Category Archives: Truth

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

16 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

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( Twenty-six minute read)

We have heard all of this over and over, but it is impossible to get serious about climate change, because it has been turned into a product to be traded.

The very words Climate Change, Global warming, Biodiversity, Sea levels, Natural disasters, Droughts, Melting  ice, the list goes on and on as a result they are falling on deaf ears. For example  “sustainable development”: a phrase at which many people quietly glaze over and switch off.  Or “Global warming” is another of those deceptive phrases. It doesn’t sound that threatening.

So if words like “climate change” and “global warming” have become a turn-off for most ordinary people, maybe we should change the words.  Perhaps we should talk instead about what those things actually mean:

Killer weather, a world under water, and a mortgaged future.

We have been told for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm.

We all know this and we know that it’s urgent. The world listened, but it didn’t hear. The world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough. It hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change.

As a result, climate change is a problem that is here, now. Nobody is safe. And it is getting worse faster and faster, till one tipping point is reached causing a rolling coaster of from here to eternity.

There are many tipping points to choose from.

Here is mind. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melts.

This is a feedback loop with teeth.

Back in the 50s it was more than ten meters thick, reflecting as much as 3% of the sun’s incoming light back into space.

That light is now heating the Oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic, both becoming the fastest places on Earth with rising temperatures. Which means a greater and greater release of permafrost carbon and methane, 20 times stronger than Co2.

The Arctic permafrost contains as much methane as all the Earth’s cattle could create over the next six centuries.

If released this fart would push the Earth into an irreversible tipping point at which point the sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with the global temperatures 5/6 degrees Celsius higher. At that point civilisation would be over.

One would think that such a scenario would be sufficient to make all of us pay attention but not so.

Why?

A big part of the reason is our own evolution. The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us.

We lack the collective will to address climate change, because of the way our brains have evolved. We have evolved to pay attention to immediate threats. We overestimate threats that are less likely but easier to remember, like terrorism, and underestimate more complex threats, like climate change. Too much information can confuse our brains, leading us to inaction or poor choices that can place us in harm’s way.

Our brains evolved to filter information rapidly and focus on what is most immediately essential to our survival and reproduction.

In our modern reality it’s causing errors in rational decision-making, known as cognitive biases. “Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival make it difficult to address complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

  • Hyperbolic discounting. This is our perception that the present is more important than the future. Throughout most of our evolution it was more advantageous to focus on what might kill us or eat us now, not later. This bias now impedes our ability to take action to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it’s hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.

Families carry water during a drought in Ethiopia; temperature rise already has altered weather and water systems in profound ways (Credit: Creative Commons)

  • To address the issue of climate change it requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities.
  • The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

The future value is the value of it at some time in the future. The farther into the future we look, the fuzzier our view, but there will be no future unless we invest trillions and trillions into sustainability.

On a warming planet, no one is safe.

The air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all rely on biodiversity.

Unfortunately, we have created a world where an asset from a business perspective, has no value unless it can produce cash flows in the future. The difference in value between the future and the present is created by discounting the future back to the present using a discount factor, which is a function of time that is running out right in front of our eyes.

The world’s ecosystems are capital assets that up to now have escaped valuation and have therefore been mismanaged.

Now they are being bought by rich privateers, together with financial instruments and institutional arrangements that will allow individuals to capture the value of ecosystem assets.  For example, Sovereignty Wealth Funds.  They buy environmental protection, but only by liquidating natural capital (for example, prairies, forests, fisheries) to generate the funds; even “information” economies are built in proportion to such liquidation. The reinvestment in natural capital never equals the amount liquidated because of procedural inefficiency and profit-taking.

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The process of valuation in the short term might lead to profoundly favourable effects on the stock market, but the decision of how much to spend now to avert climate changes hinges on assessing how much it is worth to us now to prevent that future damage.

Since most of us would prefer money now, over money later, economists typically figure that we’re willing to spend only less than a dollar now to prevent a dollar’s worth of damage in a year, or in a decade.

The percentage less is called the “social discount rate.”

This implies that we either accept an assumption that many argue is economically unjustified (a near-zero social discount rate), or conclude that we should just accept climate change without much of a fight. (A third alternative is perhaps even less appealing to economists: accepting that their calculations simply can’t illuminate the question.)

We’re much happier to have good stuff now than later, so our short-term discount rate is high.

But we hardly distinguish between goods in the pretty far future and goods in the very far future, so our discount rate in the future is far lower to manage the essentials to life.

Now more than ever we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

We have an International criminal court, why not use it to fine this lot of polluters.

Peabody Energy

Company summary: Coal company
Based in: Missouri, United States
Founded: 1883
Emissions per capita: 2,231,818 tonnes – or, 449,057 return flights from London to Sydney.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation

Company summary: Petroleum company
Based in: Kuwait City, Kuwait
Founded: 1980
Emissions per capita: 2,133,248 tonnes – or, 445,354 return flights from London to Sydney

ConocoPhillips

Company summary: Crude oil and natural gas
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1875
Emissions per capita: 1,464,423 tonnes – or, 305,725 return flights from London to Sydney

Chevron

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: California, United States
Founded: 1879
Emissions per capita: 900,218 tonnes – or, 187,936 return flights from London to Sydney

Saudi Aramco

Company summary: Petroleum and natural gas company
Based in: Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Founded: 1933
Emissions per capita: 750,126 tonnes – or, 150,930 return flights from London to Sydney

ExxonMobil

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1999
Emissions per capita: 559,412 tonnes – or, 116,787 return flights from London to Sydney

BP

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 1909
Emissions per capita: 485,306 tonnes – or, 97,647 return flights from London to Sydney

National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)

Company summary: Government-owned national oil and natural gas company
Based in: Tehran, Iran
Founded: 1948
Emissions per capita: 407,542 tonnes – or, 82,000 return flights from London to Sydney

Royal Dutch Shell

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: The Hague, Netherlands
Founded: 1907
Emissions per capita: 384,939 tonnes – or, 77,452 return flights from London to Sydney.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965. The worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

The top plastic polluting companies

Company Examples of products             Number of countries plastic was found in Pieces of plastic found
Coca-Cola       Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite                                            51                                              13,834
Pepsico            Pepsi, Lays, Doritos                                                  43                                              5,155
Nestlé              Nescafé, Kit Kat, Nestea                                           37                                              8,633
Unilever          Persil, Cornetto, Sunsilk                                            37                                              5,558
Mondeléz International  Oreo, Cadbury, Milka                                34                                                1,171
Mars              Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers                                      32                                                  678
P&G              Tampax, Pantene, Ariel                                              29                                              3,535
Philip Morris International  Parliament, Merit, Marlboro               28                                                2,593
Colgate Palmolive  Colgate Palmolive                                           24                                              5,991
Colgate, Ajax, Palmolive
Perfetti          Mentos, Chupa Chups, Fruittella                             24                                                465

It’s important to remember that, as a consumer, you do have the power to change the future of these polluting companies. As more people switch to renewable energy, cut down on plastic, and live a little more sustainably, these polluting companies will have no choice but to change their habits to stay on trend.

Economists develop new methods to quantify the trade-off between spending now and spending later.

To figure out how much we should spend fighting climate change, economists have some questions for you:

The health of the planet may hinge on the answers.

Most economic analyses of climate change have concluded that we should be spending only small amounts to combat climate change now, ramping up slowly over time. This conclusion mystifies most climate scientists, who argue that immediate action is the only way to forestall dreadful consequences. And at the heart of the disagreement are these very questions, about the value of future generations’ welfare in monetary terms.

The worst consequences of climate change are likely to unfold only over decades or centuries — in other words, in our children’s or grandchildren’s or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes, not ours.

The higher the price payed, also equates with a higher level of risk, which generates a higher discount and lowers the present value of any action.  The higher the level of risk is represented as beta in the capital asset pricing model, means a higher discount, which lowers the present value of  nature.

Discounting is the primary factor used in pricing a stream of tomorrow’s crises. .

By reiterating the importance of the world’s natural capital to the human prospect, the next step, is to focus on stabilizing the scale of human economy.  This requires taking on the advertising industry that is promoting consumption. It should be illegal to advertise any product that is not sustainable in their manufacture. Put restrictions on all advertising that is in contradiction to health of not just us, but the earth.  It has become a voracious top predator across the entire globe.

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Biodiversity?

It is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its interactions. Bio means living, and diversity is the variety of life on earth. It represents different relationships (like ecological, cultural, or evolutionary) between several types of organisms on this planet. All living beings on from human beings to the tiny creatures like microbes combined to form Biodiversity.

Starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment. These myriad interactions have made Earth habitable for billions of years.

Wildlife is not something you watch on television. The reality is that the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all ultimately rely on biodiversity.

It represents the knowledge learned by evolving species over millions of years about how to survive through the vastly varying environmental conditions Earth has experienced. We all interdependent with one another. Hence each species plays an essential role to boost ecosystem productivity.

