Education can contribute significantly to the promotion of mutual understanding and tolerance.
Today’s revolution in social communications involves a fundamental reshaping of the elements by which people comprehend the world about them, and verify and express what they comprehend. The internet has significant effects on communicating, teaching and learning.
What today is called the digital divide, will be the Educational Disaster of the Future.
It takes a wide range of different communication styles to get across to all the different learning styles that exist, but as our modern world evolves and becomes more sophisticated, so must our learning institutions.
Technology enthusiasts have long heralded the power of technology—from the printing press, to blackboards, to the laptop—to transform education.
The potential of technology to help improve education has significance beyond teaching children reading and math.
Quality education plays an important role in promoting economic development, improving health and nutrition and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. Economic growth, for example, can be directly impacted by the quality of the education systems in developing countries.
Our first problem is that the internet is not always accessible by all learners and teachers. The second problem is though English all over the world is taught widely as a second language its is the primary language of the internet.
As a result in most of the non-English speaking parts of the world the internet it is only a tool for educational activities.
In my previous post in this series we looked at Communication.
I ended that post by stating that Education is Communication.
With most of the world deprived of any Internet connection we are WiFi our way to a digital divide that will have more than serious consequences for those countries but for all of us.
Of course, education has used technology for centuries, from blackboards to textbooks, yet in recent history very little has changed in how education is delivered.
Modern information and communications technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities. But it is highly unlikely that this will happen.
Many emerging and developing nations will be left out of the internet revolution entirely.
Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe.
Here are a few examples.
About half of online Chinese (52%) have used the internet to buy products in the past 12 months.
Majorities of internet users in Bangladesh (62%) and India (55%) say they have looked for a job online in the past year.
54% of internet users across emerging and developing countries use the internet to get political news and information.
In Venezuela, three-quarters of cell phone owners (who constitute 88% of the adult population) use their device to take pictures or video.
More than six-in-ten internet users in Poland (64%) say they have gotten health information online in the past 12 months.
Over half of the reduction in child mortality worldwide since 1970 is linked to “increased educational attainment in women of reproductive age.”
Back to Education.
Four years ago the iPad didn’t even exist.
We don’t know what will be the current technology in another four. Perhaps it will be wearable devices such as Google Glass.
You don’t have to be a genius or a clairvoyant to see that Education as we know it is rapidly becoming obsolete.
So what is the future?
On the possibilities of recent forms of technology, often known as Information Communication Technology (ICT). ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications. It is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops.
The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally.
But the questions are:
What will education be? Who or what will be doing the Education? For what purpose? Is it desirable that we all end up being educated by the cloud if the future of education technology is all about the cloud and anywhere access.
Thanks to the cloud and mobile devices, technology will be integrated into every part of school. In fact, it won’t just be the classrooms that will change. Games fields, gyms and school trips will all change. Whether offsite or on site the school, teachers, students and support staff will all be connected.
In my ideal world, all classrooms will be paperless.
Unfortunately educators working in and with developing countries rarely have an expertise or even a basic grounding in the wide range of technological innovations and their potential uses for education.
Even the most seasoned education expert is likely to stare blankly if terms such as ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation.
Students will take ownership of their own learning. Rather than being ‘taught.’
Students can learn independently and in their own way. They could be in the same room or in different countries.
Will this form of education be mass brainwashing?
The cloud will set, collect and grade work online. Students will have instant access to grades, comments and work via a computer, smart phone or tablet.
The great disadvantage will be the lack of oral communication.
The iPads and other mobile technology are the ‘now’.
Reflecting western style democracy.
Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Infrastructure is paramount to the future of technology in education.
This should be happening now.
Teaching and learning is going to be social but people are even more leery of the internet’s effect on morality. It is should be driven by the question: How is this changing your capacity to engage the world effectively?
Universities should teach students how to deal with a world in constant motion, a world that doesn’t come labeled and arranged for you, a world in which you have to work with a lot of other people both because you need their help and because they need to understand why you think what you’re doing makes sense.
This is what is going to be importance to our world which is reminding us so every day of the week that Inequality is at the source of all our troubles.
We’ve lost sight of this, but we can reclaim it through education.
It is possible to say that technology is not a purpose but only a tool for all humanistic necessities. This at the moment is totally untrue.
If you don’t believe me, look a Wall Street.
The winner in this process will be humanity as a whole” and not just “a wealthy elite that controls science, technology and the planet’s resources”;
The Internet transmit and help instill a set of cultural values—ways of thinking about social relationships, family, religion, the human condition—whose novelty and glamour can challenge and overwhelm traditional cultures.
The Internet far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here in Education that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come”
The Internet can make an enormously valuable contribution to human life. It can foster prosperity and peace, intellectual and aesthetic growth, mutual understanding among people’s and nations on a global scale. If it is married into Education for all.
Wall Street : Every trillionth of a second shares, stock, currency, futures, are bought and sold for profit by Computer programs.
It’s no wonder that a median of only 29% say the internet is a good influence on morality, while 42% say it is a bad influence.
There’s still a way to go to ensure all schools are ready for the future of technology.
So go now, and look with your newly educated eyes at this world.
If students aren’t proficient in their studies to begin with and technology is used incorrectly, a whole mess of problems will arise.
What does 2016 hold in store when we look at the new year.
HERE ARE A FEW OF MINE: IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.
