Tag Archives: The Future of Mankind

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: SHOULD WE BE ABLE TO SELF IDENTIFY WHEN IT COMES TO GENDER.

17 Tuesday Jan 2023

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( Six minute read) 

Pause and think about the above statement. Even to discuss its implications is fraught with dangers.

So at the outset to this post let me state that I have little appreciation of  what it is like to live in a body that does not recognise its gender. 

Are you a man or a woman?

To answer this question you would have been able to give a definite answer one way or the other, and would probably have appealed to your body type and biology to explain it.

Until recently, most people would have found that a simple question. 

However it is turning into a highly fraught and emotive debate, due to certain chromosomal or hormonal conditions, not all individuals can be easily categorised as biologically male or female.

Why does a man feeling like a woman or visa versa mean that transitioning is a medical necessity, but feeling and defining yourself as black is shrouded in layers of deception?

The real rationale for questioning our traditional understandings of men and women has little to do with the existence of intersex people and more to do with the recent increase in the number of people who are biologically unambiguously of one sex, but identify as the opposite.

How do you decide which feelings are legitimate—and should be acted on—and which are not?

The resulting minefield of human-rights ambiguities, and questions over who is allowed to say what is bewildering.

                                                                 ——————————-

When we reject our birth definition of who we are, life becomes complicated.

In our current cultural moment, one person is affirmed for defining themselves by how they feel, but another is told that how they feel is irrelevant.  So which is it?

Is the proposed movement to self-declaration of gender making a mockery of the structure of society.?

(There’s also the question of what happens when the freedom for some to self-create comes into conflict with the right of protection for others.) 

The proposal is that, rather than continue the current system, where someone requires a medical diagnosis and a two-year period of living in their acquired identity before they can legally change gender, those seeking to transition should simply be allowed to self-declare, meaning that someone born a man could declare himself to be a woman and immediately have the right to enter spaces reserved for women.  

How would you like being sexually assaulted by “women with penises” or a man with a vulva, must give us pause for thought about whether this is wise. 

Not to mention  sport . “You can’t just proclaim yourself female and then compete against women.

There must be some standards.

People insist that self identifying is ok for some protected characteristics but not for others.

Well, that seems arbitrary.

Some of us will know and agree with people who want to redefine their “assigned” gender, or we may feel that way ourselves; yet

we don’t automatically agree that people should be able to redefine their race. Perhaps it’s vice versa.

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The issue of what it means to be a human is confused.

Reality is being obscured so that race, gender, and age are all coming to be described as fluid.

Self-worship rapidly leaves us empty, so it is an error to think that gender identity—or any other identity for that matter—as

something that can be completely determined by one’s self.

In an individualist society, we prize the values of freedom, autonomy, equality and self-determination.

  

We believe that people should be free to pursue their own agendas, to become whomever they wish to become, provided that they

do not hurt others along the way. From this view, it is easy to see how we might want to sanction the idea that gender—one’s

experience of self as man or woman, masculine or feminine, as non-binary, or even non-sexed—as something that a person

defines for oneself.

But this is neither true of transgender identities nor of any other type of psychological or social identity. 

I cannot establish an identity by myself; it must be negotiated with and validated in my relations with others.

This does not mean that I have no role in establishing my identity—it simply means that I cannot and do not do so by myself.

The point here is not that one’s personal experience is irrelevant to one’s identity—it is indeed foundational.

The point is that it is simply not sufficient. We need more than what someone says in order to establish and verify an identity.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t believe transgender people when they claim an identity. It is simply to say that the

everyday idea that our identities are established solely through self-identification is a flawed one.

This is also not to say that transgender people have to prove themselves to others.

It is simply to say that the everyday way we verify any given claim to an identity relies not on a mere verbal statement, but also

what a person naturally and spontaneously does in everyday interaction.

Identity formation is a social and not simply an individual process.

The problem arises when we come to think that social gender replaces the category of biological sex. It doesn’t.

Gender simply refers to something different from (if not fully independent of) biological sex.

If we are going to embrace the concept of gender, we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that gender doesn’t trump

sex. And, of course, the opposite is also true: sex doesn’t trump gender.

Each has their place in the vagaries of social life, and we must work together to find out when they are relevant and when they are

not.

But the identities that we are free to construct are our social identities.

The moment we distinguish gender from sex, we have two parallel concepts where there was once one.

To say that gender is malleable means that people can create social identities along the full range of the gender spectrum.

This use of the term “gender” should be an acceptable one.

The problem comes when people use the category of gender as a replacement for sex. When this happens, the concept of gender is

extended beyond its appropriate limits—that is, to one’s experience of ” who I am” in relation to others.

Transgender people need and deserve compassion.

They deserve the right to define themselves in terms of their experienced genders. A person who experiences discordance between

their assigned sex and their social and relational sense of gender is likely to experience suffering from that fact alone.

Such suffering is amplified by the many indignities and humiliations that such individuals face in a society that finds it difficult to

understand and accept people with transgender identities.

The result of all of this would be a radical redefinition of our words “man” and “woman”, and of the political entities those words

describe.

Rather than referring to members of biological classes, who can generally speaking be distinguished from one another by sight, the

words will now refer to subjective mental states, feelings in a person’s head, indistinguishable from one another except by self-

declaration.

The current discourse which insists that a person becomes a woman the moment they declare themselves to be one.

A legal redefinition of our existing gender categories so that they reflect gender identity, instead of biological sex, would have the

consequence of overriding existing legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex.

We don’t know to what extent anyone would seek to exploit legislation designed to allow people to self-identify as women. 

The categories of “man” and “woman” effectively become meaningless.

This is not a satisfactory outcome, especially for those who strongly feel that they identify as one particular gender. 

Shifting our definition of what it means to be a woman so that it no longer has any grounding in the material or social reality of

what it means to be a woman helps no one.

Should parents who allow their children to choose their own gender be considered irresponsible … or enlightened?

Should robots be allocated a gender?

All human comments appreciated no matter what gender. All like click and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHO IS MAKING HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES IN SUPPLYING ARMS TO THE UKRIAN?

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( Fifteen minute read)

The human being is apparently the most aggressive and cruel species that has ever inhabited the Earth: There is no other animal that kills members of its own species in such a systematic way as man does (Sangrador, 1982).

So it is not surprising that the current Ukraine war raises difficult political and ethical questions, because these day with technology we fail to see systematic polarisation, because we all assume good and bad are equally distributed among us, but that is just an abstract idea, far from the reality.

If western leaders think that their arms-length encouragement of Ukraine will bring about a Ukrainian military victory, then they are fatally misreading Putin’s intentions and resolve.

Russia’s progress may be slowed, but it’s highly unlikely to be stopped, far less pushed out of Ukraine, and in the meantime the grinding destruction and hideous war crimes continue.

The west’s current approach of supporting Ukraine’s war aim of defeating the aggressor, and providing arms for that purpose while pointedly avoiding direct military intervention, is guaranteed to prolong the war and it is not at all clear that the kind of support we are giving (and not giving) is the right way to go about preserving the Ukrainian nation.

One thing is certain it is that Putin will never accept defeat.

He is already too deeply invested in this war to back off with nothing to show for it.

If Russia’s aim was to exterminate the Ukrainian nation, then the west’s approach is helping to do just that. Encouraging the Ukrainians to continue, however just their cause, is merely making their country uninhabitable.

Of course as with any war the problem is how what and where should support be given but in the background of any war there are those supplying ammunition and arms to both the aggressor and the opposition.

Large defence companies are already seeing their share prices go up as investors anticipate the impact of the war on profits.

