THE BEADY EYE. NO COMMENT VIDEO’S
19 Friday Apr 2024
Posted in Beady eye videos, Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE. NO COMMENT VIDEO’S
Category Archives: Uncategorized
THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. ISRAEL WILL NEVER BE A SECURE NATION.
18 Thursday Apr 2024
Posted in Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. ISRAEL WILL NEVER BE A SECURE NATION.
( Two minute read)
Indeed, Israel’s deliberate, industrial-scale murder of the Palestinian people under the pretext of “self-defence” won’t enhance its security or secure its future.
Rather, it will produce greater insecurity and instability, further isolate Israel and undermine its chances for long-term survival in a predominantly hostile region.
Without shedding its colonial regime and embracing normal statehood by excepting the rights of all its people in a one state solution ( not two state) its demise is not in the so distant future.
Israel’s colonial nature presently supported by the USA, dominates its behaviour at each and every turn wasting countless opportunities to end its occupation and live in peace with its neighbours.
It has multiplied the number of illegal Jewish settlements and settlers on stolen Palestinian lands and networked them through special bypass roads and other planning projects, creating a dual system, a superior, dominating one for the Jews and an inferior one for the Palestinians.
In the absence of peace and in the shadow of colonisation, the country has slid further towards fascism, enshrining Jewish supremacy into its laws and extending it to all of historic Palestine.
As they tightened their siege of the Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air prison, and dropped all pretence of ever allowing it to unite with its Palestinian hinterland in a sovereign Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is undermining its own institutions, and any chances of peace based or coexistence between two peoples.
To have any chance of living in peace it must address the root causes of the conflict with the Palestinians, namely their dispossession, occupation and siege.
Even with USA/ UK backing it has no chance of surviving among all the indigenous people of the region, who have coalesced more than ever before.
Israel can no longer use its fanciful theological claims to justify its violent racist practices. God does not sanction the slaughter of innocent children.
Israel has no good options after the war ends. If it continued on the same destructive path the demise of Israel “as we know it” is around the corner regardless of how much Palestinian, Arab and Israeli blood it sheds.
—————-
The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians.
We have to understand: Israelis aren’t going anyplace, and Palestinians aren’t going anyplace.
Discussions of a two-state solution is now cobblers.
A decent number of Israelis and Palestinians have come to conclude that it’s not a solution, that the nature of Israeli behaviour, especially in the West Bank, makes a Palestinian state unviable.
How exactly, or who would drawn the borders, never mind decide how or who rules.
(A substantial line of thought [in Israel] is that it’s more important that Israel be Jewish than democratic.)
There are alternatives to a two-state solution — including a one-state solution, a confederation.
One of the biggest challenges for Israelis is balancing the need for a Jewish state and a democratic state. This could and can be achieved with a written constitution approved by international law.
“If you have a one-state solution that gives citizenship to all of the natural-born residents of Mandatory Palestine — which includes Gaza and the West Bank — you don’t have a Jewish majority,”
It’s hard to imagine this kinds of possibilities in this moment, but the need for change is clear.
Iranian leaders have been among the sharpest critics of Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. Tehran has made no secret of its praise for those who attack Israelis, including the Hamas-led attack that Israel says killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7.
Iran blames Israel for the April 1 airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus that killed seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two IRGC generals. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being behind the attack.
If Israel was responsible, it would be the latest in a long line of attacks against Iranian targets.
A shadow war between Iran and Israel has grown over the years and with the recent Iran drone and missiles attack you may rest assured that if Israel targets Iranians nuclear sites the USA will be over the moon.
That will trigger not just a major regional war but threaten the very existence of us all.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT COMES TO IRIAN?
15 Monday Apr 2024
Posted in Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT COMES TO IRIAN?
Tags
History., Iran, Iranian Israel, Israel, middle-east, politics
( Ten minute read)
Iran has scarcely been out of the headlines in recent months. But how far back does the history of Iran stretch?
Like me I am sure we know little or nothing of it history.
Long before Iran came to be known in the mid-twentieth century as one of the countries of the Middle East, for nearly two and a half millennia it was known to the Western world as Persia.
So here is a starting point for an exploration of the history of modern Iran.
The Islamic Republic has been in a state of influx almost from its start. It has managed to survive in this state of perpetual crisis — and sometimes even benefited from it — because confrontation, or anticipation of confrontation with a nemesis, that is with the United States, played into its hand. It gives the regime the pretention of legitimacy as the core to national resistance against Western hegemony and regime change. The sense of emergency hence contributed to its survival. Moreover, the ruling clergy and its associated groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, although a small minority devoid of the true support of a majority of Iranians, survived in power probably because of a strong sense of group solidarity.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented the first time in the modern history of the Muslim world that a movement dominated by the clergy took control of a state. Historically, this is a very unusual event, not just in the Islamic world, but anywhere. Religion and state were seen as two pillars of stability in Iranian society.
Shi’ism as a belief system, supported and reinforced by the region’s geopolitical complexity, preserved Iran’s socio-cultural identity.
Through the preservation of the language, Iran managed to preserve a collective memory of its past, which is also rather unusual.
Basically, the memory of Islamic conquest became the foundation myth for the sense of Islamic identity that emerged in Egypt, Syria and eventually Iraq. Iran was different. It preserved its memories of pre-Islamic times and grew quite proud of them.
Iran’s oil industry was basically a colonial industry created and developed by the British. A massive amount of the revenue went to the British government while a much smaller percentage went to the Iranian government. But even that share of the revenue was crucial for a nearly bankrupt Iranian state in the post-WWI era. It provided the necessary funds for greater centralization; for enforcing modern reforms; for strengthening the armed forces; and for the creation of an autocratic regime under the Pahlavis that no longer sought the traditional support of the religious establishment.
The Allied occupation of Iran in September 1941 was a rude shock to most Iranians.
Facing the soldiers of the Red Army, the British Indian Army, and soon after American military personnel seemed almost a surreal reversal of two decades of Pahlavi assurances of Iran’s reclaimed sovereignty and the might of the Iran’s Imperial Armed Forces.
The occupation triggered one of the most eventful episodes in Iran’s modern history and revealed persistent themes in the country’s recent past: the struggle for democracy. The gradual return to autocratic practices after 1953 put an undue end to Iran’s perilous experiment with participatory politics. Instead, an era of stability, albeit politically repressive, began to set in, and with the exception of a brief interlude in the early 1960s, it remained essentially unchanged until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The exile of Ayatollah Khomeini and the shah’s success, at least for a while, in silencing the forces of opposition generated a sense of royal self-confidence with an almost prophetic mission. The decade of 1963 to 1973 represented, with all its shortcomings, the best of the shah’s years: an age of economic development, success in foreign policy, and relative popularity at home.
Iran in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed an era of cultural florescence, a period remarkable for artistic creativity, the rise of new talents, and greater international exposure but also greater state sponsorship. Expressions of artistic and intellectual dissent, often transmitted through a language of symbols, emerged in cinema, poetry, and popular music.
The tumultuous events that led to the revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran were a classic example of modern popular revolution. Out of a broad alliance of Islamic tendencies there emerged a militant clerical leadership, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Over the course of the following decade, Khomeini played a decisive part in defining the Islamic Republic.
Between August 1978 and February 1979, a period of less than seven months, Iran witnessed a revolution that brought down the Pahlavi regime and abolished the institution of monarchy, wiped out the privileges of the Pahlavi elite, and significantly weakened its secularized middle classes. In its stead Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates created the Islamic Republic, which aimed to establish the “Guardianship of the Jurist” (welayat-e faqih) as the only legitimate model of governance.
That Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts put their mark on the Islamic Revolution was more than an accident of history. At least since 1961, and with a greater resolve since 1970, clerical Shi‘ism explored ideological Islam and contemplated juridical authority as an alternative to secular power.
In less than a year after victory of the revolution in February 1979, the new regime managed to consolidate its base, build new institutions, and eliminate its contenders for power.
