Making Sense, Looking at What Happens: The War Against Democracy by Extractive Industrial Political Power: Wealth vs Nurture.

Making Sense, Looking at what happens: The War Against Democratic Regulation of Toxic Industrial Practices by Extractive Industrial Political Power. The Power Wealth vs Healthy Societies. 

Ordinary people, especially the low income workers, make most of the real wealth through daily toil, and the largest proportion of the wealth they generate is extracted and accumulated. The poor are a permanent externalised cost. 

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."― Aneurin Bevan

Freedom is not the absence of limits. What I have sought always is to live the tension, the contradiction, between authority and freedom so as to maintain respect for both. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

Everyone knows we're in serious, serious trouble. And there's no need to panic. Really. We've got this. 

Let me take you through my world view, in which the future is always unfinished, not least because I, as a human being living with this culture which conditions me, becoming aware of that situation I come to the realisation that I have options to undo that conditioning. In other words I become aware that I am unfinished, I can change and grow. It doesn't have to be this way.

Fatalism is a lie the ruling class, the neoliberals and the bullies inculcate in those they hold power over. Because fatalism blocks growth, inhibits hope, limits one's perception of the future.

Destiny is an illusion. Nothing is over. The future is open to possibility.

Our world is on edge, yet not at a precipice.

The Scene

The Extractive Industries : Oil, Gas, Meat, Plastics, Mining, Lumber, Fishing and all those other organised extractive activities - extracting raw materials from the natural domain - that cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change and poverty (industries that rely on cheap labour are a leading cause of poverty, and low wages is all about maximising wealth extraction). 

These industries, their owners and activist operators extract wealth from natural resources, and from human resources. They accumulate their wealth, and hoard it away from the rest of the population. They use that wealth as a political weapon.

These industrial groups, they engage in political corruption as part of their day to day operations.

Oligarchs and companies funding a think tank that lobbies politicians who are given funds - donations and sinecure jobs - by oligarchs and companies is inherently corrupt because it is buying influence, and intervenes unfairly in democratic deliberation. Politicians implementing policy papers designed by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs interests, beyond democratic examination and oversight is corrupt. If those policy papers were set for examination by the electorate, and the electorate given equal weight and power over the decision to adopt the policy, plus the ability to over see implementation and correct any errors or harms, then that would be democratic. That does not happen.

Then there's the producers, those who make things, and whose industries also cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change and poverty and who engage in political corruption as they accumulate their wealth, and hoard it away from the rest of the population, and use it as a political weapon.

Then there's us the consumers, who use the products, who work in their industries and in our use and in our work, which we must do or we die from starvation, lack of shelter - we too cause pollution, environmental degradation, climate change, we accept poverty as long as it is other people, and we are profoundly influenced by political corruption and conditioning.

Then there's the end of use disposal. We fill our trash bins every week, we throw away old electric goods as new ones arrive, we cast aside so much material. We flush our excrement away.

Where does all the 'waste' go?


I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it, which is the essential difference between conditioned and determined existence. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom


The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party

The Oligarchy, who are politically, economically, culturally and socially organised as The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party, have all waged social, economic, political and cultural wars against those who point out the harms caused in the processes that generate that accumulated wealth, and who ask that the harms be reduced, or better still prevented, who dare suggest that reparations must be made for all the harms knowingly caused. How dare they?

The Accumulated Extracted Wealth, that pile of cash that is extracted via these industries and their sales, is accumulated and concentrated away from the rest of humanity  and it sits as the treasury of a sleepless political hegemon, a political force that infiltrates and influences every political party of note. It is used to build institutions and networks, it is used to fund workers and activists, it is used to promote, propagandise, manipulate, persuade and influence the populations from which that wealth is also extracted. War is an expensive business.

The reach of Accumulated Extracted Wealth as a political agency is immense and beyond the capability of the average electorate to counter. The asymmetry of power is real.

