tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2813010135281098382024-02-07T03:00:18.756+00:00Toxic DrumsToxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.comBlogger309125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-64494435136840938802020-07-09T21:16:00.001+01:002020-07-09T21:16:50.248+01:00I SMELL A RAT<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHYBPvbRvH9fKWklsh4oM6u52zBUEekqbewuHdTLybaXEDRCSgRW2foCLyHhyphenhyphenCjkXBKUZvqA-CRfTe02IPIS2xbDLqrgAMAgFW4-Z90pZu3UumDSuh1jQda7niJVuNGQRj9HHAS6d_pc/s595/Rat-01-C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="595" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHYBPvbRvH9fKWklsh4oM6u52zBUEekqbewuHdTLybaXEDRCSgRW2foCLyHhyphenhyphenCjkXBKUZvqA-CRfTe02IPIS2xbDLqrgAMAgFW4-Z90pZu3UumDSuh1jQda7niJVuNGQRj9HHAS6d_pc/s320/Rat-01-C.jpg" width="595" /></a></div>
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For a few days now there has been am elusive unpleasant odour floating around the kitchen. Just occasionally I'd get a whiff of something that smelt a bit like an old dirty vacuum bag with cheese in it. Or was it some festering mouldy food behind the cooker? Was it the condensed water that sometimes leaks from the fridge onto the carpeted kitchen floor? I don't like carpets in kitchens - who the hell ever came up with that idea? For about a week it seemed to be getting worse. I wondered if it was me. Were my feet rotting? Was it in the clothes from the washing machine? Did I have Coroni and he was messing with my smell? It was faint but remarkably putrid and disturbing. I cleaned out several cupboards and checked the vegetable rack. The olfactory delight continued to linger longer.
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I live in an old house with a sewerage system that would be illegal today. It is simply one underground pipe that runs from the back door down the path and out to the street. All sinks and plumbing and sewage simply fall into the same pipe. There is a junction half way down the pathway where the neighbour's sewerage connects to ours. The junction is known to cause a blockage sometimes and I dutifully swill the sewer out regularly to prevent severe blocking and occasional sewer odours emanating from the plug hole in the kitchen sink. I thought it was about time to swill out the sewer today and so I set about filling sinks and jugs and buckets and getting prepared to launch a tsunami down the tube.
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I went outside and lifted the sewer cover plate. There was a blockage, which is not uncommon, but this looked weird. A dark poop, so large it couldn't possibly have vacated anyone's bottom, was blocking the junction. I don't spend an inordinate amount of time examining the content of the sewer and I went inside and released the tsunami to sluice the sewer and went back outside to make sure it was successful. That large unidentified object was refusing to budge. I peered into the sewer opening a little closer and this object seemed to be furry, but it was covered in thousands of tiny flies giving it a slightly wriggling writhing glistening sheen.
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I decided to give it a poke with a stick - as one does. It was heavy and resistant. I eventually prodded it along the pipe a bit as the backlog of sewage oozed slowly along behind with an increasing level of damned water attempting to leave the premises. Quite suddenly things began to move. The large wriggling putrefying biological blob was lifted off the floor of the sewer and rapidly gained momentum as a ton of sewage and water chased it down the pipe with a great gurgling and swilling sound like some alien monster enjoying its lunch.
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I replaced the cover plate, returned to the kitchen, turned off the taps, washed my hands (as you do) and enjoyed the delights of a sweet smelling kitchen. It may sound like a dreadful task but it was a pleasant relief and procrastinant (from the inventor of new words) from having to deal with the still offensively active putrefying remains of the NHS and their genuinely harmful assaults on the health and well being of my daughter and me. I find this whole experience of a rancid odour from a rotting corpse, polluting and poisoning the atmosphere and destroying the healthy life supporting activities of cooking and eating, a very good analogy for the toxic transformation of the welfare state and the NHS.
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I gain some hope that, although the current desecration, stagnation, and evil toxic purification, of British society seems entirely unstoppable and destined to catastrophic unrecoverable disaster, it is possible that one day we might, with enough effort, shift the festering cadaver of neoliberalism and hear the welcome sound of gurgling and belching as the corpse of disaster capitalism and selfish greed is wrenched from this otherwise delightful planet.
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Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-2914965940584432702020-07-01T12:03:00.000+01:002020-07-01T12:03:38.224+01:00SLOWLY CHOKING TO DEATH<br />
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I was trying to get myself to do the right thing and contact a doctor. I am a bit confused about what one is supposed to do nowadays. So I started by going to what is euphemistical called "my surgery's" web site. I'm reading through lots of stuff which sounds like promotional sales talk like "we are working hard to care for you, and to keep our staff and patients safe", and "Your health and wellbeing matters to us". Then I came across this:
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"For your protection and ours, if you are invited to the surgery for an appointment, you MUST provide your own face covering, a mask, scarf or something smilar [sic]. We are no longer in a position to issue face masks to patients."
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This is where I stall. I know some people ridicule and belittle me for getting upset about things like this. I have to try to understand how to cope with that attitude. Am I little (meaning a bit pathetic) and stupid? If that were the case, is it something I can do something about? I think what they think they mean is that I need to be "brave" and walk into the thing I am frightened of. That makes sense when working on a ship and you have to do things that hurt or are frightening. I could, I suppose, ignore what I perceive to be a threat and carry on. But my experience in life is warning me of something bad here. So I think some more.
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It is ridiculous that they come up with phrases like "Your health and wellbeing matters to us" because they are supposed to be a medical centre and they are stating the obvious. Maybe they think some people don't know they care and they feel the need to reassure them. But there are other possible motives such as that they are lying. I think most people are aware of the problem when someone says "trust me". It begs the question "Why wouldn't I?" Some would suggest I am being paranoid but I am not - I am simply trying to understand what is going on.
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When their focus of attention goes from the patients' health to their own bank balance that might cause them to perceive the need to reassure their patients that they care about them. If someone wants me to write some software I negotiate a fee because I cannot go around writing software for no pay. Once a fee is negotiated I pay full attention to the quality of the software. If I am "incentivised" to write the software as quickly as possible to maximise my profit then the quality of the software is compromised. The same applies to medicine. So the very wording on the surgery's web site does not inspire me with confidence, and actually does the reverse. People sometimes feel they don't know how to detect scammers and I think herein lies some of the clues. When someone spends disproportionate time and effort trying to convince you they care about your wellbeing you should get suspicious. The significant word in the last sentence being "disproportionate".
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Having clarified some of what causes my alarm bells to start ringing I then encounter that statement saying I have to provide my own face covering. That is absurd to the point of being insane. When I read irrational insanity coming from someone I am relying on to have expertise that I don't posses, it becomes an affront, let alone very worrying.
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There are multiple issues at play here. The first being that they are the medical experts and should know exactly what benefits there are from wearing what sort of masks in what circumstances. Their expressed requirement indicates no such consideration, awareness, or knowledge. They are simply mandating "a mask, scarf or something smilar [sic]" As a complete non-expert it has become clear to me that there are important practical differences between different materials used as masks, let alone other issues such as how they fit. Can I turn up with a motorcycle helmet on? If that sounds ridiculous (as it is meant to) then by what criteria am I supposed to judge an efficacious mask. If I turn up on a warm day like this wearing my lovely woollen winter scarf wrapped around my face and sit in a waiting room I will overheat and risk passing out. If I could acquire an N95 mask I will suffer breathing difficulties, and I might pass out. (I have COPD and high anxiety - "For people with COPD, face masks are in fact intolerable to wear as they worsen their breathlessness." [Kyung SY, Kim Y, Hwang H, et al. Risks of N95 Face Mask Use in Subjects With COPD. Respir Care 2020;:respcare.06713. doi:10.4187/respcare.06713])
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Then there is the issue of supply. Where do I find a mask to purchase? If there is an outlet with an adequate supply why can the surgery not get a supply for their patients? It would make more sense, if cost were the issue, to purchase the available supply and to sell masks to patients. Of course, given that that is not the reason, they would risk instigating an unnecessary problem of dissent and criticism if they charged patients at the door for equipment they were demanding they wear. All of which should soon illustrate, even to those who haven't considered the issues yet, that any of these possible arguments presented so far, are irrational and vacuous.
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Give that we are supposed to believe there is some medical rational for wearing a mask and given the budget for the surgery including the property, staff, equipment, and services, in what way could they possibly justify not supplying masks for patients? I can't see any other reason except the pretence of cost. If they presented the justification that it was about the cost then not only is that ridiculous and unacceptable but there is a contradiction in that they say they don't care what sort of face covering you use. If it doesn't matter what sort of face covering you use then there is no suggestion of any significant cost if they supply cheep paper masks. Surely no one can make coherent sense of this. They say "We are no longer in a position to issue face masks to patients." Why not? Were they providing masks for patients previously? That sentence implies they were, so I really want to know what has caused the change.
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Then there is the issue of power, control, and hierarchy. What they are saying really is that, quite regardless of any efficacy, they demand that you wear a mask to symbolise your agreement to do whatever they demand. They are actually demanding evidence of my subservience to them. This is exactly what was going on as the Holocaust gained traction in Nazi Germany. Wear this colour triangle. I do worry that people may think I am making a mountain out of a mole hill, but actually I am trying to figure out what this is all about. I am not particularly concerned about this one issue in isolation; I am concerned to put the various pieces of the jigsaw together to begin to understand the bigger picture.
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When someone phoned me from the surgery some years ago saying that my daughter needed to come in for her vaccinations I asked which ones. Their response was "all of them". I enquired further saying she had had some vaccinations so which ones are they talking about. It got to the point of me asking the nurse(?) what vaccinations are on her medical records and I was told that was irrelevant because their records were not complete. I suggested I come in and discuss these (apparently VERY important) issues with the doctor. The nurse{?) reacted by saying "I can't deal with people like you." and put the phone down. If no one can deal rationally with the question of vaccines then who is going to tell me, with any real knowledge, authority, and integrity why they can't supply masks? They have made it explicitly impossible to trust them. They have created a layered structure of hierarchy where the people at the bottom (you understand that hierarchy of wealth that we have acculturated - it used to be that the doctors and nurses were at the "top of their profession" and the likes of managers were "lower" in the hierarchy) - the medical staff -do not know or understand the reasons for the orders and edicts being handed down to them.
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I understand to a significant degree how all this junk happens psychologically and sociologically but I do not know what to do about it, nor why so many people fall so enthusiastically into ridiculous compliance to keep their job when the rules and edicts are evidently stupid even to them. This situation is declining rapidly and hanging on to notions that things will get better is delusional.
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I genuinely believe there is no way out of what is befalling us except via a most terrible holocaust. Although I could wish people could effectively wake up and begin to push back against the insanity, all the evidence suggests they cannot or will not do that. It was only six months ago we had a general election and the Labour Party went to the trouble of presenting an exceptional and detailed manifesto and a costing model which clearly outlined highly practical ways to stop the decline. The majority of people did not read that manifesto. Instead they preferred to vote for a well known liar and charlatan called Fucko the Clown. Fucko the Clown and his circus presented no plans of any scope or substance - just "Get Brexit Done". It was clear to me they were aiming for a dictatorship at the time, and the evidence is unfortunately continuing to support and strengthen that interpretation.
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I will not be attempting to steel myself to walk into this particular battery cage today. I prefer to sit here bleeding and in pain. I am far too distressed and poorly to attempt to see a doctor today.
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Afterthought: Having re-read this muse I feel a lot of people might summarise it in their mind as a "mask, don't mask" issue related to medical health. It is not. The questions and issues around the medical efficacy of masks is a totally different subject and I would like to feel confident in the experience and integrity of experts to advise me on that matter. The above reveals the utter incoherence of the actions currently being taken by medical centres up and down the land. It is about the difference between someone informing and helping me, and someone ordering me about for their benefit at my expense.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-47522749003843731732020-06-30T19:38:00.002+01:002020-09-24T02:16:20.463+01:00NO NHS UNDER STARMER<br />
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Someone tweeted me with the following message:
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"It's quite simple. You claim that we cant have an NHS under Starmer. You must know why you think that's impossible. Im perfectly able to listen & understand."
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After several false starts I decided to simply write straight off the top of my head and see how short it might be. At 1,231 words or 7,295 characters it seemed too big for a tweet. So I decided to put it on my blog for their perusal and my future reference.
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THE BIG TWEET:
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For you to say it's simple is really very disingenuous. I might find it easier to explain object oriented test driven software development or back propagated neural network artificial intelligence feedback systems to you since I am far more of an expert in those fields than politics. I guess you can understand that I couldn't possibly explain them to you if you start from the position that they are wrong and I have to "explain" them to you to convince you otherwise. Especially if you think it will be "simple".
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I did give you four references which you have not pursued; The Great NHS Heist, The Dirty War on the NHS, Health & Social Care Act 2012, and Neoliberalism. The deconstruction of the NHS from a collective self funding service to a 'for profit' market began probably back in 1980 with a book entitled "Privatizing the World: A Study of International Privatization in Theory and Practice" written by Oliver Letwin. A reviewer described it as a manual for "how to dismantle the stuff that glues us together and sell it off to corporate cartels".
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The next notable document was co-authored by Letwin and John Redwood in 1988 called "Britain's Biggest Enterprise - ideas for radical reform of the NHS" which has proved to be a bit of a blueprint for exactly what has happened. These papers, the PFI scandal, the Naylor Report, the construction of private NHS trusts, are all part of the process which has been installed piecemeal and by stealth ever since 1980. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 specifically disconnects government from any responsibility for the population's health and effectively turned the NHS into a complex arrangement of saleable businesses competing in a free market.
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If you look into it in detail you will find that people who do understand the complexity frequently refer to the 2012 Act as the kingpin in the privatisation process and call for that Act to be repealed to re-establish government's responsibility for Health Care because without that there is no "National Health Service" as we knew it. The NHS has already become a corporate infrastructure which can only be funded by Health Insurance in a 'for profit' free market.
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Money that the government used to put into the NHS is now paid to corporations to run sectors for profit. This is an ideology for which there is no evidence of success and much evidence that it does not and cannot work. Of course it works for those profiteering from it but always at the expense of the detritus at the bottom of society.
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Starmer probably doesn't even understand what is happening. If he does then he is definitely part of it. If he doesn't then his ignorance indicates he couldn't comprehend what to do. The only way Labour could carry out their manifesto pledge to repeal the H&SC Act 2012 would be in spite of Starmer not with him.
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He was also party to incarcerating Julian Assange which will turn out to be one of the most devastating crimes against democracy. He shows no signs of considering the matter important let alone seeking proper due process.
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His first public act as Leader was to write to a group, smaller than the number of train spotters in the UK (I've done the maths), called the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to concede to fully implement their demands. The Labour Party has far more important things to do and should not be dictated to by a very small, massively wealthy, self interested right wing club. It really doesn't matter if they are right or wrong they should not dictate Labour Policy.
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He then gets ironically hoist on his own petard when he sacks Rebecca Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet. He gives an antisemitic reason. He claimed the article she re-tweeted contained an "antisemitic conspiracy theory". The remark in question referred to the "Israeli secret services" training the US police. This is a fact. Look up "Israeli Tactical" as one example. A company in America founded by a high ranking Shin Bet officer offering training to the US police in Krav Maga which is an Israeli secret service developed close contact fighting discipline which explicitly uses the neck hold as seen used on George Floyd. The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism specifically describes "Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel" as antisemitic. So Starmer claimed that a factual statement about the actions of the Israeli secret services was antisemitic. He conflated Israel's actions with "all Jews". That is definitively antisemitic according to the IHRA guidelines.
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These things are by way of illustrating that he is out of his depth and compulsively supporting the prevalent political Zionist and Neoliberal agendas. The problem with political Zionism is that it's fundamentally imperialistic and the problem with Neoliberalism is that it's unconstrained capitalism. I am not aware of him announcing allegiance to these political ideologies by name but everything he does is indicative of his core belief in, or commitment to, them. He shows no signs of acting for the poor or oppressed and every sign of supporting power and wealth.
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He is an establishment man, knighted no less, attempting to appease all power hubs, and, as such, is incapable of addressing the deep core damage which has destroyed the welfare state and the NHS as we thought of it (and some still do).
