THE BEADY SAYS; ENTERTAINMENT IS NOW BEYOND THE PALE. WHAT CONSITUTES ENTERTAINMENT? WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? IS THERE ANY LINE TO BE DRAWEN?

19 Friday Apr 2024

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( Ten minute read)

Even as violence is a concept that has long accompanied humanity, it is no easy task to make sense of what it is, or how it is exercised.

Ancient Romans flocked to carnage in the Colosseum.

Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone.

Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history.

The relationship between violent media and real-world violence has been the subject of extensive debate and considerable academic research, yet the core question is far from answered.

Portrayals of violence can manufacture our consent with government policies, encourage us to endorse the legitimacy of state power and state violence, and help determine who are “worthy victims”.

Results from the two studies suggest that socialization models of media violence may be inadequate to our understanding of the interaction between media and consumer behaviour at least in regard to serious violence.

Our media outlets from News to Gaming – Movies – Net flicks – Social Media – are saturated with violence.

More than 100 million people watched the gory Netflix show, Squid Game.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice wins Game Beyond entertainment.

This is a bit like benign masochism, the enjoyment of aversive, painful experiences in a safe context.

Whether or not screen violence is bad for us has been extensively studied and there are reasons to reconsider how much we like watching violence per se.

For example, violence creates tension and suspense, which may be what people find appealing. Another possibility is that it is action, not violence, which people enjoy. That it is violence being deemed off-limits that makes it appealing. It may be that it is justified punishment, rather than violence, that we enjoy watching.

All this suggests that media companies may be giving us violence that many of us don’t want or need.

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We should hence consider what other corporate, political or ideological pressures may be encouraging onscreen violence globally causing us to become disconnected with reality.

Movies lie about the real impact of violence on the human body – with almost 90% of violent actions showing no realistic physical consequences to the victim.

The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.

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The question of how humans came to be domesticated — at the will of a deity, independently, as some sort of evolved trait — has plagued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years.

It is tempting to try to answer this question by invoking biology and genetics, arguing that humanity is wired to be violent.

Whether humans will ever live in a violent-free, as digital technologies—such as social media platforms—become increasingly central to our daily existence they have become essential components in how violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, as access to and use of social media continue to expand across the world so does the violence enacted through these digital platforms become more common.

For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news and watch murder in all its forms.

What lies behind these episodes. Perhaps, some have argued, our intelligence and systems of culture, such as laws and social norms, are all that are holding that innate violence in check.

How good and evil may have come to co-exist in our unique species. Are humans, by nature, good or evil? The question has split opinions since people began philosophising. We have a low propensity for impulsive aggression, and a high propensity for premeditated aggression.

It raises a deeper question: Why did such an unusual combination of virtue and violence evolve?

A deeper understanding of how and why violence emerges, or doesn’t, might help us achieve a less violent future—or at least one in which we can better comprehend and manage our violence.

41% of people in the United States of America have suffered online harassment, from physical threats (14%) and sexual harassment (11%) to name-calling (31%).

But violence in digital environments is not only expanding, it is also becoming more complex as the evolving affordances, structures, and cultures of contemporary digital environments increase their scale, speed, reach, and visibility (Backe et al., 2018).

For instance, violence on social media is found in the new ways cultural and informational wars are enacted and deployed in the United States filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks and wars.

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It is a widespread phenomenon that directly or indirectly affects many aspects of our lives.

Nonetheless, digital manifestations of violence are often thought to be less “real,” “serious,” or “harmful” than those enacted face-to-face (Dunn, 2021).

Capitalism is a dirty word for many intellectuals but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

Warfare provides people with a semblance of psychological positivity in oppressed societies where other outlets are lacking.

Any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs. The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to do this makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.

War and other destructive capabilities are merely the flip side of the same uniquely human faculty that has enabled us to coexist peacefully, to innovate, to travel in space and shape our world.

The evolution of entertainment into a global landscape signifies a world where cultural boundaries blur, and creativity knows no limits. In today’s interconnected world, the entertainment industry has expanded its reach, influencing and captivating audiences worldwide with diverse content and experiences.

Entertainment has transcended geographical boundaries, morphing into a global phenomenon that unites people across cultures, languages, and continents.

Social media is cursed with pervasive and impactful harmful content. Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest?

Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another.

Film and television have long been seen as legitimate and powerful means to educate, inspire and empower wider society. To deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment – whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real world problems, or to make the world a better place.

The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.

The past two years have seen the most conflicts of any time since the end of the Second World War.

(The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.)

What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good?

The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.

Reaching beyond video to monopolise the attention of audiences in the home TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behaviour.

We are exposed to social media violence just by being there.

The amount of violent content has helped normalise aggression. The reality is that social media platforms have got a lot to answer for. In practically every situation where we’ve seen violence happen there has been some sort of connection with an online platform in some form.

Why are these social media platforms not being held to account?

Why are we so scared of asking really difficult questions and why are these social media platforms not putting more money back in the communities that are being affected by violence?

We don’t fully know the impact of social media.

But social media and the fact that something that is say in passing becomes written down, causes what might have been nothing to become something.

For most violence isn’t at all normal, but there is a proportion whose lives are far too full of violence because of inequality and poverty.

The key driver of violence.

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But what about games?

As our younger industry matures, what role should games play in reflecting and commenting on the world around us?

Already we have a number of implications that will define the future shape of the online entertainment market. As society seeks answers in the media they trust, streaming devices are now everywhere, pouring news into social media 7/7

People in entertainment, tries to make something for everyone/to make the most profit instead of making what they want, so personality and quality takes a hit.

There is definitely a cultural degradation taking place.

Violence is an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary digital environments.

Games beyond entertainment.

The advent of video games raise new questions about the potential impact of media violence, since the video game player is an active participant rather than merely a viewer. Video games that involve assuming the roles of aggressors or soldiers offer players the opportunity to be “virtual perpetrators.”

Rewarding players for successfully carrying out violent behaviour.

Online gaming communities, esports tournaments, and multiplayer platforms enable players worldwide to engage, compete, and connect in virtual worlds. Digital platforms have revolutionized entertainment accessibility. Social media influencers transcend borders, shaping entertainment trends and culture on a global scale, such as cultural sensitivities, censorship, and legal barriers that can hinder the free flow of content across borders.

There are fewer empirical studies of video game violence than other forms of media violence. Still, several meta-analytic reviews have reported negative effects of exposure to violence in video games. 

Content matters. much of the research into video game violence has failed to control for other variables such as mental health and family life, which may have impacted the results.

Given that effects on individual users may differ widely, policy discussion should be more focused on “more pressing” issues that influence violence in society such as poverty or mental health.

Rest assured that entertainment will need to master new forms of interactive entertainment — whether in video games, sports betting or the more social and communications-based services that thrive on smartphones — to keep audiences hooked.

There was no such thing as YouTube its their Tube.

U Tube now has a  War Channel created to appeal military enthusiasts around the world; offering viewers hours of programming on the American Civil war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine and all.

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Why are people less imaginative?

Because we all have the internet and other high-information sources that fill in the gaps for us.

Story telling, character-building, authenticity, and originality have all gone out the window, as entertainment has become largely an industry as opposed to a genuine creative outlet.

Game makers have the opportunity – and responsibility – to offer their players an appropriate and powerful means to get close to challenging issues or subject matter.

Games are brilliant at engendering empathy by allowing you to experience the life of other people first hand. As game makers and storytellers we have the ability to take our audiences to places they haven’t been or to feel things they have yet to experience.Soldiers with rifles walking on a leafy hill, with tanks in the background. As the Ukraine war enters its second year, Tufts experts weight alternative endings—and the possibility it won’t be resolved any time soon.

There’s the possibility of vertical escalation—meaning that Russia would use more advanced weapons, including nuclear weapons—on the battlefield. And there is the possibility of horizontal escalation, the war spilling over to other countries.

What if anything can be done?

Here are a few key recommendations, which includes improve regulations and legislation for social media companies, greater responsibility so tech companies are held accountable for inaction, and for young people to be involved in panels that are consulted on tackling online harms and the development of games, new content and online spaces.

Legislation in relation to social media platforms is needed, but it is one aspect in an array of required measures, including education, the need to address social inequalities, the need for transparency by companies, by governments who should be constantly aware of how fake violence on our screens serves real violence in our world.

Why?

Because exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world.

Yes, its true that  for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery , but society as a whole is another question.

An average American youth will witness 200,000 violent acts on television before age

18. 46% of television violence occurs in cartoons.

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The prevalence and impact of violence portrayed in media and entertainment and the near-ubiquitous portrayals of violence in various forms of media must remained a topic of intense scrutiny.

Fear is what, anxiety and depression, wars, domestic violence, relationship breakdowns, child abuse, terrorism, mass shootings, self-harm and all forms of violence towards oneself and others have in common.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IS INTERNATIONAL LAW NOW A JOKE.

18 Thursday Apr 2024

Posted by in International laws,, International solidarity.

