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We know what fate we’re going towards.

14 Saturday Feb 2015

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You don’t have to be told that the World is in a mess or for me to tell you why –  it is in this post.

Of all the places in the world you would think that the European Union (which was built out of the ashes and grief of two World Wars) would extend the hand of help to Refugees.

I am not saying that the EU should accept every Tom Dick and Harry on a  Willy – Nilly bases.

I am saying that in order to save lives the EU should have safer routes for refugees run by EU border agency.

Italy Mare Nostrum at a costs 9 million euro per month has now fished out over 150,000 migrants/refugees – mostly from northern Africa and the Middle East.

Italy ended its full-scale coastguard operation known as Mare Nostrum, and the EU replaced it with Operation Triton.  An under-resourced scheme whose primary focus, officials admitted, was securing maritime borders rather than rescuing migrants.  While on the other hand it is commencing to pump billions into the economies by Quantitative Easing.  

Shame on us all.

If the EU is not willing to set safer routes  it needs to get serious about preventing future tragedies, it needs to give Triton the mandate and resources to rescue boats throughout the Mediterranean.

The morality of Europe’s decision to downsize maritime rescue operations last autumn fly’s in the face of everything it stands for.

The drowning of over 400 migrants since the start of the year, once again raises concerns over Europe’s reduced coastguard rescue operations.

If we believed that families drowning in the Mediterranean would be a deterrent to other migrants to attempt the crossing, well it’s not.

People are leaving because they’re being pushed out.”One survivor from Wednesday’s disaster told their rescuers: “We know what fate we’re going towards and [we understand] the probabilities of dying, but it’s a sacrifice we consciously make to have a future.”

God forbid it was one of us.

The Mediterranean Sea is over 2.5 million square kilometers.

The European Union must guarantee that there are no more push-backs at its land and sea borders:

Such refoulement (The expulsion of refugees) is an infringement of international law. Fundamental rights and fundamental values are just that, and should not be modified or curtailed based upon the strength of economic indicators. For if that is the case, they were not fundamental rights or values at all.

The true measure of a country, as well as a person, is how it deals with the most vulnerable. Our children may not consider this one of Europe’s finest hours.

Foreign Office minister:  Baroness Anelay has said such operations can encourage more people to attempt to make the dangerous sea crossing to enter Europe and claims that the demand for smuggling trips will continue despite the cancellation of Mare Nostrum. The UK would not support future search and rescue operations to prevent migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Migration is seen as something negative.

The UK looks about migrants as a burdens on the labor market, security risks linked to immigration, burdens on the social security system – these are three issues that are immediately brought up when migration is discussed by UKIP. And we can see from the political discussion of the last few weeks with what strength this defense mechanism comes into operation, even though we are talking about such small numbers.

I would suggest that the Baroness should spend a few day on a Life raft.

Since refugees have little chance of legal resettlement in countries such as Britain, which has settled only 90 Syrian refugees.  Europe unlike the UK must open its arms in an act of humanity. The costs will be about EUR 2.8 million per month creating badly need jobs.

Let me tell her that the protection of asylum seekers are shared challenges. The new EU refugee operation “Triton”  will be different in nature to Mare Nostrum, as it does not have a search and rescue function, but it has only a third of the budget of the Italian mission.

The operation has six ships, two planes and one helicopter at its disposal.

The EU needs to reconsider how it deals with refugees. The invasion is a myth which has been encouraged over decades, but it has nothing to do with the reality of the global figures.

Here is what a few that survived say:

Justice Amin, Ghana

“I’m here to find work to do so that I can help my family in Africa. That’s why I’m here in Europe. So I’m not happy. I mean, I like this area, this place I am living. But I’m not happy.

 

Vito, Nigeria

He explained life in Europe isn’t what he was expecting: “They are not treating us well… there is no work for black people, for illegal immigrants, all of them are wandering the street, looking for, begging money.”

 

 

Atiku, Ghana

After be saved, he was buzzing with excitement and ambition, now he’s sleeping rough in a train station, scavenging in litter bins and begging:
“I can’t steal… so begging is better for me.That will be better for me to survive.”
He would still like to go to England, but his priority is finding work and somewhere to live.

 

One idea would be an EU-wide distribution key with clear criteria, including possibly distribution according to population and tax revenue. That way, one wouldn’t always have this jealousy and bad feeling and the refugees wouldn’t be politically instrumentalized.

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Ask Yourself—— Where do my thoughts come from.

13 Friday Feb 2015

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The other day I was sitting in the garden looking at a cherry tree.

I had a though that lead me to another thought – Where do thoughts come from.

How does the cherry tree know when to flower? You can look it up on Google.

Anyway this might be a bit deep for some.

You often hear the expression “I have lost my mind “

The question is where was it in the first place. Your brain is still there.

Back to the cherry tree.

All living thinks on Earth share a basic Mechanism. The tree get its energy from the sun and its mechanism activate the flowers. We on the other hand get our energy like animals from protein and like animals our brains compute data that is controlled based on our Memories, Emotions, and Thoughts that come from the Brain; which cannot be measured directly or objectively.

So where does Ego,Self,Sprite, fit in?

The brain works on information within itself by chemical and electrical transmission which we can these day see on MRI Scans. But it has no muscles, so you can’t see it moving. Its activity is invisible.

So where does the mind get its thoughts from. What is it ?  Where is it ?

Unlike Animals brains our brains allows self-awareness.

Is the mind Independent from the brain. Or are the mind and brain  the same.

To day they say that the mind is a function of the brain activity – as far as I can see there is no physical proof of this fact.

Is the mind located elsewhere? Or is it indeed the sum of the functions of the Entire Brain.

The Egyptians believed it was in the heart and in Babylonia times it was in the liver.

Plato ( c 428 bce- c 247 bce) in the spinal cord.

Aristotle ( c 348 bce- c 322 bce) the heart.

Hippocrates ( c 460 bce- c 377 bce) The mind was a function of the brain.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) In the Pineal Gland- in the Brain.

Blaise Pascal ( 1632-1662) Man is a thinking Reed.

Robert De Mayo Dillon ( 1947-    ) The mind is just a though it does not exist.

It was the Cherry tree that gave me the thought in the first place.

Your real nature is like the sky, like space. Just remain like the sky and let thought-clouds come and go. If you cultivate this attitude of indifference towards the mind, gradually you will cease to identify yourself with it.

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The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

12 Thursday Feb 2015

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Our physical world is polluted with dangerous chemicals, but our language, too, suffers its own kind of pollution.

Everyone is society is affected by language and communication in some way or other, no more so than Europeans.

So lets ask a few questions;

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 founded what is now the European Union, and was supposed to be the beginning of the end of nationalism in Europe. But over a half-century later, nationalism never went away. Officially, deputies and delegates will only speak in their national languages, as a matter of principle.