The United States and Russia have never seen eye to eye, especially with the conflict in Syria.
The Arab Spring will intensified civil wars in over 10 countries, including in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Somalia, Libya and Syria.
Mr Barack Obama will be THE LAST America’s non white president.
The fate of Israel will remain unclear.
The Paris Climate Change agreement will fall apart.
Global warming will increase.
The internet will have further restrictions.
2016’s economic growth rate won’t be much different than we’ve seen in recent years. The texture, however, will be different, with more gains in Europe and less in China and the commodity-dependent countries.
The biggest risk for Europe in the year? “It’s the refugee crisis,” it’s the biggest challenge to the European Union yet.
Sovereign wealth funds will continue to privatize the world.
The world’s populations are aging, and demand for cancer treatments will only increase.
Colorado, Washington and other legal-pot states will get more tourists than ever.
The people’s of the world will become more disconnected.
Television viewing will decrease due to Smart phones and I pads.
There will be more Natural Disasters.
Politics and how its delivered will have to change.
Inequality will rise.
Stocks will return just 3% in 2016.
Google will start fee charging.
World food prices will rise.
Drinking water i.e. fresh water will cause new conflicts.
Donald Trump will be assassinated.
The Olympic Games will be boycotted by Russia.
The first cloned human.
The Catholic church will begin the process to allow its priest marry.
Businesses will increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to improve their products and services.
Worlds created entirely of clouds. “Unicorns” racing through new landscapes. Data moving faster than the speed of light.
Private cloud computing.
We’ll witness the emergence of a new class of real-time applications in e-commerce and financial technology services powered by super-speedy data analytics.
Machine learning,” a field of computer science will be all the rage.
As mobile devices are ruling the world, having surpassed laptop and desktop searches in terms of paid clicks and traffic generation, it has become imperative for businesses to develop mobile-friendly websites and make their business decisions attuned to this new wave of mobile savvy clientele.
Mobile searches will exceeded desktop searches.
The boundary line between “social media” and “web” will get blurred further in 2016.
The truth will become impossible to find.
The greed of capitalism that is the root of most if not all our World problems will come under further pressure to pay.
The like button will get fewer hits.
PEDRO JADAUJI: PORTUGAL
Sporting CP will win the Portuguese league.
People will realise that face to face is better than Facebook.
Phone calls and mail letters will star to increase and sms (…) will start do decrease
Happiness indicators will start to replace GDP.
Nick Harrison: USA
Hilary Clinton will win, learn Spanish, rub Putin nose the wrong way, and cause a recession.
Asbad : Afghanistan
I predict that President Barack Obama will rethink his plan to have all operational U.S. combat forces out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. The current reality is that, while the United States is fighting the al Qaeda-ist movement that grandiosely calls itself Islamic State using air strikes and aiding allies on the ground, more needs to be done to make sure its militants do not take over larger swaths of Iraq and Syria.
Has commercialism hijacked the spiritual meaning of Christmas?
No Christian would justify much that goes on in the name of Christmas.
No one disputes that the holiday is grossly prostituted to unchristian purposes.
Are we more interested in receiving than giving?
I wonder how long it will be before Christmas as a holiday is cancelled.
Before it is Happy Xmas to my readers.
For the greater part of humanity, Christmas has no legitimate meaning at all.
Over the Christmas period there is more family conflict and more people attempt suicide than at any other time of the year.
Perhaps to avoid offending other religions the midwinter break should take place over the New Year, 31 December and 1 and 2 January. This way no religious group is favoured, not even those who still follow the pagan traditions.
The meaning is still there for those who seek it.
For me it’s about CONSCIOUSNESS.
The word Christmas comes from the Old English term Cristes maesse, meaning “Christ’s mass.” This is the name for the festival service of worship held on December 25th to commemorate the birth of Jesus. Christians have been celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25 since at least the early fourth century.
Christmas is obnoxious to some because it represents the combination of two words, “Christ” and “mass.” The word means “the mass of Christ.”
But what does “mass” really mean in the compound word Christmas? Any authoritative dictionary will reveal that the English term mass evolved from the Anglo-Saxon word maesse, which derived in turn from the Latin missa, which is a form of the verb mittere, which means “to send.”
The use of the abbreviation Xmas takes Christ out of Christmas!” opponents allege. “Xmas is an irreverent modern substitute for Christmas. The abbreviation represents the substitution of X (which means the unknown quantity) for Christ.”
There is neither certain information on the date of his birth, nor even on the year.
One reason for this uncertainty is that the stories of his birth, recorded in the New Testament books of Matthew and Luke, were written several decades after the event. Those who wrote it gave no specific dates for the events they mentioned.
For several centuries the Christian Church itself paid little attention to the celebration of Jesus’ birth.
It ranked after Easter, Pentecost, and Epiphany in liturgical importance.
The major Christian festival was Easter; the day of Jesus’ purported resurrection. Only gradually, as the church developed a calendar to commemorate the major events of the life of Jesus did the celebration of his birth become significant.
Christmas is not a Muslim holiday, therefore, Muslim countries do not celebrate it.
Although the history of relations between Muslims and Christians has not always been good, it is important to remember that Muslims always stood for a society where the rights of all individuals are not only tolerated, but respected and protected.
In the Christian religion, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ by the virgin Mary, which is observed on December 25 by Roman Catholics and Protestants.
Many in the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity observe the Christmas holiday, Epiphany.
