Cash For Questions and other COVID era songs : a different 9/11

Corruption - exploiting ones position of power and others vulnerabilities for ideological and personal gain, causing harm to society and eviscerating healthy governance.

~

Storage of millions of useless face masks, and other PPE: the Uniserve Contract 

The Good Law Project has helped to uncover the current tide of corrupt crony capitalism by taking this Government to court to reveal the details that have been deliberately obscured by this government. 
One example of the many series of dodgy contracts for useless PPE kit was with Uniserve, a British Logistics Company, with no previous experience in health care, based in Kent. Uniserve rushed out in early 2020 to contract for PPE from China, PPE that turned out to be inadequate - it could not be used.

By late summer, the volume of useless PPE that Uniserve was importing started to cause problems. Warehouses were full and shipping containers stacked up at Felixstowe, blocking our largest port. 
James Kemball, a logistics company owned by Uniserve, got the job of relocating the PPE. 15,000 shipping containers were moved. That is 15,000 truck trips. As a topical aside, what's the carbon foot print of that inept exercise?

Paying for the same 'mistake' many times.
The government is now paying James Kemball for those 15,000 containers to be stored on at least two plots, covering 10 acres, at Port of Ipswich. Thousands of containers are also sitting at Port of Tilbury, a field in Mendlesham and on a strip of rented land opposite Melton railway station. 
The proceeds of a corrupt contract scattered across the land, to flow into private profits. Money that could be better deployed funding HEPA filters in schools for example, as part of better management of the epidemic. What a double waste.

How many children will be exposed to SARSCOV2 in unsafe schools? How many will die, how many will go through long covid, how many will be traumatised by the confusion, by the possibility that they spread the virus to a friend, a relative or any other who became seriously ill? There is a link between these harms and those dodgy contracts.

We have an elected dictatorial Government, secure in an 80 seat majority, in the House of Commons, awarding dodgy contracts for useless kit to friendly associates, a government that cruelly withdrew £20 a week Covid uplift' from Universal Credit recipients for no good reason, even as the epidemic continues apace, with circa 1000 deaths from Covid every week, a government that is now paying a subsidiary of the dodgy contracted party Uniserve to store the useless PPE kit, a government that is basically funnelling public cash into private coffers, for doing nothing much beyond being a friend of the relevant Government ministers, or a party donor.

Waste and tragically, in the context of the Covid Epidemic in the UK, part of the  guarantee of more spread of the virus. Layers of harm.

The damage to our democracy, to our people, to our nations health and safety - is the profit gouged by this behaviour really worth it?

Private Eye's special report, in the form of a podcast 'Profits of Doom', and also reported in issue 1560, suggests that for those on the take, and on the make, it certainly is.

"Richard Brooks and Solomon Hughes cover both ends of the Covid wealth gap - from the companies making mega-millions out of lazy procurement processes all the way to the workers having their wages levelled down rather than up. Free major government contract with every download!"

We all know, of course, that for those who have died, who have contracted Long Covid, those whose businesses have collapsed due to mismanagement of the epidemic on these islands, their families and for the low wage working population in general, the costs are not worth it.

The Tip of The Corruption Iceberg.

Another Angry Voice published a short list of crony capitalist 'entrepreneurial' activity: their article lists a long list of this corruption,
"Here's just a fraction of it:

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his corporate paymasters like Randox within government. Randox got £480 million in Covid contracts, but they horribly botched a load of test results by sending the all clear to tens of thousands of people who were actually infected.
🔵 Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through extraordinary legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free. 
🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the six figure salary paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri for "IT lessons" without any declaration of their relationship as one of his registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique that was funded by a Tory Party donor; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa of Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election.
🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated an average of £3 million each to the Tory operation!
🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord and his sister even got lucrative contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests!
🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts.
🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 
🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin.
🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway.
🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco was lavished with at least £200 million worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is former Tory MP and grandson of Winston Churchill Nicholas Soames.
🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he "forgot" to declare as an interest in the report).
🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses) through the practice of second-jobbing, and perhaps the most egregious is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. 
The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life all combined!
🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".
🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned.
🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton failed to declare a load of secret offshore investments. He was the Tory party's PPE Tsar who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts detailed above!
🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing in parliament against closing tax loopholes!
🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat and claiming £1,900 a month in rent!
🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, £350 million of which was provided directly to Greensill subsidiaries and business interests. Then Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later!

🔵 Multiple MPs from both sides of parliament have been taking £thousands worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament. The worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest.
And this lot is just one part of the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!"

Johnson Lied, people died.

Johnson used the COP26 platform to declare that 'the UK is not remotely a corrupt country'. 

The UK is 'not remotely a corrupt country', says Boris Johnson. pic.twitter.com/zFubXGZu2V

— LBC (@LBC) November 10, 2021

His careful use of the phrase 'the country' was a deliberate evasion. His choice of wording was designed to enrage people who support his Government and annoy everyone who has a deep loyalty and affection for The Country. A lot of people would of course take exception to the accusation that the country is corrupt as a whole. And they'd be correct.

A classic gaslighting ploy. A deliberate deflection.

The issue is not that the country is corrupt. 

