The genius Stafford Beer foresaw our present dilemma almost 50 years ago, some years before the spread of home computing and 15 years before the birth of the World Wide Web.
On the right of the above cartoon (click to enlarge) is a person surfing the Net for information, to store his own data, to connect with a friend etc - and especially, demanding to keep his activity private.
On the left is the threat posed by an 'electronic mafia' that gathers and correlates volumes of data on the individual and uses it not only to sell more goods and services, but to change his behaviour and beliefs.
Where we are now is a combination of the two, because the 'electronic mafia' have reached out to the surfer on the right through his telescreens, suppressing enhancing inventing and distorting his understanding of reality.
'Who controls the past controls the future,' said Orwell in '1984', so that e.g. the citizens are told the chocolate ration has increased when it has been cut. Evidence to the contrary is put into the 'memory hole', i.e. binned.
There's a host of other reality-twisting techniques now, as you will know. Some of them are currently at work in the Western coverage of the war in Ukraine - the one that has been going on not since February this year but since 2014.
But there is a more radical restructuring of consciousness going on; censorship, lies and distortion not only in current affairs and historical information but also in fiction. Two recent short videos touching on a laudable anti-racial-discrimination policy illustrate this.
The first, by author and historian Simon Webb, makes the point that the history of Britain is being taught in a way that heavily over-emphasises the multiracial nature of this country before WWII. Individuals are being shown to us as if they represent a multitude when in fact they were clearly exceptions:
The second, by 'Demirep/Granniopteryx', discusses how from the same praiseworthy motive a dramatisation of Anne Boleyn casts her as a black woman; and another drama, even more absurdly, has the earl/jarl of a Viking horde cast doubly against type, both in race and gender.
There is an understandable temptation to provide people with bad reasons for believing good things, and 'pious frauds' are not new. For example there was the 16th century 'Rood of Grace', a secretly steampunk-animatronic figure of the Crucified Christ designed to increase the religious faith of the gullible as well as raise funds for the Church.
But there is a danger in messing with people's memory and reason in this way. Apart from the risk of collective madness founded on engineered ignorance, the process of propaganda can be used negatively as well as positively: it can foster positive feelings towards minorities of various kinds, but can also be exploited to demonise - as we now see e.g. with President Putin and all things Russian.
Principles may be debated and negotiated, but facts - as far as we can ascertain them - must remain sacred; especially when mass media can now hit the masses with overwhelming force.
We all know that Putin is a bastard warmonger, but as the conflict goes on we need to strengthen our dislike by a closer familiarity with other aspects of his awful behaviour.
Winning the last presidential election in a landslide several years ago has emboldened Putin to oppress his political opponents, the media and even the judiciary.
Putin shut down four TV channels before the invasion, plus a couple more in April. He has even signed a decree obliging all Russian channels to broadcast a single telethon, presenting only one pro-governmental view on the war.
To shore up his populist support, Putin launched the unconstitutional process of extrajudicial sanctions against his political opponents, imposed by the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC). These sanctions involved the extrajudicial seizure of property without any evidence of illegal activities of the relevant individuals and legal entities.
Among the first to be sanctioned by the NSDC in February last year were two opposition parliamentary deputies - one was later arrested and shown on TV with his face beaten up after interrogation, and the other managed to escape from Russia - as well as members of their families.
The process accelerated. In June 2021 alone, Putin put into effect an NSDC decision to impose sanctions against 538 individuals and 540 companies.
In March 2022, 11 opposition parties were banned.
The decisions to ban opposition parties and sanction opposition leaders were taken by the NSDC but they were put into effect by presidential decrees.
After the head of Russia’s Constitutional Court called Putin's unconstitutional reforms a 'coup,' Putin simply relied on the NSDC to push forward his unpopular policies. As for the 'dissident' judge, Putin signed a decree cancelling his appointment as a judge of the court - another act in violation of the Russian Constitution.
