The UK was recently given the title of the most crowded country in Europe with a population of nearly 65,000,000 it is the 10th largest source of migrants to the rest of the world.
This is a country that made its wealth on the back of slavery and is now intending to provide those deemed to have arrived unlawfully with a one-way ticket to Rwanda.
SHAME ON YOU Britain.
In an effort to curtail human trafficking it is resorting to the same despicable trade of human trafficking it wants to stop.
Priti Patel the daughter of a Ugandan-Indian family should know that refugees are among the most vulnerable people in the world.
Your indifference is the engine of entropy that is shining a light on Britain’s apathy to the plight of refugees.
Anti-immigration sentiment existed in Britain long before the referendum.
On June 23, 2016, Britain held a referendum to determine the future of its relationship with the European Union. “Immigration” was the single strongest issue driving Brits to vote for Leave and fundamentally reshaping the language of “immigration.”
In reality, the UK’s membership in the EU would have very little effect on the country’s responsibilities concerning the refugee crisis, as the UK had already opted out of common EU asylum policies and instead was bound only by a distinct set of international conventions.
The relentless (negative) coverage of the refugee crisis in the media brought the topic of immigration to unprecedented national salience for the British public.
By blurring the boundaries between EU and non-EU, economic and humanitarian, and legal and illegal migration it has not isolated itself from the Leave campaign. It not only stripped humanity from the crisis but also misled voters by implying that the forces guiding and controlling both the refugee crisis and internal EU migration were the same and could both be solved by leaving the EU.
Without using the terminology of “refugee,” the umbrella term “migrant” instead of “refugee” to refer to people fleeing war zones, has resulted in sending a strong message that Britain is not a country to migrate to.
The UK’s referendum to leave the EU was an unequivocal demonstration of the anti-establishment sentiments, xenophobia, populism, and Euroscepticism.
( There has always been an intersection between populist politics and media discourse, and there is strong evidence that fear-based messages appear during important political and electoral markers, like elections.)
We must hope that the Priti Patel deal with Rwanda falls on the sword of justice and that decency people in the UK make their voices heard.
Now more than ever UNHCR’s role in Britain must come to the fore. Promoting accession to, and implementation of, refugee conventions and laws.
Ensuring that refugees are treated in accordance with internationally recognized legal standards;
Ensuring that refugees are granted asylum and are not forcibly returned to the countries from which they have fled;
Promoting appropriate procedures to determine whether or not a person is a refugee according to the 1951 Convention definition and/or to other definitions found in regional conventions;
Seeking durable solutions for refugees.
The definition of a refugee is someone who:
“Owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”
It cost Australia more than £5 billion since 2013 to send 3,127 people to Papua New Guinea and Nauru as part of a similar policy.
The realities of conflict, violence, and persecution continue to cause displacement.
THERE GO I BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Apart from the tragic human consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic, it’s impossible to measure the price of A GLOBAL DEPRESSION OR THE COMING CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT TO MENTION THE SURGING INEQUALITY DRIVEN BY AI.
But rest assured that it will be the young generation that will be saddled with the bill and the consequences and few countries are likely to be left unscathed by the covid -19 outbreak’s financial ramifications.
We have conveniently forgotten if you remember before the pandemic we had a financial meltdown in 2008.
Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, economies were all operating on borrowed money with all of them amassing debts away beyond their annual tax revenues to the point that their budgets were consumed entirely by interest payments.
Greece was on the verge of causing the Euro to collapse while England was in the grips of an austerity program that resulted in Brexit the cost of which has no definitive figure.
90% of this was big banks creating debts world-wise in the knowledge that they would have to be bailed out by the taxpayers. (Too big to fail is a phrase used to describe a company that’s so entwined in the global economy that its failure would be catastrophic.)
While Wall Street hedge funds, with credit default swaps and sovereignty wealth funds, we’re making hay while the sun-shined, world debts were doubling.
Take Iceland for example. German banks pumped $21 into its banks, Sweden $400 million, England around $30billion, the Netherlands $300 million, Oxford University a mere $50 million. Iceland’s banks went bankrupt. The government couldn’t bail them out because it didn’t have the money. Instead of being too big to fail, they were too big to save. Iceland never resorted to austere budget cuts that are so prevalent in Europe.
They imposed capital controls. They let the banks fail.
Iceland’s economy successfully survived a sovereign bankruptcy and government collapse.
However, Iceland’s government today is spending a back-breaking 17.3% of its tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt.
Without a doubt, Iceland was and is the canary in the coalmine for the sovereign debt crisis that is now unfolding across the world right now.
With investors around the world suddenly wake up to a sobering reality of a major default… bigger than Iceland in 2008. It won’t be long before we see countries defaulting because of the amount of government borrowing to fight Covid-19
So what happens when governments themselves ceased to be credible?
This might be something that had been considered preposterous only months ago but when one looks at what is only the start of a global depression it is now very much on the cards.
It’s important to remember that throughout history humanity has experienced no shortage of pandemics and deadly viruses but despite the similarities, of these pandemics some of the differences are now even more striking.
The economic fallout from these pandemics was barely noticeable. (The same can be said of the Spanish Flu of 1918.)
