We need to talk about grooming. Again.

We need to talk about grooming.

Grooming is an active component, a strategic operation that runs though the core of every hierarchy of wealth, distal power and violence that has ever existed. 

Update: 2024 February 24th

Update: Paper on Cognitive Warfare 2023

"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."

Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.

Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)

“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)

example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.

example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU

example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate

example : Brexit!

example : Covid masks are Muzzles!

end of update.

I suggest reading that article before continuing.

Let's face it, the structure of the dominant Industrial Militarised Culture is a hierarchy structure of wealth, distal power and of violence, and it is inherently adversarial in that it suppresses the voices of those most harmed by it's operations in order to maintain it's status. This is what is happening all around us, all the time. The oppressed are being silenced, especially when they speak out and organise to confront and end the oppression they face.

To ensure the case for the oppressed is not heard by most ordinary citizens, grooming is deployed to divert the minds of the more comfortable 'well adjusted' citizens, to exploit key vulnerabilities such as insecurities, biases, knowledge gaps and fears in ways that can drive behaviour that the grooming entity can then exploit.

Thus negative stereotypes about Gypsies, for example, published in mainstream News papers, can lead to enough people thinking 'Gypsies are a problem' to enable Governments to seek to pass legislation criminalising the nomadic way of life of the Gypsy culture..
What is grooming?
Grooming is studying a person or a group of people, identifying their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns in order to exacerbate those, and thus drive predictable behavioural change that can be exploited for sexual, economic, religious, ideological or political advantage.
Grooming is fundamentally an act of psychological abuse in that rather than help the target resolve the issue, the issue is exacerbated - offence number one. 
Then the target is manipulated into behavioural changes that can be exploited  - offence number two.
Grooming is a double crime.
We need to be able to define such activity as a criminal offence as part of preventing grooming as an activity.
We also need to be able to define grooming in a way that helps those targeted for grooming to recover from such targeting, and to be able to address their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns with an eye to resolution of those, a healing outcome.

A letter I wrote to UK News Papers, defining grooming as an act of psychological abuse and suggesting it be made a criminal offence,  which was published in Ireland and Scotland. The letter looks at grooming in the context of the revelations of Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen. Ms. Haugen was a senior executive within Facebook, she was a product manager in the Facebook civic integrity department. 

In this video Ms. Haugen presents her evidence concerning Facebooks activities that exacerbated known conditions of users in order to generate traffic, through which they sold advertising, to a British Parliamentary Select Committee on Digital Media.  When challenged on this Facebook doubled down on the practice. This led Ms. Haugen to go public.



It is clear that Facebook/Meta is not taking independent action to confront this kind of abuse, and is continuing to generate vast revenues from such activity, and is lying to the public about it's actions and intent. Here Ms. Haugen explains how and why Facebook is lying to the public.

It gets worse.

Facebook is just one operational platform among many. Political Grooming operates online and in the real world of print and broadcast television, and is infecting legislatures.

We saw operatives from Cambridge Analytica move on to COVID misinformation activities early in 2020.

This is just one of many examples of this activity being very well funded, linked to right wing lobbying groups with access to legislators, and influencing COVID policy away from the Scientific advice and consensus.

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/

The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website. 
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
Byline Times writer Karam Bales has investigated, researched and written a series of articles exploring this nexus of deliberate Covid disinformation. The evidence is damning. 
A threat to democracy, a threat to healthy Governance.

"https://blog.f-secure.com/the-psychology-of-election-hacking/

An article from Finland on election hacking.

Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal.

When the news about the French election hacking broke, many recognized the timing was due to French legislation. The leaks happened just moments before the legally enforceable election silence started, making it impossible for the media to report on, and for the campaign staff to correct any falsehoods and disinformation.

But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. In fact, the leaks during the election campaigns both in the U.S and in France are textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. 

This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation."

From an article about election hacking, written by  Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish research Agency of the Finnish Defence Forces, entitled 'The Psychology of Election Hacking.'
This describes in brief the activities behind the Brexit Campaign, and indeed the grooming activity can be traced back to Boris Johnson's writing career in Brussels, in the mid 1980s, where he was paid £250,000 annually to write lies about the EU for the English Conservative audience.
To the present, then.
NATO, Ukraine and Russia

NATO, topically enough, is up to it's eyeballs in this kind of psychological grooming. 

It issued a report in 2020, entitled Cognitive Warfare. There are more documents available here : NATO's officials are quite brazen about this.

NATO is quite clear, as this text taken from the report, demonstrates.

"While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon".
"The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

"Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. "
In other words, none of this is new. What is new is the enhanced capability offered via social media and online microtargeting. The ability to influence individuals in private which enables a layer of ersatz secrecy. A sibling might share a home, but not a content feed. In that context civil war becomes easier to foment in the minds of targets within any given community. An advertising budget is now a utility of the battlefield.
 We can see the real world effects of this on our screens and news papers right now, today, as USUK media ramp up war speech, even as Ukrainians on all sides say nothing much is happening and that they don't want much to happen, either.

Attack people's minds through cognitive biases and ramp it up towards real world violence against political and economic hubs.
Weaponising the minds of any vulnerable part of the population. The NATO report says this:

"As defined by Clint Watts, cognitive Warfare opposes the capacities to know and to produce, it actively thwarts knowledge. 

Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more).3 

Cognitive Warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more). 

Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. 

Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital."

Cognitive Warfare - Political Grooming Gangsterism -  targets the whole of a nation’s human capital - Brexit, Trump, anti-masking, anti-lockdown, anti-vax, climate denialism, online and real world misogyny, the denial of Racism as a problem within Britain's institutions - Police, Military, Government, Civil Service and NHS, in spite of ample evidence of racism causing harm in all these institutions.

Corbyn and the Sabotage

Without any shadow of doubt this is intentional psychological abuse, and it has been the a core component method of mind games and sectarian warfare within the Labour Party, waged to sabotage the Socialist membership and ensure that neither Corbyn nor any Socialists would gain high office by Labour winning a majority in Parliament. This amounts to am amoral and disgusting betrayal of the right of the British electorate to fair elections and a healthy governance system.
We really need to get on top of this, rapidly.
Why is this important in terms of democratic deliberation?
Because effective policy must be based on reliable, real world evidence, rather than belief or opinion.
And, with climate change ahead of us, the need for reliable evidence based policy on almost every area of our way of life is essential. Pollution in the air, on land, in all our waterways, environmental destruction, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, racism and poverty are all areas that demand an evidence led response to resolve those problems, and the need is urgent.
There can be no room for error driven by belief or opinion - if we are to make errors, let it be based on the best available evidence and aware of the limitations inherent in such a position being that as new information becomes available, changes to policy can be made addressing that new situation.
Grooming as an activity is all about entrenching beliefs that deny evidence, in order to render the target exploitable. It is a direct threat to solving real world problems.
"A problem fully understood is half way towards resolution. A problem incompletely understood is insoluble."