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( Twelve minute read)

The present moment finds the world as dangerously divided and on the edge of international violence as any in the last thirty years. Why?

You could blame #Bill Gates for this reason.

He was blinded by the good of connecting us all and our every actions in the world, with the Internet which has introduced an epochal change that is been used both for good and bad.

Since the internet became a thing (in a period of conflict and transformation of international relations) states use to be able to find new ways of discovering points of common interest and signalling willingness to conform to particular norms.

This is no longer possible as everything is connected to some other another thing, or event with an eroding of  International laws.

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The world faces many threats that require collective action for an effective response..

Climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and future pandemics, including those deliberately engineered using cutting-edge technology, may lead the list.

The present moment of crisis has many causes – geopolitical, economic and cultural and the Internet/ AI algorithms running social media and killing programs.

Russia’s armed attack on Ukraine and now the Israel war have prompted many to despair of international law.

What it means as a practical matter is that the formal adoption of new international rules through international agreements faces roadblocks that seem likely to persist for some time.

WHY?

Because suddenly just about everyone has a portal to cyberspace, a wonderful world with an amazing range of images, sounds and writing, further democratized connections and influence around the world through cyber-activity.

These developments are transforming our world. The difference from twenty years ago could not be greater.

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The cyber-revolution, an explosion in connectivity that increasingly allowed people to bypass central authorities to communicate, agitate and organize, unfolded during the first decade of the present century.

What is the value of a legal order that has no effective remedy in store against even the most blatant violations?

Global governance seemed to have overcome the burgeoning nationalism of the 19th century.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court arguably marked the end of history in the field of international law. Surely now we don’t need another war or the current wars, to open our eyes about the insufficiency of the post-1990 international legal order. 

The differentiation concerning the real-life implications of international law are now so profound with wars conducted with AI drones and targeting programmes, we are left to realize that even in cases so clearly in violation of the most fundamental principles of international law, international law hardly seems to contain power.

Due to the lack of centralized enforcement, how international law influences states and other actors in ways that are often implicit rather than explicit, influencing the cognitive, psychological aspects of human nature, rather than the faculty for rational calculus.

Our understanding of legal terms was guided by moral concepts, not anymore.

In the absence of effective formal international law-making, jurists face a choice that will require a lot of work on language and perceptions.

It is sometimes incredibly difficult to find out whether states choose their course of action due to cognitive or motivational biases or out of sheer self-interest.

In the case of international humanitarian law, we are likely to see entrepreneurial rules favoured by states that project military force into conflicts, either international or non-international, rather than those preferred by states that find armed conflicts unfolding on their territory against their will.

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I offer here a stylized and truncated narrative that focuses on two factors:

(1) geopolitical changes related to the use of force in international and non-international disputes, and (2) the achievements of information technology.

This is not the entire story,

The collapse of Soviet Union in December 1991, seemed to put an end to the bipolar regime that had governed international security issues since the Second World War. This opened the door to the possibility of a new world order based on the international rule of law. It became possible to imagine a world where international uses of armed force would rest on international consensus, reflected in the actions of the United Nations Security Council, and thus increasingly rare.

Worldwide, States walked away from the bipolar structure that had dominated international relations for the previous forty years. Many thoughtful people believed that we found ourselves in a new age of collective security and democratic peace with the international rule of law and peaceful resolution of international disputes replacing the threat of armed conflict and the risk of Armageddon.

After 1991, armed conflict did not disappear, but shifted and is still shifting to AI weapons beyond any human control, that will produce atrocities yet to be seen- forever wars. Al-Qaeda and Da’esh embody non-State parties to such conflicts. 

Forever wars, that spawn mass terror attacks resulting coalitions invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. ( the former with the Security Council’s approval and the latter without.) However conquest did not result in triumph, but instead in prolonged insurgencies that in many ways resembled the old wars of national liberation.

Resulting in a right to collective self-defence against non-State organizations operating on the territory of Syria and Russia and Iran introducing forces at the invitation of Syria’s government.

That are neither anti-colonial struggles of national liberation nor civil wars confined to the territory of a State. Rather, they involve armed struggle by non-State actors to bring about a regime change in a particular State or region that extends outside the borders of the contested territory.

As freedom spread from the virtual space to the physical space.

Cyber-tactics could defang authoritarian uses of targeted force by enabling elements of surprise and swarming for popular uprisings that resist State-sponsored suppression of protests.

The cyber-revolution, in the eyes of some, represented the death knell of violent authoritarian regimes and thus provided yet another path to a democratic peace. Such as the 2011 Arab Spring.

Authoritarians increasingly exploited the new technologies to survey and remove their adversaries.

Once an instrument of liberation, cyberspace increasingly became the place where States bolstered their defences against dissidents. The same technologies that gave states greater resources to leverage domestic social control also provided new instruments for prosecuting international conflicts.

These actors also can infiltrate online media so as to engage in disinformation and psychological warfare. The cyber-tools not only greatly multiply the efficacy of these interventions, but complicate attribution of responsibility. These malign capacities exacerbate both traditional international disputes and the prosecution of non-traditional armed conflicts.

Both developments breed instability and leverage threats to peace and prosperity. They also raise issues related to international humanitarian law.

This may mean developing rules with which states will comply while maintaining plausible deniability that their compliance represents a broader commitment to cooperation or any indication of the normative pull of the rule of law.

With the capacity to conduct over-the-horizon operations, typically drone strikes, against persons they believe to be implicated in imminent armed attacks have developed non-trivial standards and rules of evidence to constrain military actors in choosing whom to target.

Before it becomes impossible, international law must be updated to the technology it is supposed to operate in.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. ISRAEL WILL NEVER BE A SECURE NATION.

18 Thursday Apr 2024

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( Two minute read)

Indeed, Israel’s deliberate, industrial-scale murder of the Palestinian people under the pretext of “self-defence” won’t enhance its security or secure its future.

Rather, it will produce greater insecurity and instability, further isolate Israel and undermine its chances for long-term survival in a predominantly hostile region.

Without shedding its colonial regime and embracing normal statehood by excepting the rights of all its people in a one state solution ( not two state) its demise is not in the so distant future.

Israel’s colonial nature presently supported by the USA, dominates its behaviour at each and every turn wasting countless opportunities to end its occupation and live in peace with its neighbours.

It has multiplied the number of illegal Jewish settlements and settlers on stolen Palestinian lands and networked them through special bypass roads and other planning projects, creating a dual system, a superior, dominating one for the Jews and an inferior one for the Palestinians.

In the absence of peace and in the shadow of colonisation, the country has slid further towards fascism, enshrining Jewish supremacy into its laws and extending it to all of historic Palestine.

As they tightened their siege of the Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air prison, and dropped all pretence of ever allowing it to unite with its Palestinian hinterland in a sovereign Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is undermining its own institutions, and any chances of peace based or coexistence between two peoples.

To have any chance of living in peace it must address the root causes of the conflict with the Palestinians, namely their dispossession, occupation and siege.

Even with USA/ UK backing it has no chance of surviving among all the indigenous people of the region, who have coalesced more than ever before.

Israel can no longer use its fanciful theological claims to justify its violent racist practices. God does not sanction the slaughter of innocent children.

Israel has no good options after the war ends. If it continued on the same destructive path the demise of Israel “as we know it” is around the corner regardless of how much Palestinian, Arab and Israeli blood it sheds.

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The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what’s happening between Israel and the Palestinians.

We have to understand: Israelis aren’t going anyplace, and Palestinians aren’t going anyplace.

Discussions of a two-state solution is now cobblers.

A decent number of Israelis and Palestinians have come to conclude that it’s not a solution, that the nature of Israeli behaviour, especially in the West Bank, makes a Palestinian state unviable.

How exactly, or who would drawn the borders, never mind decide how or who rules.

(A substantial line of thought [in Israel] is that it’s more important that Israel be Jewish than democratic.)

There are alternatives to a two-state solution — including a one-state solution, a confederation.

One of the biggest challenges for Israelis is balancing the need for a Jewish state and a democratic state. This could and can be achieved with a written constitution approved by international law. 

“If you have a one-state solution that gives citizenship to all of the natural-born residents of Mandatory Palestine — which includes Gaza and the West Bank — you don’t have a Jewish majority,”

It’s hard to imagine this kinds of possibilities in this moment, but the need for change is clear.

Iranian leaders have been among the sharpest critics of Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. Tehran has made no secret of its praise for those who attack Israelis, including the Hamas-led attack that Israel says killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7.

Iran blames Israel for the April 1 airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus that killed seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two IRGC generals. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being behind the attack.

If Israel was responsible, it would be the latest in a long line of attacks against Iranian targets.

A shadow war between Iran and Israel has grown over the years and with the recent Iran drone and missiles attack you may rest assured that if Israel targets Iranians nuclear sites the USA will be over the moon.

That will trigger not just a major regional war but threaten the very existence of us all.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT COMES TO IRIAN?

