Category Archives: Uncategorized

ISIS will merely disperse and conceal their forces.

25 Thursday Sep 2014

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A couple of jihadists approach the dead prisoners and finish off any survivors from point-blank range

In response to airstrikes this is exactly what ISIS will try to do.

The lessons in regard to this have been demonstrated over and over. You can flatten a place from the air, cause untold (as they like to call it collateral destruction) deaths and suffering, and recruitment’s to the flag of those being Bombed.

Since 9/11 the hornets nest we are now witnessing as Obama recently pointed out is a Net work of Death.

It is not my purpose here to attribute blame but to ask why in this modern age do we see fanatical, killers, on a mission, to wipe out anyone and everyone, from any religion or belief system and to impose Shari’ah law.?

A complicated question to say the least.

  1. Who helped these psychopaths rise to power?
  2. Who armed them, funded them and trained them?
  3. Why are ISIS very happy to show their atrocities? They post it on Twitter. They put it on YouTube.
  4. Is there any kind of constructive role the US can play in this nightmare scenario, military or otherwise, or should the Obama administration stay as far away from the situation as possible?
  5. What’s playing out across the Arab world?

The Taliban’s goals have always been nationalistic, in the sense that they claim to be fighting on behalf of Afghans against a foreign occupier. The things that propel them to fight are very local, very parochial.

These jihadist militants from Iraq were part of what national security analysts commonly referred to as Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Remember Al-Qaeda in Iraq was ISIS before it was re-branded.

We’ve had 30, 40, 50 years of dictatorship, secular dictatorship across the Arab world, in which you’ve had very weak left forces that can articulate a vision of social justice that’s also secular.

After the Arab Spring, the secular dictatorships have been overthrown for the most part, or they’ve been attempted to be overthrown, and there’s nobody else to fill that vacuum except for the Islamists.

We need to really think about what are the social origins, what are the political roots of ISIS.

What are the conditions in Iraq, particularly after 2008 and 2009, that led to the feelings of disillusionment and disenfranchisement on behalf of Sunni populations and the anger toward the Maliki government that allowed a group like ISIS to become strong in the first place?

While it’s important to keep in mind that the US and its Allies are indirectly responsible for the very existence of ISIS because of their invasion. The chaos that was sowed by the invasion and the resulting civil war were ultimately caused by the United States’ invasion and then its early withdrawal.

Was it Obama pulling out in 2010–2011 is what caused ISIS to grow and become strong, or the arming of Syrian rebels is what allowed ISIS to grow and become strong?

To think of ISIS as purely evil is a mistake. We wont get very far by thinking of them as purely evil because Jihadi Islam originates in Islam itself.

Are they more bloodthirsty than the Assad regime, or the Taliban, or al Qaeda?

Not by much, except that they try to minimize their atrocities; they don’t want the world to know about them. They hide their atrocities.

What’s different about ISIS is that they are harking back to the caliphate days of the Ottoman Turkish sultans until it was abolished by Kemal Ataturk in 1924.

This is an era of Islam’s ascendancy from the death of Mohammed until the 13th century. Some Moslems still maintain that the Moslem world must have a calif ( a representative of Allah on earth ) as head of the community.

So Isis believes that a Khalifah ( Allah representative )will unite all Islamic lands and people and subjugate the rest of the world.  

In doing so ISIS reject  international order altogether. This is why we must stand up and be counted.

As monstrous as the Islamic State may be, its success is fueled by legitimate grievances on the part of a Sunni population that has been relegated to second-class status by the Maliki government, a government that came into power as a result of the United States’ recklessly short-sighted invasion and occupation of the country, which is now supposed to be ironed out (yet to be seen) by the election of a new inclusive Government that is asking for help.

Now we’re essentially being dared by IS to intervene again in what has become a three-way civil war.

There is no solution but to accept the Bait and get rid of the blood thirsty LUNATICS, ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Brutal: Other captives are shot before being tied to makeshift crucifixes    image

I’m so speechless… there is no need for any more photos. 

As anticipated – Our World Leaders Excelled themselves once more.

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

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oil refinery moon

They say that Sarcasm is the lowest for of wit.

Well if so, we should all be showering large doses of it on the recent UN Climate Change Summit in New York the first such meeting on climate in five years.

The World leaders held back on making new commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions or to give significant climate finance to developing countries, leaving it to business, cities and campaign groups to produce the real action on climate.

Why?

Because our world leaders who were present at the Summit once again showed their in dept knowledge of the Defining problem facing the world. Climate Change.

Those who were not present obviously had more pressing engagements.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi India and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the heads of the world’s two most populous nations. In empirical terms, it’s hard to think of two more important leaders in the world right now: Together they lead more than 2.5 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population. They also were the first- and third-biggest producers of carbon dioxide emissions (the United States holds the No. 2 spot).

Wanted Poster.

 President Vladimir Putin the veto man. Russia is the 10th-most-populous country in the world and the fourth-largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions.

Wanted Poster.

 Both Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, two leaders known for their relative skepticism about climate change not in attendance.

Wanted Poster.

              

So what happened in response to thousands of world citizens marching. Not much according to reports I have read.

The oceans which cover 73% of the planet’s surface, was not on the agenda.

China, which has surpassed the US as the world’s biggest emitter, said it would also do its bit, by curbing emissions “as soon as possible”

The UK prime minister, David Cameron, also touted his government’s environmental policies. “As prime minister I pledged to lead the greenest government ever and I believe we have kept that promise.”

The president of France  François Hollande, who obviously need to go to speck savers told an investors’ event on the sidelines of the summit.

“We can’t just limit ourselves to words, expressions of regret and exercises in stock-taking,” “What will come out of Paris is a new economy,”

France went on to commit to providing $1bn to a climate change fund for poor countries – the first significant contribution since Germany threw in $1bn last July.

Sweden has also contributed.

