Data a few years ago and data now
Data is a new concept to many people, with some associations with the character called Data on Star Trek who could number crunch and instantly calculate risks and precedents and produce a considered opinion. Then there was the need to protect your data from bank fraud or identity theft. But now, as Le Carre says, the protection of data has become so misused that it is the problem, not the solution as it is barring the democratic access of information and blocking accountability. And he should know as he was a spy and protecting the people who took huge risks for other people was paramount. Not any more. Now we only protect people’s profit.
Recoup a small percent of profits & redirect to Nurses, HSE & local business recovery before CETA means no Redress
This will instantly spiral out of control if the CETA Trade Deal is ratified. What we should be doing right now via the public servant (??!!!) Paschal Donohoe and the rest of the Department of Finance is looking at who is busy, able and allowed to work and who is busy, desperate and required to work. As a recovery measure or sustainability measure, 10 cent on every item sold by supermarkets and on line stores should go to the front line workers. People do know that Ireland’s student nurses are now a year into their unpaid ‘work experience’. Pay the poor sods a wage and pay them all danger money out of the riches being made by the multinationals and financial services. Every time a small business is told it can only take card payment, the banks rake in more money. That little card machine they have to obtain costs a lot and it’s ongoing.
Have unpaid full time student nurses got enough 'work experience' for you yet, Minister Paschal Donohoe?
Data used to manipulate us
But data has been valued from the start in the 60s maybe, where it was used mainly to sell products and influence the ideas of people watching the big screen and then, later, millions of little screens. Small groups of people were handsomely paid to join forums where they established what products would be welcomed and how to make them more appealing. After a while, data became a product itself with people finding that their details had been sold on a list to other organizations who had something similar to sell to us. This is not innocent. It is no coincidence the data supporting sales is promoted and the data on the risks, toxicity or threats is hidden under the carpet. We need to wake up to the reality of being sold to. I heard someone only yesterday saying what a nice bit of lamb’s liver they had had for dinner. To a person who is able to listen, that sounds absolutely macabre but it seems almost mean to burst the bubble and suggest consideration of the short life of enslavement and slaughter that the lamb will have gone through. A world of suffering and millions of people indifferent to the suffering and not prepared to change. That doesn’t bode well for the people in countries affected by climate change first or war. It doesn’t bode well for animals and public interest in regard to the many billion animals mercilessly killed each year. Mercilessly might sound dramatic but if people don’t care they are without mercy full stop. That is without considering conditions and killing methods.
Data misused for credibility
In addition to selling, some people who have these lists of our data, weak spots, vulnerabilities, needs and google research enquiries, have stopped trying to sell to us and perfected scamming people, using their familiarity with people’s details as credibility. This became hacking which was cracked down on with full on masters degrees in cyber security, examination in which required that entrants had to try to penetrate greater and greater security systems. Nowadays, our data is used to control us. People themselves are the collateral, the waste and the value of a market. But value, not valued I hasten to add. And look who looks after our data, 'the cloud'? Who owns that? And now they want old coal mineshafts to store data. Banks own all our data, our deeds, our income. Our savings are no more than an entry in their database. Last year alone, 3 made a mistake which they admitted at once but never paid back the 400 euro, despite at least 200 calls and 200 empty promises. I discovered on on-line banking that I was being scammed €60 per month. They were known to the bank's fraud squad but they hadn't bothered to run a scan and see if any other of the bank's customer accounts were paying out to them unfairly. Even worse, they wouldn't even write to ask for the money to be repaid. Believe you me, no one is 'protecting our data' let alone our health or environment. We must individually do it ourselves.
We are not free on any level. We have given ourselves away to big tech, in exchange for a better internet connection and a chance to stream a whole film without interruption. Did we think about it? Think about 3 or 02 or any of the phone and internet companies. Think of Google or any of the instant messaging and social media fleeting post options like FB's 'add to your story'. Your friends may only see it for 24 hours but you can bet your life that someone is harvesting the data from those postings.
We are the collateral
The population are something that a country can borrow against. 10 million Irish have been exported and are living abroad. We must find a way to bring the ones that want to come, home.
The National Biodiversity Data Centre
Miss-spending of Public Money - AGAIN
And I, a consultant with far reaching solutions
Being me, it occurred to me how data could be used constructively. The opportunity came 6 months ago when Ireland’s National Biodiversity Data Centre came up for tender: Just under half a million public money annually. They have five or so academic staff on a salary that they would want to hold on to and therefore not ask questions; between 40 and 50,000. The centre pays a nominal rent to WIT Waterford institute of Technology, for a run down, out of the way one story office with a 10m2 wilded patch of land at the front where they study butterflies and other plant and insect life that arrives. Apart from the staff, the other couple of hundred thousand was off under the headings ‘informatics’, software’, ‘GIS analysis’.