We need to define grooming activity as an intentional act of psychological abuse, and we need to pass legislation that criminalises such behaviour, and the criminal law should impose severe penalties, financial and custodial, for such criminal activity especially so when it is aimed at a population, because it is a fundamental abuse of Human Rights.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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COVID is Over, Give Greed a Chance!

COVID is Over, Give Greed a Chance!

I was in my local chip shop, yesterday late afternoon, it's been a while since I splashed out on a bag of chips.
A bag of chips costs me £2.40, which is the same price as 2kg of Organic Potatoes, and so for me to buy chips - eating out - is a rare luxury. Some will say buying Organic is also a luxury. I have eaten Organic food all my adult life, and I deem it an essential element of my approach to food as the first medicine. I do not remember the last time I ate at a restaurant. I cook for myself everyday, using whole foods.  Thus far I have fared well enough, I think. 
It's mostly good luck. Health is. Most of us do not understand exactly how much good health is a matter of luck and circumstance. Ascribing personal responsibility for good luck is also a common error. Survivorship bias is among one of the most common biases.

I know because all of these are errors I make almost every day.
At 63, I can run 2 km without collapsing, I sleep 6 hours most nights, my cholesterol is 5.1, (recent blood test) and apart from genetic gum disease and loss of teeth exacerbated by 40 years of smoking (I have stopped smoking this past year, and feel so much the better for it) and neglect due to an irrational terror of dentistry, and the teeth grinding, a symptom of cPTSD from childhood and adult trauma, I appear to be in robust health.   'Appear' being the descriptive word.

I have not been to a doctor in 40 years, for any kind of detailed check up. I do not know what lurks within this battered body and mind in terms of chronic disease.
I feel the aging process, and I think am comfortable with it, (that said, I am thinking of getting rid of all mirrors in my home... lol!) and I can see into a future with more frailty. That's the nature of life. We grow, and we grow older, if we live long enough, we become decrepit. I'm well aware that I am very, very lucky. So far.

Health, Luck and Circumstance

There are millions of people who are not so lucky, who live with chronic disease, which they suffer through no fault of their own. Millions of people, active, working people, live with a vulnerability and an endurance and grace the fit are largely unaware of. Ableism is the conceit that anyone with a disability is somehow inferior, that they are lessor human beings, rather than simply unlucky in health. Ableism is also the un-realisation that some chronic disease states are almost invisible. There are a myriad of factors that determine a persons life health chances, many of which are determined even before that person is born.

So like I say, I know I am very lucky indeed. The fit are more lucky than actively fit.

Johnson and his sponsors are about to change all that. Again.  
So there I was, buying a good sized paper cone of chips, (my chippie is generous with his portions) splashing out on a luxury, and whilst exchanging pleasantries, my Chippie Man was explaining his plan to move the business to a site opposite the local train station, a process that had been delayed by successive COVID surges. 
He told me he hopes he will gain more passing trade. I have been buying chips from his shop, and from the previous owner, for 19 years. Their chips have remained the best standard throughout. I love those chips. He deserves more trade. He's also a really nice person.
He told me "COVID is over now, it's all going back to normal! I'm really happy about that."
"Hmmm..." I said as I handed over my payment, in change, in 5p coins. I am digging into my reserves for this luxury.
I suggested he might want to rethink that. "The Pandemic is not over." I said. "The virus is still circulating."
He was having none of it. He rejected my assertion. "It's in the papers! Covid is over. They are lifting all the restrictions."
I responded by asserting that Johnson was a liar, and a real danger to all of us, and that he could not be trusted. He accepted the liar allegation, (everybody does now, apart from other liars) but he did not my Covid risk assessment. 

Arrogant Repetitive Reckless Serial Endangerment .
He was not angry, nor was I. He smiled, I smiled. 
I said to him "I look to the epidemiologists and virologists, rather than the politicians or news papers." 
He smiled back at, me, shook his head and repeated "It's over. We'll be fine."
Hope springs eternal, and flows more easily through knowledge gaps exploited by News Media and Politicians working for Oligarchs whose Wealth Extraction Cult dominates our lives. 
Of course, I said none of this. Indeed that through did not occur to me until I was down the street a bit, munching on the slightly cooled, salted chips on top. That's when I started thinking about writing this piece.

My chippie is a hard working guy, looking after his small business, his family and he's not greedy. He's a good person. One of many, many millions. The vast majority of people are indeed good people.

Johnson is not a good person.
The UK Government - The Johnson Regime - is going to end the legal requirement for Covid positive tested citizens to self isolate, and that will also allow them to end payments for those who test positive, payments designed to support them self-isolating, as a way to reduce transmission of the virus. 

Savige Javid, a CDO salesman at the heart of the fraud of the 2008 crash, is criminally insane, and he's working for JP Morgan, and their agenda.

Criminally insane! Reckless Endangerment

It's not about saving money, it's about their hatred of giving ordinary people 'money for nothing'. That game is for the wealthy and their cronies. Well, it's money for connections, rather than nothing. Those connections are part of their currency of power and influence.

Someone asked, if we were back in 2020, and knowing what we know now what we have done differently?

I replied we would have removed the governments that ignored the epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists, public health experts as soon as they showed any signs of ignoring the science and gaslighting the population or enabling profiteering.

We would have chased down misinformation generators, and imprisoned them for attempted manslaughter
All of which still needs to be done.
The Johnson Regime, with Health Secretary Savige Javid (lately of JP Morgan) in political control of our NHS, and our National Health Policy, are going to end free test availability, be they Lateral Flow or PCR tests. Austerity was always a punishment strategy. Universal Credit : Sanctions, removing funding. Making the claimants scream! Making low paid work seem more attractive by maintaining or escalating poverty levels.

Circumstance 
This new strategy of ignoring COVID, of removing support for self isolation, ceasing free availability of tests, and mandating full return to offices etc, is something that will impact most heavily upon those on the lowest incomes, the minimum wage and just above it - hospitality staff, shop assistants, care workers, prison officers, teaching assistants and many others whose work brings them face to face with lots of people, many of them clinically vulnerable, on a daily basis. 
Low income workers who will be forced to pay out of their already meagre and shrinking budgets to assess their own risk in order to act as responsible citizens. Some may well decide to take the risk. We know that lack of economic support - lowest sick pay rates in Europe - has undermined suppression of the community transmission of the virus. 