15 Monday Apr 2024

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( Ten minute read)

Iran has scarcely been out of the headlines in recent months. But how far back does the history of Iran stretch?

Like me I am sure we know little or nothing of it history.National Flag of Iran | Iran Flag History, Meaning and Pictures

Long before Iran came to be known in the mid-twentieth century as one of the countries of the Middle East, for nearly two and a half millennia it was known to the Western world as Persia.

So here is a starting point for an exploration of the history of modern Iran.

The Islamic Republic has been in a state of influx almost from its start. It has managed to survive in this state of perpetual crisis — and sometimes even benefited from it — because confrontation, or anticipation of confrontation with a nemesis, that is with the United States, played into its hand. It gives the regime the pretention of legitimacy as the core to national resistance against Western hegemony and regime change. The sense of emergency hence contributed to its survival. Moreover, the ruling clergy and its associated groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, although a small minority devoid of the true support of a majority of Iranians, survived in power probably because of a strong sense of group solidarity.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented the first time in the modern history of the Muslim world that a movement dominated by the clergy took control of a state. Historically, this is a very unusual event, not just in the Islamic world, but anywhere. Religion and state were seen as two pillars of stability in Iranian society.

Shi’ism as a belief system, supported and reinforced by the region’s geopolitical complexity, preserved Iran’s socio-cultural identity.

Through the preservation of the language, Iran managed to preserve a collective memory of its past, which is also rather unusual.

Basically, the memory of Islamic conquest became the foundation myth for the sense of Islamic identity that emerged in Egypt, Syria and eventually Iraq. Iran was different. It preserved its memories of pre-Islamic times and grew quite proud of them.

Iran’s oil industry was basically a colonial industry created and developed by the British. A massive amount of the revenue went to the British government while a much smaller percentage went to the Iranian government. But even that share of the revenue was crucial for a nearly bankrupt Iranian state in the post-WWI era. It provided the necessary funds for greater centralization; for enforcing modern reforms; for strengthening the armed forces; and for the creation of an autocratic regime under the Pahlavis that no longer sought the traditional support of the religious establishment.

The Allied occupation of Iran in September 1941 was a rude shock to most Iranians.

Facing the soldiers of the Red Army, the British Indian Army, and soon after American military personnel seemed almost a surreal reversal of two decades of Pahlavi assurances of Iran’s reclaimed sovereignty and the might of the Iran’s Imperial Armed Forces.

The occupation triggered one of the most eventful episodes in Iran’s modern history and revealed persistent themes in the country’s recent past: the struggle for democracy. The gradual return to autocratic practices after 1953 put an undue end to Iran’s perilous experiment with participatory politics. Instead, an era of stability, albeit politically repressive, began to set in, and with the exception of a brief interlude in the early 1960s, it remained essentially unchanged until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The exile of Ayatollah Khomeini and the shah’s success, at least for a while, in silencing the forces of opposition generated a sense of royal self-confidence with an almost prophetic mission. The decade of 1963 to 1973 represented, with all its shortcomings, the best of the shah’s years: an age of economic development, success in foreign policy, and relative popularity at home.

Iran in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed an era of cultural florescence, a period remarkable for artistic creativity, the rise of new talents, and greater international exposure but also greater state sponsorship. Expressions of artistic and intellectual dissent, often transmitted through a language of symbols, emerged in cinema, poetry, and popular music.

The tumultuous events that led to the revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran were a classic example of modern popular revolution.  Out of a broad alliance of Islamic tendencies there emerged a militant clerical leadership, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Over the course of the following decade, Khomeini played a decisive part in defining the Islamic Republic.

Between August 1978 and February 1979, a period of less than seven months, Iran witnessed a revolution that brought down the Pahlavi regime and abolished the institution of monarchy, wiped out the privileges of the Pahlavi elite, and significantly weakened its secularized middle classes. In its stead Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates created the Islamic Republic, which aimed to establish the “Guardianship of the Jurist” (welayat-e faqih) as the only legitimate model of governance.

That Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts put their mark on the Islamic Revolution was more than an accident of history. At least since 1961, and with a greater resolve since 1970, clerical Shi‘ism explored ideological Islam and contemplated juridical authority as an alternative to secular power.

In less than a year after victory of the revolution in February 1979, the new regime managed to consolidate its base, build new institutions, and eliminate its contenders for power.

It conducted a referendum on the change of regime to an Islamic republic, ratified a new constitution, elected a parliament, elected a president to office, and established revolutionary courts, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts. All the while the newly established republic was engaged in major domestic and international crises that threatened its very existence.

A crisis of great magnitude was in progress, one that shook Iran’s relations with the outside world and initiated an adversarial encounter with the United States that shaped their relationship for decades to come.

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1979 November – Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage inside the US embassy in Tehran. They demand the extradition of the Shah, in the US at the time for medical treatment, to face trial in Iran.

The hostage crisis of November 1979 started an international tremor that for the following fourteen months would enrage the United States, preoccupy world media, appal public opinion worldwide, and irreparably damage the image of the Islamic Republic.

1980 22 September – Start of Iran-Iraq war, which lasts for eight years.

1981 January – The American hostages are released, ending 444 days in captivity.

1989 November – The US releases 567 million dollars of frozen Iranian assets.

The magnitude of this paradigmatic shift, and the way a conservative Shi‘i establishment transformed into a radical force of dissent, becomes all the more striking when we set the Islamic Revolution in the broader political and cultural contexts of the past five centuries.

2002 January – US President George Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil”, warning of the proliferation of long-range missiles being developed in these countries.

2002 September – Russian technicians begin construction of Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr despite strong objections from US.

2003 December – 40,000 people are killed in an earthquake in south-east Iran. The city of Bam is devastated

.2007 October – US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran, the toughest since it first imposed sanctions almost 30 years ago.

2009 September – Iran admits that it is building a uranium enrichment plant near Qom, but insists it is for peaceful purposes.

The country test-fires a series of medium- and longer-range missiles that put Israel and US bases in the Gulf within potential striking range.

2015 July – After years of negotiations, world powers reach deal with Iran on limiting Iranian nuclear activity in return for lifting of international economic sanctions. The deal gives UN nuclear inspectors extensive but not automatic access to Iranian sites.

2018 May-June – President Trump announces the US withdrawal from the 2015 international deal on Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran in turn warns that it will begin increasing its uranium enrichment capacity if the deal collapses as a result of the US move.

2020 January – Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, responsible for Iran’s military support for the Syrian government, killed in a US air strike at Baghdad Airport, prompting Iranian threats of retaliation.

2024 April  Iran fires hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation of Israel attack on its Embassy in Syria.

If the current regime caves under another popular upheaval, the outcome may not be promising at all.

The recent Middle East popular movements of political reform, such as the Arab Spring, have by and large failed. Likewise, any attempt toward a regime change through military option or covert operation almost definitely helps strengthen the regime’s popular base. On the other hand, if it is left to its own devices, will Iran become another China? Whether it moves away from a hostile ideological position to a more pragmatic regime with capitalist economy and friendlier posture toward the outside world is a matter of speculation. The recent U.S. departure from the Five Plus One nuclear deal with Iran, and the impending re-imposition of sanctions, does not offer a bright prelude for success of the latter option.

You only have to look at Israeli and the Iranian recent UN Security Council presentations after Iran’s direct attack to see that the Middle East is now a tinder box that no amount of Verbal is going to solve.

Iran’s ambassador repeated Tehran’s claim that it was responding in “self-defence” after the April 1 explosion at its Damascus consulate in Syria, for which Iran blamed Israel.

Israel will exact a price from Iran in response to Saturday’s attack when the time is right.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY ASK’S. Have you ever asked yourself: What do I need in life to survive?

15 Monday Apr 2024

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2024 the year of disconnection

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( Fifteen minute read)

Looking at contemporary politics, it’s easy to feel a sense of despair.

All across the world, we see a resurgence of wars, racist demagogues, now rendered respectable by the embrace of the “mainstream” political right and much of the commentariat.

Your beliefs, ideas, and values make up your ideological framework. This framework is developed over a lifetime of socialization.

Dominant ideologies are powerful forces in society. They are how dominant groups preserve their power. They do this by promoting ideas to advance their interests and maintain social order. Such ideologies shape dominant discourses that legitimize the current organization of society. These ideas are embedded in the practices of social institutions. The majority of people accept these conditions even though it is not in their interest to do so. This is referred to as hegemony, or rule by consent.

Ideology touches every aspect of life and shows up in our words, actions, and practices…. Because ideology structures our thoughts and interpretations of reality, it typically operates often beneath our conscious awareness … it shapes what seems “natural,” and it makes what we think and do “right.”

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture.

You may have noticed that many of us support ideologies that do not best serve our interests. Why is that?  A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

The simple answer is that powerful groups have ways to encourage us to believe ideologies that protect their interests. This process of getting people to accept the interests and values of ruling groups without force is called hegemony. Hegemony can also be defined as rule by consent.

