
Where the rain's always fallin'..
Our prayers ascending, but what good will they bring?
When all that's willin' is more and more killin' 
~

What a beautiful song, so movingly performed. Fergus O'Farrell died young, aged 48. His career was blighted by his health, he suffered from Muscular Dystrophy - his body of work is immense, intense, beautiful and worthy of all praise in and of itself. 

For me this song speaks to the inhumane cruelty and ultimate futility of Religion, when Religion is used as a reason to wage wars of colonisation. It also speaks of a deeply felt empathy and a humane view. It is an historical song.

It sits comfortably with Damien Dempsey's song Colony, a fierce rebuttal of the colonial mindset and a resounding song of defiance. This song makes the hair stand on end, and is as strong a heart beat of the humane as any.  Here's the writer, on why he wrote the song, for whom he wrote it.


Here's the full song, off the album. When Damien sings this, the crowds no sing with him, and the atmosphere is electric, everyone in the room is on point, fully alive to the meaning of the song, and our place in history with it. Bearing in mind that the Palestinian people, the Aboriginals of Australia, the Ashaninka of Peru and Brazil, and many, many others all live with the oppression upon them, and resist and defend their lands and rights as best they can with little in the way of support from the rest of the world. Justice is still a long way off.


Colony Lyrics: 

I sing the song of the colony
How many years and you're still not free
And your mother cries and you ask god why
Greed is the knife and the scars run deep
How many races with much reason to weep
And your children cry
And you ask god whyAnnie, she came from Dunlavin Town
The TB came and killed her family all around
Population booms
Eleven in two rooms
Katie she came from down Townsend street
Ten in a bed and no shoes on their feet
1916 came
They played the patriots game
Freddy, he came from the Iveagh flats
Tenement slums and infested with rats
Sleeping on damp straw
Trying not to break the law
Thomas, he came from Kilmaine in Mayo
Semi starvation was the only life you'd know
In a two room shack
Then jailed in Letterfrack

I look to the east, I look to the west
To the north and the south, and I'm not too impressed
Time after time
After crime after crime
They raped, robbed, pillaged, enslaved and murdered
Jesus Christ was their god and they done it in his name
So he could take the blame if it's not all a game
With bible in one hand and a sword in the other
They came to purify my land of my Gaelic Irish mothers
And fathers, and sisters and brothers
With our own ancient customs, laws, music, art
Way of life and culture
Tribal in structure
We had a civilisation
When they were still neanderthal nations
We suffer with the Native American, the Indian in Asia
Aboriginal Australia
The African people with their history so deep
And our children still weep and our lives are still cheap
You came from Germany, from France, from England
And from Spain
From Belgium and from Portugal
You all done much the same
You took what was not yours
Went against your own bible
You broke your own laws
Just to out do the rival
But did you ever apologize
For the hundreds and millions of lives
You destroyed and terrorised
Or have you never realized
Did you never feel shame
For what was done in your country's name
And find out who's to blame and why they were so inhumane
And still they teach you in your school
About those glorious days of rule
And how it's your destiny to be
Superior to me
But if you've any kind of mind
You'll see that all human kind
Are the children of this earth
And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out

You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
Inside our minds we hold, hold the key.

These two songs hold for me the sense of resistance that is deeply humane, that reaches for peace, knowing that although we are vulnerable, we are decent, we are lovers and builders of healthy community at heart and the bullies are bullies. They are not healthy people. Rulers are not healthy people. Colonisers are not healthy people.

Hierarchy of Violence Culture

From the many stories of the Bible, and before, going back 12,000 years or so, through the many Empires as they fought for territory and dominance, through to the invasion of Ireland in 1159 (I am of Irish ethnicity) and onwards as the Crusades and Islam swung back and forth, to the destruction of the Taino of the Caribbean, and the people's of South America, in 1492 onwards, to the British Colonies on what we call North America built by and for religious refugees, that stole land from Native people, and then destroyed them, utterly to the various Colonial excursions across Asia and elsewhere, pastors and merchants, armed to the teeth, through to the scramble for Africa, to the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe where Jews and others were slaughtered in their millions 'to make room' for the German Reich, and on through to today, where yet again the Palestinian people face the brutality of colonial warfare designed to extirpate them from their native homes.


Ireland cannot adopt a zero community transmission strategy to protect it's people in large part because of the partition, (and because it's own ruling class are as venal as rulers anywhere else).

