Oligarchy anti-democratic Grooming Memes - an example, debunked. A dynamic explored.

Right Wing oligarch friendly meme take down analysis.

“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

There's a meme circulating suggesting removing or reducing politician's salaries, because the politicians are enriching themselves using our taxes. It is blatantly incorrect and it is a grooming device. Obviously people who are elected to represent the people in our legislatures are engaged in full time work, and so they need to be paid a decent salary. And they are engaged in a lot of work that cannot be done by a lone individual, and therefore they need to run an office, with researchers, advisors and other staff to assist them in their work. They also have the Civil Service to support them. All of these are necessities.

The meme is targeting genuine concern that a significant cohort of leading politicians are corrupt, but it switches the bait to a different hook in order to avoid the actual problem - the corruption is the influence of Wealth as a political hegemon that buys some politicians it is not the wage and expense system which supports their role.

The meme was advertised, sponsored, promoted and targeted at 'progressives' and others who claim to be politically anti-establishment. The targets are reposting it without subjecting it to a critical analysis, without understanding the meme is designed to help the oligarchy achieve their political goal of destabilising democratic regulation of their extractive industrial model..

So I am going to give it a go.

1. The issue is not the politicians wages, the issue is the influence of Wealth (Wealth with a capital 'W' indicates Wealth as a political movement, a political organisation) on politicians and media, and the revolving door between Wealth, their media and think tanks and Government Office.

For example in England right now we have a hedge fund banker who rose through the ranks of investment banking designing and then selling dodgy CDOs that caused the '08 crash in charge of the NHS! He was doing part-time work for JP Morgan all year, while being paid as an MP, rumoured to be earning more than 1K sterling per hour until the moment he accepted the role as Health Secretary! His salary is small change. His situation is not uncommon. He who pays the piper calls the tune, as the saying goes.

2. The Oligarchy want you and I, and anyone who is concerned with political corruption to undermine democratic regulation so that they don't pay fair share taxes. The Oligarchy want you and I to undermine the possibility of democratic regulation so that we don't fund NHS properly, so that it starts to crumble under the pressure and they will privatise it to save it, and then you and I must rely on privatised insurance to pay for our healthcare costs, generating a cash revenue stream for their coffers.

The Oligarchy want you and I to undermine democratic regulation so that the poor remain poor - in order that the oligarchy can make more profit from maintaining low wage workers (which is where they make most profit...) and more importantly The Oligarchy want you to undermine democratic regulation so that they they don't have to help pay for climate and environmental damages or re-rig their industries to prevent harms, to pay their 'externalised costs'.

3. To that end they carefully conflate our sense of distrust of obviously corrupt governments which they influence, ironically enough, with their desire to dismantle democratic legal regulation, co-opting you to their agenda: they do all of this rather than encourage you to occupy the legislature and exercise your democratic power as a shared responsibility to curtail the abuse of power by oligarchs, which is what you really ought to be doing, for your own and your children's sakes.

4. So to get the oligarch money out of politics, we must do that by electing decent men and women, honest people who are also experienced in the areas we need proficiency and who reject influence and money from lobbyist, into our legislatures and resource them so they can carry out their roles.

5. We must also learn to spot grooming tactics in News Media and online, to make elections more honest, and we must become involved in understanding the problems and designing solutions.

The Power Inquiry of 2006 looked at the matter of honesty in elections and direct involvement of citizens in designing policy, in some detail. This short article is a good brief introduction to the work of the Power Inquiry.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/power_inquiry_3310jsp/

The activity of Political Grooming is a serious problem

Many people are being groomed by well organised, well funded grooming operations.

Grooming operates by studying the persons vulnerabilities and then targeting those with emotive concern in order to exacerbate them, which triggers an emotive amygdala reaction, which is often beyond conscious intellectual control and then by associating those heightened concerns with the concerns of the groomer the groomer can direct the behaviour of the target to meet the needs or exploitation target of the groomer.

It is a very dirty, nasty process.

Utterly abusive.

And they get away with it because very, very few people understand these tactics, and rather than seek to protect the groomed we get irritated with them, and the groomers exploit our irritation to drive even deeper wedge between us all.

Two ways to counter this:

1. Better understanding across the progressive alliances of how grooming operates and functions. Awareness is the best defence, being able to see it happening as it happens...

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/06/grooming-how-it-operates-why-it-works.html

2. Legislation that identifies grooming as a behaviour set, that names it as psychological abuse and then criminalises it by making it a criminal offence.

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/right-to-free-speech-also-comes-with-responsibility-40020617.html

Gaslighting and Grooming, Blaming the Victim, Bullying

#Gaslighting is essential to the bully culture because the bullies have to convince the majority of the population being bullied that they are not being bullied. That is because the bullies are usually a minority who would be unable to face down the majority if the majority united in resistance.

#GaslightingGrooming operates by studying the person's vulnerabilities, targeting those with emotive concern in order to exacerbate them, triggering emotive amygdala reaction, associating targets concerns with the concerns of the groomer by which means the groomer can direct the behaviour of the target to meet the needs or exploitation intention of the groomer.

Target concerned about lack of housing, because it impacts her or his living situation.

Groomer links lack of housing to immigration - knowing full well the situation has nothing to do with immigration, it has to do with the economic set-up and legislation that reduces access to affordable housing.

