( A three-minute read)

IT IS APPARENT TO ANYONE THAT DOES NOT HAVE SAWDUST BETWEEN THEIR EARS THAT OUT OF THE CUSTOM UNION MEANS A HARD BORDER BETWEEN IRELAND AND NORTHERN IRELAND.

“Let’s make a deal first, and we can figure out the details later.” Is bull shit.

British negotiators refusal to tackle and solve the question of the border during these talks is tragic.

Failing to address issues surrounding the border question can have ugly and unforeseen long-term consequences.

Had the British government taken direct responsibility for drawing the border in 1921 and sought to respect the wishes of local communities regarding which state they wanted to join, it is quite possible that the Troubles would never have broken out.

Instead of taking the Good Friday Agreement and the opportunity to remove the root cause of the Northern Irish conflict they paid the DUP billions to support a minority government.

In order for the UK to enact its post-Brexit immigration policies and leave the single market, it must be able to control its borders.

This said it is impossible to overstate the horror with which such a wall between the north and south would be greeted.

The arbitrary line of partition London imposed on the Free State in 1920 helped to spark the Troubles and is still a lingering grievance.

The Good Friday Agreement was seen as answering the question of whether the island of Ireland could be reunited once and for all, establishing as it did that Northern Ireland would only rejoin the South if a majority of citizens voted in a referendum or plebiscite for the option. With nationalists being demographically subordinate in Stormont, the simple mathematics meant it would never happen.

But here’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter: for the first time in my lifetime, a united Ireland is now credible – and perhaps inevitable.

Whether you believe that England is going to somehow negotiate a deal better than the remaining countries already have it is turning a blind eye to politics in Northern Ireland.

This was epitomized in the Brexit campaign, during which Northern Ireland was scarcely mentioned despite being the only part of the UK which shares a land border with another EU country. The Leave campaign also appeared to have no knowledge of or interest in what would happen to the border between North and South of Ireland.

Northern Ireland receives millions in funding from the EU for cross-community peace projects between Catholic and Protestant communities, but the loss of this money, or where replacement funding might come from, doesn’t appear to have been calculated into the Leave campaign’s financial deliberations over the cost of Brexit.

Northern Ireland voted to remain, but, like Scotland, is now finding it will be dragged out of it anyway thanks to Welsh and English voters.

Almost a year on from the EU referendum, we’re no wiser as to the future of the Northern Irish border.

May has continuously obfuscated as to how, where or why a border will be erected between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Despite the British Government’s insistence on batting away the question, it must be urgently addressed.

In order for the UK to enact post-Brexit immigration policies and leave the single market, it must be able to control its borders; a physical fence or wall is the only realistic option.

In effect, a border will fence off Northern Ireland, making its own tiny country, with one million residents penned in together with no option of traveling, working or visiting the other three-quarters of the island as easily as they are accustomed.

With Sinn Fein just one seat short of being the largest party at Stormont, reunification is by no means imminent.

The next election is likely to see them returned as the largest party, barring major events to stop their momentum.

A united Ireland is no longer hypothetical or absurd, but a credible option that must be considered seriously by both the Irish and British governments.

For the first time in my lifetime, the Irish question is no longer a question of if, but of when.  Unfortunately,  the DUP would never agree such a deal and they have the power to bring down the minority UK government.

There is more at stake than just the border in the north.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chunked in the bin.

 

 

( A FIVE MINUTE READ OF HARD FACTS.)

A transit period is going to lead to a massive EU and British taxpayers loss.

Instead what is needed is a moratorium on the implementation of the final deal, not a flexible transit deal, which will see circumstances changing on both sides.

The issue the UK needs to decide is how to deal with the over 750 international agreements, including trade deals the EU already has. During the transition or indeed a moratorium, the UK will be bound by them, meaning it will have to collect tariffs and make sure EU standards are upheld at its borders.

However, the third partners will have a say in how much the UK can benefit from those existing deals.

It is blatantly obvious that these 750 trade deals are EU international agreements that benefit the members of the EU.

London will have to decide whether to ask the EU to help in rolling over these existing agreements. This should not stop the UK from being able to negotiate their own trade deals during the transition or moratorium period, but these agreements cannot come into force unless the EU-27 agrees or the moratorium expires.

WHY?

Because it will be politically very sensitive both in England and the EU, making any kind of compromise especially difficult.

Because as the realities hit home England will (as it is its right) endeavour to reinterpret what it has agreed, as will the EU.

Because while trade talks could begin alongside the formal exit negotiations, EU law means that they cannot be concluded until the UK officially exited the EU.

The UK would then revert to being a “third country”.

This would imply the UK would face a period in which it is outside the EU but does not have a new trade deal with the single market. In this case, it would have to rely on World Trade Organization (WTO) rules until the final deal is concluded.

So England does have the right to set the groundwork for a free trade agreement between it and other nations.

It is reasonable to expect that countries with a vested interest in maintaining trade links with the UK may wish to begin informal negotiations.

Under EU law, the bloc cannot negotiate a separate trade deal with one of its own members, as rules have to apply to all member states equally. Similarly, individual member states cannot make trade deals with individual member states, with third countries on their own.

This suggests that, because the UK will remain a full member of the EU throughout the negotiating period set out in Article 50, it could only formally sign trade deals with other countries once it has left.

The UK could insist it has a different legal status now that it notified the EU of its intention to leave. However, there is no legal precedent for such a situation, as Article 50 has never been triggered before.

Since the UK is going to be in a different situation, it could be argued the normal rules can’t really apply and the UK should be able to have informal trade negotiations that could be enforced from the day it leaves, but this is largely hypothetical at the moment.

As for whether the UK could open informal trade talks with non-EU countries like India or China, the UK could make the same legal argument about the change in its status. But we have no way of knowing whether the UK could successfully argue this position regarding trade with EU or non-EU countries.