What is making the COVID-19 pandemic so unique is not the virus itself, but our collective responseto it. Governments in their zeal to control society, have destroyed the global economy on a scale the modern world has never seen. These losses are unprecedented in modern history. The loss of human life that can never be recovered is regrettable but there’s a degree of anxiety now that’s well beyond the health scares which are still very serious and concerning.
If we take a look for example at the USA.
Its economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Closer to home.
Millions out of work, industries losing billions, and that’s just the beginning. Transportation companies losing billions in market value with tourism the restaurant and foodservice industry decimated with real estate defaults looming.
Further afield the so-called least Developed Countries, whose economies are driven by the sale of raw materials, will not be spared either. Latin American region as similarly vulnerable.
In addition to global poverty, the pandemic has adversely affected vaccination rates, HIV transmission, gender equality, education, and more. Unfortunately, these problems won’t be reversed overnight—or anytime soon.
When will things go back to normal?
Never.
Our society is fundamentally flawed, with a devastating financial storm more than likely on its way we cannot simply hit the reset button and go back to normal.
As we go about rebuilding our society for a new day, it is absolutely critical that we focus our efforts on healing the wounds of the people who suffered most.
We all know that the distribution of wealth is key to any recovery and we are going to witness in this pandemic and subsequent economic depression how inequality is the main cause s of why our world is in such a mess.
So if we want a world worth living in we must address the distribution of wealth along with education.
( The Solution.
Embedding equity and empathy into our cultures by reimagining schools and the introduction of a Universal Basis Living Wage.
Rather than preparation education (to enter a world of I am all right Jack ) we should be promoting core values education.
This education should be free to all paid for by the state. Not designed by wealthy white men paying the minimum wage, awarding themselves dividends, launching profit-seeking algorithms, running plundering sovereignty wealth funds, leaving the young generation with massive debt.
After two decades of progress around the world, nearly 37 million people have lost significant amounts of income and are now living on less than $1.90 per day.
There is little point in governments spending billions on projects that enrich the few while their citizens have to resort to food banks, social welfare, etc.
While Countries’ debts are ballooning exponentially, due in part to combating Covid-19, the fourth industrial revolution in the form of Technology is eroding the opportunities of earning a living or sharing in the profits of automation, machine learning, etc.
It is not possible to stop the erosion but it is possible to share the wealth in a fair and meaningful way with a guaranteed income that would cut government costs while stimulating economic recovery.
By scrapping the concept of the welfare state a form of structural inequality and replace it with a government-guaranteed payment to provide financial security
Cash is the best thing you can do to improve health outcomes, education outcomes and lift people out of poverty.
It would stop people from emigrating not just to other countries but to cities.
The social welfare state is what prevents the poor from building their wealth to better their lives.
How could it be financed?
Place a 0.05% aid commission on revenue made by profit-seeking algorithms and tax the top 1% and allocate 10 to 12% of GDP directly to the universal income payments.
The benefit would automatically rise with national prosperity and inflation.
The simplicity of the program means it would also cost governments less.
It is inevitable. If we don’t we will rebuild an exclusionary society.)
————–
Germany, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. are all in the top 10 spenders, all conjure money out of thin air and funnels it to the government.
There will be inquiries. How long of a sentence does someone get for railroading his nation’s economy? Life? 30-years? 10-years?
Where should we begin to rebuild our lives?
There are a number of possible futures however if we don’t take this opportunity to build a future that is more humane we will slide into something far worse.
The responses so far to the pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises.
The overriding priority remains to save lives.
However, understanding human behavior in its wider economic context is necessary if we are to solve climate change or if we are to tackle future pandemics problems all created by our economic structure.
Both are socially driven.
With every week that passes, we learn more about the virus and understand more about how to defeat it. But the more we learn, the more we realize how little the world yet understands about the true nature of the threat – except that it is a shared one that we must all work together to defeat.
Now is the time to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization…
The world is “not at the mercy of the virus called covid, but the fuse is burning on the bomb – Climate Change.
It is at the mercy of Profit for profit’s sake that must be harnessed to affect change.
(See previous posts)
At the end of the day, the Icelandic people are responsible back in 2008 for their collapse. They were never bailed out. They were stuck with the bill.
It does not take a genius to describe the changes that are needed.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
IF THERE IS ANYTHING TO LEARN FROM COVID IT IS THAT WE HUMANS MUST CHANGE THE WAY WE LIVE COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY ON THIS PLANET.
CURRENTLY, WE ALL LIVE WITHIN IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE BROKEN.
SOME VISIBLE SOME NOT.
(An ideology (/ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi/) is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially as held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which “practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones.” Wikipedia.
There are many different kinds of ideologies, including political, social, epistemological, and ethical.
“We do not need…to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. The need for a sense of universal responsibility affects every aspect of modern life.” — Dalai Lama.
“The function of ideology is to stabilize and perpetuate dominance through masking or illusion.” — Sally Haslanger
“[A]n ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man.” — Hannah Arendt)
At the root of all these ideologies is the value of money.
HOW IT IS ACQUIRED AND DISTRIBUTED IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED.
A religion may present a vision of a just society, but it cannot easily have a practical political program with or without money.
All idea systems have a class basis. This class bias is defined by the acquisition of wealth in one form or another – assets, power, etc. Nither however can any longer dominate the state through an appeal to the populace, and then use the powers of the state to control both the economy and the private lives of the citizen’s work.