Thales shares have risen by 35% since the invasion, while BAE Systems shares are up 32%. Lockheed Martin has seen an increase of 14% and Aero Vironment 63%.

Supplying weapons offers no effective means of reducing violence.

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In wars there is a profound failure to mourn loose of life, because there is nothing good enough to allow the process to begin, leads to an enactment where loss is transferred usually bodily into another.

We accept that no one has the right to take another’s life, however, justified their grievances.

It is true that some people can feel that their own identity, country, belief system, are so under threat that the annihilation of the other, to preserve their own belief systems, is sometimes justified. The aggressive attacker has forfeited their rights and therefore it’s okay to attack them, to kill them, or to hurt them.

In the case of wars people are violent because it feels like the right thing to do.

It follows that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do, with Britain and Poland now suppling Tanks.

So where are we with the War?

I think when we look at the state of the world we have two conflicting regimes at war with each other: We tend to think that the seed of violence is outside of us and we are exempt from it but ” violence begets violence ” laying the seed for future clashes.

Religious fundamentalism in the form of a particularly virulent form of Islam, which most Muslims do not of course adhere to.

The other is an unfettered fundamentalism, a form of Neo-liberal secular market economics, that promulgates a vicious form of Social Darwinism. “We are all revolutionary in our shopping habits now,” that most of us don’t want to adhere to this idea – but unwittingly play a part in it – and until we realise the damage to climate change and the plight of refugees.

We are actually in a period of profound economic crisis where the human industrial system could threaten to destroy all traces of tradition, certainty and belief.

It is possible that no other currency of communication can be imagined other than death to the enemy. Hence, the dynamic can be perpetuated down the generations. The desire for vengeance and the righting of wrongs can shape an entire life.

Instead of listening to the grievances arising from the Middle East, we in the West continue to employ professional soldiers to perform what might seem acts of state-sanctioned terrorism in the name of foreign policy such as the invasion of Iraq, still a highly peculiar response to the 9/11 attacks.

Can there ever be just wars?

The answer to that question (in a democratic society) is almost always going to be “no” because the test of “Is it a last resort” which is one of the tests for a just war, is never going to be reached, because there is always in a democratic society, an alternative way of reaching your goal, which is to pursue things through the normal political process.

Is this true?

Some violence is more rational or ethically justifiable than others, such as surgical strikes, or limited warfare, the use of things like drones has become very common. The remote drone operator carrying out clean surgical hits allegedly in our name. The pleasure of an Isis general being blown to pieces.

But the question remains. Can there ever be a just war?

How many of us for instance would think it was worthwhile for anyone’s sons or daughters to die in the service of keeping the Falklands Islands British, or during the invasion of Iraq, whether this action is seen as an atrocity or ‘liberation’.

Nelson Mandela was deemed a terrorist, not a rebel with great cause, he remained on the US terrorism list most of his life. Reagan and Thatcher both viewed Mandela as a threat. Indeed, he was at first involved in necessary violent guerrilla actions against the apartheid state.

You can’t defeat an ideology, when it feels based on a justified grievance that belief systems are under threat from the modern world and a wish to regress from the advances of modernity, which seems to lack all spiritual awareness except that of materialism.

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Can violence be fought with violence?   Of course it can.

The paradox of fighting violence with violence is within psychology two opposing concepts, one called “compassion fatigue” and the opposite “substitution trauma.” Both associated with chronic stress and its effect on ceasing to feel empathy for others or feeling sympathetic to others..

Currently, because we are shown violent images daily on Television stations and social media it make’s us reflect on the consequences suffered by victims of aggression as well as the different types of aggression that are shown, making many of these scenes appear as “happy violence.”

However, luckily it is still very rare that you’ll see anybody claim that hurting someone else is an inherently moral thing to do.

Unfortunately morality as understood and practiced by real-world human beings, doesn’t always prohibit violence. In fact they make the case that most violence is motivated by morality.

An emotional abduction (Goleman, 2012) can trigger our violence: a lack of self-control, an unexpected event, the protection of a loved one, defence against an out-of-control animal, or even an attack of zeal, can trigger our most heinous thoughts.

Social interaction influences the brain and the brain influences social interaction.

Social behaviour is learned mainly by observing and imitating the actions of others, and secondly, by being directly rewarded and punished for our own actions. In this regard Putin points to the extermination of the native Indians in West (The Establishment Americas, war list is endless ) as defence of his actions.

The best way to change someone’s behaviour is to understand what motivated that behaviour in the first place.

Political leaders are right to condemn terrorist attacks – we do not have to accept the moral codes of others in order to acknowledge that they exist. However, long-term solutions to terrorist atrocities, as well as many other forms of violence such as wars in our society, might benefit from a taking a perspective that the perpetrators believe that what they are doing is good, just, and right.

Russia’s age-old security concerns, perhaps even the very logic of basing today’s international frontiers in that part of Europe on what were internal borders in the USSR, drawn up by communist leaders precisely to prevent Soviet republics and regions from being viable independent states.

“People are only as mad as the other people are deaf” – Adam Philips.

The greatest acts of violence in the last century have in fact been perpetrated by western colonialism and economic expansionism, we are now arguably reaping the backlash of those policies. The exploitation of the poor by the neoliberal economy is one huge factor in social and state violence, which leads to wars and militarism.

So to create a violent attack firstly ignore the underlying factors, poverty inequality and western exploitation, the severe effects of climate change, global warming, arguably caused by unscrupulous western economic policies.

No day goes past without some senior western politician proclaiming that Ukraine will be “successful” and that Russia is “failing” which is clearly nonsense. The risk involved in this – of a third world war – is obvious, and it’s why the west refuses to intervene directly.

Can violence be fought with violence?

Like all wars, Russia’s barbaric attack on Ukraine will finish at some point. How it ends will determine whether Europe is destined to live with a festering sore of bitterness and division at its heart.

How will the war end?

First, there is outright victory by one side or the other. Second, there is a negotiated ceasefire leading to a peace settlement of some kind. Third, an inconclusive outcome, with the fighting gradually subsiding leaving a stalemate or frozen conflict.

The most pressing question is how do we prevent a repeat of the most violent conflict that humanity has ever seen, the second world war.

Remember that world war two didn’t come out of nothing its starting fuse was the peace agreement of world war one.

Outright victory with unconditional surrender by the losing side is rare and military victory frequently led to a much more ambiguous political outcome sowing the seeds of future conflict.

The third way conflicts end is in a stalemate, with no clear winner and no peace agreement, but a gradual ebbing away of the fighting, leaving a more or less chaotic and unstable situation.

None of these analogies will apply precisely.

How will Putin’s latest Ukraine war end?

Outright victory by one side looks the least likely. Even if Russia managed to topple the Zelensky government and install a puppet regime, subjugating the whole country would require a massive army of occupation, far larger than Moscow can muster.

Moscow and Kyiv have set out their opening positions. But these are light-years apart.

Any amputation of Ukraine’s territory will result in a hostile stand-off, with regular upsurges of fighting along a line of separation. Another words back to a full-scale Cold War with Russia.

If NATO were to actively enter the war and make a quick, massive and decisive strike to cripple Russia’s invasion forces it would be the demise of the EU catapulting it back to a situation of the 1930s where there were individual states in Europe pitted against each other.

In the end there will be no classless society or reign of the Just. It will just carry on in the same kind of way. Meanwhile, all we have is the means. The means is how we will be judged.

As some put it: Peace only be achieved without weapons.

We create refugees with our economics and then blame them for wanting a better life.

Tell them (they have names)

and when they turn the bodies over

To count the number of closed eyes. And they tell you 800’000: you say no. that was my uncle. He wore bright coloured shirts and pointy shoes.

