every passing day one notices things that reinforce the belief that humanity is dead or nearly dead and that the end is just around the corner.
Delhi schools are being asked to stay closed. The Airtel Delhi half marathon is being advised to cancel by the IMA. We as a generation have failed our children, they can no longer go out and play they have to skip school just so that they can avoid breathing in the pollution. What do we do about it? We bicker like mangy dogs about the merits of Modi over Kejriwal. As if these politicians have a heart or a soul and will deliver solutions. We are willing to kill each other because of our political affiliations, we are not capable enough to clean up our cities. It is a matter of 2 at most 3 years before we might need to abandon the city of Delhi if this situation is not tackled head on. For the sake of the children I hope the armchair politicians will get up and take action rather than continue passing the blame between AK49 and Feku.
A deranged bloke enters a church and opens random fire, people praying 26 of them, are instantly massacred. At least half of them children. The youngest victim was under one year old. A mother died trying to protect her four children, two of whom she could not save from the gunfire. What is the world debating “this guy was a white male, do we use the word terrorist or just mentally deranged after all terrorist is reserved for muslims”. No one is talking about gun control and those who do mention it are told “it was a guy with a gun who prevented further mayhem”. Right so lets give every person on the planet a gun and ensure there’ll be peace. For pure statistical perspective, Guns per 100 residents:
- US 112
- Serbia 58
- Yemen 55
- Cyprus 36
- Saudi Arabia 35
- Finland/Iraq 34
- Norway 31
Deaths due to gun violence in America are 25 times more than the average of all other developed countries (source: Gun Violence in the US). And what do we start talking about when the next incident takes place? Was it a terror attack? Did the perpetrator convert at some point? Has ISIS taken credit for this attack? Do we talk gun control? No, we do say “it is too early to be talking about gun control lets not politicize this matter”. The NRA of course is a big supporter and funder for whichever party is in power, can’t take no risks with the second amendment.
The Paradise papers report broke a couple of days back. In India the usual suspects figure on the list these include Amitabh Bachchan, Jayant Sinha, Vijay Mallaya, Sachin Pilot among some 714+ Indians in the complete list. The point is not that if someone figures on a Panama papers list or a Paradise papers list they are automatically branded as anti national or tax evaders. The point is that how long does it take to investigate, decide and pronounce sentence? We make fun of the primitiveness of our neighboring country. Blame them for everything that is inherently wrong with our lives and yet those camel bumpers, goat muckers have conducted a trial based on the Panama papers, impeached a sitting Prime minister, thrown him in jail and attached the properties owned by his family while further investigations into their individual graft cases continue. Let’s leave that aside as well because this is an argument that will never find a satisfactory conclusion. Look at the soullessness of the whole cockamamie. The British queen, that last vestige of a completely frivolous and utterly hilarious fancy dress party, figures in the Paradise papers. So essentially the British citizens pay taxes, a portion of these taxes is given to the monarchy and the queen turns around and siphons away this money to the Bermuda based Applebys for investment in tax havens so that she does not need to pay taxes on her income. Wow!!! A small sum of 10million GBP was invested. The queen of course says she had no idea and it was all the doing of her financial advisors but who are we kidding here. The queen is an example of apathy. There are hundreds of filthy rich businesses who have evaded close to 2Billion GBP in taxes. Monies that could’ve wiped away hunger and homelessness from the whole world had it been properly used. How much is enough? What do you need money for? Do the rich anymore have morals or is religion and nationalism a tool only to control the masses with?