So when was Jesus actually born?
Modern scholarship estimates the year of his birth from 7 to 4 BC.
Although the Gospel narratives offer no indication as to the date, they do seem to indicate it was not in the winter. Luke describes the shepherds “keeping watch over their flocks by night” and this was not done in the coldest winter months.
But as early as 273 AD, Western Christians had decided on December 25 to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
The December date for the holiday probably arose from a desire to provide an alternative to the Roman “birthday of the unconquered sun” and the Persian birthday of Mithras, both of which were celebrated on or around the winter solstice. A Christian writer explained in 320 AD:
The Eastern church celebrated Christ’s birth and baptism on January 6 until the middle of the 5th century, when the December date for Christmas was adopted there as well and Jesus’ baptism was celebrated on January 6.
An exception to the December date is the Armenian Church, which continues to commemorate both the birth and baptism of Christ on January 6.
In addition to the date, other aspects of Christmas owe their origins to pagan celebrations, such as the Yule log, the Christmas tree, gift-giving, and lights.
The modern Christmas tree tradition probably began in Germany in the 18th century, though some argue that Martin Luther began the tradition in the 16th century.
The popular image of Santa Claus was created by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902), who drew a new image of the character annually, beginning in 1863. By the 1880s, Nast’s Santa had evolved into the form we now recognize. The image was standardized by advertisers in the 1920s.
Father Christmas, who predates Santa Claus, was first recorded in the 15th century and then associated with holiday merrymaking and drunkenness.
In Victorian Britain, his image was remade to match that of Santa. The French Père Noël evolved along similar lines, eventually adopting the Santa image.
In Italy, Babbo Natale acts as Santa Claus, while La Befana is the bringer of gifts and arrives on the eve of the Epiphany. It is said that La Befana set out to bring the baby Jesus gifts, but got lost along the way. Now, she brings gifts to all children. In some cultures, such as Germany, Santa Claus is accompanied by Knecht Ruprecht, or Black Peter.
Its difficult in such a troubled world to justify purposely over indulge without a tinge of shame.
So Christmas for me is sharing no matter how small some of my good fortune with those of us less fortunate. Christmas is becoming Consciousness of the world around you.
Our minds cannot begin to understand what was involved in God’s becoming man. For nearly 2,000 years, debate has been raging about who Jesus really is. Cults and skeptics have offered various explanations.
They’ll say He is one of many gods, a created being, a high angel, a good teacher, a prophet, and so on.
The common thread of all such theories is that they make Jesus less than God.
No matter what, CHRISTMAS IS ABOUT THE NEED TO BE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR EXISTENCE AND WHAT IS ABOUT. SHOULD BE PARAMOUNT.
WHERE DID WE COME FROM. HOW DID THE UNIVERSE COME INTO EXISTENCE. WHO MADE ALL OF IT?
Some scientists say there was this big explosion that eventually formed a primordial swamp, and … Science cannot explain it.
WHEN YOU REALIZE THE SIZE OF EARTH IN THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE IT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
Paul was writing to the Christians at Colossae.
The city was under the influence of what came to be known as gnosticism. Its adherents fancied themselves the only ones who had access to the truth, which they believed was so complex that common people couldn’t know it. Among other things, they taught philosophical dualism–the idea that matter is evil and spirit is good. They believed that because God is spirit, He is good, but He could never touch matter, which is evil.
Therefore they also concluded that God couldn’t be the creator of the physical universe, because if God made matter, He would be responsible for evil. And they taught that God could never become a man, because as a man He would have to dwell in a body made of evil matter.
Those pre-gnostics explained away the incarnation by saying that Jesus was a good angel whose body was only an illusion.
That teaching and others like it pervaded the early church; many of the New Testament epistles specifically refute pre-gnostic ideas.
No matter how flagrantly men may abuse this holiday, they cannot rob devout believers of its wonder and glory as expressed by the angel of old, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10, 11).
How little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time.
So this Christmas be Consciousness:
Remember every time you hit the like button everything you do not like is being filtered.
There’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.
My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.
For me, as for others, the Net media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.
It is replacing real wisdom with the conceit of wisdom.
It is filling us up with “content,” to the point that we are sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
It is destroying deep thinking, and eroding quiet spaces.
It is replacing compassion with selfishness. It is partly to blame for the current world conflicts.
Our thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality. A form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source we have already visited.
Smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
They are becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears and into our minds.time from human events.
We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.
But there comes a design point when there are so many tools available that our environments lose their simplicity and the cost in added complexity outweighs the benefits of convenience.
In fact it is makes us demonstrably less efficient. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.
The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV, our conscience.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image
Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.
But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
Printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.
Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our
We can turn the ringer off our phones, we can close our doors, we can auto-filter our email, we can personalize search engines, ask people to honor privacy, and so forth. But blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact and even filtering email is not a serious solution.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Google carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Which is totally untrue.
Their desire is to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”
A load of cobblers. To solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.
If our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence it would be more than unsettling. We would drain of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” turning our thoughts and actions into scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.
Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
Remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.
The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Every information technology carries an intellectual ethic. We stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
What the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
The missing premise is quality: The ratio of high quality to low quality information is falling.
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.
Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus.
Pushed information is information arriving in our work space over which we have little short-term control – the memos, letters, newspapers, email, telephone calls, journals, calendars etc. that land in one of our in boxes. To deal with it we have to make decisions. Is this garbage? Might it be useful? When? Where should I put it? Must I make a new file or new category for this?