South Korea and Switzerland went on to pledge $100m each.

Denmark pledged $70m.

Norway pledged $33m.

Mexico said it would give $10m.

But the total of $2.3bn pledged for the Green Climate Fund so far fell short of the $10bn to $15bn that UN officials and developing country said was needed to show rich countries were committed to acting on climate change.

It also was unclear whether Tuesday’s pledges represented new money. A lot of “climate financing” is just existing aid repackaged under a new name.

More than 400 companies from 60 countries all signed on to support putting a price on carbon.Some of the world’s biggest palm oil and paper producers committed to stop destructive logging by 2030, and restore an area of forest equivalent to the size of India.

But Brazil, despite its critical role protecting the Amazon rain forest, said it had been left out of the negotiations. It refused to sign an anti-deforestation pledge, dealing a blow to the Climate Change summit in New York.

“The lungs of the planet”

A number of campaign groups did not sign the agreement, saying it did not go far enough to protect the rights of indigenous people who rely on the forest, or to hold the big forestry companies to account.

So where are we?

This Summit was not a formal negotiation on climate change but an “extraordinary meeting to try to jump-start the whole thing and get it back on the rails.” to lay the groundwork ahead of a UN climate conference in Lima, Peru, this December.

Does that sound drearily familiar? It should. The world’s leaders have been hammering out various climate agreements for decades now.

There was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord.

But despite all these talks, global greenhouse-gas emissions have kept rising, putting the world on track for more warming in the years ahead.

So why should this newest round of climate diplomacy be any different?

UNDER THE 1992 CLIMATE TREATY, COUNTRIES AGREED TO TAKE ACTION — BUT NEVER SPECIFIED WHAT, EXACTLY.

They certainly haven’t achieved the goal of stabilizing greenhouse-gas emissions in the atmosphere. The world is burning more fossil fuels than ever, and carbon-dioxide emissions keep rising each year: THE CURRENT PLEDGES ARE INADEQUATE TO PREVENT 2°C OF WARMING.

THE US AND EUROPE HAVE HAD THEIR FOSSIL FUEL PARTY, NOW INDIA AND CHINA WANT THEIRS EMISSIONS.

Why are emissions FROM WEALTHY NATIONS DECLINING.

Because rich nations are “outsourcing” their carbon

By the end of 2015, they hope to hammer out an agreement with “legal force”

Believe that, you believe anything.

Here are two suggestions that would make a difference. One world wide the other Country wide.

1. If the earth is going to fry why not convert the sun-rich deserts of the world into energy producing and storage Units. 90 percent of the world’s population lives within 3,000 km of deserts.

Think of the employment it would create, not to mention the Energy and the resulting reduction in Co2.

2) Create tax cuts of the use of clean Energy.

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Adam and Eve were black. They lived in Africa at the same time – but probably never met.

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Where did we come from?

The conventional evolutionary lineage is a simple one:shambling simian stands upright, evolves into bipedal hairy brute, then slouching hairy brute with hand Axe and finally into hairless human with Smart Phone.

If you have opened this post I wont pay you the disrespect of not knowing the Darwin & Human evolution theory but did you know that he saw his first Ape at London Zoo.

So before we go any further there is no point in reading this post with a closed Darwin mind. The evidence is so sparse that people are free to frame a favorite hypothesis about what it was that made humans different.

To have a chance of understanding evolution we must think in much larger units of time and possibilities than those that we use to define our lives.

Lets ask some questions.

For instance,

  1. Can we say what direction human evolution will take in the future?
  2. Are we generically engineered or did we really descend from Apes.?
  3. Why do we still only use 10% of our brain power.?
  4. Do we have a natural place on earth?
  5. We are all supposed to be connected, to what?
  6. To what extend did our humans forebears interbreed with their closest relatives?
  7. How did humans get from thinking about food-gathering strategies to thinking about taxonomy, tax-avoidance and Twitter?
  8. Did early humans start to develop even bigger brains because they became increasingly efficient endurance runners that could get to a carcass before the hyenas and vultures, and strip away a nourishing meal of meat, fat and marrow?
  9. Did humans begin to stand upright by taking to the water – and to nourish bigger brains with high-protein deliveries of fish and shellfish?
  10. Somehow, out of this million-year-mix of food, fear and hunter-gatherer companionship in Africa, complex language emerged.
  11. The African chimpanzee is an endangered species, down to perhaps 150,000, while the human population is about to tip seven billion. What was it that we left behind in those two Chromosomes?

Our species of humans first began to evolve nearly 200,000 years ago in association with technologies not unlike those of the early Neanderthals.

There is no reliable evidence of modern humans elsewhere in the Old World until 60,000-40,000 years ago, during a short temperate period in the midst of the last ice age.

Some of them migrated out of Africa into the rest of the Old World replacing all of the Neanderthals and other late archaic humans, beginning around 60,000-40,000 years ago or somewhat earlier.

So current data suggest that modern humans evolved from archaic humans primarily in East Africa. Supporters of this model believe that the ultimate common ancestor of all modern people was an early Homo erectus in Africa who lived at least 1.8 million years ago.

Our DNA now says we appeared some 200,50 thousand years ago not 1.8 million.

So the first modern humans did evolve in Africa, but when they migrated into other regions they did not simply replace existing human populations. Rather, they interbred to a limited degree with late archaic humans resulting in hybrid populations.

If so why to we have 46 Chromosomes while Apes have 48. Where did other two go? 

It is further suggested that since then there was sufficient gene flow between Europe, Africa, and Asia to prevent long-term reproductive isolation and the subsequent evolution of distinct regional species.  It is argued that intermittent contact between people of these distant areas would have kept the human line a single species at any one time.  However, regional varieties, or subspecies, of humans are expected to have existed.

