I felt had written everything that I felt that needed to said about the issue. The scale of dishonesty in Government, in Parliament, in News Media mirrors that found in ConTheory's funded by billionaires and others, and is a narrative so deeply embedded that it cannot be spoken too clearly in any area where ordinary people can regulate political and legislative and economic power.
"Shhhhh...! We're trying our best, in difficult circumstances!"
What? A series of contracts rushed out to 'friendly' private contractors, without an open bid process, quite often cutting out the pre-existing suppliers of what ever was being contracted, from PPE to Contact Tracing, from full body bag storage to Ventilator Machines (which are not as efficacious as CPAP) being reinvented by a Hoover Company. The PR folly of Nightingale Hospitals which were designed to house serious cases, with ventilators for every bed, a deliberate choice, instead of Fever Hospitals to feed symptomatic cases at the earliest stage, where they can be treated and monitored away from the community and away from General Hospitals.
"Fancang shelter hospitals were developed and used for the first time in China to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The term Fangang, which sounds similar to Noah's Ark in Chinese, was borrowed from military field hospitals,, but it refers to a novel concept: large, temporary hospitals built by converting public venues, such as stadiums and exhibition centres, into health-care facilities to isolate patients with mild to moderate symptoms of an infectious disease from their families and communities, while providing medical care, disease monitoring, food, shelter, and social activities."
Source : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30744-3/fulltext?from=singlemessage
That choice coincided with the choice to return elderly patients from Hospitals where the virus was know to be present, without testing them, back to their care homes, to make space in Hospitals for what was expected to happen. Both choices increased likelihood of spread of the infection. I have written about this previously.
Many people were making big fees in all of this, others banking huge profits, for what appears to me to be getting in the way of the proven and known efficacious responses that were need.
New Zealand's government acted on the data, the evidence and the lived experience and lessons learned by the East Asian countries.
The UK Government had the same data, the same evidence, and outside of advisors who are in reality political appointments, Epidemiologists and Public Health expertise were shouting the alarm. The experts were ignored, some Government appointed experts in SAGE touting 'Herd Immunity' as the final solution.
"The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed through achieving Herd Immunity." Professor John Edmunds.
source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcmHsxz6y00
I could go on. We all need to log all of this, to know what is being done, and to find ways to reduce harms across the board, and not accept the false narrative set up of The Economy vs The Welfare of the People, as a dichotomy/
I don't like to think in terms of 'masses', demographics, nationalities or large group labels.
People are persons, human beings, each and every one is precious, unique, important.
I don't subscribe to terms of superior or inferior, primitive or civilised, or to terms that caricature whole groups of people.
"All Women are......", or "Men are all alike..." are caricatures and they obliviate important meaningful detail. Indeed avoiding those human details is the curse of national policy protocols designed by ideologues. They assume an aggregate, and design policy on that basis, quite often with thought to the detail variations of each persons life and experience.
Life is way too detailed and personal for each of us, only to be blotted out by averaging, finding a mean, creating a label, imposing a caricature.
Detail matters,
Thus the Good Law Project looks at specifics, the detail. News Media tends to headline and sub-edit much of the available information. One needs to check it oneself....
I had been quite feverish in my interest, having spent 5 weeks in bed, more or less, going through this strange 'flu'. I have not yet been tested so I cannot say 100% that those 5 weeks were due to COVID-19. It was certainly worse than any previous viral infection I have had. Being feverishly ill at that time focused my mind a bit,
Me, and COVID19, maybe.
I have to say that I was very worried, and that I was frightened when symptoms started taking hold. I knew very little about this. I had not been paying attention to what had been happening in China, East Asia etc, largely because I do not watch News.
I was also unaware of the 2001 SARS outbreak and containment. I think 9/11 pushed that off the front pages. Just as the Invasion of Iraq pushed awareness of MERS in 2003. Two previous outbreaks, which were successfully contained, by breaking community transmission, using contact tracing, quarantine, isolation treatment, social support. A fact that most East Asians were well aware of.