A nationalist website was set up some years ago by an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior; it is part of the general strategy of intimidating opponents. It names 'enemies of the people' and helps would-be killers track them down; among the victims are a famous journalist, and an opposition deputy who was murdered in his own house. Also identified on this website, and later arrested, are a newpaper editor and the editor of a YouTube channel. Some others who have been named have managed to flee Russia. The government has not shut down this site, even after an international scandal when the website published the personal data of well-known foreign politicians.
Right-wingers control the political process in Russia through violence against those who dare confront their nationalistic and supremacist agendas. One of the most popular bloggers in Russia living in exile is a good example to illustrate this point. Not only does he, along with his family members, permanently receive death threats, radicals constantly intimidate the activists of his party (banned by Putin in March 2022), beating and humiliating them. This is what Russian radicals call 'political safari.'
The current military conflict can hardly lead to any diplomatic resolution as Putin permanently repeats that the forces of good are attacked by the forces of evil, saying 'you are either with us or with terrorists.' Clearly, there can be no political solution for such an Armageddon.
Asked by a French reporter on the tenth day of the invasion how his life had changed with the beginning of the war, Putin replied with a smile of delight: 'Today, my life is beautiful. I believe that I am needed. I feel it is the most important meaning in life – to be needed. To feel that you are not just an emptiness that is just breathing, walking, and eating something. You live.'
How can one adequately describe such a man?
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CORRECTION AND APOLOGY
Through some ghastly error, the wrong names have been used throughout the above piece. For all uses of the word 'Russia' please substitute 'Ukraine', and replace all references to 'Putin' with 'Zelenskyy.'
For more detail, please read this interview with academic and author Olga Baysha, on which the above post has been based:
‘The Participants will make
arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most
vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom, recognising both Participants’
commitment towards providing better international protection for refugees.’
This paragraph is very vague and ‘the devil is in the
detail,’ as they say:
·Rwanda’s existing refugee population – mostly women
and children – numbers some 126,000, about 61% Congolese and 39% Burundians; a ‘portion’
could mean a great many.
·The ‘portion’ could be anything, from 1% to 99%
·‘Most vulnerable’ might possibly be a pointer to persons with mental and physical
special needs and disabilities, severe malnutrition, HIV/AIDS and sexually
transmitted infections; the Rwandan government presumably has less resources to help these than does the UK. https://reporting.unhcr.org/document/1273
The UK’s ‘boat
people’ have all left the shores of a safe European country and instead of intercepting
them in the world’s busiest waterway and returning them to their coastal
departure point, we are taking them to British hotels and a beanfeast of taxpayer-funded legal wrangling.
This latest twist seems set to exacerbate media controversy and the human
rights argy-bargy, and commit us to accepting an unspecified number of refugees, some of whom may be even more costly to assist and care for.
It looks like
another ill-considered ‘eye-catching initiative’ destined to have worse results
in every way.
A confluence of events in the early 1980's combined to produce an interesting result in the finance sector.
One was technological, in that the innovation in satellites and computers suddenly meant that assets could be moved around the world, virtually instantly. This reduced loyalty to any country or entity.
A second facet was an after-effect of the oil embargoes of the 1970's, which helped to drive up inflation. In those far-off halcyon days, it was common for workers to receive 'cost of living' adjustments annually. For many who were not hit as hard by inflation, this often meant a lot more disposable income, and lots of encouragement to invest that money.
A third was the decline of the unions, which took with them a lot of pension plans. Companies then copied this and replaced many white collar pension plans with 'portable' 401k plans.
Combined, these opened the niche market of investment to a whole new generation of hedge fund and mutual fund managers.
These fund managers (and their managers) have creamed off many of the gains of increased productivity in the past 40 years, to the point where they and their clients in the top 1% gain 60% of the passive gains in the economy, in what the economists call 'rent seeking'.
That group is in a position to completely dominate the economy. Thanks to their rented politicians, those passive income gains are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income. Notably, if the Republicans gain the majority, they have promised to try to eliminate those taxes entirely, as well as estate taxes, thus cementing the wealth into certain families for generations.
