Zero Community Transmission - a better way forwards.

I have been promoting the Zero Community Transmission strategy since I caught ill in early March 2020. From the very start. 

Why?

Because it works.

Because it was clear, from my extensive reading, listening to proven expertise, that New Zealand looked at what had happened in China and the East Asian States, and took that lived experience, clinical experience and social experience and they learned from the errors the Chinese made, in Wuhan during the first month, and they learned from the successes of the Chinese. Humility and kindness.

The USUK on the other hand did not do that.

The results thus far are more than clear, unfortunately for all those harmed by the disease itself, and  for all those whose work and incomes have been undermined, and for the failures of bad policy that cannot be undone, yet which deserve redress. Hubris and arrogance.

Zero Community Transmission

So this is www.zerocovid.uk :

Instead of living alongside this deadly virus with repeated on-off lockdowns, there is an alternative: scientists call it the Zero Covid Strategy.

Many other countries have adopted the Zero Covid approach. Britain could too.

If we’d done this in the spring, by now we’d be living without the virus – visiting family and friends, travelling without fear, drinking and eating out, going to live events, just like people in New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and China.

The Independent SAGE committee of scientists has been arguing for a Zero Covid UK since the summer. This approach is also supported by the Hazards Campaign for workplace safety.

What is the Zero Covid Strategy? 

It means eliminating the spread of infection between people in the UK and putting in place measures to prevent or quickly staunch any further imported cases. Today that means four key steps:

• A full UK-wide lockdown until new cases in the community have been reduced close to zero
• An effective find, test, trace, isolate and support (FTTIS) system, run locally in the public sector, to quickly squash any further outbreaks
• Covid screening, and where necessary quarantine, at all ports of entry to the UK
• Guarantee the livelihood of everyone who loses money because of the pandemic

Independent SAGE and Zero Covid Strategy.

A better way to go - towards zero community transmission.

• The prospect of many thousands of further deaths from COVID-19 over the next nine months is unacceptable
• The UK government must propose and share with the public a strategic plan on how the pandemic is going to be managed in the next 12 months and of how the various measures against the pandemic fit together in an integrated plan.
• Independent SAGE believes that this strategy should have as its prime objective the achievement of a Zero COVID Britain and Ireland
• It will require the government in Whitehall to replace their failing NHS Test and Trace System with a fully-fledged and locally controlled system of Find, Test, Trace, Isolate, Support (FTTIS)
• The Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Northern Ireland already have very few deaths and very small numbers of new positive cases. They have the virus under control and are well placed to achieve elimination of the virus
• England and Wales will need to make the necessary efforts as soon as possible to achieve the same position
• Achieving elimination would allow all social distancing measures to be lifted, schools to be fully open, the hospitality and entertainment industries to reopen fully, revitalisation of the economy and a sense of much needed normality for the population.

Following The Science - this links to their full report, a .pdf file

I have been writing about ZCT since the start. 

It IS the correct approach. We must start as soon as possible. It can be done.

Kindest regards 

Corneilius 

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

Belief vs Evidence, Nurture and Zero Community Transmission

I stopped writing about the USUK Governments approach to SARSCOV-2, and the disease COVID19, and I stopped writing about reaching for a zero transmission status as the basis of correct strategic approach, back in June. 

I felt had written everything that I felt that needed to said about the issue. The scale of dishonesty in Government, in Parliament, in News Media mirrors that found in ConTheory's funded by billionaires and others, and is a narrative so deeply embedded that it cannot be spoken too clearly in any area where ordinary people can regulate political and legislative and economic power.

"Shhhhh...! We're trying our best, in difficult circumstances!"

What? A series of contracts rushed out to 'friendly' private contractors, without an open bid process, quite often cutting out the pre-existing suppliers of what ever was being contracted, from PPE to Contact Tracing, from full body bag storage to Ventilator Machines (which are not as efficacious as CPAP) being reinvented by a Hoover Company. The PR folly of Nightingale Hospitals which were designed to house serious cases, with ventilators for every bed, a deliberate choice, instead of Fever Hospitals to feed symptomatic cases at the earliest stage, where they can be treated and monitored away from the community and away from General Hospitals.

"Fancang shelter hospitals were developed and used for the first time in China to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak.

1

 The term Fangang, which sounds similar to Noah's Ark in Chinese, was borrowed from military field hospitals,

2

,  

3

 but it refers to a novel concept: large, temporary hospitals built by converting public venues, such as stadiums and exhibition centres, into health-care facilities to isolate patients with mild to moderate symptoms of an infectious disease from their families and communities, while providing medical care, disease monitoring, food, shelter, and social activities."

Source : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30744-3/fulltext?from=singlemessage

That choice coincided with the choice to return elderly patients from Hospitals where the virus was know to be present, without testing them, back to their care homes, to make space in Hospitals for what was expected to happen. Both choices increased likelihood of spread of the infection. I have written about this previously.

Many people were making big fees in all of this, others banking huge profits, for what appears to me to be getting in the way of the proven and known efficacious responses that were  need. 

New Zealand's government acted on the data, the evidence and the lived experience and lessons learned by the East Asian countries.

The UK Government had the same data, the same evidence, and outside of advisors who are in reality political appointments, Epidemiologists and Public Health expertise were shouting the alarm. The experts were  ignored, some Government appointed experts in SAGE touting 'Herd Immunity' as the final solution.

"The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed through achieving Herd Immunity." Professor John Edmunds.

source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcmHsxz6y00

I could go on. We all need to log all of this, to know what is being done, and to find ways to reduce harms across the board, and not accept the false narrative set up of The Economy vs The Welfare of the People, as a dichotomy/

I don't like to think in terms of 'masses', demographics, nationalities or large group labels.

People are persons, human beings, each and every one is precious, unique, important.

I don't subscribe to terms of superior or inferior, primitive or civilised, or to terms that caricature whole groups of people. 

"All Women are......", or "Men are all alike..." are caricatures and they obliviate important meaningful detail. Indeed avoiding those human details is the curse of national policy protocols designed by ideologues. They assume an aggregate, and design policy on that basis, quite often with thought to the detail variations of each persons life and experience.

