This morning, by chance, the TV was set on the Weather Channel. Turning it on, I noted the phrase highlighted on the set behind the anchor was, “Climate Change”.
Interested, I upped the volume, just in time to hear the anchor state that some US university had just reported that 2012 was the warmest on record for X,000 years.
“Oh, good,” I thought, “at last the US media is beginning to recognize climate change as relevant.”
The anchor then went on to postulate that the northern hemisphere had been heading, in 2000 – 3000 years, towards another ice age. However, thanks to the increase in greenhouse gases and corporate pollution, this would not now occur.
I guess we all owe an immense debt of gratitude to our corporate leaders, for their foresight in saving us from freezing to death in 4013. Instead, we’ll all be fried by 2113.
Thank you to the owners of the Weather Channel – NBC Universal, Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group (or, should we just call you by your real name – Lehman Bros!). Oh, no, sorry, Lehman Bros went bankrupt in 2008 due to it’s involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis which precipitated the depression from which we are only now beginning to recover.
Strange, that the two principle figures behind Lehman Bros, Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, should now be running the Blackstone group. One of their ventures is to cheaply acquire thousands of foreclosed homes and rent them to single parent families who can’t afford to buy.
Or, to put it another way, Peterson and Schwarzman are another pair of shits increasing their already vast wealth by creaming money off the poorest in society.
But, we can bow down and kiss their feet for saving us all from a life in igloos 2,000 years from now.
Moral: don’t believe a bloody thing you hear on the Weather Channel.
PS: Besides the Weather Channel, Bain Capital owns: AMC Entertainment, Aspen Education Group, Brookstone, Burger King, Burlington Coat Factory, Clear Channel Communications, Domino’s Pizza, DoubleClick, Dunkin’ Donuts, D&M Holdings, Guitar Center, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Sealy, The Sports Authority, Staples, Toys “R” Us, and the Warner Music Group.
Blackstone own: Tele-Denmark Communications, Equity Office Properties, Freescale Semiconductor, Michaels Stores, Nielsen Company, Travelport (Orbitz), United Biscuits, Biomet, and the Hilton Hotels Corporation.
All told, that lot should ensure we don’t freeze to death in the next two thousand years.
Yet again we find the American media gripped by a non-event. Every day thousands of old people collapse and die. While it may appear strange to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox, old people dying is actually incredibly natural.
So when 87 year-old Lorraine Bayless keeled over at the independent living community of Glenwood Gardens in Bakersfield, California, and the staff on hand called the emergency services, it was unlikely she would survive for very long, and she didn’t.
The subsequent furore – headline national news, the internet swamped by half-baked pseudo-experts sounding off at the staff of the facility for refusing the woman cardiopulmonary resuscitation, (though I bet many of those who yelled the loudest hadn’t a clue what the acronym ‘CPR’ stood for), has pushed most of the day’s genuine news into obscurity.
I know nothing of the policies of this Glenwood Gardens facility, but it has been stressed that the woman was in the ‘independent living’ part of the complex, and was aware that emergency help would be restricted to summoning the emergency services.
To the uneducated American viewer it would, no doubt, appear callous in the extreme for staff to refuse this poor woman CPR. Either the national media were similarly ignorant, or they were playing on the lack of their audience’s knowledge to ‘heat up’ a dumb story.
CPR can be highly injurious, even when carried out by a trained person. On a frail 87-year-old it could prove fatally so. Apart from fractured ribs, complications include bleeding in the lining of the pleura, serious damage to the liver and spleen, and pulmonary problems. Unless she was in remarkably robust condition for her age, CPR was as likely to kill her as keep her alive.
Despite the fictions of TV soaps and Hollywood, CPR does not ‘bring you back’ to life. At best, all it can do is keep the body’s tissue from deteriorating from lack of oxygen until professional assistance (usually in the form of a defibrillator) is available. If that fails to start the heart then the patient is already dead and CPR was a waste of everyone’s time.
Glenwood Garden’s policy of non-intervention was probably determined by fear of legal repercussions. The idea that such an issue could result in someone losing their life is horrific to most of us. So, blame the lawyers. In Lorraine Bayliss’s case her death was almost certainly inevitable.
The woman’s daughter, herself a nurse, stated she was totally satisfied with the care her mother had received. Obviously, she was more aware of the best nursing approach to her mother’s condition than were the idiot news broadcasters, and those factions of the US public stupid enough to assume their media is actually feeding them something newsworthy.
