COVID-19 : Opinion is lethal, Evidence saves lives.

The World Health Organisation and many other eminent expert bodies are saying that the COVID19 Pandemic is still a long way from being dealt with, 15 months on from the first proven cases of the disease.

Estimates vary depending on who is presenting a narrative and where they are presenting from.

People in New Zealand and Australia are more confident of an end to the pandemic than people in USA, Germany or UK. People across East Asia are confident they will remain with low fatalities, yet are not so confident the pandemic will cease in the West and other places where zero community transmission is not chosen as a strategy, anytime soon. This chart lays out in bleak lines the background to the variance of opinion. It is of course incomplete, and does not reflect the full scope of the situation. It is indicative. 

More cases is always the result of increased transmission, lower cases is always the result of lowered transmission. It is that simple.

source for this graphic : zerocovid.uk

Right now, as I am typing, zero community transmission strategies are protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. In these countries deaths from COVID-19 have been kept to a minimum. In these countries they have not been subjected to repeated National level shutdowns.  In these countries the people's economies are robust and thriving, given the global circumstances. These are the effects of zero community transmission strategies.

Granted international tourism is shut down. International passenger travel is shut down.  Some people's livelihoods in  tourism are adversely impacted, and they are mostly getting support from their governments to get through the pandemic.

Across East Asia and Oceania children are attending school, young adults are attending universities,  the bars and restaurants are open,  local tourism is open,  shopping malls are open. Weddings, funerals and wakes are happening. Life goes on, pretty much as 'normal'.

1.8 billion people.

Protected by an evidence led set of strategies, without the utility of a vaccine.

People still wear masks. People living in East Asia and New Zealand are aware that any outbreak that occurs must be suppressed, and they are well are informed and fully engaged thus when outbreaks do emerge, they and their Governments, local and national, take the appropriate action and suppress the transmission until all cases are traced, all contacts quarantined, the ill are given best possible treatment and all of this is carried out until the virus dies out due to finding no new hosts.

Zero Community Transmission not complicated, it is complex, it is expensive yet cheaper than high fatalities, high long covid rates and repeated economic shocks - it is epidemiology and public health practice at its best, and it is not an extreme set of actions and behaviours, it is mostly a matter of common and collective caring. 

It is not rocket science.

Right now, in the USA and UK and EU and Brazil, a different set of strategies are being deployed and these strategies and policies have caused millions of avoidable horrific deaths, millions of avoidable long term chronic disease cases (1 in 10 of all disease level infections), vast economic harms all of which have disproportionally impacted and afflicted the low income, the poor, the destitute, the chronically unwell and the vulnerable and disabled cohorts of their populations.

Evidence ignored, opinion and belief promoted, every single wheel re-invented turned out to be square, appalling death tolls, long term sequalae for hundreds of thousands of people, vast economic harms.

These slow spread herd immunity strategies are causing immense psychological and emotional harm to hundreds of millions of people through badly managed lockdowns, followed by openings, surges of transmission  and yet more lockdowns, with no end in sight and barely 20% of the UK population  (where I live) exposed to the virus, as these governments push their populations towards a mythical herd immunity in order to 'protect the economy'. It's utter nonsense to claim they are protecting their economies with these strategies.

These strategies have cause wholly avoidable economic damage - from small businesses to self employed, from the live entertainment industry to international tourism we see millions of job losses, businesses going to the wall, entire industries failing.

Here, in the UK where I live, rocket science is nowhere to be seen, and neither is common sense epidemiology. 

There is a pattern where those in power and others online cite the harms caused by bad management to argue for worse management rather than better management as in epidemiologically sound, proven and reliable zero community transmission strategies.

Behavioural Science, Data Modelling and Economics.

Government Scientists and Advisor cite behavioural science and data modelling as the source of their policy strategies. They do not cite epidemiology, they do not cite virology and they do not cite best practice public health.  The UK Government have claimed all along that they are protecting the British Economy, that "having a strong economy is the best way to ensure a strong National Health Service".

They are failing even in that simplistic task.

Here where I live we have seen multiple waves, shutdowns followed by opening up while community is active, followed by shutdowns as hospitals are over whelmed, and the death toll rises. Cycles of death and harm, all totally avoidable. Yes, the NHS has managed to deal with being pushed to it's limits again, but at the cost of the general service that it provides. Meanwhile American insurance firms buy up local health providers paving the road of insurance schemers 'good intentions'.

Each and every death by covid19 is a horrific, tortured death. 140,000 and rising horrible, painful and very stressed lonely deaths. 

Long Covid is estimated to affect 1 in ten of disease level cases. 

Asymptomatic cases account for 20% of infections, and these people spread the infection without knowing they are doing so. 

There is, within the UK, no effective localised contact trace system.

There is, within the UK,  no effective, localised quarantine support system.

There is, within the UK,  no effective, localised isolation treatment system.

Some people are being paid to not go to work, others must work and be exposed to risks because they are 'key workers' - shop staff, services staff, police, fire brigade, ambulance, sanitation staff, meat processing staff, Amazon staff, factory workers and builders, and many others.

And there are others who are forced to work because the economic support systems are inadequate for low wage earners - people who are low earners who become symptomatic choose to work because the support for quarantine is inadequate, slow and cumbersome. Food banks are feeding hundreds of thousands of families. The charities and their workers are forced to take risks.

This week, 8th March, 2021, we see the UK Government coercing students, parents and teachers to return to fully open schools whilst community transmission is at levels above 23rd March 2020 when the first shutdown was imposed. 

A year later we see no shift to an evidence based epidemiologically sound strategy. A year  later we see the continuation of policy options that are causing avoidable fatalities and long term harms to the people of the UK and to our economies.