Target becomes concerned about immigration. More stories are presented that dehumanise immigrants.

Groomer raises rent, lowers wages and this increases the pressure the target feels.

Groomer shares content blaming immigrants for higher rent, lower wages.

Target angry at immigration more than high rent, lower wages.

In time target hates immigrants. willing to cause harm to immigrants.

Multiply this 10 million times, significant numbers will be more easily manipulated to alter their voting behaviour, and some will be more susceptible to behaviour mod than others and go further.

Pick any concern, study enough people, locate the vulnerable, slowly work on them - ensure funding flows and think tanks and others maintain the 'work flow' of grooming content. Push until significant numbers of people change their behaviour in ways that can be exploited.

This activity is psychological abuse.

It is locating biases and vulnerabilities, the rather than helping to resolve them, it exacerbates them, it exploits them in order to generate behaviour that is harmful.

Grooming is abuse. It is not a fair game. The groomer knows what he or she or they are doing. The groomed, always unaware of what is being done, is vulnerable.

For one person to to this to another is already quite grim.

For any organisation to do this to an entire population is a crime against humanity.

To do this as a profession, as a career is profoundly amoral and anti-social. To pay people to do this is an intentional action and it is a crime against humanity.

Does this apply to every Hierarchy?

Every Hierarchy of Power, Resources (Wealth) and Violence, yes.

There are examples of non-power hierarchies that are based on skill, age, experience, wisdom and they tend to be within egalitarian cultures.

Grooming is unknown in egalitarian cultures.

The Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists are waging a long war.

In the same way as the endless war against terror, their war is open ended, with only a vague and misleading indicator in public as to the final goal. The Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists will not cease in their efforts to undermine the very concept of a social contract because that is their enemy.

They see the social contract as binding the democratic state to protecting the population from the worst ravages of the Oligarchy that is built on externalised costs - no one must be allowed to impose any democratic regulation that mandates that those costs be paid by the extractors of wealth.

Think of concentrated Wealth as a political party, a political hegemon with a budget to corrupt every level of democracy.

Their war is against the very idea that governments ought to exercise power to nurture social care on behalf of ordinary people who, having no real social material power, are individually, and as individualised, atomised citizens, weak and vulnerable and for that reason they need that help and protection, which is in part their right because they pay taxation to Government.

For more detail, read this interesting blog on the agenda, the ideology and the reasons why cruelty is core to the activities of the Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists - the adverse effects are 'externalised costs'.

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

"In Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windemere’s Fan, when Lord Darlington defined a cynic as ‘a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing,’ Cecil Graham replied, ‘And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.’

Graham is not alone in thinking that any value other than the market price is absurd. Many proponents of free markets think this way.

This line of thought has an engaging clarity and simplicity: if a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on a price, what right has anyone else to say that this is not the fair value?

(of course, in the real world many transactions are not between willing buyers and sellers freely assessing the value of the transaction. Most smokers buy cigarettes, not because they have assessed the value and found it worth the price, but because they are addicted. Workers being paid below the living wage accept it, not because they agree it is fair, but because they have no other choice)."

--- worth a read, I think.

Because they are ideologues, the Free Market Fundamentalists are content to use psychologically abusive tactics most decent people would shrink back in horror from. Grooming to influence, induct, enrol or hook people into a change in behaviour that can be exploited.

The ends justifies the means for ideologues.

Their idea, their projection, their version of 'reality' is supreme. In their minds the Free Market is so good that it shoves aside evidence of harm and externalised costs, it rolls over adverse outcomes for people , it ignores collateral damage, it sees avoiding avoidable harms as a hassle or a restriction, a form of tyranny and their attitude clearly lacks empathic concern for people - people are economic units to be deployed that feed the machine that amasses wealth in order to form and maintain their political hegemonic structure.

The Free Market Ruling Class considers themselves to be 'The Beautiful People'. They truly believe this - the culture of people whose wealth and status encourages them to assume that they are superior to all ordinary folk, they are taught to feel they are better qualified to rule and govern, they think they are wealthy because they are superior rather than lucky. Even those who merely inherit vast wealth think this.

It goes that those who are think themselves superior do not mind so much the wounds inflicted upon the inferior.

Notice how the Telegraph, the newspaper of the Free Marketeers, is waxing lyrical over a teenage woman, Emma Raducanu, who recently won a major tennis tournament, salivating over her 'vast' economic potential - she is a candidate for entry into the pantheon of beautiful people, a clothes horse for the neoliberal free market wealth accumulating mindset hiding behind Nationalism.

They wish to acclaim her as a role model, and will seek to co-opt her for the aggrandisement of their ideology. Her current sporting success is the result of her efforts, her parents support and her luck and is not a marker of Britishness, or of the virtue of vast wealth. They will seek to make of her a marker of both. Even as they publish articles denigrating desperate people in leaky boats cross the English channel. Even as Priti Pat-Hell, another multicultural icon, seeks to find ways and means to push those vulnerable boat people back out to sea, as a public relations distraction from the many harms of Brexit.

Because these tactics are in essence psychological warfare tools, most of us decent people lack any understandings of how they work, and we are therefore largely vulnerable to that form of predation.

That is why Murdoch can choose who Rules.