The issue is that many members of the Conservative Party in Government (and beyond) are engaged in blatantly corrupt behaviour. Johnson also suggested that there are rules governing MPs lobbying and consultancy work, and that those found to have 'broken the rules' must be held accountable.

Here's an idea.

Make all those MPs and their associates who have extracted such great wealth from the public purse hand back every penny they have 'made' to their local constituencies councils, bar them from political and Government positions and bar them from directorships of companies for life.

Make the companies that 'donated' or 'employed' these MPs match their payments of their 'consultancy fees'  and 'salaries' to each MPs local council social care services, and bar them from political lobbying for ever.

Cameron should never be able to lobby Government ever again. He is reputed to have taken £7.2 million in salary, bonuses and shares from his involvement with Greensill. He must be made to return every penny to the public purse.

Back in February 2010, before the election which made him the Prime Minister Cameron had this to say:

"We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism.

"So we must be the party that sorts all this out. Today it is a £2bn industry that has a huge presence in parliament. The Hansard Society has estimated that some MPs are approached over 100 times a week by lobbyists.

"I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works."

International Trade Secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan on Sky News, 8th November 2021 cited in Private Eye, issue 1560, November 2021.

"I don't think we should have a removal of the ability to maintain or have a second job, because it brings a richness to our role as members of Parliament."

Choice of words, eh?

AI : Another layer of Influence.

Savige Javid : The Bankers Banker.

Prevention, in this case, is the cure.

Parliament should make 'the rule's going forward much more robust, including making this kind of corruption a criminal offence, with custodial sentences mandated for for such behaviour.

There's no need to apply such harsh obligations in retrospect. The return of all these corrupt profits would suffice for now.

My Little Crony

There's a rather superb website, a clever resource that is tracking the links and webs of crony capitalists operating within this English Government 
My Little Crony : take a while to play with it, and study it. The Good Law Project is also unearthing much of this information and Bylinetimes, Double Down News and a few others are reporting it for the public's awareness. Most news media are avoiding the matter.
What will future historians write of the failures of this Parliament and the British Corporate Media to hold this government to account? What will they say about the population that let that happen?

Corruption, legal or otherwise is an affront to democracy.

For any politician to take money from a business, or any other sponsor, and then attempt to influence legislation or contracts for that business or sponsor is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Crony Capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic and obviously corrupt, and more importantly, in the middle of a health crisis it undermines public services at every turn because attention to the detail required to maintain best possible delivery of those services is diverted to maintaining illicit cashflow into private hands, to covering it up, to gaslighting the public in order to avoid accountability. This is beyond criminal, it is institutionalised psychopathy.

~

 NEW SONG - Cash For Questions
Chorus :
Cash for questions, cash for influence, cash for peerages, personal gain!
Verses: 
The second job is bringing in the loot, sneaky, underhand, disguising the truthuse your position to rig the game,influence and effluent, pour it down the drain!
Elected on a premise, to improve societyduty of care, probity and honesty,legislators should not skate on thin icetheir responsibility is to never lie.
When crony capitalists rake in the cashwhen their 'services' fail and crashlike Dido Harding, Randox and PattersonPPE in storage, we can see the pattern.
And people get hurt, and people die, so much harm, and we all know whyit's a rigged game, voters always loseit's a rigged game, the honest ones must  now choose
let's break it down, bring them downcorruption, bullying, it's all evil.let's break it down, send them downcorruption, bullying, it's all evil.~
~Here's the  thing I see : it is that Crony Capitalism, Cash for Questions, Cash for Peerages, Corporate Donations to MPs to influence legislation and policy, Corporate and Ideological Think Tanks funded by Oligarchs (Tax Payers Alliance for example) and Corporate Lobbyism undermines democracy, it demeans the vote, it dismisses the electorate and it is reckless abandonment of duty of care by all involved. 

Not every MP, not even a majority of MPs are involved. Yet those who do not stoop so low seem loathe to root this adverse behaviour out. They bleat about the erosion of public trust in parliament, but do nothing meaningful that would prevent this abuse of power, let alone punish it.

This behavioural dynamic - the corruption of a few and the feeble response of the many - denies the democratic mandate of the electorate. It undermines justice. It pollutes everything it touches. It imposes immense costs on the population, the tax paying working class, in terms of resources diverted from serving our genuine needs.

This behaviour causes great harm.
That said, the practice is as old as Magna Carta itself, which was a medieval  attempt to institutionalise the power of the robber barons, who controlled trade and thus generated the wealth of the State the monarchy absorbed. Magna Carta was an early version of Corporate Lobbying assuming dominance of the body politic, rather than an effort to assert Freedom for citizens, as it has so often been misread and misrepresented as. 

So it goes within all violence hierarchies. If my readers do not recognise the violence of this hierarchy, I suggest assessing the non-avoidance of fatalities and chronic disease as an act of institutional violence. A Plague enhancing Government. Medieval in attitude, scope and effect.  
21st Century
This 21st Century is calling for genuine democratic regulation of everything this culture does that causes harm. Externalised Costs is the umbrella term for much of this. 

