Things I've learned after opening my eyes to what's going on in the world - Part 5

I always try to have a balance on my blog between career and relationship posts, pop culture posts, and now and then a post on serious issues. Which is why I regularly share the most interesting, shocking, fascinating and important things I've read about in the newspaper on here. Here's my latest edition:

* an article stated the true idea, that violence creates violence, and amok creates amok, it's like a virus, it also said that 60% of persons running amok announce their plans beforehand

* an intersting interview with a security officer in Israel was about how Israel protects themselves in a state of constant terror (which we in Germany are fearing to soon have right here, too), measures they take are: cyberequipment of the police, surveillance of social media, if someone is thought to plan a terrorist attac they talk with him or her as well as their parents to send the message 'we are watching you', listening to phone calls, saving license plate numbers, and cameras everywhere

* there was a fatastic essay by Elisabeth Raether which stated that we, the liberals, are the new elite, which is why the ironic thing is that the poor are voting for Trump while the eductaed elite are voting for Hillary, we liberals have the power now and we speak out for black people, trans people etc. but we leave behind the ordinary people (the white straight men), the same tendency can be seen in Europe, many poor folks voted for Brexit because only the wealthy have the privilege to actually travel Europe and see how awesome it is

* 65 million people are currenty fleeing and/or refugees, more than at anytime past WWII

* there is now a new camera technique, which we call in Germany "Lichtfeldtechnik", it means that you use lots of cameras from all angles, so that you can edit and focus etc. after the actual shooting and the camera man therefore becomes redundant

* the space probe Osiris Rex is exploring the asteroid Benno right now, the ultimate goal would be to find rocket fuel on Benno, so that it could be a gas station for long flights, f.e. to Mars

* an intersting portait on Snowden stated that he was originally pretty conservative, first he was a follower of Bush, later of Obama, but he was always dissappointed, his theory is that the more you look, the less you see, f.e. there were signs leading to the Boston bomber, but noone saw it because there was just too much information, he also thinks that the drone war creates nothing but hate and terror

* i've read a fascinating article on Silicon Valley: in the past it was a middleclass area, but then the tech elite arrived and the housing costs increased so much that the former middleclass is now homeless and starving, president Reagen's trickle down theory according to which the wealth of the rich will trickle down to the poor did not come true, later president Bush gave the rich tax giveaways so that they became even richter, the price of a house increased from 700 000$ to 2.5 million $ and the rent for a 1 room apartment is now 4000$, many are homeless and now the city council forbade sleeping in a car so that people have to sleep on the street, the problem is that the tech companies have two classes of employees: those who are employed directly by the company earn 151 600$ per year but those who are employed by subcontracters (f.e. cooks,security personal etc. who are often black folks) earn only 19 900$ per year, the homeless live in tent cities like refugees where drugs are a huge problem, the ironic thing is that the organizations who help them depend on donations from the tech companies who are the cause of the problem

* in Germany every party except the CDU is for direct democracy, when people hear direct democracy they think of Brexit but there are several German states like Bavaria and European countries like Switzerland where it works

* there are now memory hackers who can erase memories, this is used to treat fears f.e. the hacker shows a person who is afraid of spiders a spider, then gives them a beta blocker which hinders the emotion fear, someday this might be used to erase the love someone had for a dead person to also erase the grief like in sci fi movies, there are 2 types of memories: non-declarative memory (skills like driving a bycicle) and declarative memories (learned knowledge, and autobiographical memories)

If you like to learn more, you can als check out part 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this series.

Things I've learned after opening my eyes to what's going on in the world - Part 4

Here's my most current collection of interesting, eye-opening and mind-blowing things I learned about while reading the newspaper regularily. Check out part 1, 2 and 3, too.

*show me who your parents are and I tell you what you'll become - this is true in Germany, too, kids who's parents are workers or foreigners are disadvantaged, only a few of them finish High School, but the gap between those kids and the rest decreases

*the pharmaceutical industry in Germany give €575 million to doctors who then precribe the drugs the industry wants to make money from, but some of this money also goes towards research, now there's a new law which states that doctors can make it public who they get money from and for what but they don't have to, in the US they have to make it public which would be a lot better over here, too

Richard Branson

*rich people are now investing in space travel: Paypal and Tesla founder Musk funded Red Dragon a probe which is supposed to travel to Mars in 2018, Bigelow founded a modular unit which is sent to space and then inflated, other rich guys who invest in space travel are Amazon founder Bezos, Richard Branson and Steve Hawking

*the people who really have power are not the politicians but the political advisers, one of them is Gerald Knaus, he invented the Turkey deal of the EU (keeping refugees in Turkey and in return it will be easier for Turkish citizens to immigrate to the EU), but the plan created a new problem: in Greece there are now 8500 refugees and only 16 officials, Plan B is to imprison the refugees on a Greek island

Gerald Knaus

*some current developments in Germany: everywhere (not only here) economical growth is decreasing, 46% of Germans (and 71% of Afd voters) think that they could do politics better than the politicians, most times all of Germany's important media is backing Angela Merkel, the real problem about TTIP is that it is negotiated in secrecy

*apparently democacy is not the end of history after all

*today there is a global Apartheit which describes the gap between poor and rich countries

*a view inside North Korean prisons: many of the prisoners don't even know why they are held prisoner, North Korea also still has collective punishments which means that people are inprisoned because their husband, father, sister or even a distand uncle did something wrong, in prison if a woman is caught with a guard she is punished even if she was raped

*the universe should actually be entirely made up of light but there  is matter (us) which is pretty much impossible, matter is created when particles and anti-particles meet but the problem is that they actually should destroy each other immidiately (because if particles and anti-particles meet each other there's a destruction and what stays is pure energy which is what space ships in Science Fiction are fueled with or you could create a huge bomb with this energy), but despite all odds the anti-matter disappeared but why? and where did it go? there are two possible solutions: either there's a difference beween matter and anti-matter that we don't know of, yet, or somewhere in the Universe there are whole galaxies made up entirely of anti-matter

*in Lybia after Gaddafi died in 2011, they put a lot of money into rebuilding the city Sirte, but because of this there was a lot of crime and with this chaos within the city, then a islamistic group called Ansar al-Scharia appeared in the city, soon after there was a preacher and mysterious female beggars who are thought to be ISIS spies, then ISIS themselves entered the city, the government dissolved and there is no police anymore, now there is war once again; Salafists are in their believes very similar to ISIS (except that they accept a worldly leader) but their preacher critized ISIS, was killed and publicly hung up, which is why now Salafists fight next to liberal students against ISIS, Sirte is occupied by ISIS members of foreign countries (Tunesia, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq), they recrute mostly poor people, in Sirte there's now a strict dress code, certain prayer times and regular amputations and excecutions, the people there are asking Why isn't the West helping us? and they thing that if we're not helping them, we must be helping ISIS, but in thruth the West has already forgotten about Lybia

*in Germany are 2750 mosques, 45000 churches and 130 synagoges, of the muslims still 75% are Turkish and mostly Sunnis