One of my oldest and dearest friends has gone public on his support for Scottish Independence. I am greatly cheered by this. More thoughts later.
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“Continental health care seems to work fine.”
but not as well as the NHS
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8877412/NHS-among-best-health-care-systems-in-the-world.html
So why the relaxed approach to changing it into a different and increasingly privatised model? Why the attempt to make this sound reasonable?
Having just recently been rescued from the clutches of thieving Western bankers, Crimean pensioners will be delighted that Putin has now doubled their pensions to bring them into line with Russian pensions.
Public sector workers will have their salaries increased to bring them up to Russian standards, and a variety of tax breaks have been announced.
Crimea is now looking very very investable.
I daresay even Tatars will be pleased.
The New York Times is of course delighted at the good fortune of all these new Russian citizens:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/europe/russia-raises-pensions-for-crimeans.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=2
“So why the relaxed approach to changing it into a different and increasingly privatised model? Why the attempt to make this sound reasonable?”
There’s money to be made.
And those who advocate it are not very shy about their direct financial interest in the change.
“Greed is good”.
Dad! 5 08pm
“Who is SKN’s real father, I wonder?”
This is getting so embarrassing!
I’d like to be able to apologise for you. Maybe tell readers that there was a time when you did something more productive with your talents than trying to upset people. But we both know that wouldn’t be true, don’t we?
I still remember that time when I was a toddler and you got all those nuns fighting at Lourdes. What had they done to deserve you telling them I was possessed by demons? I’ll never forget your self-satisfied smirk as they were loaded on the bus by the Gendarmerie Swat Team. If only they’d known about you.
No wonder mum moved to South Georgia. Those penguins have more manners and talk a thousand times more sense than you.
…
Ba’al Zevul 1 20pm
“Premature, but true.”
True, but surely not premature. The old fool has been obsessive in his devotion to upsetting people here ever since I discovered what he was up to in the garden shed about this time last year.
But I have to acknowledge and admire your appreciation of fine poetry. You have convinced me that you, like John are a titan of culture and erudition.
…
Meanwhile some images from occupied Palestine,
http://electronicintifada.net/content/month-pictures-february-2014/13224
Chris Hedges, with Abby
AM: You talk about the impending environmental catastrophes, and also the severe economic uncertainty on the horizon—why do you think there is no sense of urgency on a large scale to address these troubling trends?
CH: Because they’re not reported. The commercial media is about bread and circus. It’s about spectacle. It’s about celebrity gossip. It’s about the Super Bowl. I mean, every week it’s something new. If we had a responsible media, especially a broadcast media, we would understand that climate change at this point is an emergency; that at this point the effects of climate change are unstoppable, and if we don’t radically configure our relationship with the ecosystem, very, very quickly the human species itself is in jeopardy. You can look at the World Bank report on climate change, turn up the heat, the World Bank can hardly be accused of being a radical organization and they speak at the end of that report in utterly apocalyptic terms. So, scientists—especially people who study climate change—they know very well what’s happening, and yet we are not hearing their voices.
We are mesmerized by electronic hallucinations, and that’s of course how corporations want it. When forty percent of the summer Arctic Sea ice melts, companies and corporations, like Shell Oil, look at the death throes of our planet as a business opportunity and they’ll run up and drop a half a billion dollar drill bits down into the Arctic Sea. I think what we have seen is a kind of iron control of the systems of information by corporate power who are determined to exploit, and exploit, and exploit until collapse, and now we’re about to see—in all likelihood—the President approve the northern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline. So, it’s an uninformed public. It’s a public which has been diverted. They’re emotional and intellectual energy has been invested into spectacle, coupled with a ruthless corporate totalitarianism that thinks only in terms of quarterly profit and has absolutely no concern for the common good or sustenance of the ecosystem that might provide some kind of decent and acceptable living standards for future generations.
AM: Chris, but on the flip side you’ve also said that as collapse become palpable, humanity will retreat in what anthropologists call ‘crisis cults’. What is a ‘crisis cult’ and why does our psychological hardwiring always revert back to these modes of groupthink?