The dominant neighbour, the English government rejects zero community transmission strategy, even as ZCT is proven to protect the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania and elsewhere, and prevent new variants from emerging, and this places of the British Isles at risk. It could so easily have been avoided.

These are the ill effects of a thousand years of overlordism.

Who rules the English people?

Ireland is still partitioned - those old wounds are still painful, and the political interference still blatant.

What the Israeli state has done and is continuing to do the Palestinian people for the past 75 years, the Normans did to Ireland for 800.

Do the Palestinians have to go through the same?

PROMISED LAND 
a poem by Michael Rosen

  A family arrived and said they had papers  
to prove that his house was theirs.
No, no, said the man, my people have always lived here,  my father, grandfather .... and look, the garden,  my great-grandfather planted that.
No, no, said the family, look at the documents. 
There was a stack of them.
Where do I start? said the man.
No need to read the beginning, they said,
turn to the page marked ‘Promised Land’.
Are they legal? he said, who wrote them?
God, they said, God wrote them, look - 
Here come His tanks.


Both groups of colonisers cited religion and culture as their justifications for their behaviour. There's always a justification rooted in entitlement and supremacy. It is always a logical fallacy.

Conquest, Occupation and resistance.

Palestine - where the act of self defence and resistance, a legal right agreed upon by the all Earths nation states, is punished by full on ethnic cleansing, social, cultural and military war fare, and where that constant punishment of an entire population has been and is still supported by the USUK political ruling classes and is enabled by the EU and UN who play the role of bystanders, even as millions of ordinary citizens in all these countries oppose the violence of the Israeli State, and are also saddened by the violence of the resistance. The Palestinian people should never have been put into that position that they needed to resist war, occupation and colonisation.

What use is there in all of this killing? 

What futures are nurtured by so much blood and gore?

I understand Faith, the way people grow up with the Faith of their parents and grandparents, never consciously chosen, always internalised through habit and thus integrated into sense of self -  I understand the psychic trap that otherwise decent people fall into, when the Institutional and Political Power of the religion is harnessed in warfare. That is an abuse of Faith.

Unicorns against masks is yet another similar faith dynamic that pollutes responsible behaviour in the midst of a pandemic.

I detest those who build that trap, who ensnare the decent, the innocent, the children, generation after generation, just to maintain an institutional power base. They are to me the most abusive of people, bullies without pause, they liars and charlatans.

And I have no easy, simplistic answer on how to free the innocents from the trap. I was entrapped myself a number of times. It was honesty that finally freed me.

But this I know - these traps must  be unset, be they religious, ideological, nationalist or genderist, and the innocent must be allowed to grow free. We have to find ways to ceasing indoctrination of defenceless children that lead to the kinds of extremism we are seeing in Israel and Saudi Arabia, in USA and elsewhere.

The Psychological Climate Issue.

Climate change is one thing, the global Pandemic is another as is the conquest and colonisation of lands already long inhabited by  people who nurtured that land - be it Palestine or the Amazon Rainforest -  and the psychological climate of hierarchies of violence culture is part of the problem and the puzzle to be resolved that all of these present.

What is happening in Israel, what is being done to the Palestinian people is emblematic of what this hierarchy of violence cult is doing to all of us, to humanity, and we the humane must find ways to stop it in it's track. 

The train of hierarchy of violence must be halted, and we must disembark.

What is happening in England and India, and elsewhere, what is being done to the people by the reckless policies of the ruling factions in regards to COVDI19 is emblematic of what this hierarchy of violence cult is doing to all of us, to humanity, and we the humane must find ways to stop it in it's track. 

The train of hierarchy of violence must be halted, and we must disembark.

We must do this, we must commit to doing, even if we do not know how that is going to work out. It is not merely the success of the project that drives this - it is integrity.

Ani Di Franco has a song, Inside Out, in which she sings "We are all citizens of the womb." This is true.

This line inspired me to write this poem.

A SONG FOR THE CHILDREN OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

The push, the release
the squeeze, the belief
in letting go - we both
surrender to the next life
as in the new world
I arrive to the softness of
the strange dry air,
something unknown to me,
the pulse of my mothers heart
the thumping with which I have
for nine months lived
- all of my life thus far -
oh the relief of hearing that sound again
having been briefly, yet intensely
separated from that
fundamental pulse.