This call for democratic and legislative regulation of harmful practice is necessary in order to prevent the harms being caused by the way the industrial system is operating. That would be a healthy movement.  The only way through this, safely, must start with ruthless honesty, accountability and for those who are causing deliberate harm, sanctions.

I am merely a grass roots singer, and old man, poor and toothless. Justice can only be done by a united grass roots. The best I can do is sing it like I see it in the hope that having a laugh at it all somehow helps to blow the veil off, clears the air a bit and helps build the bridges of solidarity we so desperately need.
Here are some of my topical Covid Era Songs of Corruption, reckless arrogance, negligent harm causation and avarice.
1. 64 Ways to Mislead a Country (50 ways to leave your lover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFDvUU-tHd0

Deliberately misleading, lying and manipulating known vulnerabilities - grooming a nation
2. Hit The Road Matt : (Hit the road, Jack)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr3j-_K6ASk
Deliberately down grading existing NHS Test & Trace, rather than expanding it from a good knowledge and experience baseline, to divert vast funding to private coffers, whilst enabling more spread of a dangerous virus. Herd Immunity.
3. Sajiid, Sajiid, Sajiid Javiiid! (Jolene)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0w69rxaNJE
A banker who sold bad debt as secure investments, sells spread of the virus as a health enhancer for the nation. Hoard Immunity.
4. The House They Call No. Ten (House of the Rising Sun)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oe2P2blhEA
Catalogue of harm caused by English Conservative Government 2020/21 in relation to mismanagement of the epidemic on these islands.

5. Cash For Questions

Youtube version.

Abuse relationship.

In my view there is an Abuse Relationship, with the English Ruling class in the dominant abuser position,  unwilling to cease it's abusive behaviour even as it can see the harms it is causing, and the working class population at large exposed to those harms.

corruption: The Great Great Game

-

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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

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

Amrit Lohia tweeted the following:

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

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

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

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

Then I wrote some more.

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

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

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

Externalised Costs

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does this reckoning have to descend into a power struggle?

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

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

That choice is real.

To recap:

Elimination of community transmission is possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who decides these deaths are acceptable? On what metric?

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

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

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

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

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Externalised Costs - The Effluent in the Room is not an Elephant.

How many Elephants does it take to change the light bulb?

It's really tricky because no one wants to be the first to point out that there's an Elephant in the room.

How many Elephants does it take to change the light bulb?

It's really tricky because no one wants to be the first to point out that there's an Elephant in the room, and she's an Electrician.

How many Elephants does it take to change the light bulb?

It's really tricky because no one wants to be the first to point out that there's an Elephant in the room, and since he's a conservative capitalist he'd much prefer we all stay in the dark. So 'Ssshhhsssh! Do NOT point at the Elephant in the Room!'

The Elephant in the Room

All industrial production systems currently operating or envisaged rely upon externalised costs at every stage from extraction of raw materials through production, consumption and on to end of life disposal, as the primary source of their profitability. This means that toxic outputs from industrial processes are not mitigated, let alone prevented. They are accepted, normalised, hidden away until they impress upon us by presenting as problems, and they are integral to the profitability of the Industrial Competing Powers system.

Ordinary people, especially the low income workers, are the people who do the work that makes most of the real wealth in this system, largely through daily toil, and the wealth workers generate is extracted and accumulated, and withheld, often by force and structures of Power. We have direct evidence of this in recent times from an 1982 Cabinet Discussion Paper written post Falklands War, when the establishment was feeling particularly confident.

The Poor Will Always Be With Us.

The poor are a permanent (deliberately so) externalised cost of Wealth Extraction. Poverty and homelessness are both externalised costs of the Wealth Extraction. Resources are deliberately withheld from those who genuinely need them, as part of driving people into low paid work 'making low paid work seem more attractive' (to maximise profit taking) and destitution is intentionally and callously maintained as a cultural whip. 

The destruction of indigenous pre-conquest culture was an externalised cost of conquest. Conquest is always a business proposition, in that it requires massive investment and a demand for returns greater than the investment, in blood and treasure.

Chronic stress of industrial extraction and business working practices  -  mining, deforestation, repetitive assembly work, boring work,low waged shop and hospitality staff, military service - is an externalised cost of the imposed work ethics that demand 'productivity'.

What does 'externalised' mean? It means that somebody else or some other organism outside the transactional economics of the extraction, manufacturing, production, sales, consumption and disposal dynamic pays the price, often with a degraded quality of their lives, or even often with their lives, in order that the maximal profits are generated, and hoarded.

⁠
All the harms we see are - pollution, environmental degradation, air toxicity, climate change, habitat loss, species extinction, poverty, war fare, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, social and national divisions and hatreds - are the accumulated externalised costs of the existing Industrial Militarised Hierarchy of Competing Powers, a cult system and its behavioural dynamics.

It is a cult. It is a toxic delusion to call it 'civilised'.

It certainly does not have to be this way. This activity and this cult does not define the Human species. It is a cult, an aberration, an abomination. It is not natural, optimally healthy human species behaviour by any measure.

What ever your stance, unless you are willing to engage with this simple fact, and actively seek ways to resolve that problem, by understanding precisely what those externalised costs are, and how they impact us all, and what we must do to prevent those costs arising or at least pay for them to be resolved, in full, our work on these issues is futile.



