(Six-minute read)

Here in this part of the world, we have just celebrated Easter.

If we remove its religious consequences in the end the Roman authorities and the Jewish council wanted Jesus dead.

He was a political and social trouble-maker.

He was killed – like so many people before and after him – because of the kind of life he lived, because of what he said and what he did. To Jesus, the whole institution fundamentally misrepresented God. The system was wrong.

Since our arrival on earth, we have excelled in one thing killing each other and all most everything around us.

On May 8, 2021, we will be marking 76 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe.

 Understanding world history would be impossible without understanding the conflicts that have shaped it.

Although there are many inventions and technological developments that were created by militaries throughout history, we can fairly say that most people would prefer to avoid military service. 

Worldwide in 2020, there are 30,277,850 million people serving in the armed forces, not including paramilitary units, according to Wikipedia.

The problem today is that our traditional definition of “war” is outdated, and so is our imagination of what war means.

Wars and conflicts may decide political boundaries, move populations, and generally shape just about everything but future wars will be driven by a multiplicity of different drivers such as climate change, artificial intelligence, lack of freshwater,  ( Already a factor in many of the below-listed wars) mass migration all coming together to create a major open conflict.

As a result war as the term’s very definition will not only become subject to debate, both politically and philosophically but difficult to catalog.

The world is a battlefield and we are at war for all the wrong reasons. 

The easy answer might just be too many and this is a 21st reality.

According to the International Crisis Group at the end of January 2021, there were at least 70 worldwide outbreaks of crisis/wars.

The Syrian Civil War. (15,898 deaths.) Afghanistan war. (143,958 deaths) The Iraq war. ( 25,223 deaths) The Yemeni War. ( 3,473 deaths) The Somali War. ( 26,418 deaths) The South Sudan war. (50,859 deaths) The Darfur war. The Ethiopian war.

With the arrival of Covid-19, these wars have all but disappeared from our TV screens.

FOR EXAMPLE THE CURRENT Genocide Emergency TAKING PLACE IN MYANMAR.

Today’s with Social Media local difficulties have a habit of becoming to morrow’s international crises/wars.

The Middle East makes it the most war-torn region in the world.

In the last 3,400 years, people have been in peace for only 268 years, and the total number of casualties from wars since the dawn of history is estimated between 150 million and 1 billion. Worldwide in 2020, there are 30,277,850 million people serving in the armed forces, not including paramilitary units, according to Wikipedia.

With almost half of the world war-torn.

What Then Must We Do?

The intent of the United Nations’ is not questioned, but in principle, it has been unable to achieve peace and in fact, things are only worsening.

The war in Afghanistan has been ongoing for 17 years. The Syrian war has been active since 2011. Since 2015 Saudi Arabia and its allies have attacked Yemen. God only knows how long the Palestinians in Gaza will have to endure to achieve peace.  

The 15-member Council of the Un has been unable to end these conflicts.

Why? 

Because the UN can never take an initiative without the approval of 5 countries including Russia, the USA, England, France, and China. An interesting fact is that these countries confront each other in the Syrian war.

As of 31 August 2020, the United nations has13 peacekeeping operations involving around 125 thousand personal, but even though it has over 125 nations contributing it remains fairly unrepresentative and ineffective due to the power of veto. 

Despite its imperfections, it would be unfair to suggest that the UN is irreformable.

Its time that the veto was removed and that all states should have the same influence. There should be no veto power in cases of mass atrocities.

The UN is now outdated and obsolete because it lacks openness, and therefore a vital component of a liberal democratic body. There should be at least one representative from each continent

 The illusion that countries can intervene in conflicts or that a few UN blue helmets are enough to sustain peace is shattered by Syria, Yemen, Iraq, the present global marketplace of death. 

With drones, we have isolated war’s physical and emotional costs. War crimes and human rights abuse are prevalent everywhere.

Do we need a UN which fails to address all of these?

We must create a moral movement against mass murder, even when the mass murder is accompanied by flags or music or assertions of authority and promotion of irrational fear.  We must make war abolition the sort of cause that slavery abolition was. We must oppose wars for rational, fact-based reasons, as opposed to fictions and misperceptions.

War-profiteering could be banned or rendered impractical.

Spreading subservience under the banner of “democracy” won’t save us while countries sell arms.  Imposing peace through armed “peace-keepers” prepared to kill won’t work. Disarming only so much, while continuing to suppose that a “good war” might be needed, won’t get us far when foreign Aid is a political football. 