You might wonder then, when most, if not all, EU bureaucrats master English, what’s the point in maintaining 23 official languages, especially at such expense? Why not just use a single language and, what’s more, why not use the language all EU bureaucrats master — English?

Within the EU institutions, ideology trumps pragmatism, and the founding ideology of the Union is “Unity in Diversity.”

Back in 1957, when there were only six member states and four languages, it was an easy credo to follow. But fast-forward to today and things are not so easy: 27 member states and 23 official languages. It’s costing the EU a lot of money, it’s having a negative impact on its global competitiveness and it will only get more complex as the union continues to enlarge. Croatia will make 24th official language.

Just imagine a General with an army of 24 different nations all awaiting the order to advance in their own language. The war would be over before it started. God knows we have moved on from Nelson days where every order had to giving in triplicate, but the idea for establishing English as the language of the EU, remains politically toxic. Long live Nelson.

English is the language of the most eurosceptic country — the United Kingdom. What’s more, France and Germany are very touchy when it comes to having their languages eclipsed by English. Any single language wouldn’t be democratic, or in the shared spirit of the union.

So we are left with. Once a delegate or bureaucrat delivers a speech in his or her native language, it’s taken up by dozens of interpreters, who simultaneously translate into their respective languages, or tune into the English interpretation and translate from that. Meanwhile, an official release of the speech is produced and sent to the translation unit and a separate group of text-based translators gets to work.

The process is costly, unproductive, and most of all, unnecessary.

So how are national and European identities tied to language and communication? And what role does power have – power in discourse, over discourse and of discourse?

In our daily lives, we often encounter combinations of words and images of all kinds. We take them as given, we use them to communicate and interpret information.

Just imagine you were born stone deaf. Your language would be based on sight–lip reading which translates to sign language which appears to be on the increase in modern forms of communication.

But we are no longer communicate only in ‘traditional’ written or spoken genres, but also using new ones, such as text messages, e-mail, tweets and Facebook posts. These force us to get accustomed to the reduction of geographical distance and of time-spans due to the GLOBALIZATION OF COMMUNICATION. These day you can get fired by a text while on holidays.

However, in all available genres, the use of language and communication as a ‘social practice’enables dialogue, negotiation, argument and discussion, learning and remembering, and other functions.

Languages and using language manifest ‘who we are’, and we define reality partly through our language and linguistic behavior.

But who determines who can speak with whom, and how? Who decides on the norms of language use; who sets these norms and enforces them; who determines whether languages, linguistic behaviors and identities are accepted?

Who, for example, decides, in the end, which language and which form of language is ‘good’ enough to pass a language test to attain citizenship or resident status? Or look at the other side of the pond. Spanish is like a creeping tide in the USA.

With the recent appearance of new states in Europe and the flow of populations across state boundaries, a new criterion centered on proficiency in the official language(s) of a state has emerged.

The acquisition of language proficiency is apparently frequently perceived as being solely in the interests of migrants and not also in the interests of the host country, as well as being the host country’s responsibility.

Moreover,many politicians still have to be convinced that second language acquisition depends on the availability of professional teachers, good teaching materials and sufficient competence in one’s native language.

Unfortunately, the worlds of language experts and politicians (and their bureaucrats) remain far apart, and much dialogue would be required to bring them together. Parameters for determining exactly who is (or can become) a ‘resident’ and/or a ‘citizen’ are at present unresolved, with little consensus across the states.

In creating language tests of various kinds, language competence has acquired the status of a key gatekeeper – providing access for some and rejecting it for others.

There are certainly no easy recipes for dealing with second language acquisition and migration. However, it is clear that we must acknowledge the close, emotional relationship between language and identity, and take account of it in the many political and educational policy decisions made every day.

All human identities are social in nature, because identity is about meaning, and meaning is not an essential property of words and things:

Two established criteria for determining citizenship, common in policy discourse,are birthplace and bloodline both are indelible printed and cannot be replaced by citizenship.

Language, power and identity’ closely these three are connected. How the discursive construction of  identities is influenced by vested interests, and how identities are thus continually re- and co-constructed and negotiated.

However, these co-constructions operate within clear borders created in politics, in the economy and in legal frameworks. The contrast between policy regulations and the ‘voices of migrants’ allows the exposition of the many inherent contradictions in the search for European identities and related values, as stated in the Charter of Fundamental Rights

Meaning develops in context-dependent use.

Meanings are always the ‘outcome of agreement or disagreement, always a matter of contention, to some extent shared and always negotiable’ (Jenkins 1996: 4–5).

The cost of Translation in the EU is (estimated) — to be €330m a year or some €0.60 for every EU citizen.

According to certain very rough estimates, the cost of all language services in all EU institutions amounts to less than 1% of the annual general budget of the EU. Divided by the population of the EU, this comes to around €2 per person per year.

In 2014 output was 2.30 million pages. Of this, 71% was done in-house and the rest by contractors. A page is 1 500 typed characters not including spaces.

                  The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

                         Learning second language ‘slows brain ageing.

Speaking a second language is better than just knowing how to speak it.

When the world changes, sometimes a new language is needed to handle that change. For instance, telegraphs spawned Morse code, airplanes spawned air traffic control signals, and computers spawned machine language, C++, Java, and many others. You may decide that no existing language can satisfy the needs of your world, and so you may choose to become a language maker, which presents its own challenges.

That leaves us with : Do words make a language or is it the other way around.  Words can be x-rays, if you use them properly- they’ll go through anything, you read them and you’re pierced. Prized possessions  are words are words that are never spoken, sometimes the thought in my head get so bored they go out for a stroll through my mouth.

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Taxation is the Price we have to pay to get it.

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

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A little bit of government is a good and necessary thing and taxation is the price we have to pay to get it. Zurich

Taxation is very much in the lime light at the moment.

One individual:

Hervé Falciani. In 2009 this Franco-Italian systems engineer for HSBC’s Swiss private bank handed over a list of more than 100,000 HSBC clients to the French Finance Minister at the time, Christine Lagarde.

HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

Now you don’t have to be a raw prawn to know way most of us would avoid pay tax if we could.

“For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” Obama said.

Here is the real reason why we avoid paying Taxes, (apart from Governments spending billions on useless warheads, conducting iff proxies wars, and privatizing national resources for short-term profits)

By taking half of everything that people own in a year the earnings of the 2,654.4 hours of the first 110.6 days go to the government.

Then our earnings can finally be our own.

For every 8-hour workday, we labor for 2 hours and 26 minutes to pay government and local taxes. One hour and 7 minutes goes to corporate and personal income taxes.

Eliminating this tax on productive earnings would eliminate 46.24% of the tax burden.

It would also allow us to keep our finances private. We dedicate an average of 20 minutes of our labor to personal savings. It should be more like 1 hour and 12 minutes.

A total TOT +1.19% of 35 minutes of the 8-hour workday pays for Social Security and Medical Insurance.