One cannot see what one does not measure.
The reduction in testing will of course lead to a reduction in the numbers of confirmed cases, but it will not reduce the numbers of cases.  As noted by Trump and John Hopkins University, albeit it different contexts, less testing means less numbers of confirmed cases - but it does not mean less cases.
The reduction in PCR testing will diminish the UK's world beating genome sequencing, and we will begin to go blind to the virus and it's variants. What we don't know could well kill us, harm us, expose us to life long chronic disease. 
And with regards SARSCOV2, what doesn't kill us quite evidently does not make us stronger.
This Johnson Regime policy is head in the sand, arse in the air: see no virus, hear no virus, virus is not happening. Pretend it is not happening. World beating denial. There were no parties.  Well there were parties, but I was not there. OK, I was there but all guidelines were followed. Russia is on the cusp of an invasion. Brexit is working. 
This is called living with the lying bastards. This is a world beating strategy. Tony Blair, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell. Liars that rule the world. Giving the world a beating.

In the most simple terms, the Johnson Regime is intent on ignoring the virus, letting the little people take it on the chin. We, the impotent plebs - oh  my, how we are understanding our impotence in ways we never expected to or wanted to know - you and I and our elderly relatives, our vulnerable neighbours, everyone in our communities, we must take it on the chin.
Protect the Hoard, let the Herd take it on the chin. 
The last two years has shown quite clearly that the poorer members of 'the herd' which  includes people who are disabled, people from ethnic minorities, low income citizens and the clinically vulnerable have taken the most on our chins, with devastating harms inflicted upon these more vulnerable parts of our population.

This report is just one of a number detailing how ethnic minorities have fared worse than others throughout this pandemic.
https://www.keele.ac.uk/about/news/2022/february/keele-comment/covid-poverty-ethnic-minorities.php

"Ethnic minority groups have suffered the highest risk of COVID mortality in the UK, according to the latest official figures. In the first wave (before the vaccine roll-out), the risk of death was highest for those with a black African background. During the second and third waves, it was consistently highest among those with Bangladeshi origins.
Those high levels of risk are partly to do with where people live and how they earn a living. Members of ethnic minorities tend to work in sectors which require face-to-face contact such as social care, retail and transport. They are also more likely to live in places where it is difficult to practice social distancing."

"Our research into rates of ethnic poverty (systemic poverty within an ethnic group) found levels before COVID of 50% for Bangladeshis, 47% for Pakistanis and 40% for black people, compared with 19% for white British people. Our work also supports fears that the pandemic risks making things even worse if action isn’t taken to reverse its effects.
For example, reports suggest that while ethnic minorities had higher unemployment rates before the pandemic, they then suffered a higher proportion of job loses during it. Rates of ethnic unemployment in the period from October to December 2019 were 4.5% for Bangladeshis, 7.7% for Pakistanis and 8.7% for black people, compared with 3.4% for white British. A year later, after almost a year of COVID, those rates went up respectively to 6.4%, 9.8%, 14% and 4.5%."
It is important to note that while the impacts of pandemic mismanagement and poverty impact ethnic minorities are as described, the mismanagement has caused immense harm to the ethnic majority as well. Nobody is safe under the Johnson Regime.

This article from December 2020 by a human rights advocacy group looks at the failures of the Johnson Regime in terms of protecting the populations right to health which, as it happens, is the legal duty of the Government.

"The UK’s response to COVID-19 has been widely criticized by scientists and the public. According to EuroMOMO, a European mortality monitoring initiative, the excess mortality that may be attributable to COVID-19 in England is one of the highest in Europe, second only to Spain.

"In this article, we observe the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and identify some issues that have emerged in such exceptional times. We argue that the right to health as enacted today is not sufficient to address these issues. The current international human rights framework is robust, but states’ obligations should be clarified so they can be adapted to public health measures in times of pandemic. At the same time, international public health documents to prepare for pandemics are not sufficient on their own to protect the right to health of everyone. We offer some recommendations to that effect.
Writing about issues as we witness them allows us to construct reliable historic memory. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many deaths that could have been avoided had we been better prepared with strong rights-based provisions. These are essential lessons to be learned, and the human rights community has a crucial role to play to ensure that future responses to pandemics are grounded in human rights law."

The People's Covid Inquiry laid out in greater detail the legislation on protecting the populations right to health, and how this Government has failed to uphold the law, and in some cases transgressed laws, including committing the offence of Misconduct in Public Office in relation to protecting the populations right to health.
Risk and Vulnerability.
Poverty aside, there are 11 million people in the UK living with chronic disease, 6 million of whom have two or more conditions - these people are clinically vulnerable. Many of these people are part of the working population.

There are are 1.3 million  clinically vulnerable children.
A similar number of adults are now enduring Long Covid. We do not yet know or understand the long term implications of their condition.
Is this Government embarking on a strategy towards total population infection?

Are they assuming that the vaccines will keep the harms below the radar of public awareness?

Are they anticipating that the deaths of the vulnerable will reduce pension costs? Is that potential saving of any real economic significance? Or is it just spite?

Are they hoping that the apparently healthy survivors will retain some kind of immunity?

Are they planning that the cases of Long Covid will be excluded from Insurance under pre-existing condition clauses?

Is the strategy of failing to control transmission of the virus congruent with the plan to proceed with privatisation of the NHS and steady withdrawal of state funded and operated social care as laid out by various Free Market think tanks and writers?

As things stand all state funded and operated services are being unreasonably stressed, staff are facing burn-out, staff retention is at record low levels - ripe for take over by private capital to 'solve the problems of socialistic state inefficiency'.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Nadhim Zawahi - children should be seen, and not heard. Honesty in schools must be crushed. Making Schools Safe for Lying Authoritarians.

Nadhim Zahawi, Education Secretary, (also Minister for Mass Infection of Children, Delta and Omicron version), writing in the Daily Mail, suggests a campaign to "root out activist teachers who indoctrinate children."

'Education not indoctrination': Nadhim Zahawi tells schools to root out activist teachers 'brainwashing' children after claims of 'worrying' race lessons and pupils as young as 10 urged to write critical letters about the PM in class

Nadhim Zahawi will issue guidance to ensure teachers present balanced views.

He said it was to ensure 'complexity' of many important questions is understood

Mr Zahawi said it is part of democracy for children to shape own political views

Comes after he investigated reports 'concerning' race theories being taught

Zawahi's ire was drawn forth from a letter written by a 10 year old child, to his local MP, in Nottingham. The letter was written as part of an English lesson at a primary school, Wellbeck Primary School. As per the curriculum instructions, taking real life examples and working them into a written project.

We are told that the teacher involved had posted critical comments on the Johnson governments policies on SARSCOV2 and Brexit on his personal twitter feed, having used the abusive term 'tory scum' at least once .
Here is  a section of the child's letter.

'We looked at famous leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, and we have also looked at teachers and headteachers who are doing their part in keeping us happy, healthy and safe.

'We also looked at people who we respect and disappointingly, our own Prime Minister has not made it onto this list.

