Deliberate exacerbation of Poverty as a 'nudge' into low paid work, to maximise wealth extraction from workers. disTrussonomics is old, and toxic.

In other  less famous news, reliable, well studied evidence suggests post-COVID infection is strongly correlated with significant neurological disease, infection generating a variety of increased risk of damage to neurological systems, presenting as a variety of known disease processes. A 7% increase in risk. Post infection, severity or otherwise, of initial infection is not a factor. The Chinese Government and people, together have chosen to reduce possible spread of infection. USUK have not. Where will we see the biggest increase in neurological disease?

"Our results show that in the postacute phase of COVID-19, there was increased risk of an array of incident neurologic sequelae including ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, cognition and memory disorders, peripheral nervous system disorders, episodic disorders (for example, migraine and seizures), extrapyramidal and movement disorders, mental health disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, sensory disorders, Guillain–Barré syndrome, and encephalitis or encephalopathy"

"It's the epithelial cells, citizen! It ain't a flu, that's now for sure a factual statement." 
As we head into winter. Onwards.
The Main Head LineDiSStrussonomics!

This is not incompetence. They know exactly what they are doing. The stonewalling and inane answers to serious questions is a tactic. Vast wealth is being made to flow in a certain direction, into the hands of the Oligarchy and poverty is being deliberately made worse and more intense, to drive people into low paid work. There is cruelty and intentionality all over this. They cannot say honestly what they are doing, in public. So they have to say nothing. And still speak. It's grim. That's how far they would go.
They are very, very good at what they do, and it is not healthy democratic governance by any measure. 

In a previous blog, I wrote up my observations on a 1981 Cabinet Discussion Paper on Long Term Planning, drawn up in September of that year, after the 'success' of The Falklands. 
It confidently discussed at what levels poverty should be maintained, in the long term, by tweaking the Social Welfare State provision, by funding from social care, education, health, welfare, policing (we have to pay for Victory).

The document made it crystal clear that low benefits were designed to 'make low paid work seem more attractive' and that the ultimate objective of that was the social engineering of a massive cheap labour force as a 'cost efficiency', increasing shareholder returns, who was then 'getting value for money'. 

In this clip from a talk with Charlie Munger, he makes it absolutely clear. Capitalism is effective because it imposes agony on young able bodied people.
Austerity, Pollution, Impoverishment - Any harm caused, unforeseen or otherwise, was a cost others bore. Those costs rested outside of the deal between the Board of Directors and Shareholders. Fines are nominal business operating expenses. Tax breaks.

This is the meaning of 'externalised costs'. 

The trauma of poverty is another externalised cost of this drive for 'efficiency', 'value for money', growing an economy in the interest of shareholders of immense monopolies, at the expense of the population. Billionaires sense of superiority and Beggars desperation and impotence. Power Disparity. It is as brutal as that and the people who are impoverished are not poor because they are flawed, it is because they are flayed, beaten down by a culture of violent Darwinian economic competition., a bigotry that broods in the core of this industrial culture. 

image source: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/category/british-politics/ 

This is what we are living through, this is that we are observing - that England's Political and Economic Power Infrastructure, it's democratic Legislature, commanded by two or three individuals in the highest offices of the Government plans to cause harm to millions of people?

An ideological policy, presented without Cabinet discussion, beyond announcing it in Parliament as an act of  dictatorial decree. a brazen demonstration of executive political power bearing down upon the entire economic, civil and social systems of the UK, already at breaking point in many places. The New Ruler demanding that  the citizens over whom she now Rules must willingly, loyally and stoically endure even greater economic and personal harm, in order to 're-start the economy' and 'cut costs of borrowing' and 'grow the economy'?

Starmer's 'Great British Energy Company' is a confidence trick, designed to protect the fossil fuel giants.

An economic and social material Somme.

Send the workers over the top, in their millions, to abject horror - COVID fatalities in care homes, impose poverty and ignore the chronic distress that causes: incrementally increasing the costs of life essentials, piling onto the bills the workers must pay, and even still, many will not have enough to eat and heat; shelter is so expensive because it underwrites mortgages, and the buy-to-let scam. Social and Economic Support is withdrawn. Raw Sewage flows into river systems and their water tables, polluting and killing the living river as it flows to the seas, spreading environmental disruption and disease causation - for profit. 350,000 excess deaths and rising, entirely due to Conservative Party policy since 2010. Climate disruption. 

Or is there more?
To be a little more nuanced : the implementation of a deliberate and intensive program of policies that will exacerbate existing poverty, and bring many, many more millions of families deeper into poverty, causing ill health, mental distress, chronic anxiety and death.
Gross National Poverty will increase at pace, as it has been in training mode with incremental stress exercises for the last 12 years, and now the race is on!
This is justified, rationalised, explained and presented as a means to encourage more and more people into work.  It's real purpose is to destroy the Welfare State, and enable the Corporate State. That is evil.