If Social Security was privatized, instead of constantly decreasing benefits, personal retirement accounts would be over funded.

An additional 19 minutes goes to consumption taxes like excise and sales tax.

Some people suggest our country could operate on a “fair tax” of entirely sales taxes. But such a method of taxation has its own problems. Critics counter that a national sales tax is regressive, favoring the rich (although this depends on how you measure “rich”). They claim foreign companies would have an unfair advantage in the international market over their domestic counterparts.

Fifteen minutes of each workday goes to property taxes.

Even renters pay this tax as businesses and landlords pass the expense on to them.

Property taxes are highest for city dwellers because real estate assessments increase in proximity to a big city. Thus they tend to be a regressive tax, taxing the poor who live in relatively highly assessed areas and shop at stores with higher assessed buildings whose high property taxes trickle down into their prices.

For the price of property taxes, average workers could purchase all of their clothing. As it is, workers have to labor an extra 13 minutes to afford their clothes.

The final 9 minutes go to other state, federal and local taxes.

So how do we create a stronger, fairer, and more sustainable economic model in which the many and not just the few benefit from rising prosperity now and into the future?

Supplement wages for low-income workers

Increases the wages of low-income workers.

Progressive tax reform.

Payroll taxes are still sharply regressive.

Make housing cheaper.

Keep unemployment low to maintain worker bargaining power.

Deregulate copyright and patent law.

How can this be done in The European Union.

The euro zone debt crisis shows that something is seriously wrong with Europe.

But what is it?

The Euro zone is a heterogeneous federation of independent states, an area of ​​exchange where markets for goods, labor and financial assets are segmented by national boundaries and often scarcely competitive.

European nations have basically been moving apart for centuries, developing their own national languages and cultures.

So far, the organisation’s leaders seem to have shown little recognition of the inherent structural flaws of the currency, preferring instead to prop up failure.

Across much of the continent, the EU’s fatal lack of real popular consent may be catching up with it to the extent that it has actually amplified the differences in terms of income, unemployment, fiscal balances and public debt. The rules for budgetary discipline are imposed from the center and are ineffective, particularly in adverse economic conditions.

The crisis has also highlighted the inadequacy of European institutions and exposed their design faults. Public apathy towards the EU is also increasing, as citizens feel isolated from the institutions in Brussels and see no way to influence European level decisions.

The Euro zone federal budget is negligible and always balanced, so that the burden of macroeconomic stabilization falls on national budgets, which are defenseless against aggregate shocks.

Last but not least, it ultimately requires the Euro zone to move away from centralized system of ineffective and invasive rules towards a system of national ownership of budgetary discipline, combined with a binding no-bail-out commitment by European institutions.

In addition to the solvency risks for states and banks, the return to national currencies carries the risk of taking the continent back to an era of competitive devaluations, trade protectionism and retaliations.

The way to shed the Euro zone from the risk of disintegration is long and fraught with political obstacles. It requires each country to jump-start the path of structural reforms, to eliminate barriers to competition, contrasting rents of firms, trade unions and national banks; it requires Europe to gradually establish a federal budget and inter-state insurance scheme, devolving the proceeds and the administration of a tax base (VAT) to the center.

The integrity of the Euro zone ultimately depends on the political will of each
member state. The benefits of free movement of goods, persons and investments – the factors that could make the EU economy strong –could be at stake.

The mantra that price stability and fiscal responsibility, together with market-friendly micro economic reforms, will not put Europe back onto a path of rapid growth and restore full employment. Nor will Quantitative Easing have the desired effect.

The disintegration of the Euro area, will be quite dire.

Take the Forthcoming Elections in Spain, and the recent Election result in Greece

The Forthcoming disintegration of the UK political system and its promised referendum on staying in the EU.

If the UK votes to leave considering the amount of trade it does with the EU it will still have to follow most of its rules – while no longer having any role in setting them. Reducing social security provisions just when the need for them may be increasing hardly seems wise.

 “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an European; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

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The excitement and dreams about becoming wealthy.

08 Sunday Feb 2015

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Right if you read the last posts and survived here is something that you might just survive.

A win on the Lotto.

A large number of articles in the press and on TV news are devoted to what people are dreaming to do with the money they could win, or interviewing past winners.

Just in case there is some one reading this and they have won or happen to win I need to say I have never won anything other than a headache from a bottle of whiskey.

Here is my survival plan:

If you win it in the next drawing, you won’t ever have to worry about money again–right?

Wrong.

The first thing to do is:

A lottery ticket is a bearer instrument meaning that whoever signs the ticket and presents a photo ID can claim the prize. So if you haven’t signed the ticket and it blows out of your hand while you are waiting for a bus, or if you show it to a friend in a bar and accidentally leave it on the counter, you’ve lost the loot.

The next move:

Remain anonymous if the rules permit it.

Once people know you’re suddenly wealthy, you’ll be badgered by requests for handouts from everyone from charities to long-lost friends and relatives–not to mention all the financial “experts” who will be vying for your business. So check the rules to see whether you can dodge them all by remaining anonymous.

The next move:

You have the choice between taking the prize money all at once or having it paid out over 26 years in the form of an annuity.

If you didn’t have smart money habits up until now, you could easily turn out to be your own worst enemy by quickly squandering the fortune.

With a lump sum payment, you must immediately pay tax on the entire amount. With an annuity, you are taxed only as you receive the payments. People who have trouble controlling their spending might prefer the discipline of receiving the money as an annuity. But this payout form has other drawbacks.  You will want to compare the effective yield of the annuity with what you could earn by taking the money as a lump sum, paying the taxes and investing the proceeds.

Next:

For the first six months after you win the lottery, don’t do anything drastic, like quitting your job, buying a home in the Caribbean, trading up for a luxury car or building a collection of handbags. Meanwhile, set aside a fixed amount for splurges—it’s only natural to want to celebrate your windfall. Save the big purchases for later.

Next:

There is no better investment than paying off debts.

Next:

Hand pick your own lawyer, accountant and investment adviser, and requiring them to work together.

Putting the money in safe, short-term investments and not even touching it for the first six months. Only spend income–not principal. Especially in today’s investment world, “It takes a lot of principal to generate income and once you start spending principal, the principal quickly dissipates.

Next :

Don’t buy a ticket in an office pool.

You could end up getting unwanted attention if someone believes that they are owed a share, as happened in these cases:

Office pools seem to be a one-way ticket to disaster.

Consider the nine Bell Canada call center employees who sued 19 co-workers for a share of a $50-million prize won in January 2011, claiming to have not been told that they were left out of the group. (A court ruled in their favor two years later.

Last but not least the Bad luck streaks.

Like one that befell 77-year-old Lucient Nault of Montreal — whose daughter-in-law drowned in a pool built with the winnings before his son — who was suing people he said took advantage of his father’s sudden wealth — was hit by a car while chasing a runaway dog. All of this led to Nault’s wife leaving him, make one wonder if every good fortune comes with the risk of a curse.