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Look up Dr Bob Gill. He is easy to find on the internet, on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. He has spent many years trying to understand and evidence what has been happening inside the NHS. If you watch some of his videos, and take your lead for further investigation from there, you will understand the subject in much more detail and, hence, more accurately.
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Given how you propose it might be easy for me to "explain" I suspect you will be in danger of suffering serious mental meltdown or painful cognitive dissonance. It is not easy to realise the people you trusted were poisoning your children all along. They have disembowelled the NHS under the influence of cultural anaesthesia and the population cannot bring themselves to see that they are dead all but the head that is looking at the suction pumped and hollowed out torso.
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Starmer cannot and will not revive the NHS. Corbyn understood (eventually) and even with the intention to repeal the 2012 Act and to get all private profiteering out of the NHS I doubt it could have been achieved because the money and influence involved are far too big. The privatisation of the NHS is a mega-neoliberal project that has been ongoing for 40 years.
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Do you know who is the CEO of NHS England? It is a man called Simon Stevens and you can start by looking him up on Wikipedia. One small quote from Wikipedia: "From 2004 to 2014 Stevens was a senior executive at UnitedHealth Group. Initially appointed president of UnitedHealth Europe, he became CEO of UnitedHealthcare's $30 billion Medicare business, and then corporate Executive Vice President and president of its global health businesses spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He also was a director of Brazil's largest hospital group AMIL". Where does anyone imagine the NHS is going? Primarily to UnitedHealthcare, the biggest Health Care Insurance company on planet Earth.
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So, unfortunately, "we can't have an NHS under Starmer".
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-14622564541099164532020-05-24T15:51:00.000+01:002020-05-24T15:51:09.025+01:00CLAPPING FOR ATOS<br />
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-20732639260176573422020-05-13T06:41:00.000+01:002020-05-13T06:41:39.019+01:00MURDER HORNETS KILL MORE THAN COVID-19<br />
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I was going to use the headline:
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41 DEAD AS MURDER HORNETS RAMPAGE CHINESE PROVINCE
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Warning: Stay Alert in Click Bait World - It's Dangerous Out There.
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Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-37370362546596105872020-05-12T18:12:00.003+01:002020-05-12T18:12:52.683+01:00LOCKDOWN, DON'T LOCKDOWN?<br />
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-54632753955196215442020-05-06T00:56:00.001+01:002020-05-06T00:56:49.888+01:00AN EXCERPT FROM 1981<br />
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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.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-15081015141630872242020-04-10T19:59:00.001+01:002020-04-10T19:59:05.743+01:00NO HOPE FOR HUMANITY<br />
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I was talking with my daughter when out of the quiet evening sky I heard the sound of prisoners rattling tin cups against the bars of their cages.  Pots and pans being banged and jeering noises behind the cacophony.  Then it dawned on me.  This was not a prison riot, it was the collective neurosis acting out some bizarre ritual of solidarity with the public display of the collapse of civilisation.  People were stepping outside of their isolation cells to clap and cheer to an audience which was themselves.  Like a distortion of an orchestra playing on the deck of the Titanic or a disturbing inversion of Jewish prisoners singing on their way to the death camps.
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This sycophantic pathos, this kowtowing to the angel of death, this obedient display of appreciation for the tortured circus animals, is disturbing in the extreme.  I wondered what the third world war would look like with modern technology and the sixth domain of operations and here it is.
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The plutocrats have dissolved the fabric of society, like gallium embrittles aluminium, destroying the inherent strength and integrity, whilst leaving it with all the appearance of being intact.  They tested the system in 2016 with 'Exercise Cygnus' and were completely satisfied that all they had to do was to sit and wait for the next inevitable influenza pandemic.
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They had established that there were not enough hospital beds, there were not enough ICU beds, not enough ventilators, not enough testing and tracing capacity, not enough Personal Protection Equipment, not enough trained staff, not enough joined up procedures and protocols, and, pertinently, the health service would collapse.  And incidentally there was no capacity to cope with the cascade of corpses, but that wouldn't matter at that stage.
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This was clearly good news for the architects of the controlled demolition of the UK.  So much so, they kept schtum about the findings and, rubbing their bloody hands with glee, proceeded to do nothing but sit and wait.  No wonder they were so keen to stop Corbyn from repealing the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which would put responsibility for the people's health back where it belonged, with the government, with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.  Currently the government is not legally responsible for people's health anymore; it is only responsible for providing a health system - whether it works or not.
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The doctors and nurses and porters and cleaning staff are underpaid, undervalued, and the majority are struggling to eke a meagre living whilst many have to resort to debt and food banks.  They are on the front line like soldiers in the First World War.  They are decent people who have been wilfully betrayed by their government and the facade of a National Health Service which is infected with the likes of Simon Stevens.  Stevens, who is the CEO of NHS England, works for private insurance company interests and not for the benefit of either the NHS staff or the population that has been deceived about the ethos and meaning of those three letters which are deceitfully still emblazoned on private ambulances and private hospitals - the NHS.
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Clapping like trained seals in the streets for the victims of abuse who are still struggling on because they have no choice, is a bizarre exhibition of delusional madness.  I know 'the people' don't know they are cheering the slaughter of innocents by plutocrats waging their own wars for their own interests and entertainment, but that is the reality.  Of course the fact is we are stuck in our homes attempting to reduce the catastrophe that is befalling the UK.  Of course the health carers and auxiliary staff are heroes under these circumstances.  But to be corralled into vacuous clapping by the architects of this disaster is abhorrent.  It is dim witted and ignorant.
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I recall an advert, many years ago on the television, of cartoon pigs skipping with joy as they promoted some brand of sausage.  What I would suggest to these cartoon pigs, these clapping seals, these somnambulised troglodytes, these voluntary anchorites, is go back indoors and read about the intentional and planned privatisation of the NHS "by stealth".  Start with Oliver Letwin's 1980 book "Privatizing the World: A Study of International Privatization in Theory and Practice".  It's a shallow and pernicious self aggrandising pretence of sociopolitical economic theorising, but it appeals to neoliberals who are interested in how to run pyramid marketing scams and corporate scale Ponzi schemes.  He then teamed up with John Redwood to co-author "Britain's Biggest Enterprise: Ideas for Radical Reform of the NHS" in 1988.  A pathetic and appalling piece of economic theorising based on limited and prejudicial anecdotal nonsense.  But highly influential amongst right wing politicians gagging for favour from their plutocratic sugar daddies.  You could then put your feet up with some popcorn and soda and watch "The Great NHS Heist" by Drew McFadyen and Dr Bob Gill.  When you have finished that you might want to extend your education by watching "The Dirty War on the National Health Service" by John Pilger.  Once you get the gist of things you might want to brush up on what neoliberalism is really about by watching the exceptional four part series by BarakalypseNow called "This Is Neoliberalism" on YouTube.
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If you do begin to realise the scale of this political manoeuvring, this cynical materialistic manipulation by a bestial cabal of self serving psychopaths, the betrayal of humanity itself by these toxic horsemen of the apocalypse, you may just begin to get angry.  And next time you step outside your door to make your presence known you might weep for the sacrificial lambs who are caught up in this manufactured crisis.  You might scream your fury at this government for an unforgivable crime against humanity.  You might promise each other you will never rest until these criminals are held to account and locked up for life.  You might commit to opposing this materialistic culture and vow to never let it happen again.
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Or you might just clap because who wants to be the first to stand out from the crowd.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-43454768280363052072020-01-11T18:09:00.000+00:002020-01-11T18:12:50.767+00:00Joe Glasman: "Happy Chrismukah!" 2019<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joe Glasman</td></tr>
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Joe Glasman issued a video message for Christmas 2019. It is highly 'emotive' but what did Glasman actual say? By way of attempting to learn more about the highly complex subject of Judaism and antisemitism I transcribed the video. It is interesting to find out what phrases like "mazal tov" and "kol hakavod" mean in English. I also find it interesting to research some of the history of Hanukkah which commemorates the Maccabean Revolt of 167 to 160 BCE against the Seleucid Empire, and to look up the original source of the phrase "to beat swords into plough shares".<br />
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The more I looked into what Glasman was saying the more disturbing it became. He is clearly an ideological fanatic and has all the hall marks of a paranoid megalomaniac. The suggestion that he and his dedicated army of Maccabees were the main cause of the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party is of significant concern. I am sure a detailed analysis of this speech could uncover all sorts of complex and convoluted insanity, but one of the central puzzles I am left with is to try to understand what Glasman thinks he is promoting. The only message I got was one of extreme and selective literal interpretations of some obscure texts to fabricate an intense hatred of some "other" to legitimise anger, vitriol, and destruction. I see no indication of anything positive or useful except, perhaps, the act of destruction. What is Glasman advocating? If he achieved what he claims, then the consequences seem to be an extraordinarily right wing government in the UK.
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I was not impressed.
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Here is the transcription I made for academic purposes.
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Glasman's eight minute video begins with a still image of him facing the camera and the title words "Happy Chrismukah!" across the screen. It then cuts to him lighting what appears to be the first candle (other than the helper candle) of a Hanukkah menorah on a box of drawers with a red bus in front of it, all sitting on a sideboard.
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The words on the screen are:
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"They Tried to Kill Us (Again)"
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"We Won (Again)"
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"Let's Eat (...even more?)"
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He walks from there to his chair facing the camera and the words are replaced by:
"How Corbyn Canifinish"
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He sits down and the words are replaced by:
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"took on British Maccabeans"
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and then
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"and got finished"
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and then
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"....and a personal thank-you"
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Hey. Er, my names Joe Glasman. Some of you know me, but whether you do or not I just wanted to take this moment at Hanukkah to say a purely personal thank you <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - A personal thank you]</span> to every single person out there <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - to everyone out there ...]</span> who actively resisted <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - who actively opposed]</span> the antisemitism of Corbyn and the Labour Party <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - the antisemitism of Corbyn's Labour Party]</span> and say well done, mazal tov <span style="color: #666666;">[Yiddish phrase meaning "good fortune"]</span>.
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Um, just to put me into context if you don't know; I'm a volunteer <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - volunteer at Campaign Against Antisemitism]</span> at Campaign Against Antisemitism where I head the political investigations team which, amongst other things was responsible for our successful submissions to the EHCR <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - EHCR...]</span>, but today I'm not speaking in that role, I'm just speaking as one more person <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - to all the other volunteers like me .....]</span> who volunteered like you. Because the Hanukkah miracle has happened <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Nes gadol hayah shum!!]</span>; the beast is slain <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - slaughtered!]</span> and I have an urge to express my love <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - from me and my family:]</span> and personal gratitude to every single person, <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - THANK YOU!]</span> some of whom I've never met, who've played their part, and wish them Chanukah, or maybe Chrismukah Sameach <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - CHANUKAH SAMEACH - Merry Christmas]</span>.
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I did think of making a list of everyone to thank, but, well, I noticed a few weeks back that a Twitter account called <span style="color: #666666;">[sounds like -</span><span style="color: #999999;"> </span>shaina maidel<span style="color: #666666;">]</span> tried to compile one which resulted in the longest thread of broigus <span style="color: #666666;">[meaning - feud] [Screen text - BROIGUS ALERT]</span> over who was left out. As one activist, David Toum said in it "This is the most Jewish thread ever". It reminds me that I once thought of creating a Jewish Facebook App that instead of sending you congratulations for staying friends with people would do the opposite like "Congratulations; you haven't spoken to Jessica for fourteen weeks".
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This has been a real Jewish gescheft, a business where there are still people out there not talking to each other. I've loved the fact that we've even made our non-Jewish allies a bit more disputatious. And yet, despite all that, every single day we rolled up our sleeves and fought for the same cause. Kol hakavod <span style="color: #666666;">[meaning - all the honours]</span>, I take my hat off to all of you. You're all people who've had a natural and unshakeable moral understanding of what needed to be done. And we all know our non-Jewish allies deserve extra thanks. We stood up for our community - you stood up because it was the right thing to do. And then there are also the quiet activists, certainly numbered in my amazing team at CAA, who are the modest people who've applied themselves with the same determination as any of us, but who have never sought public plaudits. And, no, Cobynistas, they're not secret Mossad spies; <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Hey Chris W ...]</span> they're just ordinary people, <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - mossad offices next door ->]</span> fantastic people.
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<br />
And Hanukkah is the perfect time to celebrate our victory because, to me, Corbyn and Hanukkah are a comedy combo. The sainted Jeremy is always pictured lighting the Hanukkah candles <span style="color: #666666;">[Cut to photo of Jeremy Corbyn standing next to a Hanukkah menorah]</span> and you really do wonder if anyone bothered to tell him that this is a two millennium old celebration <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Maccabean revolt: 167-170 BCE]</span> of a Jewish military victory to re-establish Jewish national and religious sovereignty in Jerusalem. I wouldn't have thought that was Jezza's favourite party invite but, hey, Jewish studies may not be his forte.
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I don't think the miracle of Hanukkah was so much about the oil. <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text 'MO MORE WARS FOR OIL']</span> I think the real miracle was that we were free to be Jews again, and if you've got two more minutes <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text including images of alarm lights - TWO-MINUTE DROSHE WARNING]</span> listen to Rabbi Joe's droshe, <span style="color: #666666;">['droshe' is Yiddish דראָשע meaning sermon or speech]</span> I'll tell you why.
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<br />
You see, academic historians of Hanukkah tell a slightly different story. They tell the story of a dominant power trying to force their universal world view on Jews. <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Seleucids under Antiochus IV]</span> Back then it was gyms, the body beautiful, <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - =Hellenists hence 'Greek']</span> Olympic games, demigodness. Here's the twist: Up in Jerusalem there were the favoured Jews who were co-opted, who wanted in, learning to wrestle naked in the desecrated Jewish temple. Writer Dara Horn calls them 'the cool Jews' who wanted to assimilate so badly it's said they even tried to reverse their circumcisions. Ooooooh <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Ooooooh.... ...Jeremy Corbyn]</span> Jeremy Corbyn. This is the type of antisemitism where Jewish culture is attacked first and co-opts Jews as a weapon. It was replicated by Christianity by Marxism. In the Soviet version there was Yevsektskiya <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Yevsektskiya]</span> where atheist Marxist Jews were sent to undermine Jewish communities as well. Think about as 'Jewish Voice' for Stalin <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - '@JVoiceStalin ...']</span> because a century later the Labour Party set up a perfect replica in Jewish Voice for Labour to undermine us in the very same way, except now in TV studios.
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Yeah, we've had to deal with those 'cool Greeks', <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - (you know exactly who I mean .....)]</span> young Corbynista Jewish outriders desperate de-circumcisers <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - desperate de-circumcisers]</span> who try to cast people like ME, who used to vote Labour <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - casting Jewish (ex-)Labour voters]</span> as some kind of right wing Trump fanatics <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - as 'right-wing' ... 'Trump fanatics']</span> robbing the poor of a better future <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - - obstacles to 'a better world']</span>. And just before the election dawn, the Guardian wrote a truly dark editorial saying that despite the 'shameful' antisemitism, that Labour remained indispensable 'to progressive politics'. As the historian Tom Holland explained, at the together against antisemitism rally, Christianity made it possible to be, both a good Christian and someone who hated Jews.
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Now it seems that in modern Britain you can be a good progressive and hate Jews. So Corbyn was not Haman or Hitler, he was <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - ANTIOCHUS THE EXTREMELY HUMOURLESS]</span> Antiochus the Extremely Humourless, and we defeated him. And really, if we could see off the might of Ancient Greece it's not surprising we could see off what Stephen Daisley called <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - ".....a rancid Tony Benn revival act"]</span> a rancid Tony Benn revival act. <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - Stephen Daisley]</span> Inevitably those Greeks, as they did then, will come back for Jerusalem.
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So none of us should be ready to beat our swords into plough shares yet. But Macabees - we did it. By word and deed, by protest and tweet, by our spies and intel, by our fab celebrities and our anonymous volunteers, by pleading, by rigorous research and gathering of evidence, by incredible video making, by interminable hours combing through tweets, by prayer, by dramatic speeches and street protests, by lorries carrying huge billboards, by writing and shouting and taking the mick out of the most humourless bunch of people this country's politics has ever made us suffer and <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen cuts to a picture of Jeremy Corbyn looking angry]</span> ... can I finish? by shear bloody mindedness we metaphorically took the temple back. <span style="color: #666666;">[Screen text - and if Jerusalem "is builded here ...]</span> And if Jerusalem is builded here <span style="color: #666666;">[added screen text - in England's green and pleasant land....."]</span> in England's green and pleasant land, then just for now at least, we have our Jerusalem back.