'During this past week I watched a story on BBC Newsround that stated our PM is under investigation for 12 parties that have apparently occurred - a few of which had over 100 people at them when we weren't even allowed to meet more than two people

'What makes this matter worse is that when he was questioned about it in Parliament he said the following, ''I have been reassured there was no party.''

This is a lie.
'We also looked at people who we respect and disappointingly, our own Prime Minister has not made it onto this list,'

Reasonable points, well made.

Seems reasonable to me. And yes, I can easily imagine a 10 year old child writing  such a letter, being able to comprehend such basic matters of justice. Most children are  naturally intelligent, creative and curious. Most have a keen sense of injustice.

This brings me back to February 2006, at the Power Inquiry Conference, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, opposite the Houses of Parliment.

Part of the afternoon session was a general discussion that touched on Iraq, Pensions, the NHS, Education, lowering the voting age and other matters. The panel was inviting questions from the audience. About 500 people were seated in the hall.
There was a 13 year old boy, close to the front, who had his hand up, and he kept it up, standing there for a good 10 minutes, as other questions were taken and answered.
Eventually, the panel acknowledgd  his persistence, and allowed him to speak, a microphone was passed to him. This is the question he asked.
"What if the money spent on War in Afghanistan and Iraq was invested into our grandparents pensions?"

The audience erupts in applause. Applause subsides, panel takes two more questions.
The adult politicians on the panel - Menzies Campbell, Ed Milliband - ignored his question, answered the other questions.

I was there, I witnessed that happen. I was infuriated.

The child made a really good observation. We all knew the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were amoral, un-necessary and illegal. 

The 'adults' turned from the honesty of a child and in that moment betrayed the very meaning of democracy and justice. 
Most children have a keen sense of injustice.
Most children, if invited  to, if they feel safe and if they can truly trust the adults before them, will be honest about what they see.
Rarely will they be wrong - they see what they see.
Hence the honest child is seen to be a threat by every authoritarian, be it a parent, a teacher, a class bully or indeed a corrupt politician,
Honest history, a genuinely honest history curriculum would prevent so much avoidable nonsense. The lack of honesty about our histories among our political class, in our news and press media, in news broadcast and across entertainmentin England is well known.

History is not merely about the past, it is the present we are living through. We are always writing our history. Johnson did not break any Laws and he never lies, and even if he did, it cannot be said directly in Parliament. Some people devote a lot of energy to rewriting history as it happens.

What price an Honest History Curriculum? 

However, due to political interference, in spite of teachers best efforts, we do not have a honest and balanced, well informed history curriculum. Lessons on Slavery, Empire and The Holocaust are carefully curated to obscure the detail that really does matter.

My personal take on history is that it ought to tell the stories of the least powerful people and their families, the people most adversely impacted by the actions of the most powerful - for what, and at what human cost. This graphic illustrates this power disparity.

It was created by David Smail, and is part of his talk:  'There's No Such Thing as Society'. The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy

A talk given at the SCOS annual conference on 'Organizations, Institutions and Violence', Dublin, July 2001

source: http://web.archive.org/web/20090530020422fw_/http://www.davidsmail.info/talk01a.htm

David Smail has written much that is pertinent to the situation we find ourselves in, in the midst of a Pandemic. His site is off-line, and this link goes to an archived version of his website, via way back machine, which I find very useful.

This article below in The Conversation on the matter of Holocaust history, and a general lack of knowledge across the UK on that matter, is topical, in that it reveals something of the grimy underbelly of discrimination currently emanating from the Home Office, and percolating throughout the ideological fight or flight emotional grooming of Brexit, and the almost constant political 'fiddling' with our children's education. The politicos at the Department of Education are quite exercised about indoctrination - they prefer their own to any others, or to none, as it happens.

https://theconversation.com/most-uk-adults-dont-know-key-details-of-the-holocaust-how-it-has-been-taught-in-schools-may-explain-why-171702

"A survey exploring knowledge of the Holocaust has exposed limited awareness in the UK of some of the most fundamental aspects of this history. Conducted by the Claims Conference, a non-profit organisation which secures compensation for Holocaust survivors, the survey was based on interviews with 2,000 randomly selected adults. Less than half of the respondents knew that six million Jewish people were killed and only one-quarter were aware of the meaning of “Kindertransport”, the rescue of children from Nazi territories.

I am a researcher at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and was a member of the taskforce for the Claims Conference United Kingdom Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study. My research explores teaching and learning about the Holocaust in English secondary schools.

Absence from schools

The lack of knowledge revealed by the survey is partly due to patchy school teaching of the Holocaust. Before the 1990s, Holocaust teaching and learning in the UK was neither widespread nor popular. Generations of children received little or no formal education about the Holocaust.

This had slowly begun to change in the 1980s, but the most significant development came in 1991 when the Holocaust became compulsory content in the national history curriculum in England for students aged 11-14 years. It has remained on the curriculum ever since. Although there is no such statutory requirement in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, it is widely taught in these countries as well

The deliberate lack of a fully informed historyin schools is a covert method of indoctrination by omission. "What they don't know about us can't harm us."

Which helps explain why Home Office can get away with proposing legislation that criminalises the entire traveller community. By which I mean to say that in a healthy governance system, that idea would be shot down as soon as an official uttered the words or sent a memo or email suggesting such a policy, and that person would be subjected to a 'performance review' and likely urged to seek counselling. Clearly we do not have a healthy governance system at The Home Office.

A brutal oppressive column inciting legalised hatred of Traveler culture is not a joke.

https://barristerblogger.com/2021/05/20/the-evil-of-priti-patels-anti-gypsy-legislation/
This blogger writes about a very dark article in the times, written by Matthew Parris:"What on earth has happened to Matthew Parris?
For the last thirty years or so he has produced beautifully written, persuasive columns on subjects from llamas to high politics, typically characterised by thoughtfulness, tolerance and moderation. Then, last Saturday he wrote an extraordinary piece under the headline “We should stop pandering to Travellers.”
Depressingly, almost all of the 1200+ people commenting below Mr Parris’s article agreed with him. Many of the comments – and I doubt that they were those sympathetic to Gypsies – had been deleted as “violating our policy,” but a sample of those considered acceptable included comments such as:

“They live below the legal radar and do not abide by the same rules of decency and respect that most people do.~Poor to non existant (sic) education, high levels of criminality, high unemployment and truly dreadful attitudes to women make it a group we can do without in the future.~These groups are the most violent of societies and live by crime. Of course their children are uneducated; wives are beaten; medical staff are intimidated. The list is endless.~[T]heir lifestyle is at root parasitic – it feeds almost entirely off the mainstream without giving back – or any intention of doing do – it’s all take and no give; all entitlement and no responsibility.”~That their children are deprived of education is the fault of their lifestyle, children moving all the time cannot have a settled education. That they die young, is also their own fault too.”
~

Matthew Parris, his editor, the editor of the Times and all these people view the prospect of  legalised oppression of the traveller culture as a positive.
The same people are livid over Allan Carr's Holocaust 'joke'.  Hypocrisy abounds.