Therefore taxing Accumulated Extracted Wealth - a slogan that has gained some traction in recent times - is already too late in that it faces the Sisyphean difficulty that by the time that much Wealth is accumulated it has become a political hegemon, a political party within and without all other political parties, groups, think tanks and movements that can and does counter any and every move to rein that power in, to address the harms caused and make just adjustments to the situation.

I repeat myself.

The point needs to be made, repeatedly. Unlike a lie, this does not become more true by repetition. Even if it was never expressed, it remains true. Repeating this is one way to shake off the dust of the prevailing fatalism. Accumulated Wealth is a Political Party.

Accumulated Extracted Wealth is a political force that is now in a position that it is stronger than many democratic States and it is currently stronger than electorates who do not understand that Accumulated Wealth is a political force.

It has to be said that there are some among the wealthy whose accumulated wealth is not party to the power struggle who make some efforts to rebalance the situation, and that in confronting this we must be careful to pay due attention to the detail and avoid generics. Slogans cannot take the place of detailed and fair analysis. 

Hope is not just a question of grit or courage. It's an ontological dimension of our human condition. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

Taxing the Rich is too late.

We need to get in before that Wealth is extracted and accumulated as a political force. AOC and her dress have a point, of course. There is something deeply unfair in the way taxation operates, and there is something profoundly ugly in the maintenance of poverty, in such a wealthy country, where close to 10% of US population cannot meet their most basic needs because they simply do not have the money to pay for those most basic needs. She's not 'wrong', she's just too late.


Taxing the really rich, the Accumulated Extracted Hoard of Wealth. does not deal with the externalised costs, and  therefore it lets them off the hook, and for very little in return, in social material terms.

Externalised Costs

I don't know if you know this : the top 20 Industries would all be unprofitable if they paid all their externalised costs. You might want to pause and just let that sink in. Where does the profitability come from? 

Who, then, pays the price of all the externalised costs?

What are all those externalised costs?

Climate Change, Environmental Damage, Air Pollution, Poverty, Low Wages. Warfare, Racism and Misogyny are all part of the externalised costs domain, in one way or another.

How can we address this problem set?

A brief outline.

Here I present a very brief, simplistic line out of I think what needs to be done. I am, of course, well aware that achieving these is both complex (there are many needs to be met, and balances to be crafted between different needs, to do all of this safely for everyone involved) and it will be complicated (the addiction to power and status will get in the way of every possible action taken to solve the problems we face, and that addiction to power and status and wealth will be a point of friction, a force of resistance, a source of recalcitrance, presenting as sulky passive aggressive reactionary behaviours by the addicts and their supporters).

The Environment. - we must clean up how industry operates, repair damage done, prevent further damage. This is all eminently possible, it will mean less profits for shareholders, etc as more investment is put into the clean up and prevention dynamics.

The Low Wage Workers. - make lowest possible wage well above any measurable poverty line, globally.  Again absolutely feasible. And again, reduced profits to shareholders as we invest in happy workers who are no longer struggling, stressed out because they lack money.

The Vulnerable Poor - Abolish poverty and destitution, look after the vulnerable. That's a factor of State and currency, and can be done irrespective of day to day taxation. By investing in care systems where care professionals are well trained, well paid and well resourced, Governments will be injecting currency into the economy and increasing happiness, decreasing chronic stress.

If after that, wealth is accumulated, then tax it fairly. 

Bearing in mind that taxation no longer funds day to day business of any Government that operates within a State that has a central bank that issues that States currency. So there's no pressure, right?

Some Democratic governments are taking steps to confront the Extractive Industries and the Accumulated Wealth Party to regulate them so as to stop further harm and setting up processes to ensure that they pay something for the harms already caused.

Everyone knows we're in serious, serious trouble.

To recap : The Extractive Industry owners are a political party called Wealth. Their vast Wealth is what gives them political power - they can fund think tanks, news papers, TV stations and online misinformation with which they can and do influence voters; they can 'donate' money to politicians and they can hire psychologists and other mercenaries, and they do. They do this to protect their ability to amass wealth which they need to be able to maintain and exercise the political power to protect their interests.