CH: When things become so desperate, human societies retreat into forms of magical thinking. At the end of the Indian Wars and the latter part of the 19th Century, you saw the rise of the Ghost Dance which swept through the remnants of native communities. These communities believed that the Great Spirit, the warriors would come back; the buffalo herds would come back; they would get their lands back; the white colonizer would disappear. That is replicated, as anthropologists have studied, throughout societies that collapse.
Now, the way we express our crisis cult, is through the radical Christian right, again, a form of magical thinking which denies evolution, which believes in the rapture; that those believers, when Jesus returns, will be raptured up into heaven. That’s a classic example of a crisis cult, so that when things become desperate you gather in a church, you pray, you carry out Christian ritual, you tend to lash out at a society to purge. You see it in the rhetoric. Whether it’s against homosexuals; whether it’s against undocumented workers, Muslims, a long list of contaminants that will somehow make the society right—all of that has within it the makings of a crisis cult. But crisis cults are what societies do when despair reaches such a level—and we’re certainly headed in that direction—when you are unable in a real way to affect the environment of the world around you, then you wrap yourself in these cocoons of fantasy……
AM: Let’s talk about that new Oxfam study that recently came out that shows how eighty-five people control the equivalent of the bottom half of the World’s wealth. What’s your response to people that say, “We just have to remove those eighty-five people”?
CH: Well, it’s a system of corporate power which is not necessarily driven by individuals so much as driven by corporate interests. Exxon Mobil, Citibank, Goldman-Sachs. So, you can arrest and imprison the head of Golman-Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein—which is where he belongs—but somebody will take his place. What has to happen is we have to break the back of corporate power which is now global, and break the logic whereby everything is about profit; that nothing has value beyond its monetary value. That’s an extremely dangerous moment for any society to live in, because when nothing has an intrinsic value, whether that’s water, air and human beings, then the ruthlessness of those corporate forces mean that you will squeeze every ounce of potential profit. Everything becomes a commodity and you squeeze those commodities until there’s nothing left and that’s exactly what’s happening. So, it’s not individuals, it’s the rise of corporate power which is a species of totalitarianism. Different; it differs from past systems of totalitarianism but it is no less totalitarian than fascism or communism, or totalitarian forces.
AM: Right. The system is a machine at this point. If those people died today, it would still grind on. In a recent article you discuss the menace of the military mind and how only devotion to establish forms of behavior result in individual success. How do you think this concept applies to the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and his feelings towards journalists who have exposed NSA documents?
CH: Well, I speak as a former war correspondent who spent twenty years covering conflicts around the globe—Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa—so, I know the military really well and blind obedience, aggressiveness resort to violence. All of these things; you know, destruction of individuality, all of these things work really well on a battlefield. They don’t work very well in a peacetime society. So, when Clapper made this comment that Edward Snowden and his quote-unquote ‘accomplices’—and he was clearly referring to journalists such as Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald—should be prosecuted, I understood exactly what he was saying. He was a former Lieutenant General; he comes out of this military culture which detests the press, and has always made war on an independent press. Their vision of journalism are all the little lackeys who sit through their press conferences and follow them around and write glowing tributes to their heroism, or whatever they’re directed to write in press pools.
But actual journalism is something that within the military culture they’re deeply hostile, too, and the triumph of military values is—again—symptomatic of a civilization in decline; the rigidity, the celebration of hyper-masculinity, the lack of empathy, the belief that every problem should be dealt with by force both internationally and domestically, militaristic hyper-masculine regimes speak exclusively in the language of force, and then you see within popular culture, subsequently, a celebration of those hyper-masculine military values. I’ve been in enough combat to tell you those values are quite useful in a firefight, but they will destroy a civil society. I think that is a window into how tattered our civil society has become, and how we have shifted our allegiance from an open society, from empathy, from a capacity to embrace various opinions and outlooks and political stances to this increasingly rigid militaristic society, and Clapper is a figure who exemplifies precisely this sickness.