I gaze with all my body,
all my soul
and we catch each other,
before I reach to feed.
and oxytocin mediates the adrenaline
I am born, and we are clean, together...

My fathers deep voice rumbling in peace and joy,
amazement and bliss.

Being born is the art of the eternal welcome.
 Mind and body
one ingenuous zone of love,
head to toe I know
that my love of life,
this desire to nurture,
the qualities
we see
and feel in each other,
and we are recognised,
for these are the echoes,
these are the dreams
that are essential
above all else.

Nurture love,
tend the garden

Blessings are
these tears of love,
these peals of laughter
like a silken glove
held and yet unrestricted.

And then the flags, the tanks, and the shelling?

This tragedy is pathology,
the loving is all gone,
the culture says no breast-feeding in public,
it's more important
that you learn your Nations song!

Booooom!

~

What to do?

The first things that must be done is that states that organise violence on the scale that USUK and Israel and Russia and others do must be inhibited from doing so by their own populations - and in that populations across the Earth  must find ways to build solidarity and generate material support for each other in achieving this. We are in this together.

It is for the British population to control their State and Oligarchy who interfere in other countries.

It is for the American population to control their State and Oligarchy who interfere win other countries.

It is for each countries population to assert our right to self govern - it is not the  exclusive right of any ruling class,  no such right exists. The ruling class rules by might and leveraged power and that is, in this 21st Century, wholly illegitimate.

This means we must as people in humane, informed  intelligent solidarity take control of the democratic legislatures and write the laws that will control these powers and forces, and thus make them safe for people everywhere.

We need to do this just to get to the position where we can deal with Climate Change, Environmental Pollution, Air Particulate Pollution and poverty.

Climate change demands a psychological change among all democratic electorates.

We need peace to be able to work on Climate Change in meaningful ways.




Kindest regards 

Corneilius 


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

The word 'woke', when used by bullies, is an insult. Which is a compliment.

The word 'woke' is being used by right wing bullies as an insult. 


What they don't get is that it is a compliment.

I am woke (ish). I'd rather not be acutely aware of Racism, in the sense that Racism is just so un-necessary, a cruel invention, designed to set workers at each other in order to prevent us from joining hands and confronting the Ruling class owners. I wish it did not exist. I am not glad to be aware of it. However Racism was invented, and until we un-invent it, I think I need to be acutely aware of it, and how it functions within existing hierarchies of power, wealth and violence as an institutionalised weapon in the class war because that class war is causing so much harm. Being asleep to the existence of that war is no longer an option.

Origins of 'woke'.

The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.


"Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America. Lead Belly’s usage has largely stayed the common, consistent one ever since, including during one notable brush with the mainstream in 1962, via the New York Times.

That year, a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians."

Source: Vox - really interesting article, well written and obviously worth the read, gives a way better history of 'woke' than I am presenting here, and brings the recent 2000s story to the forefront.

Turning gold into lead, and failing.

When 'woke' moved from within the African American community into wider use, over the last decade or so, the alt right tried to turn it into an insult, without realising it is a compliment. 

The alt right white supremacist misogynists hated that the African Americans had such a cool, clear and simple word that indicated an acute and historically accurate political awareness: that really boiled their piss into steaming clouds of rage. Cool and right.

They are also really, really irritated that they cannot use their own word 'N8gg8R', yet African Americans can and do use it freely, lovingly among themselves. lolz.

It's a really interesting dynamic. You can feel the dirty, gagging yet impotent rage when the bullies try to turn the word 'woke' against people seeking a pathway towards confronting and impeding racist oppression.

For the alt-right and white supremacists, labelling me or you as 'woke' is their attempt at being insulting.

It is a way of dismissing the other person, as a put down and as a way to avoid the evidence. It is always used at the other person.

Being dismissed in the middle of a discussion or interaction can trigger a reaction, hacking the amygdala, shutting down cortex. 

The bullies know this.

That usage of the insult is designed to trigger the target into anger, derailing the frontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain.

That is a trap.

Never react with a counter strike.

Just point out the truth. "Why thank you, I am woke! So kind of you to notice!"

What ever it is, what ever the discussion.  Just place the evidence.

Don't worry about convincing or persuading. Just place the evidence, calmly.

That way the bully has no traction. That way the bully loses. Watch the steam from his or her ears, notice the reddening of the cheeks, the thin beads of sweat, the squirming incoherent rage. Let it sizzle.

