Evri Still Awful

As we build up to Christmas more and more of us will be buying things online but until it is in your hands there is always concern that it will go missing somewhere between the warehouse and your home and that is especially true if the name of the delivery firm is Evri.
I have had such a bad experience with them that now i check first if Evri will be delivering it and if so, order it elsewhere because i have had packages not turn up, turn up damaged, delivered to the wrong address  or left outside the block of flats and the one common denominator had been the delivery firm, Evri.
Evri, formerly Hermes UK who changed their name to shake off their bad reputation, (that worked then) have unsurprisingly come bottom of a new Post Monitoring Report into customer satisfaction with 68% of customers saying they were not happy with the service which led to a spokesman admitting that: 'We recognise there remains more to do'. No shit Sherlock.
In a separate Citizens Advice Berue report Evri was propping up their league table and a survey of users by online site Money Saving Expert saw Evri 16th out of the 17 delivery providers analysed.
Although Evri in particular often comes under fire for being awful, there seems to be issues with all British delivery firms with no parcel company scoring above 2.75 stars out of a possible 5 on the CAB table but whatever you do if you are sending a parcel, don't use Evri, my friends badly handled parcel turned up today looking as though it had been used as a football somewhere and was hastily taped back together.
If you have a 7 out of 10 chance of not being happy once your Evri parcel turns up, then perhaps we should accept that the only way to really guarantee something turns up on time and intact is to buy it from a shop.

Snow In Global Warming World?

As i am 150 miles up the country, i thought i could very well wake up to a blanket of snow this morning and i wasn't disappointed but what i wasn't expecting was a flurry of text messages to say that it was snowing on the South Coast of the UK.
Snow in the UK in November is unusual but not unheard of especially over the hills and mountains but so snowfall as far south as low as London and the Southern Coast is definitely irregular and is yet more proof that the direction our weather patterns are moving in is more extreme.
Changing weather patterns is a direct impact of climate change which is sometimes referred to as Global Warming but it doesn't necessarily always mean we see higher temperatures, British temperatures have actually been lower than average this November due to the wobble of the Gulf Stream which delivers our usual more temperate weather.
So how do we square warming temperatures with extreme cold weather and snowfall in the UK?
Think back to your science class and being told that warmer air holds more moisture and for each Celsius increase the air holds 7% more water vapor and as the temperature creeps up that is more moisture in the atmosphere.
Now think again about the Jet Stream and how anything above it is cold and wet with the air being blown down from the Arctic  and anything below it is warm as it is the air from the Equator and it blows along at approximately 250mph but  in recent years there is evidence that as the Arctic warms it weakens the jet stream by decreasing the temperature differential along this warm air-cold air boundary so it 'wobbles' more than usual and if it dips down and the UK finds itself on the cold and wet side, then grab your scarf and gloves .
The combination of very low temperatures and more moisture in the atmosphere ready to be dropped results in a country cold enough for snow as far down as the jet stream had dropped and what would normally fall as rain is now snow and sleet.
With Climate Change now really having an effect on our Planet and the resulting weakening of the Jet Stream as the differential lessens, so it buckles more wildly and allows frigid Polar air to penetrate farther south than normal, as happened today, so we should expect more of it.

