I am no scientist but it stands to reason if the magnetic north is moving the earth is rotating differently than in the previous hundredths of years.
As a result as with any spherical shape that rotates, it is exposing a slightly different surface, either for longer or shorter to any light shining on it such as the Sun causing a difference in temperature to the exposed portion of the sphere.
What is causing the magnetic north to shift?
Whatever is causing it the weight distribution on the earth has to be contributing.
Human-made materials are now equal weight to all life on Earth.
The mass of everything people have built and made, from concrete pavements and glass-and-metal skyscrapers to plastic bottles, clothes, and computers, is now roughly equal to the mass of living things on Earth and could surpass that this year, according to research published today in Nature.
The Earth weight: 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000 Metric Tons.
Freshwater.
Every year we use a massive 4.3 trillion cubic meters of freshwater = 4,260,000,000,000 m3 / tons.
Concrete. After water the single most widely used material globally. It outweighs the combined mass of all living plants. China production of 2 billion tons alone is predicted to reach four times the 1990 level. 2 billion tonne quantities per year, by 2050, concrete use
Plastic. – 8.3 billion tons
The world produces a million plastic bottles a minute – many for water. That’s 500 billion in a year!
Asphalt. – 30% of the world is Land of which 2% is urban which is covered let’s say to the extent of 10%. Therefore 30%x2%x10% = 0.06% of the world covered in Asphalt.
Sand. – 15 billion tonnes.
Crude Oil. – Nearly 100 million barrels per day. The average barrel of domestic crude oil weighs 302.82 pounds. You do the maths this time.
The mass of earth’s life is about 1.1 trillion metric tons.
In 2016, a team of scientists estimated the weight of the “technosphere”—including not just wholly artificial buildings and products, but also the approximate weight of the land and seafloor that we’ve excavated, modified, or trawled to build cities, plant crops, raise livestock, and catch fish.
They came up with a figure of 30 trillion tons.
Now add, for example, ( The World Steel Association estimates that for every ton of steel we produce) almost two tons of CO2 are added to the atmosphere.
Then add on all the rest of Cardon produced and the amount the whole human race emits every year is 35 billion roughly.
It is no wonder the magnet north has shifted.
To finish I invite any environmental to tell me that I am wrong.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats.
All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps.
In the next few months, we will once again witness a gathering of verbal diarrhea in Scotland all promising to go green.
There is no doubting in the last few decades that we humans have achieved advances away beyond what our ancestors would have believed possible. The irony is that to survive we have to become something very different from what we are.
Many optimists believe that technology can transform society and solve climate change.
To a great extent, this is probably true no more so than in the field of medician.
Take the discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928 of Penicillin.
Before its discovery, we were dying thirty years early than we do today.
His discovery was down to an accidental piece of bacteria landing on one of his Petri dishes which took another ten years to develop into a drug to save lives.
Today with human intelligence and machine learning we can produce drugs in a matter of months.
The way forward to reducing CO2 emissions is not a by-pass lane it is by using the technologies that already exist.
It’s time to cut out the verbal and bull shit and make these technologies affordable to all.
Yes, the world today is in a dire state and a new kind of social and ecological environment needs to be created with green energy the price of which is toppling daily.
Comparing global problems involves lots of uncertainty and difficult judgment calls, but every problem is solvable if we devote resources to building a just world and not guns.
THE WORLD RUNS ON ELECTRICITY.
SO IF WE WANT A GREEN FUTURE NON-REPAYABLE GRANTS TO CONVERT FROM FOSSIL FUELS GENERATED ELECTRIC TO ENERGY BY NON-POLLUTING RENEWABLE MATERIALS – WIND – SUN- WATER- GEOTHERMAL – HYDROGEN.
SUCH A MOVE WOULD CREATE MILLIONS OF JOBS AND COULD BE FUNDED BY PLACING A WORLD AID COMMISSION OF 0.05% ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT HAVE PROFIT FOR-PROFIT SAKE AT THEIR HEART. ( See previous posts)
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We are now presented with two very different futures.
The last generation that can stop devastating climate change. We have the knowledge and the tools – we just need politicians to lead the way.
or
We fail to meet climate mitigation goals.
For certain, either outcome will not be easy or cheap and it is happing faster than we wish to acknowledge.
The problem is the two outcomes are profoundly interlocked with lots of uncertainty.
HOWEVER, UNLIKE THE CURRENT PANDEMIC CLIMATE CHANGE WON’T JUST DISAPPEAR IT WILL REQUIRE A NEW MEANING OF LIFE.
To recognize that we are entering a new world with opportunities and perspectives is an enormous challenge not because of climate change but because of the current inequalities existing on the Planet.
The choice we are now confronted with is one we will have to make over and over again as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just, and healthier future.
The question is who is going to pay for the transition.
New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future but also pose catastrophic risks.
THERE IS LITTLE POINT IN REDUCING GLOBAL TEMPERATURES IF BY THE TIME IT HAS STABILIZED HALF OF THE WORLDS POPULATION HAS BEEN DESTABILIZED OR DISPLACED.
A lack of global emphasis on foreign aid, conflict, and political factors have kept poverty as a driving factor of Inequality.
To adjust to the coming new kind of social and ecological environment, how do we frame either of the above outcomes constructively.
We will have to relearn the world to do so.
We have to become more aware of the future of our planet and our future and the legacy of the human species to start a serious battle to make up for the damages.
At the moment it is difficult to know the changes in the ecosystems that surround us not to mention the social uncertainty to come.
The fundamental economic problem is related to the issue of scarcity.
Society is mostly dominated by people wishing to consume more goods and services that are available.