Nobody I know in London or anywhere else knew anything about either at the time I was falling ill. It was my daughter who alerted me to the situation, in that I demonstrated the arrogance of my ignorance enough for her to comment on it. I realised I knew nothing about this SARSCOV2/COVID19
That there was already a history to this story became clearer over the next few weeks, as I learned more.
Give me Fever!
Fever is part of the bodies natural anti-viral response, and I learned this from Dr. John Campbell, whose videos I found in late March. Vitamin C and D, fluids, rest, keeping warm, enduring headaches, aches, (avoiding Ibuprofen and others like it) confusion, weakened breathing, sweats in waves of intensity and hoping everything I was doing was helping my body deal with the infection.
All the while I was reading, sweating, coughing, studying, watching news reports, reading specialist blogs, looking to see what I could find out that was reliable evidenced nuanced descriptions of what was really happening.
I read a lot more.
I even looked for and found a CoViD-19 anti-gen testing kit that one could buy online - the East Asians already had them before the European stage of Pandemic - and found one that could deliver a reading within 30 minutes, based on a pin prick blood sample. As to it's efficacy, it is still available on the market.
Learning refused.
This was mostly via private sector contracts with political supporters rather than National Health and University systems. I watched in horror as USUK ignored the experience of the East Asians in order. It just did not make any sense. I could see what New Zealand and Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore and many others had done and were doing, and it was working.
My mind boggled when it was explained away by 'well they are compliant populations in authoritarian states'.... what? There's no way to reach that level of stupid, that internalised caricatured delusion.
Then in April I was shown Johnson's February 3rd Speech in Greenwich where he says :
""And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.
And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.
Really?
worried that others "go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage."
https://youtu.be/baWbWpOtJnc?t=536 - watch Johnson take off his suit, and his spectacles to emerge as Economic Superman!
On February 3rd?
And the result?
Medically irrational policies, one after the other.
"Empty the pubs at 10pm? "
Ludicrous!
"Groups limited to 6 people at 6 feet distance, 1 metre if wearing masks."
"Masks are ineffective."
Masks slow down spread, reduce viral loads.
"Masks are an imposition upon our God given freedoms."
Lunacy on all sides.
Contact Tracing is is a core capability needed to track where the virus is, and to identify cases to be treated, contacts to be alerted, quarantined and underpinned with economic or financial support for people to stay indoors, until the community transmission drops to zero. It is not test dependent.
Testing enhances the precision of contact tracing, yet testing does not replace that basic task - with every identified case of illness, that cases contacts are reached and supported fully to enter a two week quarantine.
If, during that time, they develop symptoms, they are moved to a Fever Hospital for immediate treatments support, designed to prevent escalation of the disease, to provide support to all mild cases to recover, and then return to the community, more or less immune, feeling looked after. If they do not develop symptoms they return to the community, and the community adopts zero community transmission as their collective strategic approach, supported by the State. It's not complicated, it is complex, and it is a person to person job at the point where contacts are being met and supported....
China's Central State Government, Universities, Corporations and Military collectively ramped such a system system up within weeks, deploying 18,000 contact tracers, in the middle of an uncontrolled infection transmission in a city of 11 million people. And it worked, even before testing was widely available.
We in the UK after 8 months have a bunch of privatised provisions with none of that efficacy, with a Tax Payer bill for £12 billion for the basic tools, which are not functional.
£12 billion of which a substantial portion has been gouged out as profit, fees, commissions and so forth, all of which add no social material value or efficiency to the privatised test and trace system. Quite a few new millionaires have been created. Small, inactive companies with no previous experience are afforded multi million pound PPE supply contracts. If a paper company with £130,000 assets gets a no bid contract for £108 million, someone has made a 10% cut on that deal.
Other examples of grift abound - Contact Trace Staff are paid basic wage, yet the company charges the government more than twice that amount. Meanwhile the workers are not so busy, and their systems are inefficient.
If those workers were integrated into local NHS and Council provision, with the funding to go with it.... that's more effective systems, more integrated systems, local knowledge and understanding, community cohesion, and thus better roll out, better outcomes for the community and no one needs to be making a vast profit..