It conducted a referendum on the change of regime to an Islamic republic, ratified a new constitution, elected a parliament, elected a president to office, and established revolutionary courts, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts. All the while the newly established republic was engaged in major domestic and international crises that threatened its very existence.
A crisis of great magnitude was in progress, one that shook Iran’s relations with the outside world and initiated an adversarial encounter with the United States that shaped their relationship for decades to come.
—————–
1979 November – Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage inside the US embassy in Tehran. They demand the extradition of the Shah, in the US at the time for medical treatment, to face trial in Iran.
The hostage crisis of November 1979 started an international tremor that for the following fourteen months would enrage the United States, preoccupy world media, appal public opinion worldwide, and irreparably damage the image of the Islamic Republic.
1980 22 September – Start of Iran-Iraq war, which lasts for eight years.
1981 January – The American hostages are released, ending 444 days in captivity.
1989 November – The US releases 567 million dollars of frozen Iranian assets.
The magnitude of this paradigmatic shift, and the way a conservative Shi‘i establishment transformed into a radical force of dissent, becomes all the more striking when we set the Islamic Revolution in the broader political and cultural contexts of the past five centuries.
2002 January – US President George Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil”, warning of the proliferation of long-range missiles being developed in these countries.
2002 September – Russian technicians begin construction of Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr despite strong objections from US.
2003 December – 40,000 people are killed in an earthquake in south-east Iran. The city of Bam is devastated
.2007 October – US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran, the toughest since it first imposed sanctions almost 30 years ago.
2009 September – Iran admits that it is building a uranium enrichment plant near Qom, but insists it is for peaceful purposes.
The country test-fires a series of medium- and longer-range missiles that put Israel and US bases in the Gulf within potential striking range.
2015 July – After years of negotiations, world powers reach deal with Iran on limiting Iranian nuclear activity in return for lifting of international economic sanctions. The deal gives UN nuclear inspectors extensive but not automatic access to Iranian sites.
2018 May-June – President Trump announces the US withdrawal from the 2015 international deal on Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran in turn warns that it will begin increasing its uranium enrichment capacity if the deal collapses as a result of the US move.
2020 January – Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, responsible for Iran’s military support for the Syrian government, killed in a US air strike at Baghdad Airport, prompting Iranian threats of retaliation.
2024 April Iran fires hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation of Israel attack on its Embassy in Syria.
If the current regime caves under another popular upheaval, the outcome may not be promising at all.
The recent Middle East popular movements of political reform, such as the Arab Spring, have by and large failed. Likewise, any attempt toward a regime change through military option or covert operation almost definitely helps strengthen the regime’s popular base. On the other hand, if it is left to its own devices, will Iran become another China? Whether it moves away from a hostile ideological position to a more pragmatic regime with capitalist economy and friendlier posture toward the outside world is a matter of speculation. The recent U.S. departure from the Five Plus One nuclear deal with Iran, and the impending re-imposition of sanctions, does not offer a bright prelude for success of the latter option.
You only have to look at Israeli and the Iranian recent UN Security Council presentations after Iran’s direct attack to see that the Middle East is now a tinder box that no amount of Verbal is going to solve.
Iran’s ambassador repeated Tehran’s claim that it was responding in “self-defence” after the April 1 explosion at its Damascus consulate in Syria, for which Iran blamed Israel.
Israel will exact a price from Iran in response to Saturday’s attack when the time is right.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : WHEN THIS WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALISTIAN ENDS WHAT SORT OF COUNTRY WILL ISRAEL BE? NEVER MIND WHAT’S LEFT OF PALISTIAN.
04 Thursday Apr 2024
Posted in Israel and Palestine, Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : WHEN THIS WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALISTIAN ENDS WHAT SORT OF COUNTRY WILL ISRAEL BE? NEVER MIND WHAT’S LEFT OF PALISTIAN.
( Fifteen minute read)
As global attention has turned to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, many Israelis are on a parallel warpath to convince the world they are victims, not aggressors.
Indeed any country has the right to defend its self but not to extent that it creates a genocide.
The slogan Yachad Nenatzeach!, Together We Will Win!, is everywhere in Israel:
Once there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … after we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom.
Of all forms of human error, prophecy is the most avoidable.
Israelis’ sense of security has been undermined.
The fear among Israelis is that if Hamas can do it once they can do it again.
By moving methodically through the Strip, Israel slowly pushed over a million Gazans into Rafah along Gaza’s southern border. It is only now poised to take Hamas’s last remaining stronghold, with international opposition, even among Israel’s closest friends, reaching a verbal fever pitch, the UK/USA are breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel.
The UK government does not directly supply Israel with weapons, but does grant export licences for British companies to sell arms to the country.
————————-
When people fight a war that begins with a murderous genocidal attack by one side on the other, the side that was attacked is less inclined to be empathetic towards its enemies.
However the demolition of much of Gaza will make it difficult for Israel as a society to function.
“More of the same”
Continuation of a war in the Gaza Strip, albeit at a diminished intensity, dragging on for an extended period, turning into a protracted war of attrition, resembling the eighteen-year Israeli presence in the security strip in southern Lebanon or the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan aligns well with the alt-right’s so-called Decisive Plan.
While everyone’s attention would remain fixated on Gaza, where the primary efforts of the regular army would continue to be concentrated, local settlement guards or militias functioning as irregular or semiregular units, akin to paramilitaries, could turn the West Bank into hell on Earth.
———————
Is there a way back from the hardness of Israeli hearts in the face of hundreds of thousands of people who because of our war are fighting like animals for pieces of food, a safe place where their children can lay down their heads, medicine, clean water and dignity? The answer is probably yes, but its going to take generations.
On the current trajectory of Israel’s attacks from the air, sea and the ground, Gaza looks set to be an enclave with 2.3 million people essentially living in rubble.
The fear among Palestinians is that Israel wants a “second Nakba”. Palestinians use the word Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — to refer to the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave — or fled in fear – upon the formation of Israel in 1948. Many Palestinians believe the reason Israel is bombing Gaza so heavily is to make it unliveable so that eventually the majority, if not all, of the citizens, facing starvation, will force their way into Egypt.
The 1948 expulsion remains an animating force in Palestinian identity, and it changed the demographics of Israel.
The Jerusalem Post — has carried a prominent opinion piece advocating the emptying of Gaza. That in itself is extraordinary — the most read English-language newspaper for Jewish communities around the world running the argument that the new home for Palestinians in Gaza should be Egypt.
Flattening the whole strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.
Joel Roskin, an academic from Israel’s Bar Ilan University, said that the major portions of Gaza were now considerably incapacitated and cannot be simply fixed. “Rather, the damaged and destroyed structures must be completely torn down. The tunnelled – and consequently exploded and bulldozed — soil must undergo extensive environmental and engineering rehabilitation … the facts demonstrate that the northern Sinai Peninsula is an ideal location to develop a spacious resettlement for the people of Gaza. Its open areas, along with the existing infrastructure, can easily host large-scale development projects that, if led by the Chinese and supported by local labour, for example, can easily mature in just one to two years.” Bull shit!
Writing in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Sfard questioned who Israelis would be after the war, asking “how many tons of coldness and indifference have settled inside us in order for us to turn high-rise buildings into dust, promenades and plazas into ruins and a million and a half people into displaced people who have nothing?
“And what will become of a society whose media outlets, which provide it with information about its deeds, have refrained for over 10 weeks from bringing even a single interview – a single one! – with a resident of Gaza to tell what’s happening to them; who censor the pictures of the dead children and the weeping mothers, the children that we killed and the mothers whose bereavement we caused? The Israeli TV channels are shaping our collective perceptions not only by means of what they show, but also, and perhaps mainly, by means of what they’re hiding from us.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects any suggestion of ethnic cleansing, insisting that the primary aim of Israel’s military action is to “destroy Hamas”.