One in nine people in the world go hungry each day and suffer from nutritional deficiencies as a result.
Currently, 1 in 9 people lack access to clean water across the world.
The problem is not that we aren’t producing enough food, but rather that people lack access to food. Many people do not have enough money to purchase food and cannot grow their own.
To try to work out which global problems are most pressing and make progress on foundational questions about how best to address them is impossible unless we address the fundamental problem.
To recognize that scarcity will drive almost everything.
To recognize a sense of shared humanity.
To recognize that approximately 600 million children are not mastering basic mathematics and literacy while at school.
To recognize that is not just climate change that treating the world but artificial intelligence and the way we are using it.
Using only the interaction of its embedded sensors, computer programming, and algorithms in the human environment and ecosystem — is becoming a reality that cannot be ignored anymore.
Because building autonomous weapons systems are one thing but using them in algorithmic warfare with other nations and against other humans is another.
They will in no uncertain terms alter the very fundamentals of security and the future of humanity and peace.
As global temperatures continue to rise, technology improves and the world economy grows, it gets easier to cause destruction on an ever-larger scale with the weaponizing of artificial intelligence both military-wise and as a social tool.
The Weaponization Of Artificial Intelligence
The development of autonomous weapons system (AWS) is progressing rapidly, and this increase in the weaponization of artificial intelligence seems to have become a highly destabilizing development. It brings complex security challenges for not only each nation’s decision-makers but also for the future of humanity.
There are always unforeseen consequences when new technology is introduced. Those unintended outcomes of artificial intelligence will likely challenge us all.
AI algorithms must be built to align with the overarching goals of humans.
As more and more data is collected about every single minute of every person’s day, our privacy gets compromised.
Look at what is happing in China with its social credit system, it could devolve into social oppression.
Unless you choose to live remotely and never plan to interact with the modern world, your life will be significantly impacted by artificial intelligence.
The transformative impact of artificial intelligence on our society will have far-reaching economic, legal, political, and regulatory implications that we need to be discussing and preparing for.
Sure, it can transform our lives for the better.
In fact, people have gotten used to depending on AI for almost everything and can’t imagine not having these technological advancements as part of their life. Because many processes and applications are getting automated, people are getting addicted to these kinds of inventions which can be an issue for future generations to come.
Societies will face further challenges in directing and investing in technologies that benefit humanity instead of destroying it or intruding on basic human rights of privacy and freedom of access to information.
In the future, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence will play an even more fundamental role in content creation that will affect our wallets, health, safety, and lives.
The mistake we are making is to think that this situation is the only future.
That it is impossible to regulate AI because of the rate of AI change entails.
This is not true as it is possible to Audit all AI technology and algorithms to ensure that comply with human values and to make their programs totally transparent.
Why is the above urgent?
Because combined with climate change we are faced with and a transactional wealth of a new currency of unknowable value called personal data inequality will ravage the planet we all live in and on.
These are not some science fiction movie scenarios the current Pandemic is revealing a much more tragic and fragile world that requires more than trust.
The United Nations (UN) currently lists 22 “Global Issues”.
These correspond with the most important issues of our time and are known as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Here is a few of them.
FOOD SECURITY.
HEALTH ISSUES.
EDUCATION.
GENDER EQUALITY.
AFRICA.
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES/ POLLUTION.
OCEAN CONSERVATION.
WATER SCARCITY.
GLOBAL ISSUES THAT REQUIRE POLICY SOLUTIONS.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Rather, it serves as an overview of some of the major issues all global citizens should be aware of.
Artificial intelligence is not on the list.
Because the biggest challenge facing the planet needs every solution possible including technology like artificial intelligence (AI).
But AI is not a silver bullet it can only unlock new insights, pinpointing those responsible for it.
The current environmental issues pose so many problems to industry and society that not enough action has been taken to stop turning Climate change into a product.
My goal in this blog is not to convince people climate change is real, or that AI is destroying society it’s to get people who do believe that climate change is real and that Algorithms for profit’s sake are plundering the world to do more to affect change.
What can be done by any of us against the might of Capitalism that will have any effect?
There is only one weapon available to us all and that is our buying power.
If we use our collective buying power you will then see not just governments but global corporations change their tune from profit to sustainability.
We decide whether we want to look at the world in one way or another, always making tradeoffs.
As Harvey Sacks observed.
” If only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed”
” But the best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a world that has whatever organization it already has”
All are under threat because all are happening at what scientists estimate to be about 1,000 times the normal pace and are yet to be quantified.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
People think they’re free, but in reality, they don’t even understand freedom.
To live a free life, you must first be free.
Rousseau notes that the real mystery of freedom is how we can be in chains and still regard ourselves as free (Rousseau: 181).
And Kant’s argument provides us with a formidable justification for assuming that freedom is the necessary and indispensable condition of human existence given that man has the capacity to act upon the commands of reason: that is the categorical imperative.
If the will is subject to extraneous circumstances or influences it ceases to express itself freely in our actions. In this scheme of things, freedom can only be preserved if the moral laws that individuals endorse and accept as their guidance are such that they can accept them voluntarily (Kant: 57-58).
Just how true in the world of Algorithms, Data collection, Social Media, Search Platforms, Track and Trace, Potential Covid Passports, Smartphones with around-the-clock electronic surveillance to name just a few, remains to be seeing.
In fact, there is no such thing as freedom.
Is there a statement more likely to provoke consternation from people than to submit that there is no such thing as freedom?
I think not.
The modern political theory holds that “freedom” is something available to all but in the technology world and post-pandemic world, there is no such thing as freedom in the absolute sense since everyone views freedom differently.
Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?
The dictionary definition of freedom is; The power or right to act, speak or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint and the power to determine action without restraint.
In other words, we have full control over the things that we choose to do.
This is simply not true.
A democratic constitution will not state that each of us is free, what it says is that we have the right to certain freedoms which the constitution is supposed to protect.
We are simply part of a system of rules that gives us certain rights referred to as freedoms.
So what have we got?
Free means that we freely make the choices we make and are thus are morally responsible for our choices. In addition, we may be held legally accountable for the choices we make.
Or does it mean I am stronger than you, so I will retain my freedoms at your expense by the use of force?
There is no such thing as “freedom” because it can’t be defined objectively.
Why?
Because too many people in the world live with the constraints of poverty, poor access to health care and education, and a structural lack of opportunity.
None of us were representation or were participants in the writing of the rules of the social contract of the Internet.
In the face of such a common reality, is it reasonable to speak of free will as a tool to change lives?
At the most, we might be able to argue that in such circumstances a person is constrained but not determined.
We are free to stop eating but we are not free to stop breathing.
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The truth is that our rights, beliefs, and actions are determined by our biology, neurology, life context, nature, experiences, and interpretation of our experiences.
In psychological terms, free will means that we understand the history of our determinedness; how we have come to be what we are.
However, the scope of your individual rights has one primary limit: it ends where the rights of another begin.
Apply that universally and you have the basis for all rights.
Instead of using the word “freedom” as an entity all in itself (which does not exist) should we be using rights?
Each culture defines rights differently based on the ethos of the various cultures.
“Rights” are simply arbitrary policies set up by individual societies to meet the needs of the citizens. Different people and different individuals differ on what they believe is a right.
Again, a subjective phrase depending on what is morally right.
It is my belief, and it is a belief shared by many, that these are rights that should be observed, and that the infringement upon these rights of any entity, whether it be government or individual, should be stopped.
So rights are freedoms with the caveat that it’s morally correct to collect Data without our express permission to do so in the first place. A Liberty which is taken for granted.
Take “Liberty” an abstract word that doesn’t have an absolute definition.
The word simply means whatever it is accepted to mean even if one’s man’s desired Liberty is perceived as infringing on another man’s Liberty.
Freedom, use to be the ability to legally do or think anything that does not infringe upon the rights of another human being whether or not the action or thought is popular or under a certain prevailing viewpoint.
Freedom does happen, in the brain but one’s perception of freedom changes when one can not see the freedom one owns. So freedom these days still exists though it may seem as though it is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Not any longer. To access platforms one has to agree with an untransparent Algorithm that runs that platform.
Is this morally wrong?
How do you define “morally wrong” when everyone has a different moral belief?
The problem is that data collection is now the holy grail and the fewer people in a country feel they have been severely limited in their freedom, the less free the country is as a whole.
“Freedom is nothing left to lose”
The current Pandemic has and is highlighting how freedoms that are taken for granted can be reversed.
As long as the masses do what the elite tells them to do, then they are free.
What then is freedom?
The power to live as one wishes. – Marcus Tullius Cicero.
The moment we let go is the moment we find freedom. – Rebekah Stephenson.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. – Martin Luther King.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom assumes responsibility and most people are afraid of that. – Sigmund Freud.
Freedom is the power to choose our own chains. – Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. – Tyler Durden.
Money doesn’t buy you freedom, but freedom cannot be achieved without money either. Money doesn’t work for you, you work for money – you’re a slave for money.
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The role of the internet and social media offered the possibility of retrieving a common space and a way for people to share and connect and to be free.
It was a chance to build an economy that wasn’t based purely on the extraction of resources and capital.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, digital technology is used to double down on industrialism and it has evolved in everything from the spread of terrorist propaganda to the rise of authoritarianism.
At some point, technology ceased to be a tool to help us get what we want and instead became the only thing we actually want.
Technology is everywhere, and we’re all more or less dependent upon it — so how do we escape the pitfalls?
We’re talking about algorithms here. They live with us, even if we don’t see them.
We stopped using technology and it started using us.
We’re all hostage to our technologies, or we’re simply at the mercy of this system.
We’re being steamrolled by our devices, and the result is a kind of emotional slavery turning crucial decisions about people’s lives over to machines to translate the data into action.
We now live in a consumer democracy that restricts human connection and stokes “whatever appetites guarantee the greatest profit.”
Algorithms are behind the digital services that we consult daily. They are modifying the opinion of their users based on their psychological profiles and they are increasingly being extended to all businesses.
Take a platform like Facebook, and Facebook is using data from your past to dump you into a statistical bucket. Once they know what bucket you’re in, they do everything to keep you in that bucket and to make you behave in ways that are more consistent with all the things about that bucket.
The lifeblood of data science is turning what left of our identity into “filtered freedom” “predictive algorithms freedom” “governance algorithm” “risk reports algorithms, Google search algorithms, all effectively destroying human autonomy.
With a growing dependence on automated systems that are taking humans and transparency out of the process?
Where are our digital rights?
How to confront the use of algorithms.
George Orwell once predicted that those who control the information hold the power.
This is more true today than it ever was!
How do you win against a computer that is built to stop you?
How do you stop something that predetermines your fate?
There must be total and full transparency with all algorithms subject to auditable accountability.
I can’t control other people, but I can control my choices.
One of the things we need to make really clear about algorithms — is that they are hand-tailored to a particular decision.
Kant notes that man may come to approve of various rules of social co-operation for a variety of reasons, some of them ethically more obscure than others.
Algorithms are not just doing our thinking for us they are fucking up the world.