#MakeLowPaidWorkSeemMoreAttractive 

Lower wages improve shareholder returns, cheers them up when they are sad.
What remains unmentionable in News media, and indeed in the legislatures, and even within the political parties that 'oppose' these policies is the unvarnished raw simple truth - that the goal of the policy is maximising wealth extraction from people's labour, on behalf of the Wealth Extraction Faction and that it is a strategic stance of the English Oligarchy as a political force.
For example, when a producer of a product refuses to improve the product, (competition) their executives can always cut wage costs, cut staff, make them do more work for less, and then claim this is 'an increase in business efficiency', and gaslight the remaining workforce by claiming they were 'saving your jobs'. Be grateful.
A scam operated as a revenue generator for shareholders. 
"Which is what my job's worth." 
The Managing Director of any large corporate entity embodies a legal duty to enhance shareholders returns. Shareholders returns are the Law. If gambling with the lives of vulnerable marks enhances wealth extraction, rigging the tables ensures security. Expressed in business objectives jargon, presented to the public as face value. 'Growing the Economy'. Marketing and optics. Gaslighting,
Austerity was always about this.

Who are the Managing Directorship of UK Plc. Who are the major share holders, and what political collateral do they control?

Big Society
Cameron's Big Society was about exacerbating poverty by slowly, incrementally reducing the budgets for all state funded social care systems.

His slogan 'Hug a Hoodie' was really 'Mug Good People'.

Power cults with always gaslight, groom, bully, coerce, seduce and mislead enough of their subjects in to accepting their lot, or they resort to brute force. Brute force is always in the background. Waiting.

The Psychology of Power Cultures. We do have a choice.

They did this while exploiting the compassion dollar.

Marketing campaigns citing civic goodness and the general kindness of people in the community as a social good.

Marketing the goodness of ordinary people as if it informed Conservative Social Care policy, using the emotional connection to 'nudge' the population, and by returning some small part of of the withdrawn funding back towards the Community Voluntary Sector social care infrastructure run by local charitable groups, with the condition that they reframe as social enterprises. The chess move is to start to regulate them so that they operate as non-profit business entities.. 
A significant portion of those local groups were already struggling with underfunding, and because the new funding could not touch the sides of what had been withdrawn, many became unable to continue, and some quit, others were 'rescued' - acquired by social care companies, as formal Social Care Provider business organisations that 'deliver social care provision'. 
This withdrawal of unconditional state funding and moral support has caused immense harm to millions of lovely, decent people for far too long. it's really sad that the politicians are not as honest as this writer, about the harms caused, about avoidable harms.
In the neoLiberal fantasy 'The Business of Charity is Business' - an efficient business providing charitable service and shareholder returns. It is a conflict of interest with the Vocation of Care as a Social Economic and Material practice. 
The first duty of care of anyone with some power is to avoid avoidable harm. In every detail. 
Turning a charity which tries to correct a systemic harm into a business is strategic. This is used to lever in a corporate control and oversight dynamic that reduces the vocational staffing to a 'labour force' where in business terms 'low wages are a cost efficiency, and this adds efficiency to the business. Managers must be well paid, and increase in pay is success in 'efficiency' and 'savings' linked.
 Basic 80s Masters of Business Administration bullshit.
Cutting costs across any social system cannot improve any service or care to vulnerable people. 
Deploying funding in more effective ways that improve patient and staff outcomes is denied a chance to demonstrate it's efficacy..

If an efficiency action causes a person harm, for that person the experience is that it is violence. 
If the generator of that efficiency knew the likely adverse outcome, and went ahead without meaningful mitigation, then it really is a form of violence. 
There is a vast Power Disparity at the root of this, and it is being abused. Managers are in position to maintain the exercise of authority and power from the executive, to the work force. It is a command chain. You will do what you are told. 'Efficiency'.
If, after being notified of such a harm, as consequence, and the generator persists, then that is cruelty. Deliberate cruelty.
This is the way a vulnerable person might see, and directly experience all of this.
There's a lot of us about, and it's a really, really awful set of circumstances set be other people wielding vast power, and abusing it.
Everyone is vulnerable, by degree.
Everyone is made stronger by social solidarity.
Poverty is an externalised cost of efficient wealth extraction, designed to feed the engine of Wealth Accumulation as a form of political power, and deployed as a weapon with which to protect itself. The middle class fear poverty, and so they happily accept the gaslighting associated with blaming the impoverished as it sets them free of any obligation to correct the situation within which they enjoy so much comfort. They are careful to present as 'charitable' in order to preserve their modesty. 
Imposed poverty cannot be justified, rationalised, explained or tested against the evidence of the lived experience of the people affected by the policy of maintaining poverty. 

We know this, you and I. Our friends and family, our neighbours, our colleagues and dancing partners. Our children know this too, they see it more clearly because it's their immediate future and it's not looking good and we were in charge....