Some examples are obvious: without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there would be no fruit or nuts.

Humans and our livestock now consume 25-40% of the planet’s entire “primary production”, i.e. the energy captured by plants on which all biodiversity depends.

The intricate jigsaw of life, constructed over hundreds of millions of years, has been thrown into disarray in the last 10,000 years by humans relocating species around the world. These invasive species can devastate ecosystems that have never developed defences – from rats devouring albatross chicks in their nests to snakehead fish decimating native species.

If money is a measure, the services provided by ecosystems are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone costs the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m (£400m), a year.

From an aesthetic point of view, every one of the millions of species is unique, a natural work of art that cannot be recreated once lost. “Each higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, a Bach fugue, or any other great work,”

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to some scientists.

The results are scary.

Humans can’t have power over nature in nature.

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Despite the fact that natural resources are limited and take millions of years in the formation, the human is exploiting them for their endless greed and comfort.

Species extinction provides a clear but narrow window on the destruction of biodiversity.

The huge global biodiversity losses now becoming apparent represent a crisis equalling – or quite possibly surpassing – climate change.

Billions of individual populations have been lost all over the planet, with the number of animals living on Earth having plunged by half since 1970. Abandoning the normally sober tone of scientific papers, researchers call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” representing a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Humans may lack gills but that has not protected marine life. The situation is no better – and perhaps even less understood – in the two-thirds of the planet covered by oceans. Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people but rampant overfishing has caused catches to fall steadily since their peak in 1996 and now more than half the ocean is industrially fished.

Even much-loathed parasites are important. One-third could be wiped out by climate change, making them among the most threatened groups on Earth. But scientists warn this could destabilise ecosystems, unleashing unpredictable invasions of surviving parasites into new areas.

Today, 75% of the world’s food comes from just a dozen crops and five animal species, leaving supplies very vulnerable to pests or disease that can sweep through large areas of monocultures. Add in the falling yields expected from climate change, and the world’s growing global population faces a food problem.

Locating the tipping point that moves biodiversity loss into ecological collapse is an urgent priority. This being the only living world we are ever likely to know, let us join to make the most of it.

Could the loss of biodiversity be a greater threat to humanity than climate change?

Yes – nothing on Earth is experiencing more dramatic change at the hands of human activity.

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or millennia.

That call is more urgent than ever. Our posterity is running out of chances.

But once species become extinct, particularly those unknown to science, there’s no going back. To put the matter as concisely as possible, biological diversity is unique in the evenness of its importance to both developed and developing countries is beyond any technical advances.

To spread technical capability where it is most needed, arrangements can be made to retain specimens within the countries of their origin while training nationals to assume leadership in systematics and the related scientific disciplines. Science is the best way to establish links with other cultures because it is concerned not with ideology but with nature and humanity’s relation to nature.

Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival now make it difficult to address long-term challenges that threaten our existence, like climate change.

It is already clear enough that the missing ingredient is political will.

For example

Recognising the power of small groups.

Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively. In other words, how we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.  To get people to act, we need to make the issue feel direct and personal by focusing the issue locally, pointing both to local impacts and local solutions: Like moving one’s city to 100% renewable energy.

The key is having a large-scale, organised effort – but one supported and understood by hundreds of smaller groups and communities.

It’s true that no other species has evolved to create such a large-scale problem – but no other species has evolved with such an extraordinary capacity to solve it, either.  If academia, business, government, and citizens act together toward this common goal, we can create a pollution-free energy system; form a prosperous, adaptable and resilient society; keep human, animal, and plant life flourishing; and create a better world for ourselves and generations to come.

We can’t undo the mistakes of the past. But this generation of political and business leaders, this generation of conscious citizens, can make things right. This generation can make the systemic changes that will stop the planet warming, help everyone adapt to the new conditions and create a world of peace, prosperity and equity.

The world is now experiencing the early effects of climate change.

The overall effect of inadequate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is creating a human rights catastrophe, and the costs of these climate change related disasters are already enormous. The Colorado river in the USA is drying up, the ice shelf is the Antarctic is melting, the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting five time faster. Somali is no the threshold of a Famine.

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If we don’t act, who will?

We have evolved to be able to stop human-induced climate change. Now we must act.

The risk that without intervention we could cross a threshold leading to runaway climate change. An inconvenient truth.

To save natural resources and to bring a change we have to change our habits that exploit our natural resources and directly or indirectly.

If you could ask one question of Global Leader.

What is the main motivation of your leadership?

Which competencies do you see as instrumental to develop in global leaders in order for them to thrive in this new world?

The key to multicultural leadership is in understanding the difference between intent and impact, as well as engaging in supportive interactions that cultivate a nurturing environment.

Sitting in Davis/ G20  ivory tower’s ONE cannot develop global mindset.

“The secret to success is sincerity. Learn to fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

Feel free to add your question.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. CIVILIZATION WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A VERY THIN VENEER.

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Climate Change., CO2 emissions, Dehumanization., Environment, Green Energy., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Life., Reality., State of the world, Telling the truth., The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., Truth, Unanswered Questions., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. CIVILIZATION WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A VERY THIN VENEER.

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.( Twenty minute read) 

There are no words to describe the present state of our world.

Here below is a recent picture from Australia, it more than adequately does the job. Millions of dead fish float were seen floating on the Lower Darling in Far west NSW.

A thousand fish per square metre (caused “severe deoxygenation”)

We seen conflict raging for decades across the world, as if war is always and forever an ordinary routine, limited to developing third world nations, however wars are no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. With the Coming Climate Change we ent seeing nothing yet when it comes to wars.

IT IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF OUR TIMES, WITH PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES, FOR THE FOOD CHAIN, ENGERY  DISEASES, DWINDELING RESOURSE AND FUTURE WARS.

To date we have had summit after summit with countries promising to reduce their carbon emission at varying degrees and rates of time, with 60% not in the west returning home, PROBALY THINKING WHY SHOULD THEY BE CARRYING THE CAN WHEN ITS IS THE COUNTRIES IN THE WEST THAT CAUSED THE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Vermillion Cliffs at Paria Canyon Wilderness in Arizona

We are already in a pivotal moment in deciding our planets future, which requires significant societal changes to mitigate it.

Why?

Because our current global political economy solves problems through business as usual growth, wasting precious time to effectively reduce emissions to prevent human suffering and ecological system collapse at an unimaginable scale.

Because we are unable to put the common good in front of short term profit.

Although we have been raising public awareness on climate change for years, this is not enough; the global temperature increases day by day.  Unless greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature are reduced within years, the world will face demanding consequences.

Because the fragility of life as we know it, will be shattered by Climate change.

——–

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. What we fail to remember is that we ourselves live in the very world we do not seem to care what happens to.

We do not realise is that with each day that passes without any action, the number of natural resources available also decreases significantly.

Take the Fashion Industry’s for example.

10,000 litres of water are used to produce just one kilogram of cotton.

WITH OVER 5 BILLIONS PAIRS OF JEANS PRODUCED A YEAR  – 60 PAIRS A SECOND USING – 1000 LITERS OF WATER PER PAIR = A MIND BLOWING WASTE OF WATER. 

The average jeans collection needs 36,250 litres of water. Hoodies and sweatshirts need 23,450 litres. T-shirts and shirts require 15,000 litres, while our undergarments combined use 45,950 litres of water. The average person drinks 691 litres of water per year.

This means that our jeans collection has used 52.5 years of drinking water for one person.

The next time you put on your best threads, think about the environmental cost of your outfit — you may just be dripping wet.

 

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” We are now entering in the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability.”

How is the Earth going to survive, if the only species it has the chance to lean on, turn their back to it?

Climate is the envelope within which all other environmental conditions and processes important to human well-being must function. ANY TIPPING POINT COULD opened the floodgates.

Inevitability politicians portray history as a journey from savagery to civilization and assume this trend will continue to their desired outcome.

We have witnessed in the past 30 years the degradation of liberal democracy, the spread of Islamic terror across borders, and the resilience of the illiberal Chinese political system.

Up to now very form of society has been based, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes…This is why Capitalism combined with democracy has provided the perfect balance for governance, and as a consequence took root in most countries.

The liberal arrogance shown at the end of the 20th century paved the way for the blowback of the 21st.

Liberals failed to confront the innate inequality of the post-war international order so liberal inevitability politics sealed its own fate. By failing to address the problems of the now rapidly collapsing global order, and those who are committed to democracy and strong institutions have spent this century trying to pick up the pieces.Vladimir Putin sits angrily at desk

Where eternity politics is best on display currently is in the Russian narrative on their invasion of Ukraine.

To the Russian eternity politician, the West is simply repeating its century-old tactic to assault Russian values and Russia’s greatness, as they did in the Crimean War, Great Northern War, or any other conflict they may pick.

But the eternity politician makes the same mistake as the inevitability politicians, they remove agency from individuals and movements with personalized beliefs, motivations, and tactics.