Pulled or retrievable information is information we can tap into when we want to find an answer to a question or acquire background knowledge on a topic. Most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.
Our lives ought to get easier in information rich environments but the question is at what cost.
He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.
Yet no search engine seems to return hits with sufficient precision to save us from having to browse dozens of useless pages in our effort to berry pick the best items. The result is that we spend more time searching
more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them.
we need a new theoretical understanding of our activity space and our dynamic relation to our environments.Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload.
As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.
Yesterday the UK government spent 10 hours debating whether to expand its Bombing on ISIS/Daesh into Syria.
During the debate there was hardly a mention of Arms Sales other than,
“Isis didn’t come from nowhere, its weapons don’t come from nowhere. We sell vast amounts of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and a number of other places” Mr Corbett.
When it comes to how arms sales are perceive – whether they are British or US or whatever – it tends to be seen as a domestic economic issue.
The Middle East has now descended into proxy wars, sectarian conflicts and battles against terrorist networks. Countries in the region that have stockpiled American military hardware are now actually using them and wanting more.
Adding to the concern is the fact that the spending spree on arms comes against the background of a marked increase in military interventions by countries in the region since the Arab spring in 2011. Saudi Arabia has intervened in Bahrain (at the request of that kingdom’s ruler during the so-called Pearl revolution), in Yemen in 2009 and again in Yemen this year.
$18bn expected to be spent on weapons this year.
War is good for business.
In March 2015, the Syrian civil war, rightly declared by the United Nations as the “worst humanitarian disaster since the Cold War,” entered its fifth year.
Today, a number of factors make the conflict intractable.
The revolution began around issues of social inequality and the desire for freedom from fear and repression.
The Syrian civil war was never just about Syria. From the beginning, regional and international powers intervened in the conflict by supporting the different warring parties.
The rise of mainly foreign jihadist groups like the “Islamic State” (ISIS) have exacerbated the situation by both wrestling further decision-making power away from Syrian actors and by establishing itself as a radical “spoiling” force that would hinder any negotiated political agreement.
As more actors become involved, one constant factor remains: no single group or faction has the military strength to be able to simultaneously defeat all its adversaries and declare military victory.
Russia:
Russia has continued to supply the Syrian military with weapons and equipment throughout the conflict. Moscow insists it is only fulfilling pre-existing contracts and that it is not violating any international sanctions.
The S-300 surface-to-air missile defence systems recently delivered to Syria.
Despite Western pressure, Moscow insisted earlier this year that it would be honouring its previously agreed contract with Damascus for supplying sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems.
Given the unprecedented levels of weapon sales by the west (including the US, Canada and the UK) to the mainly Sunni Gulf states, Vladimir Putin’s decision last week to allow the controversial delivery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran – voluntarily blocked by Russia since 2010 – seems likely to accelerate the proliferation.
Russia has already reportedly sent advanced Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles, SA-17 surface-to-air missiles, and short-range Pantsyr-S missile systems.
Iran:
Tehran is believed to have become a key supplier of rockets, anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Iran has stepped up its military support of Syrian government forces since the end of 2012.
However, Iranian officials deny breaking the UN sanctions imposed on its arms exports.
To evade the sanctions, Tehran has allegedly been transporting most of the weapons through Iraqi airspace on commercial planes and, more recently, overland through Iraq by lorry, something the Iraqi government denies.
Photographs and videos published online appear to provide evidence of recent Iranian arms shipments.
One purportedly shows an Iranian-made rocket, on which the date of manufacture is listed as 2012; another an ammunition crate containing mortar shells made by a Iranian defense ministry subsidiary in 2012.
Syria:
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), have said that the vast majority of its weaponry has been bought on the black market or seized from government facilities.
European Union: May 2011, it imposed an arms embargo on Syria.
As the uprising entered its third year, several member states – led by the UK and France – lobbied to be able to supply arms to “moderate” forces in the opposition.
Despite deep rifts, foreign ministers agreed to let the embargo lapse in May 2013.
Though EU member states do not appear to have already sent arms directly to the rebels, another European country has been linked to a secret, large-scale airlift.
In January 2013, a British blogger began to notice weapons made in the former Yugoslavia were appearing in videos and images posted online by rebels fighting in southern Syria.
The recoilless guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers and shoulder-fired rockets appeared to be from an undeclared surplus from the 1990s Balkan wars stockpiled by Croatia.
Western officials told the New York Times that the weaponry had been sold to Saudi Arabia, and that multiple plane loads had left Croatia since December 2012, bound for Turkey and Jordan.
They were reportedly then given to several Western-aligned FSA groups. Croatia’s foreign ministry and arms-export agency have denied any such shipments occurred.
US:
The US has repeatedly said it is reluctant to supply arms directly to rebel groups because it is concerned that weapons might end up in the possession of militant jihadist groups.
But on 14 June 2013 Washington said it would give the rebels “direct military aid”after concluding Syrian troops had used chemical weapons.
The CIA is reported to have played an important role behind the scenes since 2012, coordinating arms shipments to the rebels by US allies.
In June 2012, US officials said CIA officers were operating in Turkey, helping decide which groups would receive weapons.
The CIA is also reported to have been instrumental in setting up the alleged secret airlift of weapons from Croatia.