It is now clear that early Homo sapiens, or modern humans, did not come after the Neanderthals but were their contemporaries.  However, it is likely that both modern humans and Neanderthals descended from Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Rhodesiensis. 

Evolution Of Man – What is it?

The modern theory concerning the evolution of man proposes that humans and apes derive from an ape like ancestor that lived on earth a few million years ago.

The theory states that man, through a combination of environmental and genetic factors, emerged as species to produce the variety of ethnicities seen today, while modern apes evolved on a separate evolutionary pathway. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the evidence reveals evolution to be increasingly less scientific and more reliant upon beliefs, not proof.

The Running man Theory: 

Six million years ago our ancestors began walking on two feet. In that six million years the foot evolved from the flat-footed knuckle walking like that of a chimpanzee, to what it is today, an arched foot perfect for upright, high-speed running.

Scientists now know the missing link for what enabled humans to survive through periods that many other species went extinct, it’s called Persistence Hunting. And the human body perfected the equipment for such high endurance running:

Humans are primates Theory.

Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species,Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa — chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas — share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. At one point in human history, around 40,000 years ago, modern humans must have shared the planet with at least four other human cousins:

The DNA Theory.

Evolution occurs when there is change in the genetic material — the chemical molecule, DNA — which is inherited from the parents, and especially in the proportions of different genes in a population.

Genes represent the segments of DNA that provide the chemical code for producing proteins. Information contained in the DNA can change by a process known as mutation. The way particular genes are expressed – that is, how they influence the body or behavior of an organism — can also change.

Genes affect how the body and behavior of an organism develop during its life, and this is why genetically inherited characteristics can influence the likelihood of an organism’s survival and reproduction.

Our most common male ancestor, ‘Adam’, has finally got his original birth date – and its 9,000 years earlier than scientists believed.

UK researchers claim that ‘Adam’ walked the earth 209,000 years ago, contradicting a recent study that suggested the Y chromosome predated humanity.

Adam’ walked the Earth between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, much earlier than previously believed.

Their findings put ‘Adam’ within the time frame of his other half ‘Eve’, the genetic maternal ancestor of mankind.

Here is worth mentioning. The Big Bang Theory. Life not Us.

A concept which seeks to explain the origin of the universe, claiming that billions of years ago all the matter and energy in the universe was condensed into a particle no bigger than a pin-head.

No one knows where it came from and why for some unknown reason it exploded.

So there you have it without the Religious Theories, thank God.

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Democracy – Is it just Political Ignorance that is exercising the Vote.

23 Tuesday Sep 2014

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Democracy is supposed to be rule of the people, by the people, and for the people.

But is it ?

The public often does a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know and this state of affairs has persisted despite rising education levels, increased availability of information thanks to modern technology, which is mostly the result of rational behavior, not stupidity. ( Recent Referendum In Scotland)

But it is striking that knowledge levels have risen very little, if at all, despite rising educational attainment and the increased availability of information through the internet, cable news, and other modern technologies.

Voters still overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and to undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily interpret correctly in other contexts.

Moreover, those most interested in politics are also particularly prone to discuss it only with others who agree with their views, and to follow politics only through like-minded media.

A truth-seeker should actively seek out defenders of views opposed to their own.

The results of the Scottish Referendum strengthens the case for limiting and decentralizing the power of government.

Why?

BECAUSE:  When it comes to General elections without a clear choice there is a small turn out, compared to the Scottish Referendum which had a clear and precise question to be voted on TURNED OUT 85% of its population.

In General Elections most of the public has very little idea of how the basic structure of government and how it operates down to such ignorance and confusion as to which government officials are responsible for which issues.

Why?

For several reasons,

BECAUSE: Public ignorance is not limited to information about specific policies.

The problems of political ignorance and irrationality are accentuated by the enormous size and scope of modern governments.

BECAUSE: Voters routinely reward and punish political leaders for events they have little control over, particularly short-term economic trends. Incumbents also get rewarded or blamed for such things as droughts, shark attacks, and victories by local sports teams.

Some people react to data like the above by thinking that the voters must be stupid. But political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people.

BECAUSE: We vote with our feet in the private sector, by choosing which products to buy or which civil society organizations to join.

BECAUSE: Most people don’t precisely calculate the odds that their vote will make a difference.

BECAUSE: Moreover, political leaders and influential interest groups often use public education to indoctrinate students in their own preferred ideology rather than increase knowledge.

BECAUSE: Information shortcuts are small bits of information that we can use as proxies for larger bodies of knowledge of which we may be ignorant. The major flaws are that shortcuts often require preexisting knowledge to use effectively, and many people choose information shortcuts for reasons unrelated to truth-seeking.

BECAUSE: For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.

BECAUSE: For many, it is rational to take the time to vote, but without learning much about the issues at stake.

BECAUSE: If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. The chances OF CHANGE are very small, and act accordingly.

BECAUSE:  The chances of effectively monitor more than a fraction of the activities of the modern state is all but impossible.

BECAUSE:  Voters If things are looking up, they will reward the incumbents at election time. If not, you can vote the bums out, and the new set of bums will have a strong incentive to adopt better policies, lest they be voted out in turn.

BECAUSE:  Voters choose their opinion leaders largely based on how entertaining they are, and whether they make us feel good about the views we already hold.

Add all the above up and it points to that the Current Democracy is too big, too complicated, too influenced by consumerism, untruest,  in a state of confusion with rampant political ignorance.

There is no easy solution to the problem.

The key difference between foot voting and ballot box voting is that foot voters don’t have the same incentive to be rationally ignorant as ballot box voters do.

In fact, ballot box voters have strong incentives to seek out useful information unlike political fans, foot voters who know they will pay a real price if they do a poor job of evaluating the information they get.

So the informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government.

The more decentralized government is, the more issues can be decided through foot voting. 

It is usually much easier to vote with your feet against a local government than a state government, and much easier to do it against a state than against the federal government. Choosing among the former usually requires far less in the way of moving costs than choosing among the latter.