AM: Chris, in a recent speech you gave, you said quote, ‘I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.” Chris, Glen Greenwald recently spoke about how one man, Edward Snowden, has changed the world, and that singular capacity is the antidote to defeatism. What do you regard as the antidote to defeatism?
CH: You can’t talk about hope if you don’t resist, and Edward Snowden has certainly resisted. Heroically. We must carry out the good, or at least the good so far in as we can determine it, and then we have to let it go. The Buddhists call it ‘karma’. I come out of the seminary; that’s what faith is. It’s the belief that it goes somewhere even if empirically everything around you seems to point in the other direction. Once we give up, once we stop resisting, then we’re finished. Not only finished in a literal sense, but finished spiritually and morally. So, I fall back in moments of distress like this on that belief, which is one that I learned in seminary; that we have a capacity and an ability and a moral duty to fight against forces of evil even if it looks almost certain that those forces will triumph.
ALCANON ALERT…. EDIT Button Please….
The Link to Above Copy… with More @
http://www.mediaroots.org/chris-hedges-crisis-cults-and-the-collapse-of-industrial-civilization-the-military-mind-the-antidote-to-defeatism/
Brian,
“What has to happen is we have to break the back of corporate power which is now global, and break the logic whereby everything is about profit; that nothing has value beyond its monetary”
That’s wrong thinking, we have to influence and educate the minds of the consumer, corporations and banks are reactionary!
Good article.
I watched a party political broadcast on behalf of UKIP tonight. …… well, ….. Channel 4 was pretending it was a documentary but it was an hour long homage to Nigel Farage.
Here’s the hard-hitting, not, film-maker Martin Durkin, in a Telegraph article to promote his film …..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10731266/My-six-months-with-normal-Nigel-Farage.html
….. and here’s some quotes so you don’t have to read it:
I’ve been reading and hearing this guff about Farage for a while now. Seems to me they’re setting him up to fill the same role as the Tea Party did in the USA – drive the political debate even further to the right.
The media keep telling us UKIP will win the upcoming European Elections. They’re probably right, but it won’t be because of Farage’s ‘charm’ or UKIP’s policies – it’ll because the media keep telling us that supporting Farage is OK because it’s the ‘new middle class cool’ and a ‘guilty pleasure’ and it’ll ‘to shake things up.”
So UKIP will win in Europe and the Question Time panel will earnestly conclude that the voters have issued a wake-up call to the major parties, and our three ‘leaders’ will heed the cry of middle England and lurch rightwards, bickering about Europe while agreeing to embrace UKIP’s libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, and Farage will be be yesterday’s news in time for the General Election.
I wonder how far in advance all this stuff is scripted?
Brian. 11 25 pm
Chris Hedges, spot on! Thanks
“It’s a public which has been diverted. Their emotional and intellectual energy has been invested into spectacle, coupled with a ruthless corporate totalitarianism that thinks only in terms of quarterly profit and has absolutely no concern for the common good or sustenance of the ecosystem that might provide some kind of decent and acceptable living standards for future generations.”
And since you never seem to sleep, here’s some music to while away the quiet hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWrMotphCE
Well Thank you wee yin…
great sounds and vibes Magico… Sort of Stuff One just has to move the hips to
my Musical range is vast as the Cosmos…
Sofia.. to Cross Post From Squonk / Alcanon’s Joint
Seen these kool dude’s a couple of weeks ago in Glasgow
Give it a few mins…. @
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-li3KlTtTA
Sorry Jay…
Meant to say Cheers .
Craig; Just an FYI. Ebola has gone airborne in Africa….
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-20341423
‘Today'(BBC R4) reports that UKIP is against wind turbines because they are ugly and noisy.
Checked the mirror lately, Nigel?
Thanks Technicolour and Herbie for those comments in support of OUR NHS. Wonderful use of the English language by Nye Bevan. Can you imagine the spivs in Whitehall at the moment being able to speak like that?
As you say, the main motivation for the privateers is greed.
These brilliant performances came to mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q
Brian. 2 21am
WOW! Thanks.
What an empowering treat to start a new day with. Truly inspirational. No wonder he was silenced.