Turkey:
The Turkish government is a firm supporter of the rebels, but has not officially approved the sending of military aid.
However, reports suggest it has played a pivotal role in sharp acceleration of arms shipments to the rebels since late 2012.
The Turkish authorities had oversight over much of the airlift of weapons from Croatia, “down to affixing transponders to trucks ferrying the military goods through Turkey so it might monitor shipments as they move by land into Syria”, according to the New York Times.
Jordan:
The Yugoslav-made weapons first seen in the hands of FSA units in southern Syria in early 2013 are believed to have been smuggled over the border with Jordan.
The Jordanian government has denied any role and said it was trying to prevent smuggling.
However, the New York Times found evidence to suggest Royal Jordanian Air Force transport planes and Jordanian commercial aircraft had been involved in the alleged airlift of arms from Croatia.
Iraq:
Syria’s rebels, who are drawn mostly from the country’s majority Sunni community, are said to have acquired weapons, ammunition and explosives from Sunni tribesmen and militants in neighbouring Iraq.
Arms are reportedly smuggled over the long, porous border and sold or given to the rebels. Al-Qaeda in Iraq played an active role in founding the al-Nusra Front and provides it with money, expertise and fighters.
Lebanon:
As with Iraq, Lebanon’s Sunni community is reported to have helped supply Syrian rebel fighters with small arms purchased on the black market or shipped from other countries in the region, including Libya.
The Lebanese authorities have seized unmarked shipments of ammunition, including rocket-propelled grenades.
The Syrian town of Qusair, which was recaptured by government forces in June 2013, was a transit point for weapons smuggled from north-eastern Lebanon.
Libya:
The North African state has been a key source of weapons for the rebels.
The UN Security Council’s Group of Experts, which monitors the arms embargo imposed on Libya during the 2011 uprising, said in April 2013 that there had been illicit transfers of “heavy and light weapons, including man-portable air defence systems, small arms and related ammunition and explosives and mines”.
“The significant size of some shipments”, it said, “and the logistics involved suggest that representatives of the Libyan local authorities might have at least been aware of the transfers, if not actually directly involved.”
Saudi Arabia:
Saudi Arabia is reported recently to have taken the lead in channelling financial and military support to the rebels.
Unlike Qatar, the Gulf kingdom is believed to be suspicious of the Islamist rebel groups, and has focused on supporting nationalist and secular factions of the FSA.
In late 2012, Riyadh is said to have financed the purchase of “thousands of rifles and hundreds of machine guns”, rocket and grenade launchers and ammunition for the FSA from a Croatian-controlled stockpile of Yugoslav weapons.
These were reportedly flown – including by Royal Saudi Air Force C-130 transporters – to Jordan and Turkey and smuggled into Syria.
Qatar:
Until now, Qatar is widely believed to have been the main supplier of weapons to the rebels.
The Gulf emirate has denied providing any arms, although it has promised to support the opposition “with whatever it needs”.
Most of the weapons are thought to have been given to hard-line Islamist rebel groups, particularly those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has acted as an intermediary.
This has reportedly drawn criticism from Western officials who say many of the groups are extremist.
Qatar Emiri Air Force transporter planes flew to Turkey with supplies for the Syrian rebels as early as January 2012, according to the New York Times
By autumn 2012, Qatari aircraft were landing at Esenboga airport, near Ankara, every two days.
Qatari officials insisted they were carrying non-lethal aid.
A complete and detailed picture of the arms race in the Middle East is impossible to construct.
But the availability of weapons in the region, from which British firms make billions of pounds a year, was a “contributory factor” in the ongoing conflict.
In 2013 the Independent reported that the UK made £12.bn from arms sales to repressive regimes around the world, most of which are in the Middle East and Africa.
Over the last decade, the Middle East has become a focal point of the world arms buildup. Each year, the regional arsenal grows, as the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and others ship billions of dollars worth of weapons to the countries there.
Today, the region receives over half of all arms deliveries to the Third World, and more than a quarter of all world arms shipments.
In less than 20 years, these have grown tenfold in value — from $4.7 billion in 1962 to $46.7 billion in 1980, nearly nine times the world average.
When the states of the world are ranked by military spending per capita, six of the top seven are in the Middle East.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Brunei, Kuwait, United States, Soviet Union and France.
By the end of the 1970s, the region was spending between 13 and 15 percent of its gross national product for the military, compared with 8.3 percent for the Warsaw Pact countries, the next highest.
If Israel’s battle-ready reserves of some 300,000 are included, the Middle East now has almost twice the total military manpower of the US, and is approaching the 4.7 million total for the US and all NATO countries except Turkey.
During the same period, operational combat aircraft in the region grew by more than 50 percent, from 2,900 to 4,400, surpassing the size of the combined European NATO air forces.
The one Canadian deal alone – to supply Saudi Arabia with light armoured vehicles – will account for 20% of the military vehicles sold globally in years covered by the contract.
With conflicts raging in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, this is just the thin edge of the wedge. Saudi has booked enough arms imports in 24 months for them to be worth $10bn a year.
Arms sales to the top five purchasers in the region – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Egypt and Iraq – surge this year to more than $18bn, up from $12bn last year.
Abu Dhabi staged the 13th edition of the International Defence Exhibition and Conference in 2015 it attracted 1,200 exhibiting companies and over 100’000 visitors.