New Westminster, B.C.: A woman who claimed she was tricked out of her equal share of a $12.6-million jackpot is currently suing her former business partner and the former business partner’s husband over their deal to buy tickets with the money from their delivery truck cash boxes. The couple claimed that the money they spent on this particular 6/49 draw was their own.

Windsor, Ont.: An 83-year-old man sued his wife — plus her two daughters and their spouses — after she cashed in 6/49 numbers worth $3.5-million in 2008, then initiated divorce proceedings. The owner of the Pioneer Snack Express later produced video evidence that the retired carpenter bought the ticket himself and posted a sign with a security camera photo to publicize this fact.

Cambridge, Ont.: A woman who established a long-distance relationship with a man who owned a convenience store, then later moved from Toronto to help him run the business, was dumped right after he scored a $21-million 6/49 jackpot in 2006 — violating a verbal agreement she claimed they had. Right after the win, though, the store owner opted to get back together with his wife.

Burnaby, B.C.: Fingerprints factored into a claim that a man had his $10-million winning ticket stolen by neighbours in 1992 —  the result of losing a wallet and getting it back with one slip of paper removed — even though it took 11 years for an affidavit to be filed in court. The wallet-loser took over a decade to pursue the matter because he didn’t think science could help him.

Winnipeg: A home care worker unsuccessfully sued the elderly wheelchair-bound woman she looked after on the grounds that they had a verbal agreement to split any winnings. But the $11.4-million jackpot winner’s son, who was photographed collecting his prize in 2000, admitted that he initially lied that he bought the ticket himself in order to spare his mother the media attention.

London, Ont.: The Super 7 winner who curiously waited until nearly the end of the one-year deadline to pick up his $30-million prize in 2004 eventually settled out-of-court after a long legal battle with the woman he dumped after one last hotel room romp. The trial involved a detailed deconstruction of their torrid decade-long relationship — and the couple might have even reconciled.

Winning the lottery sounds great on the surface.  But what are the odds that a scenario similar to one of these will happen to you?

Are lottery tickets a good investment? Not really.

A West Virginia man who won a $315 million Powerball jackpot back in 2002. At first he gave millions to charity, including $14 million to start his own foundation. But later, a briefcase with $545,000 in cash and cashier’s checks was taken from his car while it was parked outside a strip club. His office and home were broken into and he was arrested twice for drunk driving. His granddaughter died under suspicious circumstances and by 2007, he had spent most of his money. He told reporters, “I wish I’d torn that ticket up.

To sum up:

Sudden wealth is most likely to exaggerate your current situation, but it won’t fundamentally change your sense of well-being. The overall happiness levels of lottery winners spiked when they won but people tend to return to a set point.

But the good news is that the general mental well-being of winners vastly improved. If you feel fulfilled, you are a careful financial planner and you have strong relationships in your life, a lottery win is likely to build on those strengths.

However if you’re unhappy, you’re not good at managing money and you’re surrounded by people you don’t trust, a big win will probably make your problems worse.

Big winners ruffle spend 44% of their lottery winnings after five years, but only a few spent their entire winnings in their lifetime.

Legal gambling has a net impact on state tax revenues.  There is little doubt, however, that politicians see the potential tax revenues as a key benefit. The purported beneficiaries of state lotteries rarely experience a significant increase in state government expenditures instead, unrelated expenditures increase.

Individuals are merely shifting charitable expenditures to lottery expenditures. This is because of the high level of publicity that lotteries and their intended beneficiaries receive. As a tax, lotteries are highly regressive.

Lotto’s  are now camouflaged by the mass media and advertising as doing good, (“good causes”) without support or highlight any one cause in particular.

There is now a Web site ( www. the Lotto.com) who will buy your tickets world-wide so you can stay anxious and anonymous best of luck.

Powerball Lotto The mother of all lotteries. In less than 25 years it has paid out over $5 Billion dollars in first prizes.

Mega Millions Lotto is the one with the single largest jackpot in the history of North America, at $656 Million Dollars. Subject to taxation both for US citizens and non-US citizens, with the latter category taxed at a flat rate of 25%.

Euro Millions Lotto The Euro Millions Lotto is so loose, in fact, that as of January 2012, there is a permanent cap placed on the jackpot at 190 Million Euros. The second reason the Euro Millions Lotto is so popular is because winners outside of Switzerland are not subject to taxes.

Euro Jackpot designed to service countries not included in the Euro Millions Lotto.

UK National Lotto The UK National Lottery operates in this manner, advertising that the Lottery supports “380,000 … good causes… across the UK.

SuperEnalotto Italian lottery 34.648% of the revenues gathered from ticket sales are apportioned for winners.

La Primitiva Lotto Based in Spain 70% of ticket sale revenue goes into the prize.

El Gordo Lotto the most popular in Spain the win can remain secret the Spanish government allows winners to keep everything.

Are players affected by the attention media devote’s to the game? They sure are. When the jackpot increases the media attention induces players to buy more tickets.

For those of us who dream about becoming wealth the best feeling in the world is friendship.

We’re all gonna die!! Life on Earth has only 1.75 billion years left

08 Sunday Feb 2015

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Sorry for the over the top headline but Scientists have done the maths and according to their calculations, life on Earth has 1.75 to 3.25 billion years left to thrive.

Even short geologic time scales outrun our ability to project human history.

One common, frequently unconscious misconception is that history is linear, progressing toward an inevitable end point.

Our inability to see ourselves as part of a continuum of processes that will continue into the future is also directly linked to our shortsightedness in managing our environment. Human impacts already equal or surpass many natural processes. For example, human earth-moving processes exceed natural erosion in the volume of material moved (Hooke, 2000; Wilkinson, 2005).

Let’s peer into the future.  The reasons for disaster are not hard to conjecture.

Technology might become so advanced that humans will no longer need to modify the natural environment extensively, but any attempt to predict technology far in advance is bound to be almost pure speculation.

Space Weather (which includes any and all conditions and events on the sun, in the solar wind, in near-Earth space and in our upper atmosphere)  can affect space-borne and ground-based technological systems and through these, human life and endeavor.  Not to mention Yellowstone National Park that could decide to erupt.

Even if humans avoid causing a mass extinction, many species will have become naturally extinct and new ones will have evolved.

The truth is we don’t have a particularly detailed idea of what is going on inside out own planet never mind on the surface.

When the Earth’s molten core eventually cools and hardens to the point that there is little or no slip-sliding of different substances, it more than likely its magnetic field will die out as well. The Earth is thought to have begun this cooling sometime in the last billion years.

That’s good, since one way or the other we certainly have a lot of time left; while a magnetic flip is largely meaningless, magnetic death certainly would not be.