Because we are living in history all the time, the real history of ordinary people's lives as they are affected by the actions of a few people, operating distal power infrastructures long established, continually enhanced, always protected, no matter that harm befalls us.
Externalised Costs = Externalised Harm and getting away with it.
If an efficiency causes a person harm, for that person the experience is that it is violence. 
If the generator of that efficiency knew the likely adverse outcome, and went ahead without meaningful mitigation, then it really is a form of violence. 
There is a vast Power Disparity at the root of this, and it is being abused. Managers are in position to maintain the exercise of authority and power from the executive, to the work force. It is a command chain. You will do what you are told. 'Efficiency'.
Everyone is vulnerable, by degree.
Everyone is made stronger by social solidarity.

Solidarity

What then, can we do to best protect our interests as humane beings, citizens, parents, friends, colleagues and communities? What must we do to put a stop to this abuse of power?
The Wealth Extraction Faction's solidarity is entitlement, superiority, history and the hubris of getting away with it for so long. I thing it's disgusting. Here's a new word : Soilidarity. Dirty.

Clean Solidarity.
Social solidarity  is food banks supplied by individuals in the community, operated by groups in the community, to prevent real harm, with minimal infrastructure resources, networking across a population of 67 million people,  working, feeding millions of struggling workers and their families, a huge effort in an environment where access to free social service of all kinds is being reduced due to Government imposed budget cuts as another method of exacerbating poverty.

Solidarity is the power of association utilised to political advantage, to elect into the legislatures that we pay for, through our taxes - good people who will legislate to protect the interests of the people, to abolish poverty, warfare, racism and misogyny.

Starmer is none of this. Corbyn was, and still is, all of this.

That is the meaning of the complete silence of the UK News Media on the Al Jazeera 'Labour Files' Documentaries.

The Trauma of Poverty.
When one is poor, everything is more expensive. All our income goes into the local economy. 
Vat claims some of that back, as do many other taxes, even when someone earn less than the income taxation threshold. All the cash we, the  poor and the working poor, receive in State support, we return to economy and Government. 
The part that goes off shore is the profits from our economic spending, to the shareholders of Utility Industrial Complex, the Food Industrial Complex, the News Media Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex..
Wealth Extraction as a hegemonic political, economic and cultural belief, activity and behaviour is Violence. The denial ofbr> invasions are quite obviously violent.

The Truth About Poverty
Everything we think we know about poverty is probably incorrect, a caricature of the impoverished, designed to mislead us. 

An institutional culture of deliberate judgemental paternalistic societally enforced snobbery, for profit. Peoples must see the poor as having only themselves to blame.

Whereas the truth is much simpler - most people are decent, honest and caring. Why? Because it's so much healthier. That's just common sense. 

Rutger Bergman gets into the detail, in the video just above - it's a friendly chat.

Make a cup of team sit back, open the popcorn, switch off the phone, take it all in. This is healthy science meets social care as an economic commons at it's very best.

Given our general good nature, what's happened to our perception of one another?

This raises the question as to why the caricature of poverty and the theme of the selfish individual remain as existential assumptions within the narratives of the established political and economic system, irrespective of ideology, creed, 
Hegemony 
Maintaining the dominance of Corporations and Wealth over the people, as it is,  is cruelty beyond imagination.
This is what the English Ruling Class really is, as an institutional infrastructure. A weapon system, designed for oppression and exploitation.
For the moment, set aside the individuals, the personalities who populate the active parts of it.
The infrastructure of power has certain directives - to gain power, to maintain power, to enhance power, to project power, to exercise power, to protect power. These directives are the very heart of The Security State and Militarism. Putin, Blair, Bush and Johnson are competitors in the same evil contest. Taking sides with any of them enrols us into the evil.
People who seek to work in that environment will likely internalise all of that, so that it then becomes an apparent emergent value of the person, as they normalise to that environment.
The more ambitious will compete to get ahead. Winner takes all. What ever it takes. How far will the competitor go to achieve objectives of Power? How far to protect Power?

Bearing in mind, practically everything this culture's narrative about poverty is not only wrong, it is deliberately wrong because it is meant to mislead, in order to evade to costs of not only not causing such harm, but also the task of nurturing the people, and our shared environment.
This is the psychology of Power, and the practice.
It is institutionalised cruelty to impose poverty upon a population. They have no morals. They have no empathy, They know exactly what they are doing. From Fossil Fuel Industry denying Climate Disruption for three generations to Liz Truss borrowing money through our enforced enlistment in the promise to pay it back, plus interest, as income tax payers, which she will then give to Fossil Fuel Shareholders to preserve their current profitability.

Externalising the Costs, a common industrial and military practice. Every violent hierarchy does this. Poverty is an externalised cost of efficient wealth extraction, to feed the structures of Power, and resource it to protect itself.
None of it can be justified, rationalised, explained or tested against the evidence of the lived experience of the people affected by the policy as it is implemented. 