According to the New York Times, defense industry officials have notified Congress that they are expecting additional requests from Arab states fighting Isis – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt – for thousands of new US-made weapons, including missiles and bombs, to rebuild depleted arms stockpiles.
Haider al-Abadi, disclosed that he was seeking arms worth billions of dollars from Washington – with payment deferred – for the battle against Daesh/Islamic State (Isis).
Ironically, among the key weapons suppliers in the arms race are permanent members of the UN security council who have been at the center of two unconventional arms control initiatives – disarming the Syrian government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and negotiating for a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme.
They showed how Saudi Arabia had become the world’s largest importer of weapons and fourth largest military spender and that other Middle East states were sharply increasing their arms purchases.
Last week France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, disclosed progress in talks to sell Rafale fighter jets to the UAE, one of the Middle East’s biggest and most aggressive arms buyers.
CHINA could be on the verge of teaming up with Russia to unleash its military might in Syria and destroy Islamic State (ISIS).
For perspective:
During the first year of the war on terror, approximately 72 million rounds were expended in Iraq and another 21 million in Afghanistan — about 2,000 rounds per war fighter.
There are over 80 million gun owners in the U.S. If every single one went out and bought just 100 rounds – barely enough for one afternoon on the range – it would require 8 billion rounds of ammo.
If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.
So how do we reverse the trend?
To do this,
Our approach needs to go well beyond the current focus on militarily downgrading and defeating ISIS and keeping the conflict from spreading to Syria’s neighboring countries — a strategy that has arguably already failed.
Syria is now functions as a war economy, and fighting is seen as one of the few options available to generate income.
Within the country, there are over 7 million people who have been internally displaced and over 12 million people who need basic humanitarian aid to survive.
Current international funding and resources fall short of covering Syria’s enormous humanitarian needs — including basic food assistance — and it must be increased.
What’s more, the international community’s priority needs to be to work on ensuring access for humanitarian aid workers, as they cannot reach parts of the Syrian population, whether due to the Syrian regime’s obstruction or ISIS’s extensive control.
With no clear military victory in sight, a political arrangement is still the best — albeit extremely complex — bet to see an end to the war.
Only a stronger, non-jihadist Syrian opposition can ultimately wrestle control and support away from radical groups like ISIS/Daesh and al-Nusra and sit at the negotiating table.
Something’s got to give.
And when it does, these are some possible scenarios:
If Assad is killed, the regime will likely fall and the rebels could claim victory. That would lead to an attempt at a transitional government, likely composed of members from the newly formed Syrian National Council, despite its immediate problems and the fact that jihadists have been the most organized rebel force up to this point.
A truly dangerous scenario would be if it went from the proxy war which it now is to a full-blown world war with Iran-Syria-Russia on side against the West and its Gulf allies.
The destabilization of the entire region. Syria would then turn into a free-for-all.
President Bashar al-Assad is given a safe passage out of Syria to end the nation’s bloodshed. This great compromise is not likely since Assad vowed he would never leave Syria alive. France is good at giving Mass killers a home.
With the amount of arms sales there is every likely hood that the Arab forces could become the Middle East’s newest source of Anti- democratic, sectarian- based, instability, potentially intensifying the Sunni-Shia conflict.
While most of the warring parties are exhausted, they also believe they have no alternative to war, that the only possible conclusion is either victory or death.
We live in an imperfect world. Poverty, disease, lack of education, environmental destruction –
If you Google what is wrong with the World you will get realms on what is wrong without any resolutions.
The problems are obvious the solutions are not so.
Now don’t get me wrong the Internet has opened my eyes to all sorts of problems, but I see the same world as I saw before, but I see it in a different light.
Some thins which lay in the shadows have begun to glow and other things that seemed so important have become faded and dim. My values have begun to turn inside out and now I locate my home in myself, one voice that might change another.
There is so much communication these days nobody has time to listen.
Nobody is any longer quite sure what is true or untrue.
If we want to achieve anything, what, in the world, would we have to change? We need to see what is happening without illusion.
Can we do anything about it?
This is the answer — We will have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves.Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are — our very biology.
You may think that this is impossible but it will not be long before we will have to say hallow to a new species of Sapiens that have had their DNA tweaked. Its called CRISPR. https://youtu.be/SuAxDVBt7kQ
If you think we got problems wait until we have designer babies playing God driven by Gene Drive for lack of a better word.
There are sure to be a few rogues.
Therefore there is no better time to star teaching how much we have in common and to accept an opinion other than our own.
The source of every single problem in this world, past, present, or future, can be traced to a lack of or miscommunication. To how things are split. Gene splitting combined with Artificial Intelligence will be the final straw that breaks the camel back.
Back to the present.
You cannot accomplish peace with war and you can’t have peace during war.
You would think with all the advances in communication we would have a greater understanding of the world problems. The opposite is truth.
As communication improves the options for encouraging obnoxiousness get ever more widespread.
As I see it there is a need for this to be corrected if we are to evolve at all as a species.
This can only be achieved if what is posted and spread by Social Media carries the same labeling that our food is required to carry on its packaging. Green for true, Yellow it needs authentication, Red false.
Another words we must force the function of the Internet to marry together the true reality of this world and the reality of the next.
How are we to know the actual intentions of people unless they communicate them in an effective way?
If everyone could just say what they mean and mean what they say, we’d all be better off.
Just look at the mess we are all in.