For the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party, this is indeed a vicious cycle. They are addicted, and only a united electorate, a grass roots grounded in evidence and solidarity, has the capability to help them end their addiction, by regulating their behaviour through the agency of Democratic Legislatures taking due responsibility.

The Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party get their wealth by externalising costs, by paying low wages, by thrashing the environment, by refusing to devote the resources needed to prevent the harms associated with their industries, from acquisition of raw material to end of life disposal, and everything in between. This is causing immense avoidable harm. That is not acceptable on any level.

If they are forced, or helped, nurtured and regulated by democratic Governments directed by evidence led caring adult electorates to pay the costs, their industry's would under current measures barely break even, and they would lose their political power. It is the loss of power that keeps them awake a night. That is their biggest fear - without their power they would become ordinary citizens. People just like you and I.

Beautiful People no more - oh dear. 

But actually, they could and would become far more beautiful in depth and humanity than their current imaginations could possible envision. Yes I know someone like Trump or Johnson has no interest in that at all.

To be truly humane is to eschew the leverage of power over others for it's own sake, for egoic satisfaction or for personal gain, to fully share the power to nurture one another, as a conscious choice, knowing one could choose otherwise. Being ethical is as much as possibility as being unethical is. It is that choice, to be ethical, knowing you could just as easily not, that makes for profound humane beauty.

Empathic Civilisation.

Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, : "It takes strength to be an empathetic leader."

Jose Mujica, President of Uruguay  : "If we lived within our means - by being prudent - the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.."

Jeremy Corbyn : “Life is life. Some of the wisest people you meet are sweeping our streets" and "We are one of the richest countries in the world, and there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to live in poverty.”

Ghandi : "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." 

Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."

The hierarchy of power and violence cult prefers to inculcate a fatalistic world view in the population it presides over. But that is a lie. We are naturally a learning species.  These leaders chose to learn and grow, and lead as student and teacher. 

I recognise that being born into where I was born, I was exposed to a certain social and experiential conditioning that implanted values which I then internalised. Yet those values are not who I am. They do not define me. Who I am is up to me to define and decide, and I have found that being an ethical humane being, I instinctively choose the path of growth, the way of learning, the life of ethical behaviour, the behaviour of nurture. That is who I am, imperfect as I know myself to be, aspiring towards an unknowable future that is grounded in ethical behaviour in the present, ethical action and the ever present intention for a nurturant outcome

If I am a pure product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in the world and, therefore, it is not possible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

This is a war

And yes, they - whoever they are - the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Party are waging a war. They see this as a struggle, a fight, a war to protect their entitlement and dominance.

Each of us must face this, as disturbing as it might seem, None of this will be easy. The effort required is immense. The cost of not making that effort and of not obstinately pushing through with it until we succeed to build a nurturing culture and economy, within a healthy polity will be much, much more than immense, it is likely to bring more trauma, more pain, more distress for billions of lovely human beings, and it might possibly be terminal at the species level.

What to do?

Here's an interesting video that tries to take a bigger picture look at systemic change given the problems outlined above. It goes through the various elements and suggests we need, as citizens, to elect legislators who will regulate the accumulated wealth structures so we can reduce harms, repair damages, build in nurturing processes going forwards.


If this work to make our culture a genuinely nurturing industrial economic culture was done and done really well, the owners would likely break even, they could remain in their exalted positions of relative luxury, and they would probably generate three profits - the larger profit would be a healthier system that does minimal damage which it repairs; the day to profit would be a small return to reward their efforts, justly shared across the population and the lasting social and historical profit would the the kudos they'd receive for being eminently reasonable and sensible about the whole thing.

Could a character like Koch or Johnson or Xi imagine being written about in future histories as one who helped the culture retreat from harm causation to engage in a nurturant culture? 