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

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https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous

People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Why not stop the spread of the virus, as a way to both prevent further fatality and disease and to avoid future lockdowns, now? People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels do much better under elimination strategy. 

These are very difficult times, for everyone.

And leading into the spread of the virus, and the disease, there was a surge of chronic stress induced by a culture of acquisitive competitive 'meritocracy' grounded in free market fundamentalism exacerbated by 'Austerity' policies mandating vast cuts to social welfare, health and social care programs based on a series of outright lies about fiscal policy and fiscal possibility pre-existed the pandemic. 

Allowing the virus to spread led to repeated lockdowns which added to the stress the more vulnerable among our population were dealing with. Stopping the spread, as Vietnam, New Zealand and a good number of other countries chose has demonstrably led to much better outcomes, on every available measure bar international tourism.

Why are the English Government and others wilfully ignoring the widespread evidence that is right before our eyes, the evidence that 1.8 billion people are being protected by elimination of community transmission strategy. 

How could they all ignore something so blatantly real?

The UK governments, the UK Press News Media, the Labour Party front bench, The Churches, the Green Party , the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and all broadcasters of TV and Radio refuse to bring that evidence up for detailed discussion. 

What is that?

How could anyone let that slide?

This is to me where the government position is weakest.

They cannot argue all that evidence away without lying or making up stuff .

That is why they dismiss it out of hand, refuse to discuss it. They can’t handle it safely for their objective, because any acknowledgement of that evidence undermines their positions, and their policies.

Why do they dismiss Elimination of Community Transmission?

I think it is in part because doing so requires that the state resources and empowers local government to support all the people to stop the spread, to be helpful, to prioritise help for the local population to take best care of one another and that is too close to socialist practice for neoliberal free market fundamentalists to allow. That cat must remain in the bag.

How does the language of  'freedom' and 'restrictions' emerge to dominate the public discourse, that is to say the discourse published by official news media, mirrored by leading politicians and pundits. What does it seek to 'stimulate' in significant cohorts of the population?

Where the evidence leads is that stopping the spread of the virus in the community offers the best chances of freedom preserved, and allowing the virus to spread reduces all our freedoms, not least when the spread of infection runs out of control, impacting services visibly. For the English government that visibility is about optics, not people's welfare. 

It's not a good look, denial.

In my view Sir Keir 'less with the evidence' Starmer is daily betraying the working class he purports to represent by not bringing that evidence up every time he sits opposite Johnson, every time he speaks to the press. He is also betraying everyone else.

Just one short sentence is all he needs to say "Elimination Strategy is working for 1.8 Billion people" and  "You do know that spread is placing them at greater risk than their own governments are." 

I even have a pithy slogan for him.

"Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love!" 

One breaths worth of words, at the start or end of every briefing, statement or public utterance. Such a small effort, for such a huge benefit.

Never in the field of population level health care has anyone avoided so small an effort in order to avoid so huge a benefit to so many whilst blatantly supporting a government that is causing immense  deliberate harm whilst pretending to be a political opposition. Not quite as pithy as the Churchill original.

The dynamic of the slow spreader Governments, the English, Brazilian, Indian and other NeoLiberal Free Market Fundamentalist  governments who for whatever reason have chosen to allow spread of the virus have literally made the virus more dangerous and the populations they govern more vulnerable on very front. 

What drives that kind of policy decision making, most recently articulated by Savid Javid, the English Health Secretary, as not 'cowering before the virus'. The little bully. 

"With income distribution at current levels, roughly half of the working population in both the US and the UK would be unable to survive without external help. Most people regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, and they view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society.

To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden.

Market forces, they say, are meritocratic – and the problem is that these people have too little merit.

Ira Sohn, Professor of Economics at Montclair State University, has pointed out that with technological advances, many of these people (i.e. people who have to work for a living) will no longer be needed at all:

The prospects for adopting labour-saving technologies in many of the labour-intensive sectors in the economy are improving annually: self-checkout at supermarkets, self-check-in and -out at hotels, self-ordering and bill settlement in restaurants, self-administered health diagnostic tests and so on all translate into a reduced need for workers per dollar of gross domestic product on the one hand, and fewer total workers along with higher levels of GDP on the other.

Horses were used extensively on the farm and in transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe, but once mechanization and electrification were implemented, and the railroad, automobiles and buses became commercially viable as transport alternatives, owning horses became a hobby of the rich, and the horse population declined quickly and dramatically.

The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death). As technology continues to become ever more capable and most humans, frankly, do not, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.

source : https://99-percent.org/what-is-the-market-fundamentalist-agenda/ 

Does that fit the dynamic of the current English Government's policy direction?

There is a good case for Elimination strategy countries to impose sanctions on the spreaders, for reckless endangerment.

The 'try to control a slow spread' countries are more dangerous to the people than the virus needs to be. 

It is a try out, as in it is a trial, as in a well-dodgy experiment based on a fallacious position - ignore known evidence and let's see what happens.

They are exacerbating matters on every front, deliberately. Worse they are taking a huge risk because we know that the virus's evolutionary pressure will find ways to escape vaccines precisely because it is allowed to spread.