Life is way too detailed and personal for each of us, only to be blotted out by averaging, finding a mean, creating a label, imposing a caricature.

Detail matters,

Thus the Good Law Project looks at specifics, the detail. News Media tends to headline and sub-edit much of the available information.  One needs to check it oneself....

I had been quite feverish in my interest, having spent 5 weeks in bed, more or less, going through this strange 'flu'. I have not yet been tested so I cannot say 100% that those 5 weeks were due to COVID-19. It was certainly worse than any previous viral infection I have had. Being feverishly ill at that time focused my mind a bit,

Me, and COVID19, maybe.

I have to say that I was very worried, and that I was frightened when symptoms started taking hold. I knew very little about this. I had not been paying attention to what had been happening in China, East Asia etc, largely because I do not watch News.

I was also unaware of the 2001 SARS outbreak and containment. I think 9/11 pushed that off the front pages. Just as the Invasion of Iraq pushed awareness of MERS in 2003. Two previous outbreaks, which were successfully contained,  by breaking community transmission, using contact tracing, quarantine, isolation treatment, social support. A fact that most East Asians were well aware of.

Nobody I know  in London or anywhere else knew anything about either at the time I was falling ill.  It was my daughter who alerted me to the situation, in that I demonstrated the arrogance of my ignorance enough for her to comment on it. I realised I knew nothing about this SARSCOV2/COVID19

That there was already a history to this story became clearer over the next few weeks, as I learned more.

Give  me Fever!

Fever is part of the bodies natural anti-viral response, and I learned this from Dr. John Campbell, whose videos I found in late March. Vitamin C and D, fluids, rest, keeping warm, enduring headaches, aches, (avoiding Ibuprofen and others like it) confusion, weakened breathing, sweats in waves of intensity and hoping everything I was doing was helping my body deal with the infection. 

One of his videos suggested that learning from the experience, the errors and corrections of the  East Asian approach to the epidemic might be a good move. There's so much valuable detail in those errors and learnings that ought to be informing USUK collective action on this epidemic nationally and globally the pandemic.

All the while I was reading, sweating, coughing, studying, watching news reports, reading specialist blogs, looking to see what I could find out that was reliable evidenced nuanced descriptions of what was really happening. 

In mid March I read the WHO final report on Wuhan from February 23rd.

I read a lot more.

I even looked for and found a CoViD-19 anti-gen testing kit that one could buy online - the East Asians already had them before the European stage of Pandemic - and found one that could deliver a reading within 30 minutes, based on a pin prick blood sample. As to it's efficacy,  it is still available on the market. 

Learning refused. 

And yet the Western States decided to create their own new tools, from scratch, as local and national epidemics were emerging. Rather than hit the track running, they hit the track of infection control stumbling, and have continued to refuse to learn how to run in this particular challenge. That said, they have disbursed a lot of cash, tax payers cash, in failing to learn - or perhaps it is intentional, and Herd Immunity is the price of Hoard Immunity in the eyes of the Establishment,

This was mostly via private sector contracts with political supporters rather than National Health and University systems. I watched in horror as USUK ignored the experience of the East Asians in order.  It just did not make any sense. I could see what New Zealand and Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore and many others had done and were doing, and it was working.

My mind boggled when it was explained away by 'well they are compliant populations in authoritarian states'.... what? There's no way to reach that level of stupid, that internalised caricatured delusion. 

Then in April I was shown Johnson's February 3rd Speech in Greenwich where he says : 

""And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.

We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century.".

Really?

worried that others "go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage."

https://youtu.be/baWbWpOtJnc?t=536 - watch Johnson take off his suit, and his spectacles to emerge as Economic Superman!

On February 3rd?

And the result?

Medically irrational policies, one after the other. 

Policies that make no Epidemiological or Public Health sense at all.

"Empty the pubs at 10pm? "

Ludicrous! 

There is no scientific evidence to support that policy.

"Groups limited to 6 people at 6 feet distance, 1 metre if wearing masks."

"Masks are ineffective."

Masks slow down spread, reduce viral loads.

"Masks are an imposition upon our God given freedoms."

Lunacy on all sides.

Contact Tracing is is a core capability needed to track where the virus is, and to identify cases to be treated, contacts to be alerted, quarantined and underpinned with economic or financial support for people to stay indoors, until the community transmission drops to zero. It is not test dependent.

Testing enhances the precision of contact tracing, yet testing does not replace that basic task - with every identified case of illness, that cases contacts are reached and supported fully to enter a two week quarantine.

If, during that time, they develop symptoms, they are moved to a Fever Hospital for immediate treatments support, designed to prevent escalation of the disease, to provide support to all mild cases to recover, and then return to the community, more or less immune, feeling looked after. If they do not develop symptoms they return to the community, and the community adopts zero community transmission as their collective strategic approach, supported by the State. It's not complicated, it is complex, and it is a person to person job at the point where contacts are being met and supported....

China's Central State Government, Universities, Corporations and Military collectively ramped such a system system up within weeks, deploying 18,000 contact tracers,  in the middle of an uncontrolled infection transmission in a city of 11 million people. And it worked, even before testing was widely available.

We in the UK after 8 months have a bunch of privatised provisions with none of that efficacy, with a Tax Payer bill for £12 billion for the basic tools, which are not functional.

£12 billion of which a substantial portion has been gouged out as profit, fees, commissions and so forth, all of which add no social material value or efficiency to the privatised test and trace system.  Quite a few new millionaires have been created. Small, inactive companies with no previous experience are  afforded multi million pound PPE supply contracts. If a paper company with £130,000 assets gets a no bid contract for £108 million, someone has made a 10% cut on that deal. 

Other examples of grift abound  - Contact Trace Staff are paid basic wage, yet the company charges the government more than twice that amount. Meanwhile the workers are not so busy, and their systems are inefficient.

If those workers were integrated into local NHS and Council provision, with the funding to go with it.... that's more effective systems, more integrated systems, local knowledge and understanding, community cohesion, and thus better roll out, better outcomes for the community and no one needs to be making a vast profit..

Seeking power to make more profit makes everything complicated.

We are where we are.