2 million: you say no. that was my aunty.

her laughter could sweep you up like

The wind to leaves on the ground.

6 million: you say no. that was my mother.

her arms. the only place I have ever

Not known fear.

3 million: you say no. that was my love.

We used to dance. Oh, how we used to dance.

Or 147: you say no. that was our hope. Our future. The brains of the family.

And when they tell you that you come from war: you say no. I come from hands held in prayer before we eat together.

When they tell you that you come from conflict: you say no. I come from sweat. On skin. glistening. From shining sun.

When they tell you that you come from genocide: you say no. I come from the first smile of a new born child. tiny hands.

When they tell you that you come from rape: you say no. and you tell them about every time you have ever loved.

Tell them that you are from mother carrying you on her back. until you could walk. until you could run. until you could fly.

Tell them that you are from father holding you up to the night sky. full of stars. and saying look, child.

this is what you are made of. From long summers. full moons. flowing rivers. sand dunes.

you tell them that you are an ocean that no cup could ever hold.

JJ Bola | poet

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In a world where there are disadvantages, neglect and unfairness, there will always be collective and individual activity to reverse the inferior position, by finding other bodies and minds to carry it.

The thing is, no one would ever engage in something that serves the purpose of one’s species’ survival unless one found some pleasure in it.

But does this concept imply while making the revolution enjoying the violence in the process is okay?

Is there really such a convenient separation between a revolution (or rebellion or civil war) and everyday life violence?

If so, one has to use a different register for judgement.

People could receive reinforcement or rewards for their aggressive behaviour in different ways: directly or indirectly.

Every act of violence can feel justified with the currency of communication is the exchange of pain.

It is clear that such questions can and must be discussed.

You can’t defeat an ideology, when it feels based on a justified grievance that belief systems are under threat from the modern world and a wish to regress from the advances of modernity, which seems to lack all spiritual awareness except that of materialism.

When the state is violent, is violence justifiable?

What happens when we tolerate the intolerant? And when we spare the life of a killer? Do we become their enablers?

Is assassination a more justifiable form of political violence than war?

The ethics of selective assassination as a tactic in warfare has not really been given much of consideration until the invention of drones, and with their appears, the acceptance, increasingly that you can execute people before you have tried them.

Freedom is a form of human flourishing that we can only develop or aspire to acquire in relationships with other people.

Violence is destructive of the great fabric of human association that I need in order to develop as a free person.

For example, the Taliban was supposed to be crushed by the invasion of Afghanistan; a very similar kind of organisation to ISIS or ISIL. In the end, as John Alderdice has said, they have to be talked to.

To the Russian President: Vladimir Putin.

Your time will end.

Please end your invasion of the Ukraine . It’s not working. Whatever your reason was for the invasion is no longer valid. You are only hurting your own people. The scansions are incredible and direct and hurtful for your people. It’s not working and it’s not worth destroying both the Ukraine and Russia. However, if you insist on being closed minded an ignorant the please go about it. You will only end up destroying yourself. What you are doing is crazy and stupid.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: WE ARE NOT SATISFIED WITH POLLUTING THE EARTH , CONTAMATING OUR ATHOMPSHIRE AND OCEANS. WE ARE NOW POLLOUTING SPACE.

15 Sunday Jan 2023

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( Four minute read)

With all the problems in the world one would think that we would be avoiding adding to them.

We ignored environmental violations. As a result, we have killed thousands of species, but what might be worse is that we are likely going to kill ourselves. This doesn’t mean we would have all-out nuclear war, but our tendencies to pollute and not care are going to cause harm. This is the issue with pollution out in space.

It’s a serious issue.

We have oceans and rivers, and we pollute them until they become almost unusable. We’ve done exactly the same with space.

The atmosphere is polluted with thousands of objects, no different than all the pollutants dumped in our oceans.

On Earth, natural processes disintegrate or just moves our trash out of sight — everything in space stays there unless we bring it back down.  (Left to gravity alone, satellites can take decades to re-enter the atmosphere and combust.)

From the first launch in 1957, humanity has been launching thousands of projectiles into space and everything we have sent up is still there.

Though nobody gave a shit in the early days of space exploration, we were dumping as much as we want with no concern for the consequences.

We have made the space pollution problem and now we are forced to fix it.

All the debris that is now floating in space is like when ancient bugs become fossilized in amber — it’s a complete untarnished record of sixty years of carelessness.

Yet even our actions in the atmosphere still have an impact on us — no different than the harms of deforestation and marine pollution. Space is an environment that is as sacred as the terrestrial mountains and streams.

Countries also add to the space trash by blowing up satellites. This has been done by the U.S, Russia, India, and China, but in-particular, India has been testing their anti-satellite missiles.

Nass is able to track about 23,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball — however there are an estimated half a million pieces the size of a marble that are much more difficult to track and an inconceivable amount of microparticles smaller than a fingernail that are virtually impossible to detect.

Even tiny pieces of metal and paint flecks fly around the Earth at the speed of orbit — about 17,500 miles per hour. On Earth this is the equivalent of a 550 pound object going 60 miles per hour, which would smash right through a car. Even microparticles can cause tremendous damage — spacecraft can be carved with deep gouges on the exterior and bear cracked glass.

The prospect of a clean-up is massive and currently there is no realistic solution.

Every collision is generating more debris and shrapnel as pieces flew apart on impact. This debris then collide with other debris and spacecraft, creating even more shrapnel. Eventually space will become impenetrable due to the unstoppable cascade of colliding debris.

If we, as a species, want to explore the universe, we first must perfect our abilities here at home. If this involves cleaning up after our previous messes, then the future of space travel will be as secure as ever. Therefore, for the betterment of humanity, space debris must be cleaned up, or else, in the long-run, it will have devastating impacts on our exploration and daily lives.

Humans have been polluting the Earth for centuries before any laws came into force.

Space has no laws, country governing it use. Private companies are free to do or launch as many satellites as they wish.

I say that is time we that when an orbital mission is planned, it must include a legal binding strategy to remove the spacecraft from the orbit within 25 years.

I would also argue that space is a culturally valuable environment because the manmade objects up there are a record of the development of technology and of contemporary telecommunication. There is a huge number of really interesting abandoned and non-functional satellites and spacecraft that tell the story of the space age and how the humans engage with a very challenging space environment.

We need to make some serious progress in the next decade, 20 years tops, if we are going to prevent disaster.

A space environmental management plan to preserve significant technology and satellites that may have played an important part in history, and does not want to see space junk mindlessly destroyed.

A binding international agreement on how to deal with this stuff.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail,com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHILE WE ALL ARE PREOCCUPIED WITH OUR LIVES, EVERYTHING IS GOING UP AN UP. INEQUALITY, COST OF LIVING, INFLATION, IMMIRGATION , CORRUPTION, WARS, TEMPUTURES.

06 Friday Jan 2023

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(Five minute read) 

OUR COLLECTIVE STUPITY SEEMS TO HAVE NO LIMITES.

Rising sea level, sinking land, eroding coasts, and temperamental storms are a fact of life with more than a hundred million people worldwide live within three feet (a meter) of mean sea level, vulnerable to sea-level rise.

As of 2021, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets together, have contribute 4 trillion tons of water annually, through icebergs or meltwater discharge, raising the sea level by around one millimetre per year. Every centimetre (10 mm) of sea level rise is an unmitigated disaster in waiting. 

Generally speaking, additional six million people will be displaced worldwide for each cm.

We all know this but things that normally happen in geologic time are happening during the span of a human lifetime.

With a continuation or acceleration of the trend that has the potential to cause striking changes in the world’s coastlines quicker than the wars to come.