Dominant ideologies, however, are not more influential because they contain better ideas. Instead, they represent the extent to which powerful groups in any society are able to shape our ideas, values, and beliefs. Dominant ideologies are often linked together. Through hegemony, ruling groups try to ensure that we will accept their views and ideologies without question.

The transformative ideologies are the most difficult to pinpoint.

However, some people resist submitting to the desires of the ruling group.

To address social problems, we must be able to recognize dominant and counter ideologies. We must be aware of how they impact the economic, social, political, and environmental ideas and values in our society.

We need to foster international cooperation and solidarity to address environmental challenges collectively, transcending borders and divisions to stop coming wars.

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Physiological needs are the requirements of all biological creatures.

Unfortunately our system of Capitalism has turned all of these needs into products, resulting in government’s using what should be considered essentials into revenue generating sources, by applying service charges or taxies. Capitalism has fuelled the industrial, technological and green revolutions, reshaped the natural world and transformed the role of the state in relation to society.

In recent years, capitalism’s shortcomings have become ever-more apparent. Prioritising short-term profits for individuals has sometimes meant that the long-term well-being of society and the environment has lost out – especially as the world has faced the Covid-19 pandemic and Climate change.

It has lost its ability to be fair.

57% of people worldwide say that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world”.

The reality is that in daily life, most of us are pursuing all of these basic human needs simultaneously to varying degrees.

Without air, water, and food, sleep homeostasis and sex all biological organisms perish.

So instead of focusing on which need you’re attempting to meet, government’s have allowed and are still condoning  life to be exploited for profit resulting in – Inequality, Climate change and Coming wars. 

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In order to live you need fresh air. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

In order to live you need fresh water.  That’s pretty self-explanatory. (You can only survive without water for 3 days.)

In order to live you need food. That’s pretty self-explanatory. (Most of us, we need food, daily else we feel less than fulfilled.)

In order to live you need to build a good shelter. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

In order to live you need a living environment where security and safety are met. That’s pretty self-explanatory. (There is a primal innate fear of others and the need to seek security that is hardwired into the human brain. You don’t have to look around very long to notice how much of human behaviour is driven by the desire to feel secure.)

These unmet basic human needs fuel our unconscious behaviour.

We all share the same needs.

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Healthy identity is based on the fulfilment of these needs … These needs are felt and remembered cellularly throughout our lives, though we may not always be intellectually aware of them.

They were originally experienced in a survival context of dependency. We may still feel, as adults, that our very survival is based on finding someone to fulfil our basic needs.

In adulthood the needs can be fulfilled only flexibly or partially, since we are interdependent and our needs are no longer connected to survival.

Research suggests that over 95% of our behaviour is unconscious.

In today’s society, we also seek greater levels of financial security which goes hand in hand with the need for job security. (Tools like insurance have also been created in an attempt to offer more stable financial security in case of an unforeseen event.)

If you don’t have enough money to pay for rent (or your mortgage and taxes), clothes (for protection, not fashion), and transportation (to get food and make money), your safety needs aren’t being met.

The result is that individuals necessarily act selfishly when basic human needs drive them.

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In some parts of the world, many individuals can’t meet their physiological needs.

It’s estimated that over a billion people don’t have sufficient food to eat, basic nutrition, or clean water to drink. Shelter from the elements, clothes to cover our bodies, and some semblance of the familiar.

Belonging is also a psychological need.

(Belonging is a feeling of connection with and approval from others. It starts with our immediate family, then bridges out to friends, religious groups, and other social groups (like sports teams or clubs). This need to belong later extends into professional relationships and a significant other. This unmet need to belong drives us to identify with social groups, religious institutions, and other special-interest groups in adulthood. It also fuels a lot of people’s impulse to invest time in social media.)

Our image-driven culture pushes us to be more concerned with what other people think than with how we feel about ourselves. We seek approval from others instead of self-acceptance.

————

Physiological needs can also remain unmet even in individuals who aren’t in an environment of lack.

How do you know if you have unmet basic human needs?

To accomplish this, we must first cultivate self-awareness and self-leadership, become honest with ourselves, and learn to abide in our centre. These practices allow us to reflect on our lives and better understand ourselves. Self-actualization appears to be rare in our societies today and has become much more complex and even distorted at times.

For example, financial security is one domain that is constantly emphasized in today’s society and it seems that many spend their entire lives engaged in its pursuit, finding out, often too late, that they will never truly achieve any semblance of it.

If you don’t agree, take a closer look at the lives of some of the wealthiest people on the planet or those who are rich and famous. Their lives are filled with tragedy. Wealth doesn’t solve the problems we think.

Understanding the fundamental impermanence of things can be very freeing since it reflects a very real and dominant factor in life, one that we often struggle to accept.  If you don’t agree, just ask impermanence’s primary representative, death. It will knock on everyone’s door one day or another, most often unannounced.  

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What would you do if you only had one month to live? One week. one day?

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs.  Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Consider the overall direction of your life.

Because what the world needs are people who have come alive to the rip off capitalism.

Why because it is failed and is still failing, even on its own terms. While experience varied between countries, generally this involved the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy being in public ownership – the national utilities of water, gas and electricity, along with the crucial productive infrastructure of transport and telecommunications, with the remainder of the economy being regulated to various degrees.

Government spending was used to maintain full employment, along with the implementation of industrial policies, regional policies, and active labour market policies. These interventionist measures generally went beyond just maintaining economic growth and full employment, to welfare state delivery.

Any governments pursuing these sorts of progressive agendas would be likely to wish to co-operate and collaborate internationally – on tackling the climate crisis, the industrial-scale global tax avoidance and evasion, and the root causes of international financial crises which lie in the deregulation of speculative finance and the financial sector generally.

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To get any sense of where to go, we need a much more thorough understanding of the forces that underlie this symbiosis of economic power and political power and the distortions of public discourse that it induces.Jay Directo/Getty Images If the gap grows between rich and poor, then instability can follow (Credit: Jay Directo/Getty Images)

“The voters don’t choose the politicians, the politicians choose the voters”

Ultimately, it is worth remembering that citizens in a capitalist, liberal democracy are not powerless.

We live in an oligarchy, not in a democracy, A thing cannot be changed if the plan is for something that the situation is not. Oligarchy cannot be stopped by treating it as though it were a democracy.

As a society we continue to make slow progress in ameliorating this historical deficit.

Of critical importance also is the role of the individual in promoting his or her own equality. No amount of government intervention will confer equality if individuals fail to take advantage of the opportunities before them.

The system must be fixed for problems to be addressed.

So I say first things first, let’s ensure that we build a system where there is equal opportunity for all so that individuals can succeed or fail on their own merit. Will such a system guarantee full equality?

I have my doubts but I’m convinced it will promote greater equality in our imperfect society.

Young politicians enter the great building of power with sincere hearts, but leave with the stench of the corrupt swamp having their noble intentions suffocated and extinguished.

Every nation needs to wake up from their own illusions of their own importance in the world and start looking after its people.

———–

To make sure that the government gets the message that the people all of the people should be represented not just the few.

Get money out of politics ENTIRELY and then maybe there’s hope.

Now with the technology that exist,  I think a ‘perpetual referendum’ democratic socialism, may be a solution:

We need to assert the importance of turning the social surplus toward ending hunger and illiteracy and toward addressing fundamental problems of social and economic life — such as the catastrophe of the climate and of endemic joblessness.Banksy in Boston: Portrait from the F̶O̶L̶L̶O̶W̶ ̶Y̶O̶U̶R̶ ̶D̶R̶E̶A̶M̶S̶ CANCELLED piece by Chris Devers | Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

No point running a government if you don’t have an organized mass force to drive the social policy from the hall of government to the home of the poorest worker.

Government’s won’t put such perpetual referendum in place but we the people with technology can. 

Your vote (on one thing or many things, doesn’t matter) is kept online at all times and can be polled by the computer at any time. And not only can be but must be. And you can change your vote (or votes) at any time.

The people must take back what people with money have stolen from them over the decades, i.e. our right for true democratic representation where elected politicians carry out the will of the people not the will of the wealthy few who have corrupted it.

The abolition of intellectual property and the renationalisation of monopoly infrastructure could reverse the tendency towards private monopoly that could contributed greatly to stopping the rising inequality of the early 21st century. The massive financial sector of the early 21st century, is a huge source of inequality.

We might be blind to what capitalism could look like in another two centuries. However, that does not mean we should not ask how it might evolve into something better in the nearer term.

The future of capitalism and our planet depend on it.

Until politicians work for every person these are the choices. 

Capitalism thrives on the mantra of individualism and free enterprise. In this economic system, private entities, such as individuals or businesses, own the means of production. But, it’s essential to note that capitalism is not just about profit. It’s also about personal freedom, economic resilience, and societal prosperity. It champions the belief that everyone has the right to economic freedom. This belief is driven by the potential for profit.