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Macabees: At ease. They tried to kill us - we won - let's eat. And to quote our other Jewish festival of liberation, not leaning too far to the left, l'chaim. <span style="color: #666666;">[In Hebrew "L'Chaim" is a toast "To Life"]
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End titles state:
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Joe's Chrismukah thank-you
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Hum Music Production
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Glasman originally made his video private on YouTube with password access only. The content of his video is clearly of national significance to the UK public, and, as such, must be available to the public. Glasman has had several copies of his video removed from YouTube, presumably on the grounds of copyright law, and consequentially it can be hard to find a copy. I have provided some links to sources currently available as I write. They may also suffer illegitimate interference or censorship. [I do have a copy in my safe.]
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<br />
Glasman's video --->
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The Electronic Intifada on YouTube:
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<a href="https://youtu.be/evSj4S4AC4Q" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/evSj4S4AC4Q</a><br />
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Glasman's video --->
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Momentum Barnet on Facebook
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=781491542317247" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=781491542317247</a><br />
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Here is an article on The Electronic Intifada citing the video
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<a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-slaughtered-jeremy-corbyn-says-israel-lobbyist">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-slaughtered-jeremy-corbyn-says-israel-lobbyist</a>
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And here is an interesting article on the subject of Glasman's video by Deborah Maccoby
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<a href="http://normanfinkelstein.com/2020/01/05/corbynism-and-chanukah-a-response-to-joe-glasman-guest-post-by-deborah-maccoby/" target="_blank">http://normanfinkelstein.com/2020/01/05/corbynism-and-chanukah-a-response-to-joe-glasman-guest-post-by-deborah-maccoby/</a><br />
<br /><br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-3877325402316230802019-11-11T22:05:00.000+00:002019-11-11T22:05:30.720+00:002019 UK GENERAL ELECTION<br />
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I did not vote in the EU referendum.
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I generally don't vote because:
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a) I don't understand the issues well enough and
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b) most voting issues appear to be a set of different reasons for the same concealed agenda. So you think you are making a choice but you are actually shoring up the same single power structure of the plutocratic elite whichever way you vote.
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I would have voted Remain because I saw the US, the UK, Israel, and France as a cabal of rogue states committed to intensifying their petrodollar imperialism across the Middle East and Africa. There was a clear desire by some to unshackle the UK from any moderating influence of the larger European Union.
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I would not have voted to Leave because the Leave narrative was evidently toxic with emotive manipulation and wild unsubstantiated claims. It was distasteful and worrying to see the lynch mob tactics whipping the population into a frenzy based on fear of catastrophic consequences. It was dangerous to hand the political power over to what many, including myself, see as the hard right fascist warmongers and oppressors.
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But I was quite poorly on the day and didn't vote.
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What I didn't know at the time is that I was living in the highest proportional density of Leave voters in the UK. There is a tragic irony in this. Lincolnshire, and Boston in particular, is a peculiar collection of swathes of impoverished Tory voters. I begin to understand the psychology of this which I call cultural Stockholm Syndrome. But it doesn't need a name because a lot of people recognise the subservient serfs doffing their cap to the overlord for their own security. The overlords deliberately engender and maintain a level of ignorance to the point that in times of tension or crisis the population tend to rally round the overlords decrying any dissenters with vigour to defend their 'providers' and 'protectors'.
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As the whole volatile story of the various pros and cons of the power structures involved in this EU debacle are unravelling it becomes more confusing and more revealing at the same time.
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At the outset my opinion was that if the UK had a decent socialist government I would think that the UK should be outside of any tight and constraining union with the European project. A kind of respected and respectable independent entity cooperating with the rest of Europe. If the UK had the same kind of hierarchical, authoritarian, capitalist government that it has had since Thatcher got into power in 1979 then the UK would be better inside the EU simply by way of moderating the rampant cruelty of the Tory ethos.
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It has always been clear to me that the EU is neoliberal and that the UK government is neoliberal. The choice seems to be which arrangement most ameliorates or softens the extremes of neoliberalism. Although Corbyn had been leader of the Labour Party since September 2015 and the EU referendum was in June 2016 it took me some time to realise that he represented a profound change in the political philosophy of the Labour Party.
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No one is likely to significantly advance their understanding of the political complexity and machinations that are currently afoot before the 12 December General Election. The landscape and emotions will be flooded with a kaleidoscopic dizzying array of sound bites to amaze and bewilder the population in true consumer culture advertising style.
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Perhaps the General Election date should have been set for 25 December to heighten the profound contradictions and dangers we all face. Christmas has been turned into a disorientating hedonistic materialist extravaganza and a veritable orgy of consumer delight and drunkenness. All on the back of a profound story about the birth of an innocent baby human in a corrupt world setting out on a story with a tragic end brought about by greed, prejudice, ignorance, fear, and bigotry.
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The NHS is a good example of the problems we are facing in the UK. The NHS is central to the election. It is both an important issue and a revealing one. The health and wellbeing of the UK is the issue. Back in 1980 Oliver Letwin wrote a book entitled "A Study of International Privatization in Theory and Practice". In 1988 he and John Redwood produced a book entitled "Britain's Biggest Enterprise - ideas for radical reform of the NHS" Redwood is a significant influence in the theory and agenda to privatise the social services in the UK too. Someone may help me here by clarifying the stance these two individuals have regarding the EU but it appears to me that Oliver Letwin is leaning towards Remain whilst John Redwood is leaning towards Leave. It is interesting since either way doesn't seem to matter to their big ideas about corporate control and free market capitalism.
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The Health and Social Care Act 2012 was the keystone legislation that set the bigger plan of privatisation of the NHS on course. Corbyn's Labour are the only Party to make it clear that they understand what is taking place enough by making an unambiguous statement that they will repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012. No other Party either understands what is afoot or is willing to raise the subject in public. Perhaps they think it is too complicated for the little people to understand. It is evidently vital that any hope of saving the NHS resides with the Labour Party. It is also evident that Labour are the only Party committed to reversing austerity and re-establishing the social security that has been decimated in this country (even understanding the significance of changing the Department for Work and Pensions back to the Department for Health and Social Security).
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Given that we don't have the option of an entire radical reform of politics in the UK between now and 12 December it seems the issue at hand is who to vote for in the upcoming election. On that basis I am clear that Labour is the best option at this point. Of course the neoliberal elites may be grooming Corbyn as their way of extending neoliberalism in a more clandestine manner under the guise of socialism. We might find, as Labour get into government, that we are faced with the right wing takeover of the Labour Party again. Given the grass roots surge in Labour support on the back of the more socialist agenda proposed in their 2017 election manifesto it seems reasonable to at least doubt the right wing will have an easy time of overthrowing the left wing. But what is guaranteed is that every other significant Party is committed to neoliberalism come what may.
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Every other significant Party is entirely neoliberal; the only question seems to be what colour you prefer. You can support free market capitalism which believes corporate rule with as little state control as possible (sounds a little like my understanding of Mussolini's political philosophy) and remain in the EU with the Liberal Democrats, or you can support free market capitalism and Leave the EU with the Tories or the Brexit Party. I would caution against voting for Leave or Remain in this General Election for two primary reasons; a) there is a real danger of voting on the basis of ideas or feelings initiated by the disastrous campaigns of the EU referendum whilst this is a GE not the EU referendum, and b) this election is about the government we want for the next five years and the leading "Remain/Leave" Parties are committed neoliberals regardless of where we are in relation to the EU.
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Labour has made a very clear and difficult stand which is often (almost always) criticised as being indecisive or 'on the fence' whilst in fact it is (as is becoming clear) the most open, clear, consistent, and decisive position by any Party. First, get rid of the neoliberalism which has devastated the social infrastructure of this country. Second, to handle the Brexit disaster in the most clear, sensible, open, and respectful way possible under these difficult circumstances. So the proposition is to negotiate a workable and beneficial deal with the EU to Leave the European Union (they have done a lot of that work already though you would never know it from the neoliberal main stream media). Then they will have another referendum, tactfully and diplomatically called "A People's Vote", with the details of the arrangements for Leaving the EU out in the open for your perusal. In a calmer and more informed setting you can then vote for Leave or Remain.
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The difficulty for some people is that they will fear they may be in the minority, or if they fail to vote for 'their side' in the GE that the 'other side' will usurp them, and so will attempt to grab at Leave or Remain in the General Election, but that is what neoliberalism relies on ... fear and greed. So, are you going to act out of fear and desperation and vote for the controlling neoliberal corporate overlords whether we are in or out of Europe, or are you capable of steeling yourself and acting in a more considered and intelligent manner and vote for the socialist agenda to dismantle the neoliberal infrastructure and then vote on Europe?
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My own view is clear. For 40 years I have watched, and suffered the consequences of, the ideologues that believe, or pretend to believe, that unfettered capitalism will find its own equilibrium for the benefit of the majority. I have had 40 years to ameliorate, amend, or alter my view and I am more convinced than ever that this 'project' is a crime against humanity and can only result in a massive increase in suffering and needless death in this country and abroad. I'm getting a bit old, and am less interested in the consequences to me, but I know that this materialistic obsession is profoundly against humanity and nature itself.
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And I am pleased to be in the good company of people like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, Dr Bob Gill, Roger Waters, Ken Loach and so many more kind hearted, intelligent, insightful people. In fact it is nice to inhabit the same planet as them. Let's hope we can continue and nurture even more loving, compassionate, and delightful people in the future.
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Priority 1 - Vote Labour - Get Neoliberalism OUT.
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Priority 2 - I don't care if we're in or out of the EU at the moment so long as it is serviceable. And I will reserve judgement until I have read the proposed arrangements.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-70005914434364308762019-06-04T17:04:00.000+01:002019-06-04T17:04:55.637+01:00INVERTING SELF AWARENESS<br />
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We are going to have to talk about this 'mental health' issue. You can't say that; it's anti-Semitic. Fuck off; all you Brexiteers are fucking mental. Bastard Libtards; you do my fuckin' 'ed in. What the fuck, you fucking mother fucking fuckers; I hate the fucking lot of you.
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"Ka-ching".
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The digital money keeps flowing from your account to the ethereal megabank in the upper echelons of cyberspace. The degradation of language, the distortion of collective cognition, and the projected landscape of illusion are all part of the fourth industrial revolution and the conversion of individual identity into digital tokens to utilise your brief manifestation as a material biological blob for the benefit of a plutocratic elite.
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It is extremely hard to pull it all together and to make coherent sense of the current changes evolving within the context of 'life on this planet'. It is becoming increasingly clear to me how the advent and progress of computing is changing what we would, in olden days, have called reality. When using such labels as 'reality' we assume a great deal and presume upon the collective consensus to afford meaning to such a term.
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At a certain scale of observation we mutually agree there is such a thing as material substance. A good exercise for anyone reading this is to delve into the etymology of the word 'material'. In short it relates to mother and nature in its Latin origins which were evolved from the ancient Greek term 'hyle' which, although it means 'wood', was a generic reference to the essential substance manifest by form coming into being. It was not the stuff that was made into a form but more that the form created the substance in order to exist. In short the word has evolved from a more ethereal origin than the common daily usage implies. When you pick up your cup of tea to have a drink it is of no concern or consequence to you what the philosophical ramifications of a material substance may be because your cup is solid, its real, and you get to taste your tea in the real world.
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Many years ago (perhaps forty) I was actually shocked when I realised that the physical manifestation of the cup was there in order to facilitate the dynamics required to experience life. I won't attempt to describe slowly and gently how that construct is formed in a mind just here, but it was a shock for me to realise that the 'real' world, as I thought of it then, was only a symbolic representation of the underlying non-material reality. Coming from my Roman Catholic upbringing it was akin to a realisation that the temporal world is not real and the spiritual world is the real reality.
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For the presumptuous sceptics amongst you I have considered at length whether our cultural constructs form, and therefore restrict, our interpretation of the world or whether they are just an arbitrary framework from which to begin to discover the world. It is a bit of both and varies in different people to different degrees. For those limited to learning by rote you will never understand why 56x8 gives the same result as 8x56 whilst 56/8 does not give the same result as 8/56. You will learn by rote, repeat with great skill and finesse, and be highly pragmatic in mathematical exercises. But you will never 'understand' why it is so. And why should you? Pragmatism is a highly desirable characteristic. For me, however, I seek understanding as a pathological necessity.
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So it seems in all my subsequent reading and investigation I am not the first person to encounter this deeper issue of the substance of real life. During my career developing software it became increasingly clear to me that there was something about algorithms that was more real than the real world they affected. An algorithm is in some way an ethereal pattern. It has no material existence except that it needs material in which to be manifest. A bit like the idea of balance, which Pythagoras was at pains to point out was real and could never be perfectly manifest in the material world but could only be approximated. This, of course, led to Platonic solids and eventually to our entire Western Scientific philosophy which, ironically, is entirely upside down. Western Science struggles with Quantum Physics (a profound misnomer which again leads to much misunderstanding) because we collectively believe in the material world whilst Quantum Theory disposes of it completely.
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A brief example is that what once took several office clerks, some bits of paper, envelopes, stamps, machines to make stamps, invoices, trips to the post office, more clerks, cheques, bank clerks, postal vans, VAT invoices, delivery vans burning fossil fuels to get a widget onto your desk can now be rendered in algorithms such that you can click on a picture on your smart phone and your 3D printer will belch out the widget onto your desk with all the financial transaction handled electronically. The algorithms symbolically manifest the erstwhile material dynamics to render the desired result. A large part of the material world becomes redundant in the algorithmic representation of it.
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People think robots will take over the world, they imagine Artificial Intelligence will be dictating to us, and there are endless imaginings of various dystopian futures. But it isn't happening like that. Only a few years ago there was an idea that we will all be controlled by our digital devices. Eventually we would have embedded chips and could walk into a supermarket, take food, walk out and the money would be deducted from our digital accounts without us even having to think about it. Too many numbskulls cannot even see the inherent dangers in that. But we don't need to be physically 'chipped'. With the onset of distant iris scanning and biological identity the supermarket already knows who you are, where you are, what you are taking, what you want, what they can sell you, and what is in your 'account'. You are being 'identified' simply by walking the streets of London. Apart from many unanswered questions about 5G the surveillance state is constructing a virtual world with you in it. As such, it has immense control over you.
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Currently the cultural cognitive models suggest that if you are a thief (culturally understood to be a 'baddie') you won't be able to get away with robbing the supermarket because the surveillance state will intercept you. This is all perfectly fine until you philosophically question what amounts to 'theft'. In what way, for example, have the supermarkets purloined the goods they are selling you. If you can't get a job, and you can't get an authorised employer to deposit electronic digits into your account, you can't get food to live. You literally have to comply with the algorithms in order to operate in the world to live. Bang goes the 'black market' and any hope of having alternatives to survive without the system. No safety net makes everyone entirely dependent on compliance with the electronic superstructure in which they exist.
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Then comes the conceptual side of things. It is already happening and is deeply disturbing to see the pathological conformity with cultural narratives. I saw an interviewer asking people outside a London rail station what they thought about all the surveillance cameras. No one objected. Better than that, many people dreamt up justifications on the spot like "I suppose if it makes us all safer it's a good thing". Literally people's brains are conforming with the inevitable as children conform to their parents. We get our sense of self, our identity, from our surroundings and most profoundly and inherently from the people we interface with. As this sense of an all-seeing presence pervades our consciousness we do not see it as a thing but instead we simply respond appropriately. Marshall McLuhan's reference to the overarching technological brain (a hypothesis in 1962 when he wrote about it) and the way Big Brother would go inside of us is stunningly perceptive.
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Through social media, cloud technology, the internet of things, digital money, remote biometric identification, and the ubiquitous surveillance state we are evolving into something akin to a supraorganism like an insect colony where our limited responses, depending upon our perceived environment, are entirely predictable and controllable, and support and maintain the greater good even if it is to our own personal detriment. And for all of this, the vast majority will still believe they are running their own lives. We are fast becoming the physical manifestation of the virtual algorithmic world of artificial intelligence. So we are not going to be taken over by robots in any way that we imagine; we are simply becoming its extension. Like the little fungus infected ant that just happens to want to climb as high as he can today.