The evidence of the lived experience in the UK is that the policies of the UK Government are causing vast harms, and when compared to countries following zero community transmission strategies, the variation in policy and outcome is clear.

In simple terms the difference is between opinion and evidence.

Opinion is lethal, evidence saves lives. 

Opinion, belief and ideology is lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.

Gavin Williamsons opinion is that schools are safe for full attendance re-opening. Williamson cites a .002% case rate among students during the September re-opening period. Sounds like a small figure. .002% of 8.9 million students is 17,800+ cases. That is not a small number. Factor in the inadequacies of a centralised contact tracing system that has failed on almost every metric then we have a situation where were do not know how many infections are linked to those cases, what their index cases were, where the virus was transmitted... Gavin Williamson is playing tricks with numbers to push a deliberately egregious policy. 

A recent study on school safety makes this clear. 

"On Feb 22, 2021, the UK Government announced that schools in England would fully reopen on March 8, 2021. 

While returning to school as soon as possible is imperative for the education, social development, and mental and physical welfare of children, not enough has been done to make schools safer for students and staff.

1

 

Without additional mitigations, increases in transmission are likely, this time with more infectious and possibly more virulent variants, resulting in further lockdowns, school closures, and absenteeism. Even when schools were supposed to be fully open, at points of high community transmission, 22% of secondary school children were not attending due to self-isolation.

2

 

In some areas, attendance was as low as 61%.

3

Arguments that schools do not contribute to community transmission and that the overall risk to children from COVID-19 is very small have meant that mitigations in schools have received low priority. Yet the evidence cited for these arguments has serious limitations.

4

,  

5

 

Primary and secondary school closures have been associated with substantial reductions over time in the effective reproduction number (Rt) across many countries (including England) and time periods.

6

,  

7

 

In contrast, data from the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) 2020 COVID-19 Infection Survey show that the prevalence of infection among children aged 2–10 years (2%) and 11–16 years (3%) rose above the prevalence for all other age groups before the 2020 Christmas break (appendix p 4). 

Both modelling and real-world data in preprint showing rising cases in regions where the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant was prevalent during the lockdown in November, 2020 (when schools were open),

8

,  

9

 suggest that opening all schools now without robust mitigatory measures in place will probably lead to Rt rising above 1 in almost all scenarios. Modelling data by the University of Warwick and Imperial College London

10

 suggest that at least 30 000 more deaths from COVID-19 are estimated under the proposed reopening scenarios. 

Throughout February, 2021,

11

 despite fewer students being in school at this time, teaching staff were at higher risk of infection. Recent school outbreaks in northern Italy, where the B.1.1.7 variant is prevalent, are also concerning."

The study goes on to outline a series of mitigation steps to suppress transmission within the school community.

None of which is currently provided as logistical support or funded by central government at this time. 

A former OSTED chief urged teachers to put their lives on the line, for the future of the children they are teaching.

I saw the interview and to my mind he was impatient and dismissive rather than attentive to the needs of the teachers and the students. He was not calmly presenting evidence. 



Mary Bousted, of the NEU, corrected his assertion that schools were not functioning, which was a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts - she pointed out that teachers are in already in schools teaching key workers children and vulnerable children, and are helping children in a variety of ways to make up for the fall off in social services provision, as well as running remote online tuition.

Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.

More from the study...

"Although COVID-19 is unlikely to cause severe disease in children, estimates of the prevalence of long COVID symptoms based on the ONS Infection Survey suggest that 13% of children aged 2–10 year and 15% of those aged 12–16 years have at least one persistent symptom 5 weeks after testing positive.

Given uncertainty around the long-term health effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, it would be unwise to let the virus circulate in children, with consequent risk to their families. Reopening fully in the setting of high community transmission without appropriate safeguards risks depriving many children of education and social interaction again, worsening existing inequalities.

By contributing to high community transmission, it also provides fertile ground for virus evolution and new variants."

What kind of person demands that children take these risks? The same kind who launched a war against a country based on a careful set of obvious lies, claiming that they are bringing Democracy to an oppressed people? That went well.... not!

Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives

This country really needs a Union of Teachers, Parents and Students who are studying the evidence, who are learning about the evidence base for zero community transmission strategies, because it directly affects their lives now and into the future to confront this situation and to support the NHS by confronting MPs, local councils, local media, national media and any other arena's of influence with the evidence.

We cannot leave that study to the News Media or The Government. They are deliberate in their failure to present accurate and timely evidence since last December 2019.

We need the 8.9 million school children, the 2.38 million university students to be studying the evidence that exists on zero community transmission strategies. We need their parents to be on board, as learners in this.

We cannot trust the UK Government to be honest, so we must be the voices of honesty within the UK.

We need this cohort to engage with NHS staff and with other representing organisations to co-ordinate a push back at every level of society, aware that the Government and Media will not support this push back and will actively resist the most honest, evidence based analysis.

If I have repeated myself, and I have, it is only because the frustration of seeing what is possible being deliberately ignored by so many for such little purpose with so much harm attendant that I persist.

Not yet blue in the face, not yet breathless, I will continue to posit zero community transmission strategy until it is in place. It is the only strategy that makes humane sense.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Womb with a View - International Womens Day

I do not and never have accepted the culturally imposed definitions of Masculine and Feminine. Oddly enough.

 

source : the origins of unhappiness by david smail

In my youth it was, for me, a matter of a un-verbalised feeling that the behaviour of men towards women was 'odd', that it lacked personhood. It seemed like people were taking sides where no sides existed, in my mind, as a person. Men and Women as strangers.

The personhood - the happening inside is what I mean by 'person', it is not the 'personality' and it is not the culturally approved patterns.