One of my great concerns as an ex-pat is watching from afar as the structures and standards that prevailed for so long in my home country are systematically dismantled by a load of privately educated, frock-coated, shits with no more desire to run the country for the benefit of its people than has a school of sharks for the victims that will become their next meal.
I refer to the class of so-called ‘politicians’ presently in charge of the United Kingdom’s future.
There was a time when great statesmen rose to political prominence by devoting their careers to the improvement and advancement of the lower social classes.
Many, though not all such great men, came from the aristocracy. That fact did not prevent them exercising a natural humanity towards those over whom they held political sway. Neither men nor women of such caliber exist in today’s world of corrupt, self-serving, politicians.
For years, the British National Health service was respected, held aloft on the world stage as an example of the success of social medicine. Today it is being dismantled before our eyes, privatized along similar lines to the money-guzzling monstrosity that passes for a healthcare system in the United States. The latest viper to slither into the top seat of the now ridiculously named “UK Ministry for Health”, Jeremy Hunt,[1] professed a deep dislike of socialized medicine and stated he much prefers, …”something along the lines of the US model…”. He’s also a firm believer in homeopathy!
One can only wonder why Viper No 1, Prime Minister David Cameron, placed such a shit in charge of the NHS, if it weren’t to oversee its dismantlement on behalf of the US medical corpocracy?
My last post referred, in the title, to skunks. It’s hard to differentiate between shits and skunks, though on balance I find the skunk more preferable. After all, it’s hideous aroma is no more than a defense mechanism. There’s nothing defensive about the stench of shit emanating from the Palace of Westminster these days. It’s an all-to-familiar aroma of corruption, as the big boy corporates on this side of the Atlantic, hungry to expand their ill-gotten profit-taking at the expense of the UK poor and needy, pour many more than forty pieces of silver into the eager, outspread, palms of our much-unloved, British parliamentary shits as they happily sacrifice the lamb of the NHS on the butcher’s hook of US corporate control.
Further twisting the knife of poverty in the backs of the poor and needy, Cameron recently announced that people living in “social housing” – that is, houses rented from housing associations or local authorities – will lose a percentage of their housing benefit for every unoccupied bedroom in their home.
Here, in a BBC report, is what this little shit, Minister for Pensions Steve Webb, had to say about it:
Under the government’s so-called “size criteria”, families will be assessed for the number of bedrooms they actually need.
The change affects council tenants, and those renting from housing associations, of working age who receive housing benefit…Tenants in social housing will have their benefit reduced by 14% if they have a spare bedroom or 25% if they have two or more extra rooms.
The Liberal Democrat minister [Steve Webb] was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the example of a divorced father who has a spare bedroom for his visiting children, but will lose out under the new arrangements.
Mr Webb said: “Many of the people we are talking about – over 100,000 – are in work. So they could, for example, work a bit more and simply pay the shortfall.
“We’re talking on average £14 or £15 a week. So three hours at the minimum wage would pay the shortfall then he can keep the spare bedroom and have someone to stay.
“The issue of an extra shift, a bit of overtime, to pay that shortfall, if it really matters to have that spare room – and I entirely understand that it will, for a family in that situation – making up the shortfall through working extra hours will be one of the options. But there may be others.”
The government has estimated the change will affect around 660,000 housing benefit claimants.
Or, the father requiring a spare bedroom for his estranged, visiting, offspring will now need to work so many hours he won’t have the time to look after them.
Pettiness, a meanness directed at the most hard-hit in society, is a hallmark of the true political shit today. Their aim is the demolition of society. They work their shitty little butts off to drag Britain down into the mire for their own short-term gain.
Perhaps it’s not so much them who do the dragging. They are just allowing it. They are just obeying the demands of their corporate and political masters on this side of the Atlantic. It would be interesting to know the content of private transatlantic telephone conversations between British politicians and US corporate and political bosses. We can be sure those conversations exist. As yet, we can only guess what deals are done; what favors promised; what remunerations exacted.
The “Special Relationship” is being dragged down to a whole new, stench-ridden, level.
Meanwhile, British people, complacent about their welfare state, are naively untroubled by the decimation taking place before their eyes. They’re blind to the once proud Union Jack methodically ripped from its staff in front of them, soon to be replaced by a dirty, bedraggled, and heavily shit-stained, Stars and Stripes.