Which is why Piers Morgan walked off set. 



He lost, in public, to the truth, calmly told.

Some one asked on twitter : "what is the opposite of 'woke'?"

I wrote the following.

Bully.

Bully is the opposite of woke.

The opposite of woke is not asleep.  Being asleep is not the opposite of woke. It's possible to not know something, to be genuinely unaware. If someone is genuinely asleep, one cannot blame them for not hearing or seeing an emerging danger.

Being awake and a bully: that is the opposite of woke.

Racism is bullying.
Misogyny is bullying.
Xenophobia is bullying.
Nationalism is bullying.
Nativism is bullying.
Hating the vulnerable, the poor, the disabled is bullying.
Externalised Costs is bullying.
Profiteering is bullying.
Hierarchies of Power and Violence are bully cultures.

All of these are the opposite of woke.

When an Oligarchy or Plutocracy is occupying democratic legislatures, excluding the people, and in co-ordination with those who mediate existing public discourse by controlling the bulk of public news media - that is bullying.

Online political grooming is bullying.

Free Speech is a responsibility to be honest, truthful. 

Free Speech is not a licence to be a bully.

Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of lies and various logical fallacies targeting vulnerabilities.

The bullies hide behind Free Speech - to do this they deliberately describe it inaccurately.

The origin of Free Speech is that a Government may not block or harass or oppress a citizen from speaking truth. That is what it means. Nothing more than that. There's an element of Religious Freedom associated with it though that is the least part of the meaning. Religious truths vary, are relative to one another and often do not mirror social material reality. That is why Religion is less than useful when deliberating on policy that concerns the shared spaces between us, the commons. The care of the commons demands honesty and evidence above all else.

The meaning of Free speech is that those in Power cannot be allowed to sanction anyone for speaking truth to the community, in public, about the behaviour, actions and outcomes of those in Power.  That honesty is critical to any democratic system. 

Whistle-blowers are essential to any community's integrity and they must be protected. 

Transparency makes any system safer. 

Evidence matters.

When the British Prime Minister dismissed Zero Community Transmission strategy as impossible and impractical in spite of the evidence that it is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania, that was bullying. He was using the power of his position to make sure that no honest discussion of ZCT would be allowed in Parliament, thus undermining Free Speech.
 
Free Speech was never meant to suggest anyone can utter whatever lies, falsehoods or misinformation they like as manipulative tools in any public fora, as tools that exploit other people's vulnerabilities in order to secure any economic, ideological, political or religious advantage.

I think that kind of behaviour is criminal in intent. I know it is criminal behaviour.

Exploiting another human beings vulnerability in order to groom and then exploit that person is a criminal action. It is pure evil. In the sense of a lying nasty venal assault on the integrity of the psyche of the other person for personal gain. 

I do not subscribe to any concept of Evil as outside of human action - there is no Satan, no Santa Claus, no force of Evil outside of human behaviour and action.


my song, Bully, Bully, Bully



 

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Be Alert!. Bullies Exploit Emerging Vulnerabilities.



"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."



BE ALERT!

It will take 2 to 6 weeks for the first clear signs of a surge in infections to become apparent..


The UK Government is gambling with your lives.

Only if you allow them to.

Stay home, tell your boss to think about the legal action you will be forced to take if he or she demands you return, or offers to fire you if you do not.

Do not send your children to school, do not demand more teachers place themselves at risk, furlough is not an easy money free ride, it is a protective measure.

Do not be bullied.

There is a local epidemic, here in the UK. 


We are called upon to be alert. Then let us be alert. Let us pay close attention to the implications, the masked threats, the veiled insinuations.

The virus is real. The infection is not a hoax. 
Viruses are not bullies. Hoaxers are bullies. Some bullies will be attempting to exploit the situations created by this  viral infection and the disease it causes. Bullying can be described as using any form of power disparity to manipulate or coerce others to meet the needs of the entity with the greater power.

David Icke is a bully. Alex Jones is a bully. Both are exploiting people's fears and insecurities, their rage and hatreds and emotional reactions to sell books, to sell product, to market a brand, to build a cult following. That is a form of bullying, it is psychological bullying. Donald Trump is a bully.  Trumplestiltskin - the public persona is that of The Bully's Bully. The Bully for all Seasons. I will stamp my feet if I do not get my own way!