Person to me means the emergent sensory being, the embodied being, the what it is I feel like, moment to moment

Often times look in a mirror and not recognise what I see - this to me is because the happening within of me is not on the skin, it is within, below the skin, and so of course the mirror cannot reflect that, and the within being cannot be seen by the mirror.

Today is International Women's Day. What if we have no mirrors?

https://www.internationalwomensday.com

What does that mean? Well for one thing it is about this - 80% of frontline health provision is provided by women. Internationally women provide most of the expert care for their communities, beyond mothering. This video clip shows Mike Ryan of WHO talking about who delivers health care, globally. 



That's one part of the meaning of International Women's Day and Month - why is there even such a date, such a need to express solidarity?  Because sex/gender based oppression is real. 

And this week in the UK the Male Patriarchy Bullying Conservative Government trolls the nation with a derisory 1% pay rise for health care workers in order to dim public discourse about their deliberate coercion of parents, teachers to return children they care for to COVID19 unsafe schools in the midst of a lethal epidemic.

The News Mefia rage about Meghan Markle combining Misogyny and Racism as further deflection from the truth if the situation we are in, and the deliberate mismanagement of this epidemic that has taken 140,000 lives in utterly horrific manner.

Well, for me it also means that and all of the following and much, much more. After all I am a man, a bloke, a male and I am not a woman. I do not have to endure the stares, the cat-calls, the sexualised banter, the gropes and leers, the assaults on my dignity and person that almost every woman I know endures in this culture. So yes, there's a lot more to this than my minute 'as a male' perspective could ever articulate.

Somethings are too big to fully articulate as one person. Many important subjects are too big to fully articulate as one person - thus the community that integrates all of it's perceptions, be they accurate, evidence based or intuitions or dreams or otherwise, gathers the most data. Listening works. Speaking in turn works. Speaking to one another, rather than at one another, works.

I am trying to write not as 'a man', and not as 'masculine' - I think both those terms are meaningless cultural gibberish - but as a person. What is 'masculine' other than a ludicrous fairy tale of culturally approved behaviours from within a violent hierarchy cult.

We are all citizens of the Womb. That is where I start. That is where we all start.

ani di franco - inside out

There are no exceptions to this. Everyone is a person who started out in the Womb.

Womb is evolutionary nurturant physiological neurochemical endocrinological bio-logical reality.

Bio-logic. The Logic of Life. The Logic of Nurture.

Womb is about nurture so that the child can grow, safely.

Womb is about a mother in safety, a mother who is not subject to chronic stress, a mother who is cared for as part of a whole community of socially partnered people, of all ages, working and living and growing together.

There is no competition within Womb. Womb is egalitarian.

There is no hierarchy of power within Womb.

Womb knows no nation though it does know the sound of language.

Womb knows no race though it does know the sounds of song, of breathing, of farting, of walking, of sleeping. Womb knows laughter and tears. Womb knows mystery and learning.

Womb is more common to all of us humans, primates, mammals than many other things.

And yet, in this culture there is no room for Womb in the corridors of power. 

Womb is not considered when combustion engines burn fossil fuels releasing tiny particulates that the mother breathes in and absorbs and carries to the Womb through her blood, where those particulates concentrate in the tiny foetus's blood and tissue.

Womb is not considered in the economic thinking of how to support the best possible nurturing parenting across a whole population.

Womb is not revered, Womb is not central, Womb is not celebrated, Womb is not venerated and all too often Womb is seen as a distortion of the approved shape of  woman. 

Powerlessness :  the foetus in the Womb has no view that is integrated into the deliberations of how to organise a healthy society. 

COVID19 and the chronic stress of women who are pregnant as the epidemic is wilfully mismanaged - what impacts will we see emerge in those children as infants, toddlers, children and adults?

Here, Allan Schore talks about the biology of emotional self regulation. His research, and that of many others, draws on Neuroscience, Endocrinology, Developmental Behaviour, Evolutionary Psychology to examine the critical period from Pregnancy to the stage where the child is able to walk, and thus able to explore the new world he or she is in, independently. What the biology tells us is that self regulation of emotion must be matured by that stage of increased mobility. The last thing an explorer of a new world needs is inability to self regulate his or her emotional state - tantrums are really dangerous to any explorer and biology is not stupid.

We know from a vast data set that 'the terrible twos' is a condition unknown in egalitarian and pre-conquest cultures. What we now understand is that 'the terrible twos' is a dysfunctional state crafted by motherhood that is under severe stress - it is not the mothers fault, it is the expected outcome of mothers under immense evolutionary distress.

The safety of the womb is compromised by the lack of safety in the culture. The safety of the womb that is continued by the safety of the family and safety of the extended family is compromised in this Industrial Hierarchy of Violence culture, which is historically a Patriarchy of trauma. This is historic fact. 

The difference between men and women in this culture is about power. Who mediates power and why?

It is not the genitals that are the greater difference between men and women, it is the Womb. It is not hairy chests and breasts that define us as different. It is not that the brains of men and women are different.

It is that the culturally imposed roles that impose difference in behaviour and social conditioning upon our brains are dull and oppressive, they are utilitarian roles mediate by power relationships. It is that the culture that pretends  that Womb is not central to all of everything about us is impossibly weirdly off key to the meaning of life.

We are a womb species.

And in any case, we are persons first and foremost - and for that reason I think it is an error to categorise either of us by the secondary nature of our bodies, not least by imposing cultural gender roles that ignore the meaning of the Womb of all things, that first place we are truly nurtured, that place that speaks to the nurturant truth of biology as a whole system of nurturing living activity, the place that suggests this is how it starts and long may it continue.

Womb is Life. Wombs do not need to be occupied or full to be of and for life. An un-used, empty Womb is still a womb and it is in use nonetheless. Women are not defined by being wombish. Persons are not defined by their bodies alone.

War is anti-womb.