AI algorithms are worthless without a dataset to work on.
Because of this, the usefulness of an AI algorithm is intrinsically tied to the availability of high-quality data. In this regard, AI algorithms are fundamentally different from other types of software, whose code is valuable on its own without any additional data.
This is why you see companies like IBM buying Weather Channel’s data operations not because it wanted to know if it’s going to rain, but because climate change is going to be the number-one factor driving global GDP the data will allowing it to do everything from predicting winter energy demand to forecasting crop yields.
Google, Facebook, and others hold similar advantages in their respective areas, possessing vast quantities of consumer and social-media data that can be used to train highly valuable AI tasks, from sentiment analysis for marketing to object-recognition for photos to natural language processing for user interfaces.
For AI tech companies with large treasure troves of data, the sky is the limit, and rest assured it is not to stimulate broad societal benefits but to cash in on your freedoms.
Freedom is to remember your humanity what you do with what’s been done to you.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Once again the hands of the world to do anything are tied as we watch the fruits of historical events unfold in yet another tragic outbreak of killing in the lands of fundamentalism.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.
In 1921 Northern Ireland was created when Ireland was partitioned by the Government of Ireland Act 1920. The ratification of the treaty led to a renewed period of civil war and years of hostility and violence between unionists and nationalists known as The Troubles.
Both are now only solvable by Unification.
Like Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, Israelis Jews, and Palestinians can only be united under a single, binational plural nonsectarian society state.
If this were to happen both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, Catholics, and Unionists would enjoy the same legal and civil rights and live under governments in which all religions and cultures are represented and protected.
Why is this the only route?
Like Northern Ireland Israel has no written constitution, the Basic Laws provide legal statements outlining the rights of the individual.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this after Israel introduced the Basic Laws.
“This is a defining moment in the history of Zionism and in the history of the State of Israel. One hundred twenty-two years ago after [Theodor], Herzl shared his vision, we have established into law the fundamental tenant [sic] of our existence. “Israel” is the nation-state of the Jewish people. A nation-state that respects the individual rights of all its citizens; and in the Middle East, only Israel respects these rights. This is our state, the state of the Jews. In recent years, some have attempted to cast doubt on this, and so to undercut the foundations of our existence and our rights. Today we etched in the stone of law: This is our state, this is our language, this is our anthem, and this is our flag.”
The law enshrines the Zionist idea upon which the nation was founded, namely that Israel is a country established to fulfill the Jewish people’s “right to national self-determination.”
Therefore when one looks at the recent history of Israel it mirrors South Africa’s years of Apartheid Law.
However, there is something tragically ironic about the Palestinians’ campaign to press for a UN resolution to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Because that was what Israel already offered in 2000 and again in 2008 to no avail but because the history of the twentieth century is a history of the Palestinians’ resistance to establishing a Palestinian state—if it had to exist side by side with a Jewish state. By that standard, historic Palestine is simply a misnomer, especially if what is meant is an area with a particular set of borders enduring through time.
Why?
Because the troubles of the Holy Land are surrounded by too many walls.
Because we all know that borders and walls are porous and will become more so in the future with Climate change.
Because when I see images of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, the Berlin Wall, the fences in Derry, the Jerusalem turnstiles, and the wall I know I don’t think of strength. I don’t think of freedom. I don’t think liberty. I don’t think compassion. I don’t think empathy. No, when I see that fence, I think of oppressive regimes.
Does a country that prides itself on freedom need a fortified border fence?
For all who confront a wall, it remains a daily, brutal reminder of aggression and loss.
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Historic Palestine and Northern Ireland as we know it today are derived from a map drawn up by the British at the end of World War I—in particular Israel by British Christians whose understanding of the geography of Palestine was largely based on the Bible, which, as we all know, is derived from the Jews.
Think about it:
A border drawn by British Christians based on their reading of the Jewish Bible is now interpreted by Muslim fundamentalists as God-given and unchangeable!
The two-state solution has a long history dating back at least to 1937 when the British proposed to partition the land between Arabs and Jews while leaving Jerusalem under international control.
Achieving a two-state solution is unrealistic now and will remain so.
There will be no two-state solution.
Because.
There are 1.9 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (as of December 2019), comprising 21% of Israel’s population.
There are more than 60 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Since 1948 when the state was established, Israel has used laws such as the British Mandate-era Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance law and the Absentee Property Law to confiscate millions of acres of Palestinian land for the use of Jewish Israelis.
Since 2002, Israel has been constructing a wall that stretches for more than 700 kilometers, annexing Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank.
In September 2010, the late spiritual leader of the Shas party, which was part of Netanyahu’s coalition government, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, declared that Palestinians and other non-Jews were created to “serve” Jews.
In 2014, the Knesset passed a law distinguishing between Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, declaring that Christian Palestinians in Israel are not in fact Arab, part of an effort to divide Israel’s minority Palestinian population. This even though almost all Christian Palestinians are Arabs, and consider themselves to be such, and has long formed an integral part of Palestinian society.
In May 2012, Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, Spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party, which was part of Netanyahu’s coalition government, told supporters the world was created for Jews and that Palestinians and other non-Jews are “murders” and “thieves”
In 2018, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) passed the “Jewish nation-state” law as one of the country’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, which was widely condemned as racist and entrenching apartheid in Israel.
Israel’s Basic Laws also bar political candidates and parties from advocating for a secular democracy in which all citizens are fully equal, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, by calling for an end to Israel’s system of Jewish privilege.
In 2018, legislation calling for Israel to become a state based on full equality for all citizens introduced by Palestinian citizens of Israel was banned by a committee and prevented from even being debated by the Knesset
Ahead of the April 2019 election, Netanyahu wrote on Instagram: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People – and them alone.”