I say “First, you exit and then you negotiate the new relationship, whatever that is”

What a future trade deal with the EU might look like, and how long it will take to conclude, will be a matter for Parliament and the next prime minister.

Reality Check:

So when the BBC news stated recently that Theresa May has done a trade deal with China is this false News or is Britain in breach of the Lisbon Treaty, and if so should negotiations be suspended.

Today we learn that  THE CHINESE prime minister has hailed a new high point in UK-China relations after Theresa May signed a cooperation agreement on trade and investments.

Dress it up how you like this is a blatant breach of EU Laws.

The alarm bells are ringing:

All human comments appreciated

. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

( A Ten-minute read)

We all know that the world’s problems are complex, but what in the first place is it exactly that makes a problem complex when the solution is known.

You could say there are many reasons, and you would be right.

The problem is ignored, misunderstood, tampered with, to complex to understand etc,

So is it that our history is now so complicated that it cannot teach us anything.

Indeed understanding complexity an inconvenient oxymoron.

The word itself is generally used to characterize something with many parts where these parts interact with each other. It is difficult to understand the whole without understanding the motion/behaviour of every single one of the components.

I suppose in the end the complex thing about complexity is it is constantly in competition with other complex systems.

Complexity breed complexity.

We see and witness this every day with Capitalism versus the core values of life, none more so than with Climate Change and Poverty that are interconnected to all the woes of our world.

The climate is probably the most complicated system in the world and maybe only a fraction of the many problems that we face in the world,  but no matter how you look at it, the climate has plague human civilisation and is entrenched throughout human history.

The problem is that all of us take it for granted and have little understanding of its effects other than it governs all of us for better or worse.

Ignore it at your peril.

So will Social media change the course of history?  Will it make the world a better place? Can it force all of us to realise that if we want a world we must as a unity world address what is becoming more and more evident day by day that if we continue to ignore the scientific warnings we are heading for a world that will not be livable on for and species, man or mouse?

It has the power to do so, but only if it expresses the majority in a unified outcry.

Two hundred or so years ago we had Slavery. These days you would say that it is all but eradicated.

Today we are causing inescapable devastating changes to the ecology of the earth.

Let’s awaken our conscience. With every passing year, the environment is getting degraded.

In the foreseeable future.

Scientists have estimated that over two-thirds of flora and fauna that once inhabited the Earth are now extinct.

However, we all know the problems that climate change will bring and once started will be unstoppable for all intuitive purposes other than building defences and moving.

There will be little or no point in saving National Parks with Elephants, Tiger, Silverback Apes unless we save the termite, the ant, the butterfly, the trees, the plants unless we save the environment as a whole.

Everything is interconnected – especially the environment which is connected to all forms of HUMAN LIFE, RICH OR POOR, INTELLIGENT OR IGNORANT, VIRTUAL OR  REAL.

Unfortunately for the planet ( On which all life exists, ) we are the only species with the ability to effect change. All others are only interested in their own existence.

Our present dilemma is the lack of Collectivism driven by the Smartphone and Algorithms. Both technologies are concealed from us the truth, creating a sea of irrelevance, with a captured Culture of short-term Pleasure.

We are becoming oppressed by data. A society drugging ourselves.

In 20/25 years we are going to see a major change due to climate change which will be swift and big. There will be no room for I am all right Jack politics of the Donald Trumps of this world.

Something is rotten in the state of technology where there is little social conscience.  Fake news and disinformation are just a few of the symptoms. But the problem is far more fundamental. These powerful algorithmic engines that run platforms are black boxes of profit.

The great lie is that social media shows us the world. Brings us closer together. Little wonder that lies spread, and inflates, to pickle our minds and our own prejudices.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, strap us into a single-seated algorithms theatre without any windows or doors. It is an infinite blend of your personal likes and dislikes scraped off the internet.

How will we be able to measure the impact of the above?

Google is more powerful than most states on the planet presenting a threat to liberal democracy in as far as the preservation of the rights of the individual’s data is the property of private corporations or the state.

No one should now douth that these platforms impact and shape public discourse, and shape society at large, distracting attention away from of core values TOWARDS social INSTABILITY.

Facebook and Google, Apple, U Tube, and their like are powerful monopolies almost void of any regulation.

Algorithmic accountability should not mean that a critical mass of human suffering is needed to reverse the damage they are inflicting on us and the generations to come.

It will be too late to measure their impact, except when we feel its harms.

With climate change, there will no gradually decay.

The Paris Climate Change Agreement is not an inspirational rallying cry or a recipe for bold action. It serves better as the motto for the tortoise than the hare.

It appears at this moment in history as in the past centuries that we humans do have not the ability to turn long-term thinking into action without creating a war.

There will be no solution till we give Eco Systems a Monetary and Rights value.

Shallow Paris Climate agreement promises are already worthless.

Why?

Because without removing or at least making the one thing that is driving Climate change and poverty – Greed to pay there will be no marked improvement in any future or present world problems.

We can all wail like I am doing here till the cows come home.

Without independent financial clout to effect change, we are pissing against the wind. ( See previous posts)

The solution to climate change and poverty is not just money.

Free energy would go a long way to saving the environment.

A basic wage, generated from greed/ profit for profit sake, would reduce the inequalities of the world and have a profound effect on the climate.

Both are a simple solution to a complex world problem.

It is Crystal Clear that if we do not do something to protect the Enviorment we all Fucked.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

( A one-minute read) 

UK government wants the EU to give it a transition period even if talks on the future relationship break down.

Britain and the EU will have to overcome some key sticking points regarding transition before they can move onto the question of the future relationship.

The question is can you have one foot in the door and the other outside.

All logic tells one that this is not possible.