The NBDC have no data and no means of analysis
But there was no analysis being done. The National Parks and even concerned citizens and local governments, with their Climate Charters, are supposed to be able to request reports from the data centre…eg shall we allow a PET (plastics) factory in that area of special conservation….you know, basic stuff that might need protecting or assessing. More importantly than no analysis being done is that little data is being collected. All the data is collected by volunteers, with no incentive at all. And I don’t mean financial even.
Solution to lack of biodiversity monitors
There are plenty of people who would love to learn to identify pollinators, wildlife and walk the same stretch of road or hillside, year after year to observe changes over time. Education would have been enough. There are community groups with water, permaculture, pollinators and other environmental remits. There are social centres promoting mental and emotional wellbeing through re-connecting with nature, there are farms under pressure to transition to organic - And they need not be in the dark or start from scratch. There are many farms that have come to understand biodynamic and permaculture methods and learnt through trial and error which pests can turn out to be beneficial insects and how long soil takes to regain its structure or crops need to generate what they need without recourse to chemicals. There are special interest groups and there are colleges with clubs and societies. All these have a budget to co ordinate and implement systems for monitoring and supporting biodiversity.
Ireland is Despised and Fined by Europe for Our Inaction
In addition, Ireland is being fined by the EU, for every day, that we have failed to comply with our agreement to survey and protect conservation areas (this is nearly twenty years). As everyone in Ireland knows, if any developer wants to do anything, they can. So the team who tendered outlined in detail the ways and need to raise the profile of the Data Dentre (NBDC – www.biodiversityireland). The government needs to be able to report on our climate agreements and application of the European Biodiversity Directives.
Our Economy Depends on Biodiversity Data
Ireland needs to be able to draw down money to take action on those agreements. Local authorities and lawyers need evidence of negative impacts, if they’re to argue against a destructive industry project. So as well as a citizen science recruitment drive to submit data through the open source software app the NBDC uses, we also planned to facilitate the analysis of data too. We would have a forum of doctoral students from different disciplines, who could interrogate the data and extrapolate the implications from their perspective, be it historical, geographical, scientific, environmental or political and their job would be to collectively arrive at and deliver a considered opinion. At the moment, if a report is requested from the data centre, no response is received. These doctoral students would have received a stipend of 10,000 euro a year (7,000 is standard) for their participation and contribution.
Education: Every should know how to monitor
Local pollinators & Species Loss
Our team included a national training school, ready and able to survey and recruit a broad base of citizen scientists and a multitude of groups to support and coordinate their projects. It is only these volunteers who learn how to identify the different species, for example, different bees or butterflies or distinguish fresh water insects from life found in polluted water. Our training school was well known for its expertise in designing and offering vetac accredited courses. With qualifications attached, this crucial observation and data collection jobs would be recognised.
The Government & Industry Do Not Want To Know
The Data or Address It
A database and website are worth nothing with no data and no way of using the data. Think of the difference in recognition between a few outdoorsy do-gooders with their birdlife book and the old-fashioned swatch from the NBDC (National biodiversity Data Centre) going out and searching the leaves and grasses for occasional sightings of their favourite thing as opposed to groups nationwide monitoring before and after biodiversity presence around every new wifi mast. The latter would be much more useful. Probably at least half the people who are in the Green Party are concerned about the impacts of wifi on the navigation of birds and pollinators but the party line is ‘we have studied many papers on both sides and have distilled them into a rigorous monitoring policy for human health and that of wildlife’….Oh no, that’s not what they said actually. They said ‘WHO says it’s safe’
Technology Has Altogether Too Much Power reports Financial Times
WHO Says Technology Is Safe
Yes, Ireland has refused to do any studies of technology safety just take the EU money with open arms and give it out with inpunity.
Back to the NBDC tender. At least they use open source software. This is not a given I found out as a month later we tendered for the national seaweed mapping project. We wanted to use open software again. It would be a pity not to as then all the seaweed harvesting license holders could be in on the mapping, including their boundaries and the multitude of conservation applications seaweed can bring….but no they wanted software that can be sold abroad….most people don’t realize that our seaweed resource, including previously licensed stretches of coast have been sold to foreign interests already. They don’t want the Irish seaweed harvesters even aware of the map. This is who the Small Innovation Authority Gave It To, It Would be worth seeing if they are Irish and how they intend to commercialise the software they create. Remember that if something is to be commercialised it is the very option of a resource being considered for protection.