After the 2020 election, the United Arab List was the third-largest bloc in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature.
In both 2019 and 2021, Netanyahu also made electoral alliances with virulently racist, extreme right-wing political parties that openly call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel/Palestine.
As part of an effort to maintain the Jewish majority created by the expulsions of 1948, Israel has passed a series of laws to limit the growth of the remaining Palestinian population and their towns and villages, and marginalize them politically.
There can be no peace or unification while dealing with terrorists like Hamas or the Provisional IRA or UDF. Like the IRA Hamas desperately needs a ladder that enables it to adopt a more pragmatic approach that will allow it to compromise its control in Gaza without formally compromising its ideology.
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Where are we now?
Is peace even a possibility for one of the world’s longest-running conflicts or has the time already run out?
For nearly three decades, the so-called two-state solution has dominated discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the idea of two states for two peoples in the territory both occupy was always an illusion, and in recent years, reality has set in.
The two-state solution is dead.
Israeli settlement growth has already made two states unfeasible.
Relinquishing land claims or building settlements in pursuit of peace to any people is especially war-making.
A “two-state solution,” would leave the Palestinians with only limited administrative sovereignty over a noncontiguous territory completely surrounded by Israel. Permitting an annexation that would create a reality of apartheid.
The time has come for all interested parties to instead consider the only alternative with any chance of delivering lasting peace: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state.
It is time to cast aside the concept of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in favor of an Israeli-Arab agreement as the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Israel /Palestinians case reaching an agreement on things like borders, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees is too complicated for any other solution.
In the Northern Ireland case, the complicated history of discriminatory and repressive English regime teaches us that Ireland had to cope with a revolution and civil war when it was undergoing a fundamental transformation that is still not completed without unification.
With the collapse of the Catholic church power in Southern Ireland, the current border had been only a political border up to England turned it back on the EU.
As a result, Northern Ireland while staying part of Britain reaching an agreement on a border that recognizes that Ireland is in the EU is a fact of life.
In the Israelites case, if one was to draw the border along the ‘67 lines, hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live in West Bank settlements wind up on the Palestinian side. Would those people become citizens of Palestine or (probably forcibly) be made to move back to Israel proper?
Yes, in both cases a one-state solution still comes with logistical problems of its own, not the least of which is who would keep the peace between two peoples who have been at war for more than a half-century.
There is no incentive or stick in the universe that can make Israelis or the Irish agree to double their population and with a culturally foreign, hostile population to boot unless there is recognition that we are basically all the same.
Any other solution requires two separate, independent states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, each with its own government and full autonomy over its domestic and international affairs which is totally unrealistic.
Where would the borders be between these states?
What would happen to Jerusalem, a city important to both peoples?
It is time for a progressive one-state solution.
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Israel now faces a clear choice:
Hopelessness and endless conflict can be replaced by a peaceful future, but only if we act differently. We must put aside the concept of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in favor of an Israeli-Arab agreement as the only realistic means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Either it finds ways of integrating its Arab citizens into national life and reversing a growing trend of communal alienation and anger. Or its own Arab citizens could become a powerful part of a more unified Palestinian national movement confronting Israeli rule.
The devil is in the details.
The current outbreak of violence is sowing the seeds for a conflict that is worse than the one we already have. We are far from the verge, or anywhere close, to achieving a conflict-ending agreement.
The issue now is not even one or two states it’s three states, what you have right now is a three-stage approach.
You have Israel with its residual authority in Gaza and the West Bank, you have the Palestinian Authority which is dysfunctional although admirable entity which has done quite a bit in terms of state-building, and then you have Hamas which is consolidating its power and control in Gaza and the longer that separation continues the longer that consolidation and the hardening of those political, economic and physiological lines will be.
Recognition of Israel as the nation of the Jewish people, the so-called fifth element, which has now become a fundamental part of the negotiating process at least on the Israeli and, I suspect, the American side to have put the notion of negotiating two states right now between this Israeli government and this Palestinian Authority virtually unthinkable.
We have to understand something, violence and disruption and dislocation have been part of the peace process since its inception. In fact, the farther the peace process goes the more upsets and violence there is.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are 20 percent of the population of Israel they have rights that are guaranteed by law but the Israelis discriminate against them socially and economically.
Then we have in one of the most densely populated places in the world 6 million Palestinians ruled by Israel, with no citizenship.
We all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is extremely complex and filled with biases and denials, not to mention cherry-picking only certain aspects of history at the expense of others.
Arab dictators of nearby countries don’t care about Palestinians and find it more convenient to just keep the conflict frozen. A huge obstacle to solving the problem is the official policy of Arab states, which all agreed to not grant citizenship or any other regular legal status to people born in them who are descendants of “Palestinians.”
We also know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue won’t go away. Neither will it be solved by oversimplification or dismissing the many arguments-some which are justified from all sides.
Take, for instance, I have never understood by what logic the Palestinians in the West Bank would want to create a one-state, would actually make a case for one-state, or on what legal and political basis would they lay their claim to citizenship in one state.
Last but not least where are the voices on the opposite sides of the younger generation.
Surely those that belong to multiple nations and are not still diasporic with today’s technology have myriad cross-border connections – that impact identity (and politics?)
Yes, they are dealing with an uncertain world, and yet if you consider the past now is the moment to be more optimistic about the future.
Any historian and geographer who has spent time on the ground and around the world know that borders and boundaries are porous at best times.