How the world would look like after the Covid 19 outbreak subsides.

Therefore, if and when this present crisis abates, humanity will have to reckon with differing and extreme positions shaped by both the Utopian fantasies as well as baser emotions.

In other words, it is up to us to choose the path that is amenable to future generations instead of giving in to the hate and the vitriol that is passing around.

Having said that, there are some things that would remain the same even in the New Normal – Killing.  

We must use the present crisis to transition and transformation from killing to protection of everything that gives life. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.  

 

 

( Fifteen-minute read) 

In these days of fake news, machine learning, online capitalism, AI data mining, popularism politics, algorithms, Growing economic and social inequalities IT CAN NOT BE OVER STATED that the right to protest must be protected.

WHY?

Because we are moving to clientelism in which powerful interests — either businesses, trades unions, civil servants, key professions, or religious groupings — are bought-off.

Because politicians seem to be able to lie with impunity with us the great unwashed having little redress when they do.

Because freedom to protest occupies the space that should be reserved for the sovereignty of ordinary citizens.

Because the post-pandemic world will be different. 

Because corporations and bureaucracies can push elected politicians around too easily.

Because bankers or civil servants, for example, seem to be allowed to dictate what regulations they will have applied to them.

Because global trade-treaties signed by existing governments bind nation-states into rules and structures that make the voters of the future powerless.

Because these trade decisions are often made in a too short-termist way. Partly because of the way electoral cycles promote short-termism and now because of the pandemic and the developing economic depression to generate revenue freedoms are second class values. 

That’s some of what we are up against this year.

If we lose the fight, our freedom to demand that our leaders receive consent will vanish as quickly as our free-market economy.  

I have no expectation of, or desire for, democratic perfection but I hope that readers accept that the beliefs or the desires of citizens will have a strong influence on democratic outcomes and as there are circumstances where a perfectly good democratic decision will result in an outcome we don’t like.

Freedom flows from the people.

It is not something bestowed on us by the government and we must understand that equal justice under the law is at stake. Our voting rights are at stake. Workers’ rights are at stake. Consumer rights are at stake, and holding corporations accountable is at stake. And again there is so much more.

It’s true that no one can change how we think or what we believe, but we can be forced to adopt values and ideologies we don’t agree with by legislation or a simple court decision.

When the threat of peaceful protest becomes a political tool our right to peaceful assembly is in jeopardy.

Remember, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can’t be found in silence. 

 

                                             ——————-

There is nothing like an economic shutdown to show that freedom rests in the hands of the government and not the people.

In a year that has seen spectacular curbs on our liberties, freedom to protest is more important than ever because when the government gives something away it is very difficult to take it back.

Under the cloak of the pandemic, we are now not only looking at the introduction of Covid-19 passports but restrictions to peaceful protest.

It’s a lot easier to serve the needs of small groups of people and use them to push legislation that opens the door to larger social change than it is to serve the needs of all the people.

So the government takes and doles out as it sees fit so it can promote itself and preserve the freedoms of the politicians who control it.

You probably haven’t given a lot of thought to the consequences for our fundamental freedoms.

Business shutdowns and other coronavirus pandemic-era restrictions raise an ugly question we can’t ask right now, but is democracy in retreat?

There should be no illusions about what the deterioration of established democracies could mean for the cause of freedom globally.

The future of democracy depends on our ability to show that it is more than a set of bare-minimum defenses against the worst abuses of tyrants—it is a guarantee of the freedom to choose and live out one’s own destiny. 

In Syria and Myanmar, hundreds of thousands of civilians from certain ethnic and religious groups have been killed or displaced as world powers either fail to respond adequately or facilitate the violence.

In Hongkong, we are witnessing what’s left of democratic freedoms being quashed by China. 

In England, we are seeing a country trading freedom for desperately needed revenue.

In  Europe, even long-standing democracies are being shaken by populist political forces. 

The crisis of confidence in these societies has intensified, with many citizens expressing doubts that democracy still serves their interests. That’s the problem with not understanding how freedom works.

SO THE QUESTION should be what happens when protecting our individual liberty threatens the liberty and lives of others?

That’s a conundrum we won’t solve any time soon, if ever.

The people we elect to lead don’t know what to do so their solution is to separate, isolate, and enforce. If you have no contact with other people you can’t spread this bug, so as the bug spreads our freedoms slip away.

Many, if not most of us are just as blindsided and even panicked by what the coronavirus can do. 