Communism is a quintessential manifestation of egalitarian ideals. It seeks to pull down the socio-economic partitions between the affluent and the impoverished. Its driving force is the establishment of equality and fairness. The societal benefits are not skewed in favour of a privileged few. Instead, they are spread across all its members. Yet, the intricate dynamics of human nature and socio-political realities often pose significant challenges to implementing communism. It’s a philosophy that seeks to remould society’s foundation. It presents a different perspective on the socio-economic structures that govern our world. Its cardinal principle is collective ownership and equality. 

Socialism amalgamates elements from both capitalism and communism. It is unlike the laissez-faire economics of capitalism. However, it is not as radical as communism in its distribution mechanism. It encourages fair wealth distribution. But, it does not eschew private property. socialism emerges with a balanced approach. Yet, it does not do so at the cost of personal freedoms, as in capitalism. The means of production are often state or worker-controlled. There is a conscious effort to check capitalist-style monopolies and wealth concentration.

Most nations operate in mixed economies. They cherry-pick elements from different ideologies.

They create a model that best serves their unique needs. The impact of these ideologies on today’s world is profound and multifaceted. It colours the lenses through which we view societal structures, economic models, and the state’s role in our lives.

As we go about our daily activities, we are engaged in a web of relationships that connect us to the larger world. We rely on ideas and values to form opinions, make assumptions, and arrive at conclusions. However, many of us aren’t aware of where these notions come from or how they influence our thinking. Most of us assume that our points of view are accurate and truthful. We think that they are just common sense. This may lead us to dismiss, discredit, or misinterpret perspectives that differ from our own.

This means that we rarely evaluate our perspectives in relation to alternative points of view.

A future where our planet’s people can succeed emphasizes sustainability, collective action, and innovation. What if we demanded that profit be removed from the policy of government’s. 

Many types of government expenditure constitute investment: purchases of transport and energy infrastructure, school and hospital buildings, IT systems, defence systems, and intangible assets. Government investment often includes purchases needed to implement long-term policies, such as investment in green energy infrastructure to support action on climate change. 

Another words invest public funds, allowing a fair profit, keep sufficient funds for maintains, and then nationalize, so everyone benefits.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: SHOULD WE BE BOTHERED WITH TIME ?

12 Friday Apr 2024

Posted by in #whatif.com, Time, Time., WHY IS TIME SO CONTROVERSIAL?

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( Twelve minute read)

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’

Heraclitus.

At first glance, this quote may seem perplexing, but it carries profound meaning and significance. Essentially, Heraclitus is asserting that both the river and the person are in a perpetual state of change, making it impossible for any encounter to be exactly repeated.

This idea challenges our perception of constancy and emphasizes the dynamic nature of life. The straightforward interpretation of this quote suggests that every moment is unique and cannot be replicated.

It serves as a reminder to appreciate the present moment, as it will never be replicated exactly the same way again. It teaches us to embrace change, appreciate the uniqueness of each moment, and acknowledge the continuous evolution of ourselves and the world.

So does time exist or not.

It’s is imperative in our understanding of the universe and our place in it, is weird. It is an illusion. The experience of time is actively created by our minds. The way we experience time in our minds is never going to match up with the latest discoveries in physics.

Nothing exists in any permanent or fixed sense. Life is a dance between our lived experience of which time is a fulcrum and the reality of existence that we are essentially empty of anything solid or permanent.

Since time immemorial (with no start or finish)  There is no time like now.

Your time is up.

Just what that means no one knows.

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Writing this post would in itself be a waste of my time if the cosmos was that simple.

I believe we have only just scratched the surface of the universal laws of physics; the universe is anything but simple, or is it so simple that our brains cannot grape hole of it’s existence.

There may in fact be something to this crazy notion that the nature of the universe could be turned on its head should the fundamental quantity of time be transformed into another dimension of space.

If you travelled at near light speed for ten earth years and returned to earth very soon for you ,you would need older people and relate to them in a present. Would it follow that time does not exist?

Consider the following scenario:

  • I get in a spaceship, and travel really close to the speed of light for a while, and then come back.
  • A lot of time has passed on the Earth, but since I was traveling so fast, I only experienced a few years passing.
  • So, my friends on Earth are dead, whereas I’m only a few years older.

But what I’m having trouble wrapping my head around, is why is it them that’s dead, and not me?

After all, given what I understand about relativity, it’s just as fair to say that my spaceship stayed still, and it was actually the Earth that travelled really fast and then came back to my ship.

In that scenario though, the Earth being the fast-moving ship, and my ship being the stationary body, wouldn’t it be that I am dead, and everyone on the Earth is just a few years older?

But the earth and the space travellers aren’t symmetric — an easy way to see this is that one of them spent a lot of energy (the rocket fuel, say) to make this situation happen, and one of them didn’t.

To add on to this, lets say the man on Earth got on his own second spaceship and eventually caught up close to the first spaceship and is approaching the same speed as the first spaceship. Relative to the second spaceship, would the increased energy of the first spaceship gradually lower down to it’s energy at rest up until they become the exact speed?

If you trawled through Space time where would you end up?  In a web of invisibility,  an eternity of  mush.

How can this be ?.

The simple answer is that because you are the traveller and therefore have to slow down, stop, accelerate in the opposite direction and come back again.

So this would mean that energy increases as speed increases.

Since time immemorial has no start or speed, it does not exist, either as space time or any other time you wish to define.

Because it appears that the theory of relativity and Quantum can not live together. The two theories are fundamentally incompatible with each other.

This has resulted in two leading “quantized” theories of general relativity— string theory and loop quantum gravity—and now a new theory called the “postquantum theory of classical gravity, that attempt to bridge the gap between these two worlds.

This theory challenges the idea that Einstein’s general theory of relativity needs to be “quantized” at all, and posits that the discrepancy between quantum mechanics and general relatively can instead be explained by unpredictable “wobbles” in spacetime.

Jonathan Oppenheim posits that spacetime isn’t quantum at all, but classical. The only differences, he claims, is that that spacetime “wobbles” randomly, rather than being uniform.“

So it’s important to understand how this contradiction is resolved.

  • The exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree these theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Although quantum mechanics and general relatively help explain the universe—at both small and cosmic scales. If spacetime doesn’t have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally.

So we know we need a new physical theory to explain the universe, and that this theory might not feature time. Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct.

FOR ME THERE IS NO SUCH THING A SPACE TIME THAT CURVES SPACE TIME, IT DOES NOT EXIST WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF GRAVITY – GRAVATIOLAL PULL IS A FORCE.  

The different gravitational pulls would force a quantum interaction that behaved as classical relativism would—the particle in less gravity would move with less constraint than the one in stronger gravity.

A person walking beneath a large clock swinging from a rope.

Does time exist?  No its man made.

Our entire lives are built around time.

Managing in a world without time seems positively disastrous.

We plan for the future, in light of what we know about the past.

We hold people morally accountable for their past actions, with an eye to reprimanding them later on.

We believe ourselves to be agents (entities that can take action) in part because we can plan to act in a way that will bring about changes in the future. But what’s the point of acting to bring about a change in the future when, in a very real sense, there is no future to act for? What’s the point of punishing someone for a past action, when there is no past and so, apparently, no such action?

We have no idea how time might be “made out of” something more fundamental than motion – distance

or duration for example ( which all need time unlike existence)

Our naïve perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Physics without time’.

The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the opposite order when viewed by another.

Time does not exist at any level in nature there is only “now.”

Existence is at anytime, here to day, gone to morrow.

Time and space themselves really only manifest out of their interactions and the web of causality between them. We cannot know the positions and speeds of all the particles in the Universe. If we could, there would be no entropy, and no unravelling of time.

The discovery that time does not exist would bring, not the entire world to a grinding halt but entire universe.

Like all prisoners doing time the whole world would suck.

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Knowledge will always be limited by the limit of the knowledge at any particular time no matter how they may take that knowledge and project theories about our world, the universe and existence itself.

Because all knowledge would exist in that moment is time therefore gravity.

If time does exist then it is in that place in-between those moments of change – causation gravity.

After all time is change and change happens with each moment of time.

Don’t worry: even if time doesn’t exist, our lives will go on as usual.

If we are questioning the reality of time than are we also not questioning the reality of astrophysics and with it the age of the universe along with the age of our solar systems and planet and all that goes with that right up to evolution and with it no doubt homo-sapiens and our existence on this planet and in this universe.

If you were to zoom in to space-time, you would see that time doesn’t advance into the future continuously but in quick little tick-tick-ticks of a discrete clock.

If we accept the premise that “time” is simply a metric we use to measure changes in mass and energy relative to space, it’s hardly a revelation. Stuff keeps moving around and thermodynamics keeps working as it ought.

Whether neurophysiology has a quantum level function from which consciousness emerges,

Time to make a cup of tea.

I feel there’s a slippery slope going on here.

If it’s possible to determine the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years there’s obviously a ‘before’ and ‘after’. This implies ‘time’ Mass and momentum require the concept of spacetime as they are aligned to those dimensions. There is no such thing as perfect stillness so there has to be time.