Jerusalem will have to be the capital of both states, there will have to be security arrangements that meet Israeli security needs and the Palestinian desire for sovereignty and there has to be some resolution of the refugee issue which deals with a variety of aspects, compensation, rehabilitation, absorption, some historic recognition by the Israelis of the refugee problem, some limited return of refugees to Israel proper perhaps, unlimited return to a Palestinian state, but these are general principles, and once you state those there is still a lot of work to be done.
As long as the conflict is ongoing, the Palestinian economy can’t rebuild, so foreign money spent will achieve little more than temporary humanitarian relief till one side fully capitulates to the other due to slaughter.
The only way true citizenship of a country can be achieved after years of wars is the creation of a new state from the rubble.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
(Six-minute read) Before life becomes electrical pulses with the arrival of quantum computers that will analyze big data in real-time the world needs to ensure that all data collection and its uses are totally transparent.
Since we constantly leave data in our wake, even casual technology users have no problem finding two points through which to draw a line.
We all know Big Data is well on its way to transforming the art of marketing into science and currently, the world that we live in becoming more and more ruled by data.
One of the more recent frightening things is seeing Amazon algorithms that could figure out if a woman were pregnant or if a man were gay.
If this sort of information is collected and used in future algorithms, the idea that programs, apps, or services could infer psychological data based on tests that have no psychological rigor is not just dangerous but against what is left of human rights.
That’s the sort of stuff where I feel like we need to be very conscious and cautious. The data we’re collecting and what data we’re sharing are vital because it is really on the proliferation of devices and social media in ways that go far beyond what appears to be on its face. To rule all aspects of life.
Online data is more than just a collection of ones and zeros, every piece of data a company records can be cross-referenced against other databases.
This is not hypothetical or scientist fiction use of data but rather a cultural change in the way we work, play, and communicate with each other.
The data revolution has only just started and the changes are substantial.
Take the Chinese Government’s recent introduction of a social credit system that relies on thousands of data inputs, including frivolous spending, or even playing too many video games.
Or The South Korean app that tracked the locations of all new visitors to the country, while registration was necessary for facilities such as gyms, restaurants, and malls, and people who broke quarantine were asked to wear a location-tracking bracelet.
You might think that these examples are in countries that do not operate as open democratic countries but ask yourself where are all the track and trace data due to covid going to end up.
Where are we today when it comes to data collection?
What are the biggest threats to our personal rights and freedoms in the age of technology?
There’s little doubt that data holds huge value in the fight against COVID-19 and the return to some resemblance of normality for citizens. That doesn’t, however, give collectors of public data the permission to use it as they please.
Contact tracing solutions are one of the primary ways in which public data has been collected over the course of the pandemic.
However COVID-19-related data should commit to only using the data for purposes that contribute to fighting the pandemic. This citizen data should be deleted as soon as it loses its relevance. This is not happing. Rather its collection is intensifying with the introduction of the Covid passport.
Contact-tracing apps have been portrayed as anonymized, deletable, and non-violating of existing privacy laws. However, the jury is still out on that.
For example, data on who contracted the virus in certain neighborhoods and which locations acted as epicenters might contribute to prejudices forming about those areas.
There’s no question that the public data accessible through contact tracing is of extreme value to government bodies that seek to increase surveillance on their citizens.
In addition to contact tracing apps, significant amounts of medical data are also being gathered, stored, and shared by hospitals and system providers with mandatory testing and temperature monitoring to ensure workplace safety.
All of these data collection practice calls into question how this data is being stored and used.When it comes to employer access to data, there are already issues forming here.
If employers have access to employees’ or potential employees’ health data, they could use it against them and allow citizens’ health history to impact their employment opportunities.
We are well on the way to what I call – The unregulated invasivity spectrum.
As this totally unregulated technology continues to evolve our personal and professional lives will be affected significantly.
There are some serious debates about the acceptable use of data.
For example, when is it OK to collect data or metadata (which traces the patterns of the information gathered) about the citizens of a country?
Organizations managing citizen data must be made under the law to open their processes for third-party review to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
What is acceptable?
With the Internet of Things growing at a staggering rate and artificial intelligence experiencing a renaissance, it’s little wonder that Big Data is taking center stage.
When combined with artificial intelligence, Big Data has proven itself a powerful tool in the fight against cybercrime, and collaboration and data-sharing have the potential to make networks far more difficult to compromise.
How do you challenge an algorithm and what’s the process for fixing the error?
The Information Age is still not in full effect, however, our world is increasingly reliant on computer technology which is evolving along the way.
Instead of having to rely on surveys and manually tracking how people move throughout an area, cities can instead rely on sensor-derived data, providing far greater resolution and a pool of data to draw from orders of magnitude larger than ever before available.
Government officials can better develop programs to encourage more efficient consumption through taxes and financial incentives, and Big Data is invaluable for informing these programs.
By relying on machine learning and other artificial intelligence tools, powerful computer systems using sophisticated algorithms can seek out signals that would be lost in the noise using more traditional statistical tools.
The ever-increasing flow of new data has made it nearly impossible for doctors and even large medical organizations to make sense of what the best and latest information is saying.
Computer-based help systems are coming, and Big Data has the potential to make them even better than human-run systems only if they are totally transparent if not our vote is worthless, and democracy as we know it is going to be dead in the water before we become Green. This is frightening.
We must define acceptable use of data and find ways to safeguard our personal information. In doing so, we must be careful that we don’t cut off the innovation and the opportunity for data to improve lives for those who need it most.
Regardless of how advanced technology gets, the need for human insights cannot be removed from the equation.
The online landscape is turning from a playground into a battlefield as to how to handle the complexity of Information with Technology becoming the be-all and end-all.