What is possible is that any final agreement carries a watertight moratorium granting a suitable implementation period of let’s say two or three years.

Such a moratorium would allow the dust to settle while ensuring that the final agreement is not watered down.

It would save taxpayer on both sides unnecessary further costs due to changing circumstances on both sides.

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

 

 

Dear Mrs Foster,

Your recently comments on the BBC re the border and the sun shining out of the a… of unnamed politicians has led me to write this open letter, which I am posting in my FLIPBOARD MAGAZINE #Silent Witness To The Truth.

” Nobody understands negotiations probable better than I”

It is quite obvious that you indeed understand negotiations being unable to re – establish a government in Northern Ireland.

“Some people are taking their moment in the sun, to try to get the maximum in relation to the negotiations – and I understand that but you shouldn’t play about with Northern Ireland particularly at a time when we’re trying to bring about devolved government again.

“But they certainly shouldn’t be using Northern Ireland to get the maximum deal for their citizens.”

“Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar “should know better” than to “play around” with Northern Ireland over Brexit” “His government is being reckless with Northern Ireland over Brexit.”

The hypocrisy of these comments beggars belief.  But I suppose they are understandable coming from the leader of a Party that has historical links to loyalist paramilitaries.

For my readers:

The DUP was founded in 1971 by Ian Paisley and is a hard-line faction of the UUP, Ulster Unionist Party. 

The UUP evolved from the Ulster Unionist Council, which was founded in 1905 to resist the inclusion of the historical province of Ulster in an independent Ireland.

The DUP views the Republic as an existential threat to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, staunchly supports union with Britain.

Citing the territorial claims in the Irish constitution, which the party viewed as illegal and a threat to the security and religious freedom of Protestants in Northern Ireland, the DUP traditionally avoided all contact with the Irish government.

In the early 21st century, however, the party moderated its stance on a number of issues, most notably its longtime opposition to Sinn Féin’s participation in any power-sharing institution.

Arlene Foster, Its current leader vehemently opposed the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA attempted to kill her father (A reservist police officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary) by shooting him outside their family home. They also set off a bomb on her school bus ten-year later.

Her “cash-for-ash” scandal, the cost of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme she set up in 2012 spiraled out of control and saddled taxpayers with a multi-million pound bill., caused the demise of the present NI devolved Government.

In October 2016, Mrs Foster was photographed alongside with Charter NI’s chief executive, Dee Stitt, who is also a leading member of the Ulster Defence Association.

Then there is your understand about the origins of the border.

For my readers:

It was the Government of Ireland Act (1920) that first divided the island into two separate jurisdictions, each with its own government and parliament.

This act of partition was envisaged as an internal United Kingdom matter and as a temporary answer to the thorny question of contested sovereignty across the island.

It was a solution that made sense in light of two overarching principles of contemporary democracy: nation-statehood and majoritarianism.

The border was intended to create straightforward majorities on either side that reflected broadly different national sentiments.

The island’s complex history as a site of contests for power and control – some of which battles had wide European resonances – was thus dramatically over-simplified and reduced into the division of the Irish border.

In 1922, after two years of civil war, the unionist-dominated government of Northern Ireland exercised its right not to be included in the Irish Free State, and the border officially became an international frontier.

The colonial high-handedness with which the border was carved is reflected in its route, which cuts through single farm holdings and shows little respect for the natural terrain of the landscape.

The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, on which Northern Ireland’s peace process rests, approaches the Irish border not merely as a dividing line between the jurisdiction of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom but as the embodiment of historical difference between British and Irish nationalisms.

It assumes that the primary political, social and cultural identities within Northern Ireland centre on conflicting interpretations of the border’s legitimacy and, what is more, that they have conveniently settled into a stable binary divide:

British/Protestant/unionist and Irish/Catholic/nationalist.

The strongest manifestation of this is a commitment by both governments to facilitate Irish reunification if it is the will of a majority in both jurisdictions, expressed via a referendum.

That said, all such activity will be in response to the new delineation of the UK’s borders with the European Union.

The precise nature and purpose of those borders (including the Irish border) will, of course, be determined by the outcome of negotiations that look set to take place with no direct input from Northern Ireland or the Irish border region.

Why then is the Ulster man adamant against any thought of making common cause with Dublin?

What lies behind the motto that expresses so aptly the sentiment in the North, Not an Inch”?

For it must be remembered from the outset – all anti-partitionist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding – that the union with Great Britain is preserved not by a British garrison hut by the declared will of the Northern Ireland people, expressed through their elected Parliament – and that will is paramount.

You might say that it is the most childish of evasions, the most ignoble of pretenses, to place the responsibility for partition on England and to ignore the many and fundamental differences which more than adequately explain the political division of Ireland.

To a great extent this is true.

Ireland as a whole has suffered and struggled for peace for centuries and I as a Irish man living in France strongly object to Mrs Foster and any others who do not aspire to its unity by peaceful agreement.

For this reason, the price of a hard border is too high on both sides.

The border between Northern Ireland and Eire exists because of the ideological gull’ which divides the two Peoples . Although Ulster and Ireland cannot unite, they can be good neighbors – on this condition, that each recognizes the right of the other to shape its destiny in its own way without interference.

That is true democracy; it is also sound statesmanship.

YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER.

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

 

 

 

 

( Three to Four minute read)

The world is awash with Social Media embedded with algorithms to the extent that everything heard or read is an opinion, not a fact, everything we see is a perspective of the truth.

I’m a huge fan of reader interaction but how are you supposed to decide what to do with the comments on your own blog?

We’ve got countless video calling apps, messaging apps, photo sharing apps etc. Apps may come and go, but the medium of communication is here to stay. It has impacted all of our lives in different ways, and we can no longer imagine a world without social media.

