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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‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ Nationhood is a Changing.

13 Saturday Sep 2014

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Here we are once again writing about a subject that in this part of the world will be put to the test next week – When Scotland goes to the poll – In or out.

What exactly are the Scots being asked to determining.?  Are they being asked as who its citizens are whether modern or traditional, European or non-European.

Or are they having an independent Scotland’s moment, giving concrete form to the tricky question of ‘who are the Scots’?

Or !  If creativity is not grounded in the soul, then reality is reduced only to the quantifiable parameters of markets and money; and with that, politics gets reduced only to the question of whether Scotland will be better or worse off with or without England until the oil runs out.

Now let me say that no writer writes in a vacuum but in this case that is exactly what I am doing because I believe that a nation is a soul of forgotten voices, a spiritual principle.

But in reality nationhood is often defined in terms of commonness of culture, language, history, ethnicity, religion and spirit.

The terms nation, nationhood, nationality seem to have become distant at a time when globalization, multiculturalism, intercultural or cross-cultural communication define the way we live with respect to ourselves, the others and the environment on the whole. This becomes usually more emphatic in times of hardships for a country, especially during foreign invasion.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori once summoned together people of different age and background to defend one’s country and culture.

So lets ask the question.

In the world as we know it to-day what do you think constitutes a nation or nationhood.? ( If your brave enough lets hear your views)

The world today is demarcated by borders according to the positioning of sovereign states of nations. Despite this, this sense of commonness as defined above is hard to maintain in present day society, when social, economic, demographic, technological and other developments take place in an eye shut.

Thus, in the present society a new feeling of commonness appears to define nation, nationality and nationhood. It is the attempt to balance “civic citizenship” against “cultural citizenship”

Nations are not naturally occurring phenomenon and nationalism pursues a behavioral entity of the nation.

Nations are basically fabrications and constructions perceived in the minds of ‘man’. the nation is an ‘imagined political community.

Another words the nation is now an exchange of cultures, and the erasure of borders and boundaries have given way to a globalized world in which all cultures negotiate.

Cohesive elements are provided by language, religion, shared historical experiences, physical congruity and others.

Nations can exist with or without a distinct political identity, that a ‘nation’ is the product and is born out of the birth of ‘Capitalism’,especially ‘print capitalism’ that enables the dissemination, development and spread of the imagination and subjective awareness in raising the feelings of ‘togetherness’,‘belongingness’ and the inclusive ‘we’, in the bond of world consumerism.

This type of cultures have slowly eroded our Western and Eastern culture in an attempt to fused our culture, to give birth to hybrids and mutants.

We need to start by asking the much deeper question of what we think that life is all about. What is a human being? Are we just egos walking about on legs of meat, here today, gone tomorrow?

While many of the broader discussions of globalization and regionalisation convey an air of inevitability, most neither advocate nor address the vexed issues raised by the free flow of people.

What, then, does the Nation or Nationhood mean to ordinary people?

Nationalism’ is a sentiment of loyalty towards the nation, which is shared by people, inherited blinkers of race and religion, what we call ‘loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom or is the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity) congruent with the cultural unit, the nation.

A good example is the Current state of affairs  in Syria, Iraq with a violent secessionist movements in the form of ISIS trying to create a Muslim State.

Instead of living in harmony as most imagined nations around the world, this Lot of barbaric wankers want to create a nation with its roots in fear, suspicion and hatred of the other.

While in Europe, North America, Soviet Union and the UK there is a growing backlash against immigration and multiculturalism.  Nationalism and its xenophobic correlates continue to flourish to no avail  because flows of transnational migration will unseated the nation-state as the dominant form of political organization in the world today due to Inequality and Poverty, and Greed.

To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people, a Nation.  Long live free Scotland.

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The greatest instance of market failure in the history of humankind.

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

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The damage done is already beyond repair – Global warming poses a far greater emergency than, say, Islamist terrorism.

It would be reasonable to think that with all the Global Summits, and 97% of climate scientists have reached the conclusion that climate change will strikes to the molecular core of our existence it would be on the top of every countries to do list and world media coverage,

The failure of the climate change catastrophe to ignite wide scale is baffling to say the least.

Virtually no one any longer believes that temperature will be able to be contained to the internationally recognized tipping point of two degrees.

We are fools to underestimate the magnitude of the challenge.

The problem seems to be that the more distance we have between ourselves and the natural world the better. This has created a type of lethargy where we become very disoriented, and we don’t realize the impact our actions are having on the things we actually need in order to survive.