War is child abuse.

Aristocracy exploits the womb as a utilitarian device of inheritance, alliance and power structures.

Poverty is anti-womb.

Misogyny is anti-womb.

Imposing poverty is collective child abuse.

These are some of my thoughts on International Global Earth Woman's Day.

One day is not enough, 365 days is not enough, Wombs are for the future - by nurturing the present we bring hope and beauty into the future.

By nurturing in the present we send love into the future.

I am in awe of Womb. Womb is already more than Space Exploration can ever be. 

Jacinda Ardern speaks about kindness as though it is political.

She is correct.

Cruelty is also political.

I have had enough, already, of the politic of cruelty. Haven't you had enough of that , already?

If we have a future, it is the politic of kindness, the politic of nurture  that is the continuation of Wombing - nurture, nurture, nurture.

The profit of nurture is happy wombs, happy mothers, happy fathers, happy children, happy communities, happy societies.

I do not care that 'bullying is the the way it is' - I do not care for the Alpha Male, the Power, the Empire, the Billionaire, I don't care that they are everywhere declared an inevitable imposition, a product of the struggle for survival, that this is how it is, accept it, get over it, get on with it - these cults are nothing but trouble. We don't need them. We never did. They have no real human value.

I don't see any value in women behaving like the men who are bullies in Power, carrying weapons. I don't see any value in the men who are bullies in power, carrying weapons. That is neither equality nor is it equity. It just cruelty and violence. It is stupid, venal, dumb, idiotic, cruel, callous and nasty.

Feminism is not advanced by female combat troops, by female grunts.

These are my thoughts in international women's day.

Women being bullied in public - that is the story of Diana and Meghan.

Diana and Meghan - reveal the misogynistic bullying that is the very core of the concept of Aristocracy and the functional utilitarian objectification of The Womb as a tool of hereditary Power.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Letter : Zero Community Transmission is a practical, pragmatic strategy that is protecting 1.8 billion people and their economies.

Dear Editor

There are Governments, lobbyists and others who are citing harms caused by bad management of the epidemic locally, and of the pandemic globally, to argue for opening up whilst community transmission is still very much active, which amounts to worse management, rather than arguing for best management that achieves zero community transmission.

Zero Community Transmission was dismissed as and 'not credible' by the English PM, and 'impractical' in the UK Parliament this week

This is untrue - Zero Community Transmission is protecting the health and welfare and the economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. They are pragmatic States.

Zero Community Transmission is a series of practical, common sense measures that are not by any measure extreme, and which avoid repetitive cycles of open and shutdown, as well as reducing the possibility of variants emerging from within virus laden communities.

I, and many others, would appreciate it if you could publish this letter to correct this misinformation coming from the UK Government, and others.

Yours sincerely

Corneilius Crowley

Please withhold my address and phone number from publication.

Exploiting the Harms caused by bad management to argue for worse management, rather than for better management aka zerocovid

Some misanthropic governments, malign lobby groups and misinformed citizens are using the harms caused by deliberately bad management to argue for worse management rather than for better management  and this is lethal. It is venal avarice exhibited those who should behave better, given the duty of care inherent in the position of power they occupy. An old story, perhaps, corrupt Governments imposing malign policy upon entire peoples under the guise of help yet does it have to be this way?

#BodgJoh #BodgeJohnson

Associating the success (and by extension, failure) of a public health response with an appeal to an exceptional national character can be dangerous. It can make learning from others less likely, and make changing course, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, a painful – perhaps impossible – process.

source: https://theconversation.com/sweden-and-japan-are-paying-the-price-for-covid-exceptionalism-151974

Ordinary people who are using the harms caused by deliberately bad management to argue for worse management rather than better management are misinformed, some are mislead and there are others, a minority who are content to remain wilfully ignorant.

1.8 billion people and their economies are being protected by zero community transmission strategies, and have been for over a year.

The news media, the government and their sponsors and blinded supporters and the 'freedom' mob (who pretend to themselves they oppose the Governments bad policy) are all refusing to follow the Science,  and what they are doing is arguing for worse management, whilst deliberately ignoring the evidence, the science and the lived experience of 1.8 billion people?

1.8 billion people in China, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Finland, Norway and a bunch of other countries following the science and the best public health practice is a huge evidence base.

Zero community transmission is a series of  mostly fairly straightforward policies, they are not extreme actions, they are common sense, science led actions that suppress a virus in a community and then maintain a situation where community transmission is not allowed to erupt.

The key elements of best public health outbreak management in no particular order include:

1. generalised mask wearing,
2. general attention to hand hygiene,
3. physical distancing where necessary,
4. localised person to person contact tracing,
5. fullest support to anyone who has been in contact with a known case to quarantine,
6. testing for presence of the virus and for antibodies on a community level around outbreaks,
7. fullest support for treatment of symptoms in isolation, away from the community,
8, Fever clinics to protect general hospital systems.
9. tightly quarantined borders,
10. full support for all workers if and when they need to isolate,
11. clear  timely information available on outbreak status to citizens in their locality,
12. clear and consistently science grounded communications from Government and Health Authorities 32. and an absence of profiteering - meaning the profit is the outcome for the whole community or population.

In essence chasing down the virus as a behavioural dynamic supported by national and local governance and health systems.

This is what Governments and 1.8 billion people are doing across East Asia and Oceania and it is working.

These actions are all being done without a vaccine - it's great that a number of vaccines have been developed and are helping, yet they are not the solution to a virus that mutates in order to over come barriers placed in it's way.

The solution is to stop the transmission of the virus. A virus that does not meet human host dies. Slowing transmission down is not that. Stopping transmission achieves that goal.

How could people I personally know ally with the UK Ruling Faction and ignore that evidence?

How could people I personally know appeal for opening up without the better management?