The Labour party elders are completely unable to counter these weapons not least because they are unable to identify them in real time, name them and then counter them in public discourse as a praxis of exposure, a way to educate the electorate on the nature of these tactics. See, show, tell - this they cannot do.

Public awareness of these tactics is the best defence in the first instance.

As things stand the Labour party elders and their membership appear to be unable to take the fight to the political grooming gangsters. They MUST change this, and rapidly. They have the public platform to do this, they need to name the tactical plays, every time they are given ANY platform, and they need to move away from the Press as a means to reach the public - they cannot speak clearly through that Press Mechanism at all. It will always seek to thwart them, twist their content.

Conflation

Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error, and when done intentionally it becomes a weapon, a psychological tactical weapon.

The Free Market Oligarchy carefully conflates elements of people's concern in order to gaslight and groom those who are vulnerable within electorate. They know they cannot fool all the people, all of the time, so they target those who they identify as vulnerable by studying biases within demographics.

Here are some examples.

Authority/Authoritarianism - Authority is the respect afforded to experience and skill in any given field. Authoritarianism is the brute force of Sajid Javid removing mask mandates, with the anti-mask Freedom lobby baying in the background, with impunity, in order to provoke more spread of the virus to reach mythic herd immunity, aka 'living with the virus' as a means to stabilising 'the economy'.

Freedom/License - Freedom is not license to do as one pleases - Alisteir Crowley's admonition 'do what thou wilt is the Law' is not Freedom at all. Freedom comes with a responsibility to cause no harm. Causing pollution is a breach of Freedom of those who need to live without pollution.

Concern/Fear - Genuine concern is not the same as fear, and to denigrate genuine concern by lampooning it as fear is tactical gaslighting.

Evidence/Opinion - In matters of the shared commons, evidence is critical to developing healthy policy, and because opinion can often be in conflict with evidence, opinion or belief in the design of policy can undermine the health of the commons, precisely because it often ignores or denies the evidence.

Commons/Property - The deliberate occupation of the commons, only for it to be privatised

Regulation/Limitations imposed - Oligarchs tend to see regulation of their industries as onerous, in particular regulation that limits toxic practices or harm causation. They conflate that regulation with tyranny or unjustly imposed limitations.

Duty of Care/Restrictions - Everyone has a duty of care, as participants in the community, to everyone else in the community. To cast those duties as restrictions is a deliberate conflation.

Autonomy/Sovereignty - Autonomy is about being equal and responsive within a community, with equal rights and responsibilities - Sovereignty means being above others, a law onto oneself. They are not the same thing.

Because they - the Free Market Fundamentalists - are ideologues, for them the end justifies the means, and this means all forms of psychologically abusive manipulation and grooming tactics are being used, without remorse.

Labour elders are unable to identify this, which is why the Blairites were able to sabotage Corbyn.

In order to resolve the problems we face, we MUST address this vulnerability.

We must thwart the political grooming machine before we can make any real progress on Climate, Pollution, Environment, Poverty, Racism, Misogyny or Warfare.

Awareness across the grass roots is key

---

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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Because We Can, We Must

Because We Can We Must

The only way for the English people, the adults in the country, to start to repair the damage of the past 20 years (and more) of war mongering by the English Establishment, the Ruling Class who direct these wars, is to indict Blair and to indict all those who prosecuted the War of Aggression against Iraq.

The lies about WMD and the grooming promise of Democracy vs the solemn oath that British Combat Troops make, which was exploited at their expense.

“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

We need to be ruthlessly politically ethical and honest about all that flowed from that.

Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.

And yes, I know. I know. That's not going to happen any time soon. The Establishment will oppose and resist that, of course they will. Criminals do not voluntarily walk into the dock. That does not change the facts - the resolution of the problem remains the same. Indict our own war criminals if we want to encourage world peace. Lead by example.

If we want Peace, then we must at least prevent war. Chucking a few war criminals into jail would be a good move in that direction. 'Just saying!'

Look at him: he is guilty, he is culpable and responsible for so much avoidable harm and he knows it. We all know it. He's not the only one. They all need to be held to account, and we all need to understand how we let this happen, collectively. How do we become so politically weak that we cannot impede our government when they are about to commit the worst possible crimes a state can commit? What does this say about the health of our polity?

"Sitting in the dock at The Hague"?

Some day, it must happen.

Peace is more than the absence of war.

How better to help the people of Afghanistan than to indict Blair, to own up to the awful crime that the English State perpetrated upon the Afghani people and to make appropriate reparations to the Afghani people for the damage our political class have inflicted upon them?

It is also, given the days we are living in, absolutely critical to understand that there is no way to generate the international co-operation necessary to meet the challenges of Climate, Environment, Racism, Misogyny and Poverty without confronting war making and bringing it to an end. That means we must account for the harms caused and make it very, very clear that we will prevent further abuses of that nature into the future. It means we must demonstrate the ability to wage justice as a co-operative action.

This task will not be taken up by the Ruling Class who see war as a political utility and a cash cow - it must be us, you and I, and our neighbours, our brothers and sisters across the Earth.

Peace is more than the absence of war

It must be us, the people who are always caught in the crossfire, who always pay the price who extract the price of accountability from the abusers.

It must be us, the people working together as a humane polity, who unite in solidarity for our children, for their children and for all their futures as much as we would do it for our own present.