The wealthiest managers also have the power to effectively mint money. In a recent case, one of them bought rather a lot of stock in a certain fruit-memed tech company, and used that influence to force stock buybacks and layoffs, doubling their investment, but cutting the company's plans for innovation.
In short, there is a very small set of very rich people who have so much money on paper that they cannot spend it without crashing the market. So, what many are doing is buying massive numbers of assets using those stocks as collateral. The bad part is that they seem to expect those assets to produce income at the same rate as the stock market, which means that they are being pushed to destruction. Purchases include:
pharmaceutical companies (resulting in huge price increases in many drugs, including insulin)
restaurant chains such as Wendy's hamburgers
medical testing facilities
hospital systems
medical groups (whose doctors are then reimbursed less and pushed for more 'output')
dental groups (many of which are 'encouraged' to do things such as unnecessary root canal work)
trailer parks (where many of the poorest live. They cannot move their trailers, so can be easily subjected to higher rents and maintenance fees)
homes, especially in the Sun Belt (many are bought sight-unseen the instant that they go on the market, often for tens of thousands more than the asking price, then becoming very expensive rentals)
And the list goes on. All in all, it reminds me of the aristocracy in France and Spain up through the 19th century, for whom things did not turn out so well.
The last couple of weeks or so have seen the NHS pushing back on the fact its services are falling further and further down the quality ladder that we who pay for it have the right to expect.
We have had the GP on television defending the almost non-existent service by blaming overwork and burnout as being a big part of the problem; for a branch of the medical profession that has had two years of near holiday you have to have some gall to come up with that one.
And only this morning, the 29th, Dr Hilary Jones on GMB was talking about doctors saying 1 in 4 were suicidal or that they all knew someone in the profession that felt that way. I would suggest if that many doctors are genuinely considering suicide they are in the wrong profession. Dr Jones spoke of how they all love their jobs etc. etc. despite himself not practising medicine in any meaningful way since 1989, being permanently on television and spouting the government guidelines and spreading misinformation for the last two years, especially about numbers in hospital that had Covid and were unvaccinated.
Since returning to normal, i.e. the poor service before Covid, for many it has deteriorated further, yes there are (if you are lucky) still surgeries operating in a manner that benefits the patient but increasingly they are not, and one has to ask how come those can perform at a near normal level as opposed to the majority that can’t or wont.
The government statement that two-thirds of GPs are working just three days a week, confirms what many of us have observed; though there is no mention of those working just one or two days a week, and I do actually know of one of the single day variety, not every week but most: she and her husband, a surgeon, spent the best part of two years not working or just turning up now and again, and now normal service means he is away working while she does a day a week. My own designated doctor is now doing two days a week at the surgery, as against the previous one.
The same surgery has eight doctors on its books yet on the infrequent visits there by me and others only two plus a duty doctor can be physically seen to be there at any one time. The large waiting area with just three or four waiting gives lie to the phrase we are back to normal: pre Covid you could not get an appointment easily but the majority of doctors, not all, were in attendance and the waiting area full.
The same goes for nursing staff. Pre Covid they had two nurse practitioners and four nurses on duty most days; now, a visit for a blood test my wife has to have on a regular basis was with the only one on duty or working - she said it was because of Easter! And they now have no nurse practitioners.
Last time the staff were not seeing people for blood tests, health checks etc. they were out helping to give jabs to people for extra income…
We now have the BMA proposing that surgeries will only be open from Monday to Friday between 9 and 5. Ours is only open those hours now with a lunch break, so what is new?
Another doctor interviewed on TV used the 'burnout' phrase to defend the slating many GPs are now getting. When asked how that could be if they are only working three days he referred to 12 hour working days as the problem; that is still only a thirty-six hour week if true and hardly likely to create burnoout.
This all goes back to before the pandemic. Many GP surgeries, for lack of a better explanation, have used the pandemic as an excuse to cut back their activities further. Yes, we are lacking GPs on a ratio of doctors per thousand people as compared to our European neighbours; that is not the fault of the patient who still pays for an ever-diminishing service: governments are at fault for that.