We don’t have to just communicate with someone face-to-face to tell them about the latest gossip.

In fact social media helped us to raise our voice about issues and be heard by millions across the globe. In doing so it is killing any fragment of privacy in our life. On the other hand it has helped us spread awareness about a million different things.

No vile act can go unpunished anymore.

We can all agree on one point- it has had an impact on all of our lives.

It has its advantages and disadvantages.

It has provided a platform for anyone to post anything, which is a means to influencing people.

Influencing someone is a big power and nowadays, an issue can be resolved through the support of millions of strangers on the internet who feel like your cause is worth supporting. Petitions on the internet have become a huge thing for people who want change but can’t bring it about themselves.

Gone are the days when politicians only stood up on a dais and shouted their poll promises.

People no longer only look to news houses to update them with information. A simple search on Twitter about the issue can give you much more information about it than news houses. Now, however, with the social media, people can immediately seek relief by posting about it.

Social media has given a platform to share practically everything.

The fact is, today’s social environment is a digital one.

There is no doubt that social media plays an intricate part in the lives of many people. There are more than 2.3 billion active social media accounts in the world.

This means that more than 30 percent of the world’s population is using sites like Facebook and Twitter regularly.

Many disasters like floods, earthquakes or terror attacks have garnered attention on social media and have gotten support from millions across the world. Facebook came up with the ‘safe’ option which lets you update your loved ones that you are safe and secure after the disaster.

If someone tells they have been someplace and there is no evidence of it on their social media, did it really happen?

Social media has definitely shown us that it is here to stay.

Connecting to the Internet, see what’s new around, search for new ideas waiting for funding in Kick starter.

It has become the norm of the society, and will probable go down in history as the fetish that broke democracy. 

Opinion use to be held by individuals with little or no effect other than expressed it in private conversations or written books or articles, (with a limited audience) they have now turned into bush fires that are spread by comments on Internet platforms, doing immense damage to two aspects life:  Privacy and Accountability.

For example:

If Trump’s opinion tweets in any way reflected actual US policy, we would be in serious trouble. It’s impossible to suggests that Trump’s tweets don’t cause substantial damage in and of themselves.

However is it the comments that he attracts with his opinion that are causing the damage.

(We can’t change who he is, but we can use Social Media to get rid of him.)

Or

This week:  Catalonia’s separatist government staged a referendum on leaving Spain – against the wishes of the national authorities. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont says the Spanish region has won the right to statehood following a contentious referendum that was marred by violence.

Or

The mess England finds its self in due to baseless untrue comments concerning immigration, loss of Sovereignty etc.

For many people, including myself, something changed when we saw the Britons wanting to leave the EU. They have already forgotten what life was like without the EU and its freedoms.

So when it comes to the value of comments, one blog may have tons of comments with little traffic, whereas another blog may have tons of traffic with little comments.  However you can rest assured that all comments are being monitored by Big brother who is always watching for key whether they be relevant or not.

Comments are not a reliable indicator of blog traffic.

The Question is are they data-driven decisions– are comments generating revenue for unseen Algorithms?

Comments are sometimes shallow pitches for back links or marketing.

Another words there is no correlation between the number of comments on a post and the number of links that post gets.

Do blog comments lead to more traffic?

Almost no one clicks through to your blog via comments.

If you go to Google Analytics:  26.7% of the keywords that are ranked in Google are most likely to come from the comments section.

It could be that Google may not be placing as much value on text created through comments or words appearing lower on a page (since comments are located below each blog post) as it does on the post itself.

The theory is that the more blog comments you have, the more content you’ll have on each page, and the more keywords you should rank for, which should increase your overall search traffic.

Who comments on blogs?

Random people on the Internet.

Lackluster comments like “Great Post, ‘me too!’ ‘you’re awesome!’ These types of comments, with like clicks definitely do not add value to a post.

The assumption is that on hot topics, like climate change, readers already come to the article with preconceived notions, and thus the civility of the comments would have no effect on them – they are already polarized.

However, it takes more than just having a social profile to get people to follow your blog post.

For instance, Tweets between 71 and 100 characters have a 17 percent higher engagement rate. Facebook posts with approximately 40 characters are 86 percent more likely to engage fans as opposed to longer pieces. The most popular YouTube videos are less than three minutes long.

In fact, Facebook Groups experienced more than 25 billion “likes” within the posts on the group platform in 2015.

Social posts that include imagery have a higher engagement rate by 650 percent than just plain text.

There are more than 313 million active users on Twitter each month. It accounts for almost 30 percent of all social media traffic on the Internet.

Recently I received a comment:

That pointed out that I had a grammar error in the opening paragraph of a post. The comment went on to express his or her opinion, encouraging others not to read the post.

After considering whether I should approve or delete the comment I decided to remove it.  Perhaps I should responded ( “Criticizing minutia points in my posts that didn’t matter — “do you have a toothbrush? syndrome”.)

Our attention is our most valuable commodity, and with unlimited channels competing for it, we’re in a dire situation if we don’t put some emphasis into where our attention falls.

Do we want to ask our readers to commit time and energy to commenting on blogs all over the Net when we know for certain that their focus is best spent creating worlds of their own for the digital future?

It is becoming increasingly obvious as time goes on that comments are being screened. Follow us on Facebook/ Twitter.

Genuine Commentators have most definitely increased the value of my posts and I can’t even fathom the idea of not letting their voice become a part of my posts.

So is there a value to comments particularly when you are inundated by tons of spammy or low-quality comments?

As a blogger I feel it is my duty to reply.

My view is no.

However, I ask you to leave your comments whenever you want. I’m not looking for high ratings or views.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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( A ten minute read)

For better or worse the British Empire had a massive impact on the history of the world. It was in effect the plunder of a quarter of the world by one country.