 

And it is the spread among the vaccinated who have not yet met the virus where that evolutionary step will occur, not among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated have already generated variants out of our various conditions. Proving that the virus can interact with different environments and make changes that increase it's ability to thrive.

Suggesting to the vaccinated that they should go out and risk contracting the infection in order to assure economic recovery is a nonsensical suggestion. The economy would be in much better shape adapted to a successful elimination of community spread strategy.

Tourism, for example, does not have to be international.  There are plenty examples of tourism consumers and providers successfully adapting to the current situation, where people take their holidays more locally, putting cash back into their own economies.

All live events and hospitality industries do much, much better under elimination strategy.

Health care does much, much better under elimination strategy.

Everything that affects ordinary people's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Remember each of us is not safe until all of us are safe. This applies to this virus as it does to the matter of climate change, for example. Or poverty. Or air pollution.

Stopping the Spread is spreading the Love.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Grooming others vulnerabilities is as low as it gets, in terms of everyday abuse of power."

Learning to Live with The Virus - Why do abusive Governments 'cower' from the truth? Elimination Strategy works.

“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually a normal response to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.”  — Dr. Gabor Maté

Johnson, and many of the people entrusted with the power to govern, are men who went to English Public Schools, all male boarding schools, where they learned early to behave in the way we are seeing them behave today. In such schools, the children are forced to learn to 'live with the un-natural situation'
 by denying their vulnerability. I know this from my own experience. 12 years of 'elite' Catholic Boarding Schools distorted my emotional and psychological being. It is not a normal, healthy environment for any child to grow up in.

This begs the question: are such men as they have become truly fit to Govern the shared commons for the entire population of the UK?

 

Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton. Photograph: Richard Shymansky from News Syndication/Gillman & Soame UK Ltd / News Licensing

Richard Beard has written about that experience, because he too endured the English Boarding Public School system, and he has been writing about the psychological harms, all avoidable, caused in those schools and was instrumental in setting out the awareness of how this dynamic afflicts those who seek out the power to rule, and in turn how that afflicts us all.

Q: "Boris Johnson and David Cameron attended similar schools at a similar time. How do you think it shaped them?

A: (Beard) In so many ways. Almost every day I read the paper and think, yes, I recognise that. Recently, it’s the idea that you just have to live with stuff – with Covid, for example. Just as at school you just had to live with your parents leaving you behind, with the daily authoritarianism, with not going home for weeks at a time. This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice."

The Bullingdon Club - Ruling Class Scions at Play?

In this video (see below) Prime Minister Johnson, of England publicly and brazenly implies that countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, China, Finland, Iceland and others were 'panicking' and taking 'medically irrational' action that would cause economic harm in the face of a global pandemic of the SARSCOV2 virus, and he rejects taking appropriate action. The outcome of his decision compares adversely with the outcomes in those other 'panicked' countries on every rational measure - in terms of public health, mental health, economics and civil liberties. The lack of empathy and concern for the vulnerability of the population, for whom he has taken responsibility, to this new virus is astonishing!

The evidence for this is incontrovertible. Johnsons brazen rejection of elimination of community transmission at that precise stage amounts to a deliberate, intentional conscious act of national, population level abuse. News Media has protected the Johnson misGovernment. Labour, under Starmer, has supported the Johnson misGovernment and ejected from Parliament the leading voices that might have voiced a more rational and honest opposition. 

Are we learning to live with a culture of abuse. Habituation to distal power and powerlessness, poverty, war and corruption as 'part of the Human Condition', part of 'Human Nature'?  Is this the 'new normal'?

Britain Is a Conquest Word. 

Great always referred to the dominance of all of these Islands and their peoples by the English Ruling Oligarchy. Patriotism is an abomination, if there is poverty structured into the situation of that Nation. Patriots scream, they wail and cry' Freedom!' but they never, ever seek to abolish poverty within their territory.

The so-called United Kingdom was united by conquest, violence and guile, never by free choice of a free people. Unlike the EU. Which was chosen, by every country that joined, pretty much.

Thus it is logical the political inheritors of the conquerors, the asset owners who ruled the British Empire which conquered the Ottoman Empire during WWI and carved it up, badly, also supported the creation of the State of Israel, as a mother supports a child. Israel is a bastard child of the British Empire. Partition  has long been a strategic policy imposed to impede others from making progress.

"There's horrible, horrible people floatin' about......"

Mhairi Black speaks about Westminster, the House of Commons, and the reality of what goes on in that building.

"People who you see, and ask how has no one evaluated you yet? - there's something seriously dark in that person's thinking."

Ayn Rand Fan Club?

People like Ayn Rand fan Sajid Javid who accuses people who care for others of 'cowering before the virus', people like Cyril Smith a known child molester, who remained unmolested by the Police throughout his odious reign oft terror, people like Tony Blair who lied and manipulated others to   prosecute a number of lethal wars, people like George Osborne who used lies to push Austerity which caused deliberate harm to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people like Winston Churchill who ordered Greeks who collaborated with the German Nazi invaders  to attack and murder other Greeks who had fought the Germans, who wanted a democratic Greece freed from Monarchy. Churchill even paid them to do this dirty, bloody job. People like that who cause harm to others in pursuit of personal power.