As I have already told you, I starting back in end of March I read a lot, thought some more and wrote about this experience as it seemed to me then. My blog went from average 800 hits a month to 14,000 hits per month. And nothing changed. The irresponsible insanity continued. I realised that I am such a small teenie little being in all of this. Barely a ripple in the water, and with water this choppy what's a ripple worth - the ripple of an empty life jacket floating on the surface whilst the person who wore it sinks and drowns? My trade has disappeared. No more sound engineering, no more event hosting, no more live gigs, and when the 'economy was reopened' we had to host small events that never even broke even. The Music Industry is quiet on Zero Community Transmission. Who will help us?

Impotence 

I gave up on the writing about it all for a while. I decided to stop, to watch and to be - to protect myself, my state of mind, to avoid burn out or worse, I chose to relax as much as possible throughout the summer, outdoors as much as I could be, getting the sun shine, feeling the nurture of a fertile spring and summer in the vegetation. I let go in the hope that something would change, and in order to give me time to assimilate my newly re-discovered impotence.  I am tiny. Really feeling that right now. I have always been well aware of it.

We are, as individuals, impotent by comparison to the institutions of State. That is why collective organisation and action is so important. The emergence of workers organisations in the 19th Century is meaningful.

When the institutions of State fail to address the needs of the people, unless the people are united we cannot act in ways to correct the problem. 

It can be done.

It has been done. 

It is a process, an incomplete and imperfect work, that will require constant attention over generations.

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/

"....countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. 

They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. 

When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. 

Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. 

Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living."

It was not easy.

Strikes, deeper poverty, state violence, an economic depression, mortgage failures, unemployment.... over two decades of effort by the lower income sector until economics undermined the middle class too, and they participated in the shift, consciously.

Consciously. 

The Norwegian grass roots had the evidence, the lived experience and thus a fuller collective understanding of the specific issues confronting them. 

The material truth will set us free, always, whereas 'The Truth' as an ideological stance or religious belief is always a prison.

Belief as a weapon system.

Belief and custom are relative, what is true is universal. A table is a table, yet some make tables for sitting on the floor with, others for sitting at the table with chairs.

Invoking 'The Truth' is usually an attempt to avoid or negate the universally experienced by claiming an idealised specific is universal, and the lived experience ought then to conform to that, and where it does not, it must be corrected.

Belief in a God of Wrath, a Loving Bully, reflects a belief about the righteousness of Hierarchy and the justification of violence utilised to protect Hierarchy. Both God and Natural Hierarchy of Power are belief system concepts, and are made materially real by institutionalisation and by the people operating within those institutions who tend to assume the power of the institution is theirs, personally.

Internalised values, those values absorbed by being inducted into an institution - military training internalises the Military ethic into the infantry fighter and the officer alike. Obey orders, with commitment, protect your team mates, conquer the enemy.

Passive aggressive management and behavioural nudge non-science.

The deliberate mismanagement of their local epidemics by USUK Governments (their scapegoating, their misinformation and the public narrative gas lighting are all deeply, profoundly dishonest and they are using confusion as a shield, and that much at least is deliberate, as in deliberate avoidance of duty of care and responsibility)  and the scope and spread of viral ConTheory has  ensured that there are enough people who are misled, misinformed and vocal about it as to be able to 'report' and thus market the confusion of conTheory to make it look bigger than it really is, big enough to mask the deliberate mismanagement.

Passive aggressive management techniques include giving targets vague sets of instructions, which require them to take decisions the manager ought take responsibility for.

The passive aggressive manager neglects to provide full support to the targets, and thus sets the target up for taking the fall. If things go wrong, blame the actions of the target.

The passive aggressive manager is a politician seeking power.

Making mountains of mole hills.

In populations of many tens of millions a one day protest of 30,000 people is a minute event.   A small football stadium. Everyone there thought it was huge. It was not huge.

Put it on the News, and it's hit!

Even getting a million hits on an online video is no longer truly huge. A politician speaking at a conference is a small event. Put it on the news, it becomes something else. Reality and myth making. 

Put the conTheory protesters on the News to castigate or 'censor' them, and they look much, much bigger than they really are. Justin Beiber. Madonna. Fame mechanics. Making conTheory Famous Already. 

Cult Bands

A band with a following of 30,000 is a small cult band. But if I am one of the cult, I think we are bigger than we really are, and more special than we really are.

That is a key to the manipulative 'magic' of marketing, the Oz factor - magnifying any given subject by repetitive exposure and suitable props. Theatre.

I might occasionally read of a terrible crime, and then in a sudden news surge I hear of five such incidents in a day, for a week throughout the News cycle and even though I have no direct experience, nothing in my life or community that reflects that kind of criminality I am worried. 

My emotional state has been affected. Worry hormone cascades occur. If that surge persists, then what it triggers becomes my habituated state. It is also possible that I have unresolved trauma, and that some of my reactivity is embedded in that experience, my woundedness, my protectiveness.

And I don't really notice this is actually happening. I notice what the News media train me to notice, and I internalise it. Daily habituation. What I might not know is that there are hundreds of such crimes daily across a population as the average, and that average has dropped over the decades, and that the real risk of contact with such crimes is growing less and less with each passing day, that I am in real terms pretty safe. The Cult of Law and Order that Right Wing politicians deploy is rooted in the narrative that this is not so.

Fear of The Immigrant is a Xenophobic Cult Belief.

You do know that Capitalism is a cult, right?

Idealised beliefs opposing or denying any part of the whole of the evidence held by any group of people, that also includes othering those who do not subscribe to the same sets of idealised beliefs.

I was born into a cults and went through a number of cults throughout my childhood, teens and into my thirties. You were too, most likely. Cults are everywhere.

What I was doing was swapping one set of beliefs for another, like a download, without any integration or real understanding, and sad to say, it was only because that was going nowhere for me, I was not feeling any better about myself or my life that I asked myself "what was the point? "

Why swap one set of beliefs for another? Why belief?

On the positive side - and this is just a personal assessment, and in no way condones the practice - the variety of cults exposed me to many different ideas, practices, pragmatics, ways of seeing and thinking, ways of cooking and composting poop. On the negative side was the insistence on attaching to The Belief and The Mission - the two operate together. A sense of purpose. and yet the same psychological and emotional issues emerging, time and time again. No real growth. No wisdom. Nothing gets dome.