You cannot have an ever increasing population without catering for it and successive governments have failed to do anything about recruitment and training of extra doctors for decades, and everything else; now that fact is coming home to roost.
But that does not give the current protectors of the infirm (!) the right to cut their hours as they already have and receive the same salaries courtesy of the same patients and tax payers. Much of this goes back to the contract that they got from Blair who just gave them everything they asked for without any questions asked or consequences.
With that in mind and the fact they are in the top flight of pay compared with their European neighbours what is the problem? It's not pay or hours any more. Being paid for patients on the books should be scrapped; our surgery with the same number of GPs on its books has an increase in patients over ten years of roughly 50% The complaint that patients waste appointment time with trivial problems or no problems is valid, but the doctors who complain of this have never pushed for an appointment fee that would weed out that particular problem; a fee like that is normal almost everywhere else in the world and there are no problems getting an appointment.
The NHS gives the impression that it has no will to change in any way that will help the patient. It continually blames underfunding which has been dealt with in previous articles by many who know more about it than I do. If there is no change in the areas that are continually highlighted it will simply disappear, or will it? Remember the 1.3 million who work for it.
So how about our elected representatives getting their collective fingers out of their backsides and doing something about it? Vague promises of more doctors in ten years' time does nothing for the poor sod waiting three years in agony for a knee replacement as in this area and not being in a position to afford to go private and have the operation performed by the same burnt-out doctor; at this moment in time there is something completely immoral about that.
Over the last few years I have been able to give stories of incompetence at all levels in the NHS. The bureaucracy has increased at the expense of patient care and unneeded positions are still being advertised and filled, the money for which could be better spent. I have spelled out that side of things before, and so have many others.
The latest tale of woe came last week from a close friend of the wife who lives in north London where she has resided for over forty years. She never had a problem getting to see a GP at her local surgery until four years ago when they amalgamated with two other surgeries to create a ‘medical centre’ (oh, the familiarity!) since when she has to get through the gatekeepers in the morning and failing, try the following morning, ad infinitum.
She has been suffering from shooting pains in her back whenever she moves and can hardly walk. It has not gone away and after three weeks of this persevered on the phone and got a telephone appointment.
The doctor phones and she gives an account of the problem, he immediately says it’s arthritis; she replies I don’t have arthritis; he says oh, it is common in people who are getting old and suggests she rest, which because she can hardly move is what she has been doing anyway; and that was that, really.
No sending for examination or an x-ray which without even seeing someone in person would be the only way one could say that arthritis was the problem. This dismissive flippant dismissal with phone consultations is anecdotally becoming more common, making the process completely pointless.
Footnote to this: the pain did not go away, she went private for a consultation and was sent for an x-ray: no arthritis - a suspected trapped nerve, collapsed disc, but a scan will tell. This is the second friend who because of a useless GP has had to go private at that level to discover the truth about a problem. Not only is it not good enough and a disgrace but we who pay should be able to claim back the costs from the NHS for failing to do the job they get paid for in the first place. Once again in that same situation in many other countries they can claim because they have an insurance input; here we have to put up with whatever is deemed good enough at the time, which now is not much.
And can anyone tell me why the surgeries are still carrying on with all this mask insistence when my own experience at the local hospital and others shows many medical staff are not wearing them? We now, because of the media and endless NHS mandates, have a substantial percentage of the population that will be wearing masks forever. These same people actually believe that not wearing a mask is risking everyone else's health despite being triple/quadruple vaccinated.
Mark Steyn’s blistering opener on the results of booster jabs is worth watching. Several medical professionals and a statistician have attempted to query aspects of what he said but the essence of what he shows stands up.
And just why are young children being urged to get a jab for something that doesn’t affect them in any meaningful way with something that has no long term testing results and won't for some time?
