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Tuesday 7 December 2021

413. Famine, homelessness, covid. The solutions are under our noses…

Dogs before People - before I start this Tuesday - just a brief reminder (click the link) - now that this has blown up properly - of my post back in August because it  partly explains the mess we are in when priorities are set on whims and favours by this corrupt uncaring administration.

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Why are we literally hell-bent on ignoring the solutions?

Why do we simply refuse to do the things that work?

The links between covid, homelessness and starvation are clear as their solutions are obvious. We just love to ignore the obvious. Or, in the interests of greed, selfishness and self-interest we pretend there aren’t any straight forward fixes.

During the first wave of covid lockdown in the UK there was an ‘Everyone In’ scheme in place which got nearly 40k rough sleepers in off the streets. Up here in Edinburgh we went from every other doorway on Princes St packed with a body in a sleeping bag – to CLEAR.

The idea that homelessness is an intractable problem was blown out of the water. And yet we are moving back to pre-pandemic levels.

For years we’ve been told by the pharmaceutical companies that the answer to world hunger is genetically modified crops and that nonsense pervades despite the observations of such organisations as Greanpeace  The reality is that the problem is solvable another way –without the profit motive for big pharma – by fair distribution of the abundance of food we have, global fair pay and a reduction in consumption in the West which would massively benefit physical and mental health levels here too.

And we see the same with covid. We knew before covid that the only way to deal with these global diseases is globally. But voices like Gordon Brown’s were ignored in favour of the likes of our old pal and war criminal Tony Blair and the jingoist pig man Johnson. Grab everything for ourselves then back to Costa-del-barf. And – predictably – the virus is having a ball in parts of the world where vaccination rates are minimal – and new variants are ready to come back and bite us on our selfish Western arses.

We know the answers. That is the frustrating thing. We are unprepared, unwilling and as unlikely as ever to do the right thing. Greed and selfishness almost always get in the way. Easier to pretend it’s all too difficult to solve and we have, like Indiana Jones, to make a very costly epic out of searching for some may-or-may-not exist holy grail.

So

Why are we literally hell-bent on ignoring the solutions?

Why do we simply refuse to do the things that work?

The answer is as simple as the solutions we ignore. Greed gets in the way.

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And remember the spoof Teddy talks this week - not so much turkeys voting for Christmas as sheep voting for abattoirs.