I know that right now, given the current narrative of the Establishment, this looks seriously unlikely. 

However we are all unfinished beings and the future is likewise unfinished. Hope springs eternal. The well of evolutionary mutual aid is deeper than civilisation, older than the human species. We can do this, and we must.

Does that make sense?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

This thing of being alive is lovely - which is why we must confront the bully culture.

This thing of being alive is lovely. 

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

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."― Aneurin Bevan



The story of how life moved from bacteria to plants, to animals, to forests and plains full of living creatures, all the way to people singing songs, laughing with children as we play and learn together, crying when we hurt, seeing, tasting, hearing, running and sleeping to awaken again, and everything else that emerges from being alive and human and loving and sensitive. How lovely it is to be a warm friendly, loving sensitive humane being! No machine, no invention can ever match that! 

Humour me, and stop right now - gaze at your hand, close it as you take a gentle breath in and as you exhale feel your hand and fingers, breathe into your hand and fingers. Do this again, and close your eyes, and then move, move your fingers gently, and feel how utterly strangely wonderful this ability to use a hand really is. Then grip something tightly, with all your strength and relax to hold it ever so gently, finding your lightest touch possible. Such a range of capability, such potential for finesse. 

Isn't it amazing? 

I do this and I think of the millions of years of evolution that went it to making this possible and I am filled with awe and gratitude. I am excited by this thought, this feeling. I think I did nothing to make this possible. How did I, this consciousness, arrive with this incredible set of capabilities? How lucky am I to be so gifted? Are we not truly blessed?

I am more often than not quietly in awe and gratitude for being alive, even though some days I am deeply depressed, or insanely angry, or confused or frightened, or just meh! A toothache is horrible and there are many other pains that are harder to bear, that take the delight out of the moment.

Justice is rooted in sensitivity

Nonetheless, I know that this thing of being alive is oh so precious, for me and for you and for every baby born, for every person who lives, every being that lives - and this, this feeling is why I detest the bully cult so much - how dare they (whoever they are) intrude upon that feeling, impinge on that sensitive life in others, and disturb it, taint it, trample all over it for their power, wealth and pomp. How dare they! That is the seat of my feeling of injustice, at it's most visceral. Before words, the feeling. Babies know this. Infants and toddlers know this. All young children know this. Innate.

The symptoms of chronic trauma are not a disorder.

People who cause trauma, who deliberately expose others to avoidable harms, are a disorder. People who expose others to chronic stress in order to accumulate wealth and power are a disorder.

Social systems that deny these simple truths are disordered. The symptoms presenting in people who have been harmed are not a disorder. They are symptoms, understandable symptoms.

George Bush and Tony Blair are disordered. As leaders or presenters or spokespersons of the institutions of competing militarised powers, they are a disorder. They are a dysfunctional psychology in action. 

If they were indicted and put on trial, that would probably go a long way to helping all those harmed by their actions come to better terms with their lived experience, especially if the outcome was to prevent future wars.  Most survivors do not want what happened to them to happen to anyone else, ever.

And for me it's not about punishing Blair and Bush et al. although I understand that drive, to hit back, to see that the person who has harmed shares the pain in some way - for me it primarily is about preventing future harms by showing that we, the grass roots, are willing to intervene and forcibly impede those who would initiate and prosecute war or harm causation. Holding them to account and putting them in prison is a matter of health and safety more than it is a matter of punishment. A warning. Don't you dare even think about initiating such action!

It is also true that to indict Bush and Blair is, for so many people, already too late. The vast harm they and those institutions they were embedded has caused is already done, and cannot be undone. Millions are suffering, un-necessarily. Their precious lives have been trampled upon and desecrated. How do we face that? What do we need to do to ease all that suffering?

The past is finished, the future is always unfinished.  

How we move in the present matters because here is where we determine the potential of the future. That we recognise what happened in the past and confront it matters in the present because it must be done in the present, it cannot be put off until tomorrow, or the day after, or next week, next month. It must be done in the present.