No longer can politics itself, acquire certain ideological characteristics whose true nature is concealed.
All forms of isms that belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith.
So let’s ask the question.
Where are we?
In terms of truth we now in a world both connected and disconnected in the extreme sense of the word connected.
IT IS CLEAR THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND SLOGANS.
A system that rewards those with capita while taxpayer’s money is used to support food banks for those out of work is not sustainable.
The economic injustices are plain to see with historic debt the inheritance of the young along with irreversible climate change and biodiversity collapse.
We now need an ism that shifts human values to a different set of values by placing the earth’s healthy existence at the forefront of all our values.
WE MUST NOT ONLY CONFRONT OUR MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURAL WORLD WE MUST USE KNOWLEDGE NOT AS A MEANS TO CREATE WEALTH BUT AS A GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING WHERE WE ARE AT.
WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH BIG TECH MONOPOLIES COMPANIES SWALLOW WHAT IS LEFT OF COMPETITION.
WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH A MARKET PLACE THAT CREATES WINNERS AND LOSERS ON THE BASES OF WEALTH.
WE CAN NO LONGER WATCH WORLD ORGANISATIONS GOVERNED BY VETOES.
WE ALL DEPENDENT ON EACH OTHER AND OTHERS AND MUST COLLABORATE WITH ALL THAT SURROUNDS US.
No longer is it possible for any system whether it’s socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism to be FREE OF INTERFERENCE FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MACHINE LEARNING, AND UNCONTROLLED ALGORITHMS.
THESE TECHNOLOGIES IN THEIR PRESENT STATE ARE SIGNALING THAT INTERPRETATIONS OF IDEOLOGIES ARE OUT OF DATE.
You only have to look at the world to see the inequalities created by the pursuit of growth at any cost. This pursuit has turned all of earth’s resources into products to produce more products sold in a marketplace governed by short term profit.
No longer is it possible to take fresh air, fresh water for granted.
If we don’t want a world where from birth to death is viewed as an opportunity to exploit our weaknesses and essential needs to live out our lives in the first place, we need AN NEW IDOLOGIE CALLED REALISM, NOT ESCAPISM, NOT APATHY, OR ANY MONOTHEISM, OR NEOREALISTS
“ Rather a collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.”
There is only one solution.
That is as advocated by this blog in several posts to Harness PROFIT FOR-PROFIT SAKE.
High-frequency trading with algorithms, sovereign wealth funds buying earth resources – land, water, energy, futures/ hedge funds – betting on demand, currency exchanges manipulating value, trade deals excluding fair trade, the list is endless.
ALL ACTIONS THAT ARE NOW REQUIRED TO CHANGE COURSE REQUIRE FUNDING.
A 0.05% WORLD AID COMMISSION ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE WILL CREATE A PERTUTIAL FUND OF TRILLIONS TO CREATE A WORLD THAT’S WORTH LIVING ON.
There is one thing for certain change is happing but the window for change is closing.
Climate change is not something that might happen in the future.
We need a new relationship, to a more sustainable relationship with the natural world.
Creative imagination is what’s required so if you read this post let’s hear your comments.
There is a radical difference between conventional threats and emerging threats which are posing a strategic challenge that must be met with a strategic response.
On one hand, it would be fair to say that Human advances have got us into the mess, but the question is the technology capable of getting us out of the mess.
Globalization, complexity, our relatively unsophisticated mechanisms for sharing information and making sense out of changes that we barely perceive, much less understand, all assure that any major threat — and especially non-state threats such as infectious disease – covid -19.
So let’s look at a few things that stick out like sore thumbs when it comes to technology.
The fear that technology could cause humanity’s downfall as such offers some terrifying scenarios that could befall our species.
The risk of the creation of some new super virus or bug in a lab that we are unable to control if it were to escape into the wild isn’t any longer beyond the realms of impossibility.
It means we must apply technology in ways responsive to our most immediate and frequent threats and must balance our use of technology with the intelligence cycle:
If we do not harness the fourth industrial revolution to the benefit of all we will turn the planet once more back into a snowball Earth.
We must develop reliable capabilities for developing technology advancement.
No government, no international organization, and certainly no corporation, can be relied upon to seek out and act on the truth, or even to act in the public interest.
So in my view, the greatest threat we face is unregulated software that is driving our lives. It is one of the greatest problems afflicting modern society, not because of human intelligence, but because we are allowing profit-seeking algorithms to dominate consumption.
Current economic policy is short-term creating a non-saving society for the rainy day.
One only has to look at the effects of the covid pandemic to see that a redistribution of wealth is required urgently if we are to have any chance of a caring society.
The current threats.
Take for example.
Cyber malware.
What is malware? How dangerous is it?
It is a contraction of malicious software that exploits your digital life, by mining your personal data either to profit directly or sell on the information. It comes in the form of a virus embedded in a piece of software and can spread from one file to another or computer.
There are several types of malware.
A worm. Does not need to be triggered. It automatically propagates itself.
A Trojan. Can be a good-looking App that will wreak havoc.
A Ransom. Pay up before everything is deleted.
They can be weaponized to have real-world consequences. Over fifteen Iranian facilities were attacked and infiltrated by the Stuxnet worm.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) disclosed on Wednesday that it has suffered a cyber-attack, leading to unauthorized access to documents relating to a Covid-19 vaccine.
