The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
A friend of mine described William Shatners comments on Bezos' master plan to move polluting industries into space: "That's boldly going nowhere, Jim!"
Here's a short segment of William Shatner speaking prior to his brief journey into the edges of space on Blue Origin, Bezos's reusable rocket.
Interviewer to Shatner : "For the kids watching today, do you have any words for them?"
Shatner : ".. Well... Seriously the truth of the matter is this whole blue origin thing is based on the idea of building industry above the Earth.... and taking this pollution out of this planet .. out of the immediate planet.. and putting it up there.. That's got to be the future the Earth and and the Earth is is dependent on that .. and the youth.
The two work hand in hand and so it's very important that the young people today know that this, that up there, is the future and to work towards that.. for the improvement of the Earth."
"I think people don't understand it, or most people don't," Bezos told "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King in an exclusive interview after he landed back on Earth Tuesday. "When you get into space and you can see the Earth's atmosphere, it's so thin and fragile looking. So we do have to take care of this planet. And right now it's just true that our civilization is — we pollute the planet.
This sounds fantastical, what I'm about to tell you, but it will happen. We can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space," he said.
It will take decades to get there, Bezos acknowledged, but he cited the technological advances that have happened since the Wright Brothers took their first flight in 1903.
If you told somebody, 'One day there will be a 787,' it would seem fantastical. But that is what happens. And we do need to move heavy industry off Earth. Because this is the best planet. We've been to all the planets in this solar system with robotic probes — this is the good one," Bezos said.
Bezos is off loading the problem, continuing the toxic behaviour, doing it somewhere else - in space - rather than changing the behaviour.
The truth is that the top 20 industry sectors would be loss makers if they paid their full externalised costs.
If they paid for all the damage they do, they'd not be profitable.
They make profits by causing harm instead of avoiding that harm in the first place. They estimate that it would be cheaper (for them) to build the infrastructure to move industrial production into space, than to change the way industrial production operates on Earth so that it does not cause so much harm. Why do they think this way?
Billionaires Wealth is built on a huge deceit. Billionaires Wealth and Power is rooted in the practice of externalising costs. They use their wealth as a political weapon to prevent democratic regulation of their wealth extraction and sequestering systems.
An externality is a cost or benefit caused by a producer that is not financially incurred or received by that producer. An externality can stem from either the production or consumption of a good or service. Someone else pays the price.
Environmental degradation, the poverty inherent by maintaining low wages to maximise profits, the social disruption caused by political interference and corruption in democracies, clearing indigenous people's from land in order to develop it, waging wars for resources, climate change, air pollution are all externalised costs of industrial production, wealth extraction and political dominance.
The dumping of waste into landfills, or into the ocean is another externalised cost - chosen to save time and money rather than make the effort to prevent the waste or develop functional recycling of materials as an integral element of the whole industrial process which might eat into profits extracted.
3. The Elephant in the Room: The Deceit of Profit.
"Of the top 20 sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they paid those costs or invested in prevention of the harms, as things stand today. All that accumulated wealth is based on a fundamental deceit.
Climate Change is just one element of the adverse toxic impacts."
So when some politicians talks about GDP, and extolling the virtues of growing the GDP, increasing productivity and profits, know and understand that he or she is either deluded or knowingly lying, or both, and really ought to be disqualified from any role in governance, anywhere.
Brexit is fundamentally a retrograde movement, a reactionary reflexive strategic attempt to stop history, to revert to the old authoritarian rule by wealth, Empire modality of hierarchical organisation of society. Brexit is both a denial of the need for change that toxic practice has thrust upon us and a rejection of the responsibility to future generations that defines adult maturity.
That it is typified by lies and gaslighting and immature adults behaving badly is indicative. Johnson calling on the Earths nation's leaders to 'grow up' at the UN is exactly that. Immature gaslighting. It's not easy being green when you are a liar!
His lies are not to be dismissed as merely lies, or buffoonery - they are part of a political weaponization, a war of words, of unilateral treaty breaking, of destabilising democratic regulation, a struggle that is central to where we are, and where we will be in the near, medium and distal future.
What does the political industrial wealth group that represents accumulated wealth aka Capital. fear most, as we walk into dealing with Climate Change, Pollution, Environment Degradation as existential threats to Humanity?