What kind of myopia is that?

New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan and UK had the same Science and Evidence on February 2020 - NZ, Vietnam and Taiwan chose to follow the science, closely.

UK decided to ignore the Science.

The different outcomes are VERY clear.

www.zerocovid.uk for more information on what zero community transmission science is.

I argued for zero community transmission back in March 2020 and again in April 2020, without understanding the role that slow spread and variants were going to play - now we know more about variants and the fact that they are part of the same problematic behavioural dynamic.

The longer the virus has to play within any given population the more likely it will generate variants that survive what ever we throw at it. Especially within countries that have medically advanced treatment for AIDS and other immune disease states, where the virus can live within a human body for months on end.

"These questions are especially important at a time when environmental pressures, such as expanding herd immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, antiviral therapies, and public health intervention strategies, may — through selective pressure — promote virus survival and escape."

Source : https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2032888

Has any heard of the Vietnamese or New Zealand Variants?

Exactly!

Kindest regards 

Corneilius 

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

Landing a lander on Mars whilst bombing Yemeni villagers is not 'Progress'.

Landing a lander on Mars whilst bombing Yemeni villagers is not progress, just as landing a man on the Moon whilst bombing Vietnamese villagers was not 'progress'' - there is an argument that it represents a technical progress, but that is all it represents, at best, and to hold it up as human progress or cultural progress is nonsense, irrational and an avoidance of the realities we all must face.

Man on the Moon 1969

Vietnam 1969

Yemen 2020

Mars Lander 2021

A poem, by Gil Scot Heron, might find resonance today in Yemen or Libya or Syria, and indeed within the United States even still, where Racist violence by Police is as common as pie.

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.

(while Whitey's on the moon)

The man jus' upped my rent las' night.

('cause Whitey's on the moon)

No hot water, no toilets, no lights.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

I wonder why he's uppi' me?

('cause Whitey's on the moon?)

I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Taxes takin' my whole damn check,

Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,

The price of food is goin' up,

An' as if all that shit wasn't enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face an' arm began to swell.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

Was all that money I made las' year

(for Whitey on the moon?)

How come there ain't no money here?

(Hm! Whitey's on the moon)

Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill

(of Whitey on the moon)

I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,

Airmail special

(to Whitey on the moon)

Whitey's on the Moon by Gill Scott Heron 1970

I was 14 years old, 1973, when I realised the tech spin-offs of war were not worth the harms that war causes. To claim the benefits is to ignore the meaning of the harms.

Infamously Madelaine Albright dismissed the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children over the course on a decade of warfare against Iraqi Ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was elevated to power by American influence on Iraqi politics "We think, we think It was worth it!" was her thoughtless commentary, when questioned about those deaths, the cost to Iraqi civil society and it was indicative of the cult she was a member of.

Madelaine Albright - "I think this is a very hard choice"
- a choice made for the Iraqi children and their parents, not by them.

The culture of Violent Hierarchy, the culture of competing industrialised militarised powers as the dominant culture among modern human societies, is a cult. Generalised acceptance of any cult is typically based on false beliefs, misinformation, gaslighting and disinformation. I know this from personal experience, having been hooked into a number of cults in my life time. 

Cultish Beliefs.

The Malthusiams of Boris Johnson are likewise cultish beliefs which are directing the disastrous management of the Corona Virus epidemic sweeping across Britain in successive waves - he obviously believes the costs of the 130,000 (and rising) fatalities, the 250,000 long covid cases, the disproportionate burden borne by disabled people are a price worth paying 'to protect the Economy' (which it clearly is not doing).

Those who in the UK compare the costs of the 'successful' Mars lander operation against the budget of the deliberately 'failed' UK Test and Contact Trace mission are missing the point.

Comparing one success of the abuse system against another failure of the abuse system, without calling to mind that it is an abuse system, without acknowledging in full the harms caused by the abuse system and without putting the harms front and foremost for attention, accountability and prevention is irrational, it is a non sense.

Crowing over the success of one element of the abuse system to highlight the failure of the other is  illogical, dismissive and deeply, profoundly disrespectful and callous..

It's very similar in behavioural dynamic to what happens within an abuse family dynamic.

An abuse family system, institutionalised.

The same 'family' system that landed the lander on Mars is waging illegal, amoral wars that are killing families, destroying communities, crushing entire civilian infrastructures of whole countries.

The same 'family' system that landed the lander on mars and photographed the landing from above the lander, in live real time, from the drop modules angle, an 'amazing feat' which 'has never been seen/done before' is engaged in wars that cause wholesale slaughter, and is deliberately mismanaging epidemics that are killing hundreds of thousands of people.

The UN called for a total ceasefire of wars in April 2020. Their call for common sense was ignored by the primary war mongers.

"Freedom!" people cry. "We have such great Freedoms!" 

Others claim: "Our Freedoms are being imperilled! Don't wear a Muzzle!"

Both of these are lies.  Cultish lies.

In the UK and USA there is no public domain discussion of zero community transmission strategy.  We know that News Media in co-ordination with the political hegemony of the ruling faction are censoring any discussion of zero-covid strategies. There is no freedom.  The temporary need to stay indoors is not a loss of freedom, as some idiots claim. It is common sense. Stopping the spread is spreading the love. 

There are lobbyists who are deploying the harms caused by bad management to argue for opening up, which is worse management, rather than argue for better management as in a zero community transmission strategy. They too talk non sense, they adopt an irrational and holly unjustifiable position.

Vulnerable Peoples Lives Matter.  

Vulnerable people such as the disabled, people with 'learning disabilities', people with chronic disease are subject to 'rationing' of healthcare resources and doctors are ordered by Government to adopt 'do not resuscitate' orders as a rationing policy for these vulnerable people, who cannot dissent let alone consent to such a decision, simply because the Government of the day refuses to adopt a zero community transmission strategy. 

