大象传媒

CARE HOMES ARE 'STAMFORD PRISONS' (Zimbardo) JUST WAITING TO GO BAD.

How many care home owners, managers, staff know anything of the Stamford Prison Experiment? There was a sweet looking young lady on Question Time, who was ADAMANT that people KNOW when they are being bad and - by inference - could STOP. Conversely, Zimbardo shows (what many men quietly acknowledge) the group can take on a mind of its own - always a darker mind. CIRCUMSTANCES mediate behaviour.

I wonder if this will be raised by NewsyNighty guests? I very much doubt your presenters have any inkling. Of course, if you read your blog posts . . .

In passing: I suggest rape, particularly in war, is also mediated by circumstances. But who will have the courage to look that one in the eye?

THE WISDOM OF THE HAGUE

Am I alone in finding the phrase: "THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR" bizarre in the extreme? This is what Mladic is accused of violating. It has a Monty Python dimension.

Keeping it topical: how about the "CONSTRAINTS AND NICETIES OF RAPE"?

Or perhaps (for balance) "THE HEALTH AND HYGIENE CONSIDERATIONS OF BUGGERY"?

Or: "THE FINER POINTS AND ETIQUETTE OF DEMENTIA CARE"

Regarding the above, it seems we must give more attention to: "THE LOGIC AND RATIONALITY OF OF PERVERSITY".

'the kind of care which should be available and who should pay for it '

'Should' is a word that, when deployed carelessly, sends shutters down my back.

This is an issue in which I have a deep personal interest, so the iPlayer will get deployed, though I still appreciate the reviews of more night owl 'live' posters in advance.

I wonder, with some trepidation, who the 'guests' will be in terms of objectivity, calibre and competence.

The second anyone tries to get into matters of money without first addressing where all that has gone before vanished to with so little effect, will not be welcomed.

'a report from Peter Marshall'

This one?: /blogs/newsnight/petermarshall/

If so it, would have been good to chat further on this. Maybe he'll be reinstigated in the new blog regime?

Otherwise, perhaps not the best example of cutting edge media, 大象传媒. Though it's looking like 2 year mod referrals are a possibility.

Robert Peston's piece yesterday says it all.

/news/business-13630394

It all started with local authority "contracting out" in the 1980s which forced LAs to competitively tender their services - and care homes soon went to outside contractors, who simpy undercut the inhouse departments to get the contracts.

Now big business moved in - they saw the opportunity to separate the BUILDING from the SERVICE - and simply asset stripped the properties out from under the service - then the new owners jacked up the rents.

Now the really big boys moved in - the property portfolios could be milked much harder - move the service out of valuable locations into cheaper ones and sell off the old properties to developers.

In the meanwhile government started to squeeze the cost of care -and the entitlement to it. More and more peple found they had to sell their homes to pay - whilst others got no help.

The actual service is now being hammered from both directions, but its cost has gone up because of rent increases, whilst the volume of care provided has fallen as eligibaility criteria for subsidised care has been tightened, whilst the demand for it has risen with the ageing population - and the corporate entities responsible for providing the service are left threadbare of capital and investment.

Local government is now being squeezed beyond anything it can cope with by the coalition spending cuts being introduced so rapidly that the only thing councils can do is bear down even harder on their costs - i.e. things like care homes.

Having been asset stripped to a skeleton, its staff resources driven through the floor and the demands placed on the service it provides driven up and up, unsurprisingly the care home industry has simply run out of options.

Now stand back and take a long look at what has happened - a few people have got VERY rich out of asset stripping the property, whilst the users of the care service have seen ever higher eligability requirements, yet the cost-per-head of the service has risen hugely in real terms since it was contracted out.

Robert Peston says Southern Cross was bankrolled by RBS, which IMHO seems to have taken quite a hit on this (?check this for yourself), which then rebounded on the taxpayer via the RBS bailout. Robert talks about another company, Four Seasons, and remarks: "(RBS) wrote down by a half the 拢1.6bn they were owed."

We have therefore been comprehensively had - our care services have been asset-stripped, the quality and scale of the service has been ha

NN: 鈥楾onight we focus on the kind of care which should be available and who should pay for it鈥�

Inhumane behaviour in our society is a bigger topic than care home abuse; together with the allegations against Miladic, they represent a micro and macro of man鈥檚 inhumanity to man.