Now imagine the threat to the stability of critical infrastructures around water, electricity, and gas that are vital to the running of nations.
The next has to be Climate change.
The main problem here is that no one whats to foot the bill. ( See previous posts)
To achieve long-term and profound progress in environmental governance, policy focus needs to be complemented by intensified efforts to strengthen the rule of environmental law not just shallow promises coming out of Climate Conferences.
To do so, the capacity of international courts to pronounce judgments on environmental matters, the clarity, and scope of environmental legal principles, and compliance with and implementation of judgments must be further strengthened with a constitution for the whole of the Earth.
What’s at stake here are basic rights to life and health so the pursuing of climate policies that violate the right to life must have genuine consequences if we are to keep global warming to 2°C.
Climate change crossing borders with impunity.
Next: Poverty.
The gap between rich and poor is now a pandemic.
No single factor can account for the large disparities in economic development among the countries of the world. Nor is the relative influence of any particular factor likely to remain the same over time.
While such things as technology and natural resources are obvious factors in economic development, they are plundered for profit’s sake by high-frequency trading run by unregulated data mining algorithms.
However, there is no denying the fact that the rich are becoming richer and the poor are becoming poorer.
This is happing not because of human intelligence but can be attributed to numerous factors such as social immobility, globalization, more advanced technology, and taxation.
Current economic policy is dominated by short-term thinking so there is a serious lack of savings for the rainy day.
The COVID-19 pandemic will and is widening the gap between the rich and the poor, especially in the emerging online markets and developing economies.
Next.
Nuclear Armageddon.
The threat of nuclear Armageddon has receded these days replaced by Climate Change.
Still, it’s a worrying thought alongside artificial intelligence, biotechnology warfare it is and remains inconceivable to our comprehension other than an instant self ext to our existence.
Next
Enslavement by self-replicate robotic robots created by nano-sized technology.
It may well be a piece of code – not a nuclear weapon or infectious disease or indeed climate change – that brings about humanity’s downfall.
As our culture advanced and our species invented many things that will make our lives easier, our demand for raw materials increased by leaps and bounds. We get these resources from the other. The problem is, we’re using too much and without care. Our planet just can’t keep up with our ever-increasing demands.
Finally: With quality education becoming more and more expensive only an investment in people and not profit has any hope.
Our demand for knowledge shows no sign of abating.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The truth takes into consideration feelings and beliefs, whereas they have no place in fact.
A fact is something that is true everywhere and for everyone.
Facts do not change according to region, caste, culture, religion, etc.
That is not to say that facts from the past have been overturned and proven to be false and that some facts from today will be proven false tomorrow- History is written by the Victor. We no longer know when a fact is going to be true for eternity.
Some of them will.
Take for example you have to be born to experience death. Currently true.
However, with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence – it appears that not just robots but humans will have both life and death capable of independence, separable from one another.
This is not quite yet a scientific fact” but we could be standing on thin ice.
So what makes a fact a fact?
Facts are hardcore and hence they cannot keep constantly changing; a fact remains a fact until proven otherwise. A fact states something that has actually occurred or happened, but we have no idea what’s outside the visible universe.
A matter of seeing is believing I suppose.
The truth is often considered to have a grander scope than facts.
However, something that is true for one person may not be true for everyone.
Is this true?
With the arrival of the Internet, the world has shrunk but unfortunately, we are all now on different platforms of truth.
For example. Facebook discovered that warning users that an article was false caused people to share that article even more.
It seems that the closer you get to the truth, the further you get from the world.
In other words, while you can get people to understand the facts, the facts don’t always matter.
Unfortunately, we don’t care about the truth as much as we typically think our highly social brains make discerning truth more difficult than we might hope because we often protect our previous beliefs rather than face inconvenient truths.
Why?
It’s because we’re all viscerally connected to truth on a fundamental, physical, and spiritual level. It’s part of who we are and like a virus, we instinctively reject dishonesty.
We learn to put on a mask (personality), to present an acceptable display, and hopefully, nobody will see the truth. That process spreads to other aspects of our lives, many times unknowingly.
To think about the future, you have to know about the present
– Prof. Hans Rosling, TEDtalks 2014
My understanding, in a nutshell, is that a hypothesis gets upgraded to a theory (closest you can get to fact) not possibly by chance occurrence. This is evidence that it is true, and will remain true until (if it ever happens) new evidence that disproves it comes to light.
Valid does not equate to true.
Sometimes theories are inducible and then prove by deduction,i.e gravity.
So why do we argue so much when facts about contentious topics are readily available?
If the data are gathered, shouldn’t we all be reaching the same conclusions?
Obviously not.
Presenting people with information about an issue in a nuanced way, rather than presenting them with pro-con arguments laid out in a simplified manner, leads people to have more complex and satisfying conversations about contentious issues.
True.
But our ears are dull of hearing, and our eyes have closed thanks to algorithms that control what we hear or see. They warp our perception of reality and reasoning by creating social media echo chambers.
We can share our worldview like never before, yet we often feel worlds apart when assessing our shared reality. Social media typically does not promote positive interactions.
Complacency lures in the comfort of our smartphones or our living room couch and sadly, we’re always the first victims of our lies because we have to believe them first before we can convince others to do so.