It’s debatable whether this can actually be done — Hamas is in part an ideology and idea, it’s also one of many groups whose aims are “resistance” to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, along with Egypt, its blockade of Gaza.
Hamas, in turn, makes no secret of its ultimate aim – its charter commits it to the eradication of the state of Israel.
The longer term issue for Israel is that an entire new generation of young Palestinians could be radicalised by seeing their homes and sometimes their families destroyed.
At this crossroads, neither Israel, Iran nor Hezbollah wants an all-out war that would have terrible consequence for all of them. But no side seems ready to stop the slide towards it.
That Israel must, instead, finally agree to a two-state solution under which Palestinians have their own state is a grave mistake.
WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE IN A COUNTRY THAT WILL NEED MORE THAN WIRE FENCING OR A WALL TO MAKE IT SECURE IN THE FUTURE.
There will be a profound shift in Israel’s concept of security: many believe they must now protect themselves.
Several proposals have been put forward to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas with the U.S., Egypt and Qatar pushing to de-escalate in phases. But major sticking points about who should govern Gaza are blocking progress as Israel doesn’t want to govern and is against the top contender, the Palestinian Authority. So why is coming to a consensus for a ceasefire or peace deals so difficult?
There’s now only a one state solution.
———————
As the conflict with Hamas bleeds across borders, is wider violence inevitable?
Even if the Gaza war winds down, Israelis are shifting their gaze toward their northern border, preparing themselves for a potential new war — with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iranian-backed group is better armed than Hamas, with long-range missiles that could paralyze the country.
Historical precedents abound: paramilitary groups of this kind take orders from local commanders or charismatic political figures and are loyal only to them, not directly beholden to the central authority.
Israel’s war with Hamas has served to energise already existing tensions.
Without an end in sight, at present – the war is in danger of creating its own dynamic. And for now at least, the reality of the cross-border exchanges has a greater clarity than the rhetoric enfolding them.
———–
What sort of country will Israel be after this war? And will Gaza be liveable, or will its 2.3 million citizens be forced to move to the Sinai desert in Egypt?
No body really knows how this is going to end.
Even if the Israel pushes what remains of the Palestinians into the Sinai Desert and succeeds in dismantling Hamas as an organized military force in Gaza, it will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group.
Even if Israel changes it leader there is little room for wishful thinking here.
The likelihood of a left-wing government materializing due to internal protests appears scant. Far more probable is that Israelis will be drawn to a hawkish leader exemplifying strength and authority, typically a retired general with a distinguished military career, with a capacity to assume responsibility and navigate intra-Jewish divides.
Any withdrawal by Israel, including under a hostage deal, would create a vacuum that Hamas would do everything it can to fill as it emerges from its tunnels.
Those measures might assist in holding off Hamas in the coming months, but Israel still needs a long-term solution. That means actively replacing Hamas while it is still underground.
Discussing a plan for the future governance of Gaza brings with it political complications.
Who will replace Hamas?
Gaza will become an area in deep crisis.
——————-
It’s time for Israel’s allies to say: ‘Enough’
To stop selling arms.
When is a war crime not a war crime? Answer: when it’s done by an allied nation.
This will only happen when western governments, whose history of hypocrisy that fill many pages of history’s sad story of human exploitation, decide the political cost to them of ignoring the Palestinian deaths inflicted by their own weapons is higher than the cost of the current policy.
Key actors—Palestinian, Israeli, regional, and global—have staked out very different, often antagonistic positions on critical questions. UN interference is necessary, and it should take the shape of an interim, multinational peacekeeping force similar to the one that was tasked to facilitate the transition to an independent East Timor in 1999 or the NATO-led force deployed to Kosovo in the same year.
————–
The world we live in is changing at an astonishing pace. New technologies and ways of thinking are rapidly altering the way that human beings live, do business, communicate and interact with other. In just 40 years we have gone from rotary dial phones to 5G smart devices capable of accessing the collective knowledge of humanity. And the field of warfare is no exception.
Approaches to warfare that 30, 20 or even five years ago would have guaranteed success on the battlefield have now been made redundant. It can no longer be assumed that because a tactic worked in a previous conflict that it will work today. As the current Ukrain war with Russia shows modern day warfare does not require solders on the ground.
Today’s conflicts can also extend to the domains of cyber and space.
In the cyber domain, orchestrated hacking campaigns conducted on the behalf of nations can disable and shut down key pieces of civilian infrastructure and institutions, leaving nations in a state of panic and vulnerable to attack.
New technologies are also constantly rewriting the rule book for warfare – AI – Drones.
It seems likely that the coming years will see a major focus on soldier systems that ‘declutter’ the battlefield for soldiers by providing information on threats and targets as they are needed.
The decision on whether what that soldier sees is a friend or a foe comes entirely down to their own judgement and discretion. Making the decision can be extremely difficult in a confusing battlefield environment. To make life easier for soldiers, future weapons may have electronically flags popping up in the sight, telling them whether they’re aiming at a friend. Prior to firing, the weapon would send a small electromagnetic pulse at the target. If no response is received back from a friendly transceiver, the soldier will know they are not aiming at their own troops and will be able to confidently proceed.
So, while modern conflicts are being waged in the most complex environments in history, are there solutions to bring clarity to the minds of both soldiers in the field and leaders. NO.
We see something terrible and then it disappears.
What are the rules of war?
It’s a timely question in the wake of attacks on civilians, aid workers and hospitals in conflict zones around the world.
However enforcing out of date rules can be difficult.
For example, the five veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., China, Russia, the U.K. and France — must vote unanimously to pursue a resolution that might call for an investigation, refer a case to a court for trial, threaten sanctions or propose another motion. But often one or several of these countries has a vested interest in the conflict in question.
You would be more than naïve if you do not realise by now that Israel is not currently using AI. Indeed its has a program called Lavender choosing targets to bomb. An artificial intelligence tool developed for the war, marked 37,000 Palestinians as suspected Hamas operatives.
Mistakes were treated statistically. SUCH AS THE RECENT KILLING OF SIX INTERNATIONAL AID WORKERS.
We need to keep saying that these protections are valuable, they’re worthy, and they speak to our common humanity.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN WE REFLECT UPON OUR ORIGINS IT IS DIFFICULT TO AVOID THE MOST ESSENTIAL QUESTION OF THEM ALL – WHAT MAKES US HUMANS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS?
01 Monday Apr 2024
Posted in 2024 the year of disconnection, A solution to Climate change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., CAPITALISM IS INCOMPATIBLE IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE., Climate Change., Collective stupidity., Dehumanization., Digital age., Disaster Capitalism., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., HUMAN ABILITIES., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Inequality., INTELLIGENCE., Language, Migrants/Refugees., Modern day life., Monetization of nature, Natural selection., OUR BRAINS, Our Common Values., Purpose of life., Reality., Robot citizenship., Society, State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Technology's, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The new year 2024, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, VALUES, War, 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.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN WE REFLECT UPON OUR ORIGINS IT IS DIFFICULT TO AVOID THE MOST ESSENTIAL QUESTION OF THEM ALL – WHAT MAKES US HUMANS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS?
Tags
Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Environment, Inequility, Sustainability, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.
( Twelve minute read)
Our brain have difficulties in accepting that we actually are animals and thus highly dependent on nature where nothing exists alone.
—————
Science has organized human evolution into six levels.
We share the first five with other creatures, while the sixth level makes us unique – language.
Our use of language and given rise to the sciences and philosophical thoughts that now are transforming the entire biosphere, while abusing it to such a degree that we are currently on the verge of destroying it completely.
It is difficult to understanding that extinctions are not features of this civilization, but virtually all past civilizations have faced this fate. We might be more advanced technologically now, but this gives little comfort as we are not immune to the threats that undid our ancestors.
MAYBE THIS IS THE MAIN REASON THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO ADDRESS THE CLIMATE CRISIS, WHICH IS NOW AN INDUSTRY RATHER THAN A THREATH TO OUR VERY EXISTENCE, to the biodiversity, to food security, access to fresh water, the lack of which will result in wars.