In all likelihood, the Sun will swallow the Earth long before then, as it convulses and expands as a part of its natural death throes and that’s if a giant asteroid or a nuclear war doesn’t finish us off first.

However the 92.9 million miles between us and our host star will not be enough to keep us comfortable.

For those of you that need to use Google the Sun is a magnetic variable star at the center of our solar system that drives the space environment of the planets, including the Earth. The distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 93 million miles. At this distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The Sun has a diameter of about 865,000 miles, about 109 times that of Earth. Its mass, about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three-quarters of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. Less than 2% consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, and others. The Sun is neither a solid nor a gas but is actually plasma. This plasma is tenuous and gaseous near the surface, but gets denser down towards the Sun’s fusion core.

Where was I?  The earth will become inhospitable to humans long before the planet enters the hot zone ( Stars like our Sun shine for nine to ten billion years. The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old, judging by the age of moon rocks. Based on this information, current astrophysical theory predicts that the Sun will become a red giant in about five billion (5,000,000,000) years.  So there is not much to worry about.

However I am pushing on in years and I often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate crisis never mind the future of our planet. There is a tragic alienation between us and nature.

There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue. The amount we consume each year already far outstrips what our planet can sustain, and the World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030 we will be consuming two planets’ worth of natural resources annually.

Over the course of this century, the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change. When the century began, neither human numbers nor technology had the power radically to alter planetary system.

We know that in two billion years or so, an expanding sun will boil away our oceans, leaving our home in the universe uninhabitable—unless, that is, we haven’t already been wiped out by the Andromeda galaxy, which is on a multi billion-year collision course with our Milky Way. Moreover, at least a third of the thousand mile-wide asteroids that hurtle across our orbital path will eventually crash into us, at a rate of about one every 300,000 years.

Perhaps Google is a good idea after all to prepare a copy of our civilization and move it into outer space and out of harm’s way—a backup of our cultural achievements and traditions.

There is hope on the horizon during my Nuclear Warheads reading ( See The Series of Posts) I learned that a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could decrease global surface temperature by 1°C–2°C for 5–10 years and have major impacts on precipitation and solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. No much help. We will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of years.  Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 pentagrams of it (a pentagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils.

In the short-term, we need to make it in the economic interests of people to do the right thing. The chances of that happening in a Capitalist world I will leave up to yourself to decide. 

Here is what is happening.

The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves to see them or not.

Unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships among all of these.

Life-threatening challenges of desertification, deforestation, and pollution, of toxic chemicals, toxic wastes, and acidification of carbon dioxide and of gases that react with the ozone layer, and from any future war fought with the nuclear arsenals including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are underway.  Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already begun.

The onslaught of droughts, earthquakes, epic rains and floods over the past decade is triple the number from the 1980s and nearly 54 times that of 1901, when this data was first collected.

Yet we are aware that such a re-orientation on a continuing basis is simply beyond the reach of present decision-making structures and institutional arrangements, both national and international and endure most of the poverty associated with environmental degradation.

The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to access and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope.

This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years. Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona ” the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”

We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate.

The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues to pour in—and the news is not good.

Thanks to climate change oceans have already lost 40 percent of their phyto plankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature variations.

So you might well ask if some version of extinction or near-extinction will overcome humanity.

It deeply worries many people who are seeking ways to place those concerns on the political agendas. 

Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated at five million annually,

We’ve still got plenty of time left to enjoy planet Earth but we need to know how to respond, to changes that are already happening—and to those coming in the near future. It’ll happen very fast. 

It appears that there is not much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor can we expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because we are all more interested in leaving a legacy of material wealth that will be totally worthless.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-scientists-earth-deep-future-effects.html#jCp

Climate change and other human influences are altering Earth’s living systems in big ways, such as changes in and the spread of ,”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-scientists-earth-deep-future-effects.html#jCp

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Our Politicians need to wake up to the fact that- Globalization and technology stop at no border.

06 Friday Feb 2015

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After seven or eight post on Nuclear Weapons its back to what’s wrong with Capitalism/ Democracy.

Those of you that have been reading my blog will have already seen that I have advocated that Greed is the root problem when it comes to both the above.

I have suggested that we need to come together through Social media to stop Sovereign Wealth Funds privatizing the resources that we all rely on. To stop Computer Algorithms from plundering the Foreign Exchange, Stock Exchange, not to mention E Bay Auctions.

I have also stated that this is impossible, but that it is not impossible to place a 0.05% WORLD AID COMMISSION TO CREATE A PERPETUAL SOURCE OF FUNDS TO REMOVE INEQUALITIES IN THE WORLD.

Unfortunately to date most of my readers are to busy living their lives to engage in developing such an idea other than pressing the like button.

Not to despair. Today, we are living in the age of globalization and technological revolution.

Both have delivered much benefit to society, but have reshaped the political economy of western industrialized countries in ways that challenge the middle class and those striving to get into it.

THE TROUBLE FOR CAPITALISM IS THAT IT HAS SOMEHOW OR OTHER STOPPED SERVE THE VAST MAJORITY OF SOCIETY AND IT IS THEREFORE TURNING – DEMOCRACY INTO WORTHLESS VOTES –  that are now turning to Internet Petitions and reality TV. 

This sea change has been facilitated by technology that has loosened the connections between top management and ordinary workers. Corporations have become less committed to their work forces and their communities.

Institutions on all levels are deeply mistrusted by the public. However, part of that mistrust has developed precisely because both government and business have failed to offer broadly shared prosperity. Today, the ability of free-market democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is in question as never before.

So how do we create a stronger, fairer, and more sustainable economic model in which the many and not just the few benefit from rising prosperity now and into the future?

This is not just a question for governments but for companies and citizens as well.

My first contention HAS NOT CHANGED it is impossible to remove Greed but where we see profit for profit sake we should cap it.

We all know what is wrong, but just in case you are a Politician:  It is the GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE HAVE AND HAVE NOT’S ( NOT MONEY BUT INEQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY)

Confidence in government is at an all-time low, and consequently, the public resists intervention by a government it viewed as incapable of solving its problems. This forces families that could benefit from public support to face the challenges of the evolving economy on their own. It is a vicious cycle — and a cycle we can and must break by renewing confidence through a government that works effectively and efficiently for its citizens.

SO WHAT CAN BE DONE?

While some on the left seek to turn away from globalization and technology, that is not a realistic option. No country can prosper in isolation.

Those on the right who argue for a return to laissez-faire, trickle-down economics — cutting taxes at the top, stripping out regulation, and making deep cuts to public services — do not provide a viable alternative.

Developed countries cannot succeed through a race to the bottom in which companies simply compete on cost as workers see their job security erode and their living standards decline. When democratic governments and market systems cannot deliver prosperity to their citizens, the result is political alienation, a loss of social trust, and increasing conflict across the lines of race, class, and ethnicity.

HERE IS WHAT I SEE THAT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED.