Herein lies the problem with both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity:

They ignore the fact that developments in the political and social conscience of individuals and societies determine history, not the other way around.

As an entire nation of people is stripped of its agency the war in Ukraine is boiling down into a proxy war between two great powers. However, what cannot be done is to create a single coherent narrative about the historical past, the political present, and the prospective future, because of the simple fact that human beings do not have omniscience.

We cannot possibly isolate the individuals and communities that shape historical development. We cannot aggregate history, and we should not try. Revolutions did occur in China and in Russia (along with many other places), regimes committed atrocities with impunity, as everything they did was in service of the righteous and inevitable world revolution, just as the dogma told them.

The most dangerous facet of the politics of eternity and politics of inevitability is not the gross oversimplification of history they embody, but rather the societal implications they necessitate.

In the case of liberal capitalist democracies, it leads to a small group of wealthy individuals amassing such great control that it threatens the very institutions liberals revere as eternal.

For the Marxist, it leads to the justification of mass arrest, disenfranchisement , and slaughter in the name of an inevitable world revolution that will never arrive. And for the nationalist, it means a constant paranoid struggle for dominance against their neighbours, no matter the cost.

So with the arrival of the Internet /Social media / The smartphone, are we in an “intellectual coma.” left with a form of Capitalism that is no longer working.

In denying historicism, we shouldn’t deny that progress is possible, rather we should accept that progress is not pre-determined, and relies on all of us as active participants to truly make history.

Climate change with out a doubt will lead to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I shudder to think about this impromptu utterances.

———-

Earth on psychiatrist's couch.

 

It’s not that difficult to see that, says mass migration, it will provoke more conflict in the world.

Our tribalism will become more apparent over the next decade or so. Social Media reflects this with the pervasive mentality in western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa, south Asia, and Latin America, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, your name it and it is perversely turned into entertainment.

Everything will have to adapt to the changing times.

As culture change, so does the way we consume it – all digital and virtual viewing merging into a digital and physical worlds with  interactions changing into an endless cycle of content discovery, co-creation and sharing, which will deepen the emotional impact of content or by- pass it completely. This extends beyond our screens and newspapers and easily bleeds and blends into politics.

Righteous outrage immediately mounted online.

Xenophobia is an efficient tool to keep people divided. Colonial powers knew this early on. By separating people based on superficial characteristics, such as skin colour, and then assigning qualities to these features (such as being civilized vs. barbarian, or intelligent vs. backward), people started to believe that they were different from each other based on these highly unscientific classifications. To eradicate racism, we must become aware that our ancestors invented the notion of race for self-fulfilling reasons rooted in unscientific assumptions.

The question becomes how we classify people as strangers. This changes over time. Therefore, the classification of people as strangers is culturally constructed, with racism being one of its many forms.

Race and racism were non-existent during most of human history. To be human has always meant one thing -to be civilised. One was not born human. One had to become human.

Racism is a recently invented classification system that triggers xenophobia.

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After demonizing and abusing refugees, especially Muslim and African refugees, for years., now if one does not look like a refugee the chances of being excepted anywhere is almost zero.

You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders. Neighbour helping neighbour is a dying falsify.

Very concept of providing refuge is not and should not be based on factors such as physical proximity or skin colour.

The idea of granting asylum, of providing someone with a life free from political persecution, must never be founded on anything but helping innocent people who need protection. That’s where the core principle of asylum is located. If not we are showing ourselves as giving up on civilization and opting for barbarism instead.

On the one hand, there is something to be said about the idea of mankind as a group defined, beyond gender, race, or class, by a characteristic shared by all humans.

The history of the idea of human nature since the 5th century BC represents the history of Western violence and domination. It bears witness to some of the deepest conflicts and divisions the earth has seen.

The West identifies capitalism, liberalism and democracy as markers of civilisation and progress against Islamic fundamentalism, theocratic rule, and what it irresponsibly calls ‘the Muslim world’.

——–

These things exist with or without climate change, but the effects of climate change — migration in particular — will exacerbate them and help fuel reactionary movements around the world.

Ideology will always be a surface-level justification for conflict — people come up with narratives to justify whatever they’re doing in the political world. But if you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

We can say with some confidence that climate change will render huge parts of the world less hospitable to human beings, and that as a consequence, humans will have to change how and where they live.

Are we prepared?   NO!

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?  NO!

Have we existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions?   NO!

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?  NO!

Modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them. The problem is that these systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

The lessons for those of who lived through the coronavirus pandemic today, it that Civilization is a very thin veneer. That your well-being as individuals really depends on the flourishing of the greater society.

Why?

Because under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous. If a pandemic finds a society that is fractured, where there is distrust, where the public health system is neglected or in decay … that is going to be revealed, as it was with profiteers during the pandemic “willing to make money off human misery”

——–

Putting the pandemic into perspective as a terrible episode, but nonetheless just one episode, in a much longer story. This however  is not an option when it comes to Climate Change. Overwhelmed by the disaster, people will see what our system of Capitalism has become.

I think one of the things that is clearly exacerbating matters is when the issue is what we’d call politicized.

With technology and social media we humans – we become the stories that we tell ourselves. Our stories are never just stories. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

That’s because we tend to use history, which is at its heart the study of surprises, as a guide to the future. This should however not stop us from aiming to better understand the future: the knowledge gained through planning is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as future events unfold. We don’t know the answer, but we can at least ask useful questions and catalyze the conversation!

It’s important to remember that technology is often value-neutral: it’s what we do with it day in, day out that defines whether we are dealing with the “next big thing”.

Is there a way to think of the human being beyond the opposition between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’?

Or is such an idea of mankind yet to be invented?

 

Watch and weep.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. ARE WE ALL FOOLING OURSELVES IN THINKING THAT THE WAR IN THE UKRAINE IS NOT GOING TO SPREAD.

20 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Mr Putin., Our Common Values., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU., Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The cost of war., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Ukraine/ Russia., Ukraine/Russian war., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, War, Wars, WHAT IS TRUTH

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( Seventeen minute read)

I don’t have to tell you that wars expose the barbarity in all of us.

They say that its impossible to deal with Mr Putin. Call him what you like there have been many like him that have come and gone that did almost anything to survive in power.

Most probably during the next week we will observe the intensification of the Russian military aggression in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as well as the rest of Ukraine.

A Russian tank enters a region controlled by Moscow-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. (Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos)

War by its nature is unpredictable.

Whether a larger war happens will depend partly on President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, partly on the West’s military response, and partly on plain luck.

Aside from the risk of an unintended or unexpected incident, like a missile that goes astray along Ukraine’s western border, fired by either Russia or the Ukraine or a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant (which demands more action) the war could be catapult into a disaster beyond belief.

The question everyone has to ask—if this is going to be a large-scale war, if there is Ukrainian resistance and the conflict is prolonged over years—is whether the fighting can be contained to Ukraine or whether it will spill over into the rest of Europe.

You don’t have to be a  military general, or strategists to know that the more fuel you put on a fire the hotter it gets and the more likely it will spread.

Weapons might have changed, but wars have not, they run their course till there is no one left to kill, or to be killed, or the combating get sick of the killing and opt for peace.

What past wars tell us about how to Save Ukraine?Photo: SERGEY BOBOK/AFP/Getty Images

Most conflict since the end of the Second World War tends to involve counterinsurgency campaigns and proxy wars, making large-scale invasions—like what is currently happening in Ukraine—rare events.

Wars that end within a month last on average eight days, and 44 percent end in a ceasefire or peace agreement.

When interstate wars last longer than a year, they extend to over a decade on average, resulting in sporadic clashes.

Why?

Because the longer a war lasts with absent concessions by both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted conflict, despite the bravery of the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression, that is a dangerous prospect.

The refugee crisis will grow. More civilians will die. Russia will become even more paranoid and irrational.

Mr Putin could declare Western arms supplies to Ukrainian forces are an act of aggression that warrant retaliation. He could threaten to send troops into the Baltic states – which are members of NATO – such as Lithuania, to establish a land corridor with the Russian coastal exclave of Kaliningrad.

This would be hugely dangerous and risk war with NATO. (Under Article 5 of the military alliance’s charter, an attack on one member is an attack on all.) But Mr Putin might take the risk if he felt it was the only way of saving his leadership. If he was, perhaps, facing defeat in Ukraine, he might be tempted to escalate further.

What is needed is a viable diplomatic offramp that addresses the concerns of all parties.

The time for crisis diplomacy is now.

How this might be achieved?

This is about Russia wanting to restore a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space, and particularly about Putin wanting Russia to reabsorb Ukraine. Russia doesn’t just want a neutral Ukraine. It’s also demanding that Ukraine formally give up Crimea and parts of the Donbas.

Amid the fog of war, it can be hard to see the way forward or potential outcomes. Most are bleak.

The sense of outrage and injustice on the part of Ukraine will be difficult to overcome.