Unfortunately we are still animals living in a world that is changing the atmosphere’s chemistry, which is becoming a reality, not tomorrow, but right now and that’s with the number of people we already have.
Indeed the very technology we now rely on bring new unprecedented challenges.
From the emergence of Homo sapiens, it took roughly 300,000 years before one billion of us populated the Earth, with people evolving into their current form some 200,000 years ago.
(Huts, 2 million years ago. Boats, 900,000 years ago. Cooking, 500,000 years ago. Javelins, 400,000 years ago, Glue, 200,000 years ago. Clothing possibly 170,000 years ago.)
“Behavioural modernity,” evolved 50,000-65,000 years ago. It took 15,000 to 10,000 years to start growing stable foods.
The planet most likely will surpass eight billion people sometime around mid-November. (The world population is to exceed 10 billion this century.)
Climate change – the world population – technologies inequality – you name it, will determine how many of us will be living on Earth as we approach 2100.
There can be no mistaking the import of this, as it belies the dangers of the next several decades which will see migration on a massive scale, due wars because of runaway climate change.
Unprecedented droughts or city-destroying floods would prompt mass migrations, destabilizing the rich world or giving rise to far-right nationalism. Or a global famine could send food prices surging, triggering old-fashioned resource wars.
Survival and success do not depend on brutal force. There is an empirical connection between violence and climate change that’s persists across 12,000 years of human history.
The long chain of evolutionary development has taught us with technology and political trends conflict will continue and even intensify.
“Whether we like it or not changes will be happening, and the situation will not improve by itself.
The future well-being and actual life on earth depends on us all and our ability to express compassion and work together as the eusocial creatures we de facto are.
“No one is doing this in the right way at the moment,”
World hunger, ecological and environmental disaster, global warming, massive shifts in weather systems, the re-emergence of diseases long thought controlled, with political turmoil, in a world where a barrel of water is more expensive than a barrel of oil.
Empathy, compassion and cooperation are now so saturated by Tec that we are becoming a species totally unscrew and desentized to reality, others, and their needs, becoming algorithms predictions.
Efforts so far to incorporate climate change into future population projections have been inadequate.
————-
Where is it leading us?
To answer that, we have to think about how we got here in the first place – Greed
Currently it is estimated for that 50 million people are living on less than the $3.65 a day, with half of the global population lives on less than US$6.85.
You could add another few billons who are not poor enough to feature.
The world is divided into the very rich, and the very poor. And since everybody knows there aren’t a whole lot of very rich people, they assume the majority of the world’s population is living in extreme poverty. But that’s completely wrong; the overwhelming majority of people live somewhere in the middle.
Our problem is inequality, attached to Greed, which is now plundering the world in the form of profit seeking algorithms that are generating profits for the few, using the latest technology Algorithmic trading designed to capitalize on market inefficiencies, trades can be completed at speeds and frequencies impossible for mere mortals.
Algorithm’s are creating a new social contract between a sovereign and citizens, in which the people collectively who were sovereign are becoming digitalised citizens.
Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.
The knowledge revolution should bring a shift to direct democracy, but those who benefit from the current structure are fighting this transition. This is the source of much angst around the world, including the current wave of popular protests.
Neither, physical military strength, nor access to capital are now sufficient for economic success.
If we are to have any chance, we have to change to direct democracy which is easier to achieve than big, sprawling governments.
I’m not sure we can, but I know it will happen because capitalism or any other systems will no longer generate sufficient income to sustain social welfair states.
———————
The problem is how do we reconcile that with democracy in countries composed of millions of citizens?
Talk of artificial intelligence destroying humanity plays into the tech companies’ agenda, and hinders effective regulation of the societal harms AI is causing right now.
Barely a week seems to go by without a tech industry insider trumpeting the existential risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Fearmongering narratives about existential risks are not constructive.
Serious discussion about actual risks, and action to contain them, are.
The sooner humanity establishes its rules of engagement with AI, the sooner we can learn to live in harmony with the technology.
Algos require an uninterrupted power supply and reliable internet access. Even a brief failure in these conditions can prove cataclysmic.
———————–
What is needed are direct opportunities for all to invest in the future.
One of our fundamental challenges in the years ahead will be to mobilize the substantial sums needed for investment in everything from green infrastructure to the cutting-edge technologies that we will need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and slow the course of climate change.
At the moment we have Green bonds/Climate change bonds are issued exclusively to finance projects that positively impact the environment. Today, more than 50 countries have issued green bonds. However, the appeal of this market and the fact that there is no binding regulatory framework for green bonds may lead to suspicions of ‘greenwashing’ (false green claims).
There’s nothing new or specifically European about green bonds.
They’ve been around since the beginning of the 21st century. Although they weren’t yet called green bonds, the first of them are thought to have been issued in 2001 by the City of San Francisco to finance a solar power project.
Any organization – such as governments, corporations, and financial institutions – can issue a green bond.
The green bond market is a portion of the larger debt market. Historically, over US$2 trillion of green bonds have been issued globally to date, with the potential to grow to US$5 trillion by 2025.
Industry bodies and investor action groups such as Climate Action 100+, as well as large
market investors such as sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, are in a strong position to drive development of this market. However there is no universally accepted legal and commercial definition of a green bond.
Green bonds are proven to be an effective means to secure the resources required to meet the national climate change goals, so why not issue green bonds that any joe soap could invest in.
Lotteries exist in 46.67% of countries worldwide. In many countries, with the adoption of digitalization the Lottery is a lifestyle and a massive contribution to their revenues. The Lottery industry continues to grow worldwide, with an expected increase of 4.1% CAGR by 2031. The spread of online lotteries associated with the increase in smartphone and internet usage is one of many factors that can drive growth in the global market. The Lottery market is projected to grow to $405.20 billion by 2028.
US POWERBALL 59 tickets were sold every second of the year.
MEGA MILLIONS 2,817 tickets every minute or about 47 tickets every second—of the whole year!
EUROMILLIONS 342 EuroMillions tickets were sold every single second of 2019—or 20,566 tickets a minute!
UK LOTTO 122 lottery tickets for every one of the 31,536,000 seconds in 2019
They allows us all the chance to change our lives.
A staggering amount of money that goes into lotteries on a daily basis. In fact, just about every second of every day.
By making 1% OF ANY LOTTO TICKETS purchase eligible to acquire a climate Bond (with a gurantee interest return in twenty years from now..) RATHER THAN BIN THE TICKET ON LOOSING ONE COLLECTS THEM IN ORDER TO FUND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.
It would be everyone’s collective interest to identify with the physical manifestations of climate change.
Climate change is a defining issue of our time.
All human comments appriciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
.
THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE NOW ENTERING INTO A MORAL DARKNESS IN THE ISRAEL /PALESTINE WAR.
10 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE NOW ENTERING INTO A MORAL DARKNESS IN THE ISRAEL /PALESTINE WAR.
(Two minute read)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli army and other officials to submit to the cabinet a plan to evacuate Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost governorate.
International humanitarian law prohibits the forced displacement of civilians except when temporarily required for their security or imperative military reasons.
Forcing the over one million displaced Palestinians in Rafah to again evacuate without a safe place to go would be unlawful and would have catastrophic consequences.
I say that its time that all states that are party to the Genocide Convention now have a legal obligation BEFORE IT TOO LATE. To take material steps to put an end to Israel’s genocidal acts in the besieged Strip.
If they dont do so we are very likely entering another long and painful era where armed struggle and violent domination become increasingly and mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win.
After Hamas’s deadly attacks in Israel and Israel’s hellish bombardment of Gaza is the world going to sit back and watch what remains of Gaza and its people wiped from the face of the earth, endorsing further murderous violence against civilians.
Who gets to count as human?
The real aim of Israel’s lobbying efforts to undermine UNRWA is the liquidation of the Palestinian identity and the right of return of the Palestinian people that the UN agency has come to embody. If the Western states, and especially the United States, continue to bow down to Israel’s genocidal demands they will only add further weight to the accusations that they are complicit in its genocide in Gaza.
