Nadhim Zawahi - children should be seen, and not heard. Honesty in schools must be crushed. Making Schools Safe for Lying Authoritarians.

Nadhim Zahawi, Education Secretary, (also Minister for Mass Infection of Children, Delta and Omicron version), writing in the Daily Mail, suggests a campaign to "root out activist teachers who indoctrinate children."

'Education not indoctrination': Nadhim Zahawi tells schools to root out activist teachers 'brainwashing' children after claims of 'worrying' race lessons and pupils as young as 10 urged to write critical letters about the PM in class

Nadhim Zahawi will issue guidance to ensure teachers present balanced views.

He said it was to ensure 'complexity' of many important questions is understood

Mr Zahawi said it is part of democracy for children to shape own political views

Comes after he investigated reports 'concerning' race theories being taught

Zawahi's ire was drawn forth from a letter written by a 10 year old child, to his local MP, in Nottingham. The letter was written as part of an English lesson at a primary school, Wellbeck Primary School. As per the curriculum instructions, taking real life examples and working them into a written project.

We are told that the teacher involved had posted critical comments on the Johnson governments policies on SARSCOV2 and Brexit on his personal twitter feed, having used the abusive term 'tory scum' at least once .
Here is  a section of the child's letter.

'We looked at famous leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, and we have also looked at teachers and headteachers who are doing their part in keeping us happy, healthy and safe.

'We also looked at people who we respect and disappointingly, our own Prime Minister has not made it onto this list.

'During this past week I watched a story on BBC Newsround that stated our PM is under investigation for 12 parties that have apparently occurred - a few of which had over 100 people at them when we weren't even allowed to meet more than two people

'What makes this matter worse is that when he was questioned about it in Parliament he said the following, ''I have been reassured there was no party.''

This is a lie.
'We also looked at people who we respect and disappointingly, our own Prime Minister has not made it onto this list,'

Reasonable points, well made.

Seems reasonable to me. And yes, I can easily imagine a 10 year old child writing  such a letter, being able to comprehend such basic matters of justice. Most children are  naturally intelligent, creative and curious. Most have a keen sense of injustice.

This brings me back to February 2006, at the Power Inquiry Conference, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, opposite the Houses of Parliment.

Part of the afternoon session was a general discussion that touched on Iraq, Pensions, the NHS, Education, lowering the voting age and other matters. The panel was inviting questions from the audience. About 500 people were seated in the hall.
There was a 13 year old boy, close to the front, who had his hand up, and he kept it up, standing there for a good 10 minutes, as other questions were taken and answered.
Eventually, the panel acknowledgd  his persistence, and allowed him to speak, a microphone was passed to him. This is the question he asked.
"What if the money spent on War in Afghanistan and Iraq was invested into our grandparents pensions?"

The audience erupts in applause. Applause subsides, panel takes two more questions.
The adult politicians on the panel - Menzies Campbell, Ed Milliband - ignored his question, answered the other questions.

I was there, I witnessed that happen. I was infuriated.

The child made a really good observation. We all knew the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were amoral, un-necessary and illegal. 

The 'adults' turned from the honesty of a child and in that moment betrayed the very meaning of democracy and justice. 
Most children have a keen sense of injustice.
Most children, if invited  to, if they feel safe and if they can truly trust the adults before them, will be honest about what they see.
Rarely will they be wrong - they see what they see.
Hence the honest child is seen to be a threat by every authoritarian, be it a parent, a teacher, a class bully or indeed a corrupt politician,
Honest history, a genuinely honest history curriculum would prevent so much avoidable nonsense. The lack of honesty about our histories among our political class, in our news and press media, in news broadcast and across entertainmentin England is well known.

History is not merely about the past, it is the present we are living through. We are always writing our history. Johnson did not break any Laws and he never lies, and even if he did, it cannot be said directly in Parliament. Some people devote a lot of energy to rewriting history as it happens.

What price an Honest History Curriculum? 

However, due to political interference, in spite of teachers best efforts, we do not have a honest and balanced, well informed history curriculum. Lessons on Slavery, Empire and The Holocaust are carefully curated to obscure the detail that really does matter.