The Mission.

The Mission is to spread The Belief.

Believers know the value of their belief for everyone else! lol. The Believer feels more secure when more people share The Belief and when they can gather together, the social bond of The Shared Belief deepens. Thus they always want more people to join in The Belief.

Maintaining The Belief becomes a central activity - exposure to any evidence that undermines The Belief initiates fight or flight reactions because The Belief is internalised. Thus the mission becomes a personal matter, a question of identity. I am The Mission, I am The Belief. And therein lies the hook. As long as I remain on The Mission I must maintain The Belief. I must never look for and the real me.

If I maintain The Belief I must carry out The Mission. Even if I only convert one person over a life time, that would be considered a victory. If I question The Belief, then The Mission fails. If I question the tactics of The Mission, then The Belief is brought into question. And so forth. A bit like co-dependent 'intimate' relationships. 

These are all lessons I learned in the slow process of becoming consciously observant of myself....

The Mission is a fake. The Belief is a fake. The Work is a Fake. Civilisation as we know it is a fake. The Space Mission to fly to the stars is a fake. War is a fake.

Any policy other than Zero Community Transmission is fake.

The purpose of being alive, as far as I can tell, in biologically meaningful terms is to live well,

To live well is to behave in ways that nurture the habitat and the community.

It is to live with much loving attention across one's entire community, to care for the young and watch over them as they learn how to live, knowing they will learn everything they need, in good time. a healthy community understands that the children are to be trusted in this, and never forced. 

That is it. Thrive, and do not harm the children, your own or any others. In terms of physical fitness, emotional balance, psychological groundedness and general sociability, these are biological health benchmarks of the egalitarian human being.

With that in place, then the natural creativity of us humans expresses itself in a myriad of languages and cultures, practices and ways of living with very specific habitats, from Ice and Ocean, to Land and Forest. Diversity is our natural state, homogeneity is not our natural state - we vary because we are sensitive to the habitat and to one another. 

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

Thank you for reading this blog.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius - .mp3 songs

https://www.corneilius.net - archive

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous - .wav songs

Kindness is Political II

Kindness is Political II

For at least 250,000 years, counting all the lives lived, it is clear that billions upon billions of people, generation after generation, old and young, women, men and children have lived well and have largely behaved with kindness and grace, with respect and honesty in trillions upon trillions of small daily interactions, pottering around in life, looking after one another.

All those actions created webs of many larger actions, in wider contexts.  Every second of every minute of every day. A lot more people are being kind than are being cruel.

Kindness.  Sharing some food.

I would like to see a news channel reflect that kindness that happens everywhere, in each country, a 24 hour rolling kindnesses being presented as they are. That would be encouraging. . 

Kindness. 

Listening and hearing,  

Comfort and acceptance.

Help offered, without cost.

Our truly ancient ancestral past has been as egalitarian or partnership human communities, in diverse forms of many, many highly functional social organisation of culture, from nomad to dweller, from gatherer to gardener with many mixes in between, on land, on plains, in forests, on mountains, on ice and on the waters

The human species is is superbly evolved for egalitarian behaviour.

Bullying is unkind, and quite obviously dysfunctional.  We are not evolved to be bullied or to be bullies. Bullying is a sign of dysfunction, a distortion of what it means to be human and humanised.

There is a void between the Conquest Culture and the Partnership Culture.

Egalitarian peoples do not bully. No one is biologically evolved to be bullied. No one is bio-logically evolved to be a bully. We are evolved to be kind, co-operative, intelligent, well balanced psychologically, grounded and practical, curious and creative by learning by experience from adults who demonstrate those skills and qualities.

Robert Sapolsky :

“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.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Basically the brain's observed 'design' is that it is not so much a blank slate as a structured notebook with lots of free space available to write neural pathways into through experience.

We must learn almost everything we do - from sucking to walking, from focusing our eyes to crafting a tool - and this is why the brain is sensitive.  Because the organism is sensitive to the dynamic of ourselves within a changing environment, our neurology can pick up the signals and we can then make adjustments where needed. Learning.

We are evolved to learn most of our behaviour, all of our skill sets. We are evolved to learn how to self regulate our emotions and focus, how to feel and share the world and how to work  and organise efficiently without authoritarian direction or formal hierarchy. 

The healthy baby in the womb is not expecting to meet a world of bullies, yet we all do, in the end, meet this bully culture and that meeting always distorts our humanity. Not what we were expecting. Not what we are built for.

Bullying inhibits learning as a personal way of being a fully social human. Bullying weaponises learning as a utilitarian hierarchical power play.

Being bullied causes disease. Bullying is a behavioural dis-ease. A bully culture festers more bullying, and it trickles down through power structures, it leaks into ordinary people's lives and is a psychological pollutant. Bullying remains a serious issue afflicting school children in the UK. 1 in 5 children are being bullied, to one degree or another, in various self reporting surveys from 2018.

These -  kindness, co-operation, intelligence, emotionally well balanced, psychologically grounded, practical, curious and creative - are all bio-logical mandates for optimal human health, individually and collectively for human beings as animals. Just the basic raw data.

The ancient and evolved genetics, the neurobiology of attachment and emotional self regulation describes the biological space where human kindness is an ordinary learned behaviour, nothing remarkable, and is grounded in direct experience. Direct experience as Allan Schore puts it is the brain to brain dynamic, functioning through the body and the whole sensory experience, between mother and infant, carer and child, between siblings and throughout the family and community.

I think the evidence is quite clear that we humans, as a  species, are social, co-operative family structure egalitarian by evolution, and it is because we learn by being vulnerable and sensitive and exploratory that we are also vulnerable to harms caused by being bullied, and that is why healthy trustful parenting is central to adults behaviour within egalitarian cultures.

Work enables healthy parenting in that it is kept brief as possible, so that there is plenty time to be relaxed, to be creative, and so the children grow up, feeling trusted, around healthy relaxed happy adults, whom they can then model without losing their individual sense of self and place.

"News of The Kind"

"Kind News"

"The Daily Kindness"

Kindness o'clock.

The decision to be kind is perhaps one of the least energy demanding changes anyone of us can make.