With regard to care home abuse I have previously expressed the view that the English are not as caring as are some folk from less-developed countries, implying that there are national (dare I say racial) differences, both strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, those who grew up during WWII will acknowledge that we were a more caring society in the past 鈥搚et we were quite happy to know that we were carpet-bombing German cities and citizens. - as barrie observes 鈥淐IRCUMSTANCES mediate behaviour.鈥�

So it must be circumstances that have changed our society for the worse; nurture not nature that affect behaviour at individual and at society level. I have raged against non-discriminatory mass immigration on the grounds that our English society values and standards have suffered through 鈥榳e welcome diversity鈥� above patriotism. There are many other factors responsible, ranging from the loss of belief in the hereafter, the lowering (or disclosure) of standards of conduct by public figures (from Lords, MPs, royals and other previous role models) and the constant blast of sex, greed and hedonism from the media.

So what kind of care can we expect, and who should pay for it? More state funding is not available and more legislation is not going to encourage families to make provision for the care of their own members, unless it contains reward for family responsibility and disincentives against irresponsible procreation at the taxpayer鈥檚 expense. But I doubt that any political party will risk the loss of office for such an obvious solution, any more than governments dare mention over-population as a major cause of most global problems. Might appeal to the Green Party though?

ANOTHER YEAR OLDER AND DEEPER IN TISH - REPEAT POST (#4)

At 11:22am on 08 May 2010, you wrote:
PRIMARY INTANGIBLES NO LONGER RULE - KO (#45 and others)

As I have listed before: HONOUR - INTEGRITY - VIRTUE - WISDOM - ALTRUISM - TRUST - HUMILITY - DIGNITY (not exhaustive) when implanted deep in a culture (and often reinforced by taboo) prevent the 'runaway degradation' that assails us (and the rest of the planet by association).

The one MAN MADE (i.e. not FUDAMENTAL) 'intangible' is MODERN NOTIONAL MONEY aka wealth. While money had value OF ITSELF, it had a degree of stability; but it was always on borrowed time. It has been shown, all too clearly that, with culture moribund, notional money now holds sway - it has emerged the most powerful of ALL the intangibles.

Man removed (and is removing) the trees from this globe, demonstrating his unwisdom. He has since done an impressive job of physical pollution and moved on to going steadily mad. But his epitaph will record his most damning 'triumph' as: 'MONEY'.

Westminster has made a good pretence of expelling the money-obsessed. But remembering that money=power, and that Westminster is ALL ABOUT POWER, until we defeat the Westminster Ethos, we have CHANGED nothing.

A PRAGMATIC NOTE

Just how perverse can the Age of Perversity get? We have engineered procreation from every direction - inhibition, stimulation, prolongation, termination etc, with some quasi justification. But at the other end of life, interference is again rife, this time WITH THE EXCEPTION OF TERMINATION. Most of us who are gathering tail-end but not terminal, degradations, have no wish to be STORED UNTO DEATH, just because a bunch of dumb 'Lords Demoniacal' decree it.

WE WANT TO ARRANGE OUR DEPARTURE TO OUR SATISFACTION.

The country cannot afford 'storage unto death'. Further, the health (and incomes) of sons and daughters, many of retirement age, cannot bear it without distress and lasting psychological damage.

LET MY PEOPLE GO you ill-informed, painfully inept, stupidly blinkered, political ninnies. I am 74. I am an inventor of some proven ability, I will cheat you out of your PERVERSE SATISFACTION of driving me into lingering death, and my sons into powerless purgatory.

I have sat hundreds (yes hundreds - not hyperbole!) of hours in a 'storage facility'. I have seen the love, the callousness and the unprofessionalism, and FELT the sheer HELL of it. You politicians KNOW NOT WHAT YOU DO, but you are too busy playing Party Games to attend and I, for one, will never forgive.

DISMANTLE WESTMINSTER

meanwhile the investigative journalists have more telling stories?

Global Carbon Market's Dirty Secret

another story where people make more out of farming the carbon credits than they do in their line of trade



International team investigates alleged CO2 leak at world's largest carbon storage project

..The study鈥檚 conclusions support the couple鈥檚 long held assertion that the bubbling pond water, dead animals, small explosions, and other anomalies on their property are the result of high levels of CO2 in their soil that leaked to the surface from fractures at the nearby storage site. ...



carbon credits transfers billions from the many to a few for no valid reason.

is there anything out there that can escape the manacles of 'free marketing'? The care homes debacle, the attacks upon the NHS, and now the sight of F1 cars sloshing through the blood of freedom fighters in Bahrain. Anything goes as long as it makes a dime...what an awful world we are living in....