It must be us who take the democratic legislatures and our judiciaries back from the oligarchy and it must be us who set those institutions and the various arms of the State to serve our people's needs - to build peace, to establish stability, to start the repair of the damage done and to alter our systems of production and consumption systems so that they facilitate the prevention of further harm, be it preventing war or adapting to climate change, cleaning up pollution, repairing degraded environments, enriching our soils, cleaning our rivers, abolishing poverty and destitution and caring for all our vulnerable people as their needs dictate.

Peace is more than the absence of war

The prevailing profit system is built on deceit and externalised costs. WMD lies, and the costs born by the civilians whose cities, towns and villages have been made into combat zones. They did not invite the war, it came to them, unbidden. They paid the price. The cost in horrific deaths, disgusting maimings, devastating displacement, mass trauma and deep psychological distress is beyond all measure - the externalised costs associated with the profits of war supply logistic industrial production and consumption.

The War Against Terror shovelled vast wealth into the hands of a minority, who dominate our polities, and who continue to accrue wealth and power at our expense. Obviously they do not want us to hold them to account.

Peace is more than the absence of war

Enough already!

We all understand the grasp the oligarchy and the powerful have on the news media, on the current economic settings, on our democracies, our institutions and our public spaces. They mean business, and their business is mean, the inhumane desire to grasp power and exclude us from sharing it to improve all our lives. At times their ubiquity, size and aggressive resistance to healthy change suggests a fatalistic appraisal - they are too big to challenge, they have been around for too long, we cannot change them. All of this is true.

We cannot change them. They will not volunteer to change. We can, however, disempower them. That we certainly can do when we work together, and they know this - that is why they devote so much energy to division within our grass roots population. The future is always unfinished. Fatalism about the future is an error of judgement, and a logical fallacy.

And that is precisely why we must work ahead, and work together, from an evidence base. We must take up the work of confronting this situation in spite of their degree of control and influence, we must press ahead without their co-operation.

I think that to do that we must better understand the dark arts of political grooming, economic sabotage, political corruption and manipulation as they present at every level, from the personal to the institutional.

Neoliberals, bullies, authoritarians and dictatorships rely upon fatalism and logical fallacy narratives as psychological weapons that dissuade an oppressed and exhausted yet potentially active population from taking the necessary steps to build social and political solidarity.

Peace is more than the absence of war

We must erase that fatalism with the awareness that our unfinished futures are indeed opportunities, that we can change the situation by our collective efforts precisely because the future is unfinished. Nothing is set in stone, other than stone itself and even stone is weathered to become sand and soil.

The power of the oligarchy, their normalisation of war, their ubiquitous wealth and their interference in our democracies are not inevitable, immutable, immovable. That power is not carved from the rock. That power is not mountains high nor is it oceans deep. That power is human artifice. That power is temporary. That power is not eternal. The power structures do not define the human species and they do not illustrate the human condition, even though they do mark out this cult that claims to be a culture.

Peace is more than the absence of war

We can set them aside. We must. That is our vocation as humane beings, as parents to the next generation, this is our true vocation as neighbours, as friends and family and as a species. To craft a peaceful civilisation worthy of the gift of life.

The future for all our children is way, way, way bigger than the ruling class and the old, sordid bully cult.

It is for the citizens of each and every state to do this work within their own polities, as the first step.

Clean our houses, put them in order. We started to discuss this within England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with diligence, hope and seriousness back in 2006, within The Power Inquiry.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/power_inquiry_3310jsp/

"After eighteen months of investigation, the final report of The Power Inquiry is a devastating critique of the state of formal democracy in Britain. Many of us actively support campaigns such as Greenpeace or the Countryside Alliance. And millions more take part in charity or community work. But political parties and elections have been a growing turn-off for years.

The cause is not apathy. The problem is that we don't feel we have real influence over the decisions made in our name. The need for a solution is urgent. And that solution is radical. Nothing less than a major programme of reform to give power back to the people of Britain..."

Because we can, we must....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Avoiding avoidable harm. Is it really so much to ask?

“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
— Cleavon MD 💉 (@Cleavon_MD) July 17, 2021

China's population is twice that of US and EU.

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.

Those poor souls.

English Government cost benefit analysis is accepting one thousand ten days torture ending in death every week.

Can you imagine that as a war price?

Would you accept that?

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?"

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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

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

Amrit Lohia tweeted the following:

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

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

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

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

Then I wrote some more.

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

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

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

Externalised Costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does this reckoning have to descend into a power struggle?

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

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

That choice is real.

To recap:

Elimination of community transmission is possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who decides these deaths are acceptable? On what metric?

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

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

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

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

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity.

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity.

Acting together, we have each others back.

Because the Government do not have our backs.
They are exposing us, and our children, to avoidable harm.

stopping the spread is spreading the love
For media enquiries please contact SafeEdForAll_UK@outlook.com #SafeEdForAll benefits everyone, teachers, school staff, pupils, their families and the wider communities they live in.

We need a long-term safe, sustainable and fair to all strategy for education provision NOW pic.twitter.com/Djh1aI1joG
— SafeEdForAll #Swarm🐝 #hivetosurvive (@SafeEdForAll_UK) January 16, 2021

https://twitter.com/SafeEdForAll_UK

The best tool for change we have is, and has always been, social solidarity, collective conjoined action, similar to a general strike.