The other is choosing what state or local government to live under in a federal system – a decision often influenced by the quality of those jurisdictions’ public policy. 

It is also usually easier to foot vote in the private sector than the public. A given region is likely to have far more private planned communities and other private sector organizations than local governments.

Reducing the size of government could also alleviate the problem of ignorance by making it easier for rationally ignorant voters to monitor its activities.

moving costs can be reduced by decentralizing to lower levels of government or to the private sector, and such costs are in any case declining thanks to modern technology.

For example, some large-scale issues, such as global warming, are simply too big to be effectively addressed by lower-level governments or private organizations.

A smaller, less complicated government is easier to keep track of.

Political ignorance is far from the only factor that must be considered in deciding the appropriate size, scope, and centralization of government.

Democracy and Political Ignorance is not a complete theory of the proper role of government in society. But it does suggest that the problem of political ignorance should lead us to limit and decentralize government more than we would otherwise.

The likelihood that political decentralization might harm unpopular racial and ethnic minorities is a myth the opposite is what will happen.

moving costs can be reduced by decentralizing to lower levels of government or to the private sector, and such costs are in any case declining thanks to modern technology.

There are many different forms of democracy, but what makes a democracy different from all other forms of government is the participation of the people in decision-making. Putting power and decision-making in the hands of the people, not catering to the wishes of the wealthy or repressing freedoms.

Information is the currency of Democracy not,

The Vision is the real Democracy

This is what the Scottish Referendum taught us all.

What do you think?

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Who do you think you are?

22 Monday Sep 2014

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If I was living some considerable time ago and was asked this question depending who I was I would have said I am Inuit named Bob. An Inuit was then a Inuit.

These days given the intense interest in identity and identities across a broad spectrum of disciplines your identity is under attack by whatever you, buy, eat, and view.

Since we all know how to employ the word one might initially expect it easy to find simple and clear statements of what people mean when that ask how are you and there would be need for explanations?

So why Bother? So that we don’t all end up Categorized as Consumers.

Identity is acquiring a highly successful life of its own in ordinary language and many social science disciplines.

In popular discourse identity is often treated as something ineffable and even sacred, while in the academy identity is often treated as something complex and even ineffable.

In our world of today’s Interconnections it is being ignored with your Identity being connected and linked to likes that are decided upon by computers.

Therefore it is not so surprising when ask the question one might answer the question“who are you?”entirely differently in different circumstances.

It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign of contact.

So what does this word mean as we use it now?

I argue below that the word “identity” as used today has two distinct but intertwined meanings.“social” and “personal” identity.“

Social – American,” “French,” “Muslim,” “father,” “homosexual,“worker,” “professor,” or “citizen” as identities.”

Personal identity is a set of attributes, beliefs, desires, or principles of action that a person thinks distinguish her in socially relevant ways and that (a) the person takes a special pride in; (b) the person takes no special pride in, but which so orient her behavior that she would be at a loss about how to act and what to do without them; or (c) the person feels she could not change even if she wanted to.

I will argue, the (a) meaning applies, so that for usage in ordinary language personal identity can typically be glossed as the aspects or attributes of a person that form the basis for his or her dignity or self-respect.

Used in this sense, “identity” has become a partial and indirect substitute for “dignity,” “honor,” and “pride.” 

This is perhaps not true.

Almost every one evokes a sense of recognition, depending on the context.

For example,

If asked by ISIS I would be inclined to say a Muslim to save my head, not my dignity honor or pride. In some situations I might even give my social security number.

So what is Identity these days.

Is it how I define who I am?

or

Is it how one answers the question “who are you?”

or

Is it the sameness of a person or thing at all times in all circumstances?

or

Is it the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something
else; individuality, personality,” “national identity” or “ethnic identity?

What ever it our present understanding of “identity” lie in the academy. 

A concept which is now quite common in popular discourse as our identities are going out the window into BIG Data.

So here is my first cut at a definition.

An identity is something that fits as X in the sentence “I am an X.”

In logical terms, an identity is a predicate that applies (or may apply) to a person, that is, a quality or property of a person.

Whoops that not good enough!

Since X allows things that clearly would not qualify as “legitimate” (that is, recognizable to usage) so identities, even take on a  broad sense of the word.

For example, consider X = a person with nine fingers, or X = a person with a moles on my right arm, or X = a person who saw the dentist last Tuesday.

So an identity must be a particular sort of predicate attachable to a person.

The same might be said of national identity, if I change national affiliations.

So I still need a qualification on the definition that says an identity is an X that
satisfies.

Lets try again.

One might have multiple identities, understood simply as answers to the question “who are you?”

In ordinary speech and most academic writing, “identity” means either (a) a social category, defined by membership rules and allegedly characteristic attributes or expected behaviors, or (b) a socially distinguishing feature that a person takes a special pride in or views as unchangeable but socially consequential (or, of course, both (a) and (b) at once).

This isn’t enough either.

For example, if you lose a finger we would say that you are the same person as before; if you suffer from an advanced state of Alzheimer’s, we might not.

I might say that a crucial part of my identity is that I like to listen to rock, but if I stopped liking this music I would not think that I was literally a different person –I would not imagine that I ceased being Elvis even though I might understand my identity to have changed.

In this philosophical sense, personal identity is those predicates of a person such that if they are changed, it is no longer the same person, the properties that are essential to him or her being that person rather than being merely contingent.

Consider, then, a simple definition that says an identity is just a social category, and to have a particular identity means to assign oneself to a particular social category or perhaps just to be assigned to it by others.

Is that it?  No!

To begin with, a social category is a set of people designated by a label (or labels) commonly given to, or used by, a set of people.

Social categories have two distinguishing features.

First, they are defined and by implicit or explicit rules of membership, according to which individuals are assigned or not to the category.