We know this, you and I. Our friends and family, our neighbours, our colleagues and dancing partners. Our children know this too, they see it more clearly because it's their immediate future and it's not looking good and we were in charge....

Because we are living in history all the time, the real history of ordinary people's lives as they are affected by the actions of a few people, operating distal power infrastructures long established, continually enhanced, always protected, no matter that harm befalls us.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Chile 1973 - 9/11- England 2022 - Making the Economy Scream - Pinochet in a pinafore - avoiding avoidable harm as standard practice.

My first version of this piece was not well written, or edited. Ooops. So here goes again.

Liz Truss, in economic terms, is Pinochet in a pinafore, without the guns and uniforms. Liz Truss is a power seeking missionary, a neoliberal ideologue whose primary political concern is to dismantle the Welfare State at pace, sponsored by Shell and others of similar stature who are causing immense harm to all of humanity. The Corporate State, where taxation is a revenue stream for private profit rather than social good, is a cruel state.

I think that this short film (see below) is appropriate viewing - it's a starting point to reflect upon a wider angle view of the shituation (spelling error is deliberate) the people - poor working class and middle class alike - face across England at this time, when a self proclaimed Conservative 'Thatcherite' is seeking to grab the office of Prime Minister, elected by a small majority within a small minority, (80,000 votes won her the PM's office, to Rule over a population of 67,000,000 people from another Conservative 'Churchillian' Bully who was both elected and then ejected because he was a liar, his Cabinet were grifters - collectively, since 2010 they and their predecessors caused the deaths of over 350,000 vulnerable UK citizens through 'Austerity' and deliberate COVID mismanagement.

Raw Sewage pours into England's rivers, and onto the beaches.

"we will blight them in the rivers, blight them on the beaches, blight them with low wages and high rents and we will never surrender."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L5mMTO_J3Y

There are so many ways that the actions of a few people - persons who occupy institutional and economic positions of immense, medium and small power, always at a distance from ordinary folk where that distance insulates the people in power from the harms they cause (Cameron's ten million commission 'earned' by his lobbying on behalf of Greensill is a good example) - can have a profoundly adverse impact on the lived experience of millions upon millions, and even billions of people. The technical term is Distal Power.

Those few who wield great political, industrial and economic power and who refuse to avoid avoidable harms, to underpin 'profitability' as they pursue wealth extraction through political dominance of our culture. 

So much human psychological distress and physical trauma is attributable to this one dynamic.

Putin's Wars, the Bush-Blair Wars, the destruction of Libya, Syria and Palestine, the Work Capability Assessment Regime, Buy-to-let Mortgages, Exxon, Shell and BP's obfuscation and denial of Climate Disruption, living rivers killed by Chicken Factory Farms, Sea-beds destroyed by destructive trawling, raw sewage released in order to maximise profits, the trauma of poverty and Universal Credit Sanctions Regime, as a 'nudge' to drive people into low paid work, sending children into schools with no mitigation support during an ongoing pandemic, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, slavery, Racism and misogyny.

All of these are dynamics set in place by a tiny minority of people who wield immense power.

Chile 1973. Making the Economy Scream in order to undermine a Socialist Government, democratically elected by a huge majority as a means to an end - preserving USUK dominance over the Chilean Industrial Economy.

The costs of admitting that a Socialist government had a genuine mandate from the people (Allende's Government was well liked and supported by the larger majority of the working class population) were set aside, externalised by means of a bloody coup. Military Dictatorship was preferable to humility before Democracy.

The slaughter of Allende and his ministers, the thousands of violent deaths of democratic activists, the maiming's, the tortures, the disappearances, the theft and so much more was a externalised cost of the coup - the American political establishment did not pay those costs. The English political establishment did not pay those costs. Both establishments gathered more wealth, extracted from Chile. Pinochet found sanctuary under the wing of Thatcher and the Conservative Party.

http://markcurtis.info/2007/02/12/the-pinochet-coup-in-chile-1973/ *

Mark Curtis writes about the realities of English political involvement in Chile in 1973 and beyond.

"The files clearly show that British planners in Santiago and London totally welcomed the coup and immediately set about conducting good relations with the military rulers as repression increased, even secretly conniving with the junta to mislead the British public."*

The minds and bodies of progressive community and political leaders and workers paid the price. The Chilean State and all Chilean people paid the price in decades of a brutal military dictatorship. Thatcher did not pay the price of those externalised costs. The USUK Oligarchy made a lot of money out of that dictatorship.

"The ambassador also told the Foreign Office that ‘most British businessmen… will be overjoyed at the prospect of consolidation which the new military regime offers’. British companies, such as Shell, he added ‘are all breathing deep sighs of relief’. ‘Now is the time to get in’, he recommended, while urging the British government to provide early diplomatic recognition of the new regime."*

Indeed, we ordinary people are faced with this 'war' at every turn, by degree.