Possibilities include some kind of mass grass roots action such as a rent/mortgage/school strike or boycott, or early morning demonstration gatherings of parents, students and teachers outside Government buildings, or outside Churches, Broadcasters, News Paper offices or even local schools which we refuse to enter into under such unsafe conditions.

These could be justified by citing two legal frameworks for our action - the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child, and The Right to Health, to protect our children and citing Duty of Care, Malfeasance and Misconduct in Public Office to bring this English Government, that is causing so much avoidable harm, to heel. We could also cite safe workplace legislation.

To prevent a greater harm, a small harmless action is justified under duty of care legal principles.

To assert our civic responsibility as mature citizens, to uphold our shared duty of care to our children, and to confront this Governments failures to meet their duty of care to all of us.

No more appeals. We must direct Government. The issue must be forced through.

This is unbridled, optimistic wishful thinking on my part, because to be honest, I really do not know how we resolve this.

I understand that this Government, this English Government has an 80 seat majority. I understand that this English Government has no moral standing, that it is utterly unwilling to acknowledge any of it's errors, mistakes or its deliberately bad policy decisions and is behaving as if it is above the Law, beyond reproach, immune to any accountability. This English Government is the perfect expression of an elective dictatorship.

If there are any decent Conservative MPs, they remain silent and cowed. Starmer supports this Government, no ifs or buts. His focus is not on the welfare of our children but on a purge of the Labour Party,

I am at a loss on how to prevent the next wave of death and disease that this English Government is about to inflict upon the English population via our children.

A new National Union?

I would urge the formation of a new national Union of Students, Parents and Teachers, as learners, as evidence gatherers, as people concerned with an accurate, clear and workable pathway towards an education that prepares for the work to confront Climate Change, Air Pollution, Plastic Pollution, Chronic Stress caused disease, Poverty, Environmental Damage and of course, right now, immediately best public health policy on COVID. Sick people do not make an economy stronger.

Elimination of Community Transmission is cited by the worlds foremost epidemiologists, virologists, public health professionals, economists and social scientists as the most effective set of strategies in dealing with this pandemic.

Let's start in all our schools, let's harness the love, passion, care and concern of 11 million British Children, their parents, their teachers and push hard for what must be done.

Some concepts for parents, students and teachers to look at.

Here are some elements of Laws about protecting our children's rights, their health and safety, asserting the duty of care that all schools (and Governments) must uphold, that I think every parent ought to become more familiar with

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child : Defining the Rights of the Child

2. https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1794/rr-1 : defining what elimination of community transmission means

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00978-8/fulltext : evidence that elimination of community transmission strategy prevents the harms associated with 'slow spread' mitigation policy aka 'living with the virus' ideology.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_care_in_English_law : Duty of Care English Tort Law.

5. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/defences-duress-and-necessity : What rights, duties or protections do we have, under law, to prevent a greater harm or a greater crime?

6. https://www.lawtonslaw.co.uk/resources/misfeasance-in-public-office : Malfeasance in Public Office

7. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/misconduct-public-office : Misconduct in Public Office

We must build a solidarity like none ever seen in English history.

A general strike : it is not wishful thinking that we English citizens would really do what it takes to protect our children from harm.

A general strike : wishful thinking that we English would do what it takes to protect our children from harm.

This English Government failed to protect the the elders across the country who were living within care homes. There were over 530,000 tests carried out in the UK by 20 April 2020, yet this Government couldn’t test 25,000 people discharged from hospitals into care homes, after they had seen it spread rapidly through care homes in Italy, France and America.

“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

This was deliberate action taken, in spite of ample well evidenced warnings and advice.

Now as we arrive at the end of summer, 2021, it's about all our children.

School starts in a few days. This English Government has failed to make our primary and secondary schools Covid safe. Scotland's children are already in school, and Delta Variant Covid cases are rising rapidly. The same is guaranteed to happen here. Delta Variant is having a significant impact on children in America and in Israel, and elsewhere. Many parents are at their wits ends, really distressed by the current situation.

Imagine being a parent of a child who has a serious medical condition - one that could mean needing PICU at any given moment

Then imagine the angst those parents feel now knowing that within a week, schools in England will reopen fully with nothing to prevent Covid spreading
— Caroline Lea (@CarolineLea13) August 29, 2021

What will it take to get the adults of England to step up and protect the children of England from being forced into harms way?

Since February 2020 this English Government has refused to place effective quarantine restrictions on our borders, and knowingly allowed the virus to be seeded into and across the country on multiple occasions, citing 'free trade' rather than 'free movement' as the basis of their decision.

"Free trade is being choked and that is no fault of the people, that’s no fault of individual consumers, I am afraid it is the politicians who are failing to lead.

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."

There it is. We do not need, in this internet age, to travel during a pandemic. Tourism is lethal luxury. Business meetings can be conducted online, screen to screen. We can still buy and sell freely within and across tightly quarantined borders - goods can flow in spite of the global pandemic. Goods are not a vector of transmission - human beings are.

As it happens the primary block on the flow of goods within England is Brexit. Irony upon irony, as tourists carrying the virus travel freely and workers who could move goods are impeded.

This English Government refused to make resources available to enable find, test, trace, support and isolate as a local government and local Health Authority run system, designed to stop community transmission of the virus locally across England.