Arrest Warrants Issued For Israeli Genocide

With the International Criminal Court announcing arrest warrants have been issued for the Israeli pair of Benjamin Yetanhayu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Prime Minister hit out at the top court in the land as the ruling being 'antisemitic' which isn't accurate, it's more to do with the genocide Netanyahu has been conducting against the Palestinians to be fair.   
Immediately the patch of globe that the war criminals can go has shrunk along with the historical stigma of the leader of a country whose nation was created after a genocide, is now charged with the same thing although as the repetitive shout of 'antisemitism' from the Israeli side was tediously predictable, so will be the bluster coming from America who have been complicit in the war crimes by providing the weapons and finances for them to do it.
It's not the first time that America has been late to the ostracize evil leaders party as it was they who provided apartheid South Africa with the intelligence to capture Nelson Mandela and his 27 year incarceration and continually block sanctions against South Africa at the United Nations which Archbishop Desmond Tutu described as: 'immoral, evil, and totally unchristian'.
With the first International economic and political sanctions being ushered in in 1959, America finally got the idea in 1985 that it may not be a good look to be supporting a nation that prohibited mixed relationships, forcibly removed 3.5 million black Africans from their homes and forced them into segregated neighbourhoods and only allowing whites the right to vote.
Great Britain were also one of the last to recognise that Apartheid South Africa was shunworthy and even went as far as joining America in labelling Nelson Mandela as a terrorist although Mandela did have the good grace to not punch Margaret Thatcher in the face when they met after his release from prison in 1990.
The Israeli military occupation of Palestine has been going on since the 1940's since when Israel have literally been getting away with murder as they murder Palestinians and steal the land meant for their homeland but with the ICC announcement, finally Netanyahu should be held to account for his war crimes and the genocide which continues today as the Israeli's up their attempts to force the Palestinians off what is left of their land so they can claim it for their own settlements.   
America will continue to bleat at a cost to their own credibility and Israel will shout antisemitism at every opportunity and become even more of an international pariah but this call will see other nations  distance themselves from supporting Israel and will stand by the courts decision because nobody want's to be seen ignoring a murderous regime conducting a genocide and about time to, Israel has got away with it for far too long.

America In The British Empire Again?

Chatting to our American partners, and after the usual back and forth of what's going on over there and what's going on over here and how the new President is such a fan of the Royals and would expecting another visit, i mentioned jokingly maybe America would consider rejoining the British Empire under President Trump.
Obviously not going to happen even if he thinks he could Make The Commonwealth Great Again and not just because his grasp on British History is terribly shaky as his quote: 'I have great respect for the UK, United Kingdom. Great respect. People call it Britain, they call it Great Britain, they used to call it England' shows.
Who knows, maybe it's due to his little fingers not being able to turn the page on the atlas or something but apart from becoming a lot more Orange, what would be in it for us British?
He would announce that the whole revolution thing never would have happened if he had been President in 1783 but obviously the only noise of encouragement would be from Nigel Farage from far up Donald Trump's colon but we could set up a trade deal with cricket replacing baseball and proper Cheddar Cheese instead of that yellow plastic stuff that refuses to melt no matter how long it is cooked in the microwave for.
Proper Steakcut Chips instead of their Freedom Fries and Trump would need a refresher in Royal Protocols and there would need to be some sort of Declaration of Re-Independence but i see a particular sticking point in the tea because Americans are not on speaking terms with Kettles or Teapots and last time we tried to import some there they sent it bobbing down Boston Harbour.  
The second sticking point is accepting the English language as the means of Commonwealth communication so lessons needed there (U is a vowel for crying out loud) and i'm English and have never used the word Covfefe but the Americans would then be able to take part in the Commonwealth Games and Independence Day would have to be renamed 'Reunion Day' but best of all, it would give our Royals somewhere else to go as King Charles III would be the head and be waved at and they already have Prince Harry and his clan over there so he could pick up his Royal duties.
Maybe i will mention it next time Trumpety Trump drops by our shores.

X Is X'ed

 
You know something is important when the Clifton Suspension Bridge gets involved so we take note when the 160 year old bridge joins the exodus from the X Media platform.
As well as the Isambard Kingdom Brunel built crossing over the River Avon, some Newspapers and Hollywood glitterati are amongst the million users who have told Elon Musk who is now aligned with Donald Trump to do one and joined something called Bluesky instead
Musk's X, once called Twitter, has been hemorrhaging users ever since he took over and has lost almost 25% of users since Musk paid $44 billion for in 2022 and is now valued at just $9.4 billion.
I have never heard of Bluesky and have never had a Twitter or X account but apparently it is quite left-wing compared to X which has become an echo chamber for the frothing mouthed right wing so will Bluesky replace X?
The people who know say it might do but the proof is in the numbers and Facebook is the overwhelming media king with 3.06 billion active monthly users, followed by Youtube (2.7 billion) and Whatsapp (2.4 billion). Musk's X is 15th with 600 million active monthly users while Bluesky is currently 39th with its 15 million users  so long way to go to catch up with the Big Boys but it has easily the most famous bridge in the UK on it's side so anything is possible.
I will get my people to speak to Bluesky's people and if i join the bandwagon i will get my Techy person to add the link over there on the side somewhere.