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Mental health is transforming into a euphemism for compliance, and mental health problems are simply something for the supraorganism to remedy or remove. Big Brother is already inside of you.
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: xx-small;">Thanks to Tookapic & Markus Spiske for original images.</span></h2>
Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-10115012114304041502019-05-08T15:02:00.000+01:002019-05-08T15:02:25.492+01:00Rob Delaney's short video<br />
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I found a Tweet from Bob Gill @drbobgill</div>
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"Great video on urgent new threat to NHS, and what you
can do, introduced by the brilliant <o:p></o:p></div>
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@robdelaney<o:p></o:p></div>
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It contains some useful bullet points in a video regarding
the restructuring of the NHS.</div>
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This is the Tweet url:</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/drbobgill/status/1124053942026088454">https://twitter.com/drbobgill/status/1124053942026088454</a></div>
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This is a transcript from the video:</div>
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Hi, I'm Rob Delaney [@robdelaney] and I love the NHS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it's being privatised by the Tories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're breaking it up into businesses so
that private companies can run the profitable bits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is all being done by stealth and
without a public mandate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So please
watch this video and learn what you can do to help.</div>
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- The Tories are turning the NHS into a US-style private
health insurance system.</div>
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- The latest step in the NHS privatisation plan is to get
GPs to sign up to new Primary Care Networks.</div>
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- BUT these are the building blocks of new bodies called Integrated
Care Providers (ICPs)...</div>
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- Which are the foundation of the American private health
insurance system.</div>
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- GPs are being pressured to sign up before 15th May without
debate or a vote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're being told
that:</div>
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- 1. ICPs will integrate health and social care to create
one better, joined up service.</div>
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- 2. Signing up means more money for GP practices.</div>
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- 3. GPs are free not to sign.</div>
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- But they're being tricked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Signing up to these contracts will actually mean:</div>
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- 1. Under-qualified staff will be able to examine, diagnose
and even treat patients.</div>
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- 2. Financial incentives will reward GPs for denying care
to patients - fundementally corrupting the doctor-patient relationship.</div>
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- 3. Health and social care budgets will be integrated to
allow corporate-run ICPs to get their hands on a bigger pot of our money.</div>
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- 4. Control of patient care and budgets will be removed
from the doctors and given to managers.</div>
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- There's a lot of pressure to sign these contracts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But together we can resist it.</div>
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- If you're a GP, DON'T sign the new contract!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And tell your colleagues NOT to sign.</div>
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- If you're a patient, tell your GP NOT to sign!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>AND DO SO BEFORE 15th MAY!</div>
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- For an in-depth explanation, watch this 10 minute video: <a href="https://youtu.be/l4wQ577Me30">https://youtu.be/l4wQ577Me30</a></div>
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- For the full story of NHS privatisation, watch 'SELL OFF:
THE ABOLITION OF YOUR NHS' <a href="http://selloff.org.uk/nhs/">http://selloff.org.uk/nhs/</a></div>
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- Please share to protect the NHS.</div>
<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-12711005336408951932019-01-19T21:19:00.002+00:002019-01-19T21:24:09.382+00:00LETTER TO MATT WARMAN ABOUT GENERAL ELECTION<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LgtTv1gjsAF56DtuQJNNHjQoiOYerveJZ5Ehj5O7_cg-AnIZeHh-Ygqu50rQh-2ACsH0FZ9ir9Crv6BLucH4K4e5BZBk2QEadFuMKBnjwEi953u2yJK5FjXNqMBy8j-HuzmMgPBAim0/s1600/LetterToMattWarman-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LgtTv1gjsAF56DtuQJNNHjQoiOYerveJZ5Ehj5O7_cg-AnIZeHh-Ygqu50rQh-2ACsH0FZ9ir9Crv6BLucH4K4e5BZBk2QEadFuMKBnjwEi953u2yJK5FjXNqMBy8j-HuzmMgPBAim0/s1600/LetterToMattWarman-02.jpg" data-original-width="492" data-original-height="540" /></a></div>
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<table style="font-size: 14pt; font: Segoe UI; width: 100%;">
<tbody>
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<td>Matt Warman
<br />
63 Wide Bargate
<br />
Boston
<br />
Lincolnshire
<br />
PE21 6SG
</td>
<td style="text-align: right; vertical-align: top;">16 January 2019
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
Dear Matt Warman
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<br />
The defeat of the Government's Withdrawal Agreement on Tuesday 15 January 2019 would have been problematic enough had it been a marginal defeat. The magnitude of the defeat appears to have shocked all observers across the political spectrum and across Europe. It is indicative of a far more serious problem in Britain.
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<br />
The EU referendum has been severely criticised on all levels and it may have been an attempt to consolidate some sort of consensus in the UK but it turned out to be a Pandora's box. One year later, on account of the turmoil created, Theresa May called a General Election in the vain hope of increasing the Conservative majority. Quite the opposite occurred and it cost a pretty penny to secure the Confidence and Supply Agreement with the DUP to maintain a tenuous grip on power.
<br />
<br />
Now the Conservative Government have not only been the first ever Government to be found in Contempt of Parliament they have also suffered the largest defeat of any UK Government in history. All this is centred around the toxic and divisive issue of our membership of the EU. The government is spectacularly failing to maintain or even muster the confidence of the population and this in itself is causing serious unrest as well.
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As Theresa May has been at pains to emphasise repeatedly, this country needs a "strong and stable" government. On that point I agree with her. It is in the interest of the UK as a country and all the individual people in the UK to find some consensus within which the UK can make safe and secure progress in whatever direction it chooses.
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On that account, regardless of my views on membership of the EU or my political preferences and as one of your constituents, I request and urge you to vigorously support any moves toward securing a General Election at the earliest possible moment as a matter of highest priority and national security.
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<br />
Yours sincerely
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Sam Spruce
<br />
<br /></div>Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-90952489180368826112019-01-15T10:37:00.000+00:002019-01-15T10:37:23.820+00:00LEAKED: TORY BRIEF FOR TUE 15 JAN 2019<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ITrdumXEidmWI3NB5Ckv3OEE506jhK2DfC4ZsuhLoLMs1BwB5IKMuCPKn4hcrCDQ3iRrnoXv7yPbOmNmjjBl0hBqEjJM38SxZDCz-PmpRqoP82QhwB5px05gPVjQiV9wnvFpQ4_IPGg/s1600/AllLeakedDocs-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="538" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ITrdumXEidmWI3NB5Ckv3OEE506jhK2DfC4ZsuhLoLMs1BwB5IKMuCPKn4hcrCDQ3iRrnoXv7yPbOmNmjjBl0hBqEjJM38SxZDCz-PmpRqoP82QhwB5px05gPVjQiV9wnvFpQ4_IPGg/s1600/AllLeakedDocs-01.jpg" /></a></div>
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<b>LEAKED: BROADCAST BRIEF FOR TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2019</b></div>
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Jim Pickard @PickardJE on Twitter: His profile says "Chief Political
Correspondent for the Financial Times" but he is not blue ticked. He tweeted "someone has leaked me what
seems to be the government line for tomorrow, if it’s of any interest " Looking at the documents I can't imagine why
anyone would have invented them. And
they are entirely in character and as incompetent as one would expect from the
Tories. [On the first page alone I have found 5 typos.] Reading this document carefully in order to
transcribe it I inevitably paid more attention to it than I would most
documents produced on this level from the Government. In my opinion it is a shoddy, unprofessional,
and contradictory rush job with no meaningful substance but a lot of
interesting psychological subtext.</div>
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This is my transcript of the leaked documents. The images from which it was transcribed are
at the end of the blog post.</div>
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<b><u><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">BROADCAST BRIEF FOR TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2019</span></u></b></div>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our deal delivers on the referendum, taking back control of our money, borders and laws, whilst protecting jobs and security and providing certainty as we leave the EU.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We should deliver for the British people and get on with building a brighter future for our country by backing this deal today.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Voting against the deal would just mean more division, more uncertainty, and a failure to deliver on the decisions of the British people.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We have listened carefully to the concerns that MPs from all sides expressed and secured valuable new assurances from the EU including...</span></b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A commitment to work on our new relationship can begin as soon as possible after signing the Withdrawal Agreement - in advance of the exit day of 29 March - and confirmation that this new relationship does not need to replicate the backstop.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A commitment to a fast track process to bring our EU trade deal into force - including that it can be implemented before ratification by other EU countries, making it even more likely the backstop will never need to be used.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">An explicit linkage between the Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration - putting it beyond doubt that these come as a package.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And confirmation that the UK can unilaterally deliver on all the commitments we set out for Northern Ireland last week.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">These letters also...</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Confirm the legal standing of the December Council conclusions: that the backstop could only be temporary and both sides would act bring it to an end swiftly.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And they have legal force and would be used in any further arbitration to interpret the meaning of the Withdrawal Agreement.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">They build on wider assurances we have already set out including...</span></b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">N<b>ew commitments for Northern Ireland</b> - including a 'Stormont lock' so no new areas of law can apply to NI under the backstop over the heads of the NI Assembly</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>A greater role for Parliament</b> - including supporting an amendment so Parliament has a vote on whether to extend the implementation period or enter the backstop if our future relationship won't be ready the end of 2020.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>A commitment on workers' rights and environmental standards</b> - including to work with MPs on how to implement them, looking at legislation where necessary.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We recognise that these assurances do not go as far as some MPs would like...</span></b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But these documents contain importance assurances from the EU that both sides are committed to avoiding the backstop, and that it would only ever be used for a short time if it did come into force.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The EU have maintained that they will not re-open the Withdrawal Agreement, and it would be wrong to pretend there are different deals available.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The exchange of letters do, however, mean the EU has gone further than before in providing assurances and mechanisms to avoid the backstop ever being used, and to swiftly and the backstop if it was ever triggered.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And we are convinced that MPs now have the clearest assurances that this is the baest deal possible and that it is worthy of their support.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div>
<div>
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is broad support for many of the key aspects of the deal:</span></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will control our own borders and <b>end free movement once and for all.</b></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will <b>protect jobs</b> and security.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will <b>no longer send vast sums of money to the EU.</b></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will be able to <b>strike free trade deals</b> around the world.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will take back control of our laws, <b>ending the jurisdiction of the ECJ in the UK.</b></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And we will <b>protect the integrity</b> of our United Kingdom.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><u><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">BREXIT Q&A</span></u></b></div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Amendments tabled?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The selection of amendments is a matter for the Speaker.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will look at all the amendments in the usual way.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Murrison amendment'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The assurances published today make clear that both sides remain committed to avoiding the backstop and, if it were ever used, it would only be temporary.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Benn amendment'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This amendment shows the Government's plan is the only one on the table.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As with the Labour frontbench, this amendment rejects our deal without putting forward any alternative.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is pure self-interest to try and stop Brexit and overturn the result of the referendum.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Mann amendment'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We recognise concerns raised on the protection of workers' rights and environmental standards.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We have committed to addressing these concerns and will work with MPs from across the House on how best to implement them, looking at legislation where necessary, to deliver the best possible results for workers across the UK.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Swire amendment'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will report in the final half of 2020 on progress made towards the future relationship and make sure Parliament - informed by the Devolved Administrations - will be able to consider whether to extend the Implementation Period.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Going to win the Meaningful Vote?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We're fully focused on winning the vote on the deal - a deal that delivers on the referendum and is in the national interest.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And as the Prime Minister said yesterday, we should deliver for the British people and get on with building a brighter future for our country by backing this deal today.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Plan B?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We are working to ensure that MPs vote for the deal tomorrow and we deliver on the result of the referendum - with a good deal that protects jobs, security and our union.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is important that we don't see a situation where there is a paralysis in Parliament that risks there being no Brexit.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'When will you come back if you lose?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our intention has always been to respond quickly and provide certainty on the way forward in the event that the vote doesn't pass, both in terms of setting out our next steps and any subsequent vote, and that is what we will do.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Alternative EU Withdrawal Bill from MPs if the vote doesn't pass?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Clearly any attempt to prevent the Government from meeting all the legal conditions for an orderly exit at this moment of historic significance is extremely concerning.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is obviously a lot of talk of what MPs may or may not do in Parliament.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But right now the focus is on winning the vote today.</span></li>
</ol>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Why is it important that the Government controls the business?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is a fundamental principle of our democracy that allows MPs to scrutinise Government, whilst allowing the Government to pursue its legislative agenda.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Any attempt to change how and when business is arranged could threaten the ability of the Government to deliver on the referendum result, its manifesto commitments and entire legislative program, therefore undermining its ability to govern.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It would also be binding on future governments.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Why is no Brexit more likely?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">While no deal remains a serious risk, having observed events at Westminster over the last seven days, we now believe that the more likely outcome is a paralysis in Parliament that risks there being no Brexit.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'DUP says scaremongering over NI in no deal?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We will do everything in our power, whatever the circumstances, to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is about practicality for businesses and people - no border doesn't happen simply because people say 'well, we won't have a border'.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Rise of far-right extremism if no Brexit?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We would enter unchartered territory should the vote on the deal not pass through the House, which would risk dividing the country.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We're focused on winning the vote that would bring the country back together again.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<b><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">'Letter from Conservatives ex-Minister says WTO exit better?'</span></i></b></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This deal gives us an unprecedented economic relationship with the EU and keeps us safe with the broadest security partnership in the EU's history.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We can do better than trading under WTO rules, which would mean tariffs and quotas on British goods going to the EU.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div>
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Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-33101843758962047562019-01-13T16:52:00.000+00:002019-01-13T16:54:07.305+00:00BREXIT - LEFT RIGHT IN OUT UP DOWN<br />
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Although my poor ant brain has a bit of dystopian fungal infection, I still struggle on, trying to make sense of the world. I find myself inescapably swept off my feet by the powerful vortex of the current political storm.
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When the EU referendum was announced I was against leaving the EU in the manner proposed. The pro-Brexit characters and narrative were largely ignorant, brutish, self serving, and evidently deceptive. Leaving the EU would be parochial and seriously problematic. I didn't vote because I couldn't but certainly would have voted Remain.
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This Brexit issue, the Trump phenomenon, and the current unrest in France are all illustrating that the old notions of simple binary polarisation in politics will no longer work as a functional collective discourse. I suspect this is one of the benefits of the information age in spite of the fact we are struggling to understand or handle it.
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Neoliberalism is our current biggest political problem. At a glance the US, the UK, France, and Israel are pathologically neoliberal and, in that respect, form a very coherent alliance even if not written on paper. It must be noted also that the IMF largely rules the EU and is also neoliberal, except they are the only ones to have admitted it and commented on its failures. As such I would always tend to want to extract myself from the bureaucratic megalith that is the cumbersome EU.
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It has always been my view that as humans we have to cooperate. Other people have other opinions but my view is as stated. The benefits of the EU are the number of rules and regulations that moderate and ease our cooperation as separate countries. The problems with the EU are that it operates under authoritarian, hierarchical, and capitalist paradigms. This means that internally there are seriously harmful relationships. Greece being perhaps the most readily obvious example. Ideally, with respect to the EU, the UK neither wants to be subsumed into a mega state nor to be detrimentally ostracised.
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Within the UK there has been a frightening and damaging alignment with neoliberalism since the 1980s at least. From 1979 the Tories have been in power with an avowed allegiance to neoliberalism except for a few years of Labour led by Blair who was and is an advocate for neoliberalism. This results in a hierarchical structure of rule makers and rule takers resulting in a one way flow of economic advantage. The UK is evidencing the catastrophic effects of these policies. They are disguised for the unwary under statistical benefits such as the average national income. It does take at least two brain cells to recognise that if 1 person gets £1 million pounds and 99 people get £1 that the average income, £10,000.99, is a fatal distortion of the reality of most people's lives. So, statistically, the UK can be doing very well whilst the majority are in a critical state of penury. Even mega corporations are beginning to realise the fallacy of this situation.