Democratic Regulation that demands they pay the externalised costs, directives that urge that they invest their wealth and energy into prevention of further harms and the demands of helping populations at risk to find adaptive strategies that protect their health and well being?
For example Shell are being held to account in Holland, Exxon are being sued for lying about their knowledge that CO2 emissions were causing Climate Change. There are many other cases, precedents are being set. If it is citizens who are bringing these cases, and succeeding, it will be democratic Governments elected to continue that work that bring it to fruition. And it certainly is necessary. The problems are real, and they will not go away so they must be resolved.
Absolutely they do.
5. Sovereignty has no meaning on the individual level. Brexit is about breaking treaties unilaterally. Brexit is about evading EU and other international regulation of finance. Brexit is about setting up privatised economic zones free of democratic state 'tyranny' - the word the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Political Oligarchy use to describe any form of democratic regulation of industry and of wealth.
Free Marketeers fear democratic regulation. In impedes their ability to extract wealth. Without that wealth they are ordinary people with no power, because they have no ideological ground, and without that wealth as a weapon, without the pimping and pomposity, they are impotent and ordinary. They have no ideas worthy of the attention and loyalty of the human population.
6." Income distribution at current levels means that close to half of the working population in both the USUK would be unable to survive without external aid. Most regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, most 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."
The cutting of the £20 uplift is instructive.
7. The same logical dynamic applies to the prevention of toxic outputs from industrial processes, from raw materials to end of life disposal, from clothes to food, from housing to transport. Preventing those harms is not cost effective, it cuts into their profits. Therefore it is impractical, inefficient. Easier to ship it into space, says Bezos! He's wrong, of course.
The Free Marketeers object to being made to prevent the toxicity because it interferes with their Wealth Extraction, which is what gives them their political power - without that vast wealth, they would be unable to influence politicians, corrupt legislatures, use mass media to indoctrinate and groom entire populations. Their Wealth is the source of their power, they have no ideological or moral standing without that wealth which they deploy as a weapon.
8. These people feel entitled to `rule' the larger population in part because they view their success as proof of personal and collective superiority. They are psychologically addicted to power and are unwilling to cede any of the power they have gained, even if that means causing harm to billions of people.|
This is where we really are.
9. William Shatner did not come up with the idea to dump industrial pollution into space, disguised as 'space tourism'. He is being used, exploited as cultural fantasy icon, to fashion a veil, to groom generations into the idea of space tourism.
He's only repeating what Bezos has already indicated, back in July 2021, after the first launch.
10. So to push back we need the knowledge of what can be done to re-engineer industrial process so that it prevents toxic harms and instead outputs nutrients and enhances our environment.
And we need to bring robust democratic regulation and legislation to enable this trajectory, and that must include solid evidence based legislation and robust class actions against those who resist making these essential healthy changes because they want to retain the power to extract wealth, to hoard wealth and to use wealth as a political weapon to preserve their power, against the best interests of the global population and our shared environment.
11. This will be a serious, difficult and protracted struggle, and we must do it well, we must be wholly evidence based and we must fully commit to it and be determined, for the sake of all our children and their children to follow, to move it through to completion over a few generations. The main reason I think this is possible is this: most people are decent, our species is bio-logically set for an egalitarian default setting for our social organisation.
I have been thinking, reading, writing about hierarchically violent social and cultural behavioural characteristics for 30 years, dipping into the best work I could find, work done in the past, work being done today by serious, hardworking scientists, clinicians, practitioners and by trauma survivor populations. This study is as much a study of myself and my lived experience in this culture I was born into. There are personal elements to this pursuit as well as global concerns. Being a survivor informs my study.
What I have learned is this:
When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions, how it relates to our emotional state, our mental and physical health we discover something. It is 'designed' or 'evolved' through natural selection for optimal health. Being a bully or being bullied is not optimal health on any possible measure.
Egalitarian life was/is generally peaceful, humanely beautiful, physically healthy, grounded in solid emotional attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduces incidence of lost tempers and general violence because egalitarian culture nurtures the default setting of trust which is the basis of co-operation.
“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history."
We can do it. it won't be easy, and it can be done.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
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Making Sense, Looking at what happens: The War Against Democratic Regulation of Toxic Industrial Practices by Extractive Industrial Political Power. The Power Wealth vs Healthy Societies.