They are not alone in this. Brexit was a similar dynamic, with Boris Johnson at the very core of that behavioural dynamic, which I have previously described as political grooming. Nigel Farage stating that in his opinion street violence would be understandable if people did not get their own way. Straight bananas.

Hoax? What hoax? 


SARSCOV2 is a genuine, naturally evolved 
virus (if you take in the impact of harvesting wild animals for meat, and stocking them, live, in a meat market where stress and stock conditions can mean a virus can be passed from one creature to another in ways that would not normally occur, but can, and did, and is then transferred to a human by contact, where it finds access to cells and replicates and is then transmitted to another human being).


COVID19 is the disease caused when the virus enters a human host and uses the hosts cells to replicate, so that it can then be coughed or breathed out in tiny droplets of moist breath, to infect a new human host.

The process of using the hosts cells to make millions of copies of itself destroys those cells, and that is what causes the various disease breakdowns that can cause fatality.  Some people's immune systems cannot cope with that,  often because they are already suffering a chronic disease. Some people's immune system fails, even though they appear to be healthy. It's a risk for everyone, albeit greater for those who are already ill. We have no vaccine, and none on any reasonable time horizon.

If your lung cells are destroyed, you cannot breathe in oxygen, or breathe out carbon dioxide, and that causes lots of problems for most of your bodies organs. There's more to it than that. That is not the point of this short piece. Infectious diseases can cause terrible damage especially when we have no natural immunity and no vaccine and not curative treatment.

There is a pandemic (which is concurrent epidemics happening at the same time in different countries). This is now a global issue. 7 billion and more are involved in this. We are all in this together. It is in the air we breathe. Breathe in, breath out, spread it all about.


There is no vaccine. There is no vaccine in sight. I repeat myself. The promise of a vaccine is an empty promise. And in the next paragraph I will outline one reason why some people are floating it as a strategy with imminent potential right now. It is a delaying tactic. I think Bill Gates naivety is being exploited. I don't think he is evil. Nonetheless, there are those whose intentions are evil; predatory intent among humans is evil. We all know about predatory lending practices. Some people are clearly attempting to exploit the situation of this pandemic.

A slow spread policy avoids taking the kinds of action what would demand a Government supports a population through the process of stopping the spread, suppressing the virus and eradicating it from any given population.

For some ideologues funding the incomes of workers, (as opposed to  bailing out hedge funds and investment bankers), is considered an evil greater than the virus's impact on vulnerable people. The people might become addicted to the free money. I have written on this blog quite recently about the historical resonance of British political masters and their fear, their disdain, their hatred for helping the poor, the vulnerable.  The UN has chastised the UK Government for it's inhumane mistreatment of disabled people seeking states support to live in dignity.

Priti Patel, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Charles Trevelyan are quoted in my previous piece on the historical behaviour pattern I have observed resonating through this epidemic.


Some predatory Governments, Hedge Funds and others such as Rees-Mogg will attempt to exploit the local and global epidemics - buy low, sell high! How can we make a 'killing'?  Can we use this to acquire more power? What economic gains can we make from this crisis?

The UN calls for a global cease fire, the USA denies the motion because the WHO exists, because China exists and because both have done, and are doing, immense work to stop the spread, suppress the virus, eradicate it from populations and this shows up the US Federal Governments bad policy. 

The UK is in lock step with this move by the USA,  Both regularly abuse the Veto rights granted by their presence on the UN Security Council. Yes, the council of those who hold the biggest weapons of mass destruction systems, their versions of political protection equipment. Equipment that is a threat, rather than a protection. Bullies. History. I digress.

Let's return to the lead-up to the present moment, in the UK, by way of the speech Boris Johnson delivered even as the first cases of COVID19 were confirmed in the UK, and health officials were assuring us that the UK was among the best prepared in the world.


This is the official transcript from Boris Johnson's speech on February 3rd.


https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.


We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century."


That clears everything up then. There we have it. Those who seek to protect their populations are panicking, cowardly, spineless and weak, The UK Government is strong, caped up and ready to make vast profits in this situation.

Treating the people as children.

Boris Johnson's May Bank Holiday speech was deliberately vague, and because the instructions are vague he is hanging workers out to dry.

Classic passive aggressive management tactics are to issue deliberately vague instruction sets that contain conflicts; in response, when workers exercise too much caution, they are blamed for any failures to meet objectives, and when they are not cautious enough, they are held responsible for any adverse outcomes.