Part of the difficulty is a general sense of fatalism. Part of the difficulty is that few, if any, will acknowledge that we live within a violent hierarchy cult that has caused millennia of harm, that is causing immense harm today, that appears to be on a trajectory of more harm into the future, we are led to believe by it's size and ubiquity that it is indeed inevitable, there's a deterministic attitude associated with how this history is regarded, how it is understood. Understandable, from the individual perspective. How can I an impotent single human do anything about this?

In spite of all that it does not have to be this way, at all. It is this way, yet it does not have to be, into the future. The future is unfinished. There are more of the decent folk than there are bullies and barbarians. With solidarity the odds are in our favour.

Who pays the price?

1. Externalised costs means that ALL accumulated wealth from industrial culture is toxic, without exception. In war, who pays the price?


2. Because of point 1. the bulk of what we call profit is in fact a cultural and social material  deceit. 


3. Governance of the shared commons implies duty of care which in turn demands an evidence based approach to all activity and policy that affects the shared commons.


Any activist that is not integrating these three elements is failing to address reality as it really is.

Poverty is a weapon system.

It’s an open secret that a lot of people in work mostly think poor people are poor because they are inferior. This is a core component of Industrial Social Conditioning. 

"The Poor Will Always Be With Us."

That is a lie upon which concentrated wealth and power is founded.

It is also built into every hierarchy religion, it is a lie built into mainstream psychiatry, mainstream psychology and mainstream marketing. The only reason 'the poor will always be with us' is because the system mandates that poverty must be maintained as a whip that is used to keep workers working for industries that cause harm as they operate to accumulate wealth and power into the hands of a hegemonic class, the Ruling Class.

And for those of us who are poor we are made to feel a cloud of shame while the others are destroying the environment and looking down on us.

So the problem is clearly laid out.

Life is utterly amazing and precious, bullies undermine that at every turn, it doesn't have to be this way.

We understand it and thus the next question is how do we resolve the problem?

How do we end the culture of bullying?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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

Right Wing oligarch friendly meme take down analysis.

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan

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

The meme is targeting genuine concern that a significant cohort of leading politicians are corrupt, but it switches the bait to a different hook in order to avoid the actual problem - the corruption is the influence of Wealth as a political hegemon that buys some politicians it is not the wage and expense system which supports their role.
The meme was advertised, sponsored, promoted and targeted at 'progressives' and others who claim to be politically anti-establishment. The targets are reposting it without subjecting it to a critical analysis, without understanding the meme is designed to help the oligarchy achieve their political goal of destabilising democratic regulation of their extractive industrial model..

So I am going to give it a go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The activity of Political Grooming is a serious problem

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

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

It is a very dirty, nasty process.

Utterly abusive.

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

Two ways to counter this:

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


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

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

Gaslighting and Grooming, Blaming the Victim, Bullying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This activity is psychological  abuse.

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

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

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

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

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

Does this apply to every Hierarchy?

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

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

Grooming is unknown in egalitarian cultures.

The Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalists are waging a long war. 

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

--- worth a read, I think.

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

The ends justifies the means for ideologues. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is why Murdoch can choose who Rules.

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

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

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

Conflation

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

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

Here are some examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awareness across the grass roots is key

---




Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Because We Can, We Must

Because We Can We Must


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

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

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan

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

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

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

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

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

"Sitting in the dock at The Hague"?

Some day, it must happen.

Peace is more than the absence of war.

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

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

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

Peace is more than the absence of war

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

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

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

Peace is more than the absence of war

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

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

Peace is more than the absence of war

Enough already!

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

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

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

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

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

Peace is more than the absence of war

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

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

Peace is more than the absence of war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because we can, we must....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan

Deaths per million, August2021:  does not include cases of long covid or the many other avoidable harms caused by deliberate mismanagement, which is a political choice taking precedence over public health best practice. source

Where we are right now, in the UK.. just the raw truth! Watch this, then read on.