My personal take on history is that it ought to tell the stories of the least powerful people and their families, the people most adversely impacted by the actions of the most powerful - for what, and at what human cost. This graphic illustrates this power disparity.

It was created by David Smail, and is part of his talk:  'There's No Such Thing as Society'. The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy

A talk given at the SCOS annual conference on 'Organizations, Institutions and Violence', Dublin, July 2001

source: http://web.archive.org/web/20090530020422fw_/http://www.davidsmail.info/talk01a.htm

David Smail has written much that is pertinent to the situation we find ourselves in, in the midst of a Pandemic. His site is off-line, and this link goes to an archived version of his website, via way back machine, which I find very useful.

This article below in The Conversation on the matter of Holocaust history, and a general lack of knowledge across the UK on that matter, is topical, in that it reveals something of the grimy underbelly of discrimination currently emanating from the Home Office, and percolating throughout the ideological fight or flight emotional grooming of Brexit, and the almost constant political 'fiddling' with our children's education. The politicos at the Department of Education are quite exercised about indoctrination - they prefer their own to any others, or to none, as it happens.

https://theconversation.com/most-uk-adults-dont-know-key-details-of-the-holocaust-how-it-has-been-taught-in-schools-may-explain-why-171702

"A survey exploring knowledge of the Holocaust has exposed limited awareness in the UK of some of the most fundamental aspects of this history. Conducted by the Claims Conference, a non-profit organisation which secures compensation for Holocaust survivors, the survey was based on interviews with 2,000 randomly selected adults. Less than half of the respondents knew that six million Jewish people were killed and only one-quarter were aware of the meaning of “Kindertransport”, the rescue of children from Nazi territories.

I am a researcher at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and was a member of the taskforce for the Claims Conference United Kingdom Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study. My research explores teaching and learning about the Holocaust in English secondary schools.

Absence from schools

The lack of knowledge revealed by the survey is partly due to patchy school teaching of the Holocaust. Before the 1990s, Holocaust teaching and learning in the UK was neither widespread nor popular. Generations of children received little or no formal education about the Holocaust.

This had slowly begun to change in the 1980s, but the most significant development came in 1991 when the Holocaust became compulsory content in the national history curriculum in England for students aged 11-14 years. It has remained on the curriculum ever since. Although there is no such statutory requirement in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, it is widely taught in these countries as well

The deliberate lack of a fully informed historyin schools is a covert method of indoctrination by omission. "What they don't know about us can't harm us."

Which helps explain why Home Office can get away with proposing legislation that criminalises the entire traveller community. By which I mean to say that in a healthy governance system, that idea would be shot down as soon as an official uttered the words or sent a memo or email suggesting such a policy, and that person would be subjected to a 'performance review' and likely urged to seek counselling. Clearly we do not have a healthy governance system at The Home Office.

A brutal oppressive column inciting legalised hatred of Traveler culture is not a joke.

https://barristerblogger.com/2021/05/20/the-evil-of-priti-patels-anti-gypsy-legislation/
This blogger writes about a very dark article in the times, written by Matthew Parris:"What on earth has happened to Matthew Parris?
For the last thirty years or so he has produced beautifully written, persuasive columns on subjects from llamas to high politics, typically characterised by thoughtfulness, tolerance and moderation. Then, last Saturday he wrote an extraordinary piece under the headline “We should stop pandering to Travellers.”
Depressingly, almost all of the 1200+ people commenting below Mr Parris’s article agreed with him. Many of the comments – and I doubt that they were those sympathetic to Gypsies – had been deleted as “violating our policy,” but a sample of those considered acceptable included comments such as:

“They live below the legal radar and do not abide by the same rules of decency and respect that most people do.~Poor to non existant (sic) education, high levels of criminality, high unemployment and truly dreadful attitudes to women make it a group we can do without in the future.~These groups are the most violent of societies and live by crime. Of course their children are uneducated; wives are beaten; medical staff are intimidated. The list is endless.~[T]heir lifestyle is at root parasitic – it feeds almost entirely off the mainstream without giving back – or any intention of doing do – it’s all take and no give; all entitlement and no responsibility.”~That their children are deprived of education is the fault of their lifestyle, children moving all the time cannot have a settled education. That they die young, is also their own fault too.”
~

Matthew Parris, his editor, the editor of the Times and all these people view the prospect of  legalised oppression of the traveller culture as a positive.
The same people are livid over Allan Carr's Holocaust 'joke'.  Hypocrisy abounds.