Energy is the source of gravity, not mass.

Time (and space) emerge, as does mass and momentum as light and vacuum energy had an inner/outer product event which either destroys matter to create light (and vacuum energy) or it removes light (and vacuum energy) to make matter and antimatter pairs.

And this if all matter must be made equally with antimatter (in parallel universes) something “imaginary” must be keeping them apart. Without time (and space) there is no duality, no separation of real and imaginary, no existence at all.

Big bang and black hole singularities are just curvatures we can’t see beyond, they are not the beginning or end of anything, Technically we are in a black hole. Time is only relevant to the person measuring it.

How can we detect something which by definition is not temporally connected to us and only interacts with our universe through gravity or curvature of light and vacuum energy.

Perhaps is rotation is what gives us the “flow of time” turbulence caused by the rotation and resistance.

So for matter and spacetime we can see, there is no before the big bang, but for the energy that made it (which is timeless) it definitely was.

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The Amondawa tribe in the Amazon, for example, has no word for “time”

Much of Aboriginal philosophy resonates. Much of it doesn’t.

Same with Siddhartha Guatama’s philosophy.

This is precisely why time is such a difficult concept to pin down. As a result, memories are directed only toward the past.  Time has no direction.New Scientist Default Image

In the world of atoms, the laws of quantum mechanics are detached from time: they work either forwards or backwards, clockwise or counter-clockwise; they have no preferred direction.

In as much as humans cannot transcend time. We are travelling in time at 300 million meters per second. Light travels at 3 x 108 m/s but we’re not light, apparently. The speed of light joins space and time

So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.

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The separation of present, past and future are not clumsy constructs.

What is more to the point is what is “exist”?

To appreciate all time at once is another matter. Any associated reality would be one that transcends time. The ‘all time at once’ is the apparent oxymoron to be unravelled.

Just like atoms, we can’t see time, but only look at them.

If time might not exist, we would still have causality, the notion that one thing causes another thing to come after it.

It is doubtful that we can ever perceive a time-less cosmos.

The differing gravitational force on the moon, and potentially other factors, change how time unfolds relative to how it is perceived on Earth. The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon and the moon is only  238,855 miles (384,400 km) away.

Finally:  Its time to rap this post up.   Time is simplicity.  Its either dark matter or gravity. Time will tell.

After all, the fact is that the existence of time cannot be falsified, or its non-existence proven.

Once we understand the quantum universe better we may be able to dispense with the concept of time as an archaic and misleading concept. Virtual time will will have no boundaries dissolving as we past in time.

Exploring the possibility is what science is all about.

In all probability we will continue to use our clocks to measure out time just as we continue to use the terms sunrise and sunset even though we know that is not what in fact happens. It will all make sense in time, as our memories are set in authentic time.

Ironically an ancient Chinese philosophy encompassed the notion of the universe including both all of space and all of time.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT: OUR CURRENT THEORIES ON THE BIG BANG. THE COMPLEXITY OF WHICH IS YET TO BE ANSWERED.

05 Friday Apr 2024

Posted by in 2024 the year of disconnection

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( Twenty minute read)

In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Even earlier, this thinking goes, at some point our entire universe — all the stars, all the galaxies, all the everything — was the size of a peach and had a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees. For decades this explanation, the amazingly fantastical story, holds up of the creation of the Universe and to all current observations.

The problem is that the physics that we use to understand the early universe (a wonderfully complicated mishmash of general relativity and high-energy particle physics) can take us only so far before breaking down.

Taken at face value,

This tells us that at one point, the universe was crammed into an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. This is obviously absurd, and what it really tells us is that we need new physics to solve this problem — our current toolkit just isn’t good enough. We need some new physics, something that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies.

What we know as the Big Bang was sparked by something else happening before it — the Big Bang was not a beginning, but one part of a larger process. In other words, the complicated (and, admittedly, poorly understood) physics of this critical epoch may indeed allow for a radically revised view of our time and place in the cosmos.

—————–

I am neither a Scientist or a Quantum professor so what follows is what I have learned while researching this post. It is for some Einstein out there to answer the questions.

It is quite obvious that the Universe has not existed forever. It was born.  Out of time.  An entity cannot appear out of nothing and time has no entity while space and light do, even if they are expanding or traveling. A God as an entity is an other matter.

A universe popping into existence out of nothing is so bonkers. A detonation occurs in one place and shrapnel flies into the void.

In the Big Bang, there was no centre and no pre-existing void, so it didn’t happen at any ‘location’. Space itself popped into existence and began expanding everywhere at once, before time was invented.

But what is time? Does it exist? is the past present and the future all one and the same.?

——————-

Time is familiar to everyone, yet it’s hard to define and understand.

Science, philosophy, religion, and the arts have different definitions of time, but the system of measuring it is relatively consistent. It is not something we can see, touch, or taste, but we can measure its passage. But if a system is unchanging, it is not timeless.

The question of why time is irreversible is one of the biggest unresolved questions in science.

As far as the universe is concerned, time had a beginning. The starting point was 13.799 billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred.

If the universe is considered to be an isolated system, its entropy (degree of disorder) can never decrease. In other words, the universe cannot return to exactly the same state in which it was at an earlier point.

Time cannot move backward.

The “grandfather paradox” is a classic example. According to the paradox, if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your mother or father was born, you could prevent your own birth.

Many physicists believe time travel to the past is impossible, but there are solutions to a temporal paradox, such as traveling between parallel universes or branch points.

Will time end?

The answer to this question is unknown. Time does not actually exist. “Time is just an illusion.” Is this really true? Is time just a figment of our imagination?

It makes no appearance in physical science except…” What does that mean?

Indeed, this question borders the realm of metaphysics and ontology (the philosophy of existence) as much as it does on the strictly empirical questions about time that physics is well-equipped to address.

Time is all over the place in physics.

Is it a ‘quantum’ thing?

Quantum things are fundamentally unpredictable, appearing randomly, all over the inflationary vacuum, parts of it ‘decayed’ into ordinary, everyday vacuum. Think of tiny bubbles forming in a vast ocean.

In each bubble, the inflationary vacuum disappeared, but its enormous energy had to go somewhere.

It went into creating matter and heating it. It went into creating a Big Bang. Our Big Bang Universe is merely one such bubble among a possible infinity of other Big Bang universes in the ever-expanding inflationary vacuum!

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The twin pillars of modern physics are Einstein’s General Relativity and Quantum theory.

The laws of quantum theory permit this to pop into existence out of nothing.

The former reigns supreme in the large-scale Universe, while the latter orchestrates the small-scale world of atoms and their constituents. They have resisted a merger, which is a problem because, in the Big Bang, the Universe was small.

It is essential to unite Einstein’s theory with quantum theory.

  • And there’s another phenomenon called quantum superposition. This principle of quantum mechanics suggests that particles can exist in two separate locations at once. This really hinges on what is meant by “to be in two positions”.
  • According to standard QM, when a particle is observed to be in a particular place, it is there and nowhere else. Before the observation, however, the particle’s position may not be definite, i.e., it’s not at a particular place at all.

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There isn’t any wave particle duality because an electron isn’t a particle and it isn’t a wave. Instead it’s an excitation in a quantum field. The electron field can interact in ways that look like a particle and it can interact in ways that look like a wave, but that doesn’t mean it is a particle or is a wave.

The fundamental basis of QM is assuming that energy comes in discrete quantities rather than a continuum. There’s no obvious, intuitive reason for this, necessarily… but the results that come out of QM are spectacular- in that they are extremely well supported by experiments.

“Why is energy discrete rather than continuous?”

Physics is a parallel world of tricky mathematical models, fine tuned in order to reproduce the behaviour of reality, but it is not the reality itself.  It may sound obvious, but for many people it isn’t so.

Nobody really knows what an electron is completely.

What an electron is and what an electron can behave are different concepts to be clarified.

It’s my opinion! By the way particle is point, but wave is a function to describe all the possible locations of the particle. Electron particle cannot appear at two different points but you can find it through your interaction experiment setup.

Particles can be in two (or more) places at the same time.

This is not yet a proof that quantum mechanics hold for large objects.

For example, there is not yet a quantum mechanical theory of gravity.

In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed more than 10,000 galaxies and led astronomers to estimate there must be 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and 50 billion trillion stars.

Where did it all come from?

The religious explanation is that a supernatural causal agent call God brought all matter, energy, space and time into existence? God who was speaking spoke from outside of time.

If the universe has a beginning, that means there’s got to be some kind of beginner; It’s a beginner beyond space and time, and that looks too much like the God of the Bible.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” accurately describe what science has discovered?

Why is that proof that God created everything, first of all that God exists and that then he actually created all of this?

The Big Bang model is the idea that the universe is traceable back to a beginning.

Not just a beginning of matter and energy, but a beginning of matter, energy, space and time. And how the universe continuously expands from that beginning, and expands at the just right rate to make life possible and even advanced life possible at this moment in the universe.