It prodded me dig up the full text. Reading it is like witnessing a day of big surf on Inch Strand when the wind has backed to the east. Paragraph after paragraph rolling in towering waves of truth. Spray streaming from the curling crests.
It’s hard to choose what to quote from such a feast but here’s a taster
“Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.” Martin Luther King – Beyond Vietnam
I’ll mull it over through the day.
Full Text here, http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/martin-luther-king-speeches/martin-luther-king-speech-beyond-vietnam.htm
And as if we needed telling what we already knew. The NAO is redundant here.
Royal Mail Sell-Off ‘Cost Taxpayer Millions’
The Government priced the shares too low with buyers raking in £750m in the first day alone, says the public spending watchdog.
http://news.sky.com/story/1235001/royal-mail-sell-off-cost-taxpayer-millions
What is news is that the 20 banks and hedge funds (described above as ‘priority investors’!) who scooped the winners’ prizes have already flogged them on.
Gideon retains 30% of the now not-so=Royal Mail.
Apart from the NHS, is there anything left to privatise? Well I suppose they could flog off what’s left of the BBC. And then there’s the air we breathe. They’ve already got our water.
Another concise observation from Hedges –
“Everything becomes a commodity and you squeeze those commodities until there’s nothing left and that’s exactly what’s happening. So, it’s not individuals, it’s the rise of corporate power which is a species of totalitarianism. Different; it differs from past systems of totalitarianism but it is no less totalitarian than fascism or communism, or totalitarian forces.”
Good catch, Brian. The public’s indifference to being looted by corporations makes turkeys voting for Christmas look like red revolutionaries by comparison. Though I take issue with the idea that this is entirely new. Bread and circuses, backed with overwhelming military power, have been around since Roman times. What is new is the infinite flexibility of modern finance, which can buy and sell options on options on options using purely imaginary money to obtain actual, convertible profits. At least Rome had a hard currency.
Chris Hedges’ father was a Presbyterian minister so I reckon he had good training in public speaking and use of the language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges
“True, but surely not premature.”
I meant that as your dear father is not yet pushing up the daisies – which will surely be glad to relocate elsewhere to free up bedding space for large families of dandelions – an obituary was, in classical terms, inappropriate. However, in any unified-field theory, that would be no objection, and it could be that even as I write, your parent has turned blue and irrevocably collapsed in the shed, possibly aided by the tangerine jammed in his mouth. If so, condolences.
Ba’al Zevul. 8 29am
“True, but surely not premature.”
OK. So you were right on one minor, if rather significant, detail.
But I stand by everything else I wrote.
Who did the state broadcaster get in last night to review today’s papers? The subjects discussed included UKIP and the Royal Mail give away.
A. Cornelia Meyer
BBC World News Paper Review (Le Pen, UKIP, Russia, China, Royal Mail)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDvMxOhiTnU
Cornelia Meyer Independent Energy Expert and Chairman, MRL Corporation, United Kingdom
Studies at St Gallen University, London School of Economics and Tokyo University. Formerly: Economic Policy Adviser, Minister of International Trade and Industry, Japan; senior positions in banking and development banking covering four continents; senior positions with several GE businesses, BP and Kimberly Clark. CEO and Chairman, MRL Corporation and Non-Executive Chairman, Gasol. Holder of non-executive positions. Member, Global Agenda Council on Energy Security, World Economic Forum. Identified by CNN as a thought leader on emerging markets. On the panel of experts on the Global Exchange programme. Member, Oxford Energy Policy Club.
MRL Corporation extracts graphite from Sri Lanka and Gasol is a West African energy development corporation.
And I agree with it, Sofia.
If I can offer a helpful word:-
I think your old Dad still uses sleep-hypnosis tapes in the intervals between his strange outbursts here. My pattern-recognition app has identified one – “I Don’t Have To Prove Anything”, by Frank Lee N. Sain, a Baptist preacher and economist from Armpit, Oregon. I would also look out for “Be as Wise as Sir Keith Joseph” and “Bedtime Hayek”. Tactfully remove these from his toy cupboard, ignoring the rubber and leather items, burn them, and I think you will find his mental state improves.