"And Times readers are more polite than most. 
Elsewhere in the press it is easy to find, below almost any story about Gypsies commenters describing them as “filthy,” “thieves,” “freeloaders” “rats” and worse. The occasional slightly more liberal commenter might observe that whilst all these things are true of Travellers they are less so of the “genuine Gypsy,” a view shared by Heinrich Himmler who wished to spare a few “pure-bred” Gypsies while organising the murder of at least 500,000 whom he considered racial vermin.

How little has changed in 500 years. It has been the Gypsy and the Traveller’s lot to be hated, feared and misunderstood for centuries. The preamble to the Egyptians Act 1530 illustrates how little those prejudices have changed:
“FORASMUCH as before this time divers and many outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians, using no craft nor feat of merchandise have come into this realm, and gone from shire to shire and place to place in great company, and used great, subtil, and crafty means to deceive the people … and so many times by craft and subtilty have deceived the people of their money, and also have committed many heinous felonies and robberies, to the great hurt and deceit of the people that they have come among ….”
The Act made it unlawful for Gypsies to enter the country, and those already here were given 16 days to leave or forfeit their possessions.
Henry VIII’s attempt at ethnic cleansing failed, as did another  Act passed during his eldest daughter’s reign in 1554, which exempted Gypsies from deportation or execution if they assimilated into the general population or, as the Act put it, gave up their “naughty, ungodly and idle” way of life."
Is this History taught honestly in all our schools?  Is it not the case that that lack of honesty is part and parcel of the way oppression and hatred is nurtured and anger is directed at the nomadic culture by the settled, and that it functions as a scapegoat, a distraction and a vent for other frustrations the ordinary settled endure at the hands of the Ruling Class?

Indoctrination?
What is political grooming other than a profoundly ugly psychologically abusive covert form of indoctrination?

SCL, the 'strategic election communications' company which birthed Cambridge Analytica, ran psyhological warfare campaigns in 68 countries, during 100 elections, before Cambridge Analytica was spawned to indoctrinate and groom vulnerable people across the UK to support Brexit, the lies of which lay scattered all about us in early 2022.
https://qz.com/1239762/cambridge-analytica-scandal-all-the-countries-where-scl-elections-claims-to-have-worked/

Unsurprisingly, the people involved in this kind of work continued, even after Cambridge Analytica was exposed, and devoted their energies to spreading covid misinformation and lobbying the Covid Recovery Group amongst the Conservatives, leading to avoidable harms not being avoided.
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/

Nadhim Zahawi, the multi-millionaire landlord who voted to cut the £20 a week Universal Credit Covid Uplift, who voted against regulation of dodgy landlords and increased rights for renters, who took up the role of Education Secretary and is quite clearly  an education dunce,  the same Nadhim Zawahi wants to 'root out activist teachers who indoctrinate abd brainwash children?'

Nadhim Zawahi who is personally and institutionally responsible for mass infection of school children across England, as the Education Secretary that coerced children into unsafe schools in the midst of a pandemic.

Nadhim Zahawi has written to School leaders.

Focus = attendance

This is particularly concerning attendance targets are already driving many headteachers to threaten vulnerable households with fines and prosecutions.

https://t.co/lwsoFHfk4y pic.twitter.com/NX2WpzYShy

— Clinically Vulnerable Families 💙💜💗 (@cv_cev) November 23, 2021

Yeah, that Nadhim Zawahi. 

~
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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The Great Hack - a review.

The Great Hack.

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.” ~ Aneurin Bevan 

I just watched 'The Great Hack' on Netflix.

I watched it twice, just to make sure I was clear on what I thought it was, and editing this months later, I have to adjust my position, I have more information.