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

Why are so few people of the Press/News media and government in USUK not taking into account the experience and lessons learned by China, New Zealand, South Korea and the other countries operating Elimination of Community Transmission strategy, and reporting on the successes, and the problems they encounter, and how they resolve those problems?   

When they do comment, why do they appear to deliberately portray these strategies inaccurately and describe them as meaning eradication or Zero Covid, and thus dismiss what is already being done, what is proven to prevent the harms associated with mitigation and 'living with the virus' as 'impossible' or a 'fantasy'?

New Zealand is looking like it's suppressing and eliminating Delta - they are cautiously optimistic. They reveal the efficacy of a caring government, a caring population working together to stop community transmission even as Morrison of Australia, the Murdoch press beloved, tries to denigrate their efforts.

Reports and political commentators often describe those countries as living in isolation', as if they are cut off from the rest of the world. This is clearly not the case. A quarantined border is still allowing human traffic through, even if it limits tourism - consumer goods continue to be shipped across borders. Tourism is a luxury business, it is not a necessity. Indeed internal tourism has increased in pretty much every country, circulating money within economies. For a short term set back, Tourism could be supported to help eliminate community transmission and prevent immense avoidable harms. Instead the tourism industry has become a primary vector of the virus.

As Elimination Strategy functions to leap into action whenever a cluster emerges, usually due to an imported variant, invariably a variant that emerged in the reckless countries, the pundits of USUK et al are quick to crow about how ineffective elimination strategy is, falling silent when the clusters are controlled, and the community transmission is stopped.

The denial and the dismissive attitudes seem to me to be about protecting USUK and other reckless Governments from public scrutiny and close attention, to shield them from an open critical analysis of their deliberate, repeated mismanagement and the huge economic costs of avoidable harms they have deliberately not avoided.

1.8 billion people, c.23% of global population being protected by elimination of community transmission strategies across such a wide variety of economies and cultures is a huge evidence base. 

The USUK mismanagement teams dare not speak of it, honestly.

Freedom and being realistic

Even the 'Freedom!' crew who are highly critical of USUK Government are denying the evidence of China, New Zealand and the other countries, who have experience far less restrictions on their lives citizens of mitigation strategy countries, let alone the adverse health and mortality impacts. Death by Covid is not freedom. 10% of positive cases enduring long Covid is not freedom. So much for freedom. 

Seems to me to be that they are one the same side as the super spreader governments they proclaim against. The spreaders of misinformation are also spreaders of the virus.

Fatalism is understandable

Dr. John Campbell, a youtuber medic who does a decent job of reporting on the evidence from around the Earth, avoids political observations like the plague. So he dare not mention elimination, which he did early on, suggesting UK was insane to not learn from China and East Asia. Now he has abandoned all mention of elimination strategy, and is reliant on vaccine efficacy to get us through to a better situation.

I imagine he’s being ‘realistic’ accepting there’s no way to dislodge this English Government and just getting on with it. 

I get it. He has no option but to get on with his job, which is providing the best information he can find, from the perspective of a medic, a nurse.. Nothing will change, people need best info in order to make better decisions for themselves. Crack on.

But I see that as a form of fatalism, and I simply cannot accept that - and just as I still want to see Blair and the others indicted for war crimes, and even though I know I can’t do that myself, I refuse to let go of the need to see justice done correctly, in full, not so much as punishment but as a preventative - and so I still hold that elimination strategy is feasible, supported by vaccines, and the best way to reduce the avoidable harms that 'living with the virus' mythology leads to.

Stop causing avoidable harm. Is it really so much to ask?

IndependentSAGE is also on youtube, they broadcast a live briefing every Friday afternoon looking at the data, trends and issues, with a Q&A session for press and the public. They are a team of eminent and respected scientists in all the various fields that are affected by Covid, and they are firmly for elimination strategy, rather than 'living with the virus' or 'herd immunity'. 

