ar, but when the Cambridge Analytica story broke one year ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s initial response was a long and deafening silence.
It took five full days for the founder and CEO of Facebook – the man with total control over the world’s largest communications platform – to emerge from his Menlo Park cloisters and address the public. When he finally did, he did so with gusto, taking a new set of talking points (“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you”) on a seemingly unending roadshow, from his own Facebook pageto the mainstream press to Congress and on to an oddly earnest discussion series he’s planning to subject us to at irregular intervals for the rest of 2019.
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e position in the climate change debate. It is almost as if, simply by demonstrating their supposed credentials and commitment, the ‘answer’ and with it salvation, will be found. The ‘solutions’ to climate change repeatedly proferred by Western leaders, think-tanks and board rooms – technical fixes, managerial reorganisations and diktats from on high - recall the workings and mindset of defunct communist regimes. Put aside political ideology, however, and the notion that technocratic, scientific and political elites have’the answers’ by dint of their societal standing, practically ensures that the one thing rarely opened up to further examination is what drives their self-referential interests, values, hierarchies, mores, or - for that-matter - epistemologies, in the fist place. Even less discussed is the possibility that it might be exactly these imperatives which are acting as an intertial brake on meaningful action, or, worse still, lie at the very not of why we are in these dire straits. Mark Levene & David Cromwell June 2007 BE ASSURED our new masters of the globe are saying to us “rest assured we are not intent on destroying the world, but doing everything in our power to save it.” But the truth is that we most all individually and collectively question that assumption; and must do so by challenging the social, economic and political parameters within which these diverse elite actors (celebrities of al) assume a basis for action (or inaction) on climate change. The essential inadequacy of the elite postion rests on an unwillingness, indeed inability, to accept anthropogenic climate change as an inevitable consequence of their self-interested obsession with the need for ever continuing growth of our globalising economic system. Only by rethinking the operating premises of that are we likely to have any chance of moving towards a safer and more sustainable future.
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his life and changed the lives of everyone who looks beyond his/her nose and asks what kind of a world we live in ...
Edgar ...
Dr. Walter Schempp, a German scientist who happens to be a descendant of Kepler, discovered the Quantum Hologram fifty years ago or so, and this shows that Cartesian duality, the dominant belief of the past four hundred years, that body and mind are realms of reality that DO NOT interact - IS totally WRONG. Schempp's Quantum Holography, is showing us that the intuitive communication I have experienced in space - and that others are also experiencing - is more fundamental than our normal perceptions. In English we call intuition our sixth sense, but we should really call it our first sense because it is rooted in the quantum world and the communication to which it testifies has been around long before human sensory mechanisms were evolved. There is an intrinsic awareness in nature that reaches down all the way to the quantum level, to the subatomic particles that make up matter. That to me, and I know you will agree, Ervin, is exactly where the crux of the matter lies. There is a form of consciousness in nature. This consciousness is as important and as basic as energy.
Ervin ...
A few months ago quantum physicists Leonard Susskind, Craig Hogan and Brian Greene - among others - came up with the idea that space-time is a hologram where everything is "entangled". We know that in a hologram all of the information that makes up an image is given everywhere and at the same time, so not time is involved in going from one place to another - everything is present everywhere. This holographic information is likely to be present in the universe, and it is likely to be given for all time. It is not ephemeral. The latest experiment carried out a few months ago testify to this.
This instant interconnection, what physicists call entanglement and nonlocality, may be the key to better understanding of the nature of reality. It is also the secret of a healthier life and a healthier and more sustainable world. At the heart of space and time all things are non locally connected, and we can tap into these "deep connections" and experience the oneness you experienced in space (on your return from the moon). This experience is important for us, because it is the source of our feeling of empathy and solidarity. It motivates us to cooperate, to work together. And cooperation, as we both know, is a basic pre-condition of surmounting the problems we confront in the world today.
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presentation and funding for vulnerable communities will be measures of success in Dubai. But, as controversy over fossil fuel influence rises, what does a successful COP28 look like and is it still achievable?
COP28 should heed the calls of Indigenous people
The expectations of Indigenous peoples’ are clear, according to Joseph Itongwa, regional coordinator for the Indigenous Peoples and Local Network for the Management of Forest Ecosystems of Central Africa (REPALEAC).
“Prioritise our rights, safeguard traditional territories and align climate funds with Glasgow Pledge commitments.”
This pledge, agreed at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, saw countries reaffirm the duty of developed nations to provide developing nations with climate funding. Direct access to these funds, in line with the commitments of this Glasgow Pledge, must be put into practice this year, Itongwa says.
“As a DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) Indigenous leader, envisioning a sustainable future, I urge COP28 to heed the calls of Indigenous people.”
To combat climate change effectively, elevate traditional indigenous knowledge, secure territories, and support us as the guardians.
Joseph Itongwa
Regional coordinator for REPALEAC
Itongwa highlights the specific role of Indigenous women in biodiversity conservation - such as the women already working in the Congo Basin to maintain the forest and biodiversity. Direct funding is needed for these women in Central Africa to help strengthen their local initiatives.
Ensuring voices from a wide variety of Indigenous communities are included in the negotiations and decisions is vitally important to maintaining the health of the planet, according to Itongwa.
“To combat climate change effectively, elevate traditional indigenous knowledge, secure territories, and support us as the guardians,” he says.
Voices of science and youth
Emma Heiling is the founder and CEO of ClimaTalk, a youth-led non-profit that demystifies climate policy and empowers young people in the fight against climate change. The international organisation is heading to Dubai with the aim of making COP28 as accessible and understandable for young people as possible, encouraging them to get involved with international climate policy.
“For us, COP28 would be a success if not the strength of lobbies, the power of money, and the short-sightedness of politics, but rather the voices of science, youth and those from the most affected areas were to determine the outcome,” Heiling says.
She emphasises the need for intergenerational justice, climate justice and for the countries most responsible for the climate crisis to spearhead systemic change at the UN climate conference.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/11/28/want-cop28-to-be-successful-listen-to-science-and-vulnerable-communities-campaigners-say…