Instead this English Government deliberately outsourced the essential epidemic utilities of PPE supply, of testing and of contact tracing through private business contracts which were handed to crony's - to inexperienced people previously associated with the government, thus wasting precious time, wasting borrowed money and leading directly to avoidable fatalities, avoidable chronic disease and avoidable economic hardships as those losses of PPE impacted health care, the lack of test and trace lost track of viral transmission and as infected people continued to go to work, rather than isolate because there was no financial salary protection incentive in place for them to do so. All 100% predictable and avoidable. Deliberate action.

This English Government Failed to protect the UK Population. Deliberate action in spite of ample evidenced warnings and advice.

This English Government Failed to protect UK School Children. Deliberate action in spite of ample evidenced warnings and advice.

This English Government Failed to protect Afghani citizens who helped with the occupation and the utterly corrupt attempt at imposing Democratic Government upon Afghanistan. Deliberate action in spite of ample evidenced warnings and advice.

Defence minister Ben Wallace ignored a letter written three months ago by 45 retired senior officers requesting that urgent action be taken immediately to evacuate those Afghani who worked with the British Military and other staff over the past 20 years, before drawing down troop numbers.

Former Chief of the General Staff Lord Dannatt speaking on evacuation of Afghan interpreters:

“Many of us have been pleading with the government in the last two or three years and more vociferously in the last month or two to get this aspect of it right, because our reputation will be trashed, our moral position compromised and in future conflicts people will be very wary about potentially coming to work with us.

When 45 senior military retired officers including many ex chief of defence staff write an open letter to the PM, Foreign Secretary, Home Sec, Defence Sec- [on interpreters] and it’s not really taken seriously then I think there’s a gap in who’s listening to whom in govt atm."

All deliberate actions - not incompetence, at least not the kind where they tried, honestly, and failed. And then took considered corrected action to address the failures. Nothing of the sort. Instead we are treated to gaslighting, scapegoating, blame avoidance, denial of responsibility - all deliberate action.

Keir Starmer has supported this Government all the way through. No ifs, no buts.

My message to the Prime Minister: I don’t just want all children back at school next month, I expect them back at school.

No ifs, no buts, no equivocation. https://t.co/Q00nsGFH8u
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) August 16, 2020

This English Government, the enfeebled Parliament, the supine opposition: the enemy within.

This English Government: the most consistent threat to the health and safety of the English people. Inaction on Climate Change, Environmental degradation, Air Pollution, Plastics, Processed Foods, COVID, Austerity and amongst all this, they are exporting weaponry for warfare in Yemen and elsewhere - all in pursuit of profits, as English billionaires increase their wealth and power and more and more English citizens come to rely upon 'uplifting' food banks.

Treasury head Rishi Sunak installs luxuries in one of his homes during Parliament summer holidays, whilst planning to remove £20 'uplift' from Universal Credit payments to people in poverty. Foreign Secretary Raab on a £40,000 beach lounger as Afghanistan is allowed to fall into chaos.

This English Government: a toxic, predatory network of institutionalised bullies, their institutions, their working class mercenaries and their middle class enablers.

Until we, the English people admit this, and for as long as we, the English people, deny this, it will continue. Nationalistic cant and flag waving in the face of this much harm causation is deeply, deeply anti-patriotic!

Rioting, appealing for change is all futile. Neither tactic has ever delivered the results the English people needed. Not once.

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity.

The best tool we have is a general strike, specifically a rent/mortgage/school strike, citing two frameworks - the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child, and The Right to Health, to protect our children and citing Duty of Care, Malfeasance and Misconduct in Public Office to bring this English Government that is causing so much harm to heel.

This is unbridled, optimistic wishful thinking on my part, because to be honest, I really do not know how we resolve this.

I am at a loss on how to prevent the next wave of death and disease that this English Government is about to inflict upon the English population via our children.

Here are some elements of Laws about protecting our children's rights, their health and safety, asserting the duty of care that all schools (and Governments) must uphold, that I think every parent ought to become more familiar with

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child : Defining the Rights of the Child

2. https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1794/rr-1 : defining what elimination of community transmission means

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_care_in_English_law : Duty of Care English Tort Law.

5. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/defences-duress-and-necessity : What rights, duties or protections do we have, under law, to prevent a greater harm or a greater crime?

6. https://www.lawtonslaw.co.uk/resources/misfeasance-in-public-office : Malfeasance in Public Office

7. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/misconduct-public-office : Misconduct in Public Office

We must build a solidarity like none ever seen in English history.

A general strike : wishful thinking that we English would really do what it takes to protect our children from harm.

Peace is more than the Absence of War - Songs from 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2018

First off this 7 minute video by Joe Glenton on the realities of war is essential viewing. I'd go as far as saying watch this video, then there's no need to read my polemic or listen to my songs about war.

I still cannot get my head and heart around the idea that USUK and other NATO armies have Christian chaplains and other religious pastoral officers embedded in their ranks. For me critical thinking is grounded in empathy. But that is one dynamic my empathy cannot reach. A spirituality that blesses organised violence makes no sense to me. Other than it presents the psychology of dominator cults as rather cruel, callous and manipulative. The concept of God as an absolute hierarch is a mirror image, a projection of the bully culture.