Between 24 January and 20 November 2020 in England, the risk of death involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) was 3.1 times greater for more-disabled men and 1.9 times greater for less-disabled men, compared with non-disabled men; among women, the risk of death was 3.5 times greater for more-disabled women and 2.0 times greater for less-disabled women, compared with non-disabled women.

source: Office for National Statistics 11 February 2021

We do not, as ordinary people in England, have the freedom to prevent the State, the Government and the News Media from ignoring the science. We do not have the freedom to prevent the State, The Government and the News Media from deliberately ignoring the proven established public health mandates for handling an epidemic, just as we have no freedom to prevent the State from engaging in war and pursuing deliberate harm causation policy. 

Boris Johnson lied in Parliament about the efficacy of zero community transmission, which we know is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. It's not rocket science, it is best public health epidemiological science. He claims his policy is led by data, not dates and yet he coerces 10 million school children to attend unsafe schools on an arbitrary date even as community transmission is well above levels recorded prior to the first lock down two weeks short of one year previous.

Johnson lies in Parliament.

Tony Blair is still a free man.

Tony Blair also lied in Parliament.

When Prime Ministers lie in Parliament why must millions of innocent people pay the price?.

Progress? What Progress?

Landing a lander on Mars whilst killing hundreds of thousands of citizens with bad management of an epidemic is not progress. Removing Saddam Hussein at the cost of 600,000 Iraqi lives was not bringing democracy to Iraq, it does not represent progress.

We need to have one - progress - without the other - avoidable harms to vulnerable citizens -to be able to say that we are a safe and functional Democracy. That would indeed represent human progress.

We need to be able to land a lander on Mars and not be waging war, not be deliberately mismanaging an epidemic to be a safe and healthy Democracy.

This system is a cult. It is not a culture, it is barely a society, it is a nasty, violent hierarchical  cult.  we the ordinary citizens are caught in it's grip, stuck between a wall and a hard place, doomed by the cult's desire to retain, maintain, enhance and project it's power above all other considerations. I do not blame ordinary people - we are all victimised and dehumanised by this situation.

When a person has internalised the cult, that person cannot see it for what it is.

When a person has de-colonised from the cult, that person can see it for what it is.

This is the 21st Century.

Welcome to the truth.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is a total cultural shift.

The within all studied Hierarchy of Power Cultures the lived experience of child abuse is more common than rare. This is a true statement - a significant portion of our population, generation after generation, in homes, schools, institutions and in the community, experience chronic  abuse as children, and many people as adults live with a constant background of abuse.

Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Structural Poverty, Able-ism and other layered socially instituted  generic hatreds are very much common behavioural characteristics of this culture into which I was born.  

When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something.

Egalitarian life was generally peaceful,  beautiful, healthy, grounded in solid attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and general violence

.

This will trigger some people within a culture where self regulation is dysregulated more often than not.

Those abusive behaviours are exceedingly rare and more usually unknown in healthy egalitarian pre-conquest cultures. They do emerge in previously egalitarian cultures post conquest, as an outcome of the trauma of collision with conquest, hierarchy cultures.

These abuse behaviours are common to all Hierarchy cultures, apart from Racism which is specific to Euro-Christian White Colonial Slavery Culture and which persists to this day. "White People did not exist before 1681!"

This chart reflects the compilation and statistical analysis of a wide ranging surveys of many hundreds of different cultures that looks at a spectrum of behaviour from Egalitarian to Hierarchically Violent. A key variant that is found to be a predictor of the nature of any given culture is the way the culture relates to children.

This chart, prepared by James Prescott, is in large part drawn from the work of Robert B Textor in "A Cross Cultural Summary"

"It presents a series of some 20,000 statements, grouped according to a list of standard cultural categories, that describe which of a large number of variables (all more or less conventionally dichotomized) are associated beyond chance expectations with which other dichotomous variables, in the 400-culture sample assembled by George P. Murdock for the Ethnographic Atlas. 

The variables examined and intercorrelated in this largely computer-written survey are all those employed in 38 published or completed cross-cultural studies, plus those that have been coded for the Ethnographic Atlas. 

The volume is, I would say, easy to use. The compiler has carefully and explicitly described all of his procedural decisions, as well as providing a brief but thoughtful introduction to some of the principles of statistical cross-cultural research.

In short, as Harold Driver says in a dust jacket blurb: “There is no longer any excuse for tossing around unconfirmed and impressionistic generalizations, when thousands of sound propositions, based on world-wide samples, are now available in this impressive compilation.’’ 

I would put this injunction even more strongly: any ethnologist who assumes a correlation between two variables that have already been the subjects of cross-cultural study will henceforth be professionally remiss if he does not check his assumption in the pages of this volume.

But useful as such checks will be, particularly to exploratory comparative studies, the reader of this volume should remember that failure to find statistical support for some assumed causal relationship does not necessarily mean he should abandon his assumption."

Review by Melvin Ember, Hunter College, in American Anthropologist 1969 p.918

In other words, this is a serious compilation and survey of cultural characteristics. The charts are accurate representations of social or cultural behavioural characteristics. This is solid, grounded evidence. 

The recent work of Robert Sapolsky,  Behave : Humans at our worst and best and previous work by E. Richard Sorenson from the book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology and the work of Allan Schore in the neuroscience of emotional self  regulation and development in the first two years of life, all confirm this overview - the default state of the human species is trust, we are egalitarian by our evolutionary development. There are many others whose work confirms this thesis. 

The following assertion is no longer in the realm of hypothesis.

Our Human bodies, brains and minds are perfectly evolved for love, connection, trust, creativity, bonding, healthy attachment with grounded individual autonomy, as a core part of a functional collectivist socially nurturing dynamic, not in spite of it. 