I have posted, (see below) what I think are two useful historical examples, where in Norway and Sweden in the 1930s the population - workers and the middle class united to elect progressive socialist legislators into power to regulate the Oligarchy and more recently in 1999/2000, the Bolivian population ejected Bechtel, who had been given the Water Monopoly and had raised the cost of water to households - and I believe these examples demonstrate the viability of a pertinent social solidarity response to the shituation, and that this way to rein in the Oligarchy is currently available to the UK population of voters.  If only the 'progressive parties' in England would support it. But they do not.
We do have the right to vote, with which we can elect decent, honest people to represent us and we can set them to make laws we agree upon as fruitful for the whole community, and take such steps as necessary to legislate a legal duty to avoid avoidable harm, as the basic root of Government policy and future industrial activity.
There is a way to work towards a more nurtured shared environment, public and private, cultivated and wild.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/

https://www.democracyctr.org/bechtel-vs-bolivia
Social Solidarity,: person to person, person and family, person, family and community, community with other communities. Workers, unemployed, the poor, the destitute, the artisans, the clerks, the managers, the middle class, the majority in social solidarity when faced with a Government that is claiming that a cruel policy is an essential part of 'growing the economy'.
With care for one another as our basic social, economic and political setting, through organisation, education and network development, with training in deliberation, conflict de-escalation, conflict resolution, community based electoral democratic campaigning, to build a solidarity movement which by campaigning to gain the legislature, and by gaining the legislature drafting the legislation to regulate the Wealth Extraction, abolish the practice of Externalised Costs, for others to pay, in order to reawaken the Social Contract State, the social contract between Institutional Power and the ordinary person. This is just a rather simplistic overview. 

Obviously the class structure, with it's 1000 year reign, (class wars aside) there's a firm cultural attachment internalised by English people, to 'their betters', 'The Good and The Great'.  I am Irish by birth and education, and living in England I understand that the English have no history of resistance to their own Ruling Class.

Suella Cruella waits in the wings, ready to pounce on the poor. Iain Duncan Smith and Kwarteng assert that social support for the poor, disabled, the chronically unwell, pensioners and the unemployed is an incentive to not work.
There is no way around this. 

Pork Markets Liz Truss is Pinochet in a pinafore, without the military uniform. Exporting Yorkshire Tea to China, Cheese to France. 
A genuinely healthy Government rooted in social justice must legislate to provide support for whatever best practice that is needed to protect the people, to protect our shared environment, as climate and environmental disruption escalate. 
It is important to understand that poverty is a critical element of wealth accumulation as a political hegemon.  Poverty is an Externalised Cost of an extractive economic system.
Globally, Nationally and locally Governments of States must legislate new practice to implement, at pace, regulation ensuring that  industrial activity must pay all previously externalised costs associated with industrial production and consumer activity in order top prevent environmental and social harm. We cannot continue to pay the costs of Wealth Extraction. We need to implement a robust nurture culture to replace the externalised costs cult. 

"Penalise harm causation, reward harm prevention."
This is not a call to reform the existing culture. That task is impossible from within it. This is a call for a new culture. A nurture culture that ensures our children's children will grow into a healthy, sustainable social, political, economic and natural environment. An adaptive 100 year plan for humanity.
This cannot be build on ideology - it must be evidence based, transparent, honest and rooted in understanding that  meeting immediate human needs, medium and long term concerns, reducing vulnerabilities rather than exploiting them, enhancing the natural strength of people as a community, a society that is predicated upon, above all, human empathy,  respect and love.

Big ask?

Really?


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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The imposed burden of birth into an adverse setting one did not create. Queen Elizabeth II, Monarchy, Democracy and Republics.

Being born

Into a Family

that dictates

the parameters

of your entire lifw

in order to

meet the needs of

a thousand year old

Hierarchy of Power,

Wealth and Violence.

Is not an easy place to end up.

The person is not the Institution.

The Institution exploits the person.

Abolish the Institution,

free the family,

free their children,

free the people

and

let us

keep it humane

and

just.

Post script.

I wrote this poem at midday Thursday 8th September.

This poem could just as easily been written for all children born into this culture that is so violence prone.  Violence has many forms.
Poverty, for example, is an institutionalised setting crafted by Wealth Extraction as a dominant political force. Imagine being born into a racist or zenophobic society. We are all born into a culture we did not create, and that culture commonly fails to meet our full human needs, as it demands that we meet it's needs, often at our expense.