1) There are still too many people who are unemployed.

2) Minimum wages have lost their real value.

3) Workers must benefit from increased productivity rather than seeing returns accrue primarily to shareholders.

4) Remove barriers to women’s labor-force participation, such as inflexible work environments and high-cost child care.

5) Focusing on early childhood education, increasing the quality of our schools, eliminating financial barriers to higher education, and providing support for apprenticeship programs are all critical to driving higher skill levels across economies in both tradable and non-tradable sectors.

6) Cities and regions must be given the tools to make their own local decisions to help drive growth.

7) Increasing numbers of workers find themselves in contractual relationships that do not guarantee hours worked or provide benefits such as paid vacation, sick days, or pension benefits. No hours contracts are slavery.

8) Large corporate attention has shifted to financial engineering, particularly with the goal of minimizing tax payments. Restoring the integrity of corporate taxation will require more than a simple reversal of the policies of the past 30 years. It will require governments to develop a taxation system that can withstand the pressures of a globalized economy, promote long-term investment, and provide a stable, fair, and predictable policy framework for businesses.

9) Create Profit-sharing and share-ownership schemes provide a direct way to ensure that employees have an incentive to help their company to succeed.

10) Raising skills levels.

 These challenges are formidable, but they must be met, and any politician worth his privileged position would do well to take note.

These are essential for democracy itself. Advocates and apologists for anti-democratic regimes argue that the democracies are no longer capable of managing their problems or creating a sense of social dynamism. For democracies to thrive, rising prosperity must be within reach of all citizens.

The profound technological changes that brought down the cost of many goods and services are also replacing traditional middle-income jobs. It is changing balance of economic power away from domestic workers and toward mobile, international corporations.

Internet and computer technology has made cross-border business organization less costly and more efficient, it has become easier for businesses to outsource or relocate all or part of their operations to countries where wages, labor, and environmental standards are low.

In addition to unskilled labor — which has, in some cases, been squeezed by globalization and off shoring –advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have put intermediate-skill jobs at risk in what economists call a hollowing out of the labor market.

This trend is set to continue with 3-D printers, Google’s driver less cars, and Amazon’s drones. This is creating an even greater premium on higher levels of skills and qualifications, making the returns from ideas, capital, and top-class qualifications greater and greater.

Employment is less likely to be stable or long term.

Powerful forces of globalization and technological change must be navigated or inequalities will continue to widen, and for many, precarious low-skill work will increasingly become the norm. The consequence is that growth will stall.

Finally, it is essential that markets work in the public interest and for the long term rather than focusing only on short-term. Infrastructure investments deteriorating facilities, unpredictable service disruptions, congestion, and higher costs to businessesj and households is the result.

In summary, declining growth, the effects of the financial crisis, and increasing inequality have combined to put substantial economic stress on middle-and low-income families across the developed world.

Poor policy choices have only made matters worse. Concerns about financial instability, immigration, and tax avoidance are not the causes of our problems they are fruits ripening on the tree.

To ensure that all of society’s citizens have a stake in prosperity, and therefore all of  citizens have a stake in the future we need new social and political institutions to make 21st century capitalism work for the many and not the few.

( If you are English reading this blog feel free to forward this post to your candidate in the forthcoming General Election.)

2015 will see the creation of new political parties organised in radically different ways, – See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/2015-predictions/democracy-makes-itself-home-online#sthash.vxQJ1BiK.dpuf

Five Star in Italy prides itself on its internet-based decision making structure, as do the Pirate Parties in Iceland, Germany and Sweden. Democracy OS in Argentina has designed a sophisticated way for all its members to propose ideas and shape them online. – See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/2015-predictions/democracy-makes-itself-home-online#sthash.vxQJ1BiK.dpuf

Democracy could be reenergised. There are other possible futures, of course. A sullen anti-political mood could fuel populist demagogues. But there is at least a good chance that those with their eyes on the future rather than the past will have the edge. – See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/2015-predictions/democracy-makes-itself-home-online#sthash.vxQJ1BiK.dpuf

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The global economy has fundamentally changed over the past 40 years.

As communism collapsed and countries gradually liberalized their economies, rapid reductions in poverty and increases in living standards have taken place in Asia and especially China, in South America, and in Eastern Europe, with growth increasingly taking off in Africa. Some of those countries that have produced economic growth have done so in a manner that has left most of their citizens no better off.

This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the political systems of these nations — and for the idea of democracy itself.

Governments in developed countries must stay open to the world, seek new trade deals and regional partnerships, and continue their commitment to a dynamic market economy. While the economic mission of progressives is unchanging, the means of its achievement change from generation to generation as the economy evolves.

We need a smarter, and fairer society that returns to long-termism which will not only meet our fulfillment of environmental commitments, but will created a world worth living in.

Inclusive prosperity nurtures tolerance, harmony, social generosity, optimism, and international cooperation. Left to their own devices, unfettered markets and trickle-down economics will lead to increasing levels of inequality, stagnating wages, and a hollowing out of decent, middle-income jobs. This outcome is morally wrong, economically myopic, and at fundamental odds with a democracy in which everyone quite reason- ably asks for an equal chance to succeed.

understand and can respond to voters political systems restore their vitality and reclaim their ability to deliver on the promise of prosperity for all.

Here is the most amazing fact, when it comes to Nuclear Power.

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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While reading up on Nuclear Weapons my path led me in and out of material on Nuclear Power for energy.  I came across some stuff called Thorium. Now I am no expert and I am sure there are hundreds in the long tall grass, but the future of nuclear power is important for the world to meet future energy needs without emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric pollutants. Nuclear power could be one option for reducing carbon emissions. Any alternative to uranium is worth having: if it removes the nuclear, how are you threats. 

Existing reactors use uranium or plutonium—the stuff of bombs. 

Uranium reactors need the same fuel-enrichment technology that bomb-makers employ, and can thus give cover for clandestine weapons programmes. Plutonium is made from en-riched uranium in reactors whose purpose can easily be switched to bomb-making.

We have seen (If you have read) the series on Nuclear weapons that nuclear power entails potential security risks, notably the possible misuse of commercial or associated nuclear facilities and operations to acquire technology or materials as a precursor to the acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability.

It also has perceived adverse safety, environmental, and health effects, heightened by the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl reactor accidents, but also by accidents at fuel cycle facilities in the United States, Russia, and Japan. There is also growing concern about the safe and secure transportation of nuclear materials and the security of nuclear facilities from terrorist attack.

However if in the future carbon dioxide emissions carry a significant “price,” nuclear energy could be an important — indeed vital — option for generating electricity.

At present, however, this is unlikely: nuclear power faces stagnation and decline.

In 2002, carbon equivalent emission from human activity was about 6,500 million tonnes per year; these emissions will probably more than double by 2050. It ain’t the CO2, it’s the methane that is in real runaway problem.