Eggs cost 70 bucks a dozen today, yesterday it was 60 bucks a dozen. Coriander, that neglected and unknown condiment which used to be thrown in gratis by the vegetable vendor costs 60 bucks for a few sprigs today. Tomatoes are at 80-120 bucks a kilo. Milk is at 64 bucks a litre…. prices change daily or at the very least weekly. Commodities trading is real we could soon start trading in eggs and tomatoes if this goes on, onions as well. A LPG gas cylinder used for cooking purposes in most Indian homes costs 714 bucks in Mumbai. It used to cost 432 bucks just last July I have the receipts to back up my claim. Has my income or the salary that my wife makes gone up by 65.27%?? I don’t think so, I would know for sure but no I don’t think so. Taxes have gone up by at the very least 5% and in some cases as much as 23%. Let’s say an average of 10% increase in taxes, a 50% increase in cost of commodities and an average 10-20% increase in incomes. Are we as a nation focused on these issues? No sir we are worried about beef, Taj Mahal versus Tejo Mahalaya, Gujarat elections, love Jihad, the opposition trying to pants the government and the government 100% of the time in election mode. People today cry themselves hoarse about the way invaders from all over the world massacred and converted, looted and plundered India. I look at them and feel awed. How ignorant and idiotic can humanity get. You are forgetting that there was no India to begin with. India as an entity is roughly 70 years old, less actually. Before that there were kingdoms, small tribal fiefdoms and rajwadas that were always fighting amongst themselves over cattle and water and land and crop and well about everything including pots and pans….. how do you think invaders got in each and every time? Because we were not a single entity to begin with. It was Nehru with Sardar Patel who actually brought us together, of course for the purpose of better management the British also considered us as a single unit and gave us a unified identity but formally India was born in 1947. Our current efforts to blame every adventurer, invader, dacoit, thug who passed through these lands that we today call India, for every thing that is wrong with us as a brotherhood of savagely divided splinter groups is highly misplaced. We were not to begin with, period. and yet we fight over a legacy of what was not because unscrupulous politicians, those soulless ghouls, will have you believe that you are facing a liquidity crunch not because of the bad economic policies and inept financial management of the government but because of the invaders who killed, converted and otherwise tortured the India…. that wasn’t. A gullible brainwashed nation believes and fights each other rather than the real enemy.
A coal fired power plan witnesses a horrific horrific accident. Images of mutilated bodies are all over the place. The debate is not on how to make life easier for the survivors and dependents of deceased. It’s about who left his election rally and who continued to campaign in his election rally. Issues being lost in the flames of election rallies.
Not a day passes by that nuclear nations do not wag their nukes in each others faces much like in a locker room display of verility. The world is sitting on enough nukes, 14900 at last count of which 10000 are on active standby, enough to destroy the lives of millions of people. Millions not thousands. It would behoove a sane person to try and deescalate to get to a point where arms and ammunition become less and less necessary but no we have Donald Trump and Kim Jon Un wagging their dicks at each other in full public view. Every day threatening to go nuclear on each other. What sort of a world are we bringing up our kids in where responsible positions are taken up by the degenerates, the bullies, the polarizers and immature senile scum of the earth. We are witnessing a return to the jungle. Might is right is slowly becoming more prevalent today no thanks to our stellar leadership and not just in India. If you have the funds and the will to shove your agenda then down everyones throats it will go. Period. Discourse online, political or otherwise is puerile and putrid to say the very least. No limits, no holds barred, nothing and no one is sacred any more.
And to this whole potent pungent soup of inhumanity we are poised at a stage where we want to add the one final ingredient, Artificial Intelligence. Good luck with launching an intelligent learning entity that scans millions if not billions of interactions online on a daily basis and attempts to learn how to think from them. Interactions that are so putrid and negative that the best you can expect from an Intelligent system that learns from these interactions about us humans is that it would want to eliminate the minorities one by one till there is only uniformity of thought. A matrix like evolution and subsequent amalgamation of the machines. It seems like science fiction and it seems as if this would never happen. Seems as if one has been watching and reading too much sci fi. Well lets see how does AI work? It learns from it’s environment. How does an AI system form opinions? It picks up the popular opinion and imbibes it as even though it has been programmed to think logically to get to that stage it first needs to see what logic is and that is already hijacked by the bots and paid trolls online. So essentially what do we have here? An intelligent system that thinks like most of humanity and abhors/does not understand any divergence from the norm. How much of a hop skip is it from here to such a system or a collection of such systems eliminating the counter-view altogether. Still don’t believe me then read up about Cabridge Analytica and see how we’ve already been gamed by the system. AI is going to be the end game. It’s not science fiction. It’s real and it’s happening even as you read this. People like Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson and Jack Ma are warning humanity about the dangers of forging ahead recklessly with AI. There must be a reason. On the other hand flukes like Zukerbergs, who just got lucky, are going full steam ahead. That alone should trigger alarms all over the farm house.
The end is near, however, we can maybe do something about it. After all we did not come this far to vaporize into oblivion? Our kids deserve a better environment, we all deserve good food. Maybe we need to start by asking the right questions, of ourselves and of our politicians. My favorite:
- When are we going to see an equal distribution of wealth?
- can we expect governments to stop scaring and polarizing citizens and start reducing the stockpile of armaments?
- When will be see the nukes completely disarmed?
- can we please make it a rule that religion is personal and there will be no religious/spiritual leaders anywhere? They just muck with the emotions of gullible fools who go to them for guidance.
What are yours?