Since 1912, upwards of 80% of Mount Kilimanjaro’s renowned snowpack has vanished. The majority of the central or eastern Himalaya glaciers melting at such a rapid rate they may virtually vanish around 2035 with the Garhwali according to geologists

Over the past 50 years, Antarctic sea ice has shrunk dramatically, and in last 30 years, its extent has decreased by around 10%.

The borders of Greenland ice sheet are receding, according to repeated laser altimeter data from NASA.

In the North Hemisphere, spring freshwater ice breakdown now takes place nine days sooner than it did a century ago, while fall freeze-up takes place ten days earlier.

In certain areas of Alaska, the ground has sunk upwards of 15 feet (4.6 m) as a result of permafrost melting.

The world’s vast ice fields, enormous glaciers, as well as sea ice are rapidly disappearing from the Arctic through Peru, from Switzerland towards the equatorial glaciers at Man Jaya in Indonesia.

Coasts are literally sinking by about three feet (a meter) a century. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break up, this century, it alone contains enough ice to raise sea level by nearly 20 feet (6 meters).

All of this threatens sources of drinking water and makes raising crops problematic which will lead to wars a way beyond the scale of wars we see to day.

Oceans, in effect, mimic some functions of the human circulatory system. Just as arteries carry oxygenated blood from the heart to the extremities, and veins return blood to be replenished with oxygen, oceans provide life-sustaining circulation to the planet.

Oceans hold the key to potential dramatic shifts in the Earth’s climate and the link between changing atmospheric chemistry and the changing oceans is indisputable.  “It’s happening as we speak,” and rest assured we not going to develop gills.

An armada of increasingly sophisticated instruments, deployed across the oceans, on polar ice and in orbit, reveals significant changes among globally interlocking factors that are driving sea levels higher.

Most of the observed sea-level rise (about 3 mm per year) is coming from the meltwater of land-based ice sheets and mountain glaciers, which adds to the ocean’s volume (about 2 mm per year combined), and from thermal expansion, or the ocean water’s expansion as it warms (roughly 1 mm per year).

The globally averaged trend toward rising sea levels masks deeper complexities that will need a global wake-up call. Beyond 2100, the consequences of sea-level rise could well force an inland retreat by human civilization to higher elevations.

As the problem worsens, the continuing impact to society will be greater and the cost of responding will increase. Sunset

 We now have a new satellite (SWOT) a Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite who’s data is going to effect every aspect of living. 

Statistical trends show that more people are on the move today than ever before. According to the evidence there are now 258 million international migrants, comprising 3.3% of the world’s population. This figure does not even account for people who migrate within their countries; the most recent estimates suggest that there are now upwards of 760 million domestic migrants globally.

There are a few of the videos on the subject.

Sea levels are continuing to rise at an alarming rate.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com.  

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. WE ENTERING AND ERA OF MORE WARS. WE WILL NOT ERADICATE VIOLENT CONFLICT IN OUR LIFETIME.

05 Thursday Jan 2023

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( Twenty minute read)

The major cause of war is war.

Today’s wars are mostly undeclared, undefined and inglorious affairs typically involving multiple parties, foreign governments, proxy forces, covert methods and novel weapons.

We have just had the season of good will, with every war movie made from Dunkirk to Dancing with the wolves’ presented on TV as Entertainment.

It is sad that we have to continue to confront the pernicious argument of the “deep roots” of warfare in humanity.  There is absolutely no scientific evidence in either biology or archaeology (the only two disciplines that really count in this debate) for human warfare going back more than 10,000 years.

While in the real world we go about our lives as if it is the norm to witness more and more Conflicts/Wars.

The world is scary enough without forever imagining smoking guns morphing into mushroom clouds.

If one quality characterizes our wars today, it’s their endurance.  They never seem to end. Our media outlets, intelligence agencies, politicians, foreign policy establishment, and bureaucracy are so intertwined with military priorities and agendas as to be inseparable from them.

One does not have to go back too far to remember hearing.  If we withdraw from Afghanistan, the government of Hamid Karzai will collapse, the Taliban will surge to victory, al-Qaeda will pour into Afghan safe havens, and Pakistan will be further destabilized, its atomic bombs falling into the hands of terrorists.

The truth is that no one really knows what would happen if a war starts.Nuclear war by StefyTheSerbian on

60% of the world’s wars have lasted for at least a decade,

Why?

Because we’ve managed to isolate war’s physical and emotional costs however we do well to have an understanding of how they broke out in the first place.

Northern Ireland:

Started on Oct 1968 when a banned civil rights march in Londonderry led to clashes between police and protesters, it sparked widespread disorder and rioting across Northern Ireland. For many, this is the moment 30 years of violent conflict known as the Troubles began.

Ethiopia’s Tigray war:

A dispute over territory along their shared border was the cause of a war fought between Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1998 until 2000.

The roots of this crisis can be traced to Ethiopia’s system of government. Started on 4 November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered a military offensive against regional forces in Tigray.

Afghanistan:

America’s Afghan war is now its longest ever, part of the open-ended US “global war on terror” launched after the 2001 al-Qaida attacks. The US invasion initially aimed to kill or capture the al-Qaida terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But it quickly expanded into a “regime change” operation tasked with eliminating the Taliban and creating a functioning, democratic state.

Turmoil in Libya actually began in October 2011 when the dictator Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in a popular revolt backed by the UK, France and the US. Libya’s civil war entered its 7th year this month.

Yemen:

The conflict is in its sixth pitiless year. The Yemeni government, led by exiled president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and the Houthi rebel movement, which represents Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority – are backed by regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively.

Syria:

Started with an uprising against the autocratic presidency of Bashar al-Assad formed part of the 2011 Arab Spring revolts. It quickly turned into full-scale war as Assad’s regional foes, notably Saudi Arabia, seized a chance to overthrow a regime allied with Iran. Since then upwards of half a million people are estimated to have died.

Democratic Republic of Congo:

How this started is Anyone’s guess. The country experienced an extraordinary civil war between 1997 and 2003 when an estimated five million people died. Continuing instability in lawless areas of north-eastern DRC bordering Uganda stems from that period. Across the country the security situation has deteriorated markedly as government authority has collapsed, emboldening rival militia groups who hold sway over large areas of territory, often competing for the DRC’s rich resources.

Israel-Palestine conflict:

Started after world war two when Jews fleeing Europe where given Arabic land now conflict over who owns the region.

In Israel-Palestine, war – or rather the absence of peace – has characterised life since 1948.

Somalia:

Somalis have endured 40 years of fighting. These are but a few examples in a world where the idea of war without end seems to have become accepted, even normalised.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, broadly speaking, wars commenced and concluded with formal ultimatums, declarations, agreed protocols, truces, armistices and treaties.

Libya:

A classic case of a state of chaos deliberately fed and manipulated by external powers, in this instance Turkey, Qatar, Russia, Egypt and the UAE. Here, as elsewhere, rival rulers claim to be upholding order or fighting “terrorism” while, in reality, they seek to extend national influence and economic advantage. As long as these aims remain unmet, they show scant interest in peace.

Russia Ukraine war:

Started in 2014 after the people of Ukraine elected a new president, Petro Poroshenko. This was not welcomed by Russia, which saw Ukraine as its own territory. In response to the election, Russian troops invaded Ukraine and took control of Crimea.

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In most cases wars are initiated by governments, not by populations. And, most of the time, they are the result of disputes over resources and land, or of a government’s desire to increase its influence and power.

It binds people together – not just the army engaged in battle, but the whole community. It brings a sense of cohesion, with communal goals, and inspires individual citizens (not just soldiers) to behave honourably and unselfishly, in the service of a greater good. It supplies meaning and purpose, transcending the monotony of everyday life. Warfare also enables the expression of higher human qualities that often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as courage and self-sacrifice.