It is just a decision, after all.

The decision to be kind is one decision from which flows a series of other decisions, actions with outcomes,  and the need for constant reflection, because the context within which the kindness will be done will contain questions, problems to resolve.

Kindness is taking everything into consideration, without favour or bias.

Kindness would be the News Press and Media and Government making it clear, in the most humane interest of the people of the nation  that there are 11 million adults in the UK with one chronic disease condition, of which 3.8 million are struck with two or more conditions, and there are 1.3 million children who have one or more chronic disease conditions. 

So that is about 4 million people for whom the risk posed by the Corona Virus (sarscov2) is quite significant. Lacking a vaccine or preventative medicine, those 4 million people can only be protected by never, ever meeting the virus.

Stop the spread, Spread the Love. Kindness. Care Homes ought to be the very essence of kindness.

Unclear COVID19 regulations, misinformation and evasion of responsibility combine to usher in 'accidental cruelties' that are not addressed.

Listening this afternoon to Sheelagh Fogarty on LBC in the UK, the stories of people's experiences around Care Homes amidst this slow spread policy. People told stories about their elder parents and relatives and these were gut wrenching, one after the other. Detail after detail missed. Pain, trauma, confusion, terror and anger are being caused by Government policy because it is inadequate and impervious to all calls for help, for paying attention to the detail.

The detail matters.

How to enable visitation in safe ways, so that the isolated do not become alienated and lonely, so that they continue to feel loved an d cared for as persons? 

It is unkind that Government practice is to not challenge the spreaders of misinformation, to not lay out the clear evidence-led needs that the epidemic demands., It is unkinder still then fail to provide for the needs whilst shovelling billions to inexperienced friends, acquaintances and business associates.

Every effort must be taken to care kindly.

DNR notices are a bureaucratic unkindness.

Let this one die.  That is more cruel than unkind.

Generic  DNRs are cruel. Economic Efficiency dressed up as kindness. Fordism.

That assessment  is indicative of the pertinent facts.

Who holds power?

How do they deploy it?
  
For whose benefit?

Where does responsibility rest?

Looking at the chronic disease profile of the UK population, where 19% present with two or more chronic diseases, 19% of the population at risk is not just 'some people are at risk' is it?

Using language to mask the truth.

Detail in Kindness.

The detail is so important because life is truly intimate for each of us, the lived experience is equally intense for each and everyone of us and for that lived detail to be blotted out by a caricature that is publicly disseminated is, to my mind and heart, fundamentally abusive. 

One cannot blot out the detail of a person, or the detail, complex as it is, of hundreds of millions of persons, just to make a point.

Well, yes people do, and it is seriously unkind. It is pathologically cruel. The imposition of a falsehood blots out the human personhood.

'Immigrants'.

It's also living in a dark fantasy dystopian delusion, and completely out of touch with the social material reality of ordinary people, the 7 billion or more of my brothers and sisters born into this.

We are not caricatures, generalisations, stereotypes.

We are people. We mostly do kindness.

Community Transmission.

When the virus is travelling in the community, and the community is not tight, it will find it's way into the vulnerable population. Thus achieving zero community transmission with really effective treatment of any outbreaks or clusters is the most logical, efficacious and proven approach. Yes, it was easier, for example in New Zealand, earlier on, and the UK missed that boat,  yet it is also true that it is not too late to start, now. 

We are nowhere near mythical 'herd immunity'.

Vaccines are a distant horizon, not an assured future with a clear timetable. Work is ongoing, and will continue for some time.

5 million lovely people who are at severe risk, with potential adverse health repercussions for another 8 million people. And the unlucky healthy who might contract the full disease, and the long-covid sequalae.

So much detail.

Kindness.

We are learning as we go.

So yes, given that 21% of UK population is way, way more persons, real people than 'some people get ill from CoVid19' that is why we must act with caution. 

Government/State and everyone else ought to be supporting zero community transmission, and quarantine borders, for the duration. We know it can work, and save lives, help communities, businesses and economies work through the epidemic, safely.

Kindly, of course. 

This is no time to panic. 

Be Calm, the posters urge us.

That is I think that why zero community transmission practice (especially  because we know it can work without year long shutdowns) is necessary - start now, why not?

Kindness is honesty and transparency.

I was quite ill with COVDI19, and was fortunate enough to recover. It did frighten me to be that ill, that uncertain. I stayed home, took Vitamin C and D, lots of ginger and lemon, fluids, steam baths, soups etc and I rested and I let the fever run it's course, I lost two stone in 5 weeks, and stayed mostly in bed. I tried to be as kind as I could to myself.

Bugger the bills! They can wait!

If I am not here, they won't be paid!

Wearing a mask seemed like a small effort to help reduce the spread, and as I studied the East Asian countries response, the Chinese errors and how they responded and corrected them, how different governments engaged with the people to stop uncontrolled community transmission i was reassured somewhat.

Kindness,  if it is present, is ever present including throughout individual moods, temperament or feelings. Of course we go through moods of grumpy, out of sorts, depressed, angry, sad, teary-ness.

The kindness never goes away.

Kindness could be a culture.

Kindness is Political.

Kindness is de-militarisation.

Kindness is abolishing poverty.

Kindness is ensuring unfettered access to clean water, secure habitation, clean environment, regenerative agriculture, local food security for all our peoples, and environmentally for all others.

Kindness is supporting parents with their babies, infants, toddlers and young children by affirming healthy attachment bonding and emotional development - the community looks after everyone who is a carer, so that are cared for, those who are vulnerable are never unduly stressed. Their condition is already enough to bear. That is kindness.

Kindness is making products that last a generation, kindness is making products that can also be fully recycled or re-used at end of use-life.

Kindness is repairing land that has been poisoned, degraded, destroyed - finally paying those costs the accountants 'externalised' during the last two centuries of industrialised production and profit gouging.

Kindness is creating regenerative, nurturing work that I want to do because I can see the benefit in immediate, short and long term perspectives and I know this work supports all life, and within it all human community. There is much healthy work to be done. I would happily work the food forests of a permaculture project. I would happily assist in cleaning damaged lands. What would you do?