As various threads of commentary emerged, on Friday morning, 9th of September, I wish to add this:

Even as I wrote this poem, prior to the announcement of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, I noticed a thread of quite  nasty comment about the Queen as a person and I think it's valid to say that it’s more than that at face value. 
It is that there are political forces that exploit anger and pain on matters political, economic and cultural to generate thoughtless nastiness on all sides.
Making angry, hurt people angrier than they already are, for political and economic gain.
For me it is important that I honour the ordinary person she could have been, acknowledge the imperfect humanity of the person she was (I too am flawed in my humanity ) and focus on the Institution, it's historical basis, it's place in our democracy and I feel that it is vital that we who embrace honesty and probity push back against the hatred the groomers are trying and will continue to try to stimulate.
I noticed during Brexit the entities grooming pro-Brexit  irrational stances were also grooming anti-Brexit hatred to harden the proBrexit narrative and to use the anti Brexit hatred as a weapon for Brexit. Setting brother against brother, sister against sister, children against parents, neighbour against neighbour.
I think such hatred on either side, whilst understandable (there is much to be angry about, there is much pain in our lives) is also inappropriate and is corrosive to genuine democratic discourse. To deploy manipulative content to exacerbate that pain and anger is beyond the pale, it is utterly cruel and is a wound upon our polity.
The groomers  (Cambridge Analytica et al, Cummings, and many, many others) were deliberately engaged in emotional  trigger manipulation via online microtargeting aimed at both sides, designed to undermine rational discussion and to amplify division, and yet nobody within the Remain spotted it. 
Remain  couldn’t counter it. Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and others did nothing to expose it and confront it. That was a major failing.  A serious vulnerability.
That’s a trait in all of us who are exposed to and often distracted by grooming, when we are targeted by deliberate content designed to exacerbate any and every emotive vulnerability, and thus 'nudge' us from Fore Brain rational thinking to Amygdala based emotional reaction. 
Being aware of it is the first step in disarming it.
Any honest observer of weekly theatre known as Prime Ministers Questions in the UK Parliament can see that dynamic being deployed by leading politicians and back benchers. 

It is not surprising then that such dynamics percolate news media, online activity and our pubs and living rooms and offices.

The trickle down effect, to reset a well worn phrase.

Monarchy and The State as a polity.

There are very good arguments to suggest the abolishment of Monarchy as part of the English political settlement. An Institution crafted by violence, enriched by violence and colonisation, imposing a hierarchy of automated respect as a citizens duty, wrapped in flags of war and conquest, is not suited to the 21st Century.

Therefore it must be a rational argument, rooted in love of the people for each other, grounded in the best that healthy democracy can deliver and aspire to, with the intent to improve the lives of ourselves and our children, and their children to come.

Hatred and stereotype, caricature and insult, polarised 'debate' will not bring us to that happy state. We must check these when they emerge, irrespective of where they emerge from.

Let us do what we can to disarm the hatred stirrers, and root our polity in love, humility, honesty and empathy.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"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.

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"I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health | Sanah Ahsan" - The most honest article on Mental Health I have read.

To the Editor,
Sanah Ahsan's article in The Guardian, 6th September, is the most honest article on this matter - mental health - I have ever read in any News Paper in the UK.
"I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health | Sanah Ahsan"
"Society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person – and ignores the politics of their distress"
The psychology of any given family, community or society is revealed and perpetuated in how that family, community or society relates to and treats the children and the most vulnerable people within it.
"Given the kind of family, community or society you were born into, and everything you have experienced and endured, it's no wonder you feel the way you do."

I have been using this aphorism for 30 years. Because it is accurate.
The psychology of this Industrial Wealth Extraction culture, addicted to Fossil Fuels and Dominant Power, is key to examining the current situation regards mental health.
Wealth Extraction that evades the costs of preventing harm via Externalising Costs, and uses accumulated Wealth as a political utility to maintain Wealth Extraction above all other 'needs' indicates what that psychology is.

Climate Disruption is one symptom, among many. Poverty, Racism, Misogyny, Wealth inequity are others. Ordinary people everywhere suffer through no fault of our own.

I look forward to reading more honest writing about this dynamic, in every News Paper and elsewhere, to understand how this situation impacts our children and our most vulnerable fellow citizens. 
We really need to be honest as a culture, as political actors, as people and as a species, to be in a position to act healthfully on the matter of mental health across our Society.
Kindest Regards
Corneilius Crowley

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Care, Nurture and Power - Hatred as a political weapon. Where is the nurture?

"The further a political or economic culture moves from care and nurture, the more the proponents of such a drift will encourage hatred of all those who nurture and care, precisely because that care and nurture confronts the cruelty of that cultural shift"

Beyond standard ideological L/R polarities, rooted in the historical dynamic of the French Revolution, which replaced one oppressive ruling class with another, reducing political development to a struggle between two poles of oppression, masquerading as democracy, this is a question of de-humanisation, deliberately deployed, intentionally undermining humanity, and as Climate Disruption, Environmental Degradation, Racism, Misogyny  and Poverty reveal, it is a question for Humanity as a whole. As a species.

Where is the nurture? Ask that question of every policy proposal. Dig into the detail.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Poverty is an externalised cost of efficient Wealth Extraction. Shortest blog I have ever written

Amazon Warehouse in Mexico. He could have afforded to build decent housing for all the workers as part of the plan, around the warehouse, and still have billions to spare. He chose not to use his vast wealth for the benefit of workers.
Food, Energy and Housing Poverty is an externalised cost of efficient Wealth Extraction aka Industrial Profitability and the accumulation of Wealth as a Political Hegemon.
This is the shortest blog I have ever written,
~

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Advice to scrimp and be thrifty is gaslighting. We need a deeper policy, we need a nurture life policy platform.

"Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less." Oscar Wilde

This image is doing the rounds at the moment - for whose benefit is this being viralised?

How would you feel if someone advised you to eat less if you and your children were already eating less, due to poverty and speculation on necessary commodities driving prices up?

1. Asking people who, for the most part earn a low income (in order for corporations to pay high dividends to shareholders) to scrimp on Energy use in our homes, by 'raising consciousness' of the expense of daily use, with a tacit implication suggesting that if we made better 'informed' choices, we'd not face such intense bills is deliberate cruelty.
2. The price rises are entirely a matter of market speculation. UK generates 97% of it's own Energy needs. It has not become more expensive to drill, produce and ship oil. Speculation is all about using Wealth as an economic weapon.

Extreme inequality is a form of economic violence, where policies and political decisions that perpetuate the wealth and power of a privileged few result in direct harm to the vast majority of ordinary people across the world and the planet itself. 
3. Where's the chart for the energy costs of Tanks, Jets, Missiles, AirCraft Carriers, Mars Missions, Moon Missions, Yachts and Palaces? 
4. Where's the chart advising industry to be 'thrifty' with using energy?
Ordinary folk are responsible for at most, 25% of all Carbon emissions. USUK and EU populations are often presented as the biggest per capita Carbon emitters. Industry accounts for the most of carbon emission, with the US Military being the single biggest institutional carbon polluter on Earth. People point at China as the biggest polluter but ignore the population differences. If you combine Europe, UK and USA as one population it turns out that it is a population similar to that of China, and China's Per Capita Carbon Emissions are still below those of USUK and EU. Well below.

5. Carbon Footprint was initially designed as a tool to help us become more aware of the environmental costs of our day to day activity. Most ordinary carbon use is in getting to and from work, and in working for the Industrial Systems that refuse to pay the costs to prevent pollution and prevent environmental degradation. Because to do so would erase their profitability.

6. In it's great wisdom and benevolence, in 2004 BP recycled and popularised Personal Carbon Footprint as a way to make us ordinary people feel guilt, shame and hopeless hope (if we all did our little bit - which amounts to less than 10% of total) we could help save the planet) whist the Industrial Cult continued stomping on us all with their Carbon Wealth Extraction Boot Print. 

We little people were directed to obsess about our day to day use, so that BP, Shell, Exxon and their allies in Finance Markets could continue to obsess about Wealth Extraction in the 'most efficient' manner - by refusing to pay the costs of prevention of harm (pollution, disease casued by pollution and environmental degradation) and by speculating the price of energy fuels.

7. The Ukraine War is not causing Energy prices to rise - England produces 97% of it's energy needs from available domestic supplies.

So whose carbon foot print matters, and why?

https://toxicnews.org/2017/08/07/whose-carbon-footprint-matters/

"consumption and market exchange only represents a thin surface of our economy and its ecological consequences.

150 years ago, Karl Marx argued that the secret to profit, or what he called surplus value, laid in analyzing the “hidden abode” of production. 
We need a similar project to understand climate accountability in our carbon-based society. Of course, the most obvious producers of climate change are the fossil fuel producers themselves. 
A recent study suggests a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions since 1988 (in this case, it is important to remember that half of total historical emissions since the industrial revolution have come since that year of 1988).
Yet, fossil fuel companies are not the only ones profiting off carbon emissions. Energy-intensive industries like steel, chemicals, cement, and aluminum consume ungodly amounts of fossil fuels to power and materially feed their production. 
The cement industry alone is responsible for 5% of global carbon emissions. Fertilizer uses natural gas as a source of hydrogen to combine with atmospheric nitrogen to form ammonia (NH3). When they extract that hydrogen from methane (CH4) carbon dioxide is the main byproduct. 
A fertilizer plant I visited in southern Louisiana claimed to consume a staggering 9% of natural gas consumption in the entire state (a state that already hosts an enormous industry of natural gas consuming chemical factories). 
This single fertilizer plant has the highest carbon emissions in the entire chemical sector of the United States."
8. Calls to tax these companies are largely a way to distract attention from the hidden roots of all industrial profitability - the deep roots of Externalised Costs as the very foundation of industrial wealth extraction.

9. Nationalisation is a way to 'take back control' and set pricing according to the needs of the population, us little people, whose need for the utility of energy, water, transit systems, health care systems, education systems ect is a life need, it is not a luxury. Such a move would massively help to alleviate general poverty, and for that reason alone it must be done.

It is important to understand that such a policy is designed to not touch the sides of Externalised Costs.