Seeking power to make more profit makes everything complicated.
We are where we are.
As I have already told you, I starting back in end of March I read a lot, thought some more and wrote about this experience as it seemed to me then. My blog went from average 800 hits a month to 14,000 hits per month. And nothing changed. The irresponsible insanity continued. I realised that I am such a small teenie little being in all of this. Barely a ripple in the water, and with water this choppy what's a ripple worth - the ripple of an empty life jacket floating on the surface whilst the person who wore it sinks and drowns? My trade has disappeared. No more sound engineering, no more event hosting, no more live gigs, and when the 'economy was reopened' we had to host small events that never even broke even. The Music Industry is quiet on Zero Community Transmission. Who will help us?
Impotence
I gave up on the writing about it all for a while. I decided to stop, to watch and to be - to protect myself, my state of mind, to avoid burn out or worse, I chose to relax as much as possible throughout the summer, outdoors as much as I could be, getting the sun shine, feeling the nurture of a fertile spring and summer in the vegetation. I let go in the hope that something would change, and in order to give me time to assimilate my newly re-discovered impotence. I am tiny. Really feeling that right now. I have always been well aware of it.
We are, as individuals, impotent by comparison to the institutions of State. That is why collective organisation and action is so important. The emergence of workers organisations in the 19th Century is meaningful.
When the institutions of State fail to address the needs of the people, unless the people are united we cannot act in ways to correct the problem.
It can be done.
It has been done.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/
"....countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty.
When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation.
Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment.
Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living."
It was not easy.
Strikes, deeper poverty, state violence, an economic depression, mortgage failures, unemployment.... over two decades of effort by the lower income sector until economics undermined the middle class too, and they participated in the shift, consciously.
Consciously.
The Norwegian grass roots had the evidence, the lived experience and thus a fuller collective understanding of the specific issues confronting them.
The material truth will set us free, always, whereas 'The Truth' as an ideological stance or religious belief is always a prison.
Belief as a weapon system.
Belief and custom are relative, what is true is universal. A table is a table, yet some make tables for sitting on the floor with, others for sitting at the table with chairs.
Invoking 'The Truth' is usually an attempt to avoid or negate the universally experienced by claiming an idealised specific is universal, and the lived experience ought then to conform to that, and where it does not, it must be corrected.
Belief in a God of Wrath, a Loving Bully, reflects a belief about the righteousness of Hierarchy and the justification of violence utilised to protect Hierarchy. Both God and Natural Hierarchy of Power are belief system concepts, and are made materially real by institutionalisation and by the people operating within those institutions who tend to assume the power of the institution is theirs, personally.
Internalised values, those values absorbed by being inducted into an institution - military training internalises the Military ethic into the infantry fighter and the officer alike. Obey orders, with commitment, protect your team mates, conquer the enemy.
Passive aggressive management and behavioural nudge non-science.
The deliberate mismanagement of their local epidemics by USUK Governments (their scapegoating, their misinformation and the public narrative gas lighting are all deeply, profoundly dishonest and they are using confusion as a shield, and that much at least is deliberate, as in deliberate avoidance of duty of care and responsibility) and the scope and spread of viral ConTheory has ensured that there are enough people who are misled, misinformed and vocal about it as to be able to 'report' and thus market the confusion of conTheory to make it look bigger than it really is, big enough to mask the deliberate mismanagement.
Passive aggressive management techniques include giving targets vague sets of instructions, which require them to take decisions the manager ought take responsibility for.
The passive aggressive manager neglects to provide full support to the targets, and thus sets the target up for taking the fall. If things go wrong, blame the actions of the target.
The passive aggressive manager is a politician seeking power.
Making mountains of mole hills.
In populations of many tens of millions a one day protest of 30,000 people is a minute event. A small football stadium. Everyone there thought it was huge. It was not huge.
Put it on the News, and it's hit!
Even getting a million hits on an online video is no longer truly huge. A politician speaking at a conference is a small event. Put it on the news, it becomes something else. Reality and myth making.