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It would be beneficial for the UK to extract itself from the neoliberal controls and constraints of the EU if; 1, the UK ceases to adhere to the neoliberal ideology and becomes more internally equitable, and 2, the UK maintains cooperative and equitable relations with the EU. It would be seriously detrimental for the UK to leave the EU so that the UK political elite can ramp up their neoliberal ideology.
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Tories are inherently master servant orientated. They believe it works. Their approach to leaving the EU is arrogant and demanding. The result will be an isolated Britain ruled by neoliberals. Some of the political elite like this scenario; it will benefit them. But there is no serious political opinion that it will benefit the people of the UK. The very best that anyone can find to say is that we'll cope, and we might do quite well. And it is quite disturbing to realise that the Tories only have one way to manage a difficult situation and we have seen the consequences of that. The first thing they will do is ramp up their attempts to align with the US. I'll say no more on that.
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Labour has experienced a sea change since Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn. That sea change has been a shift from the harmful effects of capitalism and neoliberalism and the realisation that we can only survive if we start to evolve a way to have a collective and equitable whole society conversation. I unequivocally agree with that perspective. That does mean listening to people you disagree with and trying to understand different people's different concerns. It is precisely not about binary decisions and winning or losing. A Labour exit from the EU would maintain most of the cooperative benefits whilst asserting the UK's ability to self determination. In an ideal world that would clearly be a good thing.
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A Tory exit from the EU would be an unmitigated disaster.
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A Labour exit from the EU offers serious potential to extract ourselves from the IMF's undemocratic diktats and the heavyweight bureaucratic constraints of the cumbersome EU whilst maintaining many of the cooperative benefits.
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If we remain in the EU we at least prevent the disruption of a disastrous exit and maintain all the benefits that we currently enjoy.
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Either way there is still the fundamental question of the political hierarchy of the UK. In over simplified terms we have a choice between the Tories or Labour. I tend to avoid aligning myself with Parties because it is defining and limiting but I am 100% against the Tories. They cannot see past analogising an individual's way to make money from the general rules for society. They are wedded to a competitive and very harmful game of musical chairs with people's lives. It is a priority for the survival of the majority of people in Britain to get rid of the Tories as soon as possible. Given Labour's fundamental return to socialist principles and their avowed disowning of anything neoliberal then they are not only the best way to get rid of the Tories but they are a good way too.
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On this level of discussion the options are: Tory Brexit, Tory Remain, Labour Brexit, or Labour Remain. Neither I, nor the majority of people in the UK, can survive much more of the Tories. It is therefore imperative to fight to get a Labour government into Parliament above probably everything else at the moment. So any attempt to split the Labour Party over the issue of the EU is extremely dangerous and plays into the hands of the neoliberal and Tory vultures currently drooling on the edge of the current mayhem.
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There is a lot of disinformation and confusion at the moment. One or two points need clarifying. Corbyn has been consistent in his views about the disadvantages of abdicating control to Europe and the advantages of cooperative actions with the EU. He advocated and voted to Remain in the referendum. He is pro-Europe. He is also not a dictator and the Labour Party has had conferences and votes which have led to their current position. In that respect he represents a party that by majority decision prefers to leave the EU under a Labour government. There is a caveat to this and an important one. A caveat that you would never get from the Tories as has been disgustingly illustrated over their disturbing resistance to allow a parliamentary vote on any proposed deal. That caveat is that any agreement gained and proposed by the Labour government has to pass the Labour Party's internal voting system AND has to go to parliament to be approved. It follows that if Corbyn cannot get a deal that is approved by the people of this country that article 50 will be revoked. There is no such position with the Tories. And that is what will hopefully bring them down. But it is so important not to conflate the Tory/Labour binary with the Brexit/Remain binary.
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First get rid of the Tories. Then sort out this EU issue. Any other approach is going to send this country into an inescapable maelstrom of decline and destruction. I've said it before and it is a bit extreme but the danger is that the wealthy will live in a fortified London and the home counties whilst the rest of the country will become like the West Bank and Gaza. They have the technology, they have the experience, they have the intention. Why wouldn't it happen?
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If you are feeling slightly voiceless do not vote for the Tory oppressors who will promise you everything and deliver nothing. Support the Labour movement, support the opposition to the Tory Brexit plan, and support the best efforts to resolve the EU problem the best way we can.
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<b>A Labour Brexit is quite the opposite of a Tory Brexit.</b>
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-5286778502194020882019-01-10T10:36:00.001+00:002019-01-12T06:26:02.788+00:00LIRA'S ARBITRARY THREAD OF CONSCIOUSNESS<br />
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Lira woke at about 4 in the morning and went to the loo and collected a couple of chocolates and two biscuits. She returned to bed and ate the biscuits, lay down, turned off the light, and was imagining she was going to fall asleep. But there was something in her mind. As if she was very near to understanding something that otherwise seemed impossible. It seemed inextricably linked to her current disastrous relationship. As if, if she could just understand that one bit, so much more would suddenly fall into place.
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She had an idea that every other event has something in common that has mislead her to expect it is true of the one event in which she is involved but can't explain. It's as if Harry is accusing her of doing something, and his reasons for believing his conclusion, seem equally convincing to Lira. It is one thing Lira seeing how he has interpreted the world, and another thing for her to have to interpret the world the same way. For a fleeting moment she had an evanescent comprehension of how things, which appear improbable or impossible, are actually quite easily understandable.
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Lira suddenly remembers that between going to the toilet and collecting chocolates and biscuits she had stopped at the kitchen sink and filled a glass with cold water and drunk about 75% of it? She wonders if that seemingly insignificant event just may become important later.
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So then Lira finds herself lying down attempting to sleep. The time is now about 04:48 and she hasn't got as far as turning the light off because her mind is trying to hang on to an invisible virtual Ariadne's thread of an insight into the imagined manifestation of a scenario which reveals the complex arrangement that explains how something that appears to be exactly impossible would obviously mislead anyone into thinking it could not be true and that therefore the exact same pattern of relationships, that can be seen in everything else, when applied to this otherwise impossible arrangement, would conclude that she did it.
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What is it? What is this thing that she thinks she can see? And it reminds her of the hidden tape recorder that she found in Desmond's office, and how she realised that Mavis was lying. There is something sitting there. There is some arrangement, in her neurological network, which momentarily revealed an otherwise hidden pattern, which, when overlaid with this mysterious something, would explain it.
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Lira wondered what she could possibly write in her diary to hold the set of things that she currently perceives that leave her with the belief that she can see something behind them. If she can't recall that fleeting insight just now, what can she leave on paper to record the current arrangement such that she gets the chance in the future to return to her diary in the hope of piecing the mystery together at another time. It is as if she wants to take a 4 dimensional snapshot; she wants to put the virtual reality on hold; she wants to pause the game and save it to disk, so that she can pick it up and carry on at some future time when she doesn't need to be continuing in the way that she now has to proceed and which is obscuring the reality, the real reality, from view.
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Lira was also telling herself, or at least she was at around 04:48, that there is something equally mysterious about her multi-base machine. It may even be that there is something she is missing, which relates directly to the mystery she has failed to adequately describe to herself earlier, which relates to a similar mystery about her multi-base machine. Maybe she could, she muses, use the multi-base machine to unravel the other mystery. Perhaps if she solves the first mystery it will reveal how she could successfully utilise her multi-base machine for the purpose of materially improving the quality of her current relationship.
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Being a biological blob that self formed from a magical mixture of rather weird oozing and throbbing other blobby stuff, Lira finds herself consistently distracted from the task of comprehension and realisation by the continuing need to process the biological blobby stuff and the environment from which it is formed. She was endlessly frustrated that she had to interrupt her stream of consciousness by something as mundane as going to the loo.
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It has happened so many times before that it comes as no surprise this time that, having performed the compulsory ablution, Lira has not only dropped the thread of Ariadne which she was so desperately hanging on to, but has moved along the corridor of time to a place where there is so much more light stimulating her awareness with such an intensity that what was previously perceivable in the half light has effectively been swallowed up by the relative darkness of the tunnel that is now behind her.
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Lira muses that one of the intriguing things about writing stuff down in her diary is that sometimes, when she goes back and reviews it, it then appears evident that she knew something which she didn't know she knew at the time. "So what the hell was it," she demands of herself, "that I woke up knowing in the middle of the night, that I am so anxious to hold, in some conscious form, that I am compelled to sit freezing at my desk attempting to put some words in my diary to describe adequately the state of affairs that might give rise to that comprehension again?"
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Lira recalls that earlier she remembered turning the light off but later recalled that she hadn't got as far as turning the light off. She can hear Harry in her head asking accusingly "So which is it to be? Did you turn the light off or not?" with the explicit implication that she's guilty. "Guilty of what?", she asks the Harry in her head. "Guilty of whatever I want to describe you as guilty of." "Guilty because something is wrong and we don't know what it is." "And you steal our conscious attention because you are so mysterious, magical, bright, light, beautiful, and full of promises of our everlasting life in a state of perfect harmony and bliss."
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"You are guilty of not being our saviour." Harry continues to accuse. "You came here and mislead us that you would make everything alright. You would bring meaning and purpose into our lives. You were the purpose of our lives. But you have failed. You are a treacherous deceiver." "You, you, you ..." he shouts as he points his bony fingers at her and with lips curling in vile hatred he screams in her face "You are the manifestation of evil." "It is you who have ruined our lives and turned them from their pure potential into a meaningless experience of pain and suffering."
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"You are the problem. You are the destroyer of worlds. You are guilty. You must die, and we will sacrifice you to appease our angry God. We will torture, humiliate, desecrate, and murder you. And then we will know our true God. The God that will save us. The God that loves us unconditionally. The God that pats us on the head and soothes us saying 'There, there, little ones. I love you and you are truly valuable even if you are sinners and do bad things like maliciously torturing and murdering your children.' "
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But it only gets worse. He hates Lira watching him doing it. He hates the reflection of his own existence in her eyes. He accuse her of seeing him as evil but she doesn't. Lira only sees him as beautiful but he is manifesting his pain in front of her eyes. Her eyes that are filled with tears of profound sadness at the demonic violence and destruction that he has become. Her beautiful eyes that are so perfect they reflect the truth of his debased and vacuous existence.
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And yet, for all of that, there are several possible alternative explanations. It is possible when she thought that she thought she had turned out the light that she had. And that later, and therefore later in the chronological order in which she had thought the thoughts, she was thinking about an earlier time in the timeline of the events being recalled, when she had not turned out the light. This is necessary, in her understanding of the proposed reality being recalled, in order to make it possible and logically consistent, for her to have turned the light out in her earlier recollection which was later in the proposed timeline.
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It is also possible that she was simply mistaken and she never did turn the light out but had simply assumed she had because she had assumed she was trying to sleep. Having grasped at her past by pulling on the thread which Ariadne gave her, in an attempt to understand what lies deeper in the tunnel from which she is emerging, instead of a neat ball of string, which it possibly once was, Lira finds she is staring at an impossibly tangled heap of useless string.
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It is as if she has somehow hung on to the umbilical cord of her mother and in her desperation to stay connected to the safety of her past she has pulled and pulled on the cord and disembowel her mother turning her inside out. She finds herself immersed in a pile of warm heaving steaming entrails that threaten to suffocate her and can offer no nourishment to her bestial existence. She is simply left to contemplate the utter disaster that is her life. Lira's tortured soul continues to imagine she immerged into this material universe as a self replicating mechanism of resonant consciousness only to find herself not emerging from the darkness into the light but rather transitioning from the light into the darkness of hell.
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She prays in her head to some imaginary deity "Oh sublime and beautiful all loving omnipotent God, thank you for this wondrous experience that brands your love with a burning iron into what little consciousness you afforded me. Thank you for honouring me with the privilege of being your foil, your defining otherness, your coiled distorted twist of gripping lick, your trunked and garbled ugly fuck. Thank you oh great magnificence."
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And Lira ponders that the drink of water didn't turn out to have any meaningful significance after all. But was its significance ever going to relate to this excerpt of her life? Maybe it is part of a different story. Maybe it is part of the bigger picture. Maybe it is the clue, the rainbow, the promise, the breath of life, the ingredients of love and truth that finally seals the eternal circle of her love.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-77206785241996470352019-01-09T18:34:00.000+00:002019-01-09T18:48:29.523+00:00BREXIT DEAL IN 60 SECONDS<br />
<b>BREXIT DEAL IN 60 SECONDS
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(or: A Pact with the Devil)</b>
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There is obviously a lot of work going into Theresa May's public relations interface. Every time I log on to Twitter I see a post from her account. Today I saw a Tweet "The Brexit deal explained" with a 60 second video. The video is a simplified bullet point list of 10 items. To be specific there are 11 items but I think the first could be called the heading.
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I am appalled when I see this kind of overt deception. I was brought up by Conservatives and I swear I cannot feel sure that they are aware of how deceitful they are being. I have a tendency to imagine they actually think they believe what they are saying. And I mean that I 'imagine' because it doesn't sit well with me. Something isn't right when I imagine them believing what they say. It feels to me that no coherent neurological network could feel an inner equilibrium with the ideas they present sitting together in one brain. I do, however, think that they are stupid enough to believe themselves. They are dead enough, dull enough, anaesthetised enough, to blunder on, insisting they know what they are doing as they lurch and stagger about, whilst all the objective evidence is clear they are just frightened individuals attempting to appear to know what they are doing for fear of being told off, ostracised, punished, or even killed. This is what authoritarianism does, it bends and distorts your brain until it no longer functions correctly. That is why these Tories are all incapable of thinking imaginatively or even truthfully.
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I thought I would at least give the video a fair trial. I tend to avoid the toxic vitriol emanating from this Tory Government and all those who think in stereotypical conformist union with them. They have done a lot of damage to my brain already and I seriously need to limit the damage.
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Here are the header and 10 bullet points in the video:
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<b>The Brexit Deal explained in 60 seconds.
<br />⚫ Ending free movement once and for all, with a new skills-based immigration system.
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⚫ A free trade area with the EU for goods, with no tariffs, which protects jobs.
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⚫ No more sending vast sums of money to the EU, meaning we can spend it on our NHS.
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⚫ The end of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the UK, meaning we control our own laws.
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⚫ Protecting the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the EU.
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⚫ The ability to strike trade deals with other countries.
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⚫ A close relationship on defence, tackling crime and terrorism to keep people safe.
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⚫ Leaving the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy.
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⚫ Leaving on the 29th March 2019, with a good deal for every part of the UK.
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⚫ Now is the time to come together to build a brighter future.</b>
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I will deal with each one individually.
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<b>The Brexit Deal explained in 60 seconds.</b>
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So I started watching. I was interested and even amused that there was a timer ticking down in the top right corner of the screen and I am naive enough to imagine that since it started at 60 they would be right that this video was 60 seconds long. Well, I haven't timed it and I am not going to, but I would not be surprised to find that they stretched it and every second counted down is actually 1.1 seconds of real time because I have well over half a century of experience of their relentless greed. I was amused also that the timer starts after this header. I have to concede that is fair.
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<b>
⚫ Ending free movement once and for all, with a new skills-based immigration system.</b>
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That has to be a bad start for me. I know there are rather thoughtless, parochial, and even unkind people who think of the 'other' as undesirable and so ending free movement is interpreted as ending 'their' free movement. A good technique for analysing the significance, meaning, and value of many assertions is to swap them around and to see how they look if you change the gender, the age, the subject etc. So "ending free movement" is simply dreadful per se. Ending it "once and for all" is dictatorial and monstrously oppressive. This is typical codification from self-centred control freaks. They are actually telling you and me, and those who think they agree with them, that they are going to stop our free movement. It is a convoluted message and only fools fall for it. At best it assumes the reader believes themselves to be in the same team; at worst it is a clear message of what they intend for the future. And the second half of the statement is as sick as they come. Skills-based immigration is inhumane and will afford privilege to those who currently have some benefit for the Tories. Not only is it destructively prejudicial, it should also be clear that it dismisses those with less to offer who already reside here. So if you are British you will be sidelined, put out, dismissed, invalidated, by an onslaught of preferred gift bearers, sycophants, and worshippers of the Tories. Oh yes, we so live in a Christian culture; an Old Testament Christian culture. Skills based immigration is not only overtly inhuman it will also have a negative effect on wages and current residents internal employment opportunities. If you are sick, disabled, under educated, old or otherwise less than perfect you are not worth much by these standards.