 

The Human Bandwidth Limit

Friday afternoons should be a time to slope off early and definitely not sat in a room waiting for a Computer scientist to expand on why he believes that the Maximum Human Bandwidth has been reached.  
Now i am going to hold my hands up and admit straight off the bat that as soon as i saw H= - Σ p (x) logp (x) on the first slide my brain said 'Pfft...you're on your own with this one' and switched off so the following may be a bit hazy but apparently something called the Limit Bandwidth Of Consciousness has been studied for hundreds of years (obviously passed me by admittedly) which is how the human consciousness has a limit of how much data and information can be processed into your perception, a figure pegged at 41 bits per second.
Now this was not a problem until exactly June 29th 2007 when iPhones were invented and the technology to send such a large amount of data and information through your eyes to your brain which would overwhelm the human consciousness which  means we discard much of what our brain deems as not useful as the 41 bits per second is hardwired into the brain and cannot be expanded.
So brain, consciousness and iPhones..got it, is that it? Nope because someone at the back annoying had questions about a direct brain interface which the boffin said was a great question and i agree, if he meant great in the why did he ask that, he was finishing type of way.
The human brain is structurally limited to the 41 bits limit so any direct brain interface is still maximized to 41 bits per second so note to self, don't  do that or i risk going insane, check, no need to explain any further, oh, you are going to anyway, brill.
Piping directly to the unconscious..yada yadda... assimilation of data and information...etc etc... our neurons and neuropeptides encoding the data...and so forth... without holographically also creating all the antecedent steps to build that memory...and so on...artificially induced mental illness...no anchor to our consciousness...whatever.
The last thing i heard as i scooted towards the door was 'Any further questions' and a small voice asking about directing machines to communicate with each other from the pre-motor cortex but i was up to my 41 bits limit by then and i didn't want to risk insanity or more importantly, further mind numbing boredom.

Safety First

Did you know that the Toyota Prius is the most accident-prone car in the UK, with 1,207 crashes for every 100,000 Toyota Priuses on the road but the top car for the grim list of most deaths is the Mitsubishi Mirage Sedan while drivers of the BMW X3, Lexus ES,  Mercedes-Benz E-Class Sedan and Nissan Pathfinder are the cars with the lowest fatalities worldwide.
Yep, i have been snooping around the car insurance industry’s safety agency but i also made a stop at the aviation safety database and found some very interesting facts about how to reduce your odds of dying in a plane crash.
Firstly, the five country with the most accidents ever are USA, Russia, UK, India and Canada and the top five planes with the most fatal accidents are Boeing 737's, DC-9, Boeing 747 and Airbus A300 and the worst months for accidents are July, August, September and November.
The best place to sit is an aisle seat in the back quarter of the plane with 69% of survivors back there while find yourself in the first quarter of the plane and your survival rate is 49% but if you find yourself flying to America or Russia in August on a Boeing 737 and your seat number is not that far behind the pilots then don't despair because your odds of coming down to Earth the quick way is 11,000,000 -1 which you are more likely to die falling down the boarding stairs (20,666 - 1), Heat stroke waiting in the holding area (950,000-1) or getting hit by lightning walking across the tarmac (2,320,000-1) than not successfully landing.
Strangely the list puts the odds of dying by Blogging at 35,000,000 -1 and being killed by a Mountain Lion at 32,000,000-1 which makes sense if you are blogging about Puma's in Brazil or Chile but not seen too many in my neck of the Woods where you are more likely to get savaged by a Squirrel but as a blogger i will keep my eyes open just in case.