Put the conTheory protesters on the News to castigate or 'censor' them, and they look much, much bigger than they really are. Justin Beiber. Madonna. Fame mechanics. Making conTheory Famous Already.
Cult Bands
A band with a following of 30,000 is a small cult band. But if I am one of the cult, I think we are bigger than we really are, and more special than we really are.
That is a key to the manipulative 'magic' of marketing, the Oz factor - magnifying any given subject by repetitive exposure and suitable props. Theatre.
I might occasionally read of a terrible crime, and then in a sudden news surge I hear of five such incidents in a day, for a week throughout the News cycle and even though I have no direct experience, nothing in my life or community that reflects that kind of criminality I am worried.
My emotional state has been affected. Worry hormone cascades occur. If that surge persists, then what it triggers becomes my habituated state. It is also possible that I have unresolved trauma, and that some of my reactivity is embedded in that experience, my woundedness, my protectiveness.
And I don't really notice this is actually happening. I notice what the News media train me to notice, and I internalise it. Daily habituation. What I might not know is that there are hundreds of such crimes daily across a population as the average, and that average has dropped over the decades, and that the real risk of contact with such crimes is growing less and less with each passing day, that I am in real terms pretty safe. The Cult of Law and Order that Right Wing politicians deploy is rooted in the narrative that this is not so.
Fear of The Immigrant is a Xenophobic Cult Belief.
You do know that Capitalism is a cult, right?
Idealised beliefs opposing or denying any part of the whole of the evidence held by any group of people, that also includes othering those who do not subscribe to the same sets of idealised beliefs.
I was born into a cults and went through a number of cults throughout my childhood, teens and into my thirties. You were too, most likely. Cults are everywhere.
What I was doing was swapping one set of beliefs for another, like a download, without any integration or real understanding, and sad to say, it was only because that was going nowhere for me, I was not feeling any better about myself or my life that I asked myself "what was the point? "
Why swap one set of beliefs for another? Why belief?
On the positive side - and this is just a personal assessment, and in no way condones the practice - the variety of cults exposed me to many different ideas, practices, pragmatics, ways of seeing and thinking, ways of cooking and composting poop. On the negative side was the insistence on attaching to The Belief and The Mission - the two operate together. A sense of purpose. and yet the same psychological and emotional issues emerging, time and time again. No real growth. No wisdom. Nothing gets dome.
The Mission.
The Mission is to spread The Belief.
Believers know the value of their belief for everyone else! lol. The Believer feels more secure when more people share The Belief and when they can gather together, the social bond of The Shared Belief deepens. Thus they always want more people to join in The Belief.
Maintaining The Belief becomes a central activity - exposure to any evidence that undermines The Belief initiates fight or flight reactions because The Belief is internalised. Thus the mission becomes a personal matter, a question of identity. I am The Mission, I am The Belief. And therein lies the hook. As long as I remain on The Mission I must maintain The Belief. I must never look for and the real me.
If I maintain The Belief I must carry out The Mission. Even if I only convert one person over a life time, that would be considered a victory. If I question The Belief, then The Mission fails. If I question the tactics of The Mission, then The Belief is brought into question. And so forth. A bit like co-dependent 'intimate' relationships.
These are all lessons I learned in the slow process of becoming consciously observant of myself....
The Mission is a fake. The Belief is a fake. The Work is a Fake. Civilisation as we know it is a fake. The Space Mission to fly to the stars is a fake. War is a fake.
Any policy other than Zero Community Transmission is fake.
The purpose of being alive, as far as I can tell, in biologically meaningful terms is to live well,
To live well is to behave in ways that nurture the habitat and the community.
It is to live with much loving attention across one's entire community, to care for the young and watch over them as they learn how to live, knowing they will learn everything they need, in good time. a healthy community understands that the children are to be trusted in this, and never forced.
With that in place, then the natural creativity of us humans expresses itself in a myriad of languages and cultures, practices and ways of living with very specific habitats, from Ice and Ocean, to Land and Forest. Diversity is our natural state, homogeneity is not our natural state - we vary because we are sensitive to the habitat and to one another.