Ordinary people, especially the low income workers, make most of the real wealth through daily toil, and the largest proportion of the wealth they generate is extracted and accumulated. The poor are a permanent externalised cost.
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."― Aneurin Bevan
Freedom is not the absence of limits. What I have sought always is to live the tension, the contradiction, between authority and freedom so as to maintain respect for both. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Everyone knows we're in serious, serious trouble. And there's no need to panic. Really. We've got this.
Let me take you through my world view, in which the future is always unfinished, not least because I, as a human being living with this culture which conditions me, becoming aware of that situation I come to the realisation that I have options to undo that conditioning. In other words I become aware that I am unfinished, I can change and grow. It doesn't have to be this way.
Fatalism is a lie the ruling class, the neoliberals and the bullies inculcate in those they hold power over. Because fatalism blocks growth, inhibits hope, limits one's perception of the future.
Destiny is an illusion. Nothing is over. The future is open to possibility.
Our world is on edge, yet not at a precipice.
The Scene
The Extractive Industries : Oil, Gas, Meat, Plastics, Mining, Lumber, Fishing and all those other organised extractive activities - extracting raw materials from the natural domain - that cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change and poverty (industries that rely on cheap labour are a leading cause of poverty, and low wages is all about maximising wealth extraction).
These industries, their owners and activist operators extract wealth from natural resources, and from human resources. They accumulate their wealth, and hoard it away from the rest of the population. They use that wealth as a political weapon.
These industrial groups, they engage in political corruption as part of their day to day operations.
Oligarchs and companies funding a think tank that lobbies politicians who are given funds - donations and sinecure jobs - by oligarchs and companies is inherently corrupt because it is buying influence, and intervenes unfairly in democratic deliberation. Politicians implementing policy papers designed by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs interests, beyond democratic examination and oversight is corrupt. If those policy papers were set for examination by the electorate, and the electorate given equal weight and power over the decision to adopt the policy, plus the ability to over see implementation and correct any errors or harms, then that would be democratic. That does not happen.
Then there's the producers, those who make things, and whose industries also cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change and poverty and who engage in political corruption as they accumulate their wealth, and hoard it away from the rest of the population, and use it as a political weapon.
Then there's us the consumers, who use the products, who work in their industries and in our use and in our work, which we must do or we die from starvation, lack of shelter - we too cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change, we accept poverty as long as it is other people, and we are profoundly influenced by political corruption and conditioning.
Then there's the end of use disposal. We fill our trash bins every week, we throw away old electric goods as new ones arrive, we cast aside so much material. We flush our excrement away.
Where does all the 'waste' go?
I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it, which is the essential difference between conditioned and determined existence. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party
The Oligarchy, who are politically, economically, culturally and socially organised as The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party, have all waged social, economic, political and cultural wars against those who point out the harms caused in the processes that generate that accumulated wealth, and who ask that the harms be reduced, or better still prevented, who dare suggest that reparations must be made for all the harms knowingly caused. How dare they?
The Accumulated Extracted Wealth, that pile of cash that is extracted via these industries and their sales, is accumulated and concentrated away from the rest of humanity and it sits as the treasury of a sleepless political hegemon, a political force that infiltrates and influences every political party of note. It is used to build institutions and networks, it is used to fund workers and activists, it is used to promote, propagandise, manipulate, persuade and influence the populations from which that wealth is also extracted. War is an expensive business.
The reach of Accumulated Extracted Wealth as a political agency is immense and beyond the capability of the average electorate to counter. The asymmetry of power is real.
Therefore taxing Accumulated Extracted Wealth - a slogan that has gained some traction in recent times - is already too late in that it faces the Sisyphean difficulty that by the time that much Wealth is accumulated it has become a political hegemon, a political party within and without all other political parties, groups, think tanks and movements that can and does counter any and every move to rein that power in, to address the harms caused and make just adjustments to the situation.
I repeat myself.
The point needs to be made, repeatedly. Unlike a lie, this does not become more true by repetition. Even if it was never expressed, it remains true. Repeating this is one way to shake off the dust of the prevailing fatalism. Accumulated Wealth is a Political Party.
Accumulated Extracted Wealth is a political force that is now in a position that it is stronger than many democratic States and it is currently stronger than electorates who do not understand that Accumulated Wealth is a political force.