Instead of qualifying our seaweed harvesters and paying them as seaweed mappers, they want the big companies to send around people in canoes to guesstimate what is on the shore and do the rest by drone. It is a world of corruption here when it comes to distribution of public money. Because most people don’t understand what foreign direct investment is and they don’t realize how there is no tax or income of any sort from FDI, all the money just flows away from Irish industries and skills. The government and all of Europe think the people are completely stupid.
Please consider how recovery grants are now stopped for Irish but to be continued for Foreign Businesses
Even this week, Enterprise Ireland didn’t get their recovery grants renewed but the IDA got theirs. Therefore, Irish businesses can’t apply for Business Continuity grants this year. Who worked that out?
Whistleblowers Must Be Protected - Simon Coveney Said Once...and then hung her out to dry
There are few people who have tried to wake people up to the terrible corruption that damages lives, livelihoods and environment world-wide as Julian Assange. For a long time, he has been the only person who actually wanted to be informed and or listen to the truth if someone needed to share something. This is about data too. Now he is in prison. Somebody complained that he had released data about some dodgy industry leaders or politicians or both. Somebody else pinned some heinous sex assaults on him. Seems very unlikely to me that someone with a moral compass as determined as his is a terrible deviant but whatever shortcomings he has, he has yet again exposed another part of the previously unseen rout of civilization – US Prisons. On the movies you hear about isolation for a few nights to break or punish someone but as this article says, isolation and depravation are the normal conditions for political prisoners. I know a lot of people who deserve that length and level of reflection but he is not one of them. This article was interesting I thought. Also keep an eye on him as there was another key information person – a scientist at the beginning of the Iraq war who swore blind there was no justification for the war as one or other countries did not have nuclear weapons. They said he ‘committed suicide’. In this article, they describe Assange as a ‘high suicide risk’. It maybe that they plan to finish him off as well rather than risk his oceans of data and credible and incredible information becoming public knowledge.
What I read more about Julian Assange's narrowly avoided extradition from UK
Vaccines and Technology under the shroud of Covid
I don’t know if readers had put two and two together but six months ago, Ireland had not yet rolled out 5G, the higher speed internet, that uses a shortwave frequency with a multitude of smaller masts for transmission, rather than the tall masts for 3G & 4G, that there was some but minimal concern about a few years ago. Independent studies have shown that these masts emitted frequencies that were disruptive to the human body and to wildlife. Why not watch? Why not check? Why not protect public health or the environment? If we had been given the management of the biodiversity centre and the public were not interested in monitoring the developments in their neighbourhood so be it!
But the reality is, that NO ONE is regulating or monitoring the massive influx of technology, let alone the nano technology in farm sprays and therefore on food and/or how they are interacting. We are heading for genetic modification in a big way and soon we will be controlled externally, by the great remote control in the sky. Stay discerning if you can and keep your warmth and interest in other’s welfare.
The RTE, BBC and all can't decide whether to talk about Trump or the Virus. They don't mind as long as we don't hear about anything else
We are living in a time of intentional distractions. The fascists were rising long before Trump so don’t let irritation with him keep you busy. There are people who need your attention much much closer to home. Who thought there was democracy in America before the crowd at the White House, anyway? Did everyone notice that not one weapon was drawn by police - very different from the BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests. And, all the time, news readers talking about the sanctity of the voters' choice … when even I've seen footage of the fire alarms and evacuation of the counting halls in Scotland while they adjusted the independence votes and of course the incarceration of the Catalan Prime Minister who had been voted in fair and square. Come on EU, UK and Ireland, we're hardly squeaky clean ourselves. The news never covers what is relevant, it is just stirring up a fear and a need for lockdowns, crack downs. To save the HSE?! To help the NHS? To shield the elderly? To stop the virus? To protect democracy?! The powers that be are about as interested in the above objectives as I am in my friends and family taking a vaccine that will genetically damage their immune systems a bit later ... just later enough for the two events to stay unconnected. If anyone is wondering, I don't want that at all!
I write to protect people and give them a clear point of view without pushing an agenda for my own financial benefit. I will help people in any way I can. www.alternativehealthconsultancy.ie for Professional Wellbeing
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