There is probably no single reason to explain how Britain created such a vast institution and I have no intention here to attempt to give one, however it might help to examine the emotional residue of lost empire, and a peculiarly English neurosis about national pride.

Why? because, Britain has never faced up to the shame of empire.

Perhaps Brixit is going to uncover the monumental ignorance surrounding the subject and the EU referendum is the last throes of Empire working its way out of its systems.

The consequences of departure appear to matter less that May’s vapid promise that Brexit will be “red, white and blue.”

It’s impossible to know the extent to which May believes her own myth-making but May’s global Britain will not be an open-armed nation going out into the world. It is a superannuated vision incubated by an amnesiac view of history in which the empire was an act of beneficence, and the outrages perpetrated in its name never happened.

Brexit may well turn out to be a reflection of the rectitude effects left by the collapse of the Empire.

In order to examine anything one needs to know it existed or happened in the first place so as to bear witness or to do anything about it.

The question is what were the motivations behind the creation of the Empire itself?

In world history was it a positive force or a negative force is in many ways irrelevant, the fact is that it was a transformative force.

It constantly mutated, evolved and changed in reaction to events, opportunities and threats. Motivated by greed and selfishness it consisted of an incredibly diverse set of actors through its many years of existence.

So at the risk of disturbing the past here are a few undeniable Empire facts.

Never mind that the majority of people under 50 on both sides of the English channel only have a hazy idea of what the Empire and Commonwealth were all about.

Never mind that approximately 35 million Indians died because of famines caused by British misrule, or that Winston Churchill blamed one of these famines on the “beastly” Indians for “breeding like rabbits”.

Never mind that concentration camp was invented by the British Empire.

Never mind that 5.5 million million Africans were forcibly taken to the Caribbean colonies by British slave traders, that the wealth they extracted came at a horrific cost and that while that wealth continues to flow through British society today, its extraction is still keenly felt in the islands of the West Indies.

( £16 to £17 billion in today’s money, or 40 percent of all government expenditure in 1834 – paid, after the abolition of slavery, to slave owners slaves were given nothing).

Never mind that the Empire was a system of wealth extraction in which the lives of millions of people were disregarded in favor of the greed of the British nation and those who served it.

Never mind  that millions of Irish died in the Famine and the another million fled to the USA.

Never mind when it was all done that the British were erratically carving up their empire into new nations, imperial officials attempted to obliterate the truth of what had happened during empire through the systematic destruction and burning of official documents. In Delhi, this destruction went on for so long that the smoke from the fires hung above the Indian capital.

Never mind the bribe to the DUP.

Never mind Boris Johnson when he said that the continent of Africa “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”.

Never mind that in September of 2015, David Cameron told the Jamaican parliament that it needed to “move on from the painful legacy of slavery”, before announcing his government’s plan to build a £25 million prison on the island.

If we ignore or condone the never mind attitude the story of modern Britain is, in many ways, a tale of dwindling self-regard.

These imperial crimes – and many more – are either not known or glossed over, lost in the tide of colonial nostalgia and the fog of ignorance that is trying to put the Great back in Great Britain by evoking the indomitable spirit of a time when Britain bestrode the globe is a recipe for disillusionment.

If its true history is ever addressed in time, a less bellicose country could emerge — wryer, more self-aware, and chastened, perhaps, by the guilty knowledge that its national success-story was built on exploitation and conquest.

Such a response in Britain seems unlikely to happen, partly because many Brits do not know about – or refuse to accept – the darkness of empire.

Last year, Conservative MP Liam Fox tweeted that Britain “is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history”. Post-Brexit, Fox is now a cabinet minister, in charge of international trade – hardly the place you want an empire booster.

In January of 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Britons (and 57 percent of Conservatives) thought their country’s “history of colonialism” was something to be proud of, and 43 percent thought the British Empire was a “good thing”.

The manufacturing of ignorance that keeps English people from learning about Britain’s imperial past continues to this day.

English history is not just Hitler and the Henry’s.

In place of realistic forecasts, May has offered a vision entitled “global Britain”. It seems like an obvious sham constructed around a massive contradiction: that by turning our backs on our closest neighbors we will open our arms to the world.

Of the over 100 former colonies, protectorates or dominions once ruled by Britain (depending on how you count them) 52 eventually transformed into the Commonwealth, although 31 are not that significant for trade.They still have populations of less than 1.2 million.

Persuading former colonial countries to sign trade deals might be difficult.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership recently sealed between the USA, Japan and ten other Pacific Rim countries included five Commonwealth countries. Canada has already done a deal with the EU. The UK would have to negotiate separate trade deals with its larger former colonies, if they were agreeable.

Sir John Seeley once stated that the British Empire was acquired in a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’. What he meant by this was that the Empire was acquired for a variety of reasons that did not add up to a coherent whole.

It assumed that British civilisation was innately superior to those it was subjugating.

Gain an income on the back of his nation’s prestige and maritime exploits.The famous ‘East India Company’ had to go cap in hand to the British Government to save it from bankruptcy but not before many individual investors and directors had made fortunes.

Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation.

How Brexit may influence the teaching of imperial history has yet to be written.

Defining the start and finish for the dates of the British Empire is not an easy task but I have a feeling that Brixit might achieve this goal.

My feeling is if you can’t escape fantasies of empire, if you can’t learn about what really happened in the name of the British crown, you will never be able to imagine a new identity for the country, an identity that can speak more fully to the multicultural nation you have become.

If you ever wanted evidence that England still suffer from Empire fantasy just look at the arrival yesterday of 65,000-tonne of new aircraft carriers at a cost £6.2bn for the pair, plus £200m rebuilding a jetty at HM Naval Base Portsmouth (while the country faces disintegration on many fronts, see previous post.)