War used to creates a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat but now new technologies and weapons such as drones and cyber warfare are lowering the up-front cost of conflict while enlarging potential theatres of war. Global warming is turning the newly accessible Arctic into a vast, pristine battleground. Outer space presents infinite possibilities for violence.

For many people, if they are honest, war has a fatal attraction. As WB Yeats noted after the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, violent conflict can spawn a “terrible beauty” – a mix of fascination and horror that is difficult to forswear. This seems tantamount to suggesting that human beings fight wars because we enjoy doing so.

Warfare provides people with a semblance of psychological positivity in oppressed societies where other outlets are lacking but this sort of fatalism undermines efforts to achieve permanent peace.

Believe it or not it was not until  January 22, 2021, when the requires 50 states signed up to the he UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons it entry into force, and  became law.  AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED.

Let’s reject the idea that war is either admirable or good.

Let’s reverse the militarization of so many dimensions of our society.

Let’s recognize that expensive high-tech weapons systems are not war-winners.

Let’s retool our economy and reinvest our money, moving it out of the military-industrial complex and into strengthening our anaemic system of mass transit, our crumbling infrastructure, and alternative energy technology.

It’s time to make war a non-profit, last-resort activity.

Many people think that if war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable, militarism remains entrenched in modern culture however the archaeological record, for 190,000 years of human existence, there is simply no evidence of warfare in the human repertoire.

War stems primarily not from our warlike nature or competition for resources but from “the institution of war itself.” represented by NATO which lacks  factors that distinguish peaceful from nonpeaceful systems. These include “overarching common identity; positive social interconnectedness; interdependence; non-warring values and norms; non-warring myths, rituals, and symbols; and peace leadership. Only when we have a shared commitment to “non-warring norms and values,” which can make war within the system inconceivable.

War’s roots extend back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and that war is an adaptive trait, favoured by natural selection. The evidence however is overwhelming that war is a relatively recent cultural invention. War emerged toward the end of the Paleolithic era, and then only sporadically.

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We have to find alternative activities to give us that sense of feeling alive, of belonging and purpose.

If these needs are unsatisfied, and if there is an obvious enemy or oppressor to direct them towards, then warfare is almost inevitable.

We know that 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.

So can we end wars?

Actually, that’s the wrong question. The right question is: How do we end war?

Ending war, which makes monsters of us, should be a moral imperative, as much as ending slavery or the subjugation of women Presently it can only be aspiration

As inequality is the root of violence, it is  also rooted in the climate crisis and resulting resource scarcity, poverty and dislocation.

Fitna  (which can mean both “charm, enchantment, captivation” and “rebellion, riot, discord, civil strife is a fitting word for describing not only the Islamic sphere but the troubled state of the world as a whole in 2020, beset as it is by wars without end.

Another related factor is the collapse of the western-led consensus favouring multilateral, collaborative approaches to international problems. This is matched by the parallel rise of authoritarian and populist regimes that prioritise narrow national interest over perceptions of the common good.

It is obvious that the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia has now turned into another proxy war.

Ukraine was a part of the Russian empire until the fall of the USSR in 1991. This war has been going on for seven years developing into an ugly strain of Ukrainian nationalism that made life difficult for ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

Ukraine has since tried to align itself with the West.

After citizen protests led to the removal of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 (who leaned toward Russia), Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked to be able to join the intergovernmental military alliance NATO.

Russia feels strongly against NATO’s eastward expansion. According to Russia, this would provide NATO members the opportunity to establish military bases in the region. 

Supplies of weapons and large-scale financial assistance are important, but not enough to bring a end to this war which is developing into a war conducted by drones, laptops, Mobil phones, in its current phase, the conflict appears to have become a war of attrition.

The current war will change the perception of traditional alliances, Russia’s containment and possible future threats.

The war will continue to transform the world.

Depending on when and how it ends, and providing that Heir Putin doesn’t push the  button, we will find out how far back history has rolled for Europe.

On a global level the war may be seen as a manifestation of power transition and a struggle for dominance. No military is perfect. Putin has repeatedly made nuclear threats since he began the invasion of Ukraine.A Russian nuclear missile is seen during a parade in Moscow.

All wars come to an end, either by the fighting reaches a stalemate, but a frozen conflict that can heat up or cool down depending on the range of factors.

Not all wars end with a clear victory for one side but with this conflict, a peace deal, though a settlement is difficult,  because of Russia’s and Ukraine’s different goals and what they both view as their rightful territory.

It is unlikely now that Russia would be able to turn the war around entirely and achieve its original aims, but it could accept a “victory” in the form of a peace deal in which it takes more territory than it had before the invasion began.

As long as Putin is at the country’s helm, it would be very unlikely that Russian forces would retreat entirely. The chances of him being overthrown in a coup are perhaps higher than ever, but this will not happen while the war remains active. However, a total Russian retreat could be possible if Putin were to be ousted or die.

Ukrainians believe outright victory is possible.

In the end countries will use Ukraine as a battering ram for reasons of their own.

NATO declaring war on Russia would be too create a major war that could pull in other countries like China. 

The notion of Russia’s absolute incompetence must be eliminated before Heir Putin is back into pushing a button.

If a year or more of fighting will achieve nothing, then why prolong the bloodshed?

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS 2023 GOING TO BE THE YEAR THAT HUMANITY FINDS OUT THAT IT IS NOT THE DOMINANT FORCE OF CHANGE ON PLANET EARTH?

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( Three minute read)

What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?

Temptation is to say, that you may rest assured that it will be another year of unadulterated verbal dioramas diarrhoea.

With humanity waging war on nature the risks we are taking are astounding.

What did Earth look like from space in 2022?

It looked beautiful, it looked dangerous. It looked small and inconsequential, it looked incredible.iss066e109851

Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.

About 96% of all mammals by weight are now humans and our livestock, like cattle, sheep and pigs. Just 4% are wild mammals like elephants, buffalo or dolphins. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land is directly altered as a result of human activity, with nearly 90% of terrestrial net primary production and 80% of global tree cover under direct human influence.

We have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system of interactions between lifeforms and Earth that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so, too, does the hope that technologies such as artificial intelligence will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. That will only happen, however, if we act forcefully in ways that redirects the direction of technological change towards planetary stewardship and responsible innovation.2022-05_geocolor_20220505180018_logos-1

Rising greenhouse gas emissions means that “within the coming 50 years, one to 3 billion people are projected to experience living conditions that are outside of the climate conditions that have served civilizations well over the past 6,000 years.

In this decade we must bend the curves of greenhouse gas emissions and shocking biodiversity loss. This means transforming what we eat and how we farm it, among many other transformations.

Nature has now become for us a kind of glossy cardboard, digitized and virtualized, increasingly distant from our lives.

The recent Covid-19 global pandemic is an Anthropocene phenomena. It has been caused by our intertwined relationship with nature and our hyper-connectivity. ( We order Pizza by sending messages into space.)

However our actions are making the biosphere more fragile, less resilient and more prone to shocks than before.

Humans use the majority of natural geo-resources, like minerals, rocks, soil and water.

Two of the biggest barriers are unsustainable levels of inequality and technology that undermines societal goals.

Inequality and environmental challenges are deeply linked. Reducing inequality will increase trust within societies.

It is time to flick the “green switch.   We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.

It is time to integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies and decisions. And to make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory.

It is time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other. And we must do so together.

It’s is time to get off your smart phone and start to demand transparency of Algorithms that are plundering the world for profit. .

The state of the planet is much worse than most people understand and that humans face a grim.