What is at stake today is not only the future of millions of Palestinians and the very viability of the Israeli state, but the stability of an entire region, and the future of the rules-based world order.
The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist. The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around.
Terrorist organisations like ISIL and al-Qaeda could not have asked for a better environment to regroup and mount new attacks on the West, as the global majority now views the West solidly as an enabler of the ongoing genocide of an occupied and oppressed Indigenous people.
The international community must first ensure the safety of the Palestinian people.
Given the current gridlock and the total devastation of Gaza, the first step towards ending occupation should be to bring the Palestinian people – who have now been identified by ICJ as a unique “group” – under international protection.
The inclusion of Hamas in any peace process is crucial as no sustainable settlement can be achieved without acknowledging the concerns and expectations of the group that has led Palestinian armed struggle against occupation for many years.
This means the killing must stop, captives on both sides should be released, the siege should end, adequate aid and basic services should reach all Palestinians in Gaza immediately.
The international community must make it clear to Israel that it cannot infringe on the territorial integrity of Gaza by occupying any part of the territory, establishing a so-called “buffer zone” within it or dividing it into smaller settlements.
The international community must unanimously call for an immediate and unconditional cessation of all illegal construction and land-grabbing activities in the West Bank and demand accountability for the violence and aggression perpetrated by Israeli settlers against the Palestinians. World’s nations must insist on Israel decommissioning all the settlers outposts in the West Bank, and obviating any such intentions in the Gaza Strip.
To ensure that the Palestinian people can live freely and with dignity under the governance of their own elected representatives, the international community should officially recognise a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and commit to ensuring the swift implementation of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals in post conflict Palestine.
Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: ISRAEL THE LAND OF THREE BIBLES IS NOW A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE.
22 Monday Jan 2024
Posted in Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: ISRAEL THE LAND OF THREE BIBLES IS NOW A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE.
Tags
( Three minute read)
If God wanted a ‘flagship’ nation that was an example to the world he sure has got one now.
Not just a whaling wall of religious forgiveness, stricking chest’s, in the hope of jolting awakness.. but a land of no promises with a revelation that no matter what you belive in, there go I but for the grace of God.
Forgive us our Father for we have erred… is now burning example of vengeance. Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth not as God said, turn the other cheek.
My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.” (John 18:36, NIV) I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
Of course there are Bibilical quotations for ever situtation.
For the Christian, the Holy Land is birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth and the site of his ministry, for the Moslem, Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock marks the spot from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven. The Qur’an specifies that the Land of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, that God Himself gave that Land to them as heritage and ordered them to live therein.
For jews its the promised Land. In Genesis, God promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan, so Canaan became known as The Promised Land. Modern Israel and Palestine encompass the majority of Canaan.
For the rest of us its any land of promised, any place of complete bliss and delight and peace.
In reality the promised land is a theological concept.
————————-
There is no other example in all of recorded human history where a people were conquered, expelled from their country, exiled, dispersed and then, as a unique community suffered persecution, oppression and multiple attempts at genocide over a period of 2,000 years than Palistian.
On the other hand the list of massacres of Jews in Europe is virtually endless, but the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 did not, in any way, reduce antisemitism, which is on the rise.
Any society that has been influenced by Christianity, Islam, or European civilization will have antisemitism in it, even if there are no Jews living there.
The Islamic persecution of the Jews has its own unique history which is in full swing today.
Israil is now a spiritual cancer without a cure.
So tell me what exactly is Israel’s singularly unforgivable fault, because of which a permanent peace deal with it simply cannot be achieved. Fighting wars? Occupying territories? Having security and repressive apparatus? Granting citizenship on ethnic basis? Being set up by the British in early 1900s upon ruins of Ottoman Empire?
What exactly is a person called Jewish?
Judaism isn’t just a bunch of men in black suits and white shirts, it is a mystical religion that is about revealing the divine presence in this world. They spread throughout the world not by conquest and colonization, but by being conquered and scattered around, persecuted and exiled from one place to another.
Who wrote the Torah? (Consists of the five books of the Hebrew Bible, its primary goal is to convince Jewish people that Yeshua (Jesus Christ) is their Messiah.)
We don’t know. The tradition claims it was Moses, but the Torah itself says otherwise.
The black boxes are called “tefillin.” are actually a set of 2, one worn on the head and a second worn on the non-dominant arm is always bearing God and religion in their minds, giving a sense of masculinity and gender roles, since they are only worn by men.
Why do Jews sway from side to side when reading Torah or praying, trembling.
There seems to be no single reason and I am left scratching my head.
The skull cap is called a yarmulke or a kippah.
It is worn as a sign of humility before God. Some say that wearing the kippah is a reminder that God is always above us, others that it helps to remind Jews that we are separate from the rest of the Nations.
God revealed his character in this declaration to Israel:
“I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.”
How is any of that different from any other state in the region?
One of the things which always impressed me about traditional Jewish law (Halakhah) is the principle of pikauch nefesh, which states that if human life is in danger, an observant Jew is not merely allowed, but obliged to break any other of Jewish intricate laws that could stand in the way of saving it:
Now compare that to Hamas’ interpretation of Islam, or for that matter with any fascist’s interpretation of their national or religious idea; that unless you’re willing to kill yourself and as much as other people possible in heroic death for the Grand Idea, you’re a traitor to the cause and deserve nothing but death yourself.
So which of these two approaches do you think will be more likely to win wars, build states, maintain a society and endure in the long run?
The Jewish way has shown itself, time and again, able to survive even under the rule of a fascist death cult; while a fascist way cannot even survive on its own, because it will eat itself alive. Hence, the only thing left for it is to blame the Jews, who ruin everything by refusing to die!
Political Zionism, is seeing it as a an attempt to ‘force God’s hand’.
I supported Israel’s right to exist and defend herself, but not to expand by means of genocide and not to treat others whose homes were there unfairly.
(Since Israel is a Jewish state and governed by Jews, many people throughout the world feel increasing support for the Palestinian cause and concomitant opposition to Israeli policies/actions. These attitudes toward Israel may shift into, or be manipulated into, hatred of Jews (i.e., anti-semitism. Many Jews perceive anti-Israel activities as anti-semitic, though this is subject to some debate even within the Jewish community.)
So long as Judaism exists, (a religion out of time) the validity of Christianity and Islam is cast in doubt.
What it boils down to is their religious stance of “being the chosen people.”
When we wonder, “Did God choose Israel and not the other nations?”
For example Iran, which is notable for its anti Israel policies, does not limit the practice of judaism within the country.
Is there any soloution. One State Two State.
The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2022 was 73.6% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian, and 1.6% Druze.
All prophecies are fulfilled in a Federation with a written constitution ( See previous posts)
“Let there be light” is an English translation of the Hebrew יְהִי אוֹר found in Genesis 1:3 of the Torah, the first part of the Hebrew Bible.
So God created in darkness, hopefull it would turn out all right.
All human comments appriciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHY DO THE US SUPPORT ISRAEL?
11 Thursday Jan 2024
Posted in American Cultures, CULTURES COLLIDE, Dehumanization., Donald Trump Presidency., Extermination., Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHY DO THE US SUPPORT ISRAEL?
( Five minute read)
We have the spectral of Mr Antony J. Blinken the Secretary of State for the USA (the largest and once the most powerful military country in the world) running around the middle east unable to call for a cease fire in the current war Israel/Palestine.
Why?
Because, President Joe Biden’s promise for the US to “stand with Israel” continues a special relationship that dates back to 1948, when President Harry Truman became the first world leader to recognize the Jewish state, moments after its creation.
Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. At this point, more Americans, but not a majority, think Israel’s response has been appropriate.
The idea that of all nations in the world, Israel alone doesn’t have the right to respond in self-defense, of course is wrong, but as the saying goes two wrongs don’t make a right.