This flash called the Big Bang is generated by the sudden annihilation of all anti-matter in the universe.

A delicate balance of a billion and one particles to every billion anti-particles guarantees the existence of matter in the later universe. And it also guarantees the possibility of life.

From the creation event, protons, neutrons, anti-protons, anti-neutrons decompose into even more fundamental particles called quarks.

But the universe is too hot and too dense even for quarks to exist and too compressed for light to be possible.

After the creation event the universe was too hot for atoms to exist. Electrons could not orbit around nuclei. Because the universe was nothing but charged particles, an amorphous glow is all that appears. The universe would be so hot that protons and neutrons can’t stick together. All atomic nuclei fall apart.

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The universe therefore must have a beginning and, hence, a beginner beyond space and time; there must be an actual beginning of time; That means no matter what you speculate about the universe, as long as it expands on average you are stuck with this beginner beyond matter, energy, space and time.

—————

We’ve got two easy proofs that any lay person can appreciate that the universe indeed must have this singular beginning of matter, energy, space and time.

So what are we to make of all the observations that the entire universe appears to have been meticulously designed for humans?

And astronomer George Greenstein in his book, The Symbiotic Universe, expressed these thoughts:

“As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”

Stephen Hawking concedes, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”

The probability of all these known parameters randomly coming together would be one chance in 10215, a probably so incredibly tiny that statistically speaking, it’s impossible. And this probability is becoming even more remote with every new scientific discovery.

Such a high degree of design demonstrates that this entity of a god must be a personal being with an amazing creativity, wisdom, power, care and love to a degree far beyond human capabilities. He has fine tuned the Milky Way galaxy, the solar system, and planet earth so that spiritual life can be fused with physical life in this one small place for one brief span on our time line.

Millions of galaxy clusters fill the universe, each containing thousands of galaxies, adding up to ten billion trillion stars. That’s ten with 21 zeros after it.

We needed all of those stars for some reasons, alright?

This enormity is essential to life’s existence. If the number of stars in the observable universe were any greater or any fewer, life would be impossible. If there were fewer stars in the observable cosmos, nuclear fusion would be so inefficient that the only elements to form would be hydrogen and helium. With more stars in the universe, all the elements would be heavier than iron. No carbon, no nitrogen, no oxygen.

Only in a cosmos with a finely-tuned mass of stars can the life-essential elements be produced.

So it turns out, the vast reaches of the cosmos are not a big waste of space, energy, matter and time.

If energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does it come from?

Many scientists believe that the total energy of the universe is zero. Hence, no energy needed to be “created” when the universe came into existence.

As Stephen Hawking explained, when you pull two objects apart, you need to expend energy to overcome the gravity that pulls them together. As it takes positive energy to separate them, gravity must be negative energy. If that theory is correct, then there was never any need to create energy or matter – they cancel each other out. That implies that the big bang could have started as a simple statistical fluctuation.

Additionally, many galaxies appear to lack sufficient mass to be held together by gravity and should have been torn apart long ago.

So, what is causing these unknown phenomena? Dark matter, which makes up 85% of total matter in the universe, is a hypothetical type of matter that responsible for the way galaxies are organized.

Our universe is therefore the result of a quantum fluctuation. Particles routinely pop into and out of existence.

Take the sun as an example.

Its nuclear fusion reactions turn matter (think of it as concentrated energy) into visible sunlight and other forms of energy. The sunlight hits a green leaf on Earth and the solar energy is now transferred into a chemical energy store as oxygen is separated from carbon dioxide and water, leaving carbohydrate in the leaf.

We eat the leaf and breathe in the oxygen.

The respiration reaction in our muscle cells allows the energy to be used to move our arm as we hammer in a nail. The arm, nail, hammer and the air absorb the sound, get hot and radiate infrared heat to outer space.

So the energy concentrated in the original hydrogen atoms in the sun is now scattered into the universe. Low-grade and almost useless, but still the same amount we started with.

Finally my conclusion’s.Space-time: Long exposure star trail image taken at Hehuan Mountain, Taiwan.

For some thing to come into existence from nothing is impossible even a black hole has to start with some thing and disappear into some thing. What that is Space time  In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. From Wikipedia.

According to the best of current physical theories, space-time explains the unusual relativistic effects that arise from traveling near the speed of light as well as the motion of massive objects in the universe.

So its some thing that travel’s faster than the speed of light depended on its state of motion – warped spacetime!

Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter.

Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

Weight arises due to the warping of time, rather than space. What this means in practice is that gravity on earth is “equivalent” to acceleration mostly in the sense that clocks on the surface run more slowly than clocks in outer space.

If one goes beyond classical physics and into modern quantum field theory, then questions of absolute versus relational spacetime are rendered anachronistic by the fact that even “empty space” is populated by matter in the form of virtual particles, zero-point fields and more.schwinger effect

You can’t get something for nothing. In the quantum realm, something really can emerge from nothing.

As long as you have empty space — the ultimate in physical nothingness — simply manipulating it in the right way will inevitably cause something to emerge. Take a meson and try to rip the quark away from the antiquark, and a new set of particle-antiparticle pairs will get pulled out of the empty space between them an electromagnetic fields where many properties of all physical systems are conserved: where things cannot be created or destroyed. In theory, a strong enough electromagnetic field can rip particles and antiparticles out of the vacuum itself, even without any initial particles or antiparticles at all.

In early 2022, strong enough electric fields were created in a simple laboratory setup leveraging the unique properties of graphene, enabling the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. The prediction that this should be possible is 70 years old: dating back to one of the founders of quantum field theory.

In the Universe we inhabit, it’s truly impossible to create “nothing” in any sort of satisfactory way. Everything that exists, down at a fundamental level, can be decomposed into individual entities — quanta — that cannot be broken down further. If you take all of them away, however, the “empty space” that remains isn’t quite empty in many physical senses the quantum fields remain. Just as we cannot take the laws of physics away from the Universe, we cannot take the quantum fields that permeate the Universe away from it. No matter how far away we move any sources of matter, there are two long-range forces whose effects will still remain: electromagnetism and gravitation. Even if you create a perfect vacuum, devoid of all particles and antiparticles of all types, where the electric and magnetic fields are zero, there’s clearly something that’s present in this region of what a physicist might call, from a physical perspective, “maximum nothingness.”

Space cannot be “entirely emptied”  As to where is came from. Clearly, we exist, as do the stars and galaxies we see, so something must have created more matter than antimatter, making the Universe we know possible. It seems like an impossibility. On one hand, there is no known way, given the particles and their interactions in the Universe, to make more matter than antimatter. On the other hand, everything we see is definitely made of matter and not antimatter.

Doesn’t it matter. The fact that we exist and are made of matter is indisputable; the question of why our Universe contains something (matter) instead of nothing (from an equal mix of matter and antimatter) is one that must have an answer.

When it does, one of the greatest mysteries in all of existence will finally have a solution.

Therefore as Max Beerbolm said: ” Besides Dr Einstein there are only two men who can claim to have grasped the Theory of Relativity I cannot claim to be either of these.  The attempt to conceive Infinity has always been quite arduous enough for me. But to imagine the absence of it ; to feel perhaps we and all the stars beyond or ken are somehow cosily ( thought awfully) closed in by curtain curves beyond which is nothing; and to convince myself, by the way, that this exterior is not ( in virtue of being nothing) something and there fore …. but I lose the thread.”

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : WHEN THIS WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALISTIAN ENDS WHAT SORT OF COUNTRY WILL ISRAEL BE? NEVER MIND WHAT’S LEFT OF PALISTIAN.

04 Thursday Apr 2024

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( Fifteen minute read)

As global attention has turned to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, many Israelis are on a parallel warpath to convince the world they are victims, not aggressors.

Indeed any country has the right to defend its self but not to extent that it creates a genocide.

The slogan Yachad Nenatzeach!, Together We Will Win!, is everywhere in Israel:

Once there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … after we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom.

Of all forms of human error, prophecy is the most avoidable.

Israelis’ sense of security has been undermined.

The fear among Israelis is that if Hamas can do it once they can do it again.

By moving methodically through the Strip, Israel slowly pushed over a million Gazans into Rafah along Gaza’s southern border. It is only now poised to take Hamas’s last remaining stronghold, with international opposition, even among Israel’s closest friends, reaching a verbal fever pitch, the UK/USA are breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel.

The UK government does not directly supply Israel with weapons, but does grant export licences for British companies to sell arms to the country.

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When people fight a war that begins with a murderous genocidal attack by one side on the other, the side that was attacked is less inclined to be empathetic towards its enemies.A woman in a headscarf carries bags through the rubble of a destroyed building

However the demolition of much of Gaza will make it difficult for Israel as a society to function.

“More of the same”

Continuation of a war in the Gaza Strip, albeit at a diminished intensity, dragging on for an extended period, turning into a protracted war of attrition, resembling the eighteen-year Israeli presence in the security strip in southern Lebanon or the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan aligns well with the alt-right’s so-called Decisive Plan.