Kindness is abolishing structural poverty and ceasing warfare at the same time, turning the war budget into a regeneration budget, as a gift to future generations.

I think that is a first step in any 'revolution'.

Remove the whip. Stop the fight.

No more wars.

Kindness is paying close attention to disagreements of opinion and fact between friends and associates that become weaponised - our friendships are more important than our opinions, especially about matters very few of us can directly affect.  I get we feel the world we are in, all of us, intensely. All of us.

What to do, to chill?

How do I ease the pressure I feel when I am triggered?

The price of wheat is beyond your remit.  Neither of us can anything about the price of wheat.

The starting and ending of wars is beyond my remit. No one I know has been able to stop a war.

Stopping money laundering is not something a few of us could knock up in a weekend workshop and a media campaign.

True, a well organised political grass roots of working and middle class communities in solidarity could  shift the balance of power. It has been done before. 

Distraction.

Micro-targeting aka Hearts and Minds, psychology as a weapons system.

Everyone online leaves a trace of  their activity - we are broadcasting and receiving and everything is logged, measured, banked.

 Online is an advertising media world, drawing attention to content around which advertisements are embedded.

A bit like rodents and their urine, we make trails we re-use, we leave traces. These trails are also data points. Data points are what marketeers aim at.

I like images of kittens, I like guns and own three, I drive a Ford, I live at a certain address, my income is median range, I  like America, UK and Australia and I am suspicious of Russia, China, India, I eat meat, I wear chino's, I react to images, I get angry in on line chats, I leave the computer on for 24 hours every day, I commute, I shop at Walmart, I use credit card and a debit card, I have a mortgage on a  property worth £500,000, I have blue eye, blonde hair, I wear contact lenses, I like reggae but not folk, I did an online course,  and so on.... thousands of data points that can be used to sell at me. Everyone leaves a trail to be examined and exploited. Because PR marketing is exploitative to it's core.

Micro-targeting is marketeers aiming at your data point or a whole series of data points. A cat on the scent of a particular rat. Or a 'tribe' of rats.

What the Cambridge Analytica story revealed was the precision of the techniques, the scope and the adverse effect of the billionaire funded  'industrial political whispering-bullshit-in-someones-ear-at-the-party-to-start-some-shit-we-can-exploit' where 'ear-at-the-party' is our online experience and what we unwittingly expose ourselves to by revealing all this information.

This psychological industrial warfare has expanded over the last 6 years and is some respects has become automated, and it is is widespread. That behaviour, in any setting, is abuse.

Hyper-normalisation. 

Any family with someone behaving like that has to take action.  

So too a culture, or a country. If that level of personal manipulation is being weaponised as a political trigger, and nobody in the legislature or judiciary is moving to stop that then we can say that Democracy is null and void for the duration. Democracy if it exists, is transparent. Lacking transparency, it becomes a toxic mime, where we have no real power to make changes in our legislatures that would prevent abuse and exploitation.

Yes, whispering in the ears of millions of people, knowing  they are triggering peoples fears, frightening and angering these people deliberately so that they can exploit the reaction-addiction is abuse. That's what marketing and news marketing and media marketing and religious marketing do, and it is all cruelty for profit and power. Unkindness.

To deliberately undermine kindness in the community is cruelty. 

Unkindness.

Bullies in power are adept at finding ways through story and narrative to stimulate a persons hormone stasis. Mood control.

"Immigrants!"

This repeat activity then is used to alter behaviour over time through inviting the target to  'debate', to engage, and then feeding contest that suggests 'argument',  tweaking the content, refining it, followed by material that draws in other supporters to generate Social Hatred Opposition Conflict Kink,  us/them polarisation,  all fueled with verbal and visual fight or flight triggering, with most of the targeted, and those who  'oppose' them, all entirely unaware this is happening all around them.

Like someone's in the room stirring the shit in everybody's ears, and it's working, good friends are getting cross at each other, and not wanting to spend time together... not good.

It's been  used in digital marketing for ages to increase traffic. The Internet of Beefs.

 Weaponised and industrialised as a political tool.

Kindness is deciding to act, remembering that context. 

Kindness is  deciding it's ok to turn down the noise, balance up the signal.

So remember 11 million adults, 1.3 million children within the UK are vulnerable, and we all need to look after them, the way they would if we were in need.

Kindness is indeed political.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

Thank you for reading this blog.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius - .mp3 songs

https://www.corneilius.net - archive

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous - .wav songs

Child Abuse is a cultural marker across all known hierarchy or dominator cultures- Qanon is a political cultural weapon, and does nothing to protect children.

There are abusers - people who intentionally and deliberately exploit, abuse and cause harm to other people - in every political party, in every office, in every military unit, in every school, every temple.

Bullying is a standard behavioural dynamic in hierarchical situations.

Bullies in the office, predators in the Church or the Swim Club, manipulators among the family, domestic violence, abuse of power disparity, corruption and warfare are all part of the same behavioural dynamic.

And so, if we are honest then when it comes to child abuse we all know that there are abusers in many, many family homes, just as there are abusers in many institutional settings, be they left, right, centrist, secular, religious or apolitical.

So here's the honest evidence - The vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated against children by people they know, often trusted people within their family network or their community. 

Stranger attack is relatively rare by comparison, and, yes it is still a genuine threat, something to be aware of  - it does happen. Child Sexual Abuse most often involves the infiltration of a circle of trust, the grooming of target and bystanders alike a standard behaviour. That uncle you all trusted, the political conman who was trusted....

Using the issue of child abuse as a partisan political weapon does not help confront the truth of abuse in general and child abuse in particular as it stands within this culture.  That is problematic.

So I choose to name the culture - Hierarchical Industrialised Militarised Competing Powers  (HIMCOP) - and I see it as a series of behaviour patterns, behavioural dynamics that become institutionalised around the need to gain and maintain power over others. I do not see it as 'natural healthy human behaviour'.

I think using CSA as a political weapon inhibits a full confrontation with the social material situation.

I have found this to be the case, from decades of confronting the abuse I endured, turning abuse in to a partisan political weapon does nothing to reduce abuse, nothing to mitigate the harm or resolve the pain.