The question is why does the US support a country that is committing a genocide.
I believe this is because americans learned very few details about the role of racist violence in American history. They are not always familiar with the often coded language and imagery of antisemitism.
The answer lies in its history.
The USA is a country founded on immigration, so it has historical roots of support for Israel.
In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, for dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar than a Genocide.
The mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly example.
Hitler had no blueprint for the Holocaust.
Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
He was a student of history and admired America’s rapid industrialization and growth, which he attributed to a vast, diverse continental empire and agricultural base. So Hitler’s plan was for Germany to emulate the United States.
What possessed a society of seemingly, sane, educated and cultured people to implement a policy of barbarism and depraved violence upon the Jews of Europe during World War II?
Hitler’s understanding of how the American republic came to industrialize and prosper through expulsion of indigenous people and, especially, through the institution of slavery, which is now understood to have been central to America’s economic development.
First by seizing large tracts of productive land by pushing the indigenous populations out. If those natives could not be pushed out, they were to be killed. And then slave labor was to be employed to produce the food necessary to support industrialization and militarization, just as the United States had done.
When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.
Commodification and suffering and forced labor of African-Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich.
Nazi ideology also embraced virulent European anti-semitism.
The kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since.
Why?
First, the very application of the term “genocide” is applied too slowly and cautiously when atrocities happen. Second, the international community fails to act effectively against genocides. Third, too few perpetrators are actually convicted of their crimes.
Seventy years after the UN Convention, genocide remains ever present in our global society. Now consider that only three have been legally recognised – and led to trials – under the convention:
The world watched in apparent indifference. Rwanda in 1994, Bosnia (and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre), and Cambodia under the 1975-9 Pol Pot regime. The widespread killing and displacement of Yazidi by IS and Rohingya in Myanmar and Darfur, are ongoing.
Add the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 and the Guatemalan genocide of 1981-83, the Kurds in 1988-91 in Iraq, and by West Pakistan forces against Bangladeshis in 1971, the Tamils in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009, not to mention the Australia’s “stolen generations”, the Irish Famine that might fall under the UN definition is frighteningly long.
The US, for example, famously never officially recognised the 1915 Armenian genocide as one.
Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing genocide.
———————-
The “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression.
So Hitler’s model was in fact the U.S.A.
It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. a loner.
He had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle;
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors.
These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism.
But they tell us rather more about modern America.
Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis.
What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.
The above however is not the only reason as such, it is only fair to my American readers to point out.
We certainly live in a VUVA world; Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
Undoubtedly our world is becoming increasingly digital and there is a blurring between the digital and non-digital world.
The excesses of social media and the impact that this has on people’s psychological wellbeing needs to be addressed. (I think that psychology; understanding of people, their behaviour and how the mind functions, will be increasingly important.)
Desensitization is an unsettling phenomenon which stems from individuals refusing or being unable to react to or express emotion towards a certain situation. Through the click of a button on our device, we distance ourselves from the serious happenings of society.
Ours is a forgetful age. In an era of instant news, amnesia is baked in. And amnesia has consequences.
While it is vital to be aware of current events and their impacts, like the war in Ukraine and the current Israeli/Palestinian war, both are purposeless if we aren’t able to understand these events and empathize with the people involved.
We spend much of our lives on devices that are designed to need replacing every three years, accessing social media platforms that amplify the sense of a continuous present and an absent past. Everything feels unexpected, as if it is coming out of nowhere. Developments appear unconnected to the past, and indeed to each other. In the absence of a plausible historical narrative, people retreat into tribalism or conspiracy theories (perhaps both) to help them make sense of the pace of change.
The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality, no matter how universal or self-evident we may think they are.
They expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness that:
All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.
With one in every ten people in Gava now killed the future of further any peace efforts with Arab nations could now be in doubt, as Israel continues to bomb the Gaza Strip in its effort to punish Hamas.
——————–
Finally:
The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet. YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.
Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.
The internet is a breeding ground for loners who have a “vague notion of being reserved for something else. Suicide bomber, Mass killer, may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.
He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.
For me, this digital and data analytically world emphasises the important of social connections and networks. There will be a need for collaboration and for different ways of working.
Part of this will be reflected in the changing power dynamics. Organisations may operate in different ways. This includes social change, climate, and the balance that we want in our lives, simply because the repetition can be overwhelming. When things occur again and again, we become too-familiar with the situation, thus not treating it as important, unable to put intense situations into perspective.
Which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronize the past or ignore it altogether.
To sum up, as Albert Einstein said ‘learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.
The question is, are we happy to live in a world that deliberately creates destitution for some?
Our technology does not help us here.
Now as ever, great-power politics will drive events, and international rivalries will be decided by the relative capacities of the competitors.
Memory, in contrast, should generate humility:
The acknowledgment of our past, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and the recognition that the reason we have the moral convictions we do, and the material advantages we do, is because of our ancestors.
As James Baldwin relentlessly pointed out, we are our history.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY ASKS: WHAT SHOULD OUR VIEWS ON THE CURRENT WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BE? AFTER ALL WAR IS WAR.
29 Friday Dec 2023
Posted in Civilization., Collective stupidity., Cruelty., Cry for help., CULTURES COLLIDE, Dehumanization., Disconnection., Erasing history., Extremism., Freedom, Freedom of Speech, How to do it., Human values., Humanity., International solidarity., Israel and Palestine, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Militarism., Modern day Slavery, PAIN AND SUFFERING IN LIFE, Palestinian- Israel., Reality., Refugees., Religious Beliefs., Russia / Ukraine ., State of the world, Survival., Telling the truth., Terrorism., The common good., The cost of war., THE ISRAELI- PALESTINIAN PROBLEM., The Obvious., The state of the World., The Ukraine., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, Violence, War, War Crimes., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Cup., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY ASKS: WHAT SHOULD OUR VIEWS ON THE CURRENT WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BE? AFTER ALL WAR IS WAR.
( FIVE MINUTE READ)
The world today looks very different from the way it appeared thirty years ago.
It is one thing to express your opinion, it is another to do so in a way that actually puts a stumbling block in the way of others.
It’s okay to want to find ways of expressing some nuance.
Not about the wickedness of what’s happened. Not about the horror at loss of life. Not about the fact Hamas are terrorists, committed to the total destruction of the Jewish state.
But about where (like all war’s) is this war going before it ends as all wars eventually do.
How do you draw the line between retaliation and self-defence?
What proportion of vengeance is acceptable?
Is sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Gaza wise?
Is cutting off water and electricity act of justice?
These are complex questions.
Palestine is not a country. That’s the whole point.
Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable. But in terms of what happens now, and how the response plays itself out, there might well be room for nuance but first and foremost, we must unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks for what they were. Any attempt to justify these actions is morally indefensible, and we must firmly oppose the arguments of those who seek to rationalise them.
However the line between punishing evil and revenge can be a fine one, but it’s an important one.
For example, I think Hamas are freedom fighters, turned into terrorists by the west and their recent barbaric acts.
————–
Let’s distinguish between those questions on which we can be clear.
The conflict and tensions in the Middle East are complex and deep rooted.
Let’s be equally honest about the complexity of this situation and not white wash away the sins of either side.
There is no Biblical justification to what Israel is doing.
There is not Promised Land anymore.
Why?
Because the events are and were unavoidably, part of a 80 year long story of modern times.
A further episode of horror. Israel – using unprecedented violence on a largely defenseless and penned-in population, in part to cover for its own fatal mistakes and embarrassment.
You might even think that Palestinians are the ones colonizing the land of Israel, no less. And you probably believe that Israel, which holds ultimate control over the lives of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and yet denies them the right to vote in Israeli elections, is a democracy.
WAR IS WAR.
NO INTERNATIONAL LAWS or INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WILL CHANGE THAT NO MATTER WHERE A WAR IS OR TAKING PLACE.
The one thing war and bloodshed do for us is leave us longing for a new world.