There is no room for The Manichean (which is an old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means “duality,” so if your thinking is Manichean, you see things in black and white. Life can be divided neatly between good or evil, light or dark, or love and hate. ) a view of the world that is self-justifying.
For example if the US, the West and Israel stand for democracy and individual liberties against totalitarianism (fascist, communist or Islamic), then their struggle is inherently just.
If the West burnt fossil fuels to achieve economic growth are we not obligated to compensated the rest of the world for not doing so.
The solution is: As I have posted on several occasions.
TO MAKE PROFIT FOR PROFIT SAKE PAY. ( SEE PREVIOUS POSTS)
Taking Syria as another example.
The roots of problem lie in Inequality of Capitalism that has given birth to all that went before the war.
Oil for Money, Oil for Arms, Oil for natural resources, Oil for the Stock Exchange, Oil wealth for the few. Oil for political Power. Oil for Sovereign Wealth Funds that plunder the world. Oil for Water. Oil for technology. You could say Oil for life.
It is now not merely a struggle between civilizations, but for civilization against totalitarian barbarism.
As oil is running out why do we turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia Oil beheadings in order to bomb ISIS. The answer is Money.
Naturally, the defenders of democracy are entitled to use force. The loss of life on both sides is to be blamed on those who threaten the Western way of life.
This is called collateral damage so as not to upset us. Its proper name is killing innocent bystanders.
We often hear that the West should encourage Muslims to adopt its values, but “the choice is their own.” That is, the burden is upon them to demonstrate their fitness to participate in international society, and the West will render judgment in accordance with its own criteria.
This attitude relieves the West of any sense of responsibility for current conditions in the Islamic world or elsewhere whether for imperialism, capitalism, short-sighted Western support for repressive regimes in the region or anything else.
The Middle East result purely from the unwillingness of Arabs and Muslims to face facts and look beyond grievances. This combined with the settlement of Jews in Israel how are unwilling to offer full citizenship to encourage a one state solution and the dismantling of its Berlin Wall. It is one thing to argue that culture matters. It is quite another to argue that it is all that matters.
The Arabs never have and never will like Jews simply because of a lack of communication. Why do they hate each other? We don t know, and neither do they probably.
Just because some Arab s great-great-great grand-uncle took some Jews great-great-great grand cousins goat that means that they have to kill each other today.
However no problem is simple. Until such time as the Muslim world makes the correct ideological choice, the West may have no choice but to vigorously confront its enemies.
It seems we have forgotten that not every answer lies in the barrel of a gun.
The past 50 years we have witnessed an important rapprochement between history and the social sciences, which has transformed history as a discipline.
“Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other people’s in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficial phenomena.”
That such an antiquated view of history could appeal to so many in the policy making world indicates just how fully we are committed to a cataclysmic conflict with the Islamic world.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such a conflict is exactly what Bernard Lewis and his disciples desire, and that they just may succeed in provoking it. ( According to Bernard Lewis, this is not Islam itself that is an obstacle to modernization but an error of assessment on the causes of the decline of the Middle East, which locks people into a too mentality victims, seeking among other reasons for the failures of their country.)
All wars end with the residue of another war.
The next generation has already fallen to its knees and given up the fight when it hasn’t even begun.
Our planet is slowly dying and we are the reason the blame for its slow demise.
We fill her oceans with black poison. We fill her skies with acid. We cut down all the trees she spent years to grow. We cover her soil with blood and we use her as our own personal dump.
We need to forget our differences…it does not matter the color of your skin, where you were born, the way you talk or even the way you walk…cause we are all the same…we are all human beings.
But it’s the smallest variations that make us the most unique species on this planet. Yes there’s a lot wrong with the world but only we can change those wrongs into rights.
We have the power, we have the voice, we have the will and we have the choice.
Miscommunication passed down through generations leads to deep seeded differences between people who wouldn’t normally have any qualms with each other.
The key to a better future for the entire world population lies in giving priority to the development of human capabilities.
There is little point in the Paris Climate Change Conference agreeing to some international package if we ignore the underlining problems that produce Wars. Inequality :
The immediate priority must be universal primary and secondary education – all children in school at least through to age 15 – everywhere in the world.
Health span is a big and urgent thing,because if you’re not alive,then all the other things will be to little avail.
Existential risk is also a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species.
If governments are serious about achieving their aims, they must base their decisions on hard evidence and not received wisdom.
Governments need to find better ways of measuring progress than simply looking at wealth.
We must put a stop to the free-for-all out on the oceans to have any chance of saving their riches from the ravages of climate change.
Another words we must put a stop to Profit for Profit Sake.
Humans started to separate from the rest of the great apes about 7M years ago and we became modern humans 200k years ago.
Are we now throwing the old blueprint out the window?
So Are we more attuned to our modern needs for the twenty-first century and beyond?
Have we moved beyond the paradigm of living in a nuclear family home in the suburbs?
What do the objects we select tell us about the relationships that exist between designer, retailer and consumer?
What is the design thinking behind some of the everyday items that shape our lives?
First we have to look at ourselves and according to the fountain of modern-day knowledge Google it.
An average person.
Spends 25 years sleeping.
10.3 years working.
48 days having sex.
Women spend 17 years of their lives trying to lose weight.
Spends 9.1 years watching TV.
Spends 2 years watching commercials.
Spends 1.1 years cleaning.
Spends 2.5 years cooking.
Spends 3.66 years eating, about 67 minutes a day.
Spends 4.3 years driving a car.