The system of power understands that when people stop arguing, and begin to listen to one another, in order to build bridges, to deepen understanding, to learn from each others experience, then the system of power is in trouble. So they do their level best to see that we ordinary folk are set o  arguing against each other.

“If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. 

Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect.

Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy.

And in the meantime, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re all in it together against Lord Voldemort and the House Slytherin.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

So lets look at some of the data, the evidence to discern some of the truth here.

An Epidemiological Overview of Child Sexual Abuse - 2014

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311357/ 

 "The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.[1] 

The Center's for Disease Control and the US Department of Justice conducted a study in the US and reported prevalence of being forced to have sex at some point of time in their lives as 11% and 4% of the high-school girls and boys, respectively.[7] 

 A meta-analysis conducted in the year 2009 analyzed 65 studies in 22 countries and estimated an “overall international figure.” 

 The main findings of the study were:[7] An estimated 7.9% of males and 19.7% of females universally faced sexual abuse before the age of 18 years[7] 

The highest prevalence rate of CSA was seen in Africa (34.4%)[7,8] 

Europe, America, and Asia had prevalence rate of 9.2%, 10.1%, and 23.9%, respectively[7] 

With regards to females, seven countries reported prevalence rates as being more than one fifth i.e., 37.8% in Australia, 32.2% in Costa Rica, 31% in Tanzania, 30.7% in Israel, 28.1% in Sweden, 25.3% in the US, and 24.2% in Switzerland[7] 

The lowest rate observed for males may be imprecise to some extent because of under reporting.[7] 

The study concluded that CSA is an extensive problem and even the lowest prevalence includes a huge number of victims who still need to be considered.[7]" 

The reader can read the paper, and check each of the references for him or herself.

Egalitarian cultures do not abuse children. 

Hierarchy cultures do. 

Dominator cultures do.

Traumatised cultures do.

source : www.violence.de

It is that simple.

Only honesty and transparency can resolve this matter.

Honesty is evidence led, transparency is evidence available in the open, without bias. Everyone can see it all.

I think that using child abuse as a partisan political weapon is being dishonest - political weaponisation of CSA/CSE  is small minded and abusive - small minded in that it does not look to the whole society level situation, and abusive in that it is exploiting suffering to make a point. - Without really thinking it through, those who fall for that false gambit end up dumping all over the work of survivors and their advocates, the people who go to court, who pursue justice diligently.

Those who use CSE/CSA as a political weapon are also dumping all over the people who work with survivors to help them 'recover' and regain some semblance of safety and balance, and and dumping over the many health professionals and care workers, trainers, mid wives and others who work to prevent child abuse. 

Those who use CSA/CSE as a political weapon are exploiting the survivors, the harm caused becomes a weapon and they are inhibiting accurate and honest discourse on this subject.

Dealing with proven abusers.

Everyone who is proven be an abuser needs to be sentenced, and imprisoned, just as everyone who makes and spreads images of child abuse needs to be incarcerated, not as punishment, but as a fundamental societal  health and safety protocol.

Punishment does not prevent abuse. It's already too late by the stage of courts and convictions. It is true that incarcerated abusers are no longer able to abuse children freely. That is a  useful gain in the overall picture. But it is not grass roots prevention. It is important to consider what is needed to prevent child abuse.

 People who abuse children and exploit them are not safe for society. Period. 

 So too with War Criminals.  They are not safe for society.

Tony Blair and George Bush are personally responsible for the murder of at least 250,000 children in Iraq in 2003 -2006, and they are personally responsible for the orphaning of 4 million Iraqi children. 

How does that harm compare with the quantity of harms caused by Epstein or Savile, or any other case of celebrity abusers?   It is certain that in each case of abuse or harm, each harmed child sees little difference, the lived experience of that and it's impacts are utterly, utterly awful.

However at the societal level there is a vast difference. This is not to suggest the Saviles and Epsteins get a free pass by comparison. Comparison is needless when we remove punishment and install humane lonfg term incarceration for social safety.

If, as the allegations suggest, Epstein's operation was about entrapment and exploitation of powerful people as a political weapon, as a political whip, then it is ironic that Qanon et al use the abuse of small, defenceless children, as a political weapon. Both would be doing the same thing. 

Where is Child Sexual Abuse more common? How many more ordinary, non celebrity people rape children, most often their own, or their relatives or friends children, and are never exposed?

Neither of these questions are posed to afford celebrity abusers any excuse or mitigation. Again it's not a comparison. Those who are famous who are also proven abusers must always be exposed and safety restored by their removal and incarceration. Just as any one else.

Left/Right makes no difference: the abuse can and does happen in any political grouping or affiliation, any religious group or affiliation. 

Honesty and transparency do make a difference. 

 Accurate data and verifiable evidence do make a difference. 

Understanding the issues, the context and the evidence as a whole does make a difference.

Using the issue of abuse as a partisan political weapon does not help confront the truth of abuse as it stands within THIS culture. 

Here's a few resources on this subject.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485398/ - The relationship between egalitarianism, dominance, and violence in intimate relationships

https://sweden.se/society/smacking-banned-since-1979/ - Sweden Bans smacking children

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/ - a study of  our egalitarian past

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/sexual-abuse-and-memory/- A letter to Alice Miller from a Survivor. Alice Miller studied child abuse from a cultural historical perspective.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/connect/crypower/episode8/ - Colm O'Gorman — the Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland — about his own experiences of sexual assault, the world-changing power of individual action, and the extraordinary story of how he sued the Pope.

https://www.oneinfour.org.uk/about-oneinfour/ - One in Four specializes in supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse, and particularly survivors of child sexual abuse and trauma.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/26542319-the-body-keeps-the-score-brain-mind-and-body-in-the-healing-of-trauma - The Body Keeps The Score - A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

www.violence.de - The origins of peace and violence, this site looks at the work of James W Prescott, who with John Bowlby developed the first Attachment Theory back in teh 1960s.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/44171.Judith_Lewis_Herman - Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

https://www.d2l.org/the-issue/statistics/- The statistics and facts below can help you understand what child sexual abuse is, the risk factors and consequences for survivors, and how to identify and report suspected abuse

 Kindest regards 

 Corneilius 

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

Children as spreaders of SARSCOV2 - poverty, universal basic income, shopping and billionaires status - get back to work!