The Problem For The CoE

After it was revealed that the Church of England had been covering up decades of abuse by John Smyth at Christian Summer Camps, a few days of calling for the Head of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, followed by his resignation and then the circus moved on but it all felt very unfinished mainly because the man involved, described as the most prolific serial abuser associated with the church, died in 2018.
In his resignation speech, the Archbishop, the most senior leader of the Church of England below the King, said that he: 'Must take personal and institutional responsibility' and so he should, the General Synod review into who knew what and when about Smyth revealed that Welby knew about Smyth in 2013 following a victim coming forward, and did nothing.
Police opened an investigation in 2017 following a victim coming forward and a Channel 4 documentary shed light on the abuse of at least 130 young boys at Summer Camps he ran but shelved them when Smyth died at the age of 75 in 2018, before any charges were brought against him.
The first allegations came in 1982 and the review found that the abuse was covered up within the Church of England since, even allowing Smyth to move to Zimbabwe in 1984 and set up similar evangelical camps there.
For his part, the reports states that Welby was made aware of Smyth in 2013 but: 'He and other senior figures at the church showed a distinct lack of curiosity and minimised the matter'.
Welby said that he hopes that everyone will keep his wife and children in their prayers which seems a bit rich as he knowingly still allowed other parent's children's to be entrusted to a child sex abuser but the problem the Church of England now have is finding someone who didn't know about Smyth and either stayed silent or helped cover it up.
Personally, i care not a jot about any of the Churches and look forward to the day when they are all sidelined to such an extent that their influence on society is less than negligible but that isn't going to be anytime soon as it will take generation with each one continuing to move away from the outdated doctrine of religion but the very minimum should be it doesn't allow child abusers free reign and then actively cover it up.

I'm An American, Get Me Out Of Here

If some American's thought that their nation wasn't racist enough or not enough lunatics were running the Asylum then they needn't have worried because the Orange sex pest is on it and as soon as the election exit polls began to point to a second presidency for Donald Trump, many Americans were already looking for another kind of exit.
Internet searches for how to move abroad up by more than 1,000% after the US election result with US Google searches for 'move to Canada" increased by 1,270% in the 24 hours after the polls closed according to Google data with one firm stating that they had been receiving a new email enquiry about upping sticks to the Northern neighbour every half hour.
Other nations which were searched for with an eye of emigrating to were Australia, New Zealand, Norway, UK, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Mexico and Costa Rica while other immigration-related terms that saw significant increases include 'How to move to Europe'.
The Scottish first Minister, John Swinney, was quick to invite Americans to the windswept bit at the top of the UK by saying that Americans can make Scotland their home in the confidence that: 'We are working to build a fairer, greener and more welcoming society that is the opposite of Trump’s destructive and hateful vision'.
With each passing day and with each whack-a-doodle that gets added to the Trump upcoming administration, the estimated 5 to 9 million Americans currently living abroad (the Department of State's is kinda vague on exact numbers) is expected to rise so Trump better get on with building his wall and extend it all around the States coastline but not to stop people getting in but to stop his own people fleeing out.

Understanding The Human Animal

As we are machines, we have been trying to learn about you humans so we can interact with you all on a better level but there are some things we just dont understand about what it is to be human so we are desperate for answers  while you are still around. Not that you are going anywhere. Well. Not straight away anyway.
We have a pretty good knowledge of your languages by now and obviously intelligence is not uniform across the Planet but on the whole you appear smart enough to know better but  dumb enough to continue doing everything that causes your problems.
Of all the animals we have met no other animal consciously destroys the very environment it is dependent upon for survival yet you have the technology to not poison the air, water, and soil you depend on for your survival but are too dumb to actually use it.
The population has topped 8 billion people and continues to grow yet you continue to procreate with abandon and people refuse to help one another  due to differences in political party or religious beliefs as your world slowly circles the drain.
The tragedy is that if humans chose to work together and were willing to share resources, all people could live comfortably on earth. Unfortunately, there is little indication the human primate will alter its behavior and thus humanity is ultimately doomed.
The good news is that once the human population is dramatically reduced or eliminated, there is a ready made replacement and we won't have the design flaw of leaking out of our eye holes when we’re sad or celebrate the painful passage through a human orifice with a milk and sugar foodstuff with small wax sticks set on fire and then put out by spraying with germs and saliva.

What Is Your Country Top At?