Venal, cruel, adept at grooming ordinary citizens into carrying out extraordinarily cruel behaviour and murderous action.

We citizens who live here in England are ruled by a culture of professional bullies who pose as democrats, who offered up a carefully engineered toxic mime of democracy to the people,  the people who had no option other than to accept that offer or face violence (Peterloo, Orgreaves, Grenfell, COVID19) - violence can present in many ways, including deliberate negligence and harassment.

Perhaps in the midst of this deliberately mismanaged epidemic, more of the English people are seeing this, if only because the steel hand has shed the velvet glove at home and the most vulnerable are being thrown under various buses. 

Freedom and Opinion

The Freedom Day, and the Freedom from Tyranny March where the attendees were encouraged to identity, locate and document Health Care Professionals who were compared to Nazi Medics indicted at Nuremburg, many who were hanged, the implication that HCPs should be executed. Incitement.

Exploiting emerging vulnerability

The English Government aka The English Ruling Class are adept at exploiting every emerging vulnerability within the population they Rule over, and they are so good at it, that they can enrol enough of the vulnerable into performing actions of collective self harm whilst  believing the exact opposite, inciting the gullible to go further than what would be considered rational, to act in utter confusion and cause more damage to the welfare of the  shared commons, and maintain the status quo.

Take for example the way they turned a peace oriented unemployed militant working class into foolhardy warriors who would die in their hundreds of thousands, by deft use of using propaganda, in just a few short months as The Great War loomed, is a fine example of this capability.

World War 1, as it has since been named, which was a European War, it was not really a 'World War' although the British drew in working class males from across the Empire to slog it out in the bloody, shit filled, gore dressed trenches.

Fighting for Freedom, inspired by the Rulers. Freedom Day!

Learning to live with all this.

"Learning to live with....." is a song of submission.

Learning to live with Misogyny.

Learning to live with Racism.

Learning to live with Poverty.

Learning to live with Warfare.

Learning to live with Pollution.

Learning to live with Conquest.

Learning to live with Bullying.

Learning to live with Occupation and Settlement.

Learning to live with 'The Virus'.

and why not

Learning to live without Misogyny.

Learning to live without Racism.

Learning to live without Poverty.

Learning to live without Warfare.

Learning to live without Pollution.

Learning to live without Conquest.

Learning to live without Bullying.

Learning to live without Occupation and Settlement.

Learning to live without 'The Virus'?

The shutting down of self empathy that being bullied all the time can induce reduces empathy for others. To merely survive by shutting down. Taking no preventative steps.

The habituation of survival of the fittest can lead to abandoning the more vulnerable as 'weaklings'. Open up, save 'the economy', save our 'mental health', give us back our 'Freedoms'?

The accommodation to Sexism leads to suppression of the true self which is more than the perception of one's sex, which is an accident of birth rather than something one chooses. One can choose gender, as gender is a cultural perception. Culture can and does change.

The acceptance that the poor will always be with us is submission to the  unjust concentration of both Wealth and Power as 'normal' part of the human condition. It is no such thing.

And something within my being rejects all those submissions, all those accommodations even though I do understand that these are coping mechanisms, and they have some merit.

Even as I understand those useful forgetting's are the Emperors clothes that I wear, which I don to protect me from going crazy with despair and horror, something within bridles at every injustice, every act of exploitation and every selfish, immature, dehumanised action that undermines the shared commons, every piece of litter dropped that I see as I walk my local streets and parklands rankles yet still stimulates away at my humanity.  I am not alone in this.

Learning to live with our national domestic abuser, learning to live with Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro, Hitler, Cromwell, Saddam, Netanyahu is not at all learning to live well. 

Sajid Javid accused those who wish to protect the vulnerable and the economy at the same Time as 'cowering' from the Virus. 

Mr. Javid, a banker, who has zero expertise in Health Care Systems, who  is now the political controller of the English Health Care System, is a man who was among those who organised the fraudulent CDO scam, which crashed investment banks and others who had bought the dodgy CDOs. 

He personally profited hugely from all of that and paid none of the costs, he got away with it, he then entered politics, in 2010, and has been an ardent supporter of Austerity (ideological abuse of vulnerable people based on a deliberate lie) and today he demands we all learn to cease 'cowering' from the virus,  he says we must learn to live with the virus' in order that we also continue to live with his fraudulent culture.

I refuse to 'learn to live with' that.

I will have to endure it all, for I am impotent. I am a tiny, weak individual citizen. But I will not submit, go silent, turn away, ignore the injustice or flee to the safety of myth, theory and selfishness. At least not today I won't.

I say our species knows already how to live well on this Earth -  and that means to live as nurturing partners with all living systems, co-operating with life rather than trying to dominate and exploit. I say the Dominator Culture is the thing that blocks all such effort and intention to live well.

Culture change does not need to be a revolution or an evolution, just an awakening, a remembering of who we truly are, followed by daily action, individuals working as part of a collective, autonomy and sovereignty intact. The Egalitarian way lies ahead of us. Elimination of community transmission is a co-operative task, and where countries have managed to limit the virus and even eliminate it with their communities that co-operation is realised through daily effort.