So yeah, I can understand that and I can also really feel for everyone affected and afflicted by the horrific Twin Towers violent mass murder terror horror. I really do. Utter horror, an atrocity beyond belief. Deliberate cruelty.

I was never one to say "America got blowback, got a bit of what it dished out, fair enough!" That's just the most venal, unthinking, heartless and debased way of framing that event. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

I know a little about trauma, and how it afflicts one after the events, how it can linger and contaminate one's life ever after. For some the impact is worse than for others, because we are all different. Comparisons are less than useful unless they are attended to with great empathy.

I can kind of imagine the pain, terror, grief, hatred, confusion, despair, loss, of anyone in the many situations that morning, in offices, stairwells, clambering for safety, having to walk over dead bodies, fleeing for safety without really knowing what was going on... by thinking of all the times I felt terror, trauma, fear of death, horror, disgust and grief and multiply all that, and make it head spinningly fast, turn my world upside down so I don't know what hit me until it's well over and the dust has settled feeling, the first quietness, that stillness when the grief really strikes.

I can kind of imagine being on the streets seeing this happening, not knowing, making decisions to flee, or be rooted to the spot, to experience terror and horror and fear and outrage as a witness a mile away, two miles way, 100, 10,000 miles way, as it was then broadcast as a happening event.

Luck, accident of birth

I realise I am a very lucky human being to have been born where I was away from all that - it is a matter of luck and luck alone to be have been born in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Bejing, New York, or Baghdad, Gaza, Hanoi, Seoul, or born in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, or to find oneself as an indigenous peasant in South America being attacked by militarised police waging war against drugs, or to be civilian in any one of any number of wars, or a bystander or a target in any number of mass shootings, or caught up in riots and crackdowns.

I have missed so much trouble by luck more than by effort on my part. A little humility goes a long way towards a more realistic view of our culture.

I have my story, it's a minor tragedy in comparison. You have yours. Mine seems big to me, impacts me daily, and yet I see that it is only that big because I am close to my own trauma, and obviously it seems so impactful.

So many people are made to suffer through no fault of their own, by this dominator cult we call 'civilisation' - hierarchies of wealth, power and violence.

Propaganda, lies and The War Against Terror.

"Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way; stop participating in it." Noam Chomsky

So when the propaganda vomits over the air waves and the light tubes this weekend, as they deny the War Crimes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and so many others from Vietnam to Troy, from Agincourt to Trafalgar, from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from Gaza to Aleppo, from Sudan to Mali, I resist by reminding myself that war is the result of the behaviour of the leading bullies of the bully cult, Such behaviour is not an innate or inherent part of being human, it is a dirty, ugly, sick, depraved way of dominating for the sake of dominating..

I reject all fatalism about war's inevitability.

I have written anti-war, pro-peace, love songs for a nurturant culture for all of my working musicial life, and will continue to do so until I pass on or the wars stop - it's more likely the former, than the latter, yet my hope springs from the unfinished nature of life itself.

War is not inevitable. Dominator Cult is not inevitable.

Two score songs and more.

I have a reverbnation account that allows me to present MP3 files of my songs, for listening and for downloading, all for free and there's more than 50 there. The first six are arranged as my proPeace songs written in response/reaction to 9/11.

Below are descriptions of each song, why I wrote it, what the context was for each. Folk music is story telling.

Play them at least once this weekend, for me, for you, for your friends, for your children and for all their friends. Play them for the Afghani women and children, play them for the Yemeni people, the Libyans, The Iraqis, the New Yorkers, the people of Idlib, the people in Nablus and Hebron, play them the desperate people, the families with small children, trekking across strange lands, to get into in small dangerous boats to cross wide choppy waters just to find degrees of safety from wars our governments and oligarchy and businesses export for profit.

Play them to make sounds that are pro-peace, that are less anti-war than they are for peace.

I will be doing a few live stream shows this weekend, from my Facebook Page and I will record them and put them up on youtube.

The theme will be this : Peace is more than the absence of war. Why can't we have Governments that avoid avoidable harms to human beings, to our shared environment, to the species that live with us? Is peace too much to ask for?

1. TOWERS: September 2001

This song was written the week after the awful 9/11 terror attacks in USA. This recording was taken at a Virtually Acoustic Club night, in Angel, London, first week in October, with additional layers added later on that month. I had been writing letters, sending emails and even spoke on LBC Radio phone in to John Gaunt, all to articulate my desire for honesty, healing, maturity and to urge the US and UK refrain from further violence, warning that it would only make matters worse globally.

I understood the pain, the trauma, the anger - on all sides.

This song was my way of bringing that compassion to life in a song. It's not that I was 'right'. I was and remains that warfare is an abomination, is an irrational, reckless chaotic way to do foreign policy. Hierarchies of violence are toxic.

2. WE ARE GOING TO WAR : November 2002

A youtuber account known as Edensounds, a purveyor of fine music, of selected tunes and mixes, well known in certain communities associated with electronic music dance events in London, (a stalwart of the DJ craft long before the acronym EDM was ever coined), made a video of the song, listing English/British Combat Deployments since 1900, noting that there was only 1 year where British troops did not engage in combat, in the 110 years between 1900 and 2010 when he made the video.