Palestinians always act while Israel only reacts.
(It is amazing that such a poorly trained and equipped group of Palestinians from Gaza could overcome the best intelligence in the world found in Israel. The Israelis were caught napping and their response is influenced by this.)
It is not appropriate to see Hamas as separate from the Palestinian people.
It is a fundamentalist political group, supported originally by Israel, that responded to the secularism and corruption of the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority.
Whilst we may disagree about what is proportionate. What Hamas have done is wicked, “unprovoked”
What exactly counts as a provocation?
Not the 248 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 1 January and 4 October of last year.
Not the denial of Palestinian human rights and national aspirations for decades.
Israel have human rights, as do other nations, but there are terrorists on both sides, including those in power currently in Israel. Mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win.
The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist.
There are roughly 14.5 million Palestinians in the world, according to a 2023 estimate from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslims, though a significant minority is Christian. Over 5 million live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and another 2 million in Israel. The remaining population lives elsewhere, mostly as refugees, with the largest communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
As of 2019, about 5.6 million Palestinians were considered refugees by the United Nations because they or their forebears were displaced by wars with Israel.
Today Palestinians are a minority. 1.8 million Palestinians form around 20.8 percent of Israel’s population. They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.
Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame for this and the resulting wars that have plagued the region.
———–
The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around.
There is and has been wrongdoing and bad decisions on both sides.
Calling out either one, does no good.
Was the land stolen from Arabs living in the British Protective of Palestine. The land was granted them by an UN charter.
Unfortunately the “land without people for a people without land” was flawed as there were people on that land and that was stolen from them.
We are ignoring the painful context.
If we once again ignore the big picture, then all this will just keep happening.
————————–
THAT THERE IS NO DENYING (BEING LIVE STREAMED IN FRONT OF THE WORLD.) This new outbreak is turning into a Genocide.
SHOULD THE UNITED NATIONS NOW EXPEL ISRAEL? ( LIKE IT DID WITH SOUTH AFRICA DURING ITS APARTHEID.)
SHOULD INTERNATIONAL SPORT AND CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS & COMMERCIAL CORPORATIONS NOW BOYCOTT ISRAEL, WITH TARGETS BOYCOTTS. TO AVOID BEING COMPLACENT AND TARNISHED WITH A GENOCIDE?
SHOULD THERE BE A LARGE DE VESTMENT OF INVESTMENTS IN ISRAEL?
SHOULD THERE BE A MILITARY EMBARGO?
SHOULD AS 83% OF IDRSAI TO DAY SUPPORT ETHNIC CLEANSING ISRAEL BE BAN IN COMPETING IN THE OLYMPICS, THE WORLD CUP AND ALL OTHER SPORTING EVENTS.
————
EVEN WHEN ALL OF THIS COMES TO A STOP THE ROOT CAUSE WILL NOT JUST DISAPPEAR FROM THE MAP.
WE MUST APPLY PRESSURE AND NOT BE COMPLICITY.
WE MUST NOT ALLOW GOVERNMENTS TO CLOSE DOWN OR UNDERMINE ANY FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION OR SPEECH SUPPORTING A CEASEFIRE AND POLITICAL SETTLEMENT.
ISRAEL DOES NOT REPRESENT ALL JEWS ETHNICS. CLEANNESS IS A JEWS VALUE NOT GENOCIDE.
HERE ARE A FEW COLLECTIVE ACTIONS THAT WE ALL CAN APPLY.
Boycott:
Hewlett Packard helps run the biometric ID system that Israel uses to restrict Palestinian movement.
Siemens is complicit in apartheid Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise through its planned construction of the EuroAsia Interconnector
Soda Steam is actively complicit in Israel’s policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev).
AXA invests in Israeli banks, which finance the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources
Sabra hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army.
A barcode starting with 729 usually indicates a product of Israel. ( But this is not always reliable.)
Palestinian refugees have long claimed that international law guarantees them the right to return to their homes, citing U.N. General Assembly resolution 194, adopted in December, 1948, which states that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.
For its part, Israel largely considers this claim a non-starter, fearing that the return of millions of Palestinians is neither feasible nor just and would demographically overwhelm the country, erasing its Jewish character.
Sadly, 2023 has been a violent one on the global stage.
Many proposals have been put forward for how the current conflicts could, or should, be brought to a close. All will involve concessions that will effectively appease one side or the other without tackling their underlying cause.
The unanimous conclusion rest on a common belief: That wars should, and usually do, end in negotiation and compromise.
The first problem is that they don’t.
It is true that the majority of wars do not end in absolute victory. Ceasefire, armistice and stalemate terminate most conflicts, even if the ‘peace’ is infirm or short-lived.
The second problem lies in the fatalistic quality of many arguments ruling out the pursuit or even possibility of defeat. The third deficiency of arguments to ‘settle now’ is their reliance on false analogies. The fourth and greatest problem is a failure to take account of the character of this war and the outlook of a systemic adversary viscerally hostile to the ‘collective West’ and the international order it claims to uphold.
Negotiation, compromise and reconciliation are undertaken with new regimes only after old regimes are defeated and removed.
This war might not meet legal definitions of genocide, but the barbarism and the serial war crimes that have taken place – material, cultural and now ecological – have not been witnessed in Europe since the Second World War. The war is being waged on an industrial scale OF DESTRUCTION.
Western policy must be underpinned by a long-term strategy – political, military and industrial – based on a sustainable definition of victory, not on a search for negotiation with an adversary whose minimal terms flatly contradict Western interests.
Outlier events cannot be ruled out.
The only way I can foresee either the Ukraine War or the Palestinian Israeli War possibly ending is a change in leadership with new agreed compliant political federation regime installed. /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57586569/CLIMATE_WARS_ILLUSTRATIONS.0.jpg)
THERE WILL BE WITH CLIMATE CHANGE MANY WARS TO FOLLOW.
Wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it. 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.
All human comments appreciated. All like and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: What is life? What does it mean to be alive?
19 Tuesday Dec 2023
Posted in Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: What is life? What does it mean to be alive?
( Eight minutes read)
The quest to understand life and its purpose has been around as long as we have.
Today the same question persists: What does it mean to be fully alive?
With the arrival of machine learning/artificial intelligence we are becoming disposable products – here to day, gone tomorrow. Therefore most essential existential drive is to understand the meaning of our own existence, that relates to all of us – rich or poor – left hemisphere – right hemisphere.
This with what the world is now facing, there are no questions more important or pressing ( now and or in the not so distant future), than the above for the whole planet.
It is one of those philosophical questions that can never be answered definitively.
However the conspiracy of greed, in all its forms, is not sustainable for any lifeform, whether it is alive or not.
——————
Life is short and time moves fast. Your life is not a dress rehearsal – make it count.
There is simply no room for belief in a spiritual realm, or in a scientific view of reality. Period.
No matter what we put in a test tube nothing is going to crawl out alive, it would simply be another kind of physical property.
We defined biology as the branch of science concerned with the study of living things, or organisms.
That definition is pretty straightforward. However, it opens the door to more difficult—and more interesting—questions:
LET’S START.
Do you have to be conscious to be alive. No. It actually isn’t as cut and dry as you think it is. Where does consciousness come from? And how do our brains create it?
We don’t have a great scientific definition of consciousness, and philosophical definitions are disputed, but in almost every conception it has something to do with an ongoing awareness of events beyond the raw computation of their properties and immediate selection of an action.
It might depend on what we mean exactly by consciousness (cognitive/representational abilities? Qualitative experience?) and also by “living” (autonomous subsistence? Self replication? Lineage with biological organisms on earth?).
All evidence is that brains generate consciousness.
Only living matter is susceptible of consciousness, but not all living things have a consciousness in the sense that we employ. Rudimentary life forms such as worms, bacteria, virus, do have a primitive form of consciousness even though they can hardly be said to be “conscious”.
Consciousness results from the antagonistic relativization between biological matter and physical matter. Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now.