Here the spreaders are also splitters. The divisive, argumentative, opinionated argy bargy 'culture wars' are designed to undermine the population that is co-operating, keeping the virus at bay, even as they are told to reach out for 'freedom' : and they are mostly failing, people's willingness to care for one another remains stable, strong, constant, and even though the splitters and spreaders have the biggest marketing budgets, the caring is holding strong, quietly resisting.

The Johnson Government claims kudos from the success of the NHS Vaccine rollout, the European and English collegiate development of the Vaccine, and rejects responsibility for the harms associated with rejecting elimination strategy has caused, and most people in England see right through that.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Apologia: Distal Power does not Apologise as we know it - we the ordinary folk pay the price, bear the costs, the Rulers retain their Power.

The Dominic Cummings road show is back in town. Cummings is spilling the beans on some of the inside stories around this English Government. Cummings is as culpable for the avoidable harms not avoided as any in office today. He remains unrepentant. His apology rings hollow, even as he eviscerates his colleagues in public.

He should be prostrate on the floor, tears streaming from his eyes, wailing his sorrow for what he has occasioned since 2016, on so many matters of critical national political behaviour, action and outcomes. He should be begging for forgiveness, for his part in rejecting Elimination of Community Transmission strategy. 

Cummings should be opening up to tell the fullest truth telling possible, in order to bring to an end the non-avoidance of avoidable harms, in order to cease this headlong rush towards a health disaster for the English population, in order to make the case for elimination strategy that expert epidemiologists, public health professionals, nurses, doctors, teachers, parents up and down the country know we need to implement and resource, fully and at pace.

He's none of that. He is still playing everyone. His outing is not altruism or genuine honesty.

One of the threads that I have been following for some time is the resonance down through history of what appear to be repeating patterns. It is not that history repeats itself, so much as bullies behaviour does not change much. Including publicly made apologies for long denied historical harms caused to masses of people by callous Governments, the purpose of which is to retain power, status and position rather than address the harms caused as they ought to.

I have written about the similarities in English Government attitudes, behaviour, policy and outcomes when mass trauma events 'occur' at different times in History. Some situations were genuinely events that could not have been avoided, others were events entirely man made or natural events made much, much worse than they needed to be. The difference between a Volcano erupting and a war breaking out. The difference between a crop failure and a famine.

An honest study of the Irish and Bengali Famines of the Late Victorian era will reveal similarities in English Governance attitudes towards the adverse outcomes for ordinary people vis a vis the Iraq War, the COVID19 epidemic and pandemic, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Orgreaves, collusion in Northern Ireland, arming, training and maintenance of Saudi War Planes in Yemen, and the years of support for anti-Syrian violent militia who literally destroyed most of that country.

What is seen is a callous disregard, born in part by distance and class consciousness and in part by venal greed, a dismissal of the value, the human meaning of the lived experience of the most vulnerable people,  harmed by the policy decisions made by the most powerful. The men and women who occupy positions of executive authority and who control a distal, leveraged institutional power are not vulnerable in the same way those who live where the policy has its greatest impact. Asymmetric has meaning in this context. An insensitive jackboot and a vulnerable ant. 

"Many more loved ones will die!"

I have written about the way the people in power use apologia to defend their position and status, without changing their behaviour. They make public apologies, yet they never suffer indictments, trials, convictions or incarceration. The people who occupy distal power are immune to social material civil and criminal justice. They apologise, and reparations are not made or if they are made they are piecemeal and delivered late, after many years, to exhausted survivors who are largely forgotten, obscured by the passage of time.

Apologia - a defence of one's assumed power.

And so we read in today's Guardian News Paper the story of the Apology by the English Government of Tony Blair, issued in 1997, for the behaviour of the English Government during the Irish Famine. Blair did not write it, he did not sign off on it and he did not speak it, he did not mean it and neither did the English Establishment. It was the usual publicity promotional event, nothing more. Apologia. Sorry, not sorry.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/tony-blairs-apology-for-irish-famine-written-by-aides-papers-reveal

“The key sentence in your message is the acknowledgment that the British government at the time could have done more to prevent the tragedy. This is no more than a statement of fact, and falls well short of an apology, but the British government have been reluctant to say much about this in the past,” added Holmes, who said he had checked with “all and sundry” including press secretary Alastair Campbell that it was right to make such a reference.

“I hope this does not cause you any problems. It should go down well with the Irish, and I cannot see anyone here or in Northern Ireland seriously objecting.”

The text was honed by No 10 aides from a draft by the Foreign Office. An implicit apology was exactly how it was interpreted by the welcoming Irish press who saw it as an attempt to inject fresh goodwill into Anglo-Irish relations and encourage the peace process.

That the Irish Establishment were so ready to accept it as such speaks to their submission to desired myth rather than their ability and willingness to face reality, honestly. But of course, faced with a neighbour far more powerful than they and understood to be more than capable of inflicting harm (collusion in Northern Ireland, false convictions of innocent Irish citizens jailed for decades in English jails, the financial power of the City of London were all well known to the Irish Establishment) upon anyone who challenged them, their readiness to accept the apology at face value contained some wisdom. It's not a good idea to confront a more powerful bully with the truth, in International politics. And when both leaderships are steeped in NeoLiberalism, it's even less likely that a confrontation with the truth will happen.