While everyone’s attention would remain fixated on Gaza, where the primary efforts of the regular army would continue to be concentrated, local settlement guards or militias functioning as irregular or semiregular units, akin to paramilitaries, could turn the West Bank into hell on Earth.

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Is there a way back from the hardness of Israeli hearts in the face of hundreds of thousands of people who because of our war are fighting like animals for pieces of food, a safe place where their children can lay down their heads, medicine, clean water and dignity?  The answer is probably yes, but its going to take generations.

On the current trajectory of Israel’s attacks from the air, sea and the ground, Gaza looks set to be an enclave with 2.3 million people essentially living in rubble.

The fear among Palestinians is that Israel wants a “second Nakba”. Palestinians use the word Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — to refer to the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave — or fled in fear – upon the formation of Israel in 1948. Many Palestinians believe the reason Israel is bombing Gaza so heavily is to make it unliveable so that eventually the majority, if not all, of the citizens, facing starvation, will force their way into Egypt.

The 1948 expulsion remains an animating force in Palestinian identity, and it changed the demographics of Israel.

The Jerusalem Post — has carried a prominent opinion piece advocating the emptying of Gaza. That in itself is extraordinary — the most read English-language newspaper for Jewish communities around the world running the argument that the new home for Palestinians in Gaza should be Egypt.

Flattening the whole strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.

Joel Roskin, an academic from Israel’s Bar Ilan University, said  that the major portions of Gaza were now considerably incapacitated and cannot be simply fixed. “Rather, the damaged and destroyed structures must be completely torn down. The tunnelled – and consequently exploded and bulldozed — soil must undergo extensive environmental and engineering rehabilitation … the facts demonstrate that the northern Sinai Peninsula is an ideal location to develop a spacious resettlement for the people of Gaza. Its open areas, along with the existing infrastructure, can easily host large-scale development projects that, if led by the Chinese and supported by local labour, for example, can easily mature in just one to two years.”  Bull shit!

Writing in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Sfard questioned who Israelis would be after the war, asking “how many tons of coldness and indifference have settled inside us in order for us to turn high-rise buildings into dust, promenades and plazas into ruins and a million and a half people into displaced people who have nothing?

“And what will become of a society whose media outlets, which provide it with information about its deeds, have refrained for over 10 weeks from bringing even a single interview – a single one! – with a resident of Gaza to tell what’s happening to them; who censor the pictures of the dead children and the weeping mothers, the children that we killed and the mothers whose bereavement we caused? The Israeli TV channels are shaping our collective perceptions not only by means of what they show, but also, and perhaps mainly, by means of what they’re hiding from us.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects any suggestion of ethnic cleansing, insisting that the primary aim of Israel’s military action is to “destroy Hamas”.

It’s debatable whether this can actually be done — Hamas is in part an ideology and idea, it’s also one of many groups whose aims are “resistance” to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, along with Egypt, its blockade of Gaza.

Hamas, in turn, makes no secret of its ultimate aim – its charter commits it to the eradication of the state of Israel.

The longer term issue for Israel is that an entire new generation of young Palestinians could be radicalised by seeing their homes and sometimes their families destroyed.

At this crossroads, neither Israel, Iran nor Hezbollah wants an all-out war that would have terrible consequence for all of them. But no side seems ready to stop the slide towards it.

That Israel must, instead, finally agree to a two-state solution under which Palestinians have their own state is a grave mistake.

WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE IN A COUNTRY THAT WILL NEED MORE THAN WIRE FENCING OR A WALL TO MAKE IT SECURE IN THE FUTURE.

 There will be a profound shift in Israel’s concept of security: many believe they must now protect themselves.

Several proposals have been put forward to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas with the U.S., Egypt and Qatar pushing to de-escalate in phases. But major sticking points about who should govern Gaza are blocking progress as Israel doesn’t want to govern and is against the top contender, the Palestinian Authority. So why is coming to a consensus for a ceasefire or peace deals so difficult?

There’s now only a one state solution.

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As the conflict with Hamas bleeds across borders, is wider violence inevitable?

Even if the Gaza war winds down, Israelis are shifting their gaze toward their northern border, preparing themselves for a potential new war — with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iranian-backed group is better armed than Hamas, with long-range missiles that could paralyze the country.

Historical precedents abound: paramilitary groups of this kind take orders from local commanders or charismatic political figures and are loyal only to them, not directly beholden to the central authority.

Israel’s war with Hamas has served to energise already existing tensions.

Without an end in sight, at present – the war is in danger of creating its own dynamic. And for now at least, the reality of the cross-border exchanges has a greater clarity than the rhetoric enfolding them.

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What sort of country will Israel be after this war? And will Gaza be liveable, or will its 2.3 million citizens be forced to move to the Sinai desert in Egypt?

No body really knows how this is going to end.

Even if the Israel pushes what remains of the Palestinians into the Sinai Desert and succeeds in dismantling Hamas as an organized military force in Gaza, it will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group.

Even if Israel changes it leader there is little room for wishful thinking here.

The likelihood of a left-wing government materializing due to internal protests appears scant. Far more probable is that Israelis will be drawn to a hawkish leader exemplifying strength and authority, typically a retired general with a distinguished military career, with a capacity to assume responsibility and navigate intra-Jewish divides.

Any withdrawal by Israel, including under a hostage deal, would create a vacuum that Hamas would do everything it can to fill as it emerges from its tunnels.

Those measures might assist in holding off Hamas in the coming months, but Israel still needs a long-term solution. That means actively replacing Hamas while it is still underground.

Discussing a plan for the future governance of Gaza brings with it political complications.

Who will replace Hamas?

Gaza will become an area in deep crisis.

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It’s time for Israel’s allies to say: ‘Enough’

To stop selling arms.

When is a war crime not a war crime?  Answer: when it’s done by an allied nation.

This will only happen when western governments, whose history of hypocrisy that fill many pages of history’s sad story of human exploitation, decide the political cost to them of ignoring the Palestinian deaths inflicted by their own weapons is higher than the cost of the current policy.

Key actors—Palestinian, Israeli, regional, and global—have staked out very different, often antagonistic positions on critical questions. UN interference is necessary, and it should take the shape of an interim, multinational peacekeeping force similar to the one that was tasked to facilitate the transition to an independent East Timor in 1999 or the NATO-led force deployed to Kosovo in the same year.

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The world we live in is changing at an astonishing pace. New technologies and ways of thinking are rapidly altering the way that human beings live, do business, communicate and interact with other. In just 40 years we have gone from rotary dial phones to 5G smart devices capable of accessing the collective knowledge of humanity. And the field of warfare is no exception.

Approaches to warfare that 30, 20 or even five years ago would have guaranteed success on the battlefield have now been made redundant. It can no longer be assumed that because a tactic worked in a previous conflict that it will work today. As the current Ukrain war with Russia shows modern day warfare does not require solders on the ground.9Land BMS

Today’s conflicts can also extend to the domains of cyber and space.

In the cyber domain, orchestrated hacking campaigns conducted on the behalf of nations can disable and shut down key pieces of civilian infrastructure and institutions, leaving nations in a state of panic and vulnerable to attack.

New technologies are also constantly rewriting the rule book for warfare –  AI – Drones.

It seems likely that the coming years will see a major focus on soldier systems that ‘declutter’ the battlefield for soldiers by providing information on threats and targets as they are needed.

The decision on whether what that soldier sees is a friend or a foe comes entirely down to their own judgement and discretion. Making the decision can be extremely difficult in a confusing battlefield environment. To make life easier for soldiers, future weapons may have electronically flags popping up in the sight, telling them whether they’re aiming at a friend. Prior to firing, the weapon would send a small electromagnetic pulse at the target. If no response is received back from a friendly transceiver, the soldier will know they are not aiming at their own troops and will be able to confidently proceed.

So, while modern conflicts are being waged in the most complex environments in history, are there solutions to bring clarity to the minds of both soldiers in the field and leaders.  NO.

We see something terrible and then it disappears.

What are the rules of war?

It’s a timely question in the wake of attacks on civilians, aid workers and hospitals in conflict zones around the world.

However enforcing out of date rules can be difficult.

For example, the five veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., China, Russia, the U.K. and France — must vote unanimously to pursue a resolution that might call for an investigation, refer a case to a court for trial, threaten sanctions or propose another motion. But often one or several of these countries has a vested interest in the conflict in question.

You would be more than naïve if you do not realise by now that Israel is not currently using AI.  Indeed its has a program called Lavender choosing targets to bomb. An artificial intelligence tool developed for the war, marked 37,000 Palestinians as suspected Hamas operatives.

Mistakes were treated statistically. SUCH AS THE RECENT KILLING OF SIX INTERNATIONAL AID WORKERS.

We need to keep saying that these protections are valuable, they’re worthy, and they speak to our common humanity.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com