One of the most compelling aspects of the mystery of consciousness is the nature of self.
Is consciousness possible without self-consciousness? And if so, would it still matter so much?
To understanding consciousness it immediately becomes apparent that like all other biological phenomena and like life itself, it must have evolved in gradations.
People have long pondered what consciousness actually is. What do we even mean by consciousness?
How can a purely physical thing feel like something? Surely consciousness is some kind of otherness?
Perhaps consciousness is an as-yet undiscovered fundamental property of the universe, or is it God himself.
So how far back in evolutionary history should we go to look for the origins of consciousness?
All the way back. Nearly four billion years. Long before animals had brains, or even a nervous system. Back to simple single-celled organisms like bacteria. Back to the origin of life itself.
This is not to suggest that simple unicellular organisms possessed consciousness, or even a modicum of it. Not consciousness, but its building blocks:
The origins of life will never be found. Nor will we ever be able to create it.
Consciousness probably evolved as a way for organisms to go far beyond responding merely reflexively to stimuli—to be able to respond more flexibly, and in a more delayed and planned manner.
Thoughts and feelings seem ethereal, untethered from anything physical.
Self-awareness seems like a phenomenon utterly divorced from anything that could possibly be produced by cells comprised of physical particles. How the same material particles that comprise inanimate matter could be arranged in such a way as to make something alive, without adding that special, mysterious nonmaterial essence. Let alone how inanimate matter could organize itself in such clever and intricate ways through entirely unguided, spontaneous processes.
—————–
Now, in the present century, science is turning its attention to decoding the enigma of consciousness.
Without a shadow of a doubt there is no aspect of the mind that is not entirely the product of, and utterly dependent on, the physical brain. Disruption, disassembly or enhancement of brain circuitry (subtle or major) can radically alter any aspect of the mind.
And yet the mystery of how exactly the brain produces consciousness has remained unexplained.
When does consciousness begin in development? Does it emerge at birth, or is it present even in the womb?
We don’t yet know exactly how consciousness emerges, and very many intriguing mysteries remain.
About six minutes after the heart stops, and the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, the brain essentially dies. Then, deterioration reaches a point of no return and core consciousness – our ability to feel that we are here and now, and to recognise that thoughts we have are own own – is lost.
The moment the brain loses its exquisitely synchronized organization, consciousness is lost.
If that breakdown of physical processes is irreversible, consciousness is permanently extinguished, and the unique organization of matter that constituted that individual’s personhood, self or essence ceases to exist.
Everything that lives dies. Is this true? Yes You only live once. No living thing know when living a life ends.
Indeed, the denial of death is the raison d’être of most religions.
The idea of life after death makes complete sense to our intuitions, and that’s not the only reason why the belief comes so naturally to people.
Because we associate ourselves with our body and we know bodies die this is true, but the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Do you believe that your mind, personality, or self is an essence that exists independent of your physical brain?
Do you think of you as a spirit or soul, temporarily constrained and residing in the organ that is your brain—an immortal consciousness merely housed in your earthly body?
———————
Death has never been popular, especially when it is seen as the final and utter cessation of being.
The prospect’s tolerability increases only when it is reframed as a mere passage to a heavenly paradise filled with all manner of delights—all the more so for those who are suffering or disadvantaged in this life.
It all depend on the observer.
What you see could not be present without your consciousness.
Your eyes are not portals to the world. Everything you see and experience right now‚ even your body, is a whirl of information occurring in your mind so you could live a life without been conscious that you are alive.
So how can a particle change its behavior depending on whether you watch it or not?
Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave.
The answer is simple, reality is a process that involves your consciousness.
A particle’s exact location and momentum can’t be known at the same time.
So why should it matter to a particle what you decide to measure?
How can pairs of entangled particles be instantaneously connected on opposite sides of the galaxy as if space and time don’t exist?
In 2002, scientists showed that particles of light “photons” knew, in advance,what their distant twins would do in the future.
There are an infinite number of universes and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death and Life does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them.
When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix. Life has a non-linear dimensionality; it’s like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.
Of course, we live in the same world. But critics claim this behavior is limited to the microscopic world. But this ‘two-world’ view (that is, one set of physical laws for small objects, and another for the rest of the universe including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in laboratories around the world.
Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere.
————————–
You are alive, and so am I.
The tree’s outside my window.
However, snow falling from the clouds is not alive, or is it
The computer you’re using to read this article is not alive, and neither is a chair or table. The parts of a chair that are made of wood were once alive, but they aren’t any longer. If you were to burn the wood in a fire, the fire would not be alive either, or is it.
How can we tell that one thing is alive and another is not?
As I have said it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a precise definition of life.
Many definitions of life are operational definitions—they allow us to separate living things from nonliving ones, but they don’t actually pin down what life is. To make this separation, we must come up with a list of properties that are, as a group, uniquely characteristic of living organisms.
All living organisms are made up of one or more cells, which are considered the fundamental units of life
Humans—are made up of many cells.
Life depends on an enormous number of interlocking chemical reactions. Living things must use energy and consume nutrients to carry out the chemical reactions that sustain life.
Living organisms regulate their internal environment to maintain the relatively narrow range of conditions needed for cell function.
For instance, your body temperature needs to be kept relatively close to 98.6. This maintenance of a stable internal environment, even in the face of a changing external environment IS ESSENTIAL.
Living organisms show “irritability,” meaning that they respond to stimuli or changes in their environment.
Living organisms can reproduce themselves to create new organisms. Sperm and egg cells containing half of their genetic information, and these cells fuse to form a new individual with a full genetic set. You yourself started out as a single cell and now have tens of trillions of cells in your body.
Unicellular organisms may migrate toward a source of nutrients or away from a noxious chemical.
———————-
Populations of living organisms can undergo evolution, meaning that the genetic makeup of a population may change over time, for instance the basic building blocks of everyday life that have been obliterated in many areas of the Gaza Strip as the Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ deadly 7 October attacks stretches into its third month, will result in an state of unsecure Israel for decades to come.
You might well ask what can I do to change life. The answer is simple – Give and you will receive.
I was not alive in 1066 or 1492 or 1865 or 1920, so I have no way to judge any time except the time I experienced myself. I don’t think anyone can really pass judgment on any time which they did not experience for themselves, without seriously romanticising, or conversely vilifying that time.
I submit that the “golden years” for any generation, or individual, are the years right before you are forced to confront the realities of keeping yourself alive by yourself.
I am a 60th youth. so I could dream about being a part of the changes needed to make the world a better place, without being jaded by the realities of the roadblocks set up to prevent any of these changes from maturing.
We must come alive to be alive. The best time to be alive is today, this moment, right now.
We have some big challenges facing us, like climate change, growing socioeconomic disparity, and threats of an erosion of rights and on going wars. “Yes, we have challenges galore … but those challenges spark imagination, creativity, courage and cooperation (if we are smart enough to rise to the occasion).
It is a battle, but it is possible to win.
That’s a problem because when we act instead of being, we aren’t living in the fullest sense.
————————–
GET OFF YOUR SMARTPHONE.
Engage with the world around you and learning as much as possible. don’t take things for granted or perceive life casually. Being fully alive means being open to all the possibilities of your existence and exploring every part of yourself until you find what…
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life,” Henry David Thoreau said. Wrong. You need an awakened brain to see life.
To rap this post up we could ask how and what has changed to living one life.
It can be made complicated or simple as the Malthusian trap in 1751 when we allowed machines to think,
– the AI trap.
What about future.
Will a Robot’s develop their own consciousness.
Here, we ought to be concerned not just about the power that new forms of artificial intelligence are
gaining over us, but also about whether and when we need to take an ethical stance toward them.
With each new advance in our understanding comes a new sense of wonder and a new ability to see
ourselves as less apart from — and more a part of — the rest of nature.
Our conscious experiences are part of nature just as our bodies are, just as our world is.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist,” Oscar Wilde said.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
bobdillon33blog 