Today, nuclear power is not an economically competitive choice, to clear up the environment but it must be preserve as an option while it endeavors to overcoming the four challenges described above—costs, safety, proliferation, and wastes, and to zap the odd incoming Asteroids ever few thousands year.

Anyway it appears to achieve any of the  targets a critical factor for the future of an expanded nuclear power industry is the choice of the fuel cycle.

Atomic energy is seen by many, and with reason, as the misbegotten stepchild of the world’s atom-bomb programs: ill begun and badly done. But a clean slate is a wonderful thing. And that might soon be provided by two of the world’s rising industrial powers, India and China, whose demand for energy is leading them to look at the idea of building reactors that run on thorium.

According to what I have read on the subject Thorium, though hard to turn into a bomb; is not impossible, but sufficiently uninviting a prospect that America axed thorium research in the 1970s.

Here is the amazing thing.

It is also three or four times as abundant as uranium.

In a world where nuclear energy was a primary goal of research, rather than a military spin-off, it is certainly worthy of its investigation. It could be the solution to Iran problem and perhaps the first positive move by governments to dismantle the nuclear cloud hanging over the earth.

Recently, thorium has generated a fair amount of excitement for its potential as so-called “green nuclear” power, especially in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown that occurred after the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

What is Thorium I hear you saying. What’s green about thorium? If Thorium was an economic solution why hasn’t it been taken up?

Thorium named after the Norse god of thunder is a silvery-black metal basic element of nature, like Iron and Uranium. Its properties allow it to be used to fuel a nuclear chain reaction that can run a power plant and make electricity (among other things). Thorium itself will not split and release energy. Rather, when it is exposed to neutrons, it will undergo a series of nuclear reactions until it eventually emerges as an isotope of uranium called U-233, which will readily split and release energy next time it absorbs a neutron. Thorium is therefore called fertile, whereas U-233 is called fissile. Don’t ask me why.

Thorium reactors are more efficient than uranium reactors, because they waste less fuel and produce far more energy. Thorium yields little waste and is less radioactive. It is its relative abundance in the Earth’s crust. Thorium may at least do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas,

The energy potential of the element thorium was discovered in 1940 at the University of California at Berkeley, during the very early days of the US nuclear weapons program. Although thorium atoms do not split, researchers found that they will absorb neutrons when irradiated. The United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years.  They have dropped the ball. Why? The answer is nuclear weapons. The 1960s and ’70s were the height of the Cold War and weaponization was the driving force for all nuclear research. Any nuclear research that did not support the US nuclear arsenal was simply not given priority.

Almost all its nearly 100 remaining reactors will be more than 60 years old by 2050.

China’s thorium project was launched as a high priority by princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin. He estimates that China has enough thorium to power its electricity needs for “20,000 years”to build the first fully functioning thorium reactor within ten years, instead of 25 years as originally planned.

China’s nuclear reactors account for almost 40% of the world’s total.

India has abundant thorium reserves, and the country’s nuclear-power programme, which is intended, eventually, to supply a quarter of the country’s electricity (up from 3% at the moment), plans to use these for fuel. This will take time. The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research already runs a small research reactor in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai plans to follow this up with a thorium-powered heavy-water reactor that will, it hopes, be ready early next decade.

China’s thorium programme looks bigger.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims the country now has “the world’s largest national effort on thorium”, employing a team of 430 scientists and engineers, a number planned to rise to 750 by 2015. This team, moreover, is headed by Jiang Mianheng, an engineering graduate of Drexel University in the United States who is the son of China’s former leader, Jiang Zemin (himself an engineer). Some may question whether Mr Jiang got his job strictly on merit. His appointment, though, does suggest the project has political clout. The team plan to fire up a prototype thorium reactor in 2015. Like India’s, this will use solid fuel. But by 2017 the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics expects to have one that uses a trickier but better fuel, molten thorium fluoride.

Will thorium be a fool’s errand or the fuel that heralds the dawn of a new age of nuclear power? It is certainly too early to say, but one thing is for sure: Thorium has great potential and with the right backers, could become a viable adjunct to uranium, if not a serious competitor.nuclear plant

Nuclear fission using thorium is easily within our reach, and, compared with conventional nuclear energy, the risks are considerably lower. Thorium’s faces formidable technological challenges and it may take at least a decade or more for the technology to become feasible. Until that time, uranium miners have other things to worry about.

Have a look at the below Video.

<iframe width=”322″ height=”181″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/DSbTaOHt5rA&#8221; frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

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The only valid argument for a Nuclear Weapon is an incoming Asteroid. China.

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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At the dawn of the nuclear age, the United States hoped to maintain a monopoly on its new weapon, but the secrets for making nuclear weapons soon spread.

Four years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device. The United Kingdom (1952), France (1960), and China (1964) followed.

China never threatens any other country with its nuclear weapons.

It has never provided nuclear umbrella for any other country, never deployed nuclear weapons in any other country, never taken part in nuclear arms race in any form.

Chinese nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles remain a classified subject. China does not disclose any official information regarding its nuclear forces and their development programs. China is purported to have approximately 250 nuclear warheads.

This post is the last in the series of looking at the Nuclear Club members: China.

The PRC had spent an estimated $4.1 billion on its nuclear weapons program. The 1964 test made China the fifth nuclear power in the world. The weaponization of space, and cyber warfare capabilities will likely influence China’s future military development.

China’s nuclear weapons program began in 1955 and culminated in a successful nuclear test in 1964.China conducted 45 nuclear tests, including tests of thermonuclear weapons and a neutron bomb. The Chinese are widely understood to have supplied design information (including warhead design), and fissile material to the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program that were later transferred to Libya’s program. China has provided technology and expertise to the missile programs of several additional countries with suspected WMD programs, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria. China transferred 36 DF-3 medium-range missiles to Saudi Arabia in 1988, and supplied Pakistan with 34 DF-11 short-range missiles in 1992.

China is the first nuclear weapon state to adopt a nuclear “no first use (NFU)” policy and an official pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states. China acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1992.  In 2004, China joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). China ratified the IAEA Additional Protocol, making it the first nuclear weapon state to do so.

China is diversifying and modernizing its nuclear arsenal to ensure that China’s nuclear deterrent can reach the entire continental U.S., as well as a variety of other potential foes. China’s nuclear-armed submarines will be “useful as a hedge to any potential nuclear threats, including those from North Korea.

Much now depends on how China approaches the expansion, apart from the modernization, of its nuclear arsenal.   

We probably aren’t headed back to the reality of the 60s and 70s, when the US and the USSR faced off with thousands of tactical and strategic warheads apiece but we all definitely need to take the NUCLEAR shades off.

We have arrived at the end of the series and there is no doubt in my mind that as long as there is one Nuclear Warhead there will be some idiot some where that will press the button.  Whether it’s a terrorist, or what ever is of no consequence. There is no such thing as limited or no first use. (NFU)

If it was decided to eliminate ISIS by dropping a nuclear bomb, it would probably do the job resulting in a free for all.