Overreaction is understandable, but this is also a valuable lesson about how easily our freedoms can be taken away without our consent by the same people we gave consent to in the first place.

That’s the problem when politicians are charged with ensuring that our society is just they turn justice into a battle over what best suits their needs and these are judgment calls that only hindsight can evaluate.

This is pretty basic.

When economic success is in jeopardy our freedoms are disappearing one by one without a whimper of protest. 

We all have the right to get up and go about our affairs without getting killed by random, out-of-control violence.

This is a concept at the root of democracy. 

But we also have the right when we see politicians that sought office vowing to defend and now plan to take away with everything with crushing tax hikes, to hijacking our health care system, to destroying our sovereignty to abolishing free-market capitalism, to sneaking in WOKE-inspired legislation, to control what we say and the media we can access. 

The government has now morphed into a cult that seeks to silence all of those that disagree.

What started with PR about the right to peaceful protest is now a political issue with no solution except to sit back and hope for the best until peaceful assembly becomes too-dangerous a freedom of the past.

Our freedom to do something as simple as leaving our houses to visit with friends or attend a crowded church is so basic we don’t even think about it as one of the fundamental rights we enjoy. 

Just a handful of disrupters with rocks, frozen water bottles, fireworks, or other weapons in a crowd of thousands completely destroys the notion of peaceful protest.

If a just society means the government pacifies the people by paying for everything then that no longer matters. The crowd is a danger and the freedom of assembly turns against us with the taxpayers eventually have to pony up.

That’s not the point, though.

We are now so numbed to the words, War, Killed, Murder, Rape, Racism, (even when they are applied to children), that we don’t pay much attention anymore so it’s not surprising when it comes to freedom that we have enjoyed which our forefathers gave their lives to protect we make little effort to ensure that they prevail.  

Finally, of course, these days protests can be more than just physical peaceful assembly. If used collectively Social media protests with buying power it is probably the most effective way to make our voices heard.

Campaigns grounded in human rights/ values that affect profit will not just demand change but will achieve change.  Because they would hit the bottom line – profit.   

James Madison warned us:

“The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

If we were able to create a perfect democracy, it would be as participative, efficient, and consensual as possible. It would be sustainable, resolute, and robust in itself. It would be as wise as it wants to be. All of these features would be subordinate to the need for it to be as fair as possible.

 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We should be smart enough not to repeat the mistakes of the past and angry, take no prisoners. 

 

 

 

The capricious nature of these restrictive orders shows just how fragile our constitutional rights can be in a time of crisis. 

 

 

 

in lieu of a vaccine the freedoms we take for granted were all but erased in a few short months. That includes the most important freedom we have, the freedom to simply live our day-to-day lives and maybe eke out a little happiness in the process.

 

telling us to hide in our homes until they think it’s safe to come out isn’t good enough if it destroys everything that makes us what we are as Americans. 

 

 

 

 

I vehemently stand against any sort of racial, cultural, or religious intolerance that threatens to divide the melting pot our country has become

 

When do we start checking protest mobs for implements of destruction because they are a threat to the safety and freedom of law-abiding citizens who understand that political dissent doesn’t mean destruction?  The answer is never.

 

We need a Green New Deal based in climate and environmental justice, which means building a clean economy that protects communities that have been neglected by policymakers for far too long.

We already lost our freedom to give consent with the COVID-19 clampdowns that flourished in Democrat-run states and jurisdictions. Picture that kind of dictatorial governing on a national scale. 

.

 

Progress is glacial, given what we’re up against.

 

 

 

(Thirty-minute read) 

Warren Buffett’s famous bit of investing advice: “be greedy only when others are fearful.”

So, if technology has virtually revolutionized every industry in the current global economy, why are economists still question whether technology is visible in traditional economic metrics such as GDP, productivity, and corporate profit? 

Because to date, it’s not but it has and will continue to profoundly alter our modes of life and the function of the state.

The field of state activity has been widened by the Covid pandemic while profit is disappearing into the cloud. 

Profit-seeking algorithms are advancing without regulation presenting many significant opportunities but also posing major challenges. 

Today, innovations in information technology are having wide-ranging effects across numerous domains of society, and policymakers are acting on issues involving economic productivity, intellectual property rights, privacy protection, and affordability of and access to information – paying little or no attention to who benefits from this exploration of data and the profits being made. 