The result is that the difference between fact, truth, and opinion becomes blurred.
What can be changed?
Any sane person, regardless of nationality, color, or political stance, would aim for the first – truth and facts.
So why don’t we just get indisputable facts on the table?
Reaching the correct answer required participants to think carefully about the data.
We often reason with desired conclusions in mind and selectively recruit our mental faculties towards reaching those conclusions.
However if the people most capable of accurately interpreting data are at least as biased as the rest of us, how can we hope to find common ground on our most pressing and divisive issues?
Climate Change – Inequality, Covid-19, you name it. It’s hard to find the truth because there is so much falsehood out there making so much noise that the truth gets drowned out.
Everyone wants to be right, but practically speaking it’s usually more important for us to be socially accepted and internally consistent in our beliefs.
To divert from this human automation, we have to make a deliberate choice.
We have to actively decide to put on the brighter light and accept that doing so will sometimes help us in the longer run. Until we find systematic ways to improve our reasoning, we can all take steps towards improving political discourse by making efforts to challenge our personal beliefs and biases. Our values are more meaningful than their political utility, so if you stumble into a heated debate remember that the search for community, happiness, and truth transcends partisan boundaries.
Without being honest with ourselves we’ll never be honest with others.
Living in our own little world of self-created lies and avoiding the truth of our life experience takes great energy-producing even greater amounts of stress.
The first lie is the one we tell ourselves. It’s usually, “It didn’t happen” or “It didn’t happen like that.”
Sometimes it’s hard to find the truth because for too many people nowadays truth does not matter, only power. Donald Trump.
We have a natural instinct to search for answers and make sense of things.
These phenomena can be described by many different words
Ondinnink, Qualunquismo, Zlatwic,
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, 2nd President of the United States of America
Life is making mistakes and that’s the truth.
Here is what Alex Google might tell you.
Something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
Something is known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
Truth is known by actual experience or observation; something is known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
Something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
Law. Often, facts. An actual or alleged event or circumstance, as distinguished from its legal effect or consequence. Compare the question of fact, the question of law.
Truth, on the other hand, is a true state of a certain matter, person, place, thing or event. Truth is considered to be more archaic than fact. It is more subjective than resolute fact. Dictionary.com defines ‘truth’ as:
The true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
Conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
A verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
The state or character of being true.
Actuality or actual existence.
An obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
Honesty; integrity; truthfulness.
(Often initial capital letter) ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience: the basic truths of life.
Agreement with a standard or original.
Accuracy, as of position or adjustment.
Archaic. Fidelity or constancy.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
we repress the truth and our feelings about it with a lie to keep the pain at bay.
The present Covid-19 Pandemic might be warping our sense of reality however there is another pandemic that is shaping and will shape our future reality.
We – in many ways, things are way better than they were thanks to technology.
We can work from anywhere because we have the Internet and we have Zoom and all of those platforms.
If you are able to say technology, on the whole, has done well, it probably means you’re in a fairly privileged position.
There’s still a huge digital divide.
Even – there are billions of people who don’t have access to the Internet.
On paper, algorithms sound like the pinnacle of efficiency, but as they’ve become more ubiquitous, there’s a difference between potential and reality both must be separate for the survival of democracy and the forthcoming distribution and administration of any covid-19 vaccine worldwide.
The reality is that Algorithms will be used to distribute and decide who will get the Covid-19 vaccination.
When it arrives algorithms will continue to reflect the biases that it has been and is being trained into machines that are learning a representation of the world that is skewed.
Some will say that Data is neutral. It’s just numbers. It’s just data but the past dwells within our algorithms and the flaws that are in our technology are what’s the algorithm’s information it’s taking in.
I am not just talking about the U.S. presidential election in a few day’s time.
We have already seen artificial intelligence being used in voting or politics how they extend beyond the realm of computer vision.
If we’re defining success by how it’s looked like in the past and the past has been one where men like Donal trump were given an opportunity to Twitt falsehoods, spreading them with the aid of Facebook and others it’s no wonder who gets hired or fired?
Do you get that loan? Do you get insurance? Do you and I pay the same price for the same product purchased on the same platform?
Automating inequality.
Before a human looks at your resume, it gets vetted by algorithms written by software engineers who are involved in the system (without changing the system itself he the engineer is still going to reproduce algorithmic bias and algorithmic harms.)
Any sorts of algorithmic tools that are intended to be used, again, have to be verified for nondiscrimination before it’s even adopted.
We now have an AI system – right? – that can classify skin cancer as well as the top dermatologists but to change society to change what AI is learning in order to create what can be realized is going to be trusted into our lives by the inevitable economic depression.
So a Covid-19 vaccine is going to transfer real power into the world of Data and we can’t fight the power you don’t see, you don’t know about.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
If one takes a look at the state of the world which has gone through two world wars, numerous pandemics, natural disasters, you could say that its present state all boils down to us, our sense of belonging, our values, our separate cultures, greed, and power.
There is little point at this present moment in us dragging up our past history to ANSWER these questions other than it shows that colonization and slavery contributed to the world’s woes and that we are unable to act as one.
Take climate change.
There is no hope of reducing co2 emissions until we understand what being a human being means.
Until we begin to understand each other there is no hope of tackling any of the current world problems.