Moscow demands recognition of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, the “states” in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region recognised by Russia at the outset of the conflict. Their supposed independence was cynically used by Russia to argue a right of self-defence of these purportedly sovereign states.

Perhaps if the Ukraine we to offer a form of “asymmetrical federation,” would see overall claims of statehood abandoned, but areas – or Oblasts – within the Donbas that have ethnic or linguistic majorities be given greatly enhanced local self-governance.

A settlement that keeps them as Ukrainian provinces but in an environment of self-government – almost virtual statehood, offering plenty of autonomy to both districts yet keeping them within Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

This could be balanced by internationally guaranteed rights to genuine local elections and safeguards for the right of minority populations – whether Russian speaking or Ukrainian.” with cross-border links to the Russian Federation to placate separatist groups.

However, Ukraine must not suffer de-facto division forever more as a consequence of turning the invasion into a frozen conflict. The Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people who must have their sovereignty, their independence and their territorial integrity. It is vital the Ukrainian government is not pressured into accepting outcomes that reward a war of aggression.

So after an agreed period of lets say twenty years the asymmetrical federation decides by Referendum to stay as such, or join Russia or Ukraine.

During these twenty years providing Russians return to negotiations on limitations of intermediate-range nuclear weapons (and providing there is no further conflict ) NATO agrees to stop its enlargement, as part of “confidence-building”

Till than nuclear arms controlled by the United States remain in Europe.

NATO is a defensive alliance.

NATO’s world view is simple. The world is divided between two kinds of states. Those that defend something called a “rules-based international order,” called democracies, and those who don’t know what on earth they’re talking about, called authoritarians. The remedy for this unfortunate condition is of course, always more NATO.

(NATO holds its expansion to be a sacred right. It has spread across 14 countries of the former Eastern bloc to the borders of Russia. It has brought war to Europe by encircling a country that suffered about 27 million deaths the last time panzers rolled from the West.)

Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but it borders four nations that are—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Biden and other NATO allies have pledged to protect their eastern and central European members under the NATO treaty’s mutual defence commitments.

For Ukraine to give up its ambitions to join NATO, since that has long been a Russian red line.

I think what we’ll ultimately arrive at is something that satisfies no one, but at least is better than a hot war.

When Putin first came to power, his forces levelled the Chechen capital, Grozny, in order to recapture it. And more recently, Russian forces helped the Syrian government besiege cities and towns, a strategy now playing out in Ukraine. The war has sparked some protests inside of Russia, but don’t expect a popular uprising in a country that is imposing an Iron Curtain. You would have had a hard time convincing  Russians them that there country has actually invading Ukraine.

We that is the west are not going to invade Russia to effect an regime change, its not a realistic policy goal.

Why?

Because changing the regime in Russia and doing our utmost to weaken the Russian state, you cannot do that and claim that you are actually acting in the interest of the Ukrainian people because you’re not.

You are condemning them to an endless war for U.S. geopolitical purposes. There is nothing moral about that – nothing.

Where are we with the war.?

No matter how this conflict plays out, the world has changed.

It will not return to the status quo ante. Russia’s relationship with the outside world will be different. European attitudes to security will be transformed. And the liberal, international rules-based order might just have rediscovered what it was for in the first place.

This is now a proxy war “to weaken Russia” is destroying Ukraine, impoverishing Europe, and escalating, without an off-ramp, it has all the hall marks of spreading into an all-out war that threatens all of humanity with nuclear annihilation.

The bloc politics of NATO is, from the perspective of those who recall the tender mercies of its European and Japanese practitioners, nothing but the politics of imperialism in a world it no longer comprehends.

Putin will not deliberately extend an offensive beyond Ukraine unless he believed Biden would be unwilling to go to war to defend NATO allies, however he will retaliate in the cyber world, broadening the conflict quickly and dangerously.

A Russian takeover of Ukraine would deliver a blow to European order like none since World War II.

After the most recent wars with American involvement the United States will not get drawn into it unless it is dragged by NATO.

——————

In all ages war has been an important topic of analysis.

In the latter part of the 20th century, in the aftermath of two World Wars and in the shadow of nuclear, biological, and chemical holocaust, more was written on the subject than ever before. Endeavours to understand the nature of war, to formulate some theory of its causes, conduct, and prevention, are of great importance, for theory shapes human expectations and determines human behaviour.

Utilizing psychological approaches emphasize the significance of psychological maladjustments or complexes and of false, stereotyped images held by decision makers of other countries and their leaders.

This is insufficient because man behaves differently in different social contexts and nearly all wars are wage against the wishes of peacefully inclined people.

The ideal of the nation-state is never fully achieved. In no historical case does one find all members of a particular nation gathered within one state’s boundaries.

There is no rational basis for deciding on the extent to which the self-determination principle should be applied in allowing national minorities to break away.

As a rule, the majority group violently opposes the breakaway movement with violent conflicts ensue and, through foreign involvement, turn into international wars.

Nationalism not only induces wars but, through the severity of its influence, makes compromise and acceptance of defeat more difficult.

Although industrialists in all the technologically advanced systems are undoubtedly influential in determining such factors as the level of armaments to be maintained, it is difficult to assume that their influence is or could be decisive when actual questions concerning war or peace are being decided by politicians.

Improving the rationality of the decision making of individual states through a better understanding of the international environment, through eliminating misperceptions and irrational fears, and through making clear the full possible costs of engaging in war and the full destructiveness of an all-out war, possible in our age.

War can only be abolished by a full-scale world government.

Of course the likelihood of this happing is zero. 

The complex phenomenon of war represents a potential calamity of such a magnitude that all theorists must endeavour to understand it and to apply their understanding to the prevention and mitigation of war with all the means at their disposal.

Yes, as many as 200 million people may have died in wars throughout the 1900s, but roughly 10 billion lives were lived during that period. One may argue that this has merely been a matter of food production outpacing the production of assault rifles, so that violence has not so much been suppressed as overwhelmed by science.

Keep in mind, though, that these optimistic scenarios and others may, among other things, be products of their times. For we still live in the relatively benign aftermath of World War II, in which the greatest interstate war in history has led to 70 years without interstate war between the great powers.

We have a world full of beauty, with inherent call to protect that which is true, good, and beautiful.

Humanity after millennia of war may reach a culmination point, in which the number of humans killed by other humans continues to drop dramatically.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. TO SECURE A FUTURE ALL OF US MUST FIGHT THE RIGHT WAR RIGHT NOW.

19 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., Climate Change., Disconnection., Earth, Education., Energy, Environment, Evolution, Extermination., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Nuclear power., Our Common Values., Profiteering., Purpose of life., Real life experience's, Reality., Renewable Energy., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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If humanity wants to hope to contain global warming below 1.5°C – Governments must close the gap between net zero rhetoric and reality.

There can be no more hiding, and no more denying deluding yourself with a lot of greenwashing.

Political leaders, blinded by capital and powerful private interests, have long decided Earth is a small price to pay for the yachts, mansions, private jets and record profits of the one percent.

In Glasgow at the COP26 climate conference we watched as world leaders came up with new excuses, symbolic targets and new ways to silence the progressive voices who opposed them.

Global heating is supercharging extreme weather at an astonishing speed, this life-altering issue which we are NOW all witnessing daily – Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, is not getting the urgency and attention it demands.

Exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year.

If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.

It’s Now or Never.

A huge part can be done with existing technologies.

These technologies can and will create billions of jobs to drive a sustainable world, but it remains a fight of David against Goliath, because of how we measure our well being.

How we evaluate what we are doing needs to change.

GDP is a totally numbers-driven index that does not produce the true picture.

There are growing calls to find GDP alternatives to measure countries’ wealth and welfare.

GDP can’t accurately represent the wealth of a country when it ignores how money is divvied up.

Considering GDP alone, a rich country where 10% of the population controls 75% of the wealth (looking at you, United States) may rank higher than a poorer country with a more even distribution of wealth.

One of GDP’s biggest flaws is that it counts tragedies as economic bonuses. If a hurricane or tornado hits and a country spends millions of dollars rebuilding, those expenses boost GDP, even though people lost their homes, jobs, and lives.

GDP ignores many crucial ways to measure the wealth of a country: clean air, health, life span, gender equality, opportunity, education, and more. This is understandable – GDP wasn’t developed to rank countries’ welfare, but simply to measure money as the world recovered from the Great Depression.

Of course GDP cant be replaced over night, but it can be complemented by a Thriving Places Index (TPI) and this index could easily be expanded to other parts of the world.

TPI’s primary focuses are sustainability, equality, and local conditions. Unlike GDP, this index measures equality by investigating how evenly distributed life expectancy and wellbeing are across a country.

Interestingly, the U.N. encourages nations to use it alongside their gross national income data. They say that it can help governments assess national policy by “asking how two countries with the same level of GNI per capita can end up with different human development outcomes.”

By factoring in the ecological footprint, inequality, wellbeing, and life expectancy of a country, it provides a simple but rounded glance at the wealth of a country.