Modern technology has made the states perform such functions as -the protection of the aged, the weaker section, and the minorities making provision for education, health care, etc. Choices made now will have long-lasting consequences, and attention must be paid to their social and economic impacts.

It has brought about remarkable changes in the whole system of social relationships and installed new ideologies in the place of traditional ones.

 The industry is being taken away from the household and new types of economic organizations have been set up online such as factories, stores, banks, corporations, etc.

These covid inventions are leading to a shift of functions from local government to the central government of the whole state but the most striking change is the change in economic organization. 

                                             —————–

COVID-19 has not been nor will it be an equal opportunity virus so what will be the aggregate consequences of COVID-19?

Around the world, there are marked differences in how the pandemic has been managed, both in terms of how successful countries have been in maintaining the health of their citizens and the economy and in the magnitude of the inequalities on display.

It is not only exposing and exacerbating inequalities between countries but within countries. This pandemic will end up exerting a significant adverse impact on inequality and we will need a comprehensive rewriting of the rules of the economy.

One that is greener and more knowledge-based, with even greater equality, trust, and solidarity.  

To date, it is presenting a  silver lining to firms that have now crossed the psychological threshold of large-scale remote work.

Robots do get viruses. They are more easily managed. So it is likely that robots will, where possible, at least at the margin, replace humans.

For example “Zooming” will, at least at the margin, replace airline travel.

                                    ——————————

The year 2020 will go in history books as one when the world economy was ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The year 2021 is set to go into the history books for Profit above the planet’s needs and the humanity that live on it.  

Our capitalist economic system needs to first recognize that the competitive equilibrium model (whereby producers maximize profit, consumers maximize utility, and prices are determined in competitive markets which equate demand and supply that has dominated economists’ thinking for more than a century) does not provide a good picture of the plant or the economies of today.

We now have the beginnings of an economy rife with market power and exploitation which is weakening the constraints on corporate power to generate profit with profit-seeking algorithms.

While the pandemic is reminding us that our lives are in the hands of so many people who work in underpaid jobs it has stripped many of the effective rewards away from work placing them in the hands of a few online monopolies like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Alibaba, JD.Com, Etoro, Plus500, Avatrade, Libertex, Alphabet. to name just a few.  

The rules governing globalization must do more than just serve corporate interests; the environment has to be protected.   

Clearly, there will be an even faster acceleration of digitalization and automation across the board.

From virtual work from home to telehealth, distance learning, online shopping, entertainment, journalism, online delivery, the true economic realities are hitting home.  

In the meantime, there will be collateral damage, with countless businesses shutting down, millions of people losing their jobs and many will have to struggle with their mental health from the isolation of lockdown not to mention the digital market. 

                                      —————————– 

Since the pandemic started in March of 2020, more than 110 million people have become infected with COVID-19 globally – 84 million of those people have recovered but over 2.4 million people have died.

We might now be reaching a point where we are in control of the virus rather than it controlling us.

This pandemic has indeed been the great accelerator of many technologies and innovations, and it made decades happen in few weeks but most viruses are experts at changing genomes to adapt to their environment.

It is switching us from our high-touch, highly analog daily interactions to the exact opposite all in a span of a year.

As we convert our lives online the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a wily, capable and ruthless, and adaptable adversary is piling up steadily. There are two major technology trends that will accelerate in the post-Covid-19 world:

Touchless technologies and highly automated robots augment human tasks.

To estimate the distributional impact of this pandemic event we are going to need to recognize the disproportionate burden of the pandemic on low-skilled workers. 

                                         ———————–

Before Covid-19, the global market for all vaccines was about $24 billion a year.

Apart from the obvious pharmaceutical companies are filling a desperate public need, they are also corporations with shareholders expecting a return.

At the moment drugmakers are not asking for as much as they could for their vaccines, especially considering the enormous economic value attached to the end of the pandemic, because that prestige can be lost very easily if the vaccine is too expensive for people or governments to buy.

Now, these companies want to avoid the risk of investing in a capacity that eventually proves worthless.  Firms invest in large-scale capacity only after the vaccine has proved effective and it will paradoxically be easier for pharmaceutical companies to negotiate higher prices for their vaccines when they aren’t as essential for the functioning of the world.

Taking a more general look at who is going to profit, life after the pandemic “is going to be, in many aspects, a sped-up version of the world we knew.”

And this is also applicable to technology and its role at the onset of the pandemic.

The pandemic is likely to bring about a rash of debt crises so there will be a debt restructuring.