It's that time of the year, when children return to school, after the summer holidays..

Except this year there were no 'summer holidays' as schooling has been severely restricted due to the novel SARSCOV2 virus pandemic and the impact of the disease it can cause in some people, which we call COVID19.

And this has impacted tourism hugely, so many 'holiday' assumptions have been put to the most severe test. The coast of Scotland is not quite the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, is it Boris? Midges and Bell tents!

This video looks at evidence relating to children as spreaders of the virus.



At this stage the understanding is that the disease has worst impacts on older folk, and especially those with multiple chronic disease conditions that undermine immune system response. 

In essence it means this is a virus that has greater impact on older health-vulnerable people than on young, healthy people. Everyone at any age can 'get' a cold or 'flu, and show pretty severe symptoms, enough to require lots of rest, sleep, fluids and a healthy immune system and recover within a week or so. 

Most will recover. Flu can push some people with existing conditions into the most severe condition, exacerbating the situation and causing death.

With SARSCOV2 the recovery rate of disease level symptoms reduces with age and co-morbidity. 

Younger people who are infected can and do experience no symptoms or very mild symptoms and this has lead to certain assumptions about the disease spread with regards to children.

The first being that it does not affect children so much. The data supports this so far.

However, that assumption is also being used to suggest that school ought to press ahead, that it is 

'safe' for children to do so.

This policy ignores the risk of children as super spreaders and  is being driven by 'we need parents to get back to work to protect the economy' which is being driven by Hedge Funds and billionaires whose fortunes rest on the shopping of workers.

These are not public health considerations.

Children are potentially super spreaders. That is the suggestion in this video. It is well known that children spread flu and colds, that such minor illnesses spread rapidly within schools and families. Even if the virus has minimal impact on children, it can be spread by children to older folk who are vulnerable. That is a real risk.

Everything we do to reduce community transmission makes sense as public health policy.

At the present the most effective measures are physical distancing, mask wearing in crowded indoor areas, personal hygiene, avoiding large gatherings of any kind. These all impact a range of activities, including consumer shopping, education, live performance for audiences, public transport, air travel and of course the operations of health care systems.

Shut downs are an essential tool where community transmission is out of control.

They limit the spread. The only causation reason for shut downs is inadequate action taken to limit the spread of the infection. Shut downs have no other driver. Shut downs can be avoided with effective action - personal hygiene, hand washing, mask wearing, physical distancing.

That said, the economic impact of shutting down a community  is intense. Businesses cannot operate as they have done, and for many small and medium businesses this is catastrophic. Therefore Government, having a duty of care to the people, has to support the shut down, and guarantee people's incomes for the duration of the shutdown.

Pushing people to work  in ways that increase risk of uncontrolled community transmission so that billionaires and hedge funds stability and wealth creation opportunity is  preserved is not a public health consideration. 

 It is a wealth accrual issue. It is also a political power issue because billionaires have undue influence in Government in order to protect their interests over the interests of the whole community and the commons.

Ensuring workers can pay rent, buy food and stay home, safely is a public health consideration.

If we look at workers income as a public health issue the first and most obvious insight is that poverty undermines health and sanity - thus the correct response is to abolish poverty.  No amount of medical care can avoid the chronic stress health outcomes of poverty as efficaciously as abolishing poverty. 

Universal Basic Income.

Not a popular project within Industrialised Countries or among those who are wealthy, and especially those whose wealth is built on workers shopping. The resistance to Universal Basic Income - a living wage for doing nothing other than being alive - is immense. But it is not coming from ordinary folk. The resistance to that concept is coming from all those who earn lots of money from low wage, shitty, boring, mundane, dangerous and physically stressful work of hundreds of thousands, of millions of workers.

Picking vegetables. Assembling mobile phones. Combat troops on active duty. Dustbin collectors. McDonalds staff. Security guards. Cleaners and porters.

Because structural poverty is a whip - it pushes you out your front door, every day, to avoid eviction, starvation, energy poverty, chronic stress, depression, insanity, and ultimately a very painful, terrifying unhappy death. You will do any shitty job, and put up with being bullied and exploited, in order to not die of lack of food, lack of water, lack of shelter. Fair enough. 

But is it just that you are forced into that situation by deliberate structures of economic power?

Who does the economy truly serve?

Who does the school system serve?

COVID19 raises a lot of very interesting questions - it also reveals that people are kinder than their Governments.

Keep your children safe. Watch carefully what happens. Check and double check what schools are doing to reduce transmission of the virus, and if they do not satisfy the science,  they are not doing the work they ought to be doing. Better that  they have no children, than children are put in a position of causing harm, inadvertently, to their relatives, and to the wider community.

A position that is wholly avoidable. Without doing full shut down.

Remote tuition, smaller classes, less frequent classes, home learning are all proven effective. Children in school one day a week, to reduce or prevent spread of the virus, is totally doable. Many families are seeing benefits, and some experience problems - these can be resolved with careful attention to the detail in each case. 

Gavin Williamson.

In a previous blog I looked at the presentation by Gavin Williamson urging children back to school in mid May 2020. I detailed the tactical grooming devices Williamson deployed to push parents, teachers and bystanders into emotionally blackmailed positions in order to reopen schools so that working parents could return to work, saving on furlough, and generating profits for his hedge fund sponsors.

Gavin Williamson in that presentation was being a really horrible human being. He was bullying the people, the teachers, the children, their parents, for ideological reasons.  Duty of care to the children, their families and teaching staff was thrown out of the window, bath, baby and towelling.

Using the effects of badly designed shut down on already existing conditions, where the bad design of the the policy is exacerbating the existing condition, as levers to persuade people to adopt further inadequate policies is manipulative bullying. That a public official would stoop so low ought to serve as a red flag for abusive behaviour which we tax payers are funding.

Calling mask wearers cowards is narrative warfare. Calling mask refusers idiots is narrative warfare. 

And it is not all bad news, is it?

Dr. John Campbell looks at latest papers on immunity and it is looking good.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

Thank you for reading this blog.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius - .mp3 songs

https://www.corneilius.net - archive

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous - .wav songs