This alone will not however solve the problems that are now on the horizon.

We must implement measurements by monetising environmental damage factors to help countries better understand exactly where they stand environmentally.

The Green GDP is a noble effort to factor in the cost of climate change in a way that people whose focus is money can appreciate. While subjective data can immediately turn some financially conservative parties off, putting a number on the impact of environmental negligence could potentially hit home.

Our Profit driven societies focused too much on an idea that futuristic technologies will save the world from climate chaos, rather than focusing on what can be done today. If cuts to carbon are left to the future and not made in this decade, it will be too late to stay within the 1.5C limit.

What are the crucial new technologies in development for combatting Climate Change?

Clean energy is perhaps the biggest issue to tackle.

Convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source using sunlight.

There are numerous projects trying to achieve this, but most of the hydrogen used today is extracted from natural gas NG00, -3.93% in a process that emits carbon dioxide as well as the more-fleeting, but more-potent, methane.

Electrical transport and advanced batteries?

Particularly for use in electric vehicles; hydrogen; and carbon capture appears to be the miracle solution to reduce the heavy ecological impact of transport. This technology is not all green under the hood. Even before having driven a single kilometre, the electric vehicle has emissions almost twice as high as those of a thermal vehicle.

Big data has big implications in creating awareness about the consequences of climate change but it’s harvesting with the use of non transparent and unregulated algorithms.

Crowdsourcing for environmental solutions by gathering journalists, scientists, technologists, and people passionate about sustainability is creating a new wave of environmentalism.

Mobile apps such as Oroeco is an app that tracks your carbon footprint by placing a carbon value on everything you buy, eat, and do. However most Apps are profit seeking and like Big data they remain un -transparent and unregulated.

Interactive maps really drive home the point of climate change.

All of these technologies use microchips in order to operate and these are made from rare finite resources.

For the first time, a mining company is preparing to mine the seabed to collect rocks rich in metals for the batteries of electric cars. A practice that promises to destroy ecosystems that are still unexplored and that could constitute a ticking “climate bomb”. Poisoning of fresh water reserves, artificialization and loss of biodiversity, toxicity for humans, radioactive pollution, occupation of agricultural land… The extraction and transformation of raw materials are much more polluting than for the fossil car.

In the end here is where we are.

Some of the highlights included a prediction of violent conflicts and civil wars, extreme poverty and the loss of several points of gross domestic product in some developing nations, mass extinctions, and an intense, regular pattern of natural disasters.

The average decline of the species analysed was 68% in 2020, and 60% in 2018, revealing an accelerating collapse of biodiversity around the world. “We can tell ourselves that 1% is not much, but losing 1% in two years is absolutely colossal. The mere fact that this index is not improving is a disaster in itself

Taking into account a global population rise of about 2 billion people, as well as the need to supply electricity to 785 million people who do not have access to it, and clean cooking to the 2.6 billion people who currently lack it there is no more time for multinationals to obtain justice.

Governments must fine them.

Instead we see governments like the UK licensing new oil and gas fields in the North Sea and has also mooted a new coalmine for coking coal alongside introducing fracking.

Instead we see Energy being use a a weapon of war.

We all know what is necessary for life however in the age of instant gratification, we have little appreciation of where it all come from and we remain unwilling to pay for a future that only exists on the planet we all inhabit.

A large-scale nuclear war would, by all scientific projections, be a planetary disaster of the highest order.

A large -scale climate event would be far worse. Here to day gone to morrow against watch our demise over a few generations.

So every one of us must engage now. ( See previous posts as how this can be achieved)

The simplest thing you can do is educate others.

Tell people there are other ways to measure a country’s wealth.

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

Contact: bobdillo33@bobdillon33

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WILL RUSSIA INVADING UKRAINE LEAD TO WW3?

16 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2022: The year we need to change., Human Collective Stupidity., Mr Putin., Our Common Values., Reality., Russia / Ukraine ., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU., Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Telling the truth., The cost of war., The state of the World., The Ukraine., The world to day., Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, War, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Where's the Global Outrage.

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No one knows and no one wants to find out.

Let’s cut right to the chase here:

The only certainty about the war over Ukraine is that all existing certainties have been shattered.

If one listens to main media it would be fair to say that it is in a warp way encouraging Mr Putin to use nuclear weapons, ( not that he needs encouragement )

So how worried should you be?   How does this end?

It is difficult to see how Putin “wins.” But he cannot accept defeat.

As long as there is no direct conflict between Russia and NATO then there is no reason for this crisis, bad as it is, to descend into a full-scale world war.

Is this true?

It’s always hard to predict what Mr. Putin is going to do, and anyone who says they know him really well … would not be telling you the complete truth.”

The hard facts are that this has now developed into a NATO backed war.

So what are the likely outcomes?

The spectrum of possible outcomes ranges from a volatile new cold or hot war involving the United States, Russia, and China; to a frozen conflict in Ukraine; to a post-Putin settlement in which Russia becomes part of a revised European security architecture.

That is as honest an assessment as anyone who isn’t Vladimir Putin can give you.

But the wild card here is the state of Putin’s mind.

The whole idea after the Second World War was we’re going to try to set up a system whereby we live in a world in which big countries cannot just decide we’re going to send in our military and take this territory that belongs to this other country has never worked.

There is almost zero mutual trust remaining between Russia and the West.

While the conflict is tragic for the Ukrainian people, it’s unlikely to lead to World War III because, at the moment, it appears that no world leaders want it to escalate to that degree, and efforts are being made to make sure fighting stays within Ukraine’s borders.

There are three major factors that make Europe today different from in the 1930s and ’40s and could prevent World War III.

The first is the NATO alliance.

The second factor is the presence of nuclear weapons.

The third is that the Ukraine is not a NATO member, so there is no formal obligation to come to its defence.

Where is this war going to go is however the big question keeping the world on edge:

It is fair to say that China or the USA would not allow their countries to be surrounded by nuclear missiles.

So be in now doubt that intellectual laziness, historical amnesia and dishonesty will take lives in the years to come.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” – Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) or to quote the late Norman Mailer, “Whatever else it is, history is a bitch.”

There is a saying that nothing unites a country better than being invaded by an enemy but Putin’s actions have far-reaching implications for global politics and democracy.

This is a dangerous backdrop against which to have a blazing public row over who is to blame for the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

Europeans need to ask themselves hard questions. Are they willing to confront Russia? Is Russia going to challenge the borders of NATO? And how should Europe respond?

The immediate question is how to diminish Russia’s ability to threaten its neighbours.

The West’s political, economic, and military posture toward Russia is obviously in a state of flux at the moment. As a result unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is no longer a global competitor to the United States and there is no strong ideological component that unifies and divides the international community with regard to Russia.

Rather, what we see is a revisionist Russia (with somewhat limited capabilities to project force beyond its borders) that is challenging core principles of the international community.

So we have a long and potentially very unsettled period ahead of us that no radiation will cure.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. HAVE WE ALL GONE BONKERS WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE?

30 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2022: The year we need to change., Climate Change., Disaster Capitalism., Environment, Human Collective Stupidity., Life., Natural World Disasters, Reality., State of the world, Telling the truth., The essence of our humanity., THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The state of the World., Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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Four minute listen.

( Five minute read)

The message is clear Climate Change is here and is already having a significant impact.

It is inconceivable that we still have people refusing to accept the facts that surround them,  even if they saw 100 more years of it plain and apparent they and unfortunately many of our present world leaders are blind to what is happing and what is to come.

How much more evidence do they and us need ?

MAKE YOUR MINDS UP!

The Evidence for Rapid Climate Change Is Compelling:

I’ve not noticed any changes in the weather outside of the norm or I don’t give a Fuck what is happing. I’d rather live on another planet, than on one where every aspect of your life is subject to rigorous scientific control is not possible.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.Rivers and reservoirs have shrunk dramatically in the past 20 years

Right now there’s nothing like enough understanding.

Observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.

Human activity is the principal cause. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system.

However if there was meeting tomorrow of world leaders they would as before, argue that its not their responsibility, making promises that cannot be kept.

To have any chance of drilling into them the urgency of tackling climate change on a global scale perhaps it would be best to invite them all together in Gautama bay, take their mobile phone, starve them for a week and get them to write their last wills and testaments.

This might fired the starting gun on what will become a global race to eliminate fossil fuels.

At this point you might be asking why is it so difficult for the world to take action.

The effort to control climate change impacts virtually every element of a country’s economy “so countries have traditionally been nervous about what they’re going to be asked to do.”

The idea that every five years countries would be asked to come up with more ambitious targets, ramping up their efforts is therefore bull shit.

“We are living in an interconnected global village with a common stake,” says Xi.

Hybrid wind-solar plant at Zaozhuang, China“All countries are closely connected and we share a common future. No country can gain from others’ difficulties or maintain stability by taking advantage of others’ troubles.”