It could not highlight its Empire aspirations in a world of increasing inequality. (This is the equivalent of 214 thousand free university places or 11,500 extra doctors) Not to mention the renewal of Trident another £205 billion or the HS2 which is set to cost £27.4bn.

The Royal Navy undoubtedly became a formidable military institution, but it was not always inevitable that Britannia would rule the waves. But did it turn England into a limited company, an institution, not a country or is the East India Company riding the waves again.

Its plain to see that your current trajectory, careering away from Europe with some puffed-up idea about your own importance, is undoubtedly a result of this failure of education, to face up to your Imperial crimes and demonstrate humility.

I’m often amazed at the lack of awareness of many British people about what actually went down under the Union Jack. Just as Ireland needs to emerge from its adolescent phase of a dwindling isolationist theocracy by facing certain issues head-on, Britain needs to emerge from its blood soaked past in the same manner because the issues won’t go away, they will always deeply underpin the prevailing narrative and culture.

“British Empire State of Mind”, will take a nuanced approach and “help provide some context for what’s going on in the world today, in terms of global inequality, poverty and how Britain helped create the conditions that caused and continue to perpetuate it now”.

As the UK leaves the European Union, so long as it’s a fantasy wrapped in the Union flag, with the bonkers notions that humans are divided in races, some superior to others etc the keeping of the lifeblood of commerce flowing freely will become more important than ever before.

In this nostalgic la-la-land, this gung-ho attitude to empire has spread much further than the corridors of power. Its legacy is still all around us.

The political imbroglio with a whole country’s future — and collective sanity — in its hands you would think that the British Crown which is a corporate sole and represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, and judicial governance would call a second referendum.

Unfortunately a second referendum on the terms of exit are viewed as acts of treason.

It seems, jingoism has become our asylum — a mad refuge from Brexit’s cold truths.

Its time England stopped negotiating with its self and the media and start to look after its people not an Empire that does not exist.

All comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.

//players.brightcove.net/624246174001/ryaWt2q-W_default/index.html?videoId=4713180189001

 

( A seven minute read)

The British establishment is slowly coming to terms with the enormity of the legal and political cluster bomb that Brexit has unleashed on it.

From the outside England paints a picture of a country falling asunder, in desperate need of restoration in more ways than one.

Big Ben might have gone silent for four years, and India and Pakistan might be celebrating 70 years of separation complements of the Empire, Mrs T May is going to soon have to lay her cards upon the table in more ways than one.

She is picking unilateral limits on the rights of other EU citizens to work in the UK over membership of the single market – the hardest of Brexits.

Where she has failed is to explain to the country the true extent of the economic damage this will entail and the entire of the requirements of dealing with their European colleagues.

In my view in order to find a positive outcome for both sides, a wholesale change of ministers would be preferable, but this is unlikely – at least for the moment – for the sake of Conservative party unity.

It might help to have a few ministers educated in the way Brussels works.

You simply cannot talk to European leaders like you talked in the Brexit campaign, and you will look like a fool if you do.

For the Brits, they must realize if they are to get anywhere, they must first acknowledge common concerns. There are plenty to be found: on economic growth, on trade, on Russia, on tackling terrorism, and yes, on freedom of movement.

If concerns can be framed as common ones, then the EU is willing to negotiate.

What absolutely will not fly is any notion that Britain is getting a special deal: à la carte, cherry-picking, having and consuming cake – whatever you want to call it. EU leaders know this would be the beginning of a death spiral for European unity and will defend it at all costs.

The common understanding of the Brexit dynamics is that due to the time pressures imposed by Article 50, it will be England under pressure to sign a quick deal. But not taken into account is the degree to which Europe itself could change during this period.

The fact that they’ve banned foreign academics from advising them on their EU strategy is mind-bendingly stupid.

Of the many issues behind Britain’s exit, the right to live and work on equal terms anywhere in the EU has been the most painful for the UK government post-referendum. The UK has always been a country of immigrants and diversity, and has grown great on the back of it but the question of EU migration was not anywhere to be found on the ballot paper.

The EU migration issue is not going anywhere fast, no matter how many well-meaning facts you throw at it.

Because England pandered mostly to false rhetoric about immigration it now finds itself on the threshold of becoming a satellite tax haven that in the long-term is going to break up under political pressure for Scotland and bribes to the DUP.

This again raises the question of whether London and Scotland could form a union and remain in the EU, leaving the rest of the UK out in the cold. Can you imagine if the whole of London went on strike for a day? That would be a statement, and each time London did it, GDP and the pound would crash. At the end of the day the UK, or even just England, is tiny. London might be the powerhouse of the UK – it pays a third of the UK’s tax but London is not a state within a state.

Combined with the strain of its ageing population it needs to be addressing both the perception and the reality, both are essential, but pandering to either is wrong when you see the following:

( A health service that is in need of thousands new nurses, a mental health service that is collapsing, a prison system that is overcrowded, understaffed, a screwed up educational system that produce debts on average of £30,000 @ 6%pa, a housing shortage,  personal and national debt levels out of control, enormous growth in inequality, pensioners struggling, the cost of public transport going through the roof, food banks on the increase, binge-drinking, gambling, a homeless crises, a people trafficking problems, an ageing population, an energy crises, that will push the cost of production in Great Britain up, a woeful imbalance of the English economy towards London: to mentions just a few of the problems that need to be properly addressed.)

It has not even build a single runway in a single airport in less than 30 years.

Taking the above into account its easy to building policies around popular fears, rather than established facts which is undermining everything that country is and always has been.

England is in bad need of some wisdom, by addressing the social and economic problems experienced by the people who feel they are under threat.

In or out of the EU England is and will be in a personified holy mess.

Some one with an ounce of wisdom needs to say ” We want a rerun of the In or Out referendum.” Sovereignty is not absolute, inside the union or outside it. If freedom means more than being left alone, there will be less of that as well.