Because we are evolved to adapt to a wide range of habitats, and because we are as infants sensitive and vulnerable, and thus ready to learn about our new world, it is the case we must learn the behaviours that function best within the egalitarian trust default state, from our parents, siblings and wider community without direct instruction, (our brains are evolved to learn by experience, rather than being genetically programmed to generate behaviour) and it is the case that these fundamentals are distorted by childhood trauma that remains unresolved and/or chronic stress that afflicts a culture that persists over generations.

 
Back to the future, here and now...

Child abuse statistics for England and Wales in 2019

Just a quick glance at the statistics in England and Wales, for example, reveals the following :

 Of the 6,971 convictions for child abuse-flagged cases in the latest year:

• 81% (5,668) entered a guilty plea
• 19% (1,301) were convicted after trial
• fewer than 1% (two) were proved in absence
• Around one in five (21%) child abuse-flagged prosecutions in the latest year were unsuccessful in securing a conviction, equating to 1,843 prosecutions.

Source : Office for National Statistics 2019

To put that that into a more informal perspective, if the details of each conviction were read out in the daily 6pm News, it would average out at 19 cases per day, 365 days of the year. That would jump to 25 a day, for a 5 day working week. A further 20% of cases do not achieve a conviction - that is not to say the defendant was acquitted, proven innocent. One in twenty cases reported lead to a charge, or summons. Even that sorry statistic does not cover the full extent of abuse of children across England and Wales.

In 2019 a total of "around 227,500 identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019. It is important to note that some of these offences occurred more than a year ago. For example, where data were available from the Home Office Data Hub, 34% of sexual offences against children recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019 occurred one year or more ago. This includes 21% of cases which occurred 10 years or more ago."

Comments by one of the statisticians add weight to the assertion that child abuse is more common than rare across this culture.

"By its very nature, child abuse is often hidden from view and many cases don’t come to the attention of the police or the courts. Of identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, 1 in 25 resulted in a charge or summons. Of cases that did lead to a prosecution, 4 in 5 resulted in a conviction. We see similar trends in figures for sexual offences. Of course, both crimes are particularly sensitive in nature and some have occurred a long time in the past making them more challenging to investigate.” Meghan Elkin, Centre for Crime and Justice, Office for National Statistics

Add to these crimes of abuse against children, violence perpetrated against women and other instances of violence between adults that litter our newspapers, fill our courts and cause immense distress. One in five school children in English Schools reported being bullied on school premises in surveys carried out in 2018 - 2019.  The bullying follows the vulnerable online at a similar rate.  Rape and sexual harassment are background threats every women is aware of.

Clearly we have a problem that is being experienced at the cultural level, rather than being a question of few bad apples.

Adverse Outcomes for Survivors

I am a survivor of protracted severe childhood abuse and bullying by adults and other children. In my adult life I have endured poverty, destitution, loss, depression and severe psychological distress. This is typical for many of the people who have endured childhood abuse, bullying and other adverse situations.

I have to and do take a certain amount of responsibility for the choices I have made, the errors I have made, the flaws in my behaviour and attitudes - nonetheless, the  larger part of my distress was caused to me by others, and exacerbated by the lack of supportive or protective structures within this culture.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones.

The trauma of war is caused by a few who launch the war, and the many who endure do so under the greatest of strains, and largely do so unreported, whereas the people agencies that initiate and prosecute war have daily headlines to urge their case.

"Given the situation I was born into, the culture and society as it is set up and everything that I experienced, the things that should have happened that did not, and the things that should not have happened that did, it is no wonder I feel the way I do."

In the process of getting through all of that I have spent a lot of time examining my own life. I could say that I was trying to put together the pieces that were broken, reclaim the parts of me that I had lost. I  have been on a journey survival, a path of self directed learning about myself, in this life, in this culture, for 40 years. I am 61 years old.

My gradual understanding of and the integration of my lived experience has been buoyed up the many decent kind people I have met along the way.  In spite of the culture, most people are pretty decent and I have been fortunate to meet mostly decent people, and to have siblings whose love and kindness have helped me weather the storms of my life. time and time again. 

I have also been inspired and informed by the written work of superb researchers in the areas that my experience drew me to - people such as Alice Miller, Judith Herman, Robert Sapolsky, Vincent Felletti, Carl Rogers, Oliver James, Sue Gerhardt, David B Chamberlain, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Allan Schore, David Smail, Suki Pryce, Rutger Bregman, James W Prescott, John Bowlby Colm O'Gorman and many, many others - there is a list on the side bar of this blog, an incomplete list, and it gives a flavour of my 'scholarship' which has been and remains an informal, self directed process of study and learning.

My study has ranged over many subjects including biology, history, geography, anthropology, paleology, neuroscience, endocrinology, biochemistry, economics, studies of civilisations, technology, the history of writing, architecture, agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, behavioural psychology, evolutionary psychology, war fare, medicine, child development, trauma studies, linguistics, religions, shamanism, animism, power relationships, herbalism and music and more..

I have been taken in by a number of cults, and have assumed entire belief systems and lived those until I inevitably came to a point where the real world evidence undermines some aspect of the belief, and I am forced to drop the belief, and return to a confusing, painful reality, sometimes with a bump, sometimes with the greatest sense of relief and liberation.

In the end we all seek liberation from oppressive situations that dominate our lives.

Freedom is not as some would have it taking the liberty to do as one wants, not least as others around us suffer - freedom exists only in entire populations not being oppressed, bullied, hated, shot at, bombed from the air, impoverished, poisoned or polluted by agencies and powers far greater than the individual, greater even than the communities we all live within.

Peace is more than the absence of war.