Because as of yet there is no political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action

The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymying the action that is crucial for survival.

Most economies operate on the basis that counteraction now is too costly to be politically palatable. Combined with disinformation campaigns to protect short-term profits it is doubtful that the scale of changes we need will be made in time.

We need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future.

Without political will backed by tangible action that scales to the enormity of the problems facing us, the added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of the Earth’s life-support system upon which we all depend.

Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals, and catastrophe will surely follow.

So the Beady Eye wishes all a Happy New Year with the near certainty that the abovementioned problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come, if we dont now get our fingers out of where the sun does not shine.

No one has a right to pollute the air or the water, which are the common inheritance of all.

We have not inherited the Earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.

The time has come to re-educate to nature and contact with it as a lever to ensure collective well-being, physical and mental; to restore beauty, kindness, ecosystem thinking, emotional intelligence and a formation of values, heritage inherited from the wisdom of the past but negligently neglected.

After all, this is what ecology is all about: looking at reality as it is, understanding its connections, accepting its complexity, and striving for harmony between all parts.

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?

29 Thursday Dec 2022

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(Fifteen minute read)

The short answer: Yes, and it comes with a cost, we now have Apps you pay for to stop data collection

Technological advancements are difficult to forecast, but several models predict that data centre’s energy usage could engulf over 10% of the global electricity supply by 2030 if left unchecked.

There is no denying that the future of technology will continue to revolutionize our lives, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t care about their privacy. It’s human nature. You want control over what private information you share and who you share it with. Unfortunately, you can lose this control with a careless click.

Various entities handle your private data. The first among them is the government and its institutions. You can’t get public services (for example, electricity, a high school education, healthcare) without identifying yourself.

You can buy apples at a stand and remain a stranger to the fruit seller. But buy apples online, and you’ll give away private information about yourself. It may be a fact as simple as that you like apples. This information will be sold to an advertiser, and the next time you go online, an ad for apples will pop up on your screen.

Almost everything you do online leaves a data breadcrumb. You have little control over how these breadcrumbs are collected.

Usually, it works like this. Before you start using a new online service, you have to read a wall of fine print. You do not do so, because you don’t want to wade through paragraphs of jargon. You click that you agree, and that’s how you begin to give away your private data. You cannot change the agreement, and you cannot bargain — it’s take it or leave it and if you reject all, rest assured it is logged as data. 

There are countless technology advances in hospitals and medicine but as data penetrates deeper into biologically and culturally diverse corners of the world is technology a sustainability hero or villain?

Information privacy will become an even hotter topic once technologies create more invasive tools. You’ll be surrounded by facial-recognition cameras, smart speakers that listen to your conversations, e-textiles, wearable health monitors, and other data-gathering gadgets.

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All-together, this paints a challenging picture for the future of our environment. Many technology companies have yet come to grips with the environmental impact associated with their products and services.

Analysis by Veritas estimates that 5.8 million tonnes of CO2 will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of storing unnecessary ‘dark data’ – this translates to more emissions than 80 individual countries.

Destroying our planet is no easy task. Sure, you could bomb us back to the stone age, introduce a plague to wipe out all complex life or whip up some sort of nanomachine to completely eliminate the entire biosphere. But in all those cases, the rock we stand on would still remain, lifelessly circling the sun for billions of years to come.

Getting a handle on wayward data is becoming as big a problem as Climate Change.

The list of significance of data analytics just goes on and on – you need data to pitch stocks, file financial reports and provide better service to your clients, arrive at projections, assess performance. Objects that use IoT today include driverless cars, fitness trackers like Fitbit, thermostats, and doorbells. Objects that use IoT are also commonly referred to as smart objects. smart thermostat online shopping.  voice assistants. integrate your voice assistant with any smart device. food delivery.

Who hasn’t heard of Facebook, Twitter, or Skype? They’ve become household names. Even if you don’t use these platforms, they’re a part of everyday life and not going away anytime soon.top reads of 2022

Communication tools offer one of the most significant examples of how quickly technology has evolved.

Technology has changed money

No more do you have to enter a bank to withdraw money or transfer it to someone. With your cell phone and a banking app, you can manage all of your necessary bill payments online.

The smartwatch is a relatively new technology that captures almost all the capabilities of smartphones in a convenient touch-screen watch. You can receive notifications, track your activity, set alarms, and even call and text directly through these wearable devices. Technology has changed how we watch television, what news we get.  More and more TVs these days are even designed for streaming. “Smart TVs” have Wi-Fi capability. Paper books aren’t going anywhere. We can access our music no matter where we are. For better or worse, technology has also made it possible for you to find other people’s personal information on the Internet through social media. You can gain access to the information you want to know about a particular person.

Medical Guardian Medical Alert System

So is Data screwing up the world?

Well, neither really but should we be steering technological innovation and deployment to drive social progress.

Technology encompasses a broad range of products and systems, some of which will help us live more sustainably and others that won’t.  The production and use of technology will always involve the consumption of energy and materials, but if that same technology helps us minimise our consumption in other ways or allows us to use more sustainable methods of production, then the net effect will be positive.

Over the years, technology has revolutionized our world and daily lives. The amount of active web users globally is now near 3.2 billion people. That is almost half of the world’s population adoption of new technologies, like smartphones and wearables, may have slowed down significantly in the last few years, but data usage is only continuing to grow—massively.

In 2012, there were only 500,000 data centres worldwide to handle global traffic, but today there are more than 8 million according to IDC.

As data becomes more siloed and fragmented, it gets increasingly harder to find and manage.

Take Bitcoin mining network which are now consumes more energy than the whole of Ireland. And it’s growing at about 30% a month.

Take Netflix binging. Storing and streaming all that digital content requires a lot of energy, and as consumers expect regular new content and ever better video quality, the energy demands spiral upwards.

It’s not just Netflix of course. In total, data centres consume roughly 3% of the world’s energy supply, and this amount is estimated to treble in the next decade.

Take that every year, millions of data centres worldwide are purging metric tons of hardware, draining country-sized amounts of electricity, and generating carbon emissions as much as the global airline industry. Data centres energy usage could engulf over 10% of the global electricity supply by 2030 if left unchecked. It is double every four years. Analysis by Veritas estimates that 5.8 million tonnes of CO2 will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of storing unnecessary ‘dark data’ – this translates to more emissions than 80 individual countries.

All-together, this paints a challenging picture for the future of our environment because  it’s one of the largest and most unappreciated blind spots in the fight against climate change.

The most important next step right now is simply education – and getting companies to realize that the importance and benefits of more eco-friendly data centres, but the impact is also determined by how we, the consumers, use that technology.

Heading into 2023 the signals are mixed turning millions of us into remote-workers.

Perhaps the most concerning way that technology impacts our environment is through the mining of vast quantities of rare metals. Metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are used to make critical hardware components – batteries in particular – for things like computers, smartphones and electric cars. Unfortunately, mining these metals is energy intensive and comes not just at an environmental cost, but often a terrible human cost too. Moreover, these rare metals are just that: rare. Without large investment in recycling facilities, using these limited natural resources is unsustainable. The planned obsolescence of consumer gadgets only exacerbates the problem.

We will not likely get through the coming year without some sort of catastrophic attack on a very strategic and important network or service provider like Gmail, WhatsApp, or Microsoft.

The revolutions that will surface in years to come will continue to make profound changes in our everyday lives.

In the end, the environmental impact will depend not only on choices that we make as consumers, but on the social and political choices that we make collectively as citizens.

Our data centres don’t have to harm the environment, if we take the proper actions today.

Only 12% of today’s data centres that are green. According to analyst firm IDC, in 2012, there were only 500,000 data centres worldwide that were handling global traffic, but today there are more than 8 million.