Second, social categories are understood in terms of sets of characteristics – for example, beliefs, desires, moral commitments, or physical attributes – thought typical of members of the category, or behaviors expected or obliged of members in certain situations, as in the case of roles, such as a professor, student, or police officer.

”While identity-as-a-social-category captures much of what academics often mean by the term, this simple definition does not cover all that we mean by the word. In particular, “an identity is a social category” doesn’t work when we use identity in the sense of personal identity, which may be formulated in terms of a group affiliation but need not be.

So Social categories are socially constructed, but social categories change over time and are historically contingent.

Social categories generally are objective social facts beyond the reach of any one
individual to change.

Still don’t quite know who I am.

Even when the word does refer primarily to a social category – nation, gender, sexuality, for instance – it can mean somewhat more than just “social category” because of an implicit linkage with the idea of personal identity.

This is getting rather confusing. 

Because to ask about identities of such-and-such people is often to ask about the social categories in which they placed themselves (or were placed by others) and how they thought about their content or rules of membership.

In many cases it might be clearer and better to use “social category” rather than “identity.

The identity of a thing (not just a person) consists of those properties or qualities in virtue of which it is that thing. That is if you changed these properties or qualities, it would cease to be that thing and be something different.

Help!

I thought I knew who I was when I started this Post and who are you to say I am not what I am in the first place. Maybe I need a spliff  to find out, on the other hand you can rest assured that Doctor Livingston I presume is long gone. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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100 years from now Facebook is going to be full of dead people.

20 Saturday Sep 2014

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Lets ask the question?

Is Social Media going to turn out as the Ultimate Betrayal.

In a hundred years time there are going to be hundred of thousands on Facebook without any emotions, hundred of thousands of extinct Twitters, hundred of thousands of people linked to the dead, hundred of thousands Google searches never to be repeated, and billions and billions of e-mail that will never contribute to world history.

That’s BIG DATA: ( See previous blog)

Now it’s not possible here to cover all aspects of Social Media so I am going to concentrate on the most popular FACEBOOK.

The first and most important thing to make clear is that FACEBOOK is a Company, a public company for that matter and it has to find ways to become more profitable with each passing quarter.

What concerns me is the increased silence of what it will mean for a public who has no clue of what’s being done with their data.

I want to see users of Social Media have the ability to meaningfully influence what’s being done with their data.

I hate the fact that Facebook thinks it’s better than me at deciding which of my friends’ posts I should see or to suggest he or she wants to be a friend.

That Facebook algorithmically determines which of your friends’ posts you see.

That their everyday algorithms are meant to manipulate your emotions.

What factors go into this? We don’t know,  but it is obvious that they have some algorithm that show the content that people click on the most.

Anyone who clicks on a “like” button is considered to have “liked” all future content from that source. Anyone who “likes” a comment on a shared link is considered to “like” wherever that link points to.  

This is a form corrupt personalization.  They can be taught what to want.

Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent.

I hate that I have no meaningful mechanism of control on the site.

I also hate the fact that it is generating billions in profit without contributing ( other than taxes) to the relief of world poverty, to the environment problems, and any other Social problem you wish to name.

Yes of course it gives a platform to talk on these subjects only because Facebook wants to keep people on Facebook. It’s in Facebook’s better interest to leave people feeling happier.

The problem is that Facebook is a black box.

Here are a few of the questions to be answered when it comes to Social Media.

A ) Should we be worried that software tracks us through social media?

B) Should postings on social media be considered free speech?

C) How does social media facilitate mass demonstrations (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall street)?

D) Have social networks caused teens to become anti-social in the real world?

E) Should schools ban teachers from interacting with their students on social networks?

F) Does social media encourage democracy?

The term “social networking” does not exclusively belong to digital technology on the Web. On the contrary, social networks had been studied from the beginning of 20th century with the aim to comprehend how the members of a certain community interact and which mechanism can determine the interaction itself.

Social Media is a tool of direct marketing where the customers and consumers have the opportunity to participate in the process of exchange.

 It’s a blurring of work and private life 

Social Media is only just emerging, meaning that codification of acceptable and unacceptable practices has not yet taken place. The ability to collect and analyze information from the past as well as in real-time, as it is generated has far reaching consequences. 

Though it commonly is understood that conversations are generally public and open to viewing by almost anyone. It can have a profound effect on the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs of individuals who have no idea that they are under observation in the first place. 

This is what drives media entities to produce listicals, flashy headlines, and car crash news stories. To manipulate people’s emotions through the headlines they produce and the content they cover, regardless of the psychological toll on individuals or the society they represent.

You might say bull shit.

That technology companies can secretly influence our emotions?

Apparently so.“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”  The question is when does data science become human subjects research? 

”A social network proprietor can engineer emotions for the multitudes to a slight degree”

The Arab Spring as it was called. The recent Vote on Independence in Scotland, President Obama election,  ISIS one beheading. There’s no stable metaphor that people hold for what the news feed is. Emotions are being manipulated all the time, without informed consent, without debriefing. 

Information is being presented and it’s being manipulated [through social media interfaces] by definition.

The reality is, when it comes to studying human interaction or behavior (for profit or scientific glory), it is no more (or less) complicated whether we’re interviewing someone in their living room, watching them in a lab, testing them at the screen, or examining the content they post online.

So the answer the questions posed above:

 A)  YES.

B)   NO.

C)  BY manipulation of Emotions.

D)  YES&NO

E)  YES

F)   NO

 

What do you think? And O! just in case you think this was typed by one of our departed I want to be your friend.

If you e mail me your cannot be sure. The only way is living human contact.

Remember Like me at some point you will be the next person on earth to die.

Then Who or What will own your data? and what’s Social about that.?

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Capitalism vs The Climate: This Changes Nothing;

19 Friday Sep 2014

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You hear these day cry’s from lots of different quarter for the need of an ideological change if we are to tackle the numerous problems the world currently faces.