“We should embrace the vision of a community with a shared future in which everyone is bound together,” he continues.  He is right!  Heart-stirring stuff, eh?

A cynic might think his reassuring words were partly a ploy to reingratiate China with the climate-conscious Europeans, and isolate a climate-sceptic US President MR DUMP. 

But there is a much more important broader context for his announcement:

Let’s be clear what it means:

China, the most polluting nation on earth – responsible for around 28% of global greenhouse gas emissions – is saying it is going cut that back to virtually zero within 40 years. The commitment is of significant because China has never promised anything near as bold as this on climate before. President Xi’s 2060 pledge was notably unconditional – China will move ahead whether or not other countries chose to follow.

Why?

Because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing – the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?

It looks like Xi has judged that the economics of clean energy mean that decarbonising is now the most sensible choice for the Chinese economy as well as for the world’s climate.

So can we stop worrying about climate change?

Sadly we cannot.

It is going to take eye-popping investment in wind, solar and nuclear power.

Even as the economics tilts in favour of renewables the task of decarbonisation is still enormous. However once half the world is on-board with the project of decarbonisation it is hard to see how the rest could hold out.

Evidence of environmental damage and climate change everywhere. It’s the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. Tackling it means changing how we do virtually everything.

We are right to be anxious and afraid at the prospect.  Remember that by  2050 urban centres will hold 75% of the world population and 40% of them have no resilience plans in place, and have no plans to develop one in the hear future.  

Currently accounting for 70% of the worlds population and 70% of global GDP and 70% of CO2 emissions.

Don’t get me started on the food crisis.

You’ll be even more apprehensive if I was venture down that online rabbit hole.

Consider this conundrum:

When you talk to climate scientists you quickly discover they are far more worried about the dangers of global warming than most of us. Some tell you privately that they have had counselling to cope with the psychological effects of knowing the world is facing an impending disaster and not enough is being done.

Yes at this moment in history were in a mess.  Wars, Natural disasters, Energy, Rampant Inequality etc. On the right, I am alright Jack on the left just of a scream that will before defang in the next few years.

Leadership is action not position.

As Henry Miller said  ” No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance. “

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

Contact: bobdillon33gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAYS. EVERY RESEARCH HAS ITS LIMATIONS AND SO IT WILL BE WHEN IT COMES TO HUMANITY PENDING DEMISE.

09 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., Climate Change., Earth, Evolution., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Purchasing Power., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Five minute read) 

All animals must learn to do some things.

This is true even of those animals that function almost entirely by instinct. But exactly what that means – whether they are making rational decisions or simply reacting to their environment through mindless reflex – when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting remains a matter of scientific dispute.

Apes and Monkeys  Matriarchal Elephants, Parrots, Octopuses, Pigs, Dolphins, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Dogs, Ravens, Pigeons, Raccoons, Foxes, Crows,  Ants,  Whales, are all able to reason to a certain extent, to name a few.

In the true sense of learning, is by making mistakes and remembering to avoid them in the future.

We are also animals, so how do we  determine exactly what sets humans apart from other animals.

By learning from our mistakes had sharing our finds through language that we all understand and then taking correction action after reasoning that not to do so is more than dangerous. 

( Reasoning can best be defined as the basic action of thinking in a sensible and rational way about something. Sounds easy, right? Most of the time, reasoning happens automatically, but there are many types of  reasoning,  deductive, inductive, abductive, cause and effect, analogical, critical thinking, and de- compositional.

Reasoning is the ability to assess things rationally by applying logic based on new or existing information when making a decision or solving a problem and all reasoning begins with a set of reductionist assumptions that may not be challenged.

According to the Google Dictionary:

The meaning of reasoning is “thinking about something in a logical, sensible way”.
The meaning of logic is “reasoning done according to strict principles of validity”
The meaning of sensible is “… in accordance with wisdom or prudence”
Validity means to be “factually sound.”)

                                              —————————-

However all research has its limitations so it’s important to give an explanation of how your research limitations can affect the conclusions and thoughts drawn from your research.

The first thing needed is to take the new or given information and combine it with existing information, this allows for examination of all information before starting to make a decision.

Humans possess the power of reasoning but where is it when it comes to facing climate change?

“Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact.”

Life on Earth depends on energy coming from the Sun. But several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the Sun:

  • The greenhouse effect is essential to life on Earth, but human-made emissions in the atmosphere are trapping and slowing heat loss to space.
  • Five key greenhouse gases are CO2, nitrous oxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor.
  • While the Sun has played a role in past climate changes, the evidence shows the current warming cannot be explained by the Sun.

The dry, salt-crusted Lake Poopo. Poorly irrigated land, logging or evaporation can cause desertification. The amount ...

Here a few facts to put in your pipe to reason on.

People around the world are witnessing first-hand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet.

200 million people in the world, more than three times the UK population, will live below the tideline by the end of this century.

Wildfires, from Australia to California and Greece, are raging for longer and spreading farther than ever before. Blistering temperatures are proving fatal.

A chilling number of Earth’s other denizens, including 40 percent of all amphibians known to science (about 3,200 species) is under threat due to human impact,

Plastic production and use is forecast to double over the next 20 years, and quadruple by the early 2050s,

At least 155 million people, 2.3 times as many as live in the UK, were pushed into acute food insecurity in 2020 due to extreme weather, as well as conflict and economic shocks.

Climate change is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.

Nowhere on the planet is spared the impact of climate change.

Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available and makes it less nutritious.

It’s no good just having cold winters to replenish ice levels.

“The science is unequivocal.”

Once we pass a certain threshold, physics takes over it therefore stands beyond all reasoning, “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”

Unfortunately we are too occupied with ourselves, killing each other, making unsustainable profits looking at our selves on smartphones, and all the rest of the shit promoted by growth at all costs widening the inequalities in the world,  to acknowledge that the earth we live on is in crises and if no globally action is undertaken now, (not in thirty years or any time tomorrow.) there will be no growth put a race to the bottom.   

So the consequences of either ignorant of or in denial about physical alterations that climate change is going to bring cannot be left to people alone. 

Clarity about the danger is in some sense is our only possible atonement for leaving  not just a nuclear poison world behind but a world destroyed by climate change is another kettle of fish.

Why are we unable to see this? 

Many of humanity’s most dangerous problems arise from our antiquate way of looking at the Universe, which is at odds with the principals of science that we blithely use in countless technologies. 

Our cultures over the centuries downgraded the importance of having a home. To day ” the Universe” in the popular mind has become little more than a shapeless space or a fantasy setting for science fiction.

No atonement will suffice the generation to come. 

Were the generation that needs to make the big jump to sustainability. 

Get your finger out of where the sun does not shine and use your buying power to demand change.

Perhaps you will have noticed that taking the knee has disappeared from football ( Racism is cured)  if so let sport take up the mantle of promoting sustainability by holding aloft (for a minute) a piece of the earth they are playing on. 

Not until we stop focusing on or differences, classifying others into them and us will we realize the pearl we all live on. 

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

 

Contact:

bobdillon33@bobdillon33

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WHERE DO YOU THINK THE WORLD IS GOING

20 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., Climate Change., Consciousness., Cry for help., Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern Day Democracy., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Populism., President of the USA., Purpose of life., Reality., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World View.

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Twenty-minute read.

Does our perception of the world reflect reality?

We hardly see the world as it is.

Technology is often touted as the savior that will rescue us from our misbegotten ways, redeem us, and put us on the track to utopia. Then there are the dystopian views, where the future is dominated by technology that either rule over us or saps us so completely of our humanity that we might as well be a bunch of gadgets ourselves.

There are countless challenges today both environmental and not.

Mostly, we see the world through a set of layers. These layers are made up of our emotions, past experiences, and beliefs, and whichever perception is held by most, is popularly deemed as the reality.

Among contemporary scientists and philosophers, the most popular solution to the mind-body problem is probably materialism.

According to neuroscience, the contents of your head are comprised of 86

billion neurons, each one linked to 10,000 others, yielding trillions of

connections.

Materialists aspire to explain feelings and experiences in terms of the chemistry of the brain. It is broadly agreed that nobody has the slightest clue as yet how to do it, but many are confident that we one day will.

For human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life.

But, the real reality is different and it’s above any perception.

THERE ARE NO UNIQUE VOICES ANYMORE. 

Here we are once again with another verbal diarrhea conference at the Summit of America’s with the president of the USA delivering a version of his domestic economic pitch promising leaders from Latin America that the United States is committed to helping the region combat crime, corruption, and its economic struggles.

“We will introduce a new approach to managing migration and sharing responsibility across the hemisphere.”  A load of verbal bollix but it raises the question are we now heading into globalization vs regionalization?

If so why?

Because of the pandemic and the ongoing wars, today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and or try to control knowledge that is unattainable due to technology. 

Because the internet is currently eliminating the middleman the Politicians who are in a representative democracy hence the shift to direct democracy – Popularism – with power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.