"And Times readers are more polite than most. 
Elsewhere in the press it is easy to find, below almost any story about Gypsies commenters describing them as “filthy,” “thieves,” “freeloaders” “rats” and worse. The occasional slightly more liberal commenter might observe that whilst all these things are true of Travellers they are less so of the “genuine Gypsy,” a view shared by Heinrich Himmler who wished to spare a few “pure-bred” Gypsies while organising the murder of at least 500,000 whom he considered racial vermin.

How little has changed in 500 years. It has been the Gypsy and the Traveller’s lot to be hated, feared and misunderstood for centuries. The preamble to the Egyptians Act 1530 illustrates how little those prejudices have changed:
“FORASMUCH as before this time divers and many outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians, using no craft nor feat of merchandise have come into this realm, and gone from shire to shire and place to place in great company, and used great, subtil, and crafty means to deceive the people … and so many times by craft and subtilty have deceived the people of their money, and also have committed many heinous felonies and robberies, to the great hurt and deceit of the people that they have come among ….”
The Act made it unlawful for Gypsies to enter the country, and those already here were given 16 days to leave or forfeit their possessions.
Henry VIII’s attempt at ethnic cleansing failed, as did another  Act passed during his eldest daughter’s reign in 1554, which exempted Gypsies from deportation or execution if they assimilated into the general population or, as the Act put it, gave up their “naughty, ungodly and idle” way of life."
Is this History taught honestly in all our schools?  Is it not the case that that lack of honesty is part and parcel of the way oppression and hatred is nurtured and anger is directed at the nomadic culture by the settled, and that it functions as a scapegoat, a distraction and a vent for other frustrations the ordinary settled endure at the hands of the Ruling Class?

Indoctrination?
What is political grooming other than a profoundly ugly psychologically abusive covert form of indoctrination?

SCL, the 'strategic election communications' company which birthed Cambridge Analytica, ran psyhological warfare campaigns in 68 countries, during 100 elections, before Cambridge Analytica was spawned to indoctrinate and groom vulnerable people across the UK to support Brexit, the lies of which lay scattered all about us in early 2022.
https://qz.com/1239762/cambridge-analytica-scandal-all-the-countries-where-scl-elections-claims-to-have-worked/

Unsurprisingly, the people involved in this kind of work continued, even after Cambridge Analytica was exposed, and devoted their energies to spreading covid misinformation and lobbying the Covid Recovery Group amongst the Conservatives, leading to avoidable harms not being avoided.
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/

Nadhim Zahawi, the multi-millionaire landlord who voted to cut the £20 a week Universal Credit Covid Uplift, who voted against regulation of dodgy landlords and increased rights for renters, who took up the role of Education Secretary and is quite clearly  an education dunce,  the same Nadhim Zawahi wants to 'root out activist teachers who indoctrinate abd brainwash children?'

Nadhim Zawahi who is personally and institutionally responsible for mass infection of school children across England, as the Education Secretary that coerced children into unsafe schools in the midst of a pandemic.

Nadhim Zahawi has written to School leaders.

Focus = attendance

This is particularly concerning attendance targets are already driving many headteachers to threaten vulnerable households with fines and prosecutions.

https://t.co/lwsoFHfk4y pic.twitter.com/NX2WpzYShy

— Clinically Vulnerable Families 💙💜💗 (@cv_cev) November 23, 2021

Yeah, that Nadhim Zawahi. 

~
Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Substandard Housing, the NHS and the Health of the people - solving problems by nurturing people's homes.

It is estimated that more than 8 million people live in substandard housing across the UK.

It's not a bad deal to invest £9 billion to improve the lives of 8 million citizens, who will put all of that back into the economy, twice over, and repeat. People in happy secure homes contribute to the economy on many levels.

I think that on a fundamental human level, radical security of home, hearth and table is a key building block of healthy community. Every one is at home.
A little empathy and a budget of £9 billion could go a long way in terms of designing and delivering a policy that could bring about a direct social material improvement in the living situation for a significant population of fellow citizens, those 8 million souls currently living in substandard housing.

Update Edit : As we roll into the Autumn and Winter '22 and energy price speculation drives homes and business energy bills into outrageous levels (the costs of producing have not changed much in the past three years), the adverse health impacts are clear. Sir Micheal Marmot lasy them out.

'This is not airy-fairy stuff, this is shortening lives.'

Former WHO chair Sir Michael Marmot tells LBC that cold homes this winter will cause 'permanent damage to the lungs of children'.@TomSwarbrick1 | @MichaelMarmot pic.twitter.com/1nntnowhhT

— LBC (@LBC) September 1, 2022

One irate caller rang in just after the Marmot segment had finished to say "we 'ad it tough and we survived!" Tom Swarbrick has not having it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/generation-britain-long-term-illness-cold-poor-winter-cost-of-living-crisis

"All I want is a room somewhere./ Far away from the cold night air …/warm face, warm hands, warm feet. Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly.
To Eliza Doolittle’s lament we can add, not just “loverly”, but healthy, too. George Bernard Shaw, whose play Pygmalion was the source for the film My Fair Lady, was writing about Edwardian London. Yet cold and poor is the reality facing 66% of the population this winter in 21st-century Britain.
Both “cold” and “poor” will contribute to worse health and greater health inequalities. It is a humanitarian crisis. One that will not be solved by tax cuts or removing levies that favour green energy, as seems to be the “solution” proposed by our likely next prime minister. We need to act on the immediate crisis, but we also need to ask how we got here, and what to do to solve the problem of fuel poverty, and its effects on health inequalities, in the longer term.
Fuel poverty has three components: the price of fuel, the quality of housing and ability to pay. The definition used to be having to spend 10% or more of household income to heat your dwelling to an acceptable level. Some variant of that is still used in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England, the definition changed, which makes comparisons difficult: a household is fuel poor if the property has a low efficiency rating and the household disposable income, after housing and energy needs, is less than 60% of national median income.
For the cold part of cold and poor, the causal chain is simple. Inflation in general, and the cost of heating, will lead to fuel poverty. Fuel poverty will lead to cold homes. Cold homes will damage mental and physical health. The health effects are considerable, as laid out in our report, Fuel Poverty, Cold Homes and Health Inequalities in the UK, published today by the UCL Institute of Health Equity.
The health effects start in childhood with lungs damaged by cold, but also by mould and damp that tend to accompany cold in substandard housing. Children who live in cold, damp homes have more respiratory illnesses than children who do not. This higher burden of illness is likely to continue through into adulthood.
Cold damages mental health. Children growing up in cold homes have more psychological symptoms than children in warm homes. They also perform less well in school. A combination of days missed through illness, inadequate conditions for study and homework, and the effects of cold on mental health and development all contribute."
Grift and Wealth Extraction.
First, take a moment to enjoy this satirical Pythone scene of grandees celebrating their past poverty and current wealth, Who among the Tory Party will celebrate after electing Truss or Sunak, both of whom are more or less ignoring the poverty being imposed on millions of British households by rising energy prices, years of wage stagnation, austrity, privatisation of social care and grift, warming in the glow of their extra-large shareholding dividends and low taxation.