In Naomi Klein new book titled – This Changes Everything; Capitalism vs. the Climate. She advocates exactly this.  http://youtu.be/WPQI1Lui42c

While I admire her efforts with every thing these days we are bombarded with so much information that the hard facts disappear in a haze of communication resulting in a quagmire of confusion as to what is true or what is not true.

The bare fact is that if Humanity was faced with a Meteorite that was going to hit the earth and extinguish all known life we would not be able even if it wanted to change our ideology to save ourselves because of GREED.

There can be no Ideology change without equality of opportunity.

To create a world of equal opportunity for all requires unfortunately more than just aspirations.

It requires Money lots of money.

With the unbridled Privatization/ Consumerism of the world natural resources forging ahead unopposed for the sake of profit for profit sake by Sovereign Wealth Funds it’s no wonder that it is impossible to have any Ideology change that will make a difference.

The disillusion that we have some privileged position on earth are challenged every day.

ISIS is already in Europe, Alibaba is on the New York Stock Exchange, Climate change is already effecting world poverty, world economics, migration, and YOU.

” We can’t see the wood from the trees,” as the saying goes.

What we have done in the past gives has given rise to what is happening now.

There is only one solution:  The people of the world must find a way of getting Greed to contribute to the planets survival without greed’s awareness. ( See previous posts)

The planet will have 11bn people by 2100 according to a new study.

Traditional methods for fighting for change have proved fruitless. We must put people before Capitalism and Politics.

In short, there are so many cars in the world today that the fuel burnt on the world’s roads by those many cars emits 1.73 billion metric tons (equivalent to 3.81 trillion pounds) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. As of 2012, there are 1.1 billion automobiles on the earth. The 1.1 billion automobiles in 2012 already average a set of new tires about every 2 years, or 2.2 billion tires annually, and those 2.2 billion tires consume over half of the earth’s rubber production, which of course burns even more fuel.

The fight of our time has begun. The Scramble for Sustainability is still possible. Our immune systems need re-education. We need to heed the Language of Money.

If we want it we must pay for it.

There is no point in saving a Tiger, a forest, a river, or anything for that matter,even a child if they or it have no where to a full and sustainable live.

We must make the things we value more valuable than the things we don’t value by paying for them with money.

I agree with Naomi that Capitalism is on the way out but life exists in individual moments and it is up to us to make sure those moments are vital. Sharing wealth is the Mechanism. Cap Greed.

(See previous posts; 01/9/2014,23/08/2014.16/08/2014,14/08/2014, 22/07/2014, 03/07/2014)

Have a look at the below.

THE COST: HERE A FEW MIND BLOWING VALUE FOR MONEY DETAILS THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK.

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

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To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion.

Get a globe and spin it. Jab your finger down at random and, without doubt, you will have located a spot entangled in war, revolution, rebellion, terrorism, famine, plague, drought, dictatorship, poverty and/or illiteracy.

If I told you the year was 1810, you wouldn’t be surprised. Tragically if I told you the year was 2014, you wouldn’t be surprised, either.

So are we getting value for money.  CAN WE AFFORD IT!  HAVE A LOOK:

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:

The cost of the International Space Station, including development, assembly and running costs over 10 years, comes to €100 billion.

The good news is that it comes cheaper than you might think.

That €100 billion figure is shared over a period of almost 30 years between all participants: the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 10 of the 20 European nations who are part of ESA.

The European share, at around €8 billion spread over the whole program, amounts to just one Euro spent by every European every year: less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities. NOT BAD

CERN:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that’s consistent with that of the Higgs boson.

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson.

CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN – about $286 million annually.

Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year.

The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.

 

TRIDENT:

The combined cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as £130bn,

MOON LANDING:

The Apollo moon landings are considered the greatest achievement in human history and the beginning of humanity’s expansion into the universe. At its height over 400,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in the project. But what was the cost?

Apollo Spacecraft – $5.3 Billion
Saturn Rockets – $8.7 Billion
Other Costs – $11.4 Billion
The Total Estimated Cost in 1969 Dollars is $25.4 Billion and $145 Billion in 2007 Dollars.

Human costs: The lives of 3 astronauts: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The US spent $20 to $25 billion US (in 1969 dollars) to fund all of the Apollo program activities.

IRAQ WAR:

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest. 

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it.

The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said.

Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud.

IRAQ AFGHANISTAN WARS COMBINED:

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach as high as $6 trillion dollars – or $75,000 for every household in America – a new study from Harvard University has found.

Europe’s Rosetta comet-chaser satellite. 

On Jan. 20 awakened itself on schedule after a 31-month hibernation and began preparations for a spring rendezvous with a comet and a fall attempt to attach a probe to it. Rosetta cost ESA and its participating member states some 1.3 billion euros ($1.75 billion), a figure that includes the Airbus Defence and Space-built satellite, the Philae lander, launch aboard a European Ariane rocket and its planned operations.

THE COST OF 9/11.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. The House and Senate are now considering an additional request for $33 billion in supplemental funding for the remainder of FY2010, and the Administration has also requested $159 billion to cover costs of overseas operations in FY2011.

In the face of these substantial and growing sums, a recurring question has been how the mounting costs of the nation’s current wars compare to the costs of earlier conflicts.

 

HERE IS THE COST TO USA IN getting involved in recent Wars. (Not the two world wars and all of its own wars since it founders.) 

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

 

COST OF USA SUPPORT OF ISRAEL 

All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and While it is commonly reported that Israel officially receives some $3 billion every year in the form of economic aid from the U.S. government, this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are many billions of dollars more in hidden costs and economic losses lurking beneath the surface.

A recently published economic analysis has concluded that U.S. support for the state of Israel has cost American taxpayers nearly $3 trillion ($3 million millions) in 2002 dollars.

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $121 billion (adjusting for inflation, $233.7 billion as of March 2013), and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3.1 billion per year this amounted to $8.5 million every single day.

MIND BOGGLING TO SAY THE LEAST.
This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world. The military budget in the USA is about $680 billion per year.

THE UN:

VALUE FOR MONEY The UN hasn’t done enough good, and has caused enough damage for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of its future.

A full legal argument against the UN. would make a formidable document.

A snapshot of its failures will more than suffice.

Going back to its own charter, we see that the mission of the UN is split between peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts.

The cost of running the United Nations is substantial. According to its own data, “The UN system spends some $15 billion a year, taking into account the United Nations, UN peacekeeping operations, the programmes and funds, and the specialized agencies, but excluding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Around half of this amount comes from voluntary contributions from Member States, the rest from mandatory assessments on those States.

That comes out to a little more than $2 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Cost of running THE UK Parliament:

Houses of Parliament.

The cost of running the Houses of Parliament fell by more than £30m last year to just under £500m. The cost of the House of Commons increased by more than £12m,

MPs’ wages and pensions were the biggest single outgoing which came to £157.2m this figures include wages for members and staff, building expenses, security and other administration.

The amount spent on MPs’ salaries and pensions rose by almost £6m.

The overall expense for taxpayers in 2008/9 came to £498.4m, down from £531.8m the previous year.

However the good news is that the cost of running the House of Lords was reduced by £46m.

The reason for this was that the amount spent on what is listed as “other administration costs” went down from £89.8m to £39.8m. However, the total cost of keeping the Commons going increased from £379.2m to £391.8m.
In 2008/9 the cost of running the Lords fell from £152.5m to £106.5m. A Lords spokesman said that the 2007/8 accounts included a final payment of £26m towards the purchase of 1 Millbank, a new addition to the Parliamentary estate.

They also included a £23m loss, following a revaluation of the entire Parliamentary estate, a process which is carried out every five years.

VALUE FOR MONEY? YOU TELL ME.

BELOW A FEW PICTURES TO REMIND YOU OF WHO YOU WALK BYE EVERY DAY.

 

This post I feel needs a personal statement.

“ As much as I appreciate that all of the above keep people off the street and that the landing on a moon or meteorite with or without the Higgs Boson advances mankind knowledge and brings benefits of all sort yet to be seen.

The whole lot seems to me to be useless until we put our own house in order.”

WITH 80% OF HUMANITY LIVING ON LESS THAN $10 DOLLARS A DAY AND 22,000 CHILD DEATHS EACH AND EVERY DAY SURELY IT IS TIME TO COP ON.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

 

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Think of this Scotland before you vote.

15 Monday Sep 2014

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What did the big bail out cost the poor tax payer.

Ireland total cost of the bailout to more than €70bn,

AIB will require an additional €13.3bn.

– Bank of Ireland will require €5.2bn.

– ESB will require €1.5bn.

– Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) will require €4bn.

UK government bailed the banks out to the tune of £123.93bn, and at its peak had liabilities for the banking crisis of £1.2 trillion.

Greece, 166 billion euros in bailout loans,

The USA taxpayers give them an astonishing $83bn subsidy every year.

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

The Fed paid $659.4 million in “fees” to these very same institutions during the period in question. This is not part of the bailout.

OK. So now we have the full picture, right? no wrong!

Officials at the European Commission confirmed plans for a new “financial instrument” based on an existing £42billion. At present, the fund – known as the Balance of Payment Facility – exists to provide emergency loans to non-eurozone EU nations. More than £9billion has already been lent to Latvia, ­Hungary and Romania. Now officials want to extend the scheme to include financial institutions such as banks. The fact is that many banks throughout Europe today have a zombie existence where they continue to exist, attempt to draw in savings, that they cannot get, by offering deposit rates, significantly below the rate of inflation, and live in an existence where they have money to pay staff but yet cannot afford to make loans to support businesses. The banks continue to trade, annually they must increase fees and yet they continue to record annual losses. Their losses are usually met by state guaranteed loans and those states seek daily to extricate themselves from their obligations to these banks.

The bailout enslaved us to the big banks more than ever before creating a “moral hazard”

Next time you hear someone say an independent Scotland could not have afforded the banking bail out, remember how the US Federal Reserve bailed out Barclay’s to the tune of £552.32bn.  It is a fact that the contribution of an independent Scotland’s taxpayers to any bank bail-out that may or may not have been required in an independent Scotland would have been the same as it has been with Scotland part of the UK.

Ask them if they think Scotland would have made the same bank regulation mistakes as the city of London led Westminster government?

In the case of Barclay’s, it fell to the US to support the bank because they were one of the single largest purchasers of US Government debt, so the problem was the US Government’s, not the UK taxpayer’s alone. The US intervened so that its debt market didn’t collapse and to prevent broader consequences for America’s economy and society.

The UK Government bail out of RBS and HBOS amounted to £65bn. That’s a lot of money, but the US Federal Reserve made emergency loans available to RBS of £285bn and to HBOS of £115bn.

The US bailed out these UK banks too, in the same way as Scottish taxpayers contributed to liquidity support for international banks based in London (including American ones).

The whole shindig was a redistribution of money from the poor to the rich.

Just Look at what a mere 25 billion could do.

Serious: Not Serious. 

Buy enough malaria nets to protect the entire malaria-affected population of the world (half a billion people) for 80 years (based on Nothing But Nets figures of $10 a net)

Completely fund the World Food Program for five years.

Repair twice over the damage done to Haiti in the recent earthquake.

Fund enough clean water and infrastructure projects to meet the millennium Development Goals.

Buy up and extinguish the national debt of Bangladesh.

Fund the UNESCO “Information for All” Project for 1200 years.

Provide food aid to Niger for 1000 years.