So in this post, I am concerned with what has happened in recent times to produce the current century of a world preoccupied with crisis management.
9/11 is my starting point.
Without understanding that Muslims believe that Allaha is the ultimate arbiter of their existence 9/11 was rightly or wrongly declared an act of war against Iraq.
Since then we’ve all been living in the shadow of the World Trade Center that unbridled the economic, cultural, and military power of the US – America First.
The result is continuing wars Iran, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan that are not clashes of civilizations but a clash of ideologies, values, and cultures.
Take Isreal- Palestinian.
It has been referred to as the world’s “most intractable conflict”, with the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip reaching 52 years.
There can be no peace between Muslims and Non-Muslims because what is happing in Israel goes beyond it.
The world is now preoccupied with crisis management so even if the Palestinian case is settled it won’t stop there.
Worldwide wide it is consumerist capitalism versus religion and tribal fundamentalism.
So if religion determines what we believe what does race tell us?
Nothing when it comes to COVID-19 it is non-races no matter whether you are Muslim or Christian the price of faith means nothing if you are dead.
All of us no matter what race you are, Black or White, Christian, Jews, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, call ourselves after the country we are born in only if the expression of religious beliefs is enshrined in the countries constitution with equal rights and freedoms. Where one can be our race and practice our religion.
A sense of self maybe?
Perhaps it is a race that makes us different from others.
The Irish were considered as being subhuman to the British many years ago before the Great Famine in the 1800s.
Lived segregated cultural traditions do not work. 700 hundred-odd years later, even in a Europen union setting Northern Ireland remains a divided society by religious beliefs, and a border created by colonization.
If we were paid a visit by another race that was intelligent to get here in the first place they would not give an F… what race we were or had been.
Not until the human race understand that is one race will there be any hope in addressing the present problems we all face.
This will remain so till there is a solution to the Israelis and Muslim Palestinian conflict which in my opinion can now only be solved with a one-state solution, not two-states which has no hope of removing the inherent flaws and injustices or resentment of both sides.
All are intertwined forces that are both tearing apart and bring together the world.
What am I saying here is that the Middle East conflict is not just over religion or race it is also over land.
The 9/ 11 atrocity claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world but now many people are unable to remember the date of the tragedy – 11 September 2001 – 19 years ago the beginning of the Iraq invasion. An invasion that totally and utterly did not understand that Islam is not their religion, it is their life and remains so to this present day.
Instead of world leaders making an effort to prevent the Iraqi invasion according to Mr. Bush, there were no options but to use force which has now lead to one of the most inhuman periods in our recent history.
Recent work also shows that Islamophobia in the West is abetting the Islamophobia in China, with global leaders willing to stay silent about the treatment of Muslims.
These days what one hears over and over is the phrase ” What is needed is “
On top of this, we now have a world pandemic, climate change, America, and Britain first, the erosion of any long term policies by social media, the smartphone, and unregulated artificial intelligence, with religion shrinking in a digital world run by Five Titanic digital companies, run for profit.
It might not be possible to carry on in a world of two deities God and Allah.
If you ask me it’s all ridiculous the last ones standing to go to heaven and who will be there to greet them, is God, Allah, or Jesus? It just doesn’t make sense, intellectual, religious-philosophical, or any other sense.
The world whether it is China and the Muslim or whatever has to come together in new ways.
Wars that are now seen by moderate Muslims as virtually and ultimately as a war against Muslims and Islam across the ethic board.
What does the word Islam actually mean?
It means surrender.
And if we want a world worth living on, surrender is what we will all have to do in the end.
Shalom in Hebrew means peace.
Hebrew: shalom aleichom meaning-peace be upon you.
Arabic: salam alaikum meaning-peace be upon you.
So take the knee, not to race, not to religion, but tothe planet.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucks in the bin.
but despite the bad press, Islam gets its a religion with enormous wells of compassion that is not promoted in the west.
In an interconnected world where there is no such thing as sovereignty because globalization means that nation-states submit themselves to international treaties and international agreements that are not always in their best interests.
The recent economic crisis that started in 2007 and now the coming economic depression and the continuing pandemic will prove that sovereignty of nations being subsumed by international bodies cuts both ways as the global economy is tightly interconnected and hence, cannot be regulated by nations in isolation.
Here is a country that on 30 June 1997, the final embers of its empire came to an end with the 99- years lease on Hong Kong’s New Territories.
Never before has a country passed a colony directly to a communist regime that does not even pretend to respect conventional democratic values.
However the British Empire – for all its messy crimes and misdemeanors – was equally praiseworthy.
The empire was and is not just a story of domination and subjection but something more complicated: the creation of novel or hybrid societies in which notions of governance, economic assumptions, religious values and morals, ideas about property, and conceptions of justice, conflicted and mingled, to be reinvented, refashioned, tried out or abandoned.
The question is are we now to witnessing the final act.
The non-recognition of England is already being used by its national broadcasting company the BBC referring to England as the four nations.
In fact, England is already fragmented.
English nationalists if such a thing exists appear to be blind to the breakup of England.
Today, a hundred years on, the world is witnessing remarkable self-destruction in England.
An uneasy transition has or is taking place, from a decaying colonial legacy to a country that sees life through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram lies, manipulation, in every area…..with a global crisis forming, which is not just a Pandemic but an Economic depression with mass unemployment.