NN: 鈥楾onight we focus on the kind of care which should be available and who should pay for it鈥�

Inhumane behaviour in our society is a bigger topic than care home abuse; together with the allegations against Miladic, they represent a micro and macro of man鈥檚 inhumanity to man. With regard to care home abuse I have previously expressed the view that the English are not as caring as are some folk from less-developed countries, implying that there are national (dare I say racial) differences, both strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, those who grew up during WWII will acknowledge that we were a more caring society in the past 鈥搚et we were quite happy to know that we were carpet-bombing German cities and citizens. - as barrie observes 鈥淐IRCUMSTANCES mediate behaviour.鈥�

So it must be circumstances that have changed our society for the worse; nurture not nature that affect behaviour at individual and at society level. I have raged against non-discriminatory mass immigration on the grounds that our English society values and standards have suffered through 鈥榳e welcome diversity鈥� above patriotism. There are many other factors responsible, ranging from the loss of belief in the hereafter, the lowering (or disclosure) of standards of conduct by public figures (from Lords, MPs, royals and other previous role models) and the constant blast of sex, greed and hedonism from the media.

So what kind of care can we expect, and who should pay for it? More state funding is not available and more legislation is not going to encourage families to make provision for the care of their own members, unless it prescribes reward for family responsibility, and disincentives against irresponsible procreation at the taxpayer鈥檚 expense. But I doubt that any political party will risk the loss of office for such an obvious solution, any more than governments dare mention over-population as a major cause of most global problems. Might appeal to the Green Party though?

EAT A HIJACKER PASSPORT AND BECOME SUPERMAN - INDESTRUCTIBLE (#11 link)

Oh 大象传媒 - if ever you are to feel embarrassment, the time is now. Alex Jones at his irreverent best. But governance and media still LIVE WITHIN THE LIE (Vaclav Havel) we must wait a little longer. Ultimately the centre of the 9/11 lie cannot hold.

But as I have posted before, it will take a bogus NUCLEAR 'TERRORIST' ATTACK to cover the explosion of the TEN YEAR 9/11 MYTH, when it blows. And if the explosion of truth from America, coincides with the enhancing effect of Chilcot's report, the 'body parts' of Dubya, St Tony and The Lord Obama, will be reduced to Dark Matter, such will be the annihilation.

ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED CHILCOT KNOWS THAT 'THEY KNOW'. (#12 additional)

And the archive is still up and functional. But a state of emergency could intervene - could it not? Sequestering the entire Chilcot body of data TO SAFEGUARD NATIONAL SECURITY would be imperative. Or perhaps he/they will be 'got at' in the time honoured manner - threats direct, or to family, or reputation. A whitewash would look very odd against the enquiry background. Chilcot is not Hutton.

We shall see.

So apparently in the future we all have to pay more for our care - as well as paying tens of thousands for university fees, and being forced to pay into private pensions which we and our employers pay into.

One of your commentators has just said we should somehow pool this, so it's a kind of joint insurance where we all share the risk. Would that be something like a sort of national insurance scheme? Because if I look at what's taken off my meagre wages I find alongside taxes there also seems to be a large amount already called "national insurance". Now I know this isn't a real fund. But please can we have some honesty here. If national insurance is not an insurance fund we're paying into for health, care and pensions, why the hell isn't is abolished and simply added to income tax? Wouldn't that help the deficit too?

With the larger part of the 鈥榠ndustry鈥� in private hands we, the GBP, are yet again being expected to provide a blank cheque via insurance, taxation et al thereby providing a guaranteed upward spiral income for the 鈥榮ervice鈥� providers sic. Much like the business model of the utilities privatised when the Nu-Cons were last in and didn鈥檛 hide under the guise of 鈥楴u鈥�.

Not sure if I鈥檝e reached my limit yet but .....

Here is the most important comment you will read ....... Ever!

The only viable solution is - simply - for t

WHAT WAS THE ISSUE - AGAIN?

Brilliant use of false colour graphics and cross-gender face morphing (that'll teach kids not to sit up late). They really counterpointed the Vogonity of the whole thing, going forward. Well worth losing the old blog to fund.

EVEN THE ANIMAL-LOVING BRITISH DO NOT STORE THEIR PETS UNTO DEATH.

Why are we so unconscionably PERVERSE? The world knows the British love their pets more than their own blood, so how is it that pets are afforded assisted death but family members EVEN HAVING SIGNED THEIR PERMISSION, MUST ROT - SLOWLY? We should, surely, be prolonging pet life to the last cell. Would this not be kinder than brutal EUTHANASIA?

Think of the money to be made by a terminal pet store. High tech 'battery houses' with sanitation, oxygen, dialysis, insulin drips etc, could keep cats and dogs alive, a year or two longer. Visiting, by owners, would be just like it is at a human slow-death facility (aka care home).

Will someone in government PLEASE look at this miss-match, and realise that IF DEATH IS A KINDNESS TO PETS, IT MUST BE AFFORDED TO HUMANS. Even a shrimp-brained MP should be able to compute that!