Until our ethics take the form of a living praxis that isn’t just concerned about insular community, that actually is concerned with the whole of humanity, and all of life on the earth we will remain blind to the danger.

Consumerism or no, capitalism or no, charity or no, there is no way to survive unless we do it together.

Seeing that we have the ability to tear things down, that we have the ability to destroy things, we also have the ability to do the opposite.

We can actually engage the problem and reverse the process. Nature has the power to regenerate itself, and if it’s able to do that without any help then what would happen if you actually helped it?.

The condition of the earth global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response.

So the problem is consumption it expresses the psychological unwillingness of the character type produced within the consumer society to recognize the necessity for material sacrifice and even the existence of limits.

While capitalism facilitates and demands consumption, some mythical awakening will have to take place.

Once environmental collapse convert fully into economic and societal collapse this awaking will have come too late.

Yet, eyes wide open, shut the nations of the earth to do very little to avert the impending, entirely foreseeable catastrophe.

Why?

As everyone knows, the electoral cycles are systemically biased towards political and policy short-termism.

Because Nations participate in the international system predominantly to safeguard and advance their self-interest – the so-called “national interest”.

Only when they think the national interest is served will they form alliances or involve themselves in broader schemes of international cooperation.

For these reasons, the domestic political systems of the nation states potentially of greatest importance in the struggle against global warming–that is the advanced Western democracies—tend to paralyze the possibility of necessary emergency action. In the way it has evolved, the post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required.

As the problem of global warming is a historical product of the early industrial nations, it is almost impossible to convince the largest newly emerging and fast growing economies—like India or Brazil or South Africa—that their overriding obligation is to act in the interests of the earth and not in the immediate, short-term interests of their own people.

The United Nations is powerless

The cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax and carbon credits is a joke.

Progress in combating climate change requires acts of good global citizenship.

Only a handful of advanced economies—Germany, Denmark, Norway most notably—have acted thus.

To date there is no meaningful action by the two largest economies of the world—the United States and China.

China will for a long-time remain heavily dependent for its energy needs on coal of which it has vast reserves.

Australia is involved in a grotesque scramble to open up vast new coal developments especially in the Hunter Valley and the Galilee Basin in Queensland.

American exceptionalism is now a threat to both the earth and to the future of humankind.

Similarly, it has been, and will continue to prove, impossible to convince the fossil fuel-reliant economies—like Russia and the oil-producing nations of the Middle East—to sacrifice supposed national economic self-interest in favor of the future well-being of human and other species.

Perhaps even more challenging however will be the investigation of the far more common and dangerous pattern, to which almost none of us is immune: namely denialism in everyday life, or the ways in which so many citizens, knowing what they do, manage somehow to live their lives in parallel universes, on one level of existence accepting intellectually that the threat of catastrophic global warming exists, and on another finding ways of living and thinking, calmly and comfortably, as if nothing of great moment was happening that was placing the future of humankind and of other species in gravest peril.

The question was posed.

Could humankind very rapidly wean itself from the source of energy on which its astonishing material well-being had for two centuries been based? We do not yet know what the answer to that question will be.

Some time ago I made a case in a post that if we want it we must pay for it.

( Have a Look)

In the mean time for those of you who walk around looking into your smart phones wondering where you are here are a few Documentaries that might awake you.

 

The Last Man and the First Man.

08 Monday Sep 2014

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This might be too ambitious a subject to tackle but it is certainly a subject that you can let the imagination go wild.

So to read this post you will have to have dispassionate intelligence.

When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers.

Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically—that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural.

However if you look at present day DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, they have unleashed a revolution in studying evolution.

Since man fell out of a tree and stood up with 99% OF CHIMPANZEE DNA we continue to show genetically induced changes to our physiology and perhaps to our behavior as well.

Until fairly recently in our history, human races in various parts of the world were becoming more rather than less distinct.

The difficulties of the present-day point to a one-lopsidedness in our culture that harms both men and women.

Which of course we being the first man have not quite got the nervous system that is capable of seen so.

Perhaps it is the very reason we have a race of lassitude which will be the one cause of its decay. The conflict between the intransigent loyalty to life and the embattled against death proves this point.

Humans have survived for thousands of years and will most like survive thousands of more but it is becoming hard to remember life before digital news. The two world wars and current conflicts display so tragically the incompetence of us the first man to control our own nature.

We find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured—or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism.