"We 'ad it tough!"?

How callous is that?

How much money was lost or or how much wealth was extracted by the corrupted VIP PPE contracting to cronies? How many millionaires were minted? At what cost, was the failure of Test and Trace in impeding spread of the Virus, beyond the 'lost' money? 200,000 avoidable deaths, often of vulnerable people. 1.4 million cases of long COVID. Economic disaster for 3 million small businesses.

What does it mean when the the loss of what it could have been used for, had it been deployed in practical and proven ways to suppress transmission which would have saved lives, prevented chronic disease is of so little interest to our Rulers?

It bears repeating. Minting millionaires whilst negligence 'allowed' 200,000 horrific deaths, each death a catastrophic trauma event. 1.4 million cases of Long Covid. Poverty increasing. Minting Millionaires and celebrating the fact with Wine Fridays! #torydeathparties  NHS on it's knees.

Johnson advises the poor to buy a new kettle, during his self congradulation tour. 

This Parliment, and this Government, is unfit for purpose if the purpose of Government and democracy is Justice and Healthy Governance.

To be honest, and to be fair, all of that negligence, waste and grift is unforgivable; injustice prevails as long as those new millionaires still have those millions to hand, and as long as the grifters in power remain unindicted.
They - we know who they are - must be sent to trial for Misconduct in Public Office, Corruption, Corporate Manslaughter by Negligence and the newly minted millionaires subjected to class action civil litigation claims to return the misappropriated wealth to the States coffers.

Substandard Government, Substandard Housing, Top Notch Wealth Extraction.
With regards to substandard housing, we do know that such an investment - £9 billion, maybe £12 Billion given recent rises for materials and labour - would pay for itself. 
It would, in terms of tax expenditure and future returns as peoples lives are improved, provide a decent and orderly base from which those 8 million people could operate. And, in terms of the savings arising from preventing the harms of substandard housing going forwards means, it makes for a sound economic public health policy.
Avoiding avoidable harms is a sound axiom of healthy governance. An a priori ethical stance. Avoiding avoidable harm is common sense.

If we become aware of a harm, then we cease causing that harm. We look again, and we find another way to do whatever it is, a way that does not cause harm.
And that is why taking reasonable action to assure that the security and comfort of a comfortable, clean and econimically sustainable home is an actualised and lived Human Right, that it is fully met and upheld, has to be an essential element of a healthy democracy.  
There is no good reason to not devote such a small part of total government expediture to significantly reducing levels of chronic stress, distress and unhappiness substantively, in quantifiable observeable reality, for millions of people by improving the material standards of 2 millioon substandard homes.
In some sense that reflects how bio-logical life on Earth works. Everyone is at home.

And yes, our civilisation is flawed, and our circumstance as citizens, varied. We all know now that England in 2022 is far, far from a healthy democracy. It is a kleptocracy, it's governing system is operating as a bully cult, and it's people are being bullied by billionaire wealth extractors.

Who will stand up to the bullies?

It is estimated that 8 million people live in substandard housing across the UK.
Which brings me to the matter at hand. I live in substandard housing, have done for 19 years. My landlord finally put in central heating four years ago. I wage a constant battle against mould and damp. I am being evicted because the landlord wants to take the capital gains he has made in the past 20 years, by selling the property, and of course he will not share any of that with me, in spite of the rental income he has gained in that time. I serve merely as an object from which he extracts wealth.

My government supports that wealth extraction, by refusing to legislate fair social rents and by encouraging buy-to-let landlordism to maintain property value increases in order to serve the lenders, more wealth extraction.

I am one in 8 million, powerless to affect the situation, voiceless in policy discourse, marginalised and dehumanised by the billionaire press and broadcast media.
https://www.bregroup.com/press-releases/bre-report-finds-poor-housing-is-costing-nhs-1-4bn-a-year/

Substandard housing costs the people who have to endure living in such conditions more than the rent they are forced to pay. People in substandard housing bear a burden of ill health and chronic stress through no fault of their own.

Substandard housing also costs the NHS billions annually in terms of illness, accidents and injuries, and the costs go further, in  terms of chronic stress and psychlogical health, all the while a group of landlords rake in wealth, extracted from poor, low income folk and from Housing Benefits.

This is unjust. It is an atrocity. Good decent people, our fellow citizens are being exposed to avoidable harm. 8 million people, individuals, families, men, owmen and children, entire communities... cities of people living in disrepair, trapped by a refusal to invest as the landlord extracts wealth, a trap, a socially and economically  structured trap. It is not right. It is not fit and proper.

Perhaps the money paid to landlords for Housing Benefits of people living in substandard housing ought to be ring fenced, matched with Government funding, and spent on upgrading these houses to a good standard, to include forward planning adaptations towards lower carbon footprints, and only after that should landlords be allowed to take full profits.

There's a few good arguments for nationalising aspects of housing, as a common resource, maintained by the society as a social resource, a commons that good folk would choose to cherish and nurture. 
Contrast the unhappiness and ill health of those who endure substandard housing to the fact that landlords have the increased value of the property which can be used as collateral for further borrowing to buy more property to let, an 'entrepreneurial dynamic' that builds a wealth extraction web of activity, supported by neoliberal legislators whose primary concern appears to be the interests of Wealth Extraction. Unhappiness of renters and the happiness of wealth extractors, the former feeding the latter. The profit of others tears.

Another way to put this is to say the chronic ill health and distress of people living in sibstandard housing is an externalised cost, part of the economics of profiteering of some landlords. The people pay the price, they bear the burden, millions of us.

Is it true that middle class, medium and high earning working class folk tend not to understand exactly what substandard housing means? How could someone who has never lived in substandard cousing really understand what this aspect of England is really like.

It certainly does not have to be this way Resolving the situation would build a happier, safer more civil society.

The following is taken from the article linked above.