Not a word of this in the studio - of course.

THIS IS THE AGE OF PERVERSITY

To finish my trucated comment in 4.

We have therefore been comprehensively had - our care services have been asset-stripped, the quality and scale of the service has been hammered whilst we are expected to pick up the bill, not once, but twice - firstly in higher local taxes, then against via bailing out RBS who then bailed out the care home companies like four seasons, whilst the value that was in the original public sercives' assets has been taken out by the asset strippers. This is obscene.

As Robert says:

"And in case you are interested, we all have a stake in Four Season's survival. It went to the brink less than two years ago- and only survived when its banks led by Royal Bank of Scotland wrote down by a half the 拢1.6bn they were owed."

ENDS

The current spending cuts imposed on LAs will be dwarfed by the cost of bailing out the care home companies if they do go bust, so the entire cuts exercise in LA will have been a costly, pointless and deeply damaging exercise in libertarian political ideology made at the expensie of vulnerable elderly people and their relatives as well as another massive dose of bailing out the rich by the rest of us.

The NHS is nexton the agenda for the asset strippers.

Robert Peston's questions are to the point:

"As for the current government, the problems at Southern Cross pose a series of policy questions. Here are some of them:

1.Should George Osborne as chancellor revisit an idea he floated in opposition of placing limits on how much businesses can borrow, if they want to be able to deduct interest payments from tax (what's known in the trade as tighter restrictions on thinly capitalising businesses)?
2.Has the Treasury done enough to increase the tax payable by private equity partners on their carry and to increase the tax payable in general by private-equity partners and their backers who are not domiciled in the UK, so that tax system doesn't favour their kind of financing and investing techniques over others?
3.Should local authorities or government bodies be obliged to assess in a more rigorous way the financial strength of care home operators and other providers off essential services, before placing valuable contracts with them?
4.After the forthcoming NHS reforms, will commissioning bodies awarding valuable contracts to health providers from the private sector be able to obtain assurances that the finances of these private healthcare companies are stronger than Southern Cross's."

ENDS

Of course none of these restrictions could really be imposed beca

PUT IT ON DUMBEDOWN RICHARD (# 4 AND 19)

More joy :o(

3. At 17:46 3rd Jun 2011, You wrote:
'the kind of care which should be available and who should pay for it '

First sentence I hear... '"They' just need to put more money into it, otherwise..."

/iplayer/episode/b011qk3j/Newsnight_03_06_2011/?t=2m04s

Considering the amounts of money sloshing around to no avail that I have seen in the progress of an 18 month complaint process, if that's the 'cuts' mindset being promoted in some quarters from the get-go, much is again explained, but not excused.

The system is broken. Those who created it and 'operate' it seem to be seen as those best suited to fix it. It will remain broken.

/iplayer/episode/b011qk3j/Newsnight_03_06_2011/?t=5m12s

'There's been no shortage of reports..' Indeed.

Ignore accountability and anything else is merely a Titanic exercise in deck-chair arranging.

The BUPA guy responds to a critique that 'He doesn't think it's true' and things move on. On this basis he, and the programme crew, would do well on Newswatch as well.

When I hear the premise around the Dilnot Commission is 'we must pay more' I get concerned, but at least in response the panel suddenly did concede money does not solve everything.

And as to handing over homes as a 'given' because 'people don't have a god-given right...', one might wonder if this issue might not have been broadened to include the totality of savings vs. family/state care balance. For instance, maybe one could be better advised to be an employee of generous organisations who fund insurances with such as BUPA to separate personal from company-backed assets:



Or, like many, well-paid senior employees of entities quite keen to see others pay for them and their members, see savings on home purchase and development devoted perhaps to cash expenditure on 'other stuff' throughout one's career that doesn't present as tasty a target as bricks and mortar.



I have to wonder where 拢100kpa goes these days with so little needed for a roof over the head, and how it gets means tested when the time comes.

Maybe it doesn't? And if so, might pols, the 大象传媒 and those on the panel get their mighty minds round that one day.

Some things often seem more probed for 'fairness' than others.

PADDY ASHDOWN'S TAKE ON MLADIC (Andrew Marr show)

"An arrogant, posturing man".

You might say that Lord Paddy, I couldn't possibly comment.

THE RIGHT TO REMAIN UNCONCEIVED IS ABSOLUTE (#22)

Any society that does not concede this truth, owes a deep debt to the living, and an even greater debt to those who struggle in life (inept, criminal, aberrant etc) and an immeasurable debt to THOSE WHO WISH TO DIE.

Storage unto death is an indefensible obscenity.