                                         

                                          ———————-

While the Earth, the planet, will continue to go its way regardless of what happens on the surface we are unable to act collectively and never will be able to do so.

We live toward incredible times where the only constant changes and the rate of change are increasing so fast that there seems to be no meaning to life.

Not until we eradicate poverty, establish free education, set aside ideological differences, change our primary focus to the long-term care of nature and people, remove profit for profit sake Algothrims, and create a World Aid Fund that we all can invest in. (See previous posts)

Not until when we are able to separate our own perception from reality we can take the necessary measures to be happy.

Not until we all realize that we are with Climate Change currently headed to a sixth mass extinction event and that this possibility alone needs to bond our collective conscious into acting like one.  

Unfortunately, I believe, that if we aren’t now past the point of recovery, if we don’t act soon, civilization and human habitation here will be untenable.

                                      ————————

There’s no going back we are now stuck in a sad chamber of denial as those who are in power hopelessly try to ward off the apocalypse by promoting unsustainable economic growth. Our TV screens are inundated with appeals for help, while the cost of everything from health care, housing education, energy, etc is rising more than one can earn.

We must unplug our brains from smartphones and start working together in large numbers, as part of a coordinated effort to achieve change. 

Like Evolution Migration goes both ways – out and in. 

Rests assured if we continue to ignore the climate the earth will force us to go only one way, with the world passing through a nuclear war if we continue to ignore the warning signs.

If this happens humans will finally have little to no reason to fight.

What’s the point? 

                                           ————————
China faces further economic slowdown, according to future predictions.

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution forces us to think about where today’s innovations are taking us, when it comes to what our world will look like, in the medium-term – how we will organize our cities, where we will get our power from, what we will eat, what it will mean to be a refugee – it gets even trickier. 

I predict the internet will go spectacularly supernova and fifty years from now catastrophically collapse.

With the world’s superpowers thrown into chaos as they come to grip with new powers, financial slowdowns, and emerging economies it will be the start of Apple’s path to world domination. 

National leaders will find themselves under increasing pressure from their people, putting a strain on inter-country relationships.

The main political tendency will be away from multinational solutions to a greater nationalism driven by divergent and diverging economic, social and cultural forces with technology and political alining against Mega Power. With countries looking at solving their own problems before looking outward the Climate will continue to heat up.

Nations will increasingly adopt protectionist policies as well as look at ways of further securing borders, something which has already begun to take place as Europe grapples with the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Rising military costs, declining oil prices, and internal issues will all weaken Russia further with its inability to control the federation creating a vacuum. It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form.

While it remains a major economic, political and military power, the United States will “be less engaged than in the past”, with the powerhouse learning some vital lessons from history.

China will continue to be a major economic force but will not be the dynamic engine of global growth it once was,

The EU will remain hostage to the economic wellbeing and competitive environment in which it operates.

Nation-states created by the west will collapse. 

                                          ———————–

We all want to know the future unfortunately in a supposedly thriving economy we are now facing inflation as the real cost of living.

Trickle-down economics does not work. 

Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat WhatsApp have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

They are a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

“Like” button for Facebook

To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”, trading in human futures, herding us into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information.

In doing so we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathize and compromise is eroded.

We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximize our attention to advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is vital if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviors.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomization – individualism, selfishness, and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive.

For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, kill whales, mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.

Is the human race capable of pro-actively defining, harnessing, and expressing a collective consciousness, without the need for tragic experiences?

Much of the problem is around our inability to define collective consciousness. Who are we? Who do we want to be in the future? 

I think it is time to act.

Our paths have never been so clear. More than ever, science can tell us what different socioeconomic-emissions paths will mean in terms of future temperature.

Which will humanity choose?

The world is getting smaller every day. There is only one world, and it’s made of consciousness. Matter is what consciousness does. 

NO MANDATES. A long-standing issue is that the accords generally have no clear mechanisms for mandating that countries carry out their promises. World pressure and ethical considerations have to drive most of the agreements.

So, lots of promises, but no guarantee that countries will honor them.

“Once we have ruled out the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Is the nature of global collective consciousness, yet another thing, such as climate change, that the population of this planet is going to happily sleepwalk towards, as it shrugs its collective shoulders and says, “Well, you know, sniff, what can you do?”

Drones hold potential for many environmental benefits but nature’s technologies and designs are more often than not far superior to our own. 

 Computers in our pockets offer huge conservation potential. 

 

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

THE BEADY EYE SAYS. WE ALL KNOW THAT WAR IS ORGANIZED BARBARISM ON AN ENORMOUS SCALE.

12 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., THE ISRAELI- PALESTINIAN PROBLEM., The Ukraine., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, War Crimes., Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Seven-minute read) 

No matter how much you know — or think you know — about any War, there are always more horrible things lurking in the shadows.Nazi military parade

Cast your eyes over any recent conflict, and you’ll see a litany of generals, politicians, and nations that have gotten away with stuff so horrific it defies comprehension.

This post is not an attempt to justify crimes of warfare. It is a feeble attempt to highlight the double standards went it comes to defining them.

                                      —————–

Our best hope of curbing humankind’s peculiar talent for superfluous
violence and extravagant self-destruction lies in the ideal of humanitarianism.

What is a war crime? 

War crimes are often associated with atrocities committed on a scale that defies credulity. I.E the number of victims did not pass some arbitrary threshold. At the most basic level, war crimes are [objectionable] acts committed by combatants, either against other combatants or against noncombatants—that is, civilians—during wartime.

Mass murder and genocide—crimes against humanity and atrocities committed on a large scale—have become the hallmarks of war crimes.

The question is who or what decides which acts are war crimes.

In an eerie echo of our own time, defining war crimes is not so much the issue anymore.

It’s prosecuting them actually, administering justice that is the primary obstacle.

The ICC is the product of a strand of idealistic thinking about justice between waring states stretching back at least to the first world war.

                                  —————-

In world war two was it a crime to kill 60,000 to 80,000 people in Hiroshima and another 75,000 in Nagasaki or 100,000 people in one night during the firebombing of Tokyo, an event barely talked about today.

In the American war in Vietnam, was it a crime to shower 45 million liters of the herbicide Agent Orange? In the process, it doomed up to 4.8 million Vietnamese residents.

Ask someone today to list war crimes of recent history and he or she may think of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or genocide in Rwanda, the Afghan war, the Syrian War, the Yemeni War, the Iraq war, the list is endless.

The overall theme is hard to miss but there is a vast gulf separating our indifference to war crimes. 

A few months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereinafter referred to as “9/11”), the Bush Administration decided that the Geneva Conventions did not protect members of Al Qaeda.

The president (George W. Bush) thinks the ICC is fundamentally flawed because it puts American servicemen and women at fundamental risk of being tried by an entity that is beyond America’s reach, beyond America’s laws, and can subject American civilians and military to arbitrary standards of justice.

Another example is that there are clear parallels between Russian and Israeli violations of international law, including the committing of war crimes by Israeli military actions in the occupied Palestinian territories.

There are no sanctions against Israel that have so far desisted from joining nations including the US, Europe, the UK, Australia, and Japan in the imposition of an “unprecedented” number of sanctions on Russia, Belarus, and the two breakaway Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the wake of the invasion. 

According to Israel’s controversial Law of Return, “Jews, their children, grandchildren and spouses” are all eligible to visit Israel and claim Israeli citizenship. 

However, millions of Palestinian refugees are unable to return to the homes they and their forebears were expelled from in Israel and the occupied West Bank in 1948 and 1967.

Israel has granted citizenship to Russian mining oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, a figure linked to President Vladimir Putin and known to be one of the world’s richest men.

Last year, the two countries said the ICC should drop an investigation of Israel in part on the grounds that Palestine is not a sovereign country, although it is recognized as a state by the UN.

Netanyahu has accused the ICC of “pure anti-Semitism” for investigating attacks and has said Israel does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction, however, it does not have to. 

Whatever the answer, it seems unlikely that President Bush or Benjamin Netanyahu, will ever be tried for war crimes but the question of whether they actually committed war crimes remains.

                                         ——————

Neither the US nor Russia nor China nor Ukraine are members of the ICC. 

If justice in general moves slowly, international justice barely moves at all.

Investigations at the ICC take many years. Only a handful of convictions have ever been won and by the time the Barbarian is locked up there is nationwide amnesia.

Court proceedings can be brought in one of two ways:
 
Either a national government or the UN Security Council can refer cases for investigation. Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has veto power over council actions.
 

In all likelihood, there will never be a trial for either President Bush or Putin not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu,. 

Why?

I think it has a lot to do just with the power, the authority, of well-heeled countries, powerful countries, to shield their political and military members from prosecution by bodies like the ICC. 

Even if we were able to bring War Criminals to trial we just don’t have a true international police force that would arrest the offenders. 

                                   —————————

War is a place where young people who don’t know each other and don’t hate each other, kill each other, by the decision of older rulers who know each other and hate each other, but don’t kill each other. 