Now on 24th June 2020, having read 'Zucked',  I am about to start on Christopher Wylie's 'Mindf*ck'.

I will be reappraising my stance as a result and will edit this piece, or write a part two, as a follow up, to show what I am learning as I travel.

The online user-content-creator social media in general is an advertisers landscape : We create content on our timelines, that content tells facebook a lot about our psychologies.

Google+, Youtube, Amazon and Facebook's management and business model, the techniques they use to expand their business, and their willingness to make advertising revenue by selling access to their users psychologies, with intimate specificity through micro-targeting.

The lure to advertisers is founded on intimate psychological data gathering of the users likes, dislikes, key strokes, reactions, engagements, fears, rages etc, which users agree to, even if we do not fully understand what that means.  As Bill Hick put it  they are working ' the outrage dollar' or the 'fear dollar' ...

It is true Facebook does not sell your data - it is too valuable a resource for them. They hold that data and it is their feedstock for advertisers seeking to reach precise target groups. Facebook also allows the advertisers to work on any targeted group, to observe how effective their adverts are, what ways targets are responding to various versions of the content, and it enables them to use that information in real time to refine the content and enhance the effectiveness of the advertisments. 

This is relatively innocent, until a bad actor pays to target deliberately manipulative content at specific groups of vulnerable people, and enhance that for political, ideological or economic gain. And when the bad actor is spending millions of dollars a week, or billions in an election, all classed as 'advertising' then the platform becomes a vector of abuse. The platform does not create the abuse, it allows the abuse to occur.

These Companies have no functional ethical or moral code. They permit all the tactics of narcissistic bullying across their platforms, knowing it causes real harm, under the fig leaf of 'freedom of speech'. That is the problem. A bit like The Vatican.

Bill Hicks was on point in this beautiful routine.



They - the social media giants - are not the origin of such behaviours.

Most official News and Press media and all entertainment and all marketing revel in such tactics to increase sales and profitability. The Bible is as fine an example of this as any document I know of. 

Telling people what to think.

I have written much about that subject on this blog over the past decade. What they appear to be doing is knowingly, if not intentionally, enabling and profiteering from these behaviours across their services because a lot of people are vulnerable to manipulation, and there is a dysfuctional vulnerablity dollar out there, for marketers to exploit.

My apologies to Carol Cadwalladr for misunderstanding her perspective. Her work and that of other journalists and, importantly, the whistle blowers like Mr. Wylie and Ms. Kaiser is really critically important work.


-----.What follows is the original piece.

It was not about a hack at all.

Hacking is gaining unauthorised access to a prohibited computer system and injecting novel code into it to play with it, extract information, undermine it etc...

Cambridge Analytica is not a hacking operation.

Though it has been associated with hacking in the Nigerian Elections in 2015, with Cambridge analytica staff organising the hacking the emails of the Nigerian President to bring him down during an election Not that that was mentioned in this 'documentary'.

Not enough time, really. There is a lot in this documentary.

The narrative presented in 'The Great Hack' was carefully designed to avoid the simple truth that all mainstream news that carries advertising, are also being utilised as political grooming devices and that many are actively aware of that and unwilling to do anything reasonable about it.

The Sun, Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, they all carry propaganda posing as news.

The narrative in The Hack was also to seek to blame Facebook, and the Tech companies, rather than talk about political grooming, seriously.

In essence a deflection 

Another way to say it this : no one talked intelligently about political grooming.
 
As a cultural and politically institutionalised dynamic of abuse carried out in the public domain, a form of bullying, that is the mainstay of advertising, marketing, religious indoctrination and propaganda.

Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-semite, racist, terrorist supporting politician; he is exactly the opposite.
 
The press bullying of him, and his strength of character, are an object lesson in how to deal with public bullies.

Here's my take on the 'documentary'...
 
Ms. Kaiser is no ordinary whistle blower...
 
Ms Kaiser worked for the Obama Election campaign, a proven grooming operation - I said so at the time, even without understanding the way online micro targeting was being weaponised by groups such as Cambridge Analytica, because I was paying attention to the funding drives on facebook, and to the mainstream print and broadcast campaigns. And because it's been the basic dynamic of neoliberal 'democracy' for a long time and I understood that no rational citizen would ever vote for policies that cause harm to his or her own community, voters are not that irrational.