”Although the last survivor may proclaim himself universal Emperor, his reign will be brief and his subjects will all be corpses.”

Civilization as we know it could probably survive one more world war, provided it occurs fairly soon and does not last long. After which no individual will think, or even feel, for himself, but each will be contentedly a mere unit in the mass.

I am dealing mainly with the gloomy aspects of the present situation of mankind. It is necessary to do so, in order to persuade the world to adopt measures running counter to traditional habits of thought and ingrained prejudices.

If the danger of wars were removed, scientific technique could at last be used to promote human happiness. If wars no longer occupied men’s thoughts and energies, we could, within a generation, put an end to all serious poverty throughout the world.

Unless we can cope with the problem of abolishing war, there is no reason whatever to rejoice in labor saving technique, but quite the reverse.

Owing to the modern impossibility of successful rebellion this is only possible through the creation of a single armed force in control of the whole world that wars will stop.

If you look back across the aeons to the first man you can see that his faith is already woven through spiritual desolation into senility and mutual intolerance.

On the other hand he lived at one with nature and woman.

Future Last man will have to live with eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind all computerized. Even the mind will tie in organically with “know-it-all computer memory banks.  Every one of the six organs will have disposable modules, likes cassettes, and will gain an electric boost. He will also have to have a lot of the opposite sex within him.

How many people would have believed you if five hundred years ago you had said, “In five hundred years, there will be airplanes, television, and radios?” Everyone would have considered you insane.

By the time human genes are grafted onto animal bodies and alter human genes with animals strains, this mutual genetic modification will produces a freakish, mutant, hybrid that resembles neither parent.

So will this be the Last human? It’s not really human. You say it’s an animal? It’s not exactly an animal either.

Lets hear your thoughts.

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WHY NATO ?

06 Saturday Sep 2014

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Is NATO a nuclear-armed alliance that since the end of the Cold War has been in search of a mission.

This might seem like an innocent question.

However we are now faces a world marked by accelerating change, in which everyone is connected but nobody is in charge.

The end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of the Soviet Union led the Allies to establish the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and the Partnership for Peace in 1994.

Since then the  Alliance has been unable to formulate a concerted strategy of engagement with other international organizations owing in large part to disagreements among the NATO Allies. Intractable obstacles to cooperation rooted in national policies have generally been surmounted only under the compulsion of events like now.

This situation cannot be expected to change owing to their perceptions of the Alliance as a Cold War military organization composed of wealthy “northern” countries and dominated by the United States. It may be impossible to depoliticize firmly held national differences or to avoid stalemate.

According to the UN Charter, the UN Security Council has, primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. But as we all know it is an organisation now paralyzed by lack of funds, handcuffed by its permanent members, turned into a  gossip shop for its 192 members and god knows how many attracted specialized Agencies.

So knowing that NATO is primarily composed of American muscle, is Putin correctly reading their signals not to do anything of great significance.

The strategy of “kicking Putin in the cronies” is not causing many Russians to reach for the vodka bottle so far.

NATO in its recent meeting agreed in principle to a rapid reaction force and agree to reverse the trend of declining defense budgets and aim to increase defense expenditure in real terms as GDP grows;  ” we will direct our defense budgets as efficiently and effectively as possible; we will aim to move towards the existing NATO guideline of spending 2% of GDP on defense within a decade.”   Wow !

The Crimea crisis reveals the complete failure of NATO, the EU and Russia to find a path toward defense and security cooperation in the post-Cold War era.

IS’s successive victories in northern Iraq and their unchecked brutality continue to draw fighters to their ranks from throughout the Middle East, as well as from Western countries like Britain and the U.S.

There is no longer a clear enemy.

The overstepping of any mandate received by NATO may have a negative effect on the credibility of the responsibility to protect in future gross human rights violations.

There is no doubt that prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea the Wales Summit would have been little more than a glorified photo-op.

It appears reactive, a kind of military tit-for-tat, that in the long run does nothing to reverse Ukraine’s dismemberment.

NATO remains a self destructing nuclear-armed alliance in which all states must accept the principle of nuclear deterrence and being part of the NATO nuclear command and control system.

In light of this the Alliance poses no threat to any country is blowing hot and cold air,  “should the security of any Ally be threatened we will act together and decisively. ”

What it is doing is helping the creation of the Islamic State on NATO’s strategic doorstep and the steady march of the Islamist anti-state, Iran and its nuclear ambitions will continue. It was not just a question of changing weapons, but also changing bureaucracies.