It has to be said that there are some among the wealthy whose accumulated wealth is not party to the power struggle who make some efforts to rebalance the situation, and that in confronting this we must be careful to pay due attention to the detail and avoid generics. Slogans cannot take the place of detailed and fair analysis.
Hope is not just a question of grit or courage. It's an ontological dimension of our human condition. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Taxing the Rich is too late.
We need to get in before that Wealth is extracted and accumulated as a political force. AOC and her dress have a point, of course. There is something deeply unfair in the way taxation operates, and there is something profoundly ugly in the maintenance of poverty, in such a wealthy country, where close to 10% of US population cannot meet their most basic needs because they simply do not have the money to pay for those most basic needs. She's not 'wrong', she's just too late.
Taxing the really rich, the Accumulated Extracted Hoard of Wealth. does not deal with the externalised costs, and therefore it lets them off the hook, and for very little in return, in social material terms.
Externalised Costs
I don't know if you know this : the top 20 Industries would all be unprofitable if they paid all their externalised costs. You might want to pause and just let that sink in. Where does the profitability come from?
Who, then, pays the price of all the externalised costs?
What are all those externalised costs?
Climate Change, Environmental Damage, Air Pollution, Poverty, Low Wages. Warfare, Racism and Misogyny are all part of the externalised costs domain, in one way or another.
How can we address this problem set?
A brief outline.
Here I present a very brief, simplistic line out of I think what needs to be done. I am, of course, well aware that achieving these is both complex (there are many needs to be met, and balances to be crafted between different needs, to do all of this safely for everyone involved) and it will be complicated (the addiction to power and status will get in the way of every possible action taken to solve the problems we face, and that addiction to power and status and wealth will be a point of friction, a force of resistance, a source of recalcitrance, presenting as sulky passive aggressive reactionary behaviours by the addicts and their supporters).
The Environment. - we must clean up how industry operates, repair damage done, prevent further damage. This is all eminently possible, it will mean less profits for shareholders, etc as more investment is put into the clean up and prevention dynamics.
The Low Wage Workers. - make lowest possible wage well above any measurable poverty line, globally. Again absolutely feasible. And again, reduced profits to shareholders as we invest in happy workers who are no longer struggling, stressed out because they lack money.
The Vulnerable Poor - Abolish poverty and destitution, look after the vulnerable. That's a factor of State and currency, and can be done irrespective of day to day taxation. By investing in care systems where care professionals are well trained, well paid and well resourced, Governments will be injecting currency into the economy and increasing happiness, decreasing chronic stress.
If after that, wealth is accumulated, then tax it fairly.
Bearing in mind that taxation no longer funds day to day business of any Government that operates within a State that has a central bank that issues that States currency. So there's no pressure, right?
Some Democratic governments are taking steps to confront the Extractive Industries and the Accumulated Wealth Party to regulate them so as to stop further harm and setting up processes to ensure that they pay something for the harms already caused.
Everyone knows we're in serious, serious trouble.
To recap : The Extractive Industry owners are a political party called Wealth. Their vast Wealth is what gives them political power - they can fund think tanks, news papers, TV stations and online misinformation with which they can and do influence voters; they can 'donate' money to politicians and they can hire psychologists and other mercenaries, and they do. They do this to protect their ability to amass wealth which they need to be able to maintain and exercise the political power to protect their interests.
For the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party, this is indeed a vicious cycle. They are addicted, and only a united electorate, a grass roots grounded in evidence and solidarity, has the capability to help them end their addiction, by regulating their behaviour through the agency of Democratic Legislatures taking due responsibility.
The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party get their wealth by externalising costs, by paying low wages, by thrashing the environment, by refusing to devote the resources needed to prevent the harms associated with their industries, from acquisition of raw material to end of life disposal, and everything in between. This is causing immense avoidable harm. That is not acceptable on any level.
If they are forced, or helped, nurtured and regulated by democratic Governments directed by evidence led caring adult electorates to pay the costs, their industry's would under current measures barely break even, and they would lose their political power. It is the loss of power that keeps them awake a night. That is their biggest fear - without their power they would become ordinary citizens. People just like you and I.
Beautiful People no more - oh dear.
But actually, they could and would become far more beautiful in depth and humanity than their current imaginations could possible envision. Yes I know someone like Trump or Johnson has no interest in that at all.