The only valid argument for having them is an incoming Asteroid. The problem is who or where could we trust to keep a few and under whose authority would they be fired. 

By the way if the Chines population had to migrate due to CLIMATE CHANGE IT WOULD BE just as Earth shaking as the fallout of any nuclear explosion.

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Can the United States trust itself not to start a nuclear war.

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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U.S. nuclear advantage is a major problem in the Club.

Why do I say this?

Because Nuclear weapons are still the most potent military tools on Earth, and they will remain central to geopolitical competition into the Future. There are far from Relics of the Cold War.

Great-power political competition is heating up once again, and as it does, nuclear weapons will once again take center stage.

The writing is already on the wall. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are modernizing or expanding their nuclear arsenals, and Iran is vigorously pursuing its own nuclear capability. As Yale University political scientist Paul Bracken notes, we are entering a “second nuclear age” in which “the whole complexion of global power politics is changing because of the reemergence of nuclear weapons as a vital element of statecraft and power politics.”

Competition between nuclear powers is like a game of chicken, and in a game of chicken, we should expect the smaller car to swerve first, not so these days.

Let’s look at the United States. The Inventor of Atom Bomb/ Nuclear Power.

There is little point in examining the History other than to remind ourselves that the opening for signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — occurred in 1968, at nearly the peak of the U.S. arsenal’s size. And, remember, 177 countries have never pursued nuclear weapons at any point, including when the United States possessed more than 30,000 warheads.

So I am going to concentrate on the present day.

Nuclear weapons have not been central to America’s national security for the past two decades because its primary foes — Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and al Qaeda — did not have them.

To day the number of countries believed to host U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons are Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

A report released in January by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) – The United States has a total inventory of 4,650 nuclear weapons, including nearly 2,000 actively deployed warheads. Russia has roughly the equivalent. In contrast, China possesses an estimated 300 nuclear weapons, or roughly 6 percent of the U.S. stockpile.

A recent estimated put the cost of the modernization plan for the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, including operating costs, life extension programs for nuclear weapons and procurement of new delivery systems to replace aging elements of the strategic triad is estimated to be ( over the next three decades at roughly $900 billion a decade)  $1.1 trillion.

This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy.

Remember The Nobel committee, citing his disarmament efforts, announced it would award Mr. Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. ( 13/DEC/2009)

The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad, details the administration’s plans to spend at least $100 billion for 100 new long-range strategic manned bombers, and a further $30-40 billion to build the nuclear bombs and cruise missiles to arm them.

These weapons are irrelevant to the most urgent security challenges the United States and its allies face in the 21st century, including cyber threats, weak and failing states, global pandemics such as Ebola, climate change, terrorism and more.

On the other hand it could be said that the number and role of nuclear weapons  in U.S. security although reduced still provide important security benefits to the United States and its allies. The prospects for moving to lower levels than those in New START now appear limited.

The big question is:  Can the United States trust itself not to start a nuclear war, it doesn’t want to make a Russian or Chinese leader feel the need to “use ‘em or lose ‘em.”

According to a Department of Defense report, there have been at least 32 “accidents involving nuclear weapons.”  And the report only counts US accidents which occurred before 1980.

These “nuclear accidents” –which the report defines as  “unexpected event[s] involving nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons components”–  have occurred over the Pacific Ocean (twice), over the Atlantic Ocean (twice), and over the Mediterranean Sea;  they’ve happened on the territory of their allies in Spain, Greenland, England, Morocco, an another undetermined overseas base;

Here are a few declassified accounts that occurred between 1950 and 1968 of aircraft-related incidents in which nuclear weapons were lost, accidentally dropped, jettisoned for safety reasons or on board planes that crashed.

In 1957 a nuclear bomb fell through the bomb bay doors of a B-36 bomber near Kirkland Air Force Base, New Mexico.  The bomb fell 1,700 feet to the ground and its high explosives detonated, showering fragments as far as one mile from the impact point.

In 1958 a B-47 “accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon” which fell and detonated on a garden owned by the Gregg family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

In 1960 a 47-foot-long BOMARC air defense missile (which could be readied to launch within minutes) caught fire at McGuire Air Force Base near Trenton, New Jersey.  According to the New York Times, the missile “melted under an intense blaze fed by its 100-pound detonator of TNT… The atomic warhead apparently dropped into the molten mass that was left of the missile, which burned for forty-five minutes.”

Two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs that were accidentally released in 1961 from a U.S. Air Force B-52  broke up in midair over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Neither bomb detonated, but each had a yield of 3.8 megatons; the detonation of one would have been some 260 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.

Only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of these two 24 megaton device.

In 1966 a B-52 carrying four nuclear weapons crashed into a KC-135 aircraft over Palomares, Spain.  Two of the bombs did not explode and were eventually recovered after a search described as “the most expensive, intensive, harrowing and feverish underwater search for a man-made object in world history.” Two of the bombs’ high explosive material exploded on impact with the ground.  The explosion –though conventional– released substantial amounts of radioactive materials. 1400 tons of soil and vegetation were eventually removed and transported to the United States.

On September the 19th 1980 during a routine maintenance in a Titan silo an Air force repairman dropped a heavy wrench socket. The socket struck the missile causing a leaf from a pressurized fuel tank. Eight and a half hours later the vapors within the silo ignited and exploded, with the loss of one life which could have been thousands.

 

This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place.  It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an “accident.

And as If you are not already horrified the Warheads in the nation’s stockpile are an average of 27 years old.

After recent training failures, at least 82 missile launch officers are facing disciplinary action for cheating when examined on launching procedure.

Combine this with security missteps, leadership lapses, moral problems and stunning breakdowns in discipline it is no wonder that it prompted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to demand action to restore public confidence in the nuclear force.

The above Nuclear plant ( The Kansas City Plant) was built-in World War II to produce aircraft engines and went nuclear in 1949, making the mechanical and electrical parts for warheads.  ( Its computer systems are so out of date they that here is hardly anyone left who knows how to operate them.)
 
So where does all of this leave us:

As Iran’s leaders decide whether to push forward with, or put limits on, their nuclear program the exact number of nuclear weapons in global arsenals is not known.

With little exception, each of the nine countries with nuclear weapons guards these numbers as closely held national secrets. What is known, however, is that more than a decade and a half after the Cold War ended, the world’s combined stockpile of nuclear warheads remain at unacceptably high levels estimated to be 16,000.

The American nuclear umbrella over nations in Asia and the Middle East, which has instilled a sense of military security and kept many from building their own arsenals is now useless.

Few people differentiate between having 10 million dead, 50 million dead, or 100 million dead. It all seems too horrible. However, it does not take much imagination to see that there is a difference.

This video below sum up the danger of the USA Nuclear Weapons.

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