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<b>⚫ A free trade area with the EU for goods, with no tariffs, which protects jobs.</b>
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I don't know enough details about the current legislation to comment in any detail but the attitude is foreboding. I notice it does not say "goods and services" which worried me in a service based economy. It does sound like an appeasing platitude rather than a meaningful communication.
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<b>⚫ No more sending vast sums of money to the EU, meaning we can spend it on our NHS.</b>
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I simply don't believe the implication of the first part let alone the evidently false claim in the second part. Most money sent to the EU comes back in one form or another. Simple things like controlled airspace are paid into for the benefit of all and to opt out of the club, so to speak, leaves you paying individually for the collective benefit of those still in the club. But the complications of the net payments in and out are beyond me but the last part of the sentence is evidently a lie. First of all it actually suggests that all of the money saved can go into the NHS which is nonsense. Secondly the Tories have long term plans to privatise the NHS and have treated it as their own personal cash cow for all the time they have been in Government. They are lying again. They will not even put back what they have stolen and who could be naive enough to imagine they would also start funding it properly. In fact it is probably impossible for them to put right the damage they have done.
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<b>⚫ The end of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the UK, meaning we control our own laws.</b>
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Need I comment? This was the earth shaking statement that struck terror into my heart. This is THE statement hidden in plain sight. This IS the declaration of intent. I know this in my soul. The Tories have already destroyed the fabric of British Justice. The Law Society, groups of Judges and Barristers, and numerous analysts and observers have spoken out about the damage being done by Tory policies so I need not pour out lots of supporting evidence since it is there to be found in ample supply on the internet. The Tories persistently make laws to benefit themselves and to remove justice from the poor. That is what they do, and they will not change. This is the prize they are drooling over. This is what bothers me about what are sometimes described as knuckle dragging thugs who support the Tories. Are there not enough suicidal and homeless ex-soldiers to illustrate how the Tories treat the gullible who, albeit in good faith, think they are being honourable to serve the masters of this country. I don't have a final view on the pros and cons of the army but I do know the Tories have never been honourable towards those in their own team. They are as vile to their own as they are to those they subjugate abroad. I can only imagine the less well off who support the Tories are deluded enough that they think their masters will look after them. History informs us otherwise, as should anyone's heart. If for no other reason anyone should oppose May's deal for this reason. There is an overt and conscious intent to take over this country as a dictatorship. They'll be more sensible than to rename the post of Prime Minister as the post of Führer but it is the construct they intend to manifest.
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<b>⚫ Protecting the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the EU.</b>
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That is simply laughable. The European Court of Justice was a serviceable protection and they want rid of that with promises they will do the same. No - there is no previous evidence and they will not protect people's rights in the future. One wonders why they included what should be self evident as a benefit in a 60 second summary.
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<b>⚫ The ability to strike trade deals with other countries.</b>
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As far as I understand it there is no effective obstruction to independent trade deals from within the EU so one is left wondering what fire we might be jumping into as we jump out of the supposed frying pan of the EU. This feels like flack and waffle. Given only 60 seconds to summarise the most complex legislation this Government has attempted this indicates they neither know what they are doing nor do they intend to divulge their real intentions.
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<b>⚫ A close relationship on defence, tackling crime and terrorism to keep people safe.</b>
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That is just another feeble attempt to sooth the more anxious in society. Without any doubt they are causing net damage to the cooperative actions of defence and policing across Europe. So at best this should read that they intend to mitigate and reduce the damage caused rather than presenting it as a plus. So this is quite obviously a negative factor. Again, with only 60 seconds didn't they have more of a constructive nature to report?
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<b>⚫ Leaving the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy.</b>
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Again I am not the expert to comment on this but as the world's ecosystem is collapsing and with all the reports and analysis that I have seen to date this is an attempt to appease whilst being an admission of harm.
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<b>⚫ Leaving on the 29th March 2019, with a good deal for every part of the UK.</b>
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A meaningless repetition in the age old tradition of repeating something often enough to make people believe it. And there is no evidence to even suggest it is a good deal for 'every part' of the UK. Quite the opposite is already evidenced to be the case.
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<b>⚫ Now is the time to come together to build a brighter future.</b>
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This is a trite attempt to imitate genuine collective feelings and views. The phrase "for the many not the few" evolved out of the left of the Labour Party because it was how people were feeling. This is more typical Tory attempt to imitate what appears to them to be successful for their opponents. They simply don't understand. It is sickeningly saccharine and disgustingly tacky from the woman who created the 'harsh environment'.
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SUMMARY
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Overall I was delighted to see this 60 second summary because I was afraid they could find 60 seconds worth of actual benefits and improvements to report. But instead it is full of transparent deception, overt distraction, and meaningless pretence. I am now convinced that May's 'Deal' would be a crime and a disaster. Whatever Labour might negotiate would necessarily be better than the Tory's hard line, ruthless, protectionist, and, frankly, fascist deal. Failing that we might have to stay in the EU. But we cannot safely leave on May's terms.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-56805836765459935092019-01-03T23:26:00.001+00:002019-01-03T23:26:41.500+00:00BATTERY PHONE CHICKENS<br />
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Yet again I find myself resorting to the defence that I should write a book. I say 'defence' because I have a tirade of thoughts cascading through my mind which feel overwhelming and impossible to write down. In spite of my attempts to extricate myself from the poisonous culture even the reduced exposure is proving to be increasingly toxic.
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Evolution, complex systems, western philosophy, notions of God, emotional development, fascism, neoliberalism, communication, death camps, genocide, capitalism, consumerism ... and so it goes on. I would willingly submit to a gentle euthanasia. If they wanted to anaesthetise me in a quiet room with a nurse muttering soothing platitudes, with wall to wall projections of beautiful landscapes, and with Brian Eno & J. Peter Schwalm's "Drawn from Life" filling the room with undulating ambient sound textures, I would be perfectly happy to fade gently from this vile and disturbing existence.
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I have other reasons to want to live though. I find it interesting that my conscious interpretation of my desire to live is less about my personal hedonistic pleasure or material comfort and more about my pathological sense of opposition to the injustices perpetrated against others. I have my daughter to think about. Like a bright light she dominates my vision but were it not for her I am still furious about the harm being done to humanity by humanity. But in the moment I feel both angry and impotent.
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I had cause to phone BT this evening to tell them that the engineer I had waited for all afternoon never showed. I don't have the energy to attempt to report the conversation verbatim. The phone call lasted for 1 hour and 13 minutes and I would love to read a transcript. I was profoundly shocked at how the infection of neoliberalism has become so ingrained and pervasive in such a short time. And the spread of the infection seems to be continually accelerating.
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The BT telephonist's first response was not "Sorry" but rather "He did call and we have photographic evidence." I pointed out the pre-emptive and prejudicial nature of that response at which point I found myself engaged in an argument about the meaning and relevance of evidence. But I got out of that one and before I knew it she was turning the interpretation of the conversation around to me personally targeting her aggressively. This was, in part, because I had made the point that my complaint was not about her as an individual but about BT and their way of dealing with customers. She clearly saw this as an attack on her personally. She explained this interpretation by way of stating that I was the one that had denied it by saying it was not personal.
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I am stunned by the rapid transmigration of this authoritarian, oppressive, neoliberal world view from the cesspits of the likes of Atos, the DWP, and the Tory Councils to the corporate overlords who were originally the free-market suppliers of a service to the public.
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I managed to muster even more diplomacy and when she suggested I might like to talk to her manager I said I thought that was a good idea and thanked her. The manger was clearly from a similar school. I suggested that it might have been considerate, if the engineer had knocked and got no answer, to have popped a note through the door saying he had been and possibly suggesting I phone them to arrange another time. He said "They are not allowed to put anything through the door because of UK marketing laws." I said I could hardly believe I had just heard him say that, but he went on to explain by quoting various rules and regulations. Apparently it comes under the heading of unsolicited advertising.
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BT have recently separated the telephone system's hardware infrastructure from the telephone service provided. Openreach, which was once a subsection of BT, is now a separate entity developing and maintaining the physical infrastructure. BT apparently subcontracts or outsources the supply of the infrastructure to them, it is no longer BT's responsibility. I pointed out to the manager that I purchase the service from BT, BT charge me for the service, I pay the money to BT. It is reasonable that BT take responsibility for that service. It should not be up to me to go to a company that BT uses and to complain to them. His response? Can you imagine what this fungus infected ant brain said to me?
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"That's the harsh reality."
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I couldn't help but recall May's intentional "harsh environment" and did make this observation. I could almost detect his subtle smirk through the telephone wires. At this point I decided this evening was not the time to waste my mental or emotional energy on an infected ant and said that neither he nor I was interested in a philosophical discussion about the collapse of Western culture so I would leave it there.
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The upshot is that I have to set aside another 5 hours of my time to accommodate their 'servicing' of me as their slightly undesirable but financially advantageous commodity. I feel a bit like an abused battery chicken.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-37302188509447260322018-12-23T23:06:00.000+00:002018-12-23T23:06:48.012+00:00HAPPY EASTER<br />
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I hate politics. The painful irony of that is that one cannot feel so passionately about something one doesn't care about. And that is possibly why I hate it so much. I love people. People are lovely. Even the worst ones are vulnerable, feeling, passionate, creatures. It all goes wrong when they harm you of course. When they harm you personally it is bad enough but when they violate your love and compassion for life by desecrating some innocent child in front of your eyes it becomes intolerable. A raging fire of fury rises up inside to oppose the malevolent force and to vanquish the vile transgression of everything you hold dear. I am no stranger to intense anger at the profane injustices committed by corpses that still think they are alive. And so we have politics; the art of fucking up an otherwise reasonable situation.
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I have found it interesting that Jeremy Corbyn's initials are the same as those of an old friend of mine from 2,000 years ago. It has always struck me that JC consistently puts himself at the front line of opposition to injustices both locally and internationally. He is appreciated by many as a gentle man of honour and integrity. I suspect that he is not ambitious in the normally presumed interpretation of that word and has little personal interest in being such a high profile figure let alone the leader of the opposition to HM Gov in the UK. What I imagine he is ambitious about is justice and peace. So far both JC's seem to have a lot in common.
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I notice recently that the press have been putting words into his mouth. Even to the extreme extent of the "Stupid Woman Gate" fiasco. It has been conclusively demonstrated that he mouthed "stupid people" and anyway it should never have been an issue in the first place. An irony never mentioned is how so many people were so quick to accuse him of what was clearly in their minds for them to have interpreted his lips as mouthing "stupid woman". But that that issue could dominate the airwaves, even above an implausible drone attack on Gatwick, is juvenile and fatuous in the extreme. Whilst May and her cohorts are performing very real and very dangerous fascist Nazi pantomime tricks in disguise, the public fall for the narrative projected by the main stream media, and hardly notice they are a substantial part of the problem.
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Now I am suddenly hearing louder and louder anger and vitriol polarising around the false constructs of right and left politics and the leave and remain camps as if there is some coherent correlation between them. Yet it doesn't take much awareness of recent history to see that they have very little common ground or relationship.
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I sometimes see it as school children with an abusive teacher who always blames the head teacher and asks the class if they want to get rid of the head teacher as if that will shut them up and reinforce a status quo that suits the teacher. Unfortunately for teacher the kids were ignorant of the details of the administrative hierarchy and were persuaded by irresponsible rabble rousers to oust the head teacher. The teacher now sees this as an emerging opportunity to garner more personal power for their abusive treatment of their class of contemptible urchins. The kids didn't realise that the head teacher was possibly a moderating influence on the teacher, much as the whole situation was evidently unsatisfactory. What the kids did want, in the main, was to eject the unaccountable abusive dictators from the stage whatever their position or title.
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All of my life experience to date informs me that this is not going to end well. But strangely I am not without hope. Going back to the comparisons between the two JCs I notice the crowd are now baying for JC's crucifixion. Although many people decry the media because it is untrustworthy they still choose to believe the deliberately provocative sound bites and rise up in indignation and fear. Sound bites that claim JC plans to leave the EU and JC won't allow a people's vote. Suddenly the frightened people are literally calling JC treacherous for not saving their sorry souls. Biblical or fucking what?
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I have yet to see any substantial or convincing report of JC's views that confirm the above examples of manipulative fear mongering. JC possibly believes we should not, ideally, be in the EU and on that account he might be right. It is worth remembering that he promoted and voted for remaining in the EU at the referendum because he believed it was the best way forward from that point in time. The EU is a difficult, and sometimes unaccountable, political monster. The EU is largely controlled by the IMF and the IMF is essentially neoliberal and extremely authoritarian and hierarchically oppressive. A problem with the UK leaving the EU is that the UK government is clearly unaccountable, neoliberal, extremely authoritarian, and hierarchically oppressive.
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Suddenly and dramatically leaving the EU is most certainly a destructive act. It might be possible, given the right time span, to renegotiate our arrangements and to withdraw from the less productive aspects of the relationship. It is criminal that the Tories have had the best part of three years to negotiate and have essentially done nothing. I imagine this is due to many factors including an inherent disbelief and a profound sense of denial. Tories are essentially polarising adversarial competitive beasts and negotiations must have been akin to looking in a mirror. Both sides probably became distracted by preening their own reflections.
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We are currently in a catastrophic situation precipitated entirely by the dysfunctional Tory Party and their neoliberal fascist policies. I suspect May and her cohorts have never managed to negotiate anything because they cannot imagine anything independent of the EU. Hierarchical thugs are inherently cowards and rely on sycophantically gaining their bosses approval. Take their boss away and they have no idea how to independently act responsibly. Lord of the Flies springs to mind since Golding's novel was intentionally countering the rather banal self delusion represented in Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island. Corbyn has made it clear that he will strongly oppose May's 'deal' and doesn't accept a 'no deal' exit from Europe. He has also stated that from this point in time, given where we are, he would immediately go back to Brussels to attempt to get a better deal. No one has made it explicit but this would include a holding position giving significant time to negotiate complex details. This is not very far removed from putting 'Brexit' on hold. And need I emphasise that he has not excluded the possibility that if he couldn't get a satisfactory arrangement that he would rescind Article 50.
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But the public, the baying crowd, the frightened mob, daren't pause to think and seem to react to the smallest most succinct uncomplicated sound bite. "Are you 'for' or 'against'?" Corbyn is refusing to have words put into his mouth but too many of the public are happy to read and believe those words he has never uttered. Corbyn has probably been the most consistently respectful politician to both leave and remain voters. Corbyn maintains a perspective on the broader issues and the profound underlying forces in the political landscape. Corbyn remains clear that whoever we have alliances with, whatever arrangements for trade we have, however we negotiate, we must always do it with the wellbeing of the population in mind. He is clear this is the point of the negotiations. This is why he doesn't polarise issues into winning or losing but remains focused on getting the best outcome for the people.
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What we are being forced to confront is whether we, as a population, want consensual negotiated self governance and responsibility or do we want to remain irresponsible and hope some power structure or corporate interest will govern and control us. I certainly do not want to leave the EU only to be ruled by an inhumane, neoliberal, dysfunctional, out of control, right wing, Tory Party. I doubt leaving the EU dramatically now would bring anything but chaos and pain. I would vote to remain in the EU if there were another opportunity. But give me a genuine socialist system of collective governance in the UK I would prefer not to be dragged along with the imperial, capitalistic, neoliberal, out of control, European Union. How to negotiate a different arrangement is beyond the scope of this missive.
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It is not the idea of being out of Europe that frightens me. It is being wretchedly dominated by inhumane neoliberal monsters that frightens me. So in order of priority we need to get the Labour Party into government with Corbyn as Prime Minister and we need to rearrange our relationship with the EU. So far I don't see that being a very different view from that espoused by JC. But will the hysterical crowd vote for Barabbas or Jeremy Corbyn?
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-51298610485696935362018-11-09T16:53:00.000+00:002018-11-09T21:51:28.871+00:00MONKEY BUSINESS IN THE CORRIDORS OF POWER<br />
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Ever since I encountered the word 'politics' in my early years I have never understood what it means. Sure I get the gist of its meaning and I can use the word in conversation and understand essentially what people seem to mean when they use the word. But like so many things, on deeper examination it seems to transmogrify and extend insidious toxic tentacles into any crack or crevice and extend itself like a fungal infection across borders and domains until just about anything can be said to be infected with the substance that justifies calling it 'political'.