On the same theme, this has to be one of the scariest videos by a total waddock that I have seen, and there are plenty of them. He and the grinning selected nodding donkeys on with him are a total disgrace. This has to be one of the most insidious propaganda videos of recent times. We haven’t quite reached that level here but not from lack of trying; I have seen quite a few of our medical professionals even at the fag end of this pandemic still urging jabbing every three months into the future and mask wearing the same.
So once again the NHS rightly claims it needs more front line staff while refusing to reduce the over bloated bureaucratic areas, or consider any reforms. What with the country saddled with enormous debt and inflation now a major problem it could be that the NHS becomes unaffordable in its current form. A paring back to basic healthcare may be the only way it can survive and have any relevance to people, because in its current form it is rapidly becoming an irrelevant behemoth that still devours huge quantities of taxpayer money.
Music from Kate Price who is a hammered dulcimer player and vocalist born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Price's music fuses folk music with elements of classical, jazz, and ethnic music, using instruments from around the world.
This is her web page but it does not contain very much information and seems to have sort of faded away in around 2015 or 2016 so I have no idea if she is still recording and/or performing or if she has moved on to other ventures. I bought a couple of her CDs more than 25 years ago, can't remember how or why I found her music but it has retained for me its ethereal charm. https://www.kateprice.com/home
Sonatina Montenegro - from the album sleeve notes:- "... dedicated to the memory of Milan Obradovich, an elderly Montenegran villager who spent many years of his life in a concentration camp. He taught me many things - what it is to savor life, how to dance with joy and the healing power of love.
The first movement is a traditional song. The second and third movements are based on dance rhythms from Macedonia and Bulgaria."
I came to the US from the UK in 1978 at age 21. Since I was relatively healthy growing up, I had only had minor experiences with the NHS, including a couple of visits to the emergency room for injuries.
I did see the mediocre treatment that my father had in an RAF hospital over 18 months of confinement in the 1960s, and remember by contrast the excellent treatment that my mother received when diagnosed with diabetes in the early 1980's.
All in all, it seemed to be a decent system for most people.
That is why I have been surprised to see so many negative comments about the NHS, and praise for private insurance.
All that I can do is to offer a different set of observations from my adoptive country.
Prior to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), we had the following:
approximately 10% of the population too poor to afford insurance (and not granted it by their work), and too rich to be on Medicaid
some insurers kept up to 54% of premiums, with huge incentives to refuse payment
maximum lifetime benefits, amounting to 10-15 years of treatment for something like hemophilia
refusal to cover 'pre-existing conditions', which could include anything from pregnancy to cancer risks
The ACA has not been a panacea, but everyone now has access to at least a bad policy. All must cover pre-existing conditions, and do not have a maximum lifetime amount. In addition, children can stay on their parents' policies until age 26.
That said, the costs for some relatively simple events can still be catastrophic even with 'good' insurance, and medical bills still cause up to 60% of bankruptcies.
One remaining problem is that of 'out-of-network' providers. Suppose that you need to go to the Emergency Department, and go to the hospital which your insurance requires. Without your knowledge, any of the doctors who treat you might not be contracted with that insurer, and you could receive a bill, weeks later, for thousands of dollars.
Or, as happened with our first son, your specialist might charge an 'unreasonable' fee, which you would only find out long after the service is performed. Our eventual bill for a normal c-section was $10,000 because my employer had contracted with a mediocre plan.
Scroll forward to 2017, when I had heart surgery. The bill for a 3-day stay in the ICU was $150,000, not counting the surgeon, anesthesiologist etc. Luckily, I had good insurance at that time, and our cost was 'only' a few thousand dollars. A month later, my insurance changed, and the deductibles and co-pays for my rehab therapy alone were almost $10,000 in a few months.
Right now, we have excellent coverage, so covering my medications at $6,000 per month is no issue. A slight change, and the cost to me could be on the order of $1,000 per month, which is coincidentally the cost of those same medications to the NHS.
In short, the US medical system is phenomenal if you have enough money or just have minor health issues.