Professional violence at the behest of the English parliamentarians has a long tradition, indeed. Ever since the New Model Army, and before. None of it is honourable. The two world wars erupted because the prevailing culture was a culture of violent Empire. Every war since then has emerged from the same dynamic. In that context no-one fights for ordinary people's freedoms - wars are fought to preserve violent hierarchies. That is why they fight.

This song was written in November 2002, while I was living in an art collective squat in North West London, Kensal Rise.

What was this new war for? Was the outcome assured? Had we not already seen failure of War policy in Afghanistan? The Helmandi had not forgotten. Blair blatantly did not take heed of history.

3. WAR TAX : December 2003

This song was written in late 2003, and produced in 2004, in response to the battle of Fallujah that March, This track was the first I produced in my first real home of my own, in London, after 6 years of homelessness after my flat was destroyed in a fire in 1997.

The tax bill to pay for war means all that cash and effort is not being directed into nurturing healthy communities, abolishing poverty, making life better for ordinary people.

Witnessing the appalling invasion of Iraq, in which it was already clear that it had brought, at great expense, chaos, blood, gore and horror to the people of Iraq and vast profits to Corporate America, I was really furious, and also terribly sad. I also safe in a new rented social housing home of my own after a long time of homelessness, and I was imagining the unfortunate, innocent people of Iraq, so many displaced, surviving in camps, homeless due to the violence of USUK.

How lucky am I to live here, and not there, I would tell myself every morning, as I ate breakfast and took in the news.

4. DARK DESERT HIGHWAY. September 2003

A rewrite of Hotel California inspired, if that's the right word, by the images of US Military convoys on darkened desert roads heading towards Baghdad.

5. DEPLETED URANIUM BABIES May 2001

Inspired by Brian Haw's protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. There were an inordinate or excessive degree of birth deformities post Gulf War I, across areas of Iraq exposed to aerial bombing with DU munitions.

Depleted Uranium munitions have been in use since the 1990s, in Iraq, The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Libya, Syria and elsewhere by US and NATO forces.. Arguments rage about the health impacts to troops and civilian populations exposed to DU. Typically exposure occurs within a war, where there exist multiple potential contaminants and stressors and not enough research has been diligently pursued to give definitive answers. The precautionary principle ought at the very least led to an examination of toxic effects before such munitions were ever deployed. No such examination was undertaken.

6. THUNDER RUN July 2003

Written after I read reports about an armoured 'charge' of US Military Battle group into Baghdad, The Thunder Run, which apparently involved competition between battlefield commanders for the glory of being the first to 'conquer' Baghdad. As the column was travelling through urban areas, they shot the shit out anything that moved or appeared in front, to the sides.... thousands of innocent civilians and their homes were raked with live rounds..

Then a year later it was being discusse in heroic, glowing terms as a suitable subject for a Hollywood movie.

7. ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE December 2018

My response to the odious 'celebrations' of the 'Victory' claimed by British Empire in November 1918. Nobody wins in war, apart from the war supplies industries. I wrote this song that summer, and blogged it in November 2019, with a more detailed piece exploring all the ways in which warfare is related to child abuse, from training young boys to become killers, to towns and cities destroyed, from comics and propaganda to toy soldiers and war movies.

I understood long, long ago that vast quantities of money that could have been used for social benefit was being wasted, and grifted into the bank accounts of already obscenely rich oligarchs.

We had known that environmental degradation, air pollution, climate change and poverty were becoming immense problems that really needed to be addressed. But no.

"We are going to war, so PAY your taxes to guarantee our borrowings for this war!"

Afghanistan 2021 - USUK end the 20 year war, but deny it's harms.

In truth, nobody ever wins war. Everyone exposed to it loses, apart from the weapons suppliers and other material production logistics essential to the prosecution of any war.

Now, in August 2021, as the disastrous, pointless USUK and NATO war in Afghanistan is supposedly coming to an end and we witness yet again the reckless nature of the Governments involved. As it happens White Christian English Europeans have been importing war into Afghanistan for close on 200 years.

Given the most recent utter folly exposed in the awful, bungled, stupefyingly callous mismanagement of the 'withdrawal' of USUK/NATO Military forces (even as they still hold the threat of air warfare over the incoming Taliban as a future 'bargaining chip)' it should be blatantly obvious that the entire premise of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun is just a banal evil.

Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown and Blair and their Cabinets are all War Mongering Hierarchs to the core. Watching the English Parliament discuss Afghanistan last week was sickening. Repeated claims that the mission was honourable defy all notions of honesty. These people are utter hypocrites. They do not represent ordinary, decent people and their dishonesty is repugnant, makes a mockery of the very idea of a healthy and honest democracy.

Refusing to acknowledge that their war mongering allows evil behaviour to prevail, collecting a wage from the tax payers.

Clive Lewis

Here's an honest interview with MP Clive Lewis, who was in the Territorials, a Reserve of the British Army, and who is a combat veteran of Afghanistan, where he did one three month tour of duty.

One three month tour of duty, among men who had to do, who were ordered to do many, many more. I feel for the terrible burden those troops have to bear, to know they were placed where they had to kill or be killed, to endure loss, pain, woundings and grief and rage, and it turns out to have been a failure, because it was wholly illegitimate, even as they fought in good faith.

He speaks openly and honestly, informed by that experience and a wider understanding of the issues evolved since then. The theme was Afghanistan and his exclusion from being asked to speak in the House of Commons.