BRE report finds poor housing is costing NHS £1.4bn a year - 9th November 2021
BRE report – ‘The Cost of Poor Housing in England’ – quantifies the cost burden to the NHS caused by hazards arising from poor quality homes in England.
Findings reveal that 2.6 million homes in England – 11% of the country’s housing stock – are categorised as ‘poor quality’ and therefore hazardous to occupants
Most common hazards are those that cause injuries on stairs, while the costliest issue for the NHS (£857million p/a) is poor quality housing leading to excess cold
According to BRE’s analysis, more than half (£857 million) of this annual NHS treatment bill can be attributed to defects in poor homes which expose residents to excess cold, while the second biggest cost to the NHS comes from hazards which cause people to fall and injure themselves, predominantly on staircases. 
Both issues are particularly dangerous for the most vulnerable in society, such as older people and families with young children.
BRE was able to quantify the cost of poor housing to the NHS by combining existing data from the 2018 English Housing Survey (EHS) on health and safety hazards in the home, with NHS treatment cost figures. 
According to the latest EHS, an estimated 2.6million homes in England – 11% of the country’s housing stock – contained at least one ‘Category one hazard’ and were therefore considered ‘poor’. 
Today’s report follows a similar study by BRE published in 2016.
The most common Category 1 hazard is the risk to a fall on stairs, such as disrepair to, or a lack of a handrail or balustrade, with over 1 million such cases recorded in 2018. 
Fixing this issue alone would save the NHS £219million a year in treatment costs. Dampness is also a common and costly issue for the NHS, with 75,000 homes in England suffering from the most serious dampness in 2018, leading to a £38million annual bill for the NHS. In addition, there are many more homes with non-category one dampness (less serious) which have an impact on people’s health.
The cost of addrressing this vs the costs of allowing this situation to continue.

source: article linked above

As part of the study, BRE also calculated the total cost of eliminating each Category one hazard.  
From this, we can see that the cost of mitigating risks associated with dampness, for example, would effectively be paid back in seven years, thanks to costs saved. 
In total, BRE estimates that the total cost to remedy all Category one hazards in homes in England would amount to £9.8billion – which is around seven times the cost the NHS faces annually for first year treatment costs from these hazards.
Within its report, BRE also identifies that, beyond the cost to the NHS, there are ‘societal costs’ brought on by poor housing, such as those relating to long-term care, mental health and poorer educational achievement. BRE’s findings indicate the cost to wider society of poor housing could equate to £18.5 billion per year.

So it is quite clear that for a relatively small direct investment, the Government could transform the lives of millions of people.  Investments that engender best physiological and psychological health, work that will offer a boost to local community level construction industry. Adaptations to existing stock that can add to better carbon foot print for the nation's rented housing stock.

A government enacting a policy to do all of this will walk away with the kudos and warmth and respect of having achieved genuine social improvements that also support the NHS and improve educational outcomes - did I mention that children living in substandard housing do not fare so well at school as do their contemporaries living in good standard housing?

That is a win-win situation for any Government.

That is a win-win situation for tennants and landlords alike.

Failure to take action on this matter is criminally negligent and socially stupid.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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

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Dunces with Wolves

This article is about the vulnerability a knowledge gap represents, and what can happen when a knowledge gap is not recognised, and what can happen when a knowledge gap is exploited by a malign actor. 

I once thought that I was a Climate Sceptic.
Not because I understood the science - I clearly did not. I was not a climate sceptic.

I was a climate dunce.

I was ‘sceptical’ because I believed the ever present dynamic of war mongering, which is symptomatic of the odious cult of competing industrialised militarised powers  and Externalised Costs (a global institutionalised psychopathy), would make global cooperation on action needed to adapt for oncoming climate change practically impossible.
Honesty
Co-operation and honesty are essential to the efficient regulation of toxic institutional behaviour of any kind, on a global scale.

This cannot be done without legislative processes designed to confront harm causation and to support repair of environmental damage, and to prevent further land, air and water pollution. And nothing useful can be done without funding the social material action and support  needed to protect people from the avoidable harms ahead. 
Poverty must be abolished, to reduce chronic stress and to free up human potential that could be harnessed to the vocational task of repair and recovery, to build a better future for all our children, by taking action, substantive action, in the present.

War as a tool of foreign policy impedes all of that. No question that the adversarial dynamic and the waste of materials, brain power and time of war making impedes healthy action on a range of problems we face, as nations, and as a species.

I was a Climate Change sceptic.
I was a sceptic because I  thought the focus on Climate Change was a deliberate distraction from War Mongering.  It was obvious to me that the shift to  'the war against terror' (TWAT) was pushed out at the same time as American political concern about Climate Concern went 'mainstream'. For that reason I did not look at the Science of Climate Change much. I was obsessed with my anti-war stance. I wilfully maintained a knowledge gap that I ought not to have.
Bush and Gore
Gore gave way to Bush in 2000. Al Gore ceded to George W Bush without a whimper, to a  move by Bush that was clearly illicit. Why did Gore back down, after all the effort? 
Gore literally handed the control and the budget for the US Military Machine to Bush. Bush and his sponsors had 'The New American Century' as their global policy document and it was a war mongers charter using war as a tool of global political hegemony. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Then Gore went Climate Change. 

He did not mention climate change or pollution during his election campaigning.
I do not recall Gore campaigning in the 2000 presidential election on Climate Change, do you? 
I thought "that’s too convenient."  
I thought the truth about American, British, Russian and Chinese Militarism - and the industrial Wealth Extraction cult that spawned such war mongering - was too inconvenient to be faced up to. That was my 'inconvenient truth' and that enabled me to side line the other 'inconvenient truth'.

Truth is always inconvenient to those whose lies protect their status.
Looking back, I can see the irony in my own position. I thought that there was a stitch up in America to get the war makers into power. I thought then it made perfect sense to orchestrate a clever distraction to take attention away from war makers plans. Hence my ill-informed scepticism. Ill informed because I really did not understand the science that describes Climate Change.

The truth of war is inconvenient.
The wars that were prosecuted after 9/11 were planned long before 9/11. 
The plans for War on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were all on the books already. War planners know that it takes years to prepare for war, and that once The War starts, the plans go out the window, because wars do not go according to plan - they go according to who can take the most pain, absorb the most damage and still stand afterwards. 
Wars are chaotic and tend to go according to unplanned, and those who can take the most punishment tend to be the one's still standing at the end of combat operations. 
Often all sides will claim 'Victory' in spite of the massive trauma innocent civilians are subjected to. 
Assad claims victory in Syria, as does the US and Russia. ISIS is still active. The civilians pay the price.
Nobody really 'wins' a war. People survive a war. Many do not. Furthermore, given the prevailing cult of competing powers, one has to understand that no war is an isolated event, they are all part of a larger cultural behavioural dynamic.
I am not a climate sceptic today.

