CLAPPING FOR ATOS

Clapping is the new school star chart.  It is a form of social coercion.  As soon as I heard the first clap for the NHS I knew what was happening.  It has taken ten weeks for NHS workers to begin to combat the collective pathos of the clap and to feel brave enough to attempt to point out that it has some inherent problems.  They need respect and decent working equipment and conditions.  Clapping has been encouraged by the privateers and the neoliberal oligarchs.  It creates a false environment where workers are under more pressure to not complain.  It is putting them on a precarious, and cheap, pedestal.

Until the intentional deconstruction of the NHS, nurses and doctors had serious respect in society.  They worked hard for it too.  It has been a deliberate policy to downgrade them and to create a degree of discontent in the population.  This weakens their position in society and facilitates the narrative of privatisation.  Were there any meaningful appreciation of their role their pay would have immediately risen.  Their working conditions and, significantly, the tools of their trade, would have been upgraded and reinforced.

I understand completely that for many individuals it is like signing a petition - it seems the only thing they can do to show their support.  I don't object to that at all.  It's why I forgive Jeremy Corbyn for joining in - but at least he makes it overtly clear they should be paid better.  Have people learnt nothing from the hijacking of Remembrance Sunday and the social coercion to align with the official authoritarian militarised state by wearing a red poppy.  It took people with guts, genuine insight, and some serious creativity, to come up with the White Poppy initiative to oppose the hijacking of what should be, and is for many, a profound reminder of the sacrifice of so many people and the tragic death and destruction of war.  Seeing the likes of Thatcher and Blair, both overt war mongers, at the Cenotaph should really give most people a clue as to where the problem lies.

If you like war, if you believe in violence as a way to deal with life, that is your prerogative and I am not complaining about that here.  I am complaining about the social coercion which is deliberately fomented and manipulated by nefarious individuals for their own ends.  They are preying on the naive and innocent peace loving people.  It is predatory and oppressive.

This is why I find it so worrying that the next kudos cart is clapping for bin men.  When did we stop knowing they are doing an invaluable job?  We stopped as neoliberalism infected society with Thatcher's selfish ideology.  We stopped when we started respecting stock brokers and bankers as role models for success.  We stopped when we became immersed in a society of individualism and began to aspire to selfishness because it denoted success.

Neoliberal ideology has even usurped charity and turned it into a revenue siphon to extract money from well meaning people into the pockets of offshore privateers.  Charity given to the NHS goes in at the top; part of it goes off shore via secretive corporate trust funds, some of it goes into the pockets of extremely well paid executives like Simon Stevens, what is left is shared out to well paid 'business' managers to keep them on side, and none of it goes to underpaid staff.

Unfortunately the majority in the UK do not appear to understand what these rapacious vultures have been building for the last forty years.  Most people think the NHS is what it once was, and are still being told it is: a collective common resource provided by the people for the people; but it is no longer that.  Of course the people that do the work are valuable and doing a good and important job.  But clapping them in this somewhat mishandled crisis will not improve the NHS.  It will not improve the working conditions - as this government has already shown, if you have been paying attention, by, for example, maintaining the freeze on nurses pay right in the middle of this crisis.
One thing this clapping could achieve is to heighten the population's awareness of the crimes being committed against humanity by these pirates and privateers.  But I see little sign of that, or that it will adversely affect the people and corporations orchestrating this robbery.  Clapping is one thing, but it needs serious anger at the crimes against these invaluable and heroic workers, and it needs real action.

If we are not careful we will find ourselves clapping weakly for the unemployed, the disabled, the homeless, and eventually the suicide victims of the broken welfare state.  It could yet start with clapping for Atos.  You think that sounds ridiculous - just wait and see.  The population is being quite deliberately psychologically manipulated - and you are one of the chickens.

MURDER HORNETS KILL MORE THAN COVID-19

I was going to use the headline:
41 DEAD AS MURDER HORNETS RAMPAGE CHINESE PROVINCE
But having written this perusal around the manipulation of figures I decided "MURDER HORNETS KILL MORE THAN COVID-19" was even more indicative of how ridiculous headlines can be.  It is true, because murder hornets did kill more than Covid-19 in Shaanxi.  It is true, but it is so extraordinarily misleading that it is, effectively, a lie.  These things can be fun to play with, but they are becoming a death knell for humanity due to social media, psyops, asymmetric communication, and an intellectually and emotionally damaged population.