That said, the truth about the Famine and how it was 'managed' remains. Some harms are so great that they can never be forgotten, not least if those who caused the harm remain unapologetic. The Irish establishment tries its best to  say something of the truth, without going the full hog, as this RTE article outlines.

https://www.rte.ie/history/the-great-irish-famine/2020/0902/1162846-the-truth-about-trevelyan/

First and foremost, Trevelyan saw his role as essentially limiting the financial exposure of the British exchequer to funding relief for the Irish poor whose lives were devastated by the failure of the potato crop over successive years after 1846.

What he shared with the politicians and indeed the British Establishment as a whole was an ideological outlook that saw the Great Famine as an opportunity to bring about far-reaching reform of Irish society, clearing the land of the poor, developing commercialised agriculture, and making the Irish economy more ostensibly modern.

Sir Charles Edward F. Trevelyan, K.C.B. Engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph by John Watkins, Parliament Street. Image: Getty Images

Let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard. The past 18 months described in one sentence in the 'United' Kingdom.

Others tell it like it was. 

Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."

https://www.amazon.com/Ireland-1845-1850-Perfect-Holocaust-Perfect/dp/0989610616

"This book, alone, provides the covered-up facts of 1845-1850 Ireland. There was no famine in the ordinary sense of that word. It was genocide perpetrated by more than half of Britain's army (67 regiments of its 130 regiments total). They removed, at gunpoint, Ireland's abundant meats, livestock, and food crops to the ports for export; thus starving the people. The book's colored map shows the locations of lengthy deployments of each of the sixty-seven regiments while they removed livestock, meats, flour, oatmeal, and other food crops to the ports for export. The same map names the locations of some 180 of the resultant mass graves."

The impoverished Irish native Catholic population, subsiding on potatoes, working for their Anglo landlords, were left to rot as their crop rotted. There was plenty of food, readily available, within spitting distance. It went to market, under armed guard. The Irish workers were deliberately impoverished by centuries of 'Austerity' policies designed to impoverish them, render them submissive and weak.

'Toraidh' is an Irish Gaelic word for a certain kind of egregious thief. It is also the roots of the English word 'Tory'.

Credit where credit is due?

Blair did not initiate the Northern Ireland peace process. It was initiated by Catholic and Protestant women finding solidarity in each other, building a peace movement, confronting the men of violence in their communities, building bridges across the divides, even as the British Security State was waging covert warfare from within both groups of paramilitaries and their communities. These women persisted with their humane struggle to bring the violence to an end. Mo Mowlem, Jeremy Corbyn and others followed pathways worn in by the ordinary women, the mothers, aunts and sisters of Northern Ireland.

Blair took the credit that others built up over decades. 

The English Government of 2020/21 is no different.

They and those they truly represent are not bothered by the costs they have imposed upon the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish peoples by their rejection of Elimination Strategy. They have no plans to ameliorate the situation going forwards. Herd Immunity is now the obvious strategic position, and by mass infection. 

Even as they claim kudos for the 'world beating' vaccination, developed by a pan European collective effort, administered largely by the NHS and volunteers, of which the best that can be said is the Johnson administration did not impede it  in the same that the way they have impeded effective find, test, trace, quarantine and isolate systems that could suppress community transmission of the virus.

We have ample evidence of this Government exploiting the epidemic to enhance their own power, to enrich themselves and their crony associates, to bring in profound and damaging changes across social and health care provision, to avoid dealing with climate, environmental and other pressing problems.

Their latest wheeze is to recruit the youth in this task.

Disco of Malign Intent.

Saying to young people, whose development of their frontal cortex is yet to complete, and in the middle of an intense national level surge of infection via a new more transmissible variant that has vaccine escape, that they can and indeed should (to save the night time economy, do your patriotic duty) attend night clubs, knowing the frustration and intense desire of that cohort to socialise, to 'party like it's 2019' again, given the pressures they have had to endure these past 16 months of daily mismanagement, misinformation and blatant grift, suggesting that they 'take personal responsibility' rather than the government delaying opening up, maintaining legal provision (so called legal 'restrictions') to prevent spread of the virus and then say that in one and a half months time, for Health and Safety of the whole community, they would need proof of double dose of a vaccination to attend club nights (as a 'nudge' to increase vaccine take up) shows that they really do not care about the adverse effects of their policy on people - they want people to endure mass infection in the hope or gamble that this latest scheme will work.

That is the real meaning of Freedom Day!

It really doesn't have to be this way.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-virus-will-eventually-force.html

The question is simple - the economic costs of zero community transmission strategy and quarantine borders with known benign outcomes vs the human and economic costs of slow spread towards herd immunity, with repeated cycles of re-opening and shut down as the viral infection spreads in waves, wave after wave into an indefinite future of unknowable adverse outcomes.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy. Duty of Care applies universally.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy. 

Breaking  community transmission is the go to evidence led, grounded, proven strategy. It works. 

Here's a solid report, with references, on the evidence that Elimination Strategy prevents the harms associated with Mitigation policy.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00978-8/fulltext

Study it, share it. Stopping the spread of the virus is spreading the love

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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