To be truly humane is to eschew the leverage of power over others for it's own sake, for egoic satisfaction or for personal gain, to fully share the power to nurture one another, as a conscious choice, knowing one could choose otherwise. Being ethical is as much as possibility as being unethical is. It is that choice, to be ethical, knowing you could just as easily not, that makes for profound humane beauty.
Empathic Civilisation.
Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, : "It takes strength to be an empathetic leader."
Jose Mujica, President of Uruguay : "If we lived within our means - by being prudent - the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.."
Jeremy Corbyn : “Life is life. Some of the wisest people you meet are sweeping our streets" and "We are one of the richest countries in the world, and there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to live in poverty.”
Ghandi : "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."
The hierarchy of power and violence cult prefers to inculcate a fatalistic world view in the population it presides over. But that is a lie. We are naturally a learning species. These leaders chose to learn and grow, and lead as student and teacher.
I recognise that being born into where I was born, I was exposed to a certain social and experiential conditioning that implanted values which I then internalised. Yet those values are not who I am. They do not define me. Who I am is up to me to define and decide, and I have found that being an ethical humane being, I instinctively choose the path of growth, the way of learning, the life of ethical behaviour, the behaviour of nurture. That is who I am, imperfect as I know myself to be, aspiring towards an unknowable future that is grounded in ethical behaviour in the present, ethical action and the ever present intention for a nurturant outcome
If I am a pure product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in the world and, therefore, it is not possible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
This is a war
And yes, they - whoever they are - the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party are waging a war. They see this as a struggle, a fight, a war to protect their entitlement and dominance.
Each of us must face this, as disturbing as it might seem, None of this will be easy. The effort required is immense. The cost of not making that effort and of not obstinately pushing through with it until we succeed to build a nurturing culture and economy, within a healthy polity will be much, much more than immense, it is likely to bring more trauma, more pain, more distress for billions of lovely human beings, and it might possibly be terminal at the species level.
What to do?
Here's an interesting video that tries to take a bigger picture look at systemic change given the problems outlined above. It goes through the various elements and suggests we need, as citizens, to elect legislators who will regulate the accumulated wealth structures so we can reduce harms, repair damages, build in nurturing processes going forwards.
If this work to make our culture a genuinely nurturing industrial economic culture was done and done really well, the owners would likely break even, they could remain in their exalted positions of relative luxury, and they would probably generate three profits - the larger profit would be a healthier system that does minimal damage which it repairs; the day to profit would be a small return to reward their efforts, justly shared across the population and the lasting social and historical profit would the the kudos they'd receive for being eminently reasonable and sensible about the whole thing.
Could a character like Koch or Johnson or Xi imagine being written about in future histories as one who helped the culture retreat from harm causation to engage in a nurturant culture?
I know that right now, given the current narrative of the Establishment, this looks seriously unlikely.
However we are all unfinished beings and the future is likewise unfinished. Hope springs eternal. The well of evolutionary mutual aid is deeper than civilisation, older than the human species. We can do this, and we must.
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan
Deaths per million, August2021: does not include cases of long covid or the many other avoidable harms caused by deliberate mismanagement, which is a political choice taking precedence over public health best practice. source
Where we are right now, in the UK.. just the raw truth! Watch this, then read on.
🧵This is a very important video about the pandemic. Dr. Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet , a United Kingdom–based medical journal. He's an honorary professor at the London School of Tropical Med, Univ. College London & University of Oslo pic.twitter.com/AClabFsAeP
Why are so few people of the Press/News media and government in USUK not taking into account the experience and lessons learned by China, New Zealand, South Korea and the other countries operating Elimination of Community Transmission strategy, and reporting on the successes, and the problems they encounter, and how they resolve those problems?
When they do comment, why do they appear to deliberately portray these strategies inaccurately and describe them as meaning eradication or Zero Covid, and thus dismiss what is already being done, what is proven to prevent the harms associated with mitigation and 'living with the virus' as 'impossible' or a 'fantasy'?
New Zealand is looking like it's suppressing and eliminating Delta - they are cautiously optimistic. They reveal the efficacy of a caring government, a caring population working together to stop community transmission even as Morrison of Australia, the Murdoch press beloved, tries to denigrate their efforts.