“The time for pure national interests has passed, internationalism has to be our approach and in doing so bring about a greater equality between what nations take from the world and what they give back. The wealthier nations have taken a lot and the time has now come to give.”

Why destroy the planet if we don’t have to.

Whole industries (think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity) whole lines of work (middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines) exist primarily to convince us there is some reason for their existence.

It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working in bullshit jobs.

It is ironic that the technologies most responsible for the mood of today’s world are also best positioned to improve it.

AI must be programmed to enhance human life as opposed to imitating it.

From social media to the climate crisis, Big Data is helping to ruin everything. The total lack of legal data rights for individuals is a violation of autonomy, privacy, and even freedom of thought and speech.

Currently we have no rights at all to own our data, and it can be sold easily to the highest bidder to do with it as they please.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

There are fantastic things that can be done with data, and it is absolutely essential to so much of modern scientific and engineering feats which we hope might save the world. Without data, none of our interventions in great problems like climate change would be able to do anything at all. In fact, without adequate data collection and analysis, we might never have noticed that climate change is happening at all.

Just remember these few things:

  • Data is not your ally — especially not when you are trying to convince somebody of something. Changing a whole mindset requires more than just statistics, and raw data is so abstract and such a broad category that there can easily be conflicting data sets that lead to impasses in conversation. Data is a crucial tool, but you need to build trusting mutual relationships, too.
  • Data is not your friend — it does not care whether you think you have a right to it or not. Data will be owned by and used by those who created the platform you are using, until the law changes. And the law will not change unless you start caring.
  • Data is not “things” — objects are totally separate from the data abstracted from them in a way that is metaphysically irreconcilable. There is no way to recreate an apple from mere data about an apple, nor to exhaust the nature of an apple by reducing it to data-form. This is an important principle that should be remembered whenever we deal with data: data is no more than what it is, and potentially much less.
  • Data is now just such a frontier — you are the product.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S ARE WE ALL NOW LIVING IN THE WORMHOLDES OF TECHNOLOGY.

23 Friday Dec 2022

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( Six minute read) 

Never before has our society been so advanced yet so vulnerable to our evolution with technology amongst the most magnificent yet terrifying creations our world has ever encountered.

As technology grows, so do we grow around it and adapt to its new forms and capabilities.

It allows us to understand complexities that seemed insurmountable and to perform tasks that range from mundane to monumental. Yet while this great power continues to thrive and expand in our environment, what we once were as a species seems to be crumbling beneath technology’s colossal-sized foot.

The question however is:                                      Is Technology saving the world … or killing it?

Technology from the 18th century and onward has harmed the planet primarily through two factors: depleting natural resources and polluting them.

Technology makes us better at analysing data, improving workflows, streamlining supply chains, identifying problems faster, improving production processes, and more.  According to Forbes, IoT technology will be incorporated into 95% of new product designs by 2050. It is expected that everything will be connected to the internet and the cloud by 2050.

Let’s be honest, but for most people, technology isn’t something we think twice about.

Depending on the individual, technology can mean the difference between depression and laughter, solitude and social interaction, or even between life and death.

 

It has penetrated all aspects of daily life and is now needed more than ever to preserve what is left of life, as it is reducing

our ability to engage in person, turning the world into a begging pawn shop, from save almost everything, to saving yourself.

All this idealistic representation of fake lives around us is causing a diminish in many people’s confidence and self worth.

This is a catastrophic aspect of social media, which people still refuse to accept its presence and impact because we’re still in the

transition phase of full technological development.

So we are shuffled, sending messages between the two worlds and entertain with thousands of photos and videos daily.

We’re placing ourselves in a virtual world made of supermodels, vacations and holidays, and shredded bodies that are on the verge

of an atmospheric collapse and yet, electric replacement haven’t framed a total positive future. 

It is undeniable that technology has made life easier but this is also the technology that goes beyond our ethical and legal values

and social standards worldwide.

 

Even though we use technology, we do not know about its disadvantages.

What does technology do to our lives?

It’s hard to be optimistic sometimes, we know. Politics is a mess, the environment’s in trouble and half the world appears to be

either melting or actually on fire. But there are reasons to be cheerful, because technology is working to defeat each and every

horseman of the apocalypse.

Here’s how technology will save the world…

Technology continues to find new ways to help us live longer, better lives. There is no person we can’t reach within a phone call.

Gene editing with molecular ‘scicssors’ has the potential to remove inherited diseases and battle cancers; artificial

pancreases (opens in new tab) may transform the lives of people with diabetes; and ‘big data’ analysis may help unlock the cures

for conditions that currently ruin or end many people’s lives. We’re starting to see wearable devices save people’s lives by

warning them of conditions they didn’t know they had.

It is used in hospitals and our judicial systems to identify people’s mistakes.

While technology can have positive effects, it never stops wars and we’ve got thousands of years of history demonstrating that.

A universe controlled by robots doesn’t seem so far off… in the meantime the weapon we have to create a world of sustainability is

the Smart phone.

If we want to, it is possible to target profit for profit sake, BY IN ACTING SMARTPHONES PRESSURE CAMPAIGNES.

You may be certain that a million messages, to any individual, businesses, organisation, that is blocking their ability to function

will not go unnoticed.

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THE BEADY EYE’S. 2023 MESSAGE TO THE YOUNG GENERATION. IT WON’T BE EASY AND IT WON’T COST TRILLIONS TO CREATE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE WORLD.

19 Monday Dec 2022

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( SIX MINUTE READ. )

Your time is now,  to step up to the plate and start taking responsibility for the biggest growth opportunity in human history.

Unfortunately its starts with facing global challenges that are causing and will continue to cause our globally societies to change  radically. 

You don’t have be told that we are on track to a catastrophic 2.7c of global warming.

You don’t have to be told that the population of the world  will be near 10 billion of us by 2050.

You don’t have to be told that as a result the demand for freshwater and food will increase.

You don’t have to be told that it is going to take a substantial portion of the worlds annual GDP to convert to a green sustainable economic system.

You don’t have to be told that the transition will not be orderly while we have I am all right Jack attuites, with profit seeking algorithms, while we have privileged positions and assets harvesting profits by using the current recession fever for overly aggressive job cuts, while we have education at a premium, while we have immigration and countries turn  inwards.

You don’t have to be told that the Ukraine Russian war is showing the urgency to develop new energy solutions.

You don’t have to be told that people world wide must rally to collaboratively research and share Covid -19 vaccines.

You don’t have to be told that companies must stop paying out excessive dividends and share paybacks.

You don’t have to be told that there is a boom of innovations in all technologies, that it must be turned into an interdisciplinary revolution.

You don’t have to be told that old industries and jobs will disappear.

You don’t have to be told that there will be more floods, wild fires, droughts, and conflict are on the horizons.

You don’t have to be told that 80% of world wide agricultural land is using 10% of available freshwater.

You don’t have to be told that we are looking at the disappearance of our polar caps , glaciers,  forests, rivers.

You don’t have to be told that by 2025 over half the world’s population will live in water- stressed areas with rising oceans.

You don’t have to be told that that we needs new materials to build with. Steel responsible for 11% of yours days carbon emissions, concerts 8% plastics 4%

You don’t have to be told that if we do nothing you will see the biggest human migration in world history.  As environmental, political and economic refugee grow to numbers never witnessed in the World.

You don’t have to be told that the Biodiversity of the world is under treat of extinction.

You don’t have to be told that you will most likely be living through these changes.

You don’t have to be told that solutions will not be found in impact start-up but by becoming leaders in business and government.

You don’t have to be told that sooner that later the world will rally to address all of the above.