It’s a world in which if you have the power you also have the power not to be held accountable for your power.

image003.jpg
Where are we with the Russian Ukraine war?
 
Could Russian leaders be brought to justice under international law?
 
Yes.  Because they fall under the overarching crime of aggression, all uses of armed force by Russia on Ukrainian territory can be viewed as illegal.
 
But that doesn’t mean the country pointing the finger has always been in the right itself.
 
Are countries supplying arms prolonging the war? Yes  
 
The national interest is for this war to end. If we wish to stop war crimes then we need to stop the war. Prolonging it will only see more of the same.
 
We should not be blackmailed and guilt-tripped into feeding more weapons into the meat grinder. How about, just for once, we put our own interests first?                                            
 
On the other hand, understanding the twin meanings of ‘humanity’ means something universal and immensely important”. Recognising its worth is “the least we owe the dead.
 
Meanwhile, NATO is just itching to get further involved in the war. 

We live in a world in which making the wrong comment on social media can lead to people losing their jobs but where politicians and public officials, whose actions affect the lives of millions and whose failure can lead to deaths in the most unimaginable circumstances, can simply walk away and into their next lucrative assignment.

While our own media doubles down on warmongering. They seem not to care if further escalation will plunge all of Europe into economic hardship or risk wider conflict. For some reason, it’s news to Western pundits that war isn’t very nice.

In the end, this war is shining a light on just how useless our United Nations is and dark skin automatically made you less than human.

There was a day that the UN could muster Blue helmets to intervene in conflicts. Now, all it can do is pass worthless resolutions.

                                    —————– 

When it comes to war crimes, Ukraine’s hands are also blooded.

What’s bizarre about this is that these countries that are supplying millions in arms are the same people courting Ukrainian membership of the EU, as though Ukraine was some kind of liberal democracy.

As with all wars, they end with denials of involvement in killing the innocent which are called collateral damage or a mistake of identification by a rogue drone, or ballistic rocket.     

The issue of reparations doubtless will be raised in negotiations to resolve the conflict and as an international condition for resuming any normal relationship with Russia. If the sanctions are eventually lifted in stages, it could prove effective to include conditions requiring the surrender of indicted fugitives.

Perhaps if the United Nations were to tell Mr. Putin that it is going to place a few thousand Blue Helmets between the present front lines Russia would think twice about any further advancement. 

( It is however due to the presence of Nato on the Russian borders too late. As they would be labeled Nato, not UN) 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT THE ROLE OF MONEY IN POLOTICS.

05 Friday Nov 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Big Data., Corruption., Democracy, Digital age., Emergency powers., Facebook, First past the post., How to do it., Human Collective Stupidity., Modern Day Democracy., Money in Politics., Political Trust, Politics., Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS MONEY?, What Needs to change in the World

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(Eighteen-minute read) 

First, money is a medium of exchange that lets us earn, buy, and sell completely different things in the same units.

On top of this, money is also a unit of account—i.e. it lets us put the prices of very different things in the same terms.

This is why private wealth impacts public life, with the world of politics full of lobbyists. 

Money has always shaped the process of political competition and influences policymaking but most of us are unaware of how money works, behind the scenes in the political theater, it is a year-round issue that dictates the daily life of the nation.

Money finds its way into politics in myriad ways — 

Any political campaign lives or dies by its funding and for a long time, there has been a popular myth about how everyday voters who outnumber the wealthy will collectively donate more money than the few donations of the wealthy.

The influence of cash within politics could be called dark money.

It turns politicians’ existence into serving their donors instead of their voters, which affects the policies they support, how they allocate government spending, and their expressed values.

Regardless of our personal feelings, money makes the world (and democracy) go round.

It seems unfathomable that these external entities have such leverage in our election process.

Whether elected officeholders betray their voters, prioritizing interest groups or single campaign donors, remains a question to be answered in the public sphere. 

The super-wealthy class is almost single-handedly funding elections, which impacts our government’s overall functionality and integrity, meaning the power lies in the hands of few.

Cash has become a determining factor for who wins the most crucial elections like the president of the USA. 

most expensive presidential campaign

 

Since 1980 if you add it all up it comes to $ 105 billion 349 million.   

There’s way way way too much money in politics and most of it is having a corrupting, undue influence and locking out the voices that count.

For too long, money has been the one thing that has reigned supreme in a democracy.  

The influx of cash from corporations and interest groups sways the ways our political leaders pass legislation that supports these entities, regardless of the public’s best interest.

It allows corporations to buy leverage that alters the fabric of our economy.

                              ———————————

Fighting undue influence and corruption from political financing requires a clear understanding of the difference between unlawful influence on public administration and behavior and breach of trust of voters.

The former requires precise regulation of those sectors of administration that usually lend themselves to compensate campaign donors.

The potential entry point in the public sector can vary along with several channels of influence.

Beyond political advertising and election contributions, cash is influential in the lobbying industry. 

A ridiculous game in which corporations are people and money is magically empowered to speak. Allowing people and corporate interest groups and others to spend an unlimited amount of unidentified money has enabled certain individuals to swing any and all elections.  Donal Trump and referendums like Brexit.

While banning all campaign donations is an option, a comprehensive approach will take into account private agents who can resort to lobbying, personal networks, or corruption.

The truth requires that we call the corrosion of money in politics what it is – it is a form of corruption and it muzzles more of us than it empowers, and it is an imbalance that the world has taught us can only sow the seeds of unrest.

                                               —————

Money cannot always buy the best election results – Trump – Robert Mugabe – Crown Prince Abdullah – Kim Jong-un – Bashar al-Assad –Saparmurat Niyazov –  Putin – Idi Amin Saddam Hussein – Mengistu Haile Mariam – Augusto Pinochet – Pol Pot – Charles Taylor – Suharto – Mobutu Seko to name just a few dead and alive.

As of today, there are 50 dictatorships in the world.

But the millionaire class and the billionaire class increasingly own the political process, and they own the politicians that go to them for money.

It’s time to get big money out of politics., and have a system of scrutiny to ensure that no special access or call time with rich donors or big-dollar fundraisers to permanently eliminate big money from our politics and return it to the people.

                                —————-

Our democracy shouldn’t be bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful.

It belongs to all of us or does it with the arrival of Big data the next currency of politics now being used to directly influence our decisions.

Data brings change to much more than just the commercial side of our lives.

We have to acknowledge that our data has much more than just a “one-shot” value.

The fact that Facebook and other social networks collect data on us is presented as something outrageous but not in the political world.  

Putting you into an “opinion bubble” by better targeting political ads and thus motivating you to actually go and vote, and become (unknowingly) an ambassador for the power that has you in its aim, exists. 

Data as a Political Asset: valuable stores of existing data on potential voters exchanged between political candidates, acquired from national repositories, or sold or exposed to those who want to leverage them

Data as Political Intelligence: data that is accumulated and interpreted by political campaigns to learn about voters’ political preferences and to inform campaign strategies and priorities, including creating voter profiles and testing campaign messaging.

Data as Political Influence: data that is collected, analyzed, and used to target and reach potential voters with the aim of influencing or manipulating their views or votes.

In reality, the same problems with money and now data have existed for years, with huge amounts of personal data being sold to corporate clients. And yet, we only start panicking when we see how the illegal, or barely legal trade of our life patterns collected by social networks impacts our political choices.

Knowing where we spend our time, what media we watch, what books we read, what food we prefer, and what words are we most likely to use in our tweets makes the difference.

But what is it that makes the politicians “addicted to big data like it’s campaign cash”,

Unfortunately, this “addiction” to data has induced politicians and their campaign managers into the same illusion that businesses are struggling with right now:

Big data allows reliable prediction and, obviously, politics, as the very structure of societal governance, is heavily impacted.

It is, indeed, a problem.

The amount of information that companies have about who we are and what we are as social units is so huge, that it is this data reshaping the very fabric of our societies.

Most people believe — because of huge public buzz scandals like the one of Cambridge Analytica — that big data in politics serves the goals of better manipulation.

The issue of data collection in the interest of the political actors must not be reduced to just cynical Frank Underwood-style power brokers buying data on where we eat and what we watch on Netflix and who our friends are to better sell us their quotes about how they are gonna make our lives better.

The overwhelming power of the big brother that tracks our every step raises the question.  If societies value equality of information, open debate, and transparency, these trends should be of concern?

One thing we know for sure is that the clear trend of getting more and more data involved in political campaigning and decision-making is there.

Without considering these questions, there is a danger that any response may have unintended consequences and fail to advance the principles we want to uphold.

Bribery is human nature and the only way to expose it is with transparency requirements that enable the media, public interest groups, and parties to engage in this debate.

The manipulation of the future political result, by algorithms is only a click away.

We will still need (yes, NEED) tons of “money in politics.”

Without big donors, how many Independent candidates will be able to go up against the dark money and deep, oligarch pockets?

Ok, let’s figure out where that money goes. 

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.