The 'headline' for this blog post was gleaned from the most dramatic single statement I could find in a Wikipedia article about the Asian giant hornet, or vespa mandarinia, which is currently being called the Murder Hornet in Click Bait Press.  The actual statement was "In 2013, stings by Asian giant hornets killed 41 people and injured more than 1,600 people in Shaanxi, China."  The first thing to consider is that that is an extreme case so we can deduce that the situation is probably far better than that.  It is also in a particular location where the wasps are relatively common, and it is likely that people go looking for them because they like to eat their larvae.  The second thing that comes to mind is a comparison with the distorted and dramatised figures relating to Covid-19 deaths.  Covid-19 appears, by all accounts, to be significantly more dangerous and deadly to humans than giant hornets.  But it still remains extremely difficult to get any clear or meaningful idea of the significance and impact of Covid-19 from the persistent click bait headlines distorting the very meaning of the information presented.

Shaanxi province has a population of 37.33 million, so 41 deaths equates to 1.1 deaths per million per year.  That extrapolates to 85,800 deaths in the world population in 10 years or 858,000 deaths per century.  Assuming the human population might rise then one could speculate that over 1 million people could die of killer wasp stings in the 21st century.  Of course with this kind of manipulation of figures one could attempt to reduce the target population to specific named areas where more deaths have occurred.  Maybe 20 of those 41 deaths occurred in a village of 2,000 people raising the 'deaths per million' rate to 10,000.  It's not long before you arrive at a figure of 100% of people killed by killer wasps die.  It is equally true to say that there is a very high probability (not one I am about to work out now) that 0% of people you know will die from a wasp sting.  I wonder what quantum probability wave function collapse might tell us about this - or what this might tell us about probability wave function collapse.

Maybe I could find a way to justify the headline "Quantum physics predicts everyone will die from Killer Wasps".  Or better still "Science predicts everyone will die from Killer Wasps".  All I have to do is write a small article explaining that in multiple universe theory there is one universe where that is true and I can claim the headline is factually correct and get some lucrative advertising revenue from my click bait science article.

Taking this to extremes it is true to say "Murder Hornets kill more than 10 times as many as Covid-19" or maybe "Murder Wasps 10 times more deadly than Covid-19".  I just have to explain in the text that 3 people have been reported to have died in Shaanxi province from Covid-19 whilst vespa mandarinia killed 41 people in the same province in 2013.

Warning: Stay Alert in Click Bait World - It's Dangerous Out There.

LOCKDOWN, DON'T LOCKDOWN?

Somehow the narrative is still distorted.  People are rightly criticising the government for relaxing the lockdown.  But they talk about it in terms of it increasing the spread of the virus and consequently being a threat to people's health.  Those are important factors, but the implication is that the lockdown should continue.  There is something wrong with that assumption, and it is that the lockdown was correct in the first place.  I'm not suggesting there should or shouldn't be a 'lockdown', but it is clear the government's version of 'lockdown' was a complete shambles and a failure.

The idea of a lockdown is part of a bigger plan to test, trace, and isolate (amongst other responsible things).  It is also important, if you want to protect people, not to throw them in front of a bus to prevent them being run down by a bicycle.  Money, for some good reason, is a dirty word in our culture.  People actually need money to live.  It is too often banded about as some sort of superfluous gift from heaven.  But it is absolutely necessary, it is vital, to have money to live in the UK.  Cutting off someone's money supply, or revenue stream, can kill them.

For an individual it is better to take some risk to get money to live than to take no risk and no money and die.  Any lockdown should be planned to provide the resources necessary to survive.  A lockdown can't work successfully without that provision.  That is the equivalent of shovelling people into concentration camps, but in this case into their own homes as opposed to expensive 'concentration' camps.  What can then follow is the perception that the prisoners are expensive and non-productive.  A government that can execute an un-planned lockdown cannot conceive of how to fund it.  This inevitably leads to what the Third Reich called "the final solution".  It wasn't planned, but they had painted themselves into a corner.

The functionality of a lockdown is to mitigate the risk of a high death toll from the virus.  If it causes more death than it prevents then it is clearly a bad idea.  Continuing the lockdown, without the rest of the plan in place, is already proving to be more harmful than the problem it was supposed to mitigate.  The government seem to present an image of being almost hard done by, and elicit the most extraordinary sympathy from some of the least educated people in society.  They appear as if they are ordinary individuals who have been unfortunately presented with a very hard problem.  That is not reality.  The government is a massive organisation with almost unlimited resources to prepare, plan, and execute sophisticated social management.