IndependentSAGE have produced an informative timeline comparison which lays out the Scientific, Epidemiological and Public Health advice offered to English Government and compares it to the actual policy carried out by the English Government.

The situation in England is now that there are close to 25k new PCR confirmed cases daily, going by Government statistics.  ZOE records c. 55k new cases. Current estimates suggest that around 10% of positive cases are likely to contract Long Covid. We don't know how many asymptomatic cases that have not been tested are out and about in the community, people who are probably unaware of their status as potential vectors of infection. The existing test and trace systems are inadequate to the task assigned them.

Daily hospitalisations are currently running at around 750 in England. 

Death by Covid is Horrific

There were 207 Covid deaths in England's hospitals yesterday. How do people die from Covid? Breathlessness, breathing pain, oxygen depletion, headaches, inflammation, secondary infections, organ failure, sepsis: a parade of pain and increasing disability.

This is the thing few people are willing to look at but health workers are forced to see. Death by Covid is very painful indeed, the process is disgustingly awful. There’s no dignity, no peace only suffering often in utter isolation.

The person knows long before they die that they are in deep trauma, unlikely to survive, and that is it's own unique terror - the medical staff spend their days watching frightened people die awful deaths. 

Clap, clap, clap for heroes and no preventative action by government or citizens.

Is there a substantive pay rise in recognition of the extra burden NHS staff are bearing? Is there funding for extra staff to ease the work load of burned out medical staffers? No way. Not with this English government populated by those wealthy enough to take £40,000 holidays, add swimming pools to luxury homes during the summer break, spend hundreds of thousands refurbishing the prime ministers flat as they withdraw £20 'uplift pandemic support' per week from people receiving Universal Credit, which supports as many low paid workers as unemployed people, a benefit employers take profitable delight in.

The situation is similar to a war, with the braided generals at home, sitting in comfort and their combat troops in the trenches, engaged in the reality of combat, who see what it is really like, and then the patriotic civilians who just do not know and cannot therefore understand what war really is at all but who are encouraged to speak about ‘our boys and girls’ and ‘bravery and sacrifice'. 

War is always avoidable.

Every death by Covid is pretty much avoidable.  Stopping the uncontrolled spread of the virus in the community is feasible, and it does not need lockdowns, other than when the strategy fails - and we know why strategy fails.  Each and every death is a horror movie that goes on for days and days and days. Witnessed by medical staff who are powerless to do much more than manage death, and whose insight, wisdom and knowledge is given almost no hearing in offices where Government policy is decided.

Those poor souls. 

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

Can you imagine that as a war price?

Would you accept that?

And what of  our Schools, as they reopen this Friday, and are predicted to become super spreader events, with our children exploited as vectors of spread to attain herd immunity, intentionally so?

Must we accept that future for them?

As a culture, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, War, Poverty are all Externalised Costs which our children must bear the brunt of, they will pay the price.

This then is the question of our era, in a dark metaphor.

"Have we spent our lives filling our children's shoes with shit, before telling them to go for a long walk?"





Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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


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

Amrit Lohia tweeted the following:

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

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

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

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

Then I wrote some more.

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


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

Externalised Costs
.

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

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

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

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

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

Does this reckoning have to descend into a power struggle?

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

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

That choice is real.

To recap:

Elimination of community transmission is possible.

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



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Who decides these deaths are acceptable? On what metric?

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

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

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

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

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity.

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity. 
Acting together, we have each others back.

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

stopping the spread is spreading the love

https://twitter.com/SafeEdForAll_UK

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

A new National Union?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

https://patreon.com/corneilius

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https://www.corneilius.net

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

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

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keir Starmer has supported this Government all the way through. No ifs, no buts.
This English Government, the enfeebled Parliament, the supine opposition: the enemy within.

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

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

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

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

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

The best leverage we have is collective solidarity. 

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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