The response of various experts in the fields of medicine, virology, epidemiology and public health largely critical of the lack of clarity and the lack of a science based rationale.

His speech calls for factories and other workplace settings to
restart working in the midst of a lock down, at a time when statistics indicate a plateau, rather than a downturn.

Johnson makes a call to maintain social distancing even though we know that it is practically impossible in many work and travel situations to maintain that - the Ro number is still rather vaguely estimated, and in all likelihood it is still too high. We know using public transport is a super spreader. We know that thousands of new cases are confirmed at hospitals every day, and that hundreds are still dying in hospitals, at home and in care homes and that a third of UK 15,570 care homes are hosting outbreaks of infection. His instructions and directions amount to deliberate confusion.


"The main sources for infection are home, workplace, public transport, social gatherings, and restaurants. This accounts for 90% of all transmission events. In contrast, outbreaks spread from shopping appear to be responsible for a small percentage of traced infections" source

Who will take up the workers part when they are ordered back to work, and
out of concern for others and common sense they refuse? Will they then be fired? 
What of their rights under Section 44?  What legal aid access will the have? Is this how furlough is to be reduced? The addicts pushed out to face cold turkey. They can exercise all day long, to work through it?

Bullies give vague directions in order to set the victimised up for future failure and censure. This is a known behavioural and tactical dynamic associated with passive aggressive management.

News Media carefully float in comments about how furloughed workers are taking a freebie, sitting back and enjoying the free cash, Callers into talk shows repeat these claims, and acclaim their own desire to get back to work! Underneath is the unspoken allegation of mass malingering, disincentivised work shy slackers threatening the UK Economy.

Treating the people as adults.


Other Governments and organisations are responding in ways that attempt, as best they can, to take care of the people. They are attempting to stop the spread, to suppress the virus until it is eradicated from the population to whom they owe fealty and of for whom they hold a duty of care. They are supporting their people in order to have a people, to be an economy.

 'Unless we fix the biology, there will be no economy.' Dr. Erin Bromage. Understanding the risks matters. Opinion and belief may well be lethal.

 New Zealand is one example of a State choosing to take an evidenced position in order to protect the most vulnerable people within their population, which as it happens will also be the most protective of their economy.

Be like Jacinda, Stop the Spread, Spread the Love.

I wrote a song about Jacinda  vs Boris and Donald. No fridges or golf games for her. Just the daily work of suppressing transmission, eradicating the virus. Day by day.


This chart in the link below outlines the impacts of the different policy approaches in different countries, in terms of infections or progress of their local epidemic, as a result of their policy approaches. Take a look. It's real.

https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

It really is that clear.


Bullies Exploit Emerging Vulnerabilities

Another way to frame this is to say that bullies will always attempt to exploit any emerging vulnerability in any family, village, church, organisation, institution or population/state where they hold degrees of power over others. 


I understand that this is a behavioural pattern, one the bully does not have to think about engaging, that it is automatic.  See opportunity, grasp it!


The bully will be behaving in an opportunistic dynamic, and will be co-opting any push back by the populations they are afflicting, so there is this push and pull dynamic that is very unsettling - this is then masked by a narrative that gives the illusion of incompetence, and that serves the purpose of throwing the afflicted off the scent, so that the opportunity to exploit the situation remains in the control of the bully.

There is also a benefit to the bully in encouraging a raft of conTheories and even in promoting them - The Chinese Virus! - some people will reject such theories as too outlandish, too crazy to be real or meaningful, and in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, they lose touch with the bullying element. Incompetence is much more comforting an illusion, and it gives the bully more more to act.

A bully can be a person, a group of people, an institution or a Government twisting arms.

Stay alert to the plays of professional bullies.

Stay Alert!

Stay home and study the matter.

Write to your local MP.  Write to the media you read.

Protect your children and their teachers.

Make a noise, stay at home, disturb the bullies.

Stop the spread, spread the love.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Johnson: "Protect the Hoard, let the Herd take it on the Chin." The consistent policy under all the confusion.


Boris Johnson, on February 3rd 2020, in a speech about Brexit to an audience in Greenwich, laid out the UK response to the SARSCOV2 pandemic in no uncertain terms.

Bear in that that the UK Government and Health officials had already received detailed warnings from WHO and other bodies of the COVID19 epidemic in China, and the ongoing pandemic across South East Asia, which was by this date already emerging within the UK.