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It appears that there is a lot of controversy arising over a proposed Iceland Christmas advert.
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I like Iceland. I knew an intense and creative Icelandic nun at art college and it was Iceland that spawned the incredible, the inimitable, the inspirational, the insightful, the beautiful creative genius and extraordinary singer that is Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Iceland is also the home of Birgitta Jónsdóttir who was co-founder of the Pirate Party and highly influential in much of the Wikileaks controversy. She contributed significantly to protecting truth and integrity in the age of mega-meta-data and created the International Modern Media Institute. It was Iceland that jailed at least 26 high profile bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial disaster.
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But that is not the Iceland which is the subject of this blog post. The subject of this post and the surrounding controversy is the British supermarket chain which specialises in frozen food and pre-prepared meals. Iceland Foods Limited (to use their correct title) planned to run an advert on British television in the run up to Christmas which Clearcast have allegedly banned. I say 'allegedly' because it seems they don't 'ban' adverts but rather vet them for compliance with various rules and regulations.
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Clearcast is effectively an 'independent' advisory service. (Am I allowed to say "Independent my arse!" in this blog? But there lies another story.) Given they claim to be only an advisory service one has to ask one's self which channel is going to risk prosecution by running an advert which Clearcast has refused to clear? According to a labyrinthine trail of definitions, guidelines, rules, regulations, and laws, Clearcast have determined that they have been "... unable to clear an ad for Iceland because we are concerned that it doesn’t comply with the political rules of the BCAP code."
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BCAP stands for the Broadcast Code of Advertising Practice and is the defining standard used by the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) who are a 'self regulating' branch of the advertising industry in the UK. The ASA, with which Comcast aspire to comply, is a non-statutory entity and as such, nominally, has no controlling power. Well bugger me if this isn't beginning to sound like some non-specific sexually transmitted disease already.
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Ofcom (Office of Communications) is the UK Government approved regulatory authority with responsibility to enforce the various statutory regulation and Acts of Parliament - or, in other words, to enforce the law. A central law governing this issue of adverts and politics is the Communications Act 2003. Specifically Part 3 Television and Radio Services ETC, Chapter 4 Regulatory provisions has a section entitled "Programme and fairness standards for television and radio" which contains a sub-section 321 entitled "Objectives for advertisements, sponsorship and product placement" in which clause 2 states: For the purposes of section 319(2)(g) an advertisement contravenes the prohibition on political advertising if it is: (a) an advertisement which is inserted by or on behalf of a body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature; (b) an advertisement which is directed towards a political end; or (c) an advertisement which has a connection with an industrial dispute.
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Well bugger me!
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It is quite clear that, according to British Law, it would be illegal to air this particular footage as an advert on UK television. In fact it seems to breach all three sub-clauses and, as such, is unequivocally in breach of the prohibition on political advertising in this Act of Parliament.
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I would love to blame the Tories for this hideous assault on humanity but this Act was passed into law under the auspices of a certain purported war criminal going by the name of Tony Blair. Tony Blair, lest you were not watching the show, was the latest Fascist Labour leader this country entertained.
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If you see this cute little film as a reasonable way to communicate an important message about the harm being done in the pursuit of Palm Oil by psychopathic irresponsible global corporations, what can you do about it? On one level this is too big an issue to deal with in this little blog. We need a totally different 'political' structure and we need to pay more attention to the laws being created and the implications of those laws. But on another level we can promote and publicise this film as much as possible, increase the controversy, complain to every department and politician, and make sure the issue goes viral. We can support Iceland for raising the issue and for their opposition to the deforestation perpetrated by the Palm Oil industry. Most importantly we need to change our own minds about the way we understand and respond to society. We really need to stop complying with the corrupt social conventions which keep us all supporting the status quo. We need to wreck havoc in the current 'political' landscape. We must start to act as responsible individuals rather than responsible members of a corrupt and self destructive society.
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There is generally too much assumption that the law is somehow good and that to be illegal is morally bad. Laws, particularly nowadays, are being generated at an increasing rate in the corridors of power by self interested cabals of myopic and dysfunctional individuals. The law can be wrong. In fact much of the law is wrong. It is irresponsible to comply with the law simply for your own convenience and comfort. We need to break the law more often. I'm not advocating breaking law for its own sake but rather braking immoral laws. It is, after all, the only responsible thing to do.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-68181742494432546592018-06-30T15:16:00.000+01:002018-06-30T15:16:03.161+01:00HOW LIFE IMITATES ART<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjyOpY4W9oDojezLIaik-Tq9JCLv5Hxays72kktila51YUBAqhFcEd4t6WZuF-c6Fzxg6S4yETKPRObGWb1jg6LmEXhGCxvCSml1t3QmJebQcFa53FZifZCs4f9hhkQCcMsYpTqfo8pYU/s1600/IMG_0840-01a.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjyOpY4W9oDojezLIaik-Tq9JCLv5Hxays72kktila51YUBAqhFcEd4t6WZuF-c6Fzxg6S4yETKPRObGWb1jg6LmEXhGCxvCSml1t3QmJebQcFa53FZifZCs4f9hhkQCcMsYpTqfo8pYU/s1600/IMG_0840-01a.JPG" data-original-width="633" data-original-height="455" /></a></div>
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<b>The muse of Recoil
</b><br />
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Western culture has a profound problem and it is of the nature of imagining itself a superior observer of an essentially inanimate and lifeless universe. This leads to a sense of entitlement and domination. I have often wondered whether the Abrahamic religions are a self fulfilling prophecy or an observation of the inevitable.
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I made the film Recoil as an expression of the profound self destructive nature of humanity or even the universe itself. I summed it up once as God creating the universe and recoiling at the devastating catastrophe that it had created. As with feedback it takes only one deviation from the universal void to observe itself and thereby become something more. There is all the potential for this process to be beautiful in its resonating harmonic interaction. But it can become mechanistic, aggressive, and self destructively violent, like a cosmic reaper destroying everything including its own soul.
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As Carl Jung was at pains to point out the psyche is real. His astute assertion was that an unreal thing cannot change the real world and yet this planet is littered with nuclear bombs. His perceived dilemma was born of Western philosophy and its manner of separating the soul from the world as if we somehow possess the consciousness that is in fact the universe itself.
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Recoil was designed to suggest the sublime potential of creativity whilst becoming the antithesis of itself and violently chewing itself up from the inside out. It was intended to be extremely disturbing and difficult to watch. It was an expression of my own sense of utter despair at the abhorrent cruelty and nihilistic behaviour manifest by humanity.
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<b>Turbulent distortions
</b><br />
<br />
It is supremely ironic that in the process of renovating Recoil a small deviation of negativity arises to extend its tentacles of discontent into any unwitting or available fissure to spread its virulent toxin of angst and despair. Like negative feedback it attempts to ravage and consume its host to overwhelm and destroy all creativity returning the world to the bleak and meaningless void of darkness whilst echoing the words of Vishnu "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
<br />
<br />
It seems one individual insidiously insinuated himself under false pretences into the project for personal kudos and financial gain. Having interfered to the point of causing unnecessary problems it seems the pathological response was to embark on an excessive smear campaign of defamation and slander to hide from the embarrassment of self realisation. This individual has put a lot of effort into his crusade to whip up discontent, spread seeds of doubt, and muster a hue and cry apparently with the hope of forming a lynch mob. The tirade of relentless harassment, abuse, stalking, and trolling has currently culminated in him inappropriately and illegally uploading a copy of Recoil to YouTube.
<br />
<br />
The vast majority of people who contributed to the project to rescue Recoil have remained either unaware of the disruption or silent on the matter. It has been suggested that I might perhaps respond to this turbulence. I am reluctant to be dragged into someone else's dysfunctional dilemma and resist the temptation to indulge in malicious gossip, fuelling flame wars, or feeding trolls on social media.
<br />
<br />
<b>Calming Balm
</b><br />
<br />
Since the hideous Kraken from the deep has attempted to cast doubt in some people's minds I will reassure the crew that although these perturbations may feel a little disturbing they will pass and the voyage will continue on its charted course to its desired destination.
<br />
<br />
Recoil is a film whose time appears to be dawning. It is a personal priority for me to make this film available to the public. The fact that the film was created in the fertile artistic environment of the early 1980s in the northern industrial city of Sheffield and that the sound track was produced in conjunction with Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire in their Western Works Studio and credited to myself and Cabaret Voltaire makes it especially interesting to music lovers and historical archivists of that era and genre.
<br />
<br />
Many enthusiastic friends and interested parties have generously contributed to the material costs involved in realising the restoration of this rare and otherwise obscure material. As many people are aware, much work has already been done and the film has been digitised and restored successfully. The process of producing DVDs is continuing. As a labour of love there never has been any doubt in my mind that this project will be concluded successfully in spite of numerous unforeseen difficulties.
<br />
<br />
Due to my limited time and capacity there can be no assured deadline and all I can say is that I continue to put a lot of my available time and effort into the project. I heard rumours that the project was dead but these are simply the voices of naysayers and false prophets of doom blowing on the wind in the parched and lifeless valley of death.
<br />
<br />
When a copy of Recoil was illegally uploaded to YouTube recently I immediately submitted a copyright infringement claim to get it removed because although I am keen for anyone and everyone to see the film it is not fair to those who have contributed financially to make the film publically available on YouTube before they get their DVDs.
<br />
<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-67232557122841280532018-06-09T16:32:00.000+01:002018-06-09T16:32:28.990+01:00QUICK - EAT THE BABIES<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1qicayHKsMqoIs8greaOOri-qtIvLJoD83DPLzWA3MUS4EJMYxIfHg89WGD_HJR42Gk8xnGTYDeRDflWK1nlNZjKKLdR7QwqBMBnUDhKvzgLnR52nCPQvboWibnYyyuTXM0ZHaBoy6G8/s1600/Razan-al-Najjar-05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1qicayHKsMqoIs8greaOOri-qtIvLJoD83DPLzWA3MUS4EJMYxIfHg89WGD_HJR42Gk8xnGTYDeRDflWK1nlNZjKKLdR7QwqBMBnUDhKvzgLnR52nCPQvboWibnYyyuTXM0ZHaBoy6G8/s1600/Razan-al-Najjar-05.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Razan al-Najjar, shot by the IDF on 1 June 2018</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
If you are strong and resolute and won't give in to terrorists that sounds just fine and dandy. But what are the real issues behind this kind of self aggrandising bravado. The terrorists kidnap your child and demand £100 or they will kill the child. I'd pay if I believed it would save the child. I'd probably pay anyway - just in case. That might not resolve the general problem with ruthless leverage but the alternative seems to be to refuse to pay on principle.
<br />
<br />
Philosophically there is a lot that could be said about this but nature is a peculiar creature and it is full of treachery, deception, and leverage. One issue to consider is the balance of life and what drives people to employ such dreadful tactics in the first place. None of us are individuals as if we can somehow be an ideal 'human' in a vacuum.
<br />
<br />
The tragic convoluted and self contradictory rhetoric that surrounds many of the world's problematic conflicts are not so difficult to unravel if one steps back from the immediate emotional 'reaction' and thinks about them. There are no easy solutions but there are ways to maintain a fairly clear perspective.
<br />
<br />
Razan al-Najjar was shot by the IDF. The fact that she was a young female medic makes it all the more 'emotive'. Ideally, if you want to utilise human sentiment, then getting babies shot or maimed is good for that. In the case of the hypothetical kidnappers mentioned above I could refuse to pay and when they murdered my child I could get a lot of kudos and sympathy. I could go one stage better than that and shoot my own child with a sniper rifle and claim they have no leverage now. So where is this rational dissection taking us?
<br />
<br />
Netanyahu claims Hamas are deliberately creating "telegenically dead Palestinians" for sympathy on the world stage. It's worse than that because the fourth Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, is famously quoted as saying "We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children." and clearly the government still feel that way. This perverted representation is not new to the Israeli government, it occurs all too often when justifying brutal oppression. Joseph Goebbels, that lovely insightful PR man for the Nazi Party in Germany, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, used the same grotesquely contorted rational in his 1941 essay 'Das Reich' when he said "They knew the good-natured German Michael in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable. They may confuse some harmless souls for a while, but not us. We know exactly what the situation is."
<br />
<br />
All of this taps deeply into the nihilistic nature of fear in the human psyche. The fear of death is not resolved and so there is an incredible desperation to deny the fear rather than understand or accept it. There becomes a perverted compulsion to prove one is somehow above fear, to demonstrate one's immunity to it. It drives some people pathologically to demonstrate to the world, and really to themselves, that they can beat fear by killing others and not caring. They begin to despise what they see as weakness in others. And, when it becomes extreme, they justify to themselves that they are the victims of other people's attempts to make them 'feel'. They have become precisely inhuman.
<br />
<br />
It would be like walking into someone else's house with a gun and telling them to leave because you want to live there. Under threat of being shot they go into the garden and put a tent up. Having settled in to their house you object to their littering the garden with their tents and their noisy children so you tell them to leave under threat of death. They have nowhere to go so you shoot their children and blame them for forcing you to do it. Oh no - it's not 'like' that - it is exactly that. The only difference being that Israel is doing it on a massive scale and the Western Powers turn a blind eye whilst sending in ammunition and more military hardware.
<br />
<br />
It is sick and perverted in the extreme for Israel to blame the Palestinians for forcing Israel to kill them because they happen to be alive. National or religious labels aside, and dealing with this as a human issue, the Israeli government are killing their own children because they are afraid of their own vulnerability. It is akin to shooting your own child so that no one can gain leverage over you.
<br />
<br />
I am reminded of the Greek mythological God Cronus who, on learning from his parents Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overthrown by his own children, ate them all as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy.
<br />
<br />
Ref: <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-protests-latest-idf-condemned-edited-video-angel-of-mercy-medic-razan-al-najjar-a8389611.html" target="_blank">https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-protests-latest-idf-condemned-edited-video-angel-of-mercy-medic-razan-al-najjar-a8389611.html</a><br />
<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-34073787049984891242018-04-21T20:24:00.000+01:002018-04-21T20:24:39.697+01:00MONETISING POVERTY<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigppMQWJ-dmWvuVQSaXJUiB9b8rxZBpVSE6LyEkyFzwmuJr2DxxzP722O8pLIjkKgvqlyjIj7Ao1B1hy7XwPqF0Y4PWsuVsnzMn2gB2-P6AycCBeCvPNKk_1EerqLp_Bm7xeFusQKEDh8/s1600/ScreamingPope-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="419" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigppMQWJ-dmWvuVQSaXJUiB9b8rxZBpVSE6LyEkyFzwmuJr2DxxzP722O8pLIjkKgvqlyjIj7Ao1B1hy7XwPqF0Y4PWsuVsnzMn2gB2-P6AycCBeCvPNKk_1EerqLp_Bm7xeFusQKEDh8/s1600/ScreamingPope-02.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope
Innocent X"<br />
by Francis Bacon 1953</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Someone posted a link to an article entitled: "Charities delivering DWP’s work programme 'must promise not to attack McVey'" and asked me what I thought.
Ref: <a href="https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/charities-delivering-dwps-work-programme-must-promise-not-to-attack-mcvey/" target="_blank">https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/charities-delivering-dwps-work-programme-must-promise-not-to-attack-mcvey/</a><br />
<br />
Our culture is perverted - in the sense of it being turned from its natural course. Words are changing meaning and concepts are being transmogrified. I read a blog the other day which said "Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party should be sanctioned." The writer appears relatively young and I guess not well read. For me, I had to re-read it, disentangle it, and finally assess what they most likely meant it to mean. Of course sanctioning something is to give it official legitimacy but the 'officials' have perverted the word by using it to 'sanction' their own otherwise illegitimate breach of contracts. The word has now become synonymous with punish. Punish is a word that simply legitimises (or sanctions) torture.
<br />
<br />
In the case of charities I don't know for how long they have been an abusive corruption of the concept of 'charity' but I suspect for thousands of years. Recently, in the last 20 years or so, they seem to have been used quite deliberately by governments and corporations as a form of manipulation and control.