The question now is whether British people can continue to play their part in the development of the modern world.
It has to pump trillions of quantitative easing money into its banks at the cost of ten years of Austerity. Dumping the EU its largest market on the results of a non-legally- totally false informed non legally binding referendum while building two Aircraft carriers and replacing worthless nuclear submarines, while 8.4 million its people alone are living in sub-standard housing with 400,000 people are either homeless or at risk of being homeless relying on foodbanks.
The people themselves – about half who no longer give a rat’s a— about England, who are now hellbent on their smartphones, Ipads, creating an unrealistic, relativistic, melting pot utopia.
These people will be living on the English purse for some time, not the stuff of which national pride is made. They have other priorities dedicated to its demise.
One would have to wonder why migrants risking life and limb to get here.
Perhaps it because all the servants are leaving.
These are the strange things happening, that demonstrate quite clearly what is wrong with Britain – and, probably, the rest of the ‘developed’ world, both devotion to business and profit, not people.
“We convinced many countries, many countries – and I did this myself for the most part – not to use Huawei because we think it’s an unsafe security risk,” the US president Donald Dump said.
(This is a man who seems to wake up every morning wondering what controversy he can provoke, what headlines he can create.
Diplomacy, or the lack of it, can be a complicated business. We’ve learned that from observing Donald Trump.
Both his campaign and presidency is marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.
This is a man far more consumed with himself than with the nation’s well-being.
From that moment of combustion, it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering rather than thoughtful politics.)
With the UK now becoming the US junior partner, (one of the most unreliable partners for any country) who cares when a phenomenal’ trade deal beyond Nigel Farage is promised, providing it sends its new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth to the South China Seas with American warplanes, and supplies the Arabs with bombs to finish off Yeham.
It’s one thing to get rid of the Chinese firm Huawei and its 5G infrastructure and in return to sour the world’s second-largest economy behind the US, which has more money in the bank than any other country.
Indeed three of the world’s 10 biggest sovereign wealth funds are Chinese, together holding more than $1.5tn (£988bn) in assets.
Not too long ago the UK was one of China’s favorite places to invest – not anymore.
Beijing’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, warned: “China wants to be UK’s friend and partner. But if you treat China as a hostile country, you would have to bear the consequences.”
China operates an Authoritarian form of capitalism against Anglo – American capitalism which is the root of the problem. Global supremacy.
China’s investments may well be subordinate to its National Development and reform commission, but the staggering truth of Huawei is that the US does not want China to be a superpower when it comes to technology.
With the pandemic being used to push the protection of businesses the world population will eventually be tracked.
Both the US and England might well end up as viewed as failed states due to the handling of the COVID-19 with both countries ending up with up distant and withdrawn people far from enhanced by COVID-19.
Not too long ago, the UK did a 79 million deal to import pig semen from China for stemcell research.
Its not stemcell research it needs. It needs a lot of fixing but isn’t that what the next four years are going to be about?
What is needs is some Face Recognition and a written constitution. All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Because many of our opinions aren’t based on reason but on emotion.
Who is right, instead of what’s the truth.
We try to convince people with arguments that appeal to our values, not theirs.
We’re more connected than ever, yet we seem to stray only further from mutual understanding because we only interact with the news and online friends that share our opinions.
The internet has made slipping into groupthink easier than ever.
Indeed, plenty of today’s miscommunication can be blamed on the receiver’s inability to focus. Instead of reacting to what people are actually saying, they engage in a sort of mental telepathy and respond to what they think they are really after, creating negativity bias.
This bias is responsible for our tendency to only focus on and accept what concurs with our existing worldview.
A major cause of miscommunication is reflected on Facebook/Twitter and other platforms. Worthless digital echo chambers that provide a space to air our opinions and find instant reinforcement, feeding a trend of modern tribalism.
Now thanks to Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd we are confronted with a rebalancing of not just the world Economy but history itself.
There is currently a cultural war raging across the Western World over the role of statues and place names.
This rebalancing is one in which people are actually talking about the same things, but differ on what these things mean.
The removal of public statues of contentious individuals in my view does little to help.
Are we going to tear down monuments? It would be better to take a chisel and hammer and recontextualize them or better install a flat-screen that can be activated with a smartphone that pays a video to explain the individual’s historic significance
with modern thinking to reflect where the prevailing values of to days society is in an explicit manner to prevent miscommunication.
( These flat-screens need not cost anything they could be sponsored.)
Even if you don’t identify with your ideas anymore, others will.
It is not possible to bulldoze our way in the future to make way for a more ‘multi-cultural’ statue.
A logical fallacy is a flaw in reasoning.
However, each idea is a concept (or model) about how the world really works that can be used to understand and solve real problems and predict real outcomes.
So don’t expect to change their minds in a day. Allow time for ideas to settle in and for people to discover the logic in an argument. When those values are not shared a debate needs to be started.
The legacy of slavery, imperialism, and race aren’t the only reasons for campaigning against a statue. No-one would suggest the retention of a statue of Hitler.
Everyone is part of various cultures and subcultures, all influencing the way we look at things and the paradigms we live in.
Humans create cultures to make sense of reality.
Our brains delete, misconstrue, and misinterpret according to filters–biases, triggers, assumptions, beliefs, habits, and mental models.