Spends 3 months of our life in traffic, about 38 hours a year.
Spends 1.5 years in the bathroom.
Spends a total of 92 days on the toilet.
Spends 70% of our waking life in front of digital media.
We laugh out loud 290,000 times in your life.
We walk a total of 110,000 miles.
We spend 90% of your time indoors.
We consume. 1 teaspoons of alcohol per day.
We have between 4 and 6 dreams a night for a total of 2,000 a year.
We fart 402,000 times in your lifetime.
We spend 14 days of your life kissing.
We drink 12,000 cups of coffee.
If you’re more into tea, you drink 48 pounds in your lifetime.
Women spend nearly 1 year deciding what to wear.
The average man will spend 1 year staring at women.
Women spend 8 years of their life shopping.
Women spend 1.5 years doing their hair.
An office worker spends 5 years sitting at a desk.
The average employee spends 2 years sitting in work meetings.
The average person swears 2,000,000 times.
Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime
Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)
the human body is about 60 percent water.
You pass around 42,759…. Liters of Urine in an average life time.
You are awake 16 to 18 hours a day.
“The New Frugality”
The average adult spends more than 20 hours online a week.
On average, people spend more than 490 minutes of their day with some sort of media,.with global average consumption set to rise to 506 minutes.
The internet accounted for 13% of average daily media use in 2010, but is set to reach nearly 30% in 2017.
Instant messaging use has leaped from 38% of mobile phone users in 2013 to 42% in 2014, driven by services such as Whats App and Facebook Messenger.
The mobile phone is now the primary device used for gaming with a quarter of mobile users playing games at least once a week.
80% of internet users aged between 35 and 44 are now on social media.
70% of internet users say they feel comfortable giving away personal information on the internet, including their home address, and a quarter say they don’t read website terms and conditions or privacy statements at all.
Are all becoming shut-ins.?
Or are we closer today to a global revolution than ever before. Can you feel it?
Or are we all disappearing into the Cloud.
The Question is how can we ensure that this is not going to happen.
HERE IS A SUGGESTION THAT COULD NOT BRAKE DOWN THE MESS WE SEE THE WORLD IN.
A UNIVERSITY TRAVEL SUBSIDIARITY AIR TICKET AWARDED TO GRADUATES.
THE SUBSIDY COULD BE GRADED ACCORDING TO THE MARKS RECEIVED.
STUDENTS COULD BE ENCOURAGED TO SAVE THE BALANCE DURING THEIR COURSE.
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE TRAVEL TO OPEN THE MIND.
Here below are a few observations to help you make your mind up.
We don’t have to be united. We don’t have to agree. We don’t always have to “stand together,” even. If one thing changes everything will change.
We do however have to live on the same planet with conflicts of ideologies political, or religious.
Our painting now has all its elements Money, Religion, the Gun, Humanity, Earth and Woman,and it need of completion, framed and displayed.
Before we go any further if there is an Artist out there and a Sponsor or rich person that wants to do something with this piece of incredible art, fee free to do so on a crediting me with the concept.
We have placed Woman sitting on top of Earth which is represented by a background wash of intense color that shines through a transparent wash of humanity. She is sitting with her back to us. We have then peppered our canvas with the gun, money and religion.
The question is how do we make all the elements come together.
Rather than the usual frame we are going to use a circular frame which will be hung in a large Plexiglas dark glass Pipe. The pipe to represent tunnel vision.
We will fill the pipe with crystal clear waters the source of life and illuminate it with pulsing white light from back-end. This will simply enhances the natural beauty of our painting which is hidden in the transparent wash of humanity.
Light in general changes as it penetrates into the ocean., which is exactly what to achieve with our painting of the world. Placing the viewer in the euphotic zone.
Because all life in the oceans is ultimately dependent upon the light which is selectively scatters and absorbs in water it will act as a filtration of the viewers wavelengths of visible.
Our Pipe will be suspended from the ceiling at the height of an average person.
This will represent Space in which our planet exists. It will also create a clear space for the viewer cutting out any peripheral distractions.
The viewer will be invited to take a set of earphone, because sound is the one element we could not capture on canvas.
The CD will reflect the sounds that are relevant to our elements in the composition.
The “goodness” of sound is a totally scientific and quantifiable thing that allows no room for personal preference, bias, or interpretation. Its heard in a thousand different directions.
There you have it.
I hope the this series of posts has led you through the looms of life that has made our world so difficult to live as one family of humans.
We can only hope with these many-coloured skeins, may we weave the pattern of or spiritual tapestry to give covering for lives yet unborn.
When you don’t know how to do something; where the first place you turn?
The internet Right?
It doesn’t help you truly.
All it takes is for you to imagine the average human being is like you.
If you can do that, you make a better world, and a more difficult one for groups like ISIS to exist in.
The international community is by now quite experienced in pretending that the massive humanitarian crisis exists in some acceptable and remediable form, destined to improve with time.
Insisting on the humanity of the victims is also a political act, and as tragedy is spun into civilisational conflict or an excuse to victimise those who are already victims, it’s a very necessary one.
The world has been encouraged in this dangerously expedient ignorance by the media. The history of misrepresentation is long and ugly.
“Entire generations may be lost” It requires a willful blindness not to see what is occurring.
Don’t close your eyes to the truth. The truth is difficult to accept at
times. This is a humanitarian crisis !! not just caused by Climate
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