Reports and political commentators often describe those countries as living in isolation', as if they are cut off from the rest of the world. This is clearly not the case. A quarantined border is still allowing human traffic through, even if it limits tourism - consumer goods continue to be shipped across borders. Tourism is a luxury business, it is not a necessity. Indeed internal tourism has increased in pretty much every country, circulating money within economies. For a short term set back, Tourism could be supported to help eliminate community transmission and prevent immense avoidable harms. Instead the tourism industry has become a primary vector of the virus.
As Elimination Strategy functions to leap into action whenever a cluster emerges, usually due to an imported variant, invariably a variant that emerged in the reckless countries, the pundits of USUK et al are quick to crow about how ineffective elimination strategy is, falling silent when the clusters are controlled, and the community transmission is stopped.
The denial and the dismissive attitudes seem to me to be about protecting USUK and other reckless Governments from public scrutiny and close attention, to shield them from an open critical analysis of their deliberate, repeated mismanagement and the huge economic costs of avoidable harms they have deliberately not avoided.
1.8 billion people, c.23% of global population being protected by elimination of community transmission strategies across such a wide variety of economies and cultures is a huge evidence base.
The USUK mismanagement teams dare not speak of it, honestly.
Freedom and being realistic
Even the 'Freedom!' crew who are highly critical of USUK Government are denying the evidence of China, New Zealand and the other countries, who have experience far less restrictions on their lives citizens of mitigation strategy countries, let alone the adverse health and mortality impacts. Death by Covid is not freedom. 10% of positive cases enduring long Covid is not freedom. So much for freedom.
Seems to me to be that they are one the same side as the super spreader governments they proclaim against. The spreaders of misinformation are also spreaders of the virus.
Fatalism is understandable
Dr. John Campbell, a youtuber medic who does a decent job of reporting on the evidence from around the Earth, avoids political observations like the plague. So he dare not mention elimination, which he did early on, suggesting UK was insane to not learn from China and East Asia. Now he has abandoned all mention of elimination strategy, and is reliant on vaccine efficacy to get us through to a better situation.
I imagine he’s being ‘realistic’ accepting there’s no way to dislodge this English Government and just getting on with it.
I get it. He has no option but to get on with his job, which is providing the best information he can find, from the perspective of a medic, a nurse.. Nothing will change, people need best info in order to make better decisions for themselves. Crack on.
But I see that as a form of fatalism, and I simply cannot accept that - and just as I still want to see Blair and the others indicted for war crimes, and even though I know I can’t do that myself, I refuse to let go of the need to see justice done correctly, in full, not so much as punishment but as a preventative - and so I still hold that elimination strategy is feasible, supported by vaccines, and the best way to reduce the avoidable harms that 'living with the virus' mythology leads to.
Stop causing avoidable harm. Is it really so much to ask?
IndependentSAGE is also on youtube, they broadcast a live briefing every Friday afternoon looking at the data, trends and issues, with a Q&A session for press and the public. They are a team of eminent and respected scientists in all the various fields that are affected by Covid, and they are firmly for elimination strategy, rather than 'living with the virus' or 'herd immunity'.
IndependentSAGE have produced an informative timeline comparison which lays out the Scientific, Epidemiological and Public Health advice offered to English Government and compares it to the actual policy carried out by the English Government.
The situation in England is now that there are close to 25k new PCR confirmed cases daily, going by Government statistics. ZOE records c. 55k new cases. Current estimates suggest that around 10% of positive cases are likely to contract Long Covid. We don't know how many asymptomatic cases that have not been tested are out and about in the community, people who are probably unaware of their status as potential vectors of infection. The existing test and trace systems are inadequate to the task assigned them.
Daily hospitalisations are currently running at around 750 in England.
Death by Covid is Horrific
There were 207 Covid deaths in England's hospitals yesterday. How do people die from Covid? Breathlessness, breathing pain, oxygen depletion, headaches, inflammation, secondary infections, organ failure, sepsis: a parade of pain and increasing disability.
This is the thing few people are willing to look at but health workers are forced to see. Death by Covid is very painful indeed, the process is disgustingly awful. There’s no dignity, no peace only suffering often in utter isolation.
The person knows long before they die that they are in deep trauma, unlikely to survive, and that is it's own unique terror - the medical staff spend their days watching frightened people die awful deaths.
Clap, clap, clap for heroes and no preventative action by government or citizens.