Ms. Kaiser was involved in  the 2015 Nigerian Election campaign, where she introduced a team of Israeli specialists to the Cambridge Analytica team,  who had hacked the incumbent Nigerian President's emails...

Cambridge Analytica ran campaigns for right wing candidates in a number of third world countries, to earn a few bob and to prove the efficacy of the model, before going on to the really big bucks. 68 countiries, and probably more. Hundreds of elections.

Trumps Election 2016 campaign spent just under one hundred million US dollars on their facebook messaging.
 
Ms. Kaiser worked on Trump's campaign at the very core of it's Facebook operations, fully aware of what she was doing. She was at the very center of this. She knew they were targeting peoples biases, fears, insecurities and prejudice in order to exploit those for political gain.

The term for this activity is grooming.

It is taboo to say this out loud. "shhhhhhhshshs!"

Ms. Kaiser mentioned the use of weaponised communications tactics, which are apparently 'restricted' by the Department of Defence. I would say that  every Instiotutional Religion deploys the exact same behaviour. Indoctrination of the faithful. Such practice is normative in violent hierarchies. Spreading stories, maintaining a narrative, optics, favours and punishment.
 
I would take issue with Carole Cadwalladr's effort to load all the blame to Facebook and the Tech companies. They are liable and culpable, I agree, yet not singularly so. That has to be called out - the general practice of targeting known cognitive biases (vulnerability) ought itself be declared a criminal offence, as it is an abusive thing to do to another person.

Alexander Nix 

Included in the 'documentary' was two brief sections covering Alexander Nix, the CEO of CA.

His boasting at a dinner meeting about CA's abilities, and his recalcitrant appearance before the House of Commons Committee Hearings on Fake News, where he got off very lightly.

Cambridge Analytica was shut down due to bankruptcy, - such a difficult decision to make (not), and so much money already banked, lives ruined and it is likely that the bulk of their files are now missing, destroyed or lost, etc  -  there's a hole in the evidence set.

Well, well, well.

If you wish to check the nature of the Observer and The Guardian take a peek at Medialens a UK based news media analysis website which has, since 2001, confronted the propaganda that gets passed off as 'news reporting' - in effect misleading readerships in line with existing established political hegemony via the readerships triggering their cognitive biases, or as I would call it, the grooming of ordinary folk via opinion posing as evidence (WMD) in the UK media.

Chomksy called that process of propaganda the manufacturing of consent.

www.medialens.org is well worth a look.

The Great Hack

I found The Great Hack riveting - and yet I felt it was somehow dishonest. That said, everyone might want to to watch it, and note how we, in our own unique case, are being mislead - turn the exercise into a learning by experience.

It also tried to pass off Russian influence on UK voting as a major influential factor, which is inaccurate -  all competing powers brief against their perceived opponents, through various media outlets. That is standard practice, and no great secret or conspiracy. It rarely has any meaningful effect upon the target populations elections.

The major effective malign influences are always homegrown. The home government has more to fear from a people who realise they are being bullied than any other external state or agency.

In this previous posting, I outlined in the most precise and concise terms, the true nature of political grooming gangs.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2019/01/political-grooming-gangs-you-should-be.html?m=1
 

Let's have a laugh!

Boris Johnson's £10 million grooming operation will go nowhere near his hair or his crumpled suits...

and

"You've been Groomed!"

New Reality Show Pitch.

'Enjoy the thrills and spills of indoctrinators, indoctrination and the indoctrinated as our intrepid reporter takes you on a journey of discovery, breakdown and release."

pitched to ITV, BBC, CNN etc...

all rejected it as 'improbable'.

subtext - are you trying to kill us off.

( yes, of course, you are grooming gangsters!)

No, i did not pitch this, this is all make believe fake news...

--Here's a track I created to articulate the realities of political and ideological grooming.

https://soundcloud.com/coreluminous/we-know-how-to-groom-you

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

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius

https://www.corneilius.net

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous