TODAY’S MODERN HERO IS THE STEWARD OF HUMANITIES DESTINY
–A WORLD THAT WORKS FOR EVERYONE!
The Modern Hero knows that life has given each of us a core wound to be healed and a core purpose to be fulfilled.
For the new modern hero, it’s about connecting versusconquering; integrating rather than dividing.
The days of “divide and conquer.” no longer serves the evolutionary quest for something more. Can you imagine the new marching orders, “We shall connect and integrate!“
The few, who I’m calling the modern heroes are paving the way for our next level of consciousness to emerge; born from love not fear, promoting inclusion versus exclusion, emphasizing cooperation over competition, celebrating individual uniqueness versus discrimination, voluntary transparency versus secrecy, all in the spirit of unity verses separation. (See below)
If enough modern heroes of the world can collectively harness the power available to us with awake minds and feeling hearts we can make this important shift towards interdependence to happen.
The once divided nations of the world will seek to connect rather than enter in to combat. Individuals will begin to shift from the old fear based either-or thinking and protecting and proving behaviors to new freedom based thinking of “both-and” and theconnecting and
expressing behaviors that naturally follow.
What do I mean by a modern hero? What’s this heroic journey all about and how does it apply to you? What makes the modern hero both the same and different from heroes of the past?
I offer you my passionate thoughts and insights and invite you to share your own, including examples of modern hero’s from your life and their heroic acts.
I’d like to make one thing clear from the start;
There are no natural-born heroes, neither by genetic lottery or privileged upbringing. Heroes are born out of courageous choices made naturally by women and men with awake minds, courageous hearts and caring souls.
The start of the modern heroes journey is never planned, always inconvenient, seldom easy, usually met with resistance, especially from the people they care about most and their sanity is questioned, even by themselves at times.
This is the first rite of passage that initiates the modern heroes journey.
This means leaving behind the comfort and safety of the conditioned self; all the assumptions, ideas and beliefs about self, others and the world that s/he has either inherited or concluded based on limited information.
Embarking on this journey of fierce Self-discovery offers no guarantees of happiness or material success, nor the esteem of others or loved ones.
The competing ideas of individualism verses collectivism has dominated world culture from the beginning. This clash in ideology and has gotten us to where we are today.
Yet it can not take us to where we can and must go, if we are to survive as a species and thrive as planet, a transformation towards interdependence must occur.
The modern hero realizes this and makes this transformation in consciousness their joyful burden.
I believe that it’s normal for someone should step up and help those in need.
It’s not that we want to change the world, we just wanted to help in our own way.” “A person is a hero when he’s doing something good for the betterment of his fellow citizens.”
There has being a significantly decrease in the levels of empathy over the last 30 years. Perhaps this is why acts of heroism, like defending someone who can’t protect themselves or sacrificing oneself for the survival of the group, are relatively rare in the media when compared to the frequency of reports on violent crime, murder, and other atrocities.
So if you had a superpower that you could use for good, what power would it be, and why?
A modern time hero must have courage, strength, persistence, selflessness, mercy to victims, mercilessness to enemies, and cleverness.
The markings of a true hero — are strictly human capacities.
They put others before themselves. They sprint into danger. They pay dearly for their courage, and they often go years–if ever–without the recognition they deserve.
The Oxford English dictionary defines a hero as “a person, typically a man, who is admired for his courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.”
Different people have different heroes whom they look up to or try to emulate. However, whoever they may be, sport stars, film stars, politicians, social activists or businessman they all do possess certain qualities which set them apart from the commoners.
The first and the foremost quality of a hero is his courage.
A hero is laden with all the essential faculties, which are instrumental to accomplish what he seeks.
Sacrifice is a quality that stands unique from all the other virtues which makes a hero noble in his deeds.
A hero is unflinching in his or her determination and believes in his ability without the whiff of dubiety.
Being focused is also one of the most prominent qualities of a hero.
A true hero is always empathetic, benevolent and shows a great deal of compassion and tenderness to those ailing or in distress. They do not give up simply rather they are focused to withstand all the consequences that they may encounter in their path. It is a set of unshakable thoughts or beliefs, which cannot be altered by any chance. Whatever be the type of responsibility entailed on them, they take it up with utmost sincerity and take it to its logical conclusion.
They whole-heartedly dedicate themselves to the task, which is set, and work towards its completion. He or she has fierce loyalties in the sense that he or she is faithful to whatever tasks they take up.
Honesty forms the base of all his efforts.
They are determined to fight challenges with resolute courageousness.
Whatever a hero maybe—a warrior, a preacher—wisdom is always an attribute that all of them possess.
It’s considerably difficult to find a modern-day hero. There are benign world leaders, peacemakers, soldiers, activists, or philanthropists.
Beowulf was a hero in the times of the Angles-Saxons.But heroism can happen in the most unexpected places, and it’s not limited to a life-long career of do-goodery; it’s what many neurologists have determined to be a human predisposition.
Anyone can become a hero given the opportunity, and yet not everyone does. Albert Einstein referring to Gandhi once quoted “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”
My incomplete List:
My first hero is my Daughter: Against all the odds she achieved a University Degree.
Next is Angelia Merkel Chancellor of Germany: Against all the odds she opened Germany to welcoming war-torn countries refugees. Against the back ground history of Germany if anyone deserves the Nobel Prize she does.
Next all Astronauts: Any human that sits on top of 3,821,722 lb off fuel, deserves to be a hero.
The Tank man: Temporarily stopped the progression of a column of tanks on the morning of June 5th 1989, armed only with two shopping bags that he carried in each hand.
Rosa Parks: Is famous for one thing, and that is refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus.
Jane Addams: A pioneer for women’s suffrage.
Witold Pilecki: Was a member of the Polish resistance and when these unknown camps started appearing all over Poland during the 1940s, he made it his mission to discover what secrets the Nazi party were hiding. He deliberately got himself arrested by the Nazis so that he could infiltrate one of the camps, Auschwitz.
William Wilberforce: Was an English philanthropist and politician who actively fought against the abolishment of the slave trade.
Oskar Schindler: Was a German industrialist who was part of the Nazi party and is credited for saving the lives of over one thousand Jewish people.
Martin Luther King Jr: Is considered to be one of America’s greatest orators and he was eventually assassinated because of his work in advancing the civil rights campaign.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: President of the USA.
Anne Frank: force to go into hiding during the Holocaust, she and her family spent 25 months hiding in a maze of room above her father’s office in Amsterdam.
Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, Neil Armstrong, Micheal Castell’s.
Unfortunately, the internet isn’t big enough to write down the names of every single person who has made a difference, because despite how you sometimes feel, there is still some good left in this world.
There’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.
My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.
For me, as for others, the Net media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.
It is replacing real wisdom with the conceit of wisdom.
It is filling us up with “content,” to the point that we are sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
It is destroying deep thinking, and eroding quiet spaces.
It is replacing compassion with selfishness. It is partly to blame for the current world conflicts.
Our thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality. A form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source we have already visited.
Smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
They are becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears and into our minds.time from human events.
We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.
But there comes a design point when there are so many tools available that our environments lose their simplicity and the cost in added complexity outweighs the benefits of convenience.
In fact it is makes us demonstrably less efficient. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.
The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV, our conscience.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image
Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.
But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
Printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.
Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our
We can turn the ringer off our phones, we can close our doors, we can auto-filter our email, we can personalize search engines, ask people to honor privacy, and so forth. But blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact and even filtering email is not a serious solution.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Google carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Which is totally untrue.
Their desire is to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”
A load of cobblers. To solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.
If our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence it would be more than unsettling. We would drain of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” turning our thoughts and actions into scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.
Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
Remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.
The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Every information technology carries an intellectual ethic. We stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
What the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
The missing premise is quality: The ratio of high quality to low quality information is falling.
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.
Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus.
Pushed information is information arriving in our work space over which we have little short-term control – the memos, letters, newspapers, email, telephone calls, journals, calendars etc. that land in one of our in boxes. To deal with it we have to make decisions. Is this garbage? Might it be useful? When? Where should I put it? Must I make a new file or new category for this?
Pulled or retrievable information is information we can tap into when we want to find an answer to a question or acquire background knowledge on a topic. Most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.
Our lives ought to get easier in information rich environments but the question is at what cost.
He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.
Yet no search engine seems to return hits with sufficient precision to save us from having to browse dozens of useless pages in our effort to berry pick the best items. The result is that we spend more time searching
more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them.
we need a new theoretical understanding of our activity space and our dynamic relation to our environments.Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload.
As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.
Syria has become the Middle East’s biggest humanitarian disaster in decades.
For most of the last 40 years, Syria’s leaders imposed stability on the country’s mix of religious and ethnic groups. Then civil war erupted, drawing in an array of outsiders.
Secular Syrians, homegrown Islamist radicals and foreign Sunni jihadists battle forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia, and — at times — each other.
After more than four years of violence that has killed more than 250,000 people and led to the rise of Islamic State, the effects of the conflict are being felt ever further afield.
Russia and a U.S.-organized coalition are both fighting Islamic State inside Syria, with Russia supporting Assad and the U.S. on the side of the Syrian rebels.
There’s concern that Assad’s defeat could leave a vacuum that radical Islamic groups would rush to fill.
The war-weary U.S. is taking a cautious approach that minimizes harm to its forces.
There are worries that if foreign governments supply more-advanced weapons to the opposition, they might fall into the hands of the Islamic State or other al-Qaeda-inspired groups, which could turn them against the U.S. and its allies.
Russia, for its part, says its goal is to keep Syria secular, independent and, most important, intact. Russia has used its UN Security Council veto repeatedly to protect the regime and maintains its only military base outside the former Soviet Union at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus.
THIS WAR NOW IS A WAR of identity—those in which populations are mobilised by grievances that have ripened over decades or centuries.
THE QUESTION IS HOW ARE WE TO GET THE GUNS TO FALL SILENT EARLIER THAN LATER.
At the risk of stating the obvious.
We all know, that bombing is not the final solution.
We all know, that in the Western Powers, there is no stomach for an overt armed intervention. (Putting boots on the ground especially now that Russia is involved.)
We all know, that war is good for business.
We all know, that the war will spread.
We all know, that our current ideologies about war (random episodes of senseless violence- Paris) makes it hard to understand why we still have wars.
We all know, that Sects and tribes are rarely neatly divided, waiting for a line to be drawn between them. Separating them, if need be by force, will make some safer, but it will cause others great misery and may well spark new conflicts.
We all know, that both sides in a civil war often feel they must carry on fighting if they are to escape slaughter. (As those fighting in Syria know, defeat often looks like death, rather than retreat.)
We all know, that only when the fighters have been disillusioned, can mediators get to work—and then only for a limited period.
We all know, that Power-sharing creates weak governments; nobody trusts anyone else enough to grant them real power. Poor administration hobbles business. Ethnic mafias become entrenched. Integration is postponed indefinitely. Lacking genuine political competition, with no possibility of decisive electoral victories, public administration in newly pacified nations is often a mess.
We all know, that Warlords who start conflicts are rarely prepared to admit that they cannot win, and their charisma can be central to the cause.
We all know, that not only does war have a special political and economic interest for many it can be addictive in nature even seeming fun and exciting.
We all know, that the best predictor of a civil war is having a war next door.
We all know, that military victories tend to provide more stable outcomes than negotiated settlements.
We all know, that the prospect of an ending can quite often intensify the fighting.
We all know, that Angola, Chad, Sri Lanka and other places long known for bloodletting are now at peace, though hardly democratic.
We all know, that killing innocent people seems to have a common theme in religion. It gets us accustomed and hypnotized into subservience once our brains enter the alpha state of conditioning.
We all know, that Civil wars unresolved for more than a decade seem to drag on for ever, with both sides resigned to perpetual fighting, too disgusted or exhausted to face their enemies across the negotiating table.
We all know, that one reason for backsliding is that peace often fails to bring the prosperity that might give it lasting value to all sides.
We all know, that from birth, virtually all of us have been brainwashed through various outlets that encourage materialism, ego, subservience, control and conformity.
We all know, that myths are created to drive war and how those myths differ so enormously from the reality.
We all know, that our children are not learning the true history of our origin while being forced to learn a propaganda filled view of what history looks like through biased.
We all know, that there can be no peace in the middle east till Israel takes down its Sectarian Wall and offers a one state Solution. There is little point in clinging to their original dreams long after all possibility of attaining them has faded.
We all know, that civil wars do end.
We all know, there are worries that if foreign governments supply more-advanced weapons to the opposition, they might fall into the hands of the Islamic State or other al-Qaeda-inspired groups, which could turn them against the U.S. and its allies.
We all know, that Russia, for its part, says its goal is to keep Syria secular, independent and, most important, intact. Russia has used its UN Security Council veto repeatedly to protect the regime and maintains its only military base outside the former Soviet Union at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus.
We all know, that if the war continues untreated that there will be millions of more refugees.
We all know, that the world organisations
We all know, that there are casualties on both sides of the conflict.
We all don’t know the Human Toll.
The United Nations estimated in July that more than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Syria. About 2 million Syrians have registered as refugees or are pending registration, with an average of almost 5,000 people fleeing into neighboring countries each day, the office of the UN High Commission on Refugees said Sept. 3. At the end of August, there were 110,000 refugees in Egypt, 168,000 in Iraq, 515,000 in Jordan, 716,000 in Lebanon and 460,000 in Turkey, it said. Inside Syria, a further 4.25 million people are displaced, according to data from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
We all don’t know, that Leadership changes are a factor in the termination of between 25% and 40% of civil wars.
We all don’tknow, that the majority of victories come in the first year of a civil war.
We all don’tknow, that the war has pitted the U.S. and its Sunni-Muslim Gulf allies, who want to see Assad removed from power, against Russia and Shiite-Muslim Iran.
We all don’tknow, that there are about 10,000 jihadists — who include foreign fighters — fighting for factions linked to al-Qaeda. Another 30,000 to 35,000 are Islamists who share much of the outlook of the jihadists, but are focused purely on the Syrian war rather than a wider international struggle.
We all don’tknow, that Fighters from the rebel group are financed and armed in part by some Gulf Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They have struggled to hold territory. They have also battled Islamists, who see the Syrian conflict as a religious war.
We all don’tknow, that the Syrian National Council: The council of opposition groups has its main offices in Istanbul and Cairo, and was formed in 2011. It falls under the umbrella of the Syrian National Coalition. The group seeks a civil and democratic state in Syria after the toppling of Assad. It has a president, a prime minister and about 114 members. It’s an umbrella group of opposition blocs whose main goal is toppling Assad’s government. The group has sought international recognition and the formation of a transitional government, according to its website. It has pledged to guarantee the “rights, interests and the participation of all components of Syria.
We all don’t know, that the Assad’s family has ruled the country for 40 years, and has been backed by the Alawite community and other minorities. Assad’s father left behind an authoritarian government that’s been led by the socialist Baath Party since 1963. Under Hafez al-Assad, Syria allied itself with Shiite Muslim-led Iran. Lebanon’s Shiite-Muslim Hezbollah has aligned with the Syrian government and fought with them to take the strategic city of al-Qusair in June.
We all don’t know that General Salim Idris:
He became the head of the rebel Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Command in December. The East Germany-trained electronics professor was a general in the Syrian army when he defected in July 2012. He has been vocal in trying to persuade the U.S. to intervene militarily against Assad after the use of chemicals weapons in August. Idris has tried to convince the U.S. that the FSA isn’t an Islamist or radical group as portrayed by the Assad government.
We all don’tknow that George Sabra:
He was elected in April as the acting president of the coalition, and held the post until July. He’s still head of the Syrian National Council after being appointed in November 2012. During his role leading the opposition bloc he stirred controversy by refusing to rule out talks with Assad’s government. He speaks about Syria without any religious or sectarian bias and supports the formation of a secular government after the ouster of Assad.
We all don’t know Ahmad al-Jarba:
He became the opposition coalition’s new president in July. As a leader of the Shammar tribe, one of the largest in the region and from which the mother of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia also hailed, Al-Jarba is viewed as someone the leadership in Riyadh can work with. Al-Jarba was born in 1969 in the north-eastern Syrian city of Qameshli.
We all don’t know Ghassan Hitto:
Hitto stepped down as opposition prime minister in July. He was given the responsibility of administering areas inside Syria held by the rebels. He pledged to enforce laws and provide logistical support for opposition forces. The communications executive was born in Damascus and has a bachelor’s degree from Indiana’s Purdue University and an MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University.
We all don’t know Ahmad Tomeh:
Syria’s opposition National Coalition elected Tomeh as prime minister this month and tasked him with forming a transitional government. The 48-year-old is thought to be have been a consensus candidate accepted by secular members in the coalition and moderate Islamist groups fighting to oust Assad. He replaced Ghassan Hitto, a Syrian American businessman. Tomeh is from the country’s oil producing east.
We all don’tknow that Syria’s conflict began with peaceful anti-government protests in March 2011, part of a wave of popular opposition to authoritarian regimes across the Arab world. It evolved into a sectarian war after President Bashar al-Assad’s troops fired on demonstrators.
What about the sham Peace conference in Vienna misleads the world about the lack of any realistic solution to the war.is a sham conference that is not capable of delivering any peace negotiations, and that the Obama administration knew that perfectly well from the start.
None of the Syrian parties to the war were invited. The obvious implication of that decision is that the external patrons of the Syrian parties – especially Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – are expected to move toward the outline of a settlement and then use their clout with the clients to force the acceptance of the deal. The idea of leaping over the Syrian parties to the conflict by having an outside power negotiate a peace agreement on behalf of it clients is perfectly logical in the abstract.
Iran, on the other hand, is fighting a war in Syria that it regards a vital to its security. And Russia’s political and security interests in Syria may be less clear-cut, but it also has no incentive to agree to a settlement that would risk a victory for terrorism in Syria.
All the conference achieved it to mislead the rest of the world about the lack of any realistic solution to the war.
The way to end the war is to get Russia to ask Mr Assad to help with a transition into a new government.
It must create a Mutually hurting stalemates. Governments often need less pressure, since they find stalemates painful in themselves. Without full control of their territory, legitimacy seeps away. This weakens them and encourages others who have grievances to make a stand, adding to the problems.
Separate measures are needed for the Rebels. They will require extra pressure, since they are less likely to find a stalemate intrinsically painful.
Fighting becomes their raison d’être; keeping the ability to fight on is all they need. “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose,”
The trickiest part is getting both sides into painful positions at the same time. Knowing that the enemy is under the cosh can tempt embattled combatants to hold out.
The Assad regime obviously has no incentive to make peace the least bad option.
What is essential in peace negotiations is combatants’ acceptance, at least privately, that the hope of winning has died away.
They then can turn their attention to those that blindly believe anything they are told in the name of “faith”.
Civil wars tend to end as messily as they are fought. Negotiations often take place in parallel with combat.
There may well be some conflicts better fought to their conclusion than left unresolved. This is not one of them. The violence needed for a military victory has already destroy the state institutions required to stabilise a country in the long-term. The announcement by David Cameron that the UK is now engaged in drone strikes and bombing against targets in Syria is just what the wars needs. Britain will be at the mercy of events which are being shaped by the numerous other players in the conflict, all of whom have their own highly contradictory agendas.
For 90 minutes to two hours or more each night, every single person on Earth dreams.
The best creative ideas occur while we’re sleeping.
Dreams can be a rich source of inner wisdom.
Most dreams operated on the level of stories, myths and archetypes — making them a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration.
No longer dismissed by psychologists as random neuron firings or meaningless fantasies, dreams are now considered an ongoing thought process that just happens to occur while we are asleep.
In 1816, the story of Frankenstein, often cited as the world’s first science fiction novel, was inspired by a vivid nightmare..
In 1845, Howe, invented the sewing machine based on a famous dream that helped him understand the mechanical penetration of the needle.
Niels Bohr, saw the nucleus of the atom, with electrons spinning around it, much as planets spin around their sun.
Einstein As it happens came to the extraordinary scientific achievement – discovering the principle of relativity – after having a vivid dream.
Ramanujan said that, throughout his life, he repeatedly dreamed of a Hindu goddess known as Namakkal. She presented him with complex mathematical formulas over and over, which he could then test and verify upon waking. Once such example was the infinite series for Pi:
In 1886, Stevenson, dreamed up three key sequences from the infamous fantasy thriller novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Otto Loewi, a German-born pharmacologist upon awakening went directly to his lab to prove the Noble Prize-winning theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse.
August Kekulé, insightful dreamed of the structure of the Benzene molecule
Frederick Banting, had a dream telling him to surgically ligate (tie up) the pancreas of a diabetic dog in order to stop the flow of nourishment. He did – and discovered a disproportionate balance between sugar and insulin.
John Lennon, wrote a best-selling song — one of his most iconic solo works — based on a dream he had.
Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, has called many of his works “hand-painted dream photographs,” and one of his most famous renderings was inspired by an actual dream. “Persistence of Memory,
Paul McCartney, composed the melody for “Yesterday” — the most-covered song in music history — in a dream one night in 1964.
Edgar Allan Poe, suffered from nightmares throughout his life, and they were said to sometimes inspire his poems and short stories.
Stephen King, dreams formed the basis of the 2001 novel turned film Dream Catcher.
James Cameron, had a fever dream — there was an explosion, and coming out of it was a robot, cut in half,after he awoke, and once back in the United States, he hammered out a draft of what would become The Terminator.
Carl Jung, “The Red Book,” is a massive collection of years of Jung’s dreams, fantasies, surrealist dialogues and psychedelic drawings.Like Nolan, director
Richard Linklater, used his dreams as inspiration for some of his greatest films, including the animated film “Waking Life,”
On Aug. 28, 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
But dreams don’t always tell a simple story, and the field of dream research becomes even more fascinating when people from different cultures and backgrounds report having similar dreams.
“Dreams are a universal language, creating often elaborate images out of emotional concepts.”
What are dreams for?
No one really knows the precise function of dreams.
We’ve evolved to dream about scary situations more than positive ones.
Dreaming sleep starts late, and can erupt into consciousness.
“During rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, our muscles become paralyzed — a good thing, since that keeps our bodies from acting out jumping, running, punching, etc.
You may not always remember your dreams, but scientists say we all dream at some point during sleep.
You can try to control the content and stickiness of your dreams — if you believe the many new smart phone apps that are available.
App-influenced dreams are exactly like the movie “Inception” — not yet, anyway.
The fewer fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field (geomagnetic activity), the more dream-inducing sleep hormone the body produces.
The more you play video games, the more control and awareness you’ll have in your dreams — like playing your “character” in your sleep,
The prefrontal cortex, which usually keeps these things in check, goes offline as you dream.
The fantasies you deny or otherwise make taboo are also likelier to play out in your sleep.
Unfortunately most of our dreams are about >
Being Chased: The fear of actually being chased, but rather what we’re running from.
Water: Our emotions or our unconscious minds.
Vehicles: What direction we feel our life is taking.
People: Dreaming of a lover.
Paralysis: Lack control in our waking life.
Death: The end of one thing, in order to make room for something new.
Falling: Letting go.
Nudity: Vulnerability.
Food: Energy.
Sex: Outlet for sexual expression. Sex happens in only 4 percent of women’s dreams and 12 percent of men’s. Erotic and perverse dreams are more common among stomach sleepers than among those who favor other positions, found a Hongkongese study (face down in the pillow, privates pressed, you can imagine how).
House: The dreamer’s mind.
Baby: Represents something new.
Flying: Control we feel we have in our lives.
Money: Wining the Lotto. All problems solved or just beginning.
Are you desperate to wake up and be able to recount all your bizarre dreams to some poor friend or unsuspecting colleague?
If you want to be that person start taking Vitamin B-6.
Your dreams will be more vividly and it will help you to recall the dreams the following morning, according to a study. But hold back on those bananas as too much of the vitamin can mean you won’t get to sleep at all.
Ninety percent of us have had a nightmare in the past year.
Nightmares can be good for your mental health.
On a subconscious level, dreaming about conflicts helps to resolve inner turmoil at the times when we need to most. This is how we work through our emotions.
Oh, and incidentally, women have more nightmares than men.
Nightmares may actually result in a shorter labor, found researchers at the University of Messina in Italy. Eighty minutes, on average — that’s how much faster women with nightmares gave birth, compared to those who had pleasant dreams. (They also have a lower rate of postpartum depression.)
A day’s events often come back to us in dreams that night — but just as often, they show up a week later. It’s the “dream-lag effect.”
During REM, the hippocampus takes five to seven days to transfer select memories to long-term storage in the neocortex, found a study led by Mark Blagrove, director of the Sleep Lab at Swansea University.
This means that if you spot your ex today, next week’s dream will put him in a softer, kinder light than tonight’s.
Yesterday the UK government spent 10 hours debating whether to expand its Bombing on ISIS/Daesh into Syria.
During the debate there was hardly a mention of Arms Sales other than,
“Isis didn’t come from nowhere, its weapons don’t come from nowhere. We sell vast amounts of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and a number of other places” Mr Corbett.
When it comes to how arms sales are perceive – whether they are British or US or whatever – it tends to be seen as a domestic economic issue.
The Middle East has now descended into proxy wars, sectarian conflicts and battles against terrorist networks. Countries in the region that have stockpiled American military hardware are now actually using them and wanting more.
Adding to the concern is the fact that the spending spree on arms comes against the background of a marked increase in military interventions by countries in the region since the Arab spring in 2011. Saudi Arabia has intervened in Bahrain (at the request of that kingdom’s ruler during the so-called Pearl revolution), in Yemen in 2009 and again in Yemen this year.
$18bn expected to be spent on weapons this year.
War is good for business.
In March 2015, the Syrian civil war, rightly declared by the United Nations as the “worst humanitarian disaster since the Cold War,” entered its fifth year.
Today, a number of factors make the conflict intractable.
The revolution began around issues of social inequality and the desire for freedom from fear and repression.
The Syrian civil war was never just about Syria. From the beginning, regional and international powers intervened in the conflict by supporting the different warring parties.
The rise of mainly foreign jihadist groups like the “Islamic State” (ISIS) have exacerbated the situation by both wrestling further decision-making power away from Syrian actors and by establishing itself as a radical “spoiling” force that would hinder any negotiated political agreement.
As more actors become involved, one constant factor remains: no single group or faction has the military strength to be able to simultaneously defeat all its adversaries and declare military victory.
Russia:
Russia has continued to supply the Syrian military with weapons and equipment throughout the conflict. Moscow insists it is only fulfilling pre-existing contracts and that it is not violating any international sanctions.
The S-300 surface-to-air missile defence systems recently delivered to Syria.
Despite Western pressure, Moscow insisted earlier this year that it would be honouring its previously agreed contract with Damascus for supplying sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems.
Given the unprecedented levels of weapon sales by the west (including the US, Canada and the UK) to the mainly Sunni Gulf states, Vladimir Putin’s decision last week to allow the controversial delivery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran – voluntarily blocked by Russia since 2010 – seems likely to accelerate the proliferation.
Russia has already reportedly sent advanced Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles, SA-17 surface-to-air missiles, and short-range Pantsyr-S missile systems.
Iran:
Tehran is believed to have become a key supplier of rockets, anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Iran has stepped up its military support of Syrian government forces since the end of 2012.
However, Iranian officials deny breaking the UN sanctions imposed on its arms exports.
To evade the sanctions, Tehran has allegedly been transporting most of the weapons through Iraqi airspace on commercial planes and, more recently, overland through Iraq by lorry, something the Iraqi government denies.
Photographs and videos published online appear to provide evidence of recent Iranian arms shipments.
One purportedly shows an Iranian-made rocket, on which the date of manufacture is listed as 2012; another an ammunition crate containing mortar shells made by a Iranian defense ministry subsidiary in 2012.
Syria:
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), have said that the vast majority of its weaponry has been bought on the black market or seized from government facilities.
European Union: May 2011, it imposed an arms embargo on Syria.
As the uprising entered its third year, several member states – led by the UK and France – lobbied to be able to supply arms to “moderate” forces in the opposition.
Despite deep rifts, foreign ministers agreed to let the embargo lapse in May 2013.
Though EU member states do not appear to have already sent arms directly to the rebels, another European country has been linked to a secret, large-scale airlift.
In January 2013, a British blogger began to notice weapons made in the former Yugoslavia were appearing in videos and images posted online by rebels fighting in southern Syria.
The recoilless guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers and shoulder-fired rockets appeared to be from an undeclared surplus from the 1990s Balkan wars stockpiled by Croatia.
Western officials told the New York Times that the weaponry had been sold to Saudi Arabia, and that multiple plane loads had left Croatia since December 2012, bound for Turkey and Jordan.
They were reportedly then given to several Western-aligned FSA groups. Croatia’s foreign ministry and arms-export agency have denied any such shipments occurred.
US:
The US has repeatedly said it is reluctant to supply arms directly to rebel groups because it is concerned that weapons might end up in the possession of militant jihadist groups.
But on 14 June 2013 Washington said it would give the rebels “direct military aid”after concluding Syrian troops had used chemical weapons.
The CIA is reported to have played an important role behind the scenes since 2012, coordinating arms shipments to the rebels by US allies.
In June 2012, US officials said CIA officers were operating in Turkey, helping decide which groups would receive weapons.
The CIA is also reported to have been instrumental in setting up the alleged secret airlift of weapons from Croatia.
Turkey:
The Turkish government is a firm supporter of the rebels, but has not officially approved the sending of military aid.
However, reports suggest it has played a pivotal role in sharp acceleration of arms shipments to the rebels since late 2012.
The Turkish authorities had oversight over much of the airlift of weapons from Croatia, “down to affixing transponders to trucks ferrying the military goods through Turkey so it might monitor shipments as they move by land into Syria”, according to the New York Times.
Jordan:
The Yugoslav-made weapons first seen in the hands of FSA units in southern Syria in early 2013 are believed to have been smuggled over the border with Jordan.
The Jordanian government has denied any role and said it was trying to prevent smuggling.
However, the New York Times found evidence to suggest Royal Jordanian Air Force transport planes and Jordanian commercial aircraft had been involved in the alleged airlift of arms from Croatia.
Iraq:
Syria’s rebels, who are drawn mostly from the country’s majority Sunni community, are said to have acquired weapons, ammunition and explosives from Sunni tribesmen and militants in neighbouring Iraq.
Arms are reportedly smuggled over the long, porous border and sold or given to the rebels. Al-Qaeda in Iraq played an active role in founding the al-Nusra Front and provides it with money, expertise and fighters.
Lebanon:
As with Iraq, Lebanon’s Sunni community is reported to have helped supply Syrian rebel fighters with small arms purchased on the black market or shipped from other countries in the region, including Libya.
The Lebanese authorities have seized unmarked shipments of ammunition, including rocket-propelled grenades.
The Syrian town of Qusair, which was recaptured by government forces in June 2013, was a transit point for weapons smuggled from north-eastern Lebanon.
Libya:
The North African state has been a key source of weapons for the rebels.
The UN Security Council’s Group of Experts, which monitors the arms embargo imposed on Libya during the 2011 uprising, said in April 2013 that there had been illicit transfers of “heavy and light weapons, including man-portable air defence systems, small arms and related ammunition and explosives and mines”.
“The significant size of some shipments”, it said, “and the logistics involved suggest that representatives of the Libyan local authorities might have at least been aware of the transfers, if not actually directly involved.”
Saudi Arabia:
Saudi Arabia is reported recently to have taken the lead in channelling financial and military support to the rebels.
Unlike Qatar, the Gulf kingdom is believed to be suspicious of the Islamist rebel groups, and has focused on supporting nationalist and secular factions of the FSA.
In late 2012, Riyadh is said to have financed the purchase of “thousands of rifles and hundreds of machine guns”, rocket and grenade launchers and ammunition for the FSA from a Croatian-controlled stockpile of Yugoslav weapons.
These were reportedly flown – including by Royal Saudi Air Force C-130 transporters – to Jordan and Turkey and smuggled into Syria.
Qatar:
Until now, Qatar is widely believed to have been the main supplier of weapons to the rebels.
The Gulf emirate has denied providing any arms, although it has promised to support the opposition “with whatever it needs”.
Most of the weapons are thought to have been given to hard-line Islamist rebel groups, particularly those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has acted as an intermediary.
This has reportedly drawn criticism from Western officials who say many of the groups are extremist.
Qatar Emiri Air Force transporter planes flew to Turkey with supplies for the Syrian rebels as early as January 2012, according to the New York Times
By autumn 2012, Qatari aircraft were landing at Esenboga airport, near Ankara, every two days.
Qatari officials insisted they were carrying non-lethal aid.
A complete and detailed picture of the arms race in the Middle East is impossible to construct.
But the availability of weapons in the region, from which British firms make billions of pounds a year, was a “contributory factor” in the ongoing conflict.
In 2013 the Independent reported that the UK made £12.bn from arms sales to repressive regimes around the world, most of which are in the Middle East and Africa.
Over the last decade, the Middle East has become a focal point of the world arms buildup. Each year, the regional arsenal grows, as the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and others ship billions of dollars worth of weapons to the countries there.
Today, the region receives over half of all arms deliveries to the Third World, and more than a quarter of all world arms shipments.
In less than 20 years, these have grown tenfold in value — from $4.7 billion in 1962 to $46.7 billion in 1980, nearly nine times the world average.
When the states of the world are ranked by military spending per capita, six of the top seven are in the Middle East.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Brunei, Kuwait, United States, Soviet Union and France.
By the end of the 1970s, the region was spending between 13 and 15 percent of its gross national product for the military, compared with 8.3 percent for the Warsaw Pact countries, the next highest.
If Israel’s battle-ready reserves of some 300,000 are included, the Middle East now has almost twice the total military manpower of the US, and is approaching the 4.7 million total for the US and all NATO countries except Turkey.
During the same period, operational combat aircraft in the region grew by more than 50 percent, from 2,900 to 4,400, surpassing the size of the combined European NATO air forces.
The one Canadian deal alone – to supply Saudi Arabia with light armoured vehicles – will account for 20% of the military vehicles sold globally in years covered by the contract.
With conflicts raging in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, this is just the thin edge of the wedge. Saudi has booked enough arms imports in 24 months for them to be worth $10bn a year.
Arms sales to the top five purchasers in the region – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Egypt and Iraq – surge this year to more than $18bn, up from $12bn last year.
Abu Dhabi staged the 13th edition of the International Defence Exhibition and Conference in 2015 it attracted 1,200 exhibiting companies and over 100’000 visitors.
According to the New York Times, defense industry officials have notified Congress that they are expecting additional requests from Arab states fighting Isis – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt – for thousands of new US-made weapons, including missiles and bombs, to rebuild depleted arms stockpiles.
Haider al-Abadi, disclosed that he was seeking arms worth billions of dollars from Washington – with payment deferred – for the battle against Daesh/Islamic State (Isis).
Ironically, among the key weapons suppliers in the arms race are permanent members of the UN security council who have been at the center of two unconventional arms control initiatives – disarming the Syrian government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and negotiating for a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme.
They showed how Saudi Arabia had become the world’s largest importer of weapons and fourth largest military spender and that other Middle East states were sharply increasing their arms purchases.
Last week France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, disclosed progress in talks to sell Rafale fighter jets to the UAE, one of the Middle East’s biggest and most aggressive arms buyers.
CHINA could be on the verge of teaming up with Russia to unleash its military might in Syria and destroy Islamic State (ISIS).
For perspective:
During the first year of the war on terror, approximately 72 million rounds were expended in Iraq and another 21 million in Afghanistan — about 2,000 rounds per war fighter.
There are over 80 million gun owners in the U.S. If every single one went out and bought just 100 rounds – barely enough for one afternoon on the range – it would require 8 billion rounds of ammo.
If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.
So how do we reverse the trend?
To do this,
Our approach needs to go well beyond the current focus on militarily downgrading and defeating ISIS and keeping the conflict from spreading to Syria’s neighboring countries — a strategy that has arguably already failed.
Syria is now functions as a war economy, and fighting is seen as one of the few options available to generate income.
Within the country, there are over 7 million people who have been internally displaced and over 12 million people who need basic humanitarian aid to survive.
Current international funding and resources fall short of covering Syria’s enormous humanitarian needs — including basic food assistance — and it must be increased.
What’s more, the international community’s priority needs to be to work on ensuring access for humanitarian aid workers, as they cannot reach parts of the Syrian population, whether due to the Syrian regime’s obstruction or ISIS’s extensive control.
With no clear military victory in sight, a political arrangement is still the best — albeit extremely complex — bet to see an end to the war.
Only a stronger, non-jihadist Syrian opposition can ultimately wrestle control and support away from radical groups like ISIS/Daesh and al-Nusra and sit at the negotiating table.
Something’s got to give.
And when it does, these are some possible scenarios:
If Assad is killed, the regime will likely fall and the rebels could claim victory. That would lead to an attempt at a transitional government, likely composed of members from the newly formed Syrian National Council, despite its immediate problems and the fact that jihadists have been the most organized rebel force up to this point.
A truly dangerous scenario would be if it went from the proxy war which it now is to a full-blown world war with Iran-Syria-Russia on side against the West and its Gulf allies.
The destabilization of the entire region. Syria would then turn into a free-for-all.
President Bashar al-Assad is given a safe passage out of Syria to end the nation’s bloodshed. This great compromise is not likely since Assad vowed he would never leave Syria alive. France is good at giving Mass killers a home.
With the amount of arms sales there is every likely hood that the Arab forces could become the Middle East’s newest source of Anti- democratic, sectarian- based, instability, potentially intensifying the Sunni-Shia conflict.
While most of the warring parties are exhausted, they also believe they have no alternative to war, that the only possible conclusion is either victory or death.
We live in an imperfect world. Poverty, disease, lack of education, environmental destruction –
If you Google what is wrong with the World you will get realms on what is wrong without any resolutions.
The problems are obvious the solutions are not so.
Now don’t get me wrong the Internet has opened my eyes to all sorts of problems, but I see the same world as I saw before, but I see it in a different light.
Some thins which lay in the shadows have begun to glow and other things that seemed so important have become faded and dim. My values have begun to turn inside out and now I locate my home in myself, one voice that might change another.
There is so much communication these days nobody has time to listen.
Nobody is any longer quite sure what is true or untrue.
If we want to achieve anything, what, in the world, would we have to change? We need to see what is happening without illusion.
Can we do anything about it?
This is the answer — We will have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves.Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are — our very biology.
You may think that this is impossible but it will not be long before we will have to say hallow to a new species of Sapiens that have had their DNA tweaked. Its called CRISPR. https://youtu.be/SuAxDVBt7kQ
If you think we got problems wait until we have designer babies playing God driven by Gene Drive for lack of a better word.
There are sure to be a few rogues.
Therefore there is no better time to star teaching how much we have in common and to accept an opinion other than our own.
The source of every single problem in this world, past, present, or future, can be traced to a lack of or miscommunication. To how things are split. Gene splitting combined with Artificial Intelligence will be the final straw that breaks the camel back.
Back to the present.
You cannot accomplish peace with war and you can’t have peace during war.
You would think with all the advances in communication we would have a greater understanding of the world problems. The opposite is truth.
As communication improves the options for encouraging obnoxiousness get ever more widespread.
As I see it there is a need for this to be corrected if we are to evolve at all as a species.
This can only be achieved if what is posted and spread by Social Media carries the same labeling that our food is required to carry on its packaging. Green for true, Yellow it needs authentication, Red false.
Another words we must force the function of the Internet to marry together the true reality of this world and the reality of the next.
How are we to know the actual intentions of people unless they communicate them in an effective way?
If everyone could just say what they mean and mean what they say, we’d all be better off.
Just look at the mess we are all in.
There is no room for The Manichean (which is an old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means “duality,” so if your thinking is Manichean, you see things in black and white. Life can be divided neatly between good or evil, light or dark, or love and hate. ) a view of the world that is self-justifying.
For example if the US, the West and Israel stand for democracy and individual liberties against totalitarianism (fascist, communist or Islamic), then their struggle is inherently just.
If the West burnt fossil fuels to achieve economic growth are we not obligated to compensated the rest of the world for not doing so.
The solution is: As I have posted on several occasions.
TO MAKE PROFIT FOR PROFIT SAKE PAY. ( SEE PREVIOUS POSTS)
Taking Syria as another example.
The roots of problem lie in Inequality of Capitalism that has given birth to all that went before the war.
Oil for Money, Oil for Arms, Oil for natural resources, Oil for the Stock Exchange, Oil wealth for the few. Oil for political Power. Oil for Sovereign Wealth Funds that plunder the world. Oil for Water. Oil for technology. You could say Oil for life.
It is now not merely a struggle between civilizations, but for civilization against totalitarian barbarism.
As oil is running out why do we turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia Oil beheadings in order to bomb ISIS. The answer is Money.
Naturally, the defenders of democracy are entitled to use force. The loss of life on both sides is to be blamed on those who threaten the Western way of life.
This is called collateral damage so as not to upset us. Its proper name is killing innocent bystanders.
We often hear that the West should encourage Muslims to adopt its values, but “the choice is their own.” That is, the burden is upon them to demonstrate their fitness to participate in international society, and the West will render judgment in accordance with its own criteria.
This attitude relieves the West of any sense of responsibility for current conditions in the Islamic world or elsewhere whether for imperialism, capitalism, short-sighted Western support for repressive regimes in the region or anything else.
The Middle East result purely from the unwillingness of Arabs and Muslims to face facts and look beyond grievances. This combined with the settlement of Jews in Israel how are unwilling to offer full citizenship to encourage a one state solution and the dismantling of its Berlin Wall. It is one thing to argue that culture matters. It is quite another to argue that it is all that matters.
The Arabs never have and never will like Jews simply because of a lack of communication. Why do they hate each other? We don t know, and neither do they probably.
Just because some Arab s great-great-great grand-uncle took some Jews great-great-great grand cousins goat that means that they have to kill each other today.
However no problem is simple. Until such time as the Muslim world makes the correct ideological choice, the West may have no choice but to vigorously confront its enemies.
It seems we have forgotten that not every answer lies in the barrel of a gun.
The past 50 years we have witnessed an important rapprochement between history and the social sciences, which has transformed history as a discipline.
“Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other people’s in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficial phenomena.”
That such an antiquated view of history could appeal to so many in the policy making world indicates just how fully we are committed to a cataclysmic conflict with the Islamic world.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such a conflict is exactly what Bernard Lewis and his disciples desire, and that they just may succeed in provoking it. ( According to Bernard Lewis, this is not Islam itself that is an obstacle to modernization but an error of assessment on the causes of the decline of the Middle East, which locks people into a too mentality victims, seeking among other reasons for the failures of their country.)
All wars end with the residue of another war.
The next generation has already fallen to its knees and given up the fight when it hasn’t even begun.
Our planet is slowly dying and we are the reason the blame for its slow demise.
We fill her oceans with black poison. We fill her skies with acid. We cut down all the trees she spent years to grow. We cover her soil with blood and we use her as our own personal dump.
We need to forget our differences…it does not matter the color of your skin, where you were born, the way you talk or even the way you walk…cause we are all the same…we are all human beings.
But it’s the smallest variations that make us the most unique species on this planet. Yes there’s a lot wrong with the world but only we can change those wrongs into rights.
We have the power, we have the voice, we have the will and we have the choice.
Miscommunication passed down through generations leads to deep seeded differences between people who wouldn’t normally have any qualms with each other.
The key to a better future for the entire world population lies in giving priority to the development of human capabilities.
There is little point in the Paris Climate Change Conference agreeing to some international package if we ignore the underlining problems that produce Wars. Inequality :
The immediate priority must be universal primary and secondary education – all children in school at least through to age 15 – everywhere in the world.
Health span is a big and urgent thing,because if you’re not alive,then all the other things will be to little avail.
Existential risk is also a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species.
If governments are serious about achieving their aims, they must base their decisions on hard evidence and not received wisdom.
Governments need to find better ways of measuring progress than simply looking at wealth.
We must put a stop to the free-for-all out on the oceans to have any chance of saving their riches from the ravages of climate change.
Another words we must put a stop to Profit for Profit Sake.
Humans started to separate from the rest of the great apes about 7M years ago and we became modern humans 200k years ago.
Are we now throwing the old blueprint out the window?
So Are we more attuned to our modern needs for the twenty-first century and beyond?
Have we moved beyond the paradigm of living in a nuclear family home in the suburbs?
What do the objects we select tell us about the relationships that exist between designer, retailer and consumer?
What is the design thinking behind some of the everyday items that shape our lives?
First we have to look at ourselves and according to the fountain of modern-day knowledge Google it.
An average person.
Spends 25 years sleeping.
10.3 years working.
48 days having sex.
Women spend 17 years of their lives trying to lose weight.
Spends 9.1 years watching TV.
Spends 2 years watching commercials.
Spends 1.1 years cleaning.
Spends 2.5 years cooking.
Spends 3.66 years eating, about 67 minutes a day.
Spends 4.3 years driving a car.
Spends 3 months of our life in traffic, about 38 hours a year.
Spends 1.5 years in the bathroom.
Spends a total of 92 days on the toilet.
Spends 70% of our waking life in front of digital media.
We laugh out loud 290,000 times in your life.
We walk a total of 110,000 miles.
We spend 90% of your time indoors.
We consume. 1 teaspoons of alcohol per day.
We have between 4 and 6 dreams a night for a total of 2,000 a year.
We fart 402,000 times in your lifetime.
We spend 14 days of your life kissing.
We drink 12,000 cups of coffee.
If you’re more into tea, you drink 48 pounds in your lifetime.
Women spend nearly 1 year deciding what to wear.
The average man will spend 1 year staring at women.
Women spend 8 years of their life shopping.
Women spend 1.5 years doing their hair.
An office worker spends 5 years sitting at a desk.
The average employee spends 2 years sitting in work meetings.
The average person swears 2,000,000 times.
Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime
Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)
the human body is about 60 percent water.
You pass around 42,759…. Liters of Urine in an average life time.
You are awake 16 to 18 hours a day.
“The New Frugality”
The average adult spends more than 20 hours online a week.
On average, people spend more than 490 minutes of their day with some sort of media,.with global average consumption set to rise to 506 minutes.
The internet accounted for 13% of average daily media use in 2010, but is set to reach nearly 30% in 2017.
Instant messaging use has leaped from 38% of mobile phone users in 2013 to 42% in 2014, driven by services such as Whats App and Facebook Messenger.
The mobile phone is now the primary device used for gaming with a quarter of mobile users playing games at least once a week.
80% of internet users aged between 35 and 44 are now on social media.
70% of internet users say they feel comfortable giving away personal information on the internet, including their home address, and a quarter say they don’t read website terms and conditions or privacy statements at all.
Are all becoming shut-ins.?
Or are we closer today to a global revolution than ever before. Can you feel it?
Or are we all disappearing into the Cloud.
The Question is how can we ensure that this is not going to happen.
HERE IS A SUGGESTION THAT COULD NOT BRAKE DOWN THE MESS WE SEE THE WORLD IN.
A UNIVERSITY TRAVEL SUBSIDIARITY AIR TICKET AWARDED TO GRADUATES.