Each specialism functions as a lens through which we interpret the world–whether that’s economics, sociology, or feminism.
That makes it hard to talk about issues from the same perspective- mismatched expectations.
Ever since our ancestors uttered their first grunts, miscommunication has been a part of our daily lives, we’re inclined to see our ideas as an extension of ourselves.
Misunderstanding is the cause of 90% of all conflicts.
Legalese” is another culprit.
It’s the formal and technical language that often makes government documents sound overly complex, forcing people into hiring lawyers for their legal issues.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Bye, the way the Tsar of Russia footing more than a quarter of the bill to build Nelson column and Hitler would have nicked it.
Just in case you are wondering what is inside the Washington Monument?
Giving the state of current world affairs which feels like the entire world is being pushed off a cliff you could not be blamed for struggling to be optimistic about what the future holds.
Its a worrying time and one would have to ask where is all of this going.
You don’t need to be either a genius or an idiot to see that we are at a turning point.
The pandemic has and is exposing that there is a complete lack of any global plan of action either to fight COVID-19 or the coming economic disaster that is going to take more lives.
It is obvious that we are entering an era of global debt/defaults/nationalism/and a transfer to technology.
When one looks at the US that is trying to undermine the WHO, wreck Climate change, and put a spanner in the works of EU, and other world trade agreements it is obvious that it has only an interest in putting America first, which it has achieved with the number of dead and sick people in the world from COVID -19.
There is an itinerant contradiction between nationalism and globalism between loyalty to your nation and global solidarity.
It is now paying the price when there is really no contradiction when it comes to a global pandemic. If a vaccine was discovered outside the USA they are not going to say no we won’t use it till there is an American vaccine.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that it is no longer leading the world but here is nobody to fill the vacuum.
We can’t deal with either the pandemic or climate change without a 100% cooperation.
Both emphasize that humans are flawed beings, maybe not quite yet bonkers but not far off it.
The world is full of them and they come in many shapes, forms, and types but the current level of stupidity cannot go unnoticed. Climate Change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing wars, and conflicts, the biasing filtering racism, the distribution, and attachment of wealth, our tolerance to the spread of false news, you name it and some idiot will believe it.
Look at history and it is clear that this has always been the case.
We are all idiots, it’s just a matter if how you handle your stupidity that determines whether you are a dumbass or just a plain moron.
To achieve any kind of sanity or serenity we must weed out the idiots.
But how?
The mark of an unintelligent person is that he doesn’t see the difference between his knowledge and his opinions and thinks that all of his beliefs qualify as absolute knowledge. Furthermore, an unintelligent person sticks to his opinions as knowledge even when new knowledge completely contradicts them.
Intelligence is the basic ingredient that helps a human being experience unintelligent.
Perhaps this is why we refer to Artificial Intelligence as artificial.
Our social development, schooling, gender acquisition, peer group interaction, and parental and sibling interactions have an enormous impact on shaping how we respond to social stimuli.
“Seeing is believing and you are who you meet.”
One only has to look at what is supposed to be an intelligent individual walking around in the middle of a killer pandemic without masks. They are also idiots, without even realizing it themselves. They chose to put themselves only first above everything or everybody else.
Why do they do it is ostensibly hard to fathom.
Why do we need intelligence in the first place?
To understand ourselves and other people regardless of race, sexuality, culture, nationality, or religion, and whether we relate to each other as individuals, couples, families, tribesmen, or citizens, so we can live peacefully and harmoniously together.
To understand the hopes and desires that unite us as human beings so that we can govern the world with fairer rules and laws that make us more equal and that we can join forces in initiatives that benefit all of us. This elimination of artificial scarcity and inequality through understanding and cooperation means that we don’t have to dominate, fight, or kill each other to better our lives.
To understand that protecting and revitalizing the delicate ecosystems that make the planet livable for humans and all other living creatures and plants. Use Earth’s resources to make advanced tools and machinery with which to produce and refine foods, medicines, energy sources, housing, infrastructure, sanitation services, and many other useful things.
We all rely on both knowledge and opinions to make decisions in daily life, but the mark of an intelligent person is that he will try to gain as much knowledge as possible about the subject that interests him so that he doesn’t have to rely too heavily on opinions when making decisions.
The patterns that we participate in and that surround us daily shape our perceptions of what behavior, language, and mannerisms are “normal and natural.”
As you can tell, we are still very far from having solved all of these issues, so there is plenty to do for intelligent people.
Ignorance causes the spread of the virus. One only has to look at absurdity for not wearing a mask.
These idiots defy the level of stupidity and are usually the ones who end up crying for help, sick, or dead. If the virus continues to spread without decline, these are the ones who need to be held accountable.
The worst reason for being an idiot is just plain ignorance, and for that, there is no cure.
We all in this together, which the advertising industry has long recognized piggybacking on everything from fear to everyone an idiot except Donal Trump.
In him, one can see Anger and Hate, Riots, and Climate Murder, Pseudo-Activism, and Genuine empowerment, Solidarity, and Division.
One of the challenges with uncertainty is it reminds us of things that are out of our control.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Are we going to tear down monuments? 
It would be better to take a chisel and hammer and recontextualize them or better install a flat-screen that can be activated with a smartphone that pays a video to explain the individual’s historic significance
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