10. Cost externalizing is a socioeconomic term describing how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. An externalized cost is known to economists as a negative externality.
"The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs and risks to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks (2003) Republican candidate for Senate from Maine and corporate governance adviser in the film "The Corporation". Moving industries to where cheaper workers can be sourced is an externalising procedure. It's sole purpose is wealth extraction efficiency.

What we need. Starting now.
In my opinion Nationalisation must be followed by legislation that demands that industry prevents harm, pays the costs they have externalised from the beginnings of the Industrial 'Revolution' - from material sourcing through processing, manufacturing, distribution through to point of sale, use, consumption and end of life disposal - as the most basic measure of industrial health and legitimacy.

We must challenge every attempt to place the burden for such deep change upon us little people, many of us on low incomes, many more well paid yet trapped in mortgage debt; diligent workers and so-called 'scroungers' struggling to stay financially afloat are not the problem here.

We must not pass our life jackets to the Industrial Giants who are throwing us off the ship, as they sail towards the destination of continued, maximised Wealth Extraction.

We must mutiny, we must peacably take the ship over, be the majority in our legislatures that we fund, and we must plot a new course towards a nurturant industrial economic system that abolishes poverty, regulates industry well, eschews warfare as a a tool, prevents pollution and nurtures human and environment as one. and is honest and transparent.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Hamlet's Sololiqoy re-written for England 2022 : As raw sewage is poured into clean waters. To preserve profits.

Gammlet: Brexshit Shakespeare aka Shitspeare
Turd Act.
Scene : Poop, floating, lots of poop. Rich Owners smoking turd cigars. Every time they mention 'growing the economy' they pump raw sewage into our waters. 
Sovereignty.

Script: Actor holds plastic turd in hand, and looks intently at it.

 “To the sea, or not to the sea?The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to take profit against a sea of turds,And by opposing, send them again.And again.

To fan The Shit,No more; and by The Shit I mean to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand unnatural years The English are heir to: 'tis a  Devoutly Norman Ruling Class. 
To swim, to paddle ;To surface, perchance to splash —ay, there's the turd:From within that floater of death what screams may come,When we have shat on all this mortal coil,Must give us pause—there's the lack of respectThat makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whiffs and pongs of rancid poop,The profiteers's wrong, the good are made to wade in effluvia!
The pongs of dispirited Brexit lore, the law's delay,The insolence of office, and the spurnsThat patient merit of th'unworthy takes,When he himself might his arse makeWith a bare moon, our prime minister? 

Who would floaters bear,To grunt and swear under a weary life,But that the dread of something shit-like just before death,The undiscovere'd slurry, from whose germsNo traveller returns healthy, these turds puzzle the will,And makes us rather bear those Tories we haveThan fly to others much much worse, that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the sewage of profit, cast offshore thoughtlessly,And enterprises of taking great piss and old bovine movementsWith this regard their currents turn turds awryAnd we lose the lot.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"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.

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'Obese patients being weight-shamed by doctors and nurses' - ACE study is routinely ignored. Why?

To the Editor,

I read the article 'Obese patients being weight-shamed by doctors and nurses' by Dennis Campbell, Health Correspondent,  writing in The Guardian, Wednesday 10th August 2022 with some degree of sadness.

Obese patients ‘being weight-shamed by doctors and nurses’

Obese patients ‘being weight-shamed by doctors and nurses’ Exclusive: Research shows some people skip medical appointments because they feel humiliated by staff

The ACE Study, carried out by Vincent Felletti and colleagues at Kaiser Permanente, some years ago studied the health outcomes of more than 50,000 people, and found a very strong correlation between health issues such as Obesity, Addiction, Heart problems and early Adverse Childhood Experiences. Further research has show the linkage is beyond mere correlation. Early adverse experiences - bullying, sexual abuse, neglect, poverty etc can have profound long term health impacts, that emerge and present many, many years later.

http://erikwblack.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/104348885/AllFilesIPLH2.2016.pdf

It is obvious that such early experience of trauma and chronic stress is not the child's fault. How can it then be the adult's fault as those illnesses present?

I have on three occasions spoken as a caller on LBC about the ACE study, and asked why the insights of this evidence base is routinely ignored. On all three occasions I was rebuffed by the presenters. They dismissed the information. They tended to discuss food, sugar and self control. They rejected the information I was presenting.

Blaming the vulnerable is a common form of discrimination.  

Lack of knowledge is part of this, as is wilful ignorance.

How is it possible that GPs and Nurses tasked with care of people with health issues are unaware of the ACE Study? I assume it is for similar reasons most people are unaware of the ACE study findings. Is it that no one wants to admit that early childhood trauma and chronic stress exists to the degree it does, and that form many sufferers, this has health outcome impacts that ruin people's lives? Is it that children ought to be seen and not heard is still a thread that runs through our culture?

Whatever it is way, that lack of knowledge and sensitivity translates into cruelty.

We must and can do much, much better. 

Kindest Regards

Corneilius Crowley

London

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"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.

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