To put it simply at the end of the whole process humans are needed to make choices about data point combinations.
What we need to understand is what Alfred Adler said,
” What man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. Man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasure of incorporation and expansion, can be feed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality.”
The fact is that this is what society is and always has been, a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs, and rules for behavior.
We are just becoming conscious of what we are doing to the planet that we live on.
There is no douth with Climate change, future pandemics, mass migration, and energy that we are going to need big data to put things right as the population of the planet increases the demands that we place on it.
But if we peel away the massive disguise that blocks repression over human techniques for earning glory we arrive at the most pressing question of all the main problems of human life. Self-esteem.
If Big Data strips away self-esteem by removing decision-making and motivation we will become worthless products of consumption.
Remember the big tech mantra ” If the product is free then you are the product “
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
I am sure that after the recent local election in England combined with the pandemic and the aftermath of Brexit that the Labour Party is getting advice from all quarters.
The Labour party is in need of new visions for the country so here are a few things it c could and should do to regain power.
What matters is what they stand for. Rebranding is futile.
Progressive politics rarely ever win at the polls. These days with social media you have to be seen to be doing something by giving something.
Realizing that making the rich poorer will not make the poor richer.
Raising taxes is no longer the answer to everything.
Britain is a nation of immigrants proven by the Covid pandemic.
The idea that public services and job creation is out of date.
It must put forward attractive policies that the whole nation can see will make the whole nation better off.
The living wage doesn’t fool anyone in a food bank queue.
To be the party of the working class founded almost 120 years ago will require a few big symbolic policy changes.
Free Education for all including University.
In the economy of the future where knowledge is the most valuable commodity, a person or a country will have to offer more than just money.
The Pandemic has left us with our whole system of living that requires radical structural change away from profit to beneficial sustainability.
This change requires giving the means to Humans to live their lives with dignity while protecting what is left of our planet.
There are other, more ethical ways to provide social services.
At the moment we have sales taxes, gasoline taxes, poll taxes, food taxes (yes, they tax what you need to survive), sin taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gambling), “fat taxes” (taxes on unhealthy foods), housing taxes, Social Security taxes, payroll taxes, and income taxes…taxes galore! All harm the poor more than they do the rich. And of course, we have the income tax, which is a progressive tax, a tax that affects the rich more than the poor.
What if we had a cutoff point where at a certain income you pay no taxes, and those below that income get money back from the government. A Universal Income.
This alone would be revolutionary for the poor and working-class! Coupled with the removal of all regressive taxes, it would be even better.
Instead of using hundreds of billions to fund programs like Social Security and free medical care, food banks, those who would require those programs would probably just be able to afford most of what they need anyway!
The demands for all goods would skyrocket as people now have free money to put into the market.
Continue support of a Federal Solution to Scottish Independence.
If we want humans to protect, the ecosystem we have to make it more profitable to protect than destroy. Pay them to protect it.
Lastly, transparency is what makes a party powerful.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?
We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions.
Is it to be human is to be one of us?
This begs the question of the class of creatures to which “us” refers.
In deciding that all and only Homo sapiens are humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn, rather than discovering where such a boundary lays.
We’re probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds.
In fact, one could know everything there is to know biologically about a human, but still not know what is unique to humanity now, what will be unique about humanity in the future, and what is important about humanity.
Why?
Because the steady growth of computing power and sheer reality-describing data will eventually give scientists an unprecedented understanding of biological systems, including the human body, and the ability to hack it in ways that may ultimately defy death.
All of this will lead to a point at which our tools are so proficient at making themselves that more-human-intelligences emerge, and this change is now so accelerated that we can barely make sense of it.
Cells might be persuaded to develop new collective goals and assume shapes totally unlike those that normally develop from an embryo.
A new type of creature—one “defined by what it does rather than to what it belongs to developmentally and evolutionarily.
————- What will the future mean for us, for our relationships with other people, for our hopes and strivings?
When we look at how ordinary people have used the term “human” and its equivalents across cultures and throughout the span of history, we discover that often (maybe even typically) members of other species are explicitly excluded from the category of the human.
For example, Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
Generally, in wars, soldiers give nicknames to the enemy to dehumanize them.
And another example is provided by the seemingly interminable debate about the moral permissibility of abortion, which almost always turns on the question of whether the embryo is a human being.
But if we think of the human as an indexical expression – a term that gets its content from the context in which it is uttered – a very different picture emerges.
When we describe others as human, we are saying that they are members of our own kind or, more precisely, members of our own natural kind. ie natural kinds are to contrast them with artificial kinds.
If ‘human’ means ‘my own natural kind,’ then referring to a being as human boils down to the assertion that the other is a member of the natural kind that the speaker believes herself to be.
However, when it comes down to it, human beings have nothing special but our highly evolved brains that do something that other species can’t:
We remember, but so do elephants.
So our inquisitive, reflective, pondering minds are forced to wrestle with some big questions in one way or another.
We have cultures and ways of transmitting information, and I guess we may come to realize that it is just us in the future.
Rest assured humans will need humans to be human and the planet we presently call Earth will remain the only place that this is achievable.
You may be certain that AI will want to use satellites to look inside other cultures and will eventually create a human geography information system that uses satellite imagery as the baseline and overlays the satellite maps with datasets and other detailed information covering history, culture, education, economy, religion, weather, and political landscapes.
————-
Who gave EARTH its name? No one knows.
Earth is the only one in our solar system that does not come from Greco-Roman mythology. All of the other planets were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
Also, there is no particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name.
Self-awareness is in its infancy with Artificial intelligence, and the identity and authenticity of an individual in this melted world ahead will be daunting as we don’t yet understand who we are.