It should now be clear that the government is populated almost entirely by ministers who were motivated to enter politics because of the rich pickings available.  When confronted with an urgent task they are like a drunk captain in charge of a ship in a storm.  In maritime law it is correct to relieve the captain of his command in those circumstances.  These politicians, motivated by wealth, have occupied their time rearranging laws to dilute their own responsibility and to make their job of acquiring wealth easier.  This is exemplified by how they undermined the fabric of the NHS to channel funds to offshore accounts.  They forgot to maintain the ship, and they casually ignored the navigation charts, whilst they revelled in the opulent benefits of the country's wealth and resources.  They are not looking after their 'customers'; they are robbing the bank.

The members of the current government simply do not have the available neurological pathways to conceive of a way to deal with this crisis for the benefit of all.  They are drunk on their own success, and are incapable of understanding that the way to have people remain at home is to fund that move.  Funding it correctly, so that they can test and trace and eliminate the largest part of the problem quickly, so that people can return to work, is simply not something they can think of.  Their first insane thought is "Who will pay for it?"  Really - that is how stupid they are.

The individuals perpetuating, and even fuelling, the crisis of this pandemic do not have to worry about the devastating consequences to the social condition of the UK.  They have plenty of resources to leave the wasteland or simply live in expensive gated communities protected by intelligent and weaponised aerial drones backed up by militarised private security forces.  Take a look at the favelas in Rio de Janeiro alongside the most opulent communities protected as described above.  Take a look at the city of Hebron and its disconnected society in the occupied West Bank of Palestine and how the poor and unwanted population are handled by the Israeli government and their forces.  Then ask why the British military and police are sent for training to Israel.

Any lockdown is only beneficially functional if it is part of a coherent plan.  Simply locking away the plebs whilst hoping that will stop the virus is completely unserviceable.  Given that the government are incapable of handling this crisis, other than to look after themselves, then perhaps another way to create a lockdown would be as a proactive and organised assault on the government.  A national strike maybe.  Somehow take action that is directed in such a way as to produce the necessary response from the government.  But, in truth, I don't see that happening.  The plutocrats have such powerful control over the medium of communication that they can, and do, distort any communication for their own benefit and to the detriment of the people who want to communicate.

I am a problem solver but I cannot solve this problem.  All I can do is keep examining it and attempting to understand some of the inherent issues and contradictions.  There is one fundamental reason I can't solve this problem, and that is because the solution has to be a collective endeavour.  But the public debate about 'lockdown' or 'don't lockdown' is obscuring the underlying problems that this government is creating, by incompetence or design, of not working effectively to mitigate the problem of the pandemic.

AN EXCERPT FROM 1981

I left the forest and walked along the narrow street between the tall white walls.  A ladder, still wet from the rain, was the only intrusion in the otherwise empty and endless street.  I had no other option, but whether or not that influenced my decision I do not know, and I climbed the ladder.  I entered a large room that was filled with plump working women.  A row of them stood working, with their arms engulfed to their shoulders in sockets in the wall.  The sockets had gloves attached.  A similar arrangement to that used by scientists when handling radioactive material - except that these women could not see what they were doing.  They believed themselves to be cracking large coconut-type fruits and the milk was running into a trough which ran along the wall, where, at the end, the fluid was collected in urns.  There were other women who collected the fluid and others who drank it around a table.  All the women seemed to spend some time doing each activity.  As time went on I began to detect hints of a concept much vaster than the apparent system I observed.  I sensed something monstrous, something devious and malicious.  I listened more and more to the women's chatter and slowly the concept became clearer.  There was some insidious essence behind the wall.  A heinous writhing being.  What the women were cracking was the skulls of their own children to satisfy this hideous monster's appetite.  The fluid was provided in order to support the illusion and to sustain the women.  The monster delighted in being fed the blood of children by their unwitting mothers.  I tried to explain but was rebuked.  I realised that all my knowledge of this situation had come from the women's chatter.  The hidden lie was within their own minds.  I thought on this and began to realise that in order to maintain the flow of food the women could not admit to themselves their activity as they would have to stop, and deep in the unreachable depths of their minds was the imperative defence that they could not possibly cease to perform this ritual and allow their children to live, as it would be a greater tragedy for them to experience such a wretched and debased existence.