9 September 2014 - United Nations Statement

Underscoring that peace is more than just the absence of war, United Nations officials  stressed the need for concerted efforts to achieve the common vision of a life of dignity and well-being for all.

“We know that peace cannot be decreed solely through treaties – it must be nurtured through the dignity, rights and capacities of every man and woman,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks to the High-level Forum on the Culture of Peace, convened by the General Assembly. “It is a way of being, of interacting with others, of living on this planet.”

In September 1999, the Assembly adopted, by consensus, a resolution on the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. Since then, it has met annually to discuss the issue, as well as how to advance this noble goal.

Mr. Ban said that peace means access to education, health and essential services – especially for girls and women; giving every young woman and man the chance to live as they choose; and developing sustainably and protecting the planet’s biodiversity."

My 40 years of enquiry, of honest effort and exploration of this lived experience, which we all share, for better or for worse, has taught me much.

Delivering remarks on behalf of Assembly President John Ashe, Vice-President Isabelle F. Picco said the desire for a culture of peace knows no boundaries and is inherent in the hearts of all people.

“It transcends gender, culture, religion, faith and belief, and unites the rich and poor, the old and young, East and West, North and South around a common desire.”

She added that the post-2015 development agenda that Member States are currently working on must be rooted in a culture of peace.

“Peace as an overarching theme must be woven throughout the goals and underpin the targets,” Ms. Picco stated. “And our new agenda must be backed by the political will, commitment, partnerships and financial support to help usher in a new era of peace on a global level.”

This culture - Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture - is an unhealthy culture.

The invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the polluting of our air with exhaust particulates that find their way into our beloved babies wombs are all adverse outcomes of absolutely unhealthy behaviour.

Abuse on a colossal scale.

The Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture can be described as a complex post traumatic stressed disordered culture, as a hierarchy of violence and power culture, and as a trauma generating culture that normalises aspects of unresolved post trauma coping mechanisms as normative behaviour. It is a culture that sustains unresolved trauma as part of its internal engine and it's lurid mythos. The Gods as they are portrayed, behave like vengeful anti-social bullies. They are very much alike human beings with more power than they can safely handle. They are, of course, projections of the bully mind and culture.

One might well say it is an un-natural culture. No baby is born to become a bully, nor is any baby born to be bullied. Bullying is a distorted behaviour that distorts those who are bullied in turn. Chronic stress imposed by the presence of bullying absolutely undermines the natural default development of children and adults.

Allan Schore on the evolutionary biology and psychology of emotional self regulation as it develops.

We are by our evolutionary default egalitarian, bonded, securely attached, empathic sensitive beings/creatures who live as social puppies, in loving relationships that are able to weather the variations of a changing and dynamic habitat. This is our evolutionary default.

Snow blizzards, rain storms, sunny droughts, day or night, floods, tsunami's, volcanoes and general natural changes and so on - when we survive we survive largely because of luck and because of our attachment to one another, our intelligence and quick wits, our creativity and our fraternity. 

This is proven to some extent by the story of the Aboriginal people's of Australia, 80,000 years of continued thriving communities. It is the oldest narrative of the human species. Pre-historical. And there remains a core of Aboriginal people who live in those old ways, who retain the social behavioural characteristics of the healthy human culture, in spite of oppression and the conquest culture's denial of their validity. Indeed there are an estimated population of 360 million indigenous, undeveloped people's across Earth and they are all at risk of extinction entirely due to this culture I was born into.

Our default is trust. until we are subjected to chronic traumatising stressors. Then everything becomes distorted. This is the historical narrative.  I have written about this before, outlining a theory that the Hierarchy culture is the result of an egalitarian culture that was traumatised, and for what ever reasons, was unable to resolve the trauma, and remained in fight or flight reactive mode which engendered normalising controlling behaviour patterns.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-poles-of-society-everything-in.html

Our problem of healing is not an evolutionary problem  - we are more highly evolved for good health and love than anything else.

Our problem of healing is not a matter of personal flaws and failings.

Our problem of healing is a cultural problem. 

David Smail in his book "The origins of Unhappiness : a new understanding of personal distress"  - 

"It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable distance from those ultimately subjected to them. 

On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced. 

To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled. 

This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment."

In other words, David Smail understood that the impact of the behaviour of those who wield immense institutional and material power upon those who do not amounts to a disparity such that decisions that cause grevious harm to entire populations are made, with dreadful frequency, and little accountability.

No wonder people are distressed.

As I like to put it "Given the kind of family, community and culture I was born into, and everything that happened to me, it is no wonder that I feel the way I do."

Another way to put it is to say that a lot of human distress is often the outcome of things that should have happened not happening and things that should not have happened, happening - by agency of other human beings.

The Fruedian and Jungian Psychiatric and Psychoanalytical models are all deflections from this fundamental observation.  There are no archetypes of abusive or distressed behaviour lying dormant within the human psyche.  There is no genetic disposition to distress, other than we all suffer when we are chronically bullied, and that chronic state can trigger epigentic changes that alter our biology, that can throw it out of balance.

There is nothing 'wrong' with the person, there are only distressed persons and a distorting culture within which the person is forced to live, a culture that is very distressing. 

Robert Sapolsky in "Behave : The Biology of Humans at our best and our worst"

“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. 

Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the  frontal cortext from genes.”

It all comes down to culture, in the end.

Sapolsky writes “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means."

A Hierarchy of Violence culture is a behavioural dynamic, not a genetic dynamic.

We need to abolish poverty and end war as a priority for the mental health and physiological well being of Humanity, and that must include a cessation of all invasion of lands occupied by older indigenous cultures, as the essential preparatory steps, even before we approach the issues of pollution, environment and climate change.

Kindest regards
 
Corneilius

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