YOU DO HAVE TO BE TOLD THAT THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS COULD BE TRAGIC AND TUMULTUOUS.

Your response to the megatrends will shape what is meant for human to survive.

Addressing the 60 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases we emit every year, through point – of source will be a multitrillion opportunity and more.

Don’t be distracted.

Every generation has the ability to effect changes, your generation must do so, because the age of technology combined by the current Capitalists Systems will and is  turning almost ever thing in to a product to trade.

There is no reality in the metaverse a “computer generated universe. ”

You have a weapon called the smartphone which ironically is both the cause and the solutions to effect change.

If you want a living world now is the time to use this power, to attack the unsustainable consumerism’s of profit for profit sake.

Bombard their operations with millions of messages to block their activities.

THIS IS ONE LOUD VOICE THAT CANNOT NOT BE ARESSTED.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com.

THE BEADY OVERVIEW OF WHAT THE COP15 BIODIVERSITY AGREEMENT COMPLEMENTS OF VERT.

19 Monday Dec 2022

Posted by in COP 15 BIODIVERSITY.

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( TEN MINUTES READ)

COP15: an ambitious agreement to halt the collapse of life
After two weeks of negotiations, almost all the countries of the world reached an agreement, Monday morning, at the end of the 15th world conference (COP15) on biodiversity. The challenge was daunting: to set an international framework for the current decade capable of halting, and even reversing, the collapse of life.

“It is a historic text which has just been adopted, well I hope it has been adopted. The words of the European Commissioner for the Environment, Virginijus Sinkevičius, shortly after the final hammer blow of the COP15 on biodiversity, reflect the general incomprehension. A few moments earlier, China – which was co-organizing the summit with Canada – decided to adopt the agreement with forceps, ignoring the frank disagreement of the Congo. In principle, the decision had to be taken by consensus between the 196 States Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity present in Montreal.

Like others, the Central African country felt that several conditions were missing from the final document, the fruit of four years of work and two weeks of intense negotiations. Among these: the money needed to protect and restore biodiversity.

Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu and members of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity welcome the adoption of the new global biodiversity framework in Montreal, December 19, 2022 © UN biodiversity / Flickr
money for the living
The new “Kunming-Montreal Framework on Global Biodiversity” provides for funding dedicated to living organisms (public, private, national or international) to reach 200 billion dollars per year by 2030. However, certain high estimates of the amounts required fluctuate between 600 and 823 billion dollars per year, according to the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI).

Another subject of tension: many countries of the South demanded support from the countries of the North to the tune of 100 billion dollars per year by 2030 for the preservation and restoration of biodiversity; the framework finally foresees 20 billion dollars per year by 2025, and 30 billion at the latest in 2030.

Finally, while developing countries demanded the creation of a dedicated biodiversity fund, which the countries of the North opposed, the biodiversity money will finally be managed within the Global Environment Facility (GEF) , as proposed by Colombia. At least initially.

End clap to everyone’s surprise when the Democratic Republic of Congo had not given its agreement. But the legal advice of the expert of the Convention validates the procedure. © Earth negotiations bulletin
For a true sharing of benefits from genetic resources
The key issue of this COP, the sharing of benefits from the genetic resources of developing countries exploited by companies from Northern countries, for example in cosmetics or medicines ( our article ), was the subject of an agreement . This formalizes the creation of a mechanism whose workings will be determined during COP16 in Turkey.

In addition to additional funding, subsidies harmful to life must be reduced by at least 500 billion dollars per year by 2030. Subsidies granted to conventional agriculture are particularly targeted, as this constitutes the main threat on biodiversity, according to the Convention on Biological Diversity .

The text “does not break the house, but it saves the furniture” , in the words of Pierre Cannet, director of advocacy and campaigns for WWF France. “There was something for everyone,” greets a European diplomat. Everyone agrees that the new framework contains real advancements over its predecessors.

Protect 30% of land and seas by 2030
The European Union had made this its flagship proposal: the text endorses the objective of ensuring the protection of at least 30% of land, seas, coasts and inland waters by 2030. By the same deadline, 30 % of degraded areas will require “effective” restoration to promote ecosystem integrity, functions and services.

The agreement says nothing about the quality of these protections, which can range from putting the areas “under cover” to accommodating human activities – fishing, hunting, logging, etc. This point has provoked the ire of certain NGOs, including Bloom, who accuses the French government of having maneuvered so that there is no mention of an objective of 10% of areas under “strong” protection – which denies the executive.

This map shows the land areas (in green) and the marine areas (in blue) which have the status of protected areas in December 2022. Click to go directly to the site which lists them. © Protected Planet
Agriculture: no mention of meat or livestock
Alas, the final text contains no mention of animal husbandry or meat diets , while meat still requires more agricultural land. These are often borrowed from natural environments, aggravating the climate crisis and the collapse of life.

The agreement pleads weakly for a “sustainable management” of spaces dedicated to agriculture, aquaculture, fishing or forestry, through the use of practices that respect biodiversity. Among these: agroecology, “sustainable intensification” (producing more on the same land and using fewer inputs while increasing yields, according to the FAO) and “other innovative approaches” . Enough to allow everyone to see noon at their doorstep.

The planned reduction of pesticides
Notable fact and applauded by many European observers : by 2030, the new framework plans to reduce by at least 50% the “ pesticide risks » ; a more effective formulation than tackling the volumes spread alone. As Paul Leadly, a researcher specializing in population and community ecology at Paris-Saclay, tells us, while the use of pesticides has fallen by 40% in the United States, the risks have been multiplied by four due to a greater product toxicity. Some large emerging countries such as Brazil or Argentina have tried to influence to obtain a soft agreement with their agro-industrial sector and have scrapped in vain, in particular with the European Union, to remove the mention of pesticides.

Excessive discharges of nutrients into the environment – ​​such as nitrates from pig manure which destroy waterways and create green tides in Brittany – will also have to be halved in eight years. The parties also pledged to “work towards the elimination of plastic pollution” . In addition, the text encourages, without requiring, companies to report on their impact on biodiversity and the actions implemented to limit it.

Equity, rights of indigenous peoples and gender recognized
Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of biodiversity ( Green ) and their role in ecosystem conservation is recognized in this new global biodiversity framework. The text calls for balance and harmony with “Mother Earth”, as demanded by several Latin American countries.

A representative of indigenous people in the premises of the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, where COP15 biodiversity took place. © UN Biodiversity
Finally, the framework recognizes the need to take into account women, young people and people with disabilities in decision-making and to ensure the protection of environmental defenders, who are increasingly victims of abuse and even Assassination ( Green ).

And after ?
“What is not quantified and dated is not accomplished, we know it from Aichi” , remarks Pierre Cannet, of WWF France. The 20 objectives (known as from Aichi ”) of the previous global framework decided in 2010 all failed ( Green ), in particular because the text only provided for a few implementation indicators. An analysis of all national targets is planned at each of the COPs, which are held every two years. Then, the first assessment of the implementation of the national roadmaps will take place in four years.

The countries are now responsible for putting this new framework to music in their domestic policies. From 2023, France must write its new national biodiversity roadmap. It will also have to find a way to stop subsidizing harmful agricultural practices, seriously reduce the use of pesticides or the artificialization of soils, etc. “Everyone will have to live up to this Montreal agreement so that we can show that it is not a paper agreement” , explains the French Minister of Ecology, Christophe Béchu, who also applauds a “historical” text.

The text “does not break the house, but it saves the furniture” , in the words of Pierre Cannet, director of advocacy and campaigns for WWF France. “There was something for everyone,” greets a European diplomat. If the living isn’t out of the woods, everyone agrees that the new framework contains real advances over its predecessors.

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