I understand more of the science. 
Climate Change is a species level problem. As are war, poverty, racism, misogyny and wealth extraction that is based on externalised costs. They are all part of the same problem.
The issue of War remains a major block to global cooperative action on climate, and many other matters, including Covid. 
Remember when the UN called for a cessation of all war activity in early 2020, so that the world could turn together and deal with the pandemic as a collective?  
Who rejected that call? 
Covid is still telling us "work together for mutual aid, or you are lost." 
The Pandemic is not over, in spite of frequent declarations of that fantasy by right wing lunatics in power across USUK and EU.
I was not a climate sceptic: a sceptic understands the science and says 'nope, I see too many holes here so I remain sceptical'. A good sceptic is a well informed sceptic.
I was a Climate Dunce. 
I really did not know enough to be sceptical about the scientific claims of Climate Change, either way.
A dunce is not capable of rational scepticism. 
I have been a dunce on many, many issues. I am a dunce on a whole range of issues. I know nothing about the biology of venomous frogs. 
I knew nothing about SARS, let alone SARSCOV2 back in March 2020, even as I was dealing with a severe infection of SARSCOV2. Ihad not been paying any attention to the news frm China, or Northern Italy, or Spain. I was truly a COVID dunce. Which is why I decided back in March 2020 to look to the experts who know what they are talking about. 
Dunces are easy targets for grooming gangsters. 
Dunces part with their cash readily if carefully groomed. Knowledge gaps produce vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
The problem is that it’s not the dunces fault when the dunce is being exploited via a vulnerability by a dedicated grooming operation. 
Grooming is the activity of targeting a vulnerability and heightening it in order to drive behaviour that can be exploited.   The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie that looks at this behaviour.
Grooming to exploit is a double cruelty - rather than help the target heal the vulnerability, the vulnerability is heightened, and then the target is exploited.
The people who exploit others vulnerabilities are really evil. They are as the archetype of the Human Wolf, who preys on the vulnerable. Real wolves are nothing like this, of course. 
The Political groomers, the Wolves of Wall Street, are a really serious problem
Political Grooming Gangsters
Study the tactics of Cambridge Analytica, and many, many others.
1. Target - seek out and find - angry, ill-informed, passionate and vocal people, through their online activity. Micro-targeting is enabled by on line activity, where what is called 'behavioural surplus data' can be gathered, analysed and then processed to produce detailed psychometric profiles, which allows those who can see that information to target people quite precisely,on an individual basis, and present curated content to trigger biases, insecurities, hatreds and knowledge gaps.
This is gold dust for advertisers. Predictability is a key goal of advertisers. If I spend X can I guarantee a return of Y? 
Predictability is also the currency, the raw material upon which exploitation is built.
2. Heighten and exacerbate the anger or knowledge gaps of those being targeted with content directed to them. Micro targeting allows the grooming operators to measure the targets reactions, fine tune the content, and over  time present content to drive or nudge the targets behaviour in ways which can be predicted and exploited.
3. Set up online groups so they can be angry together, chat online about their anger, and form emotional bonds.Ensure they are exposed to a flow of content designed to heighten their biases and affirm their self righteousness. Online contacts can become friends.
4. Set up small real-world meet ups via focus groups, discussion groups, clubs. Form up groups of around 30 people, which can be easily led and managed. Nurture these gatherings so that to the participants, who rarely gather with that many people of similar outlook, the gathering feels like it’s part of a bigger group, part of a larger network, and then part of a movement. This engenders ‘courage’ to take action.
5. Suggest actions, set up local 'activist' groups to carry out the action, start crowd funding to drive bonding, to fund materials and signage, produce professional content supporting the action, organise transport etc..
6. Start with small local actions. Photo and video the events, and ensure these are well set, photogenic. Make small crowds seem bigger. Promote the material by advertising spend. Get targets to write to local officials, to comment on news threads, to share the content. Tell them they are making real change possible. Make it seem bigger than it is. Push for more crowd funding. When people give money they make a deeper emotional commitment. They feel like they are taking action, doing something.
7. Push out more content to deepen anger and self righteousness, especially if the small events draw criticism. Use the criticism to harden the targets positions, deepen their emotional attachment to the cause, heighten their sense of righteousness.
8. Repeat until targets are febrile.  Fever pitch. The groomers can see the degree to which targets are enervated, how long they stay up at night, how angry their online exchanges get.
9. Then ask them to raid government or media buildings in larger numbers, appoint some organisers, pay them from the crowd funding, that way the money trail does not lead back to the groomers.
10. Keep the crowd funding going. Someone has to pay the organisers, the copy editors, the graphics people, the video makers : might as well be the victims of the scam.
That’s been done in 68 countries during 100 elections between 2008 and 2016. 
By a British firm, Strategic Communications Laboratories, who honed their skills doing ‘Hearts and Minds’ campaigns post 9/11.
Cambridge Analytica was one of their illegitimate children. SCL meets Robert Mercer, and goes to work for various Free Market personality politicians.
Then Trump, Brexit and now Covid misinformation. Many State are engaged in this activity, we are told.  I think the bulk of it is being run by Free Market Fundamentalist Oligarchs and their think tanks and minions and operatives.
So what to do?
Grooming is psychologically abusive in and of itself, and the exploitation of people amounts to a second layer of criminality.
We need legislation defining grooming as a criminal offence, an act of profound psychological abuse. We need to impose a criminal penalty for such behaviour.
We need to make that penalty very serious indeed - because grooming is cruel and exploitative.  Defining grooming as a criminal offence would make it far less likely that social media platforms and News and Press media would carry such materials. Making them liable for any harms caused by such content would be a useful inducement to avoid such activity, without impeding Free Speech.

Grooming should not be protected by claiming it is Free Speech.

We also need to explain what grooming is to our people, starting now online, in news media and in all our schools.

The best way to prevent people from being groomed is to develop our awareness, our critical thinking skills, our understanding the nature of logical fallacy arguments.

This is part of building socially coherent grass roots political solidarity movements based on evidence, seeking to elect legislators who will bring in legislation and over sight mechanisms to regulate Toxic Industrial practices, to repair harms caused, to prevent new harms. and who will remove the excessive and corrupt influence of Wealth Extraction class from our legislatures and other governing bodies, from our schools and universities, from our media.

Let them influence legislation and other areas, if they wish, but on an equal footing to the citizens and scientific community. Levelling up, as they say.

A short article look at how the Swedish and Norwegian working and middle class curtailed the power of the Oligarchy during the 1930.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/

A study of one strike action by Swedish workers, demonstrating the difficulties they faced at the time. The work of building coherent grass roots political movements is difficult enough, logistically and made much, much more difficult by the violent repression of Oligarchy dominated Governments. 

https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/swedish-workers-general-strike-economic-justice-power-shift-dalen-1931

Recent moves by the Westminster Government seem to be preparing for such struggles, by making them illegal, by making electoral participation more difficult, by gerrymandering constituency borders and other tactical plays...

Kindest regards
Corneilius
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