NATO has to work out how it needs to be restructured for the current world.

Nations today use computer network operations to defend sovereignty
and to project power, and cyber conflicts may soon become the rule rather than
the exception. Cyber security will require an international solution.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rapid rise of strategic China, proliferation of destructive technologies across the world and a range of other potential threats it is clear that such self-deluding dogma of NATO must be challenged.

International relations in cyberspace seem closer to Pandemonium than Paradise. European Union and NATO, as the largest and most cohesive political and military alliances in the world, might be the best places to start.

Perhaps bring back the notation of a new European peace force would fit into NATO’S command structure and not the other way around.

At least the image could reflect Peace rather than seeing world leaders on a golf course craning their necks to watch Fighter jets surrounded by Military vehicles.

The US invests roughly €76,000 per soldier per annum, Europeans on average invest only €18,000.

The Disillusionment that we have some privileged position on Earth are challenged by such Alliances.

If you don’t believe me have a look at the below video.

http://www.upworthy.com/it-might-be-the-most-mind-boggling-photograph-humanity-has-ever-taken?c=gasan1

Every which way you look at it our planet looks like a nightmare.

05 Friday Sep 2014

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This is my one hundred post, and it makes sad reading.

It questions why I bother when the problems of the world is us.

The behavioral changes that are required of us are so fundamental that no one wants to make them.

Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face.

Why are we not doing more about the situation we’re in – given the scale of the problem and the urgency needed – I simply cannot understand.

What, then, are our options?

It looks like to me that our Capitalist Democratic Governments are palatalized by consumer driving economies, and Data.

That our religions and beliefs are superficial when it comes to demands for Food, Water, Clean Air, Life.

In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we’re in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency.

Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us.

Our activities have modified almost every part of our planet.

In fact, we are having a profound impact on it.

And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion.

By 2050, your children, or your children’s children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.

We hear the term “climate” every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Never mind the sea rising and we all turning brown.

It takes 100 liters of water to produce a cup of coffee. And that’s before any water has actually been added to your coffee.

It takes something like four liters of water to produce a one-liter plastic bottle of water.

Last year, in the UK alone, we bought, drank and threw away nine billion plastic water bottles. That is 36 billion liters of water, used completely unnecessarily.

It takes around 72,000 liters of water to produce one of the ‘chips’ that typically powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car.

There were over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145 trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips.

In short, we’re consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely unsustainable and it is already becoming a weapon of war. 

Demand for land for food is going to double By 2050,

1bn hectares of land is likely to be cleared to meet rising food demands from a growing population. This is an area greater than the US. And accompanying this will be three gigatons per year extra CO2 emissions.

If Siberia does thaw out before we finish our deforestation, it would result in a vast amount of new land being available for agriculture, as well as opening up a very rich source of minerals, metals, oil and gas. In the process this would almost certainly completely change global geopolitics.

By 2050, 70% of us are going to be living in cities.

It’s worth mentioning that of the 19 Brazilian cities that have doubled in population in the past decade, 10 are in the Amazon.

In transporting us and our stuff all over the planet, we are also creating a highly efficient network for the global spread of potentially catastrophic diseases.

To meet expected demand of energy production by the end of this century we will need to build, roughly speaking, something like: 1,800 of the world’s largest dams, or 23,000 nuclear power stations, 14.m wind turbines,  36.bn solar panels, or just keep going with predominantly oil, coal and gas – and build the 36,000 new power stations.

We spent €8bn at Cern to discover evidence of a particle called the Higgs boson.

We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe.

Human needs theorists argue that one of the primary causes of protracted or intractable conflict is people’s unyielding drive to meet their unmet needs on the individual, group, and societal level.

Conflicts and violent conflicts are caused by unmet human needs.

Humans need a number of essentials to survive. these essentials go beyond just food, water, and shelter.

They include both physical and non-physical elements needed for human growth and development, as well as all those things humans are innately driven to attain, such as recognition, safety, autonomy, equality, subsistence, respect and consideration, it becomes possible to look at strategies and solutions which may take all needs into account, on both sides.

Providing nothing collides into us we have 6.5 billion years to go before the whole lot goes up in flames in the mean time – if we don’t get a grip and stop being faceless on Facebook teach your son how to use a gun.

As I said this is the hundred post on my blog if it changes just one person it is worth it.

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When you close your eyes and enter the land of sleep it is not the only time in your life that you are content, death awaits us all.