Is there a substantive pay rise in recognition of the extra burden NHS staff are bearing? Is there funding for extra staff to ease the work load of burned out medical staffers? No way. Not with this English government populated by those wealthy enough to take £40,000 holidays, add swimming pools to luxury homes during the summer break, spend hundreds of thousands refurbishing the prime ministers flat as they withdraw £20 'uplift pandemic support' per week from people receiving Universal Credit, which supports as many low paid workers as unemployed people, a benefit employers take profitable delight in.
The situation is similar to a war, with the braided generals at home, sitting in comfort and their combat troops in the trenches, engaged in the reality of combat, who see what it is really like, and then the patriotic civilians who just do not know and cannot therefore understand what war really is at all but who are encouraged to speak about ‘our boys and girls’ and ‘bravery and sacrifice'.
War is always avoidable.
Every death by Covid is pretty much avoidable. Stopping the uncontrolled spread of the virus in the community is feasible, and it does not need lockdowns, other than when the strategy fails - and we know why strategy fails. Each and every death is a horror movie that goes on for days and days and days. Witnessed by medical staff who are powerless to do much more than manage death, and whose insight, wisdom and knowledge is given almost no hearing in offices where Government policy is decided.
And what of our Schools, as they reopen this Friday, and are predicted to become super spreader events, with our children exploited as vectors of spread to attain herd immunity, intentionally so?
Must we accept that future for them?
As a culture, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, War, Poverty are all Externalised Costs which our children must bear the brunt of, they will pay the price.
This then is the question of our era, in a dark metaphor.
"Have we spent our lives filling our children's shoes with shit, before telling them to go for a long walk?"
I
am attempting to formulate some policy suggestions on ceasing war as part of
the work to cease environmental degradation, pollution, genocide of
'un-developed' cultures and deal with Climate Change...
Where
I stand: Industrial Hierarchically Violent culture is the problem, CO2
is a symptom, pollution is a symptom, corruption is a symptom.
Humanity is not the problem.
Institutional inhumanity is the problem.
Humanity is the solution.
These two are juxtaposed in this one photo op.
Thus the matter has psycho-social elements, as much as practical, technical and material elements.
My suggestions at this early stage:
1. War Crimes indictments in the all countries engaging in war, supported by the vast bulk of the home tax paying population, their judiciaries, Faiths, the UN and the ICC.
Confront the war makers, hold them to account will prevent future politicians from war making.
1.a Reparations - support all the countries and communities damaged by war. If the war making states indict their war criminals it will send a solid proof of our willingness to be peaceful. Thus punitive reparations would be un-necessary, as the wrong doers in chief have been held to account. We should still make reparation, or restorative justice a key element in our response to war making damage.
For example, Europe could repurpose, send and budget for housing building operations, as support for those Syrian and Libyan communities afflicted by Western sponsored violence, so that they can return as soon as is feasible to a safe social and economic environment. (see 2 below).
2. Dismantling the Military Industrial Financial Political complex, and coverting all military into land workers and rescue/support services for anywhere adversely affected by intense storms, droughts, sea rises...Nurturing Heroes who build and make safe, rather than destroy.
3. Permaculture everywhere, especially in urban areas. Organic clean foods as the standard. Transition from where we are to clean food futures must be managed carefully, always bearing in mind the food security of the people, locally and nationally.
Remove all combustion engines (particulates end up in food, in foetus blood and in food products grown around frequent combustion use) - thus to grow food in urban areas demands removal of combustion engines...
3.b Put people back onto the land to nurture it - Permaculture is human labour intensive in the initial stages.
Once established, the management of that land, and the harvesting of food products will be need to be done by hand, rather than by machines. We can wholly avoid plastics in the food industry. We can shorten distance travelled by food, from growing areas to consumers.
We will need people on the land who are intimate with it's dynamics and who can spot trends and take appropriate action in advance. We will need those people to be forming happy communities, geared to producing clean food as the primary 'profit'
We will find a cohort willing to leave cities to do all of this. We do not have to 'impose' it, or order folk to move. There are in many places sound peasant cultures who would take up this project....
Local and National Food System Resilience...
3.c Protect all indignenous, aboriginal, pre-development lands from any further incursions, and listen to their relational wisdom, and learn from them.
Drop the hubris of Industrial Civilisation and GDP as a measure of human progress - it does not represent human relational progress. It represents the acquisition and concentration of wealth as a politicial hegemon.
3.d Reforestation, rather than mono species plantation systems, although there will be areas where that can work, we need natural diverse forests to return...