It is unrealistic to hope that a deal between the Tories and the DUP will have no impact on the politics of Northern Ireland. It is very tough to see how a U.K. government dependent  on Democratic Unionist Party – which is propping up the Prime Minister’s minority government for its survival as part of a £1.5bn deal can be perceived as unbiased in its efforts to forge compromises between the DUP and Ireland.

The truth is that the English government has no answers to the “really tough questions” on Ireland’s post-Brexit border. A vision of a seamless, friction less border where nobody is aware that it exists...for now that seems to me pie in the sky.

In my opinion it’s a tragedy of the Brexit debate that it appears any common European identity is not valued by everyone In England.

England is full of wealth, of multifarious produces, supply for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inanition, to be shut-in by narrow walls of isolation is the last thing the doctor wants.

In my view British insularity is not just a feature rather a state of mind.

The major flaw with the United Kingdom’s government lies not in the fact that it’s outdated and unfit for the times we live in, but in the mistaken belief shared by the majority of British citizens that their country enjoys the best and most democratic government system known to man, regardless of the fact that it has no written constitution, that many of the freedoms taken for granted in other countries and enshrined in their fundamental charters are linked to the British Sovereign’s “Royal assent” that could be withdrawn any time at his/her whim, and that upper chamber of parliament is made of unelected members to whom pompous titles are bestowed upon, together with an alphabet soup of “honors” such as MBE, CBE, CMG, KCMG, etc.

The fact is, very many British people are unsettlingly down to earth, and perpetually riveted to the TV and football matches and bygone glory.

Each medal won in Rio – 27 golds, 23 silvers and 38 bronzes – came at a price of £4,096,500 in National Lottery and exchequer funding over the four-year Olympic cycle. The Scrap Value per gold medal : $501.

The recent 6 medals won by immigrants at the London World Championships 2017 – £27 million.

‘Foreigner’ can range from someone with different skin colour, accent, beliefs or customs, to those who do not support a particular football team or even those who live on the wrong side of a main road. British people are very sensitive to ‘accents.’

England is not a land of optimists, it’s a mixture of the class system governed by Postcode lottery of life,( Quoting – Cecil Rhodes: “to be born British is to have won the lottery of life”) that stigmatizes people by race, religion, or nationality.

The whole country is drowning in ‘heritage.’ Out of the 196 countries on the world today, there are only 22 of them that Britain has not invaded.

In this technological driven world insularity can only be viewed as a race to disaster. The future is so much more important.

Career politicians only interested in their own agenda while Academia as it exists today is the product of two past great intellectual revolutions with the current technological revolution demanding unity.

Nobody gets the name of the country right. Great Britain hasn’t existed since 1801.

 

Populist governments don’t usually work out.

I don’t know what it can do. It might be the world’s fifth biggest economy, but it is in the process of becoming a drab nation to justly regarded as one of the most ominous, “divine right,” of the Referendum.

How does Britain really stack up against the rest of the world?

No matter how much Monty Python may poke fun at the British, eccentricity will remain a national characteristic.

To ignore reality to impose its own vision of the world is a pillar of English philosophy. The right to be different, be it individually or as a nation, is part of the cultural heritage of this country. Britons do this entirely in order to refract the rules of reality itself through their own twisted lens, thus allowing them to declare their nation the winners at the game of life without having to do anything particularly special.

The people have a lot to be proud of, along with some shameful scars in their colonization. However they are afflicted by a national disease which makes them think they invented everything. The mere fact that someone ejaculated in someone’s birth canal and the baby landed on English soil makes each Englishman or woman the direct inheritor of the genius of these towering figures, and you should treat all the locals as though you were personally addressing Dickens or Darwin, even if they have trouble with revolving doors.

Nearly 52 per cent of Brits who voted to leave are out celebrating that the process of leaving the EU is at last underway, while the 48 per cent who voted remain are still looking on in horror. But after all’s said and done, things might not change that much after all the warnings of disaster. A compromise will emerge between the UK and EU, in the mean time England will have shot itself in the foot.

Only 1.5 billion people in the world might speak English, 1.051 billion speak Mandarin Chinese, with another 490 million speaking Hindi and 420 million Spanish.

However, Britain remains in limbo. It exports 44 percent of its goods to the common market, accounting for 3.3 million jobs. That privileged position is now lost.

Some one kindly tell me who is saying good by to the EU. 

Is it Great Britain, England, or the United Kindom, or is it the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

How Europe responds is far more important.

All comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

( A Ten Minute Read)

What will Sparks’ it?

Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?

Some of hypotheses are undeniably hysterical, for sure, but the consequences will be more terrifying, and indefensible, than we have ever seen before.

It’s always tempting to predict death and destruction, because you’ll be at least a little bit right and no one will fault you if you’re wrong.

So will it be a clash of civilizations, severe climate change resulting in climate mitigation; resource depletion, a populist uprising. The development of robotic soldiers with the ability to wage war without putting troops on the front line. Computer glitches causing corporations wars; or diplomatic misunderstandings, all of which can lead to war. Terrorism, inequality, and internal political or civil strife can also create the pressure for war.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were only a few hundred Islamist fighters in the Hindu Kush mountains. Fast forward through 16 years of the war on terror costing some $4,000bn (£3,300bn) and leaving 1.3 million dead, and the number of terrorists is currently about 100,000. Even on its own terms, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure. How on earth did this happen?

If civilization conflicts are not the least of our worries there are indeed a vast verity of triggers.

The Trump transition is likely to exacerbate US-China tensions. Trump has threatened a trade war with China. Kim Jong Un decides to attack his neighbors in the South Pacific and Trump decides to fire back.