Undoubtedly, in the case of humans, we are more creative than any other animals currently alive or pre-human descendants with the same genes, but the problem with evaluating creativity in extinct species is that you can’t talk to them.
———–
We don’t know everything about our own species—but we keep learning more as we are rendering a new world with new opportunities and perspectives that will either go in two directions.
Either we harness technology to human values or technology is turning us into products for exploration.
Presently to live a human life which in essence is determined by an accident of birth is becoming more and more expensive so that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born.
Moreover, we can scarcely go a day without using inventions and innovations that were once the stuff of science fiction. Cell phones, flat-screen TVs, airbags and antilock brakes, CT scans, digital video players, portable computers, and, of course, the World Wide Web were completely unavailable a few decades ago.
But of course, in a future world where accidents of birth and the fortunes of good genes are even more critical determinants of success than they are now, inequalities that persist will be especially galling.
Because social and positional inequalities already distort existing measures of income and wealth, many seemingly clean-cut economic debates are more intractable than one would imagine. And of course, social anxieties over the unavoidable differences will become even more troubling, the less we can constructively address these issues.
Even if biology could somehow be conquered to the point that genetic good fortune could be parceled out equally to all, the minor differences that remained would loom ever larger.
Whether you view such an eventuality as desirable or irrelevant, more of our intellectual effort should be devoted to this future scenario. Not simply because we are heading there, but in many ways, because parts of that world are already here.
Even today, we routinely exaggerate the extent of material inequality and make foolish comparisons between different time periods and between countries at different levels of development. This does not mean that inequality has disappeared, or that it is unimportant
And as COVID-19 pulls the rugout from under economic growth, money will have so much power that it with AI will control society.
As the need for money grows, so does the greed of it.
Ever since money was introduced as a value to exchange goods, every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences and none will be bigger than climate change.
In the economy of the future where knowledge is the most valuable commodity, a person or a country will have to offer more than just money.
Money should never be the master of anyone it is a tool to be used to accomplish the things you want in life.
Even if money does not buy happiness, raising as many people as possible to a middling level of prosperity (an important first step to endure day-to-day economic agony of inequality we are still creating a recipe, not just for disaster but exiting this world.
People are waking up to a story that was already there.
This Recipe for the human stew we are in.
Viruses have been on the planet for millions of years, much longer than Homo sapiens. After a year COVID has infected more than 115 million people and caused over 2.5 million deaths, with over half a million in the US alone.
The world population of 8 billion is doubling every 61 years with 55 percent of us living in urban areas or cities, which is set to rise to 68 percent over the coming decades. Currently, Cities house more than half of the world’s population and are expected to see another 2.5 billion new residents by 2050.
Cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions.China’s co2 emission exceeded those of all developing countries. 14 gigatons, 25% of global emissions.
Producing enough food to feed the world includes raising large numbers of animals in close quarters, and they represent breeding grounds for viruses and infectious agents that can jump to humans. The spillover from animals to humans is closely linked to environmental change such as Climate change.
60% of all Mammals are livestock. Unsustainable.
80 % of all birds are Poultry. Unsustainable.
83% of wild animals are exterminated along with 50% of plants.
Because of selective breeding, future generations of selectively bred plants and animals will all share very similar genes which will reduce variation perfect for future Pandemics.
Mix all of this with Profit for Profit sake and we got a recipe for the future that will rise quicker than you can say I am all right Jack.
And I’m not saying we should go back and live like nomads. But when you put it all together — population pressure, urbanization, agricultural practices, deforestation, high mobility . . . and then climate change is going to make all these things worse.
Whatever the next event will be — and we know there’ll be another event — it’s already out there. A wake-up call is an understatement.
The Dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth – is unsustainable and we must have pandemic memory, even if we want to forget the past year.
What if anything can be done to reverse centuries of mismanagement?
The future of automation is only possible with the Internet of Things (IoT), the hub of collected data where devices interconnect. To get the most from automation, it’s essential to look beyond convenience toward efficiency.
416.2 terawatt-hours of electricity are used by data centers equaling 1% of world energy.
There is now a great urgency for the world to convert to green energy but solar panels and wind farm electrical cars are not the solutions unless they all operate on Hydrofusion. Yet commercial electricity generation from fusion still remains a goal rather than a reality and it’s a solid bet that it will not arrive on the grid before the 2030s and it will be expensive.
We are left with our whole system of living that requires radical structural change away from profit to beneficial sustainability.
This change requires giving the means to Humans to live their lives with dignity while protecting what is left of our planet.
There are other, more ethical ways to provide social services.
At the moment we have sales taxes, gasoline taxes, poll taxes, food taxes (yes, they tax what you need to survive), sin taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gambling), “fat taxes” (taxes on unhealthy foods), housing taxes, Social Security taxes, payroll taxes, and income taxes…taxes galore! All harm the poor more than they do the rich. And of course, we have the income tax, which is a progressive tax, a tax that affects the rich more than the poor.
What if we had a cutoff point where at a certain income you pay no taxes, and those below that income get money back from the government. A Universal income.
This alone would be revolutionary for the poor and working-class! Coupled with the removal of all regressive taxes, it would be even better.
Instead of using hundreds of billions to fund programs like Social Security and free medical care, food banks, those who would require those programs would probably just be able to afford most of what they need anyway!
The demands for all goods would skyrocket as people now have free money to put into the market.
On top of this, all education including University should be made free.
If we want humans to protect, the ecosystem we have to make it more profitable to protect than destroy. Pay them to protect it.
To do this see previous posts – A 00.05% World Aid commission.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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