4. End holiday flights, cruise ships etc - all energy intense long distance consumer leisure travel to be eliminated until we have clearly clean methods to support such activity...
4.a Shorten working hours, give more time for holidays so that people can have extended time with family and community in their home places.... meet new people, relax and enjoy free time in their own communities...
5. Cradle to Cradle roll out on ALL industrial processes.
This means redesigning all industrial processes such that the materials and resources are resourced sustainably, and are turned into products that can be recycled, re-used, bio-degraded to become nutrients for further use, or to be returned to ecosystems as nutrient, and that there are no toxic outputs, or 'externalised costs' borne by the ecosystem..
In addition, 100% reuse of all metals, woods, etc... once a product has reached end of life, it must be recycled. There are billions of tons of scrap metal...
6. All profits from industry to be ploughed back into making the changes, rather than feeding shareholders income portfolios, until such time as a balanced system has emerged an is well established..
7. Making indoctrination of children a Crime against Humanity.
7.a Abolishing poverty,
Indoctrination is a huge driver in war making, as is poverty - both condition youth in different ways to volunteering in Military Combat Units as a 'good idea'.
8. Reuniting age split communities.... we need to take care of each other, not put each other into care.... rebuild multigenerational community everywhere... again time within our communities nurturing each other..
9. Universal Basic Income as part of abolishing poverty worldwide...
10. Trauma Informed care and preventative practice to be established in all services, all education systems, all policing and all regulatory systems that interface between institutional power and the individual.
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 Olympic protests are great! They show the hypocrisy of all current model of Governance for what it is! Well done those who disrupt the flames progress around the globe!
Many in the Wests Media are currently pointing the finger at the Chinese Government, and many 'pundits' are commenting on China's suppression of Tibet, asking questions about China's readiness to 'enter the fold' of Democracies. They also ask questions about the apparent inability of various police forces to suppress the protesters and make comments on the 'disruption' and 'bad publicity' that the organisers, the IOC, are having to 'deal' with.
Yet few of them are realising that there are three other fingers pointing right back at themselves, and that to those who have the eyes to see, it is blindingly obvious (a neat oxymoron, if ever there was one) that those who on one hand engage in Wars of Aggression, those who export pollution to other countries to maintain the illusion of clean technologies in their own countries, those who exercise power over people rather than power for the people as standard behaviour are in no place to criticise others whose practices they supposedly abhor.
Finger One : There is the cogent fact that the West has exported almost all of it's toxic polluting manufacturing processes to China, where child labour and near as damnit indentured labour exist as standard fare for the majority, in particular those who come from the countryside...
On this our pundits remain silent. In fact most of the products they are wearing, using and consuming are made in China.
Finger Two : Furthermore, our own Governments are engaged in illegal wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly in other places under covert operations..... and this is something they have always done, it is nothing new. It is our history.
Another aspect of the Olympics, though hardly worth a finger (other than in the proverbial) is the drug taking that is rife! Both amongst the athletes (performance enhancing) and those who design and build the facades, the edifices of greed, the modern day coliseums. I am sure it takes a lot of cocaine to set up the great big deals and make the 'cool' designs (most of which are truly dreadful - the London Logo being but one example!) - hubris and greed, as ever bedmates!
The survival of the fittest is a meme that Empire spreads in order to provide manure for it's agenda, and it is proven to be so far wide of the mark that it is purely by virtue of the conditioning process we have all been subjected to that it is ever discussed in an serious terms.
Bio-diversity Science tells us what the ancients knew well, because they lived on the land, with the land and saw themselves as being of the land - they knew that all nature is a life-giving co-operative, a vast altruistic interaction that provides everything within it what it needs to grow to full potential.
Finger Three : Compare that with Western Civilisation, which chews up everything it meets, spits out what is of no use either to itself or any other life form, and continues to grow, to expand, to dominate all other ways of living. Western Civilisation, being the civilisation of city states, eats up the natural resources and converts them into toxins. For what?
For profit, for greed and for power over others. All the symptoms of a profound, abysmal loss of identity, a deep sense of inadequacy and thus a fatal misunderstanding of the nature and great gift of life.
Here's my video fro my song "The Olympics are Here"
Enjoy is hardly the word, but if you have a car with a good sound system, put the song on yer player and open the windows, drive slowly and play it LOUD!