The Ukrainian crisis was preceded by two decades of NATO expansionism up to the borders of Russia and now it is widely recognized that Russia is waging a campaign of covert political manipulation across the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

The original post-war European Union project was based around peace, social justice and harmony. The unraveling of this project might be Brexit accompanied by rising nationalism, which is likely to exacerbate the dangers of war on a continent with a fraught history of bloody conflict.

The Middle East cauldron centered around Isis and the Syrian war.

The Syrian war has seen allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – arming and funding radical Jihadist groups, such as the al-Nusra front. The terrorist attacks in Europe have demonstrated the difficulty in containing the spill-over. The Syrian war has seen the return of great-power politics with the involvement of Russia. This contamination has the potential for a wider conflict in which western countries could be drawn in.

India and Pakistan could go to war

Take your pick.

Mine is in keeping with the default operational mode of capitalism.

One might even argue that capitalism often resolves systemic economic crises through war. After all, a war economy with militarization, mobilization, full employment and jingoism can be viewed as the ultimate solution to economic woes and social unrest.

We are now at the beginning of Technology that is overseeing an extraordinary re-distribution of wealth that is tilting society off its axis.

The richest 1 percent have almost 40 percent of our worlds wealth, while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of the debt.

This is largely the result of technology.

And just wait until the work force is truly affected by the rise of robots and automation.

You don’t have to look too far back into history to see that when the marginalized have had it with the system, it doesn’t take a lot to set flame to tinder.

The emerging technologies like industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are advancing at a rapid pace, but there has been little attention to their impact on employment and public policy. So technology is likely to be at the center of the next major geopolitical battle.

The anti-immigration, anti-one percent, anti-capitalism and anti-everything else we’re seeing right now isn’t just going to go away in a society where people feel their voices are not being heard.

The next major war, wouldn’t be fought with bombs, men, or even robots. It wouldn’t be waged on a battlefield or in the sky.

Instead, it will be a silent war.

During the past couple of decades, most of the world’s private and public infrastructure had become predominantly digital.

The next major war will decimate that infrastructure.

Water-treatment facilities, oil pipelines, dams, electrical grids, telecommunications platforms, food shipments, public and private transportation, traffic lights, prisons, every single drip of media—and a long, long list of other things we need for survival but take for granted—will all be vulnerable.

Our smartphones and computers will be black rectangles. The Internet: poof! Water infrastructure will stop working, power plants will go offline. Crops, which are now operated by digital irrigation systems, will die.

And that will all be in the first few hours.

Imagine what will happen in the coming days, weeks, and months. We will essentially be sent back centuries. Computer hackers—possibly from an adversarial country—taking down power plants, water systems, the Internet, or private infrastructure. Real cyber warfare could destroy actual machines.

The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution.

So could it in fact trigger a Third World War.

As soon as 2025, large parts of the world will experience perennial water shortages, by 2050, the world’s populations will be a third to a half again as large as today. Put rising population and rising incomes together and, experts tell us, by 2050 global food needs will double, with water requirements going up accordingly.

[It takes 2,400 liters to produce a hamburger, common in many middle-income diets, it takes about 40 liters of water to produce a slice of bread, a staple of low-income diets.] On a humanitarian level, the possibilities are devastating.

Climate change requiring a shift in the way we think about the global distribution of resources.

Some will say that technology will help to get us out of the sustainability jam, but it will be nothing more than a quick fix to the vast graveyards of abject inequality created by algorithms for profit.

This is why we must now create a new World Organisation to vet all technology. (See previous posts)

World leaders have a duty to educate people to prevent the pain caused by a rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence.

Instead we see the transition of Western democracy to oligarchy and the descent into soft fascism is under way. Citizens will need to participate actively, rather than as passive consumers, to demand an end to this cycle of violence from governments and to defend the assault on democratic processes which are already having its foundations rocked by Social Media filtered platforms that have profit as their mantra.

In today’s ultra-globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and livelihoods would be wiped out. War could break out in a number of places, drawing in combatants in unpredictable ways. Combatants very rarely start a global war on purpose; the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations need to be vigilant about the threat of crisis escalation.

The spread of internet technology and social media has brought the world much closer together. Today, people from enemy countries can come together in cyberspace and find out that the “enemy” is not so different.

YouTube and Facebook makes it much more difficult for governments to carry out large-scale military aggression’s, but on the other hand all it took during World War I was one shot. Maybe all it will take for World War III is one line of code.

We shouldn’t scoff at the warnings that something like this could happen one day.

Statesmanship must go beyond diplomacy, in particular to championing new agricultural technologies. Without growing more food with less water (land, too) the water-war surprises will come, perhaps not in one year, perhaps not in four, but soon, and long into the future. Even the big threats—nuclear warfare or an ecological catastrophe, perhaps following from climate change—aren’t existential in the sense that they would wipe us out entirely. And the current bugaboo, in which our electronic progeny exceed us and decide they can live without us, can be avoided by unplugging them.

The new technologies may be self-accelerating, but they are not self-determining. I would say that the odds are good for our survival, providing that AI does not acquire the ability not just to think like us but to self-replicate.

The revolutionary potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our bodies and our minds, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. The most amazing thing about the future won’t be the spaceships, but the beings flying them. 

The truth is that from the standpoint of morality, like many other standpoints, we are hardly adapted to the world in which we live.

Technology will be the result of ever renegotiated agreement with society. Because they are so potent, their paths may undergo wild oscillations, but I think the trend will be toward the dynamic middle: much slower than the optimists expect, much faster than the pessimists think humanity can bear.

However the cold war may be over, but the Doomsday Machine that came out of the confrontation with the Soviets is still with us—and on a hair-trigger.

As global conflicts grow increasingly messy, narratives spun by propagandists and troll factories will wreak havoc via social media, state news organs and even the global free press.

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