Without a  debt moratorium, it will leave long-lasting scars.

That’s why it’s a matter of self-interest—as well as a humanitarian concern—for the developed economies to provide the assistance the developing economies and emerging markets need. Without it, the global pandemic will persist longer than it otherwise would, global inequalities will grow, and there will be global divergence.

It is not sufficient for economies is open for business. The economy depends upon imports, exports, travel, and tourism. The longer-term rebuild of the post-pandemic economy requires rethinking our policy approaches and targets defining success.

So we are at a historic crossroads for shaping the recovery and have a window of opportunity to reset economies on a new trajectory of more inclusive and sustainable growth.

Because of online profiteering and automation, this can only be achieved by the removal of the social welfare net and replacing it with unconditional no-strings-attached Universal Living Wage that will redistribute wealth, release creativity ensuring that nobody lives in poverty. 

The hiatus imposed by the pandemic provides a unique moment to introduce a far-reaching systemic change that will stop inequality from spiraling further out of control and focus on measures that will enhance social mobility.

The only question is whether it can be introduced orderly or disorderly.

GDP itself will also need to be updated to reflect value creation in the digital economy, the value created through unpaid care work as well as value destroyed through certain types of economic activity.

                                      —————————

Companies have long been profiting from our feelings – The facebook-like button is possibly the best example. Click by Click producing data that was once undervalued now worth billions. 

You name it profit is moving to profit-seeking algorithms that monitor/analyze our emotions one of the most important sources of profit in the contemporary economy.

If you don’t believe this look at the profits of Pay Pal, Netflix, Libertex, Plus 500, Etoro, Avatrade, Libertex, Alibaba, J D.Com, Alphabet, E Bay, Google, Amazon, to mention Apple, are just a handful of companies that are replacing large industrial super companies.   

All of these will not, in the short run at least, create the equality and solidarity that we need. Markets on their own pay no attention to the broader impacts that arise from decentralized decisions leading to excessive borrowing in foreign-denominated currencies or excessive inequality.

With significant economic contractions, low-income people have a limited ability to work from home than those with higher income.

Various historical epochs – hunter-gatherers, agrarian society, and industrialist society are distinguished from each other in terms of technological advancement.

The evolution of mankind can be seen in terms of technological evolution as well.

Technology changes society by changing our environments to which we in turn adapt.

This change is usually in the material environment and the adjustment that we make with these changes often modifies customs and social institutions.

Scientific and technological inventions have modernized societies in various countries. 

However, the problem of unemployment is a concomitant feature of rapid technological advancement. Machines not only provide employment opportunities but also take away jobs through labor-saving devices.

This results in technological unemployment.

Within this new context, and given the fast-paced emergence of disruptive products and business models, as well as the transformative power of digital technologies on business and society it is now of paramount importance that we are capable of detecting the economic impact of such fast technological changes and respond with similar speed and foresight.

                             ————————————–

The pandemic won’t be controlled until it is controlled everywhere, and the economic downturn won’t be tamed until there is a robust global recovery.

Manufacturing coronavirus vaccines is a potentially lucrative business, but how much will these companies earn?

If we leave it entirely to the market, we will get too little vaccine too late.

We don’t want to find ourselves with a working vaccine but too little manufacturing capacity.

Son an advanced market commitment to support vaccine development is a critical component of a timely plan to defeat the virus, reopen the economy and return to normal life stronger and more resilient.

What will the market for Covid-19 vaccines look like in the long term?

Pfizer and Moderna are likely to make money from the vaccine—and it isn’t the vaccine itself.

It’s the patents on how they were made.  

The fact that mRNA technology could be capable of changing medicine and the pharmaceutical industry as we know it. But Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccines have an element that is far more important than the elements that make it effective specifically against Covid-19: The use of RNA messengers to trigger the immune response.

These are patents cover everything from the formula, to the method of administration, to the manufacturing process. But often, when a new vaccine comes to the market, there is little in it that hasn’t been patented already in the past.

                                 ———————

With any transformation, projects get mired in the fear of the unknown, risk aversion, and a misunderstanding of what digital offers.

It won’t be long before we see the sale of a digital token for smartphones that can verify that you are Virus-free – “Vaccine nationalism.” 

Many choices being made now will be costly or difficult to modify in the future.

It took two world wars to win the freedoms we have, but it will take a pandemic for humans to be barcode-like products.

 It will take years of legal case to win them back.  

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.