NHS facing biggest ever challenge, says new boss
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26821070
Where has he been for the last 10 years? Why. At United Healthcare in the US of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnitedHealth_Group
‘UnitedHealth Group Inc. is a diversified managed health care company headquartered in Minnetonka, Minnesota, U.S. It is No. 17 on Fortune magazines top 500 companies in the United States. UnitedHealth Group offers a spectrum of products and services through two operating businesses: United Healthcare and Optum. Through its family of subsidiaries and divisions, UnitedHealth Group serves approximately 70 million individuals nationwide. In 2011, the company posted a net earnings of $5.142 billion.’
You could not f…..g well make it up.
‘Health & Government
In 2010, UnitedHealth Group spent more than $1.8 million on lobbying activities to work to achieve favorable legislation, and hired seven different lobbying firms to work on its behalf. In addition, its corporate political action committee or PAC, called United for Health Reform, spent an additional $1 million on lobbying activities in 2010.
QSSI, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, is one of the 55 contractors hired by United States Department of Health and Human Services to work on the HealthCare.gov web site.
Health Care Reform
Through 2010 and into 2011, UnitedHealth senior executives have been meeting monthly with executives of leading health insurers to limit the effect of the health care reform law.’
Ouch!
Russia’s Gazprom raises gas prices for Ukraine, ending discount agreed before the crisis that overthrew its pro-Moscow president.
Naughty Mr Usmanov.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/mr_usmanov.jpg
Mary, the Royal Mail giveaway was just that. Before hiving it off they pushed postage stamps up to twice their former cost. Long-term preferential shareholders made a short-term killing. The taxpayer was robbed. Prepare for year on year stamp increases (like the energy bills). I need to speak to my colleagues at Left Unity but I am sure I can get many to agree that the Royal Mail, together with all the other industries robbed from you and me: energy companies, water companies, railways, health-services, education, prisons and, if I got my way, banks. In private hands you just make the unhealthy miniscule rich all that much richer. It is what has demolished society – greed. Get these industries back. Bring decency back into society.
Ba’al Zevul.
You can see by my last post how deep the genetic imperative to be argumentative goes.
Dr Bullstrode says by the time I’m 18 I’ll be unable to respond to even an inoccuous “How are you?” with any response that doesn’t call into question the person’s motives and sanity and accuse them of being raving anti-semites.
…
So I better make hay while the sun is still out, so to speak.
Here’s more news that suggests BDS is working. Profiting from illegal occupation seems to be toxic to Sodastream’s share price.
http://jfjfp.com/?p=57912
Should have read: “I need to speak to my colleagues at Left Unity but I am sure I can get many to agree that the Royal Mail, together with all the other industries robbed from you and me: energy companies, water companies, railways, health-services, education, prisons and, if I got my way, banks, back in the public domain.
Third time lucky. Should have read: “I need to speak to my colleagues at Left Unity but I am sure I can get many to agree that the Royal Mail, together with all the other industries robbed from you and me: energy companies, water companies, railways, health-services, education, prisons and, if I got my way, banks, would be brought back into the public domain.
Yeah,
Let hope AS can spend some time sorting this mess out
http://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/the-tragic-magic-circle-scotlands-shameful-child-sexual-abuse-scandal-continues/
BDS is the way to go, certainly. Meanwhile, on again, off again…Israel’s blatant timewasting, with absolutely no intention of ever agreeing to anything, continues –
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/03/israel-offers-palestinians-new-talks-proposal-201433141732412297.html
And rumours that they’re going to be given back their extremely nasty spy are circulating –
http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Kerry-returns-to-Israel-in-an-attempt-to-salvage-flailing-peace-talks-347027
Was rereading Mearsheimer and Walt last night…then (Lebanon, 2006) as now, if the US isn’t prepared to use its muscle as opposed to making slightly unhappy noises, quickly stifled by AIPAC’s stooges in Congress, nothing whatever is going to change.