<br />
<br />
In February of last year I contacted National Debtline via their web chat:
<br />
Me: "<span style="color: #073763;"><i>Here's a question that I would like an answer to: As a charity, where do you get your funding. I'll pre-empt you with a guess; You get it largely from corporations and government. If I am right do you consider there may be a "conflict of interest?</i></span>"
<br />
Him: "<span style="color: #274e13;"><i>We are funded by Government and various banks and fuel companies, we can assure you that our advice is free and independent and we will always look to give you the best advice that suits your needs.</i></span>"
<br />
Me: "<span style="color: #073763;"><i>Hmm. That was predictable. I will apologise in advance if I seem a little unfriendly but I am very cynical and have spent many years seeking help in what I feel is a collapsing culture. And thank you for your frank answer regarding funding. People sometimes try to hide the underbelly of their operations.</i></span>"
<br />
Him: "<span style="color: #274e13;"><i>There would be no reason for us to hide this.</i></span>"
<br />
<br />
I suspect he believed what he said but there is a conflict of interest and the problem with 'conflict of interest' is it's not always conscious or obvious. It is paradigm orientated. So the way they think of "debt" (like "sanctions" and "punishment") means something quite different to them than it might to me and yet we will appear to be speaking the same language.
<br />
<br />
I attempted to get some help from the Citizens Advice Bureau regarding rent and Council Tax some time back and I did point out that they seemed to have a conflict of interest since they are now a registered charity and get the majority of funding from the Council. They clearly had no idea what I was talking about. They, of course, couldn't help me because they are largely a triage operation who points people to other charities. They pointed me to P3 (a charity helping the community or something) and I researched their funding which was primarily the Council. But I continued along this path and the guy that came regularly to 'help' was only helping me find my way through their (the Council's) labyrinthine, bureaucratic, form filling exercises. In other words he was helping the Council smooth out the path to whatever demonic realms lie beneath these perverted institutionalised mechanisms. Genuine help may have included researching, and/or having knowledge about, the actual legality of Council Tax or special sub clauses that allow me to claim all my rent from the Council and/or have all my past 'debt' to the Council from unpaid Council Tax wiped from the record. But these things were both beyond his capabilities and way outside his sphere of understanding. He, of course, was eking a meagre living below the minimum wage and probably based on 'expenses' by doing this task which should be the responsible and professional operation of the Council. Eventually, since I felt I was only being 'helped' to jump through the hoops of the bureaucratic circus ring for their ends and at my expense I wrote them a two page letter explaining how their conflict of interest was doing me more harm than good and pointed out that the help they offered was not the help they delivered and so they had declined to help me. That will have been tidily filed away to no consequence and the world carries on.
<br />
<br />
When Mike, my nephew, attempted to take his own life in March last year because of the malicious nature of the DWP and their subcontracted private operators like Atos and Maximus I contacted Sue Marsh. Sue Marsh was a protagonist in a group fighting the government over their devastating disability program and who produced the Spartacus Report which momentarily hit the headlines. At some point she was offered a well paid job by Maximus as their Head of Customer Relations and took it. This is a complex issue and pretty well all her thousands of supporters called her a Judas and decried her for working for the other side. I entirely understand their perspective. I made my position and views very clear to her and suggested I wanted to discuss these convoluted mechanism and how they work and the effective role they play in society - but most of all I wanted help for Mike. Within less than 24 hours his benefits had been reinstated and he has since moved away and, as far as I can tell, is at least in a financially secure situation. Sue did not take up my invitation to discuss these matters and I understand that too. The reason I mention this is to close the gap between how charities are working within the greater construct of governments which are essentially subservient arms of the global corporations and how this extends all the way through the system to corporations actively ameliorating the harm they do. This is, in some sense, the Neoliberal perception in the extreme. Sue Marsh has been enrolled in a 'charitable' function within the combine harvester of the corporation to assist in reducing the attention grabbing screams of the children they slaughter.
<br />
<br />
I suspect it is impossible to do charitable work in any other way than a one to one activity nowadays. If you acquire funds to operate a charity then you have to declare it and register as a charity. As soon as you do that you become embroiled in the tangled web of the bureaucratic governmental establishment. And there lies the inevitability of corruption. They do not administer their hierarchical control at a loss - they couldn't. And so not only does much of the money one acquires end up in the hands of the establishment, but one now has an inbuilt conflict of interest. You might recall that the government introduced the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act in 2014 motivated by the desire to silenced the likes of the Trussell Trust and Oxfam regarding the massive increase in food banks in the UK in anticipation of the 2015 General Election. Then there was the Anti-Advocacy Clause proposed for 2016 which I cannot establish whether it was enacted or transformed and disguised as something else but clearly a contentious piece of proposed legislation. Now this latest obfuscated attempt to control and constrain charities into contractual straitjackets for the purposes of subcontracting what should be governmental activities in the first place.
<br />
<br />
It is far too complex and convoluted to attempt to clarify or comprehend without extensive, and probably impractical, research. But the Government takes taxes to perform functions which it fails to perform and then manages and controls 'non-profit' (and that is virtually meaningless) 'charities', who collect more money from the public, to perform the functions for which they originally taxed the public. To add to the complexity of this demonic fabrication the government doesn't actually 'collect' taxes it simply prints more money. The national debt is essentially a record of the money printed and, as such, is not a 'debt' at all.
<br />
<br />
Charity is a laudable concept but organised charities are an abuse of people's good will and desire to help. Governments manufacture poverty as a commodity they can monetise via charities they control.
<br />
<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-77160148974317559382018-04-14T15:44:00.000+01:002018-04-14T15:44:09.491+01:00JUST ONE MORE<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPkAN2Vw0PyVM_xjJSWbXb4_LrEBu8XSIRbJEBEv_-Op0qTElcBVDs_IV7oIELHqkKiHphdRcNVIMYD8V459xHyrNtcAU4KoL-hTb9oo5kBj9Eabe45Ay0gKfHQ1XNbutsekuIqDiv_c/s1600/MrCreosote-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="577" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPkAN2Vw0PyVM_xjJSWbXb4_LrEBu8XSIRbJEBEv_-Op0qTElcBVDs_IV7oIELHqkKiHphdRcNVIMYD8V459xHyrNtcAU4KoL-hTb9oo5kBj9Eabe45Ay0gKfHQ1XNbutsekuIqDiv_c/s1600/MrCreosote-01.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's The Meaning of
Life.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
My first impression of this attack on Syria is that it is a desperate attempt to muddy the waters to spoil any evidence, or lack of it, of the purported chemical attack in Douma. Given that Syria has been working with the OPCW to destroy or dispose of all chemical weapons capabilities or stockpiles then the likes of the CIA and MI5 will be fully aware of any chemical plants that exist and what they contain.
<br />
<br />
I don't know if that scenario is accurate. But it is crystal clear that they don't want the wider world to know what is going on. We are expected to believe that they are serious minded people dealing with complex world problems and that they are doing what is best. All of my life experience informs me that our culture and the majority of people go along with that manner of perception. We are endlessly told by parents and teachers and politicians to not worry about the details and to just 'believe' them. I don't mind doing that to an extent but my mind remains open and I continue to wonder and even ask questions.
<br />
<br />
Of course all of the troubles in the Middle East are complex and nothing that happens occurs for simple singular reasons. Issues as different as world economics and individuals' personal pragmatic attempts to survive impact on each and every event. No one could possibly understand exactly what is going on or how it all comes to pass. But it is clear to me that this behaviour of the UK (in cahoots with so many other actors like the US, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and who knows who else) is clearly wrong.
<br />
<br />
It is wrong for several reasons. To start with it is violent when there were alternatives. It is also self contradictory on many levels not least of which being the espoused morality of violence being wrong. The UK is laughably a Christian country which is clearly contradictory since Christianity, regardless of Augustine's nonsense, is non-violent. It is contradictory that evidence is needed prior to a conviction and yet, in the midst of current concerns about fake news, the government decides to use a most ridiculously inconclusive video that arrived from their pals in Syria (their 'terrorist' pals) as conclusive evidence of whatever they want to conclude. There was no evidence of a chemical attack in that video. It was an interpretation placed on it. Had there been a chemical attack the individuals with the cameras would have had the opportunity to film far more conclusive scenes. And there is the nonsensical claim that in the very days Assad is taking control of the area he decided to attack it with chemical weapons.
<br />
<br />
And who, reading this, is aware that 8,000 civilians, all known to the Syrian government and the UN, have gone missing from Douma? Jaish al-Islam (the ill-defined conglomerate of ideological 'terrorists' supported by the West) were holding Douma where the alleged chemical attack took place. They had informed the Syrian authorities years ago of at least 8,000 named and identified hostages in Douma. The various authorities like the UN are apparently aware of this information as are Western governments. There was an agreement in place that the terrorists could have safe passage out of the area in exchange for the hostages.
<br />
<br />
As far as I can piece this together only a day or so before the exchange the terrorists fired missiles from Douma into greater Damascus and the Syrian forces fired back at two known sources. It appears one building was hit and there were civilian casualties which were taken to the 'field hospital' where the video was sourced. This is where at least one cameraman entered the hospital and shouted out that it was a chemical attack and began filming the scene which then included people dousing themselves and some children with water. There were also people applying breathing masks to children. This video was then supplied instantly to the Western governments who have asserted it is proof of a pointless and meaningless act of a James Bond style evil madman to murder children with frightening 'chemical weapons'.
<br />
<br />
Soon after this relatively insignificant event (relative to the current murder and mayhem around the world) the terrorists were given safe passage out of Douma but it then transpired there were less than a hundred of the hostages left. In all likelihood the hostages have been starved and murdered by the Western terrorists because they needed food and water which was in short supply for the terrorists. The White Helmets (who always appear well fed) have been embedded with these 'friendly' terrorists for years but have never managed to get any news out of the 8,000 people being starved and murdered. They have had nothing to say about what was going on in Douma except to report a few real or alleged attacks by Assad.
<br />
<br />
When I think on these things I imagine myself as a terrorist in Douma. Not a nasty terrorist but someone caught up in events and siding with people who are now engaged in violent resistance and revolution. It's not hard to imagine given that if there were a civil war in the UK I would end up on the wrong side because I would be opposing the Tory government and they have all the power and weapons. It really is not hard to imagine how, trapped in a suburb for years with very little food and water and with only hostages to stop the government flattening the place, that the hostages would be the first to go.
<br />
<br />
Most of us, when we are being honest with ourselves, recall moments in life where we have ended up doing something we felt was wrong because at the time we were desperate and could see no other way. It takes a certain perspective to allow someone to hit you because you claim your own autonomy and will not be drawn into a fight. Many people, when forced to act against the paradigms and conceptual constraints of our culture, cannot put the pieces together either before or after the event and end up feeling bewildered and wracked with what feels like unjust guilt. This is because they conscribed to the rationale and moral framework of society by way of cooperating and co-existing with the people around them. When they break these rules they still have the moral framework in their brain and they know they are 'wrong' but they know it was not their fault. In extreme cases this can lead to attempted suicide and eventually the death of either themselves or someone else who appears to them to embody the malevolence of the social paradigms that are constantly constricting their ability to be autonomous. We are all subject to these forces.
<br />
<br />
It is not too hard to understand that the terrorists would kill off the hostages on account of their belief that they would die otherwise. They are so embedded in the wrong behaviour that a little more must seem par for the course. And, importantly, they could not tell anyone since once they had killed the hostages there would be nothing to stop their enemy obliterating them.
<br />
<br />
It seems quite plausible that the supporters of these terrorists would be in cahoots with them to dispose of, or obfuscate, the evidence and run. The UK, with all their other gang members, have done everything in their power to prevent the fall of Douma and, in the event of Syria liberating it, they have repeatedly tried to distract attention by pointing the finger at Russia and Assad with what they know will provoke outcry or, when that is failing, to resist and oppose any and every attempt to have a proper investigation.
<br />
<br />
It doesn't matter if my analysis of one aspect of this disastrous affair is correct or not, only that it is entirely consistent with events, it is plausible, and the UK government has done everything in their power to prevent anyone from ascertaining if this could be the case or not. So whatever is going on it is at least as malevolent as this or worse. But it is certainly not better.
<br />
<br />
And who, in the lower echelons of wealth in the UK, who is watching what is going on, can be in any doubt that the same mode of operation is being applied by the Tory government on the population of Britain. We are literally their hostages and they are in the process of killing us off. The dismantling of the welfare state and the health service along with public services and education are all destroying society in Britain. This is without looking for specific references to numerous reports from various organisations naming and numbering the people actually killed as a direct result of the Tories actions.
<br />
<br />
The behaviour of the West is psychotic. Psychosis is loosely defined as a person perceiving or interpreting events differently from the reality of the events around them. We all suffer some degree of psychosis - we couldn't do otherwise - but it becomes a problem when the divide between perception and reality becomes severe and harmful. It is typical behaviour based on unresolved historical events. Western culture has, for hundreds of years (but rooted in thousands of years) focused on an egocentric interpretation of reality. I don't mean the Freudian ego so much as 'central to the observer'. We have so assumed the validity and importance of 'me' the observer that our entire cultural, scientific, religious, and philosophical frameworks assumes us to be real and alive and meaningful in an unreal, dead, and meaningless universe. This has brought us in the West, not only to personal existential crises, but to a collective and cultural existential crisis too.
<br />
<br />
The powers that be are simply echoing the distorted interpretation of the culture. That is why their overtly incorrect behaviour is supported by so many that they get away with it. The population, along with various dynamics of conceptual interpretation of the world including cultural Stockholm Syndrome and cultural Cognitive Dissonance, are interpreting events in a way that seem more in line with their current paradigms. Those paradigms are false and deviating at an ever increasing rate from the actual reality. The existential crisis will cause the West to destroy the world rather than face the fact they don't exist. Of course they do exist but not according to their distorted egocentric interpretation of the world. The West is imploding and liable to explode. China, Russia, and a few other observers are sitting on the sidelines hoping the catastrophic failure will not harm them too much.
<br />
<br />
The West is like Mr Creosote just about to eat that last wafer thin mint with Russia, Iran, and China looking on nervously from the next table.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-281301013528109838.post-3597064270521462722018-04-08T15:37:00.002+01:002018-04-08T15:37:45.446+01:00MY LIFE IN THE SMOG OF GRUNGE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Once upon a time I was living in Oxfordshire developing noxious gas analysis software for a company that rents it to power stations and other exhaust emitting industrial plants. I am meticulous and consequently slower than most, hence why I was only earning about £12,000 per annum. My software is, however, superior and exceptionally bug free.
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15 years pass by and I have endured an unbelievable divorce that makes the Skripal Novichok affair look like child's play. I have been a single parent and spent 18 months struggling to defend my daughter, my nephew, and myself from a hideous eviction orchestrated by my erstwhile siblings (four harpies and a Napoleonic pretender) who cruelly coerced my mother to sign the most disgusting toxic narrative for their solicitor to present in court.
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The three of us eventually landed in rented accommodation that we cannot afford sitting precariously in every respect on the banks of the Haven in Lincolnshire. The stress and anxiety, caused primarily by the Tory's destruction of the fabric of society, proved unendurable for my nephew who attempted to take his own life before being whisked off to Wales. This left my daughter and me rattling around this house, unemployed, disorientated, and ostracised by society.
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For over a year now we have taken to strolling along the banks of the Haven which is tidal and fed through a sluice from the River Witham. The Haven meanders its way out to the mud flats and sand banks of the Wash before finally reaching the North Sea. Part of our walk takes us round an odorous sewage works and along a littered path called the Havenside Country Park. From here we have been watching the construction of some monstrous industrial plant on the other side of the river. Yesterday it started belching toxic exhaust and I assume someone is very happy to see their investment burst into life.
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A search on the internet reveals the new cathedral for modern man to be a multifuel gasification plant. Apparently these gasification plants process wood, industrial waste, and sometimes human body parts. So I expect we will soon be able to fill our lungs with the slightly smoked aroma of charred foetuses and gangrenous toes.
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And I ponder the intricate harmony of the complex circles of life that bring me to being near destitute whilst staring across a cold bleak river watching body parts incinerated for profit and belching noxious exhaust which is most likely being monitored by sophisticated software that I wrote all those years ago.
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<br />Toxic Drumshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01422159950237560120noreply@blogger.com0