THE SUBSIDY COULD BE GRADED ACCORDING TO THE MARKS RECEIVED.
STUDENTS COULD BE ENCOURAGED TO SAVE THE BALANCE DURING THEIR COURSE.
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE TRAVEL TO OPEN THE MIND.
Here below are a few observations to help you make your mind up.
I am “cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of a global climate agreement emerging from negotiations in Paris.
AS WE ALL KNOW International deal-making fundamentally hinges on assessments of national self-interest by the parties involved.
This is and will be the reason FOR THE PERSISTENT failure of the global climate change negotiations.
On the other hand it is also the best chance of offering a pathway to THE WORLD for success.
Nations will not be able to agree on who is to blame, on how to allocate emissions, or on projections for the future.
We don’t know how to allocate emissions among nations, the global economy makes this impossible anyway, and the early differentiation between developed and developing economies is no longer valid.
Fortunately, environmental transformation and technological change are not waiting for this paralysis of political agreement to end.
We are in the early stages of a global race to supply a set of new technologies and scalable systems — likely the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
I think the time has come for the international community to alter its collective climate strategy, cease the search for the impossible all-encompassing top-down agreement — described unattractively as “burden sharing” — and instead encourage an approach that builds on national self-interest and spurs a “race to the top” in low-carbon energy solutions.
A new agreement should recognize that a simple one-formula-fits-all framework is not feasible:
Instead, a new start is needed, based in part on what has been called “pledge and review”: but this has to be financed fairly by placing a WORLD AID COMMISSION ON GREED. (See previous letters)
Nations may will pledge concrete steps to reduce their carbon emissions and periodically submit their progress to the international community for review so what it will change nothing without the Capitalist World putting it hand in its back pocket.
” The debates that are likely to dominate the Paris talks will not be about emissions but about money.”
Higher emissions between now and 2030 would not inevitably take the world beyond 2 degrees, but they would certainly make the task more expensive and disruptive. It would probably leave the world requiring emissions cuts of more than 5 percent each year after 2030. Many technology analysts say that is next to impossible.
Most of the world’s major nations will pledge to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But serious doubts remain as to whether these promised cuts will be nearly enough to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
In Copenhagen in 2009, rich nations agreed to establish a Green Climate Fund to help poorer nations. They promised to collectively put $100 billion annually into the fund beginning in 2020.
Less than a fifth of this has so far been pledged from public funds.
Instead, rich nations are talking increasingly about topping up with private finance. A statement from the G7 leaders summit in Germany in June said that “mobilizing of private sector finance is crucial” to the fund, and would “unlock the required investments in low-carbon technology, as well as in building resilience.
This is pie in the sky.
”African countries, and others with little or no responsibility for climate change, want a separate fund to compensate them for “loss and damage” resulting from climate disasters such as extreme heat, wild weather, floods, and droughts.
This would be a 21st century equivalent of war reparations — for climate crimes rather than war crimes.
There are too many scientific uncertainties about exactly how sensitive the atmosphere is to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases. We could get lucky, but equally there might be tipping points that could suddenly accelerate warming.
Scientists say is probably the last realistic chance for the world to prevent global warming going beyond 2 degrees Celsius.
Some kind of deal will probably be done.
But will it be one more diplomatic fudge or a real triumph for the climate?
Pledged in so far to cut emissions cover more than 65 percent of current global emissions. The pledges vary. Some are absolute targets expressed as tons of carbon dioxide per year in 2030; others are targets measured against business as usual, or promises to reduce emissions for every dollar of economic activity.
Will they finalize and formalize a binding international agreement.
With as many as 40,000 officials and heads of different nations I doubt it.
The economic impact is too great.
We have to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution will take more than an agreement.
Economic self-interest is the key. With a World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange transaction ( over $20,000) and on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions and new drilling licences we will have a perpetual fund to solve Climate change and all other inequalities in the World.
Even if the major industrialized economies were able to reduce their emissions completely, the prognosis for the earth’s atmosphere would still be grim if resource-rich developing countries do not change course.
We don’t have to be united. We don’t have to agree. We don’t always have to “stand together,” even. If one thing changes everything will change.
We do however have to live on the same planet with conflicts of ideologies political, or religious.
Our painting now has all its elements Money, Religion, the Gun, Humanity, Earth and Woman,and it need of completion, framed and displayed.
Before we go any further if there is an Artist out there and a Sponsor or rich person that wants to do something with this piece of incredible art, fee free to do so on a crediting me with the concept.
We have placed Woman sitting on top of Earth which is represented by a background wash of intense color that shines through a transparent wash of humanity. She is sitting with her back to us. We have then peppered our canvas with the gun, money and religion.
The question is how do we make all the elements come together.
Rather than the usual frame we are going to use a circular frame which will be hung in a large Plexiglas dark glass Pipe. The pipe to represent tunnel vision.
We will fill the pipe with crystal clear waters the source of life and illuminate it with pulsing white light from back-end. This will simply enhances the natural beauty of our painting which is hidden in the transparent wash of humanity.
Light in general changes as it penetrates into the ocean., which is exactly what to achieve with our painting of the world. Placing the viewer in the euphotic zone.
Because all life in the oceans is ultimately dependent upon the light which is selectively scatters and absorbs in water it will act as a filtration of the viewers wavelengths of visible.
Our Pipe will be suspended from the ceiling at the height of an average person.
This will represent Space in which our planet exists. It will also create a clear space for the viewer cutting out any peripheral distractions.
The viewer will be invited to take a set of earphone, because sound is the one element we could not capture on canvas.
The CD will reflect the sounds that are relevant to our elements in the composition.
The “goodness” of sound is a totally scientific and quantifiable thing that allows no room for personal preference, bias, or interpretation. Its heard in a thousand different directions.
There you have it.
I hope the this series of posts has led you through the looms of life that has made our world so difficult to live as one family of humans.
We can only hope with these many-coloured skeins, may we weave the pattern of or spiritual tapestry to give covering for lives yet unborn.
When you don’t know how to do something; where the first place you turn?
The internet Right?
It doesn’t help you truly.
All it takes is for you to imagine the average human being is like you.
If you can do that, you make a better world, and a more difficult one for groups like ISIS to exist in.
The international community is by now quite experienced in pretending that the massive humanitarian crisis exists in some acceptable and remediable form, destined to improve with time.
Insisting on the humanity of the victims is also a political act, and as tragedy is spun into civilisational conflict or an excuse to victimise those who are already victims, it’s a very necessary one.
The world has been encouraged in this dangerously expedient ignorance by the media. The history of misrepresentation is long and ugly.
“Entire generations may be lost” It requires a willful blindness not to see what is occurring.
Don’t close your eyes to the truth. The truth is difficult to accept at
times. This is a humanitarian crisis !! not just caused by Climate
tely, the 
internet isn’t big enough to write down the names of every single person who has made a difference, because despite how you sometimes feel, there is still some good left in this world.