The first cases of COVID19 in the UK were from a Chinese couple who had just  returned from China, who fell ill in Newcastle; their status as COVID19 was announced January 30th, they had been ill a week already.. Other cases were soon to follow, and it was know that cases were emerging across Europe. Point being that by February 1st, a global pandemic situation was known to be emerging, all Governments were alerted.

This is the official transcript from Johnson's speech on February 3rd.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.

We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century."

Protect the hoard, let the herd take it on the chin.

Here is the video of that speech.




https://youtu.be/baWbWpOtJnc?t=536 - this link starts from Johnson's mention of Corona Virus.

Here is a more detailed report from Byline Times.

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/17/the-coronavirus-crisis-boris-johnson-said-superman-brexit-britain-would-take-advantage-of-the-pandemic-and-go-its-own-way-seven-weeks-before-lockdown/

Byline times have another excellent piece outlining the link between UK Military Intelligence, The Behavioural Insights Team led by David Halpern and the 'behavioural sciences' quoted by the CMO Chris Whitty and the Government Science Adviser Sir Patrick Valence.

I have already outlined in some the dynamics of  'protect the hoard, let the herd take it on the chin' in some detail, based on my observations and the evidence available prior to the discovery of this piece, which came to me via www.joe.ie   on facebook on Saturday 17th of April.

In the early party of Johnson's speech he refers to the painting on the ceiling of the Greenwich Hall, and this chimes with my observations of the linkage between this situation, and that of the Late Victorian Holocausts in Ireland and India, the continuation of the attitude and the behaviour - the actions, outcomes and rationalisations - of British Empire Logic.

"It is great to welcome everyone here to Greenwich and I invite you first to raise your eyes to the heavens


The Vatican has Michelangelo.

Greenwich has Thornhill who spent 20 years flat on his back on top of the scaffolding, so rigid that his arm became permanently wonky, and he’s left us this gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century.

This painting above you was started in 1707, the very year when the union with Scotland was agreed – and does it not speak of supreme national self-confidence?

Look at these well-fed nymphs and cupids and what have you.

They are not just celebrating the Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny – the official title of the scene.

This is the settlement of a long and divisive political question about who gets to sit on the throne of England.

And it is visibly resolved as you can see in favour of William and Mary and the result is stability and certainty and optimism and an explosion of global trade propelled by new maritime technology."
There you have it.

This is a very serious situation.

We need  the UK policy to move from slowing the spread to stopping the spread. This will call on all citizens to understand the situation as it really is, and to engage in what it will take to stop the spread of the infection, and in due course eradicate it from the UK population.

The slow spread policy is pretty much guaranteed to lead to waves of infection outbreaks, which in time could well lead to +100,000 deaths, possibly +250,000 - horrific deaths of people with chronic illnesses, trauma, disability etc, whose immune systems are compromised, including also those living in close confines such as care homes, prisons, temporary accommodation on council housing waiting lists, the homeless and many others  - in the UK that demographic is close to 5,000.000 people.

1% would be 50,000 deaths and we are already heading for that number, with deaths close to 25,000 as of 19th April.

We NEED to stop all incoming air. land and sea travel or impose a two week quarantine of all incoming passengers, at hotels near the airports, monitored by health workers and police.

We need to fully equip NHS and carer staff with PPE and other essential tools to protect themselves.

We need to institute contact tracing, quarantine, treatment in isolation (not at home) where interventions can prevent escalation of cases into critical more readily.

We need to start the full protocols for stopping the spread, for protecting NHS and other vulnerable demographics. That means workers must be supported for the duration, by a temporary Universal Basic Income rather than Universal credit, to bear the burden, and that money will flow back into the local economy.

We cannot allow another day of "protect the Hoard, let the herd take it on the chin" as the official policy of the UK and it's peoples.

We might well need Parliament to reconvene to remove the PM, the entire Cabinet and Cummings, and the BIT team led by David Halpern, and I would suggest go as far as arresting them for gross malfeasance in public office, (their policy decision and actions, their rationalisations of what they have been doing goes way beyond incompetence) to be held on remand until we have stopped the spread of the viral infection, and eradicated it from the UK population. They are already  obfuscating and getting in the way, and cannot be trusted to do what needs to be done.

We can address their culpability in detail when our vulnerable population are safe.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.