Asphalt every trunk and regional road (110,000km) of substandard road in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here is what they could have done with in Ireland.

Research & develop 5000 new drugs….one of em’s bound to be useful.

Construct 6 Large Hadron Colliders one all 7 green party TD

Build 5 James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble), and revolutionist astronomy.

Pay the interest on everyone’s mortgage for 4 years (€147bn of mortgages at 4% is €5.88bn a year)

Abolish income tax for two years (based on 2009 gov income tax receipts of €11.8bn)

Offer everyone on the live register €100,000 to emigrate (we could afford a 50% take-up by the 466,000 on the dole)

Fly the adult population of Ireland to Las Vegas, give everyone 10k to gamble with.

Abolish VAT for two and a half years (based on 2009 receipts of €10.8bn)

Remove excise duty from fuel, tobacco and alcohol until 2015 (based on excise receipts of €4.7bn a year)

Pay the grocery bills of everybody in the country for 2.5 years.

Give every person in the country €5,555.56

Buy half a million eco-friendly Nissan Leaf cars and have enough for a 5GW nuclear power station with the cash left over.

Provide a new laptop every year to every second level student for 147 years.

Buy a 32GB iPhone, a 64GB iPad, a 13″ 2.13GHz MacBook Air and a 27-inch iMac for every man, woman and child living in Ireland.

Buy a pint of Guinness for everyone in the world to celebrate Arthur’s Day (and it would count as exports)

Scrap all fares on all forms of public transport, intercity and commuter trains and buses for 33 years.

Send 225,000 people to do the Harvard MBA.

Buy the world’s 20 most valuable soccer clubs, worth €9.6bn, wipe their debt (€2.3bn) and move them to Ireland, building each a 75,000-seater stadium (€600m each, based off cost of Aviva stadium)

Host two Olympics games, based on the London 2012 cost of €11.2bn.

Give each one of the 10,000 most senior bankers a round of golf on old head Kinsale, the most expensive course in Europe, every day for 20 years, and hope that they come up with some ideas!Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Purchase carbon credits to allow us to burn 3000 sq miles of hardwood forest.

Send 833 people into space (or perhaps just 1666 one way trips…)

Build 1,000 km of high-speed rail, serving all major coastal cities on the island (based on recent costs in Spain)

Build 75 brand new 50-teacher schools and run them for 75 years.

Build 35 new Children’s Hospitals (based on €700m cost of new Children’s Hospital in Dublin)

Pay for cervical cancer vaccines for every girl going into 1st year for the next 8333 years.

Pay for an extra 5,000 hospital consultants for 62.5 years, based on Finnish wage.

Introduce free pre-schooling for 32 years, based on an average cost of €700 a month for two years of 10 months, for all 110,000 children in the country.

Give medical cards to everyone, for 25 years based on €500m cost in 2009 to cover 1.5m people.

Make education properly free – the current cost from primary school to degree graduation is €70,000 per child. €25bn would bring nearly 400,000 students through their entire education.

Or Ireland could buy one broken bank…oh, hang on…..

I could go on and on.

If I were Scottish there is no answer but YES.YES. YES.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The universe can only be observed through a brain.

15 Monday Sep 2014

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Have you got one ?

You would be right to say that we are all endow with one, but fuck me, just look around the World at the moment and you would be lead to believe that we are all using some prototypes.

It is a no Brainer when it comes to understanding what the future will holds if we don’t cop on to ourselves soon.

Worldwide, some 827.6 million people live in urban slums.

By 2020, it is estimated the world slum population will reach almost 1 billion.

About 50 percent of the world’s population now live in urban areas. Every day millions of people world-wide call our streets their home.

Lack of clean water and sanitation claim the lives of more than 1.8 million young children every year.

In the United States, 48.5 million people are living in poverty. One third of Londoners using Food banks.

A child dies of poverty in the world every minute.

Now while I appreciate that with seven billion human beings in the world, it generate’s diverse problems in different social areas and that the entirety of the human populous does not express the same comprehension of morals. It is beyond me that we are all in the process of building a world worse than hell.

We might be perplexed and disoriented by the Higgs boson

and a life in the shadows of science and technology.

But let’s face the facts. If asked, 99.9% of us could not give a dogs bollix whether the Higgs boson matters or not.  An Inconvenient Truth.

At the current rate of births in fifty years ( most of you will be still living) there will be around 12 billion people. Hopefully Five billion more with brains asking where was our common sense and compassion when it was needed.

You think, humans are capable of heart-breaking compassion and, on rare occasion, will sacrifice their own sense of self to reach out to another in a time of need..selfish genes, tried to eliminate the “soul” from our professional vocabularies.

The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in a while we’re cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness.

The media influences the public by broadcasting starving children, misrepresenting poverty showing us only the worst cases of poverty that have led to the formation of the “haves” and “have-nots”. “Those poor people! I need to call and donate.” Reluctantly, you never pick up the phone to pledge your money.

Instead we have come to accept that we are entering a world where all truth is relative. Where power struggles are assassins with an insatiable appetite for destruction, where beggar thy neighbor banking, misery merchants ruin lives for the sake of profit, where inequalities are creating terrorist groups such as ISIS, NATO, where greed is king, where making sense of humanity is a measure of madness.

So how do we find meaning? through experiential values, that is, by experiencing something – or someone – we value. To choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Just look at Kashmir if you don’t believe what I am saying. 76000 people displaced by recent  flooding, 13 year after 9/11, 50 years after partition, thousands disappeared, mass graves, a scar on the conscious of Humanity.

Are we all insane?

Our world right now is being shaped by water not by the like of ISIS, not by ethnic or religious differences, not be the Higgs Boson, or anything else.

Game, set match is coming.

By not tackling Climate change, Inequality, and unadulterated greed, which those with brains are crying out to do so the coming Tragedy is our home Earth not the observable universe.( see previous postings)

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