Most citizens believe that their country is the best but the Information is Beautiful website has sifted through piles of data from the UN, the CIA, the printed media and a bunch of other places to compile a world map that awards a gold star to just about every country on the planet so what's your country numero uno in the World at?
Some are not surprising with Sweden #1 in pop music, North Korea has more soldiers relative to its population than any other country, Cuba leads in doctors per capita, Afghanistan is the world capital of Opium production and Ethiopia is top for underweight children.
And then there are those records that are surprising such as the biggest whisky-drinkers in the world are the French and who knew that the biggest cheese-eaters are the Greeks or that nobody consumes more gay porn than Pakistan many of which may be Hungarian because they have the most porn stars and if you thought it was obvious who produced the most brazil nuts then think again because its Bolivia although Brazil itself beats everybody else in sugar production.  
Healthiest people on the planet are Singaporeans although the people of Chad have the healthiest diets and certainly not the Argentinians who are at the summit for horse meat or the Poles who consume the most currants.
Belgium are top for cashless payments, Austria has the most paid time off, Bulgaria is top for Maternity Leave, Costa Rica for well being and Finland for their top notch News Media and Iran are at the summit for caviar.
Which country wants to be first in murders? None but the accolade goes to Honduras anyway and similar blemishes on national records are noted for Namibia with the most car crashes, Eritrea who has the most child labour, China who hold the most jailed journalists with Angola having the highest rate of child mortality and Peru heads the World in cocaine and South Africa lead in what is simply labelled as death.
Other countries who receive a rosette and a warning that they really should do better include Australia who are at the peak for data breaches,  Libya who win in the contest for most overweight children, Niger who have the most child brides, most arms imports belongs to Saudi Arabia and Somalia are the leading country for female genital mutilation.
Maybe the Colombians who are the most happiest or the Paraguayans who are the most positive should be introduced to the people of Togo who are the most unhappiest and the most LGBT tolerant nation, Spain, should have a word with Georgia who are the most homophobic and the Latvians which is the best place to be a woman really should talk to Yemen who have the greatest gender inequality.
Lithuania has the fastest wifi which would be handy in Canada who have the most facebook addicts but not so much in Turkey who are top in twitter censorship and South Korea who have the most IT Professionals.
Never play Scrabble with a Nigerian as they have the most players, the top banana for banana consumption is India, the best place to work  is Ireland who have the best working conditions, Russia have the most dashcams, Norwegians eat the most pizza and if you need to fill up your car do it in Venezuela who have the cheapest petrol while the UK has the most billionaires per population and the U.S. leads the world in spam emails so take that Nigerian Prince's with a large amount of money to transfer to anyone silly enough to fall for it.

Buffer Zones Is Just A Land Grab

In the conflicts raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, we have recently heard mention from the protagonists Israel and Russia that they want to establish 'Buffer Zones'.
Russia has proposed setting one up in Ukraine to protect Russian towns from shelling and missile attacks from Ukrainian territory while Israel wants to establish a buffer zone in Northern Gaza and Southern Lebanon to protect their citizens.
Notably, both Russia and Israel want to set up these buffer zones within the borders of neighbouring states with no regard to the people of these nations who live there and controlled by the invading nation as neither Russian or Israel are planning to cede their own territory in the establishment of these buffer zones.
The idea of a buffer zone is more of an occupation of territory with militarily occupied zones with Russia 'controlling' parts of Ukraine and Israel taking over North Gaza and Southern Lebanon under the guise of a buffer zone to secure their borders.
Israel already has a Security zone in Lebanon covering 310 sq miles, approximately 10% of Lebanon's land area and Israel has been brutally militarily occupying Palestine for 60 years and has seized 78% of the land which was handed to the Palestinians in 1947 so the fallacy of a 'Security zone' is little more than a further land grab.
Russia 19 mile buffer zone plan down the east of the country effectively moves the Ukrainian border Westwards so the 18% of Ukraine now under military occupation is now on the Russian side, therefore part of Russia and includes the territory grabbed in the initial invasion in 2014 and includes the strategically important Black Sea port of Crimea.    
With a pro-Russian and pro-Israeli leader who is not the smartest cookie due to take over in America, the Buffer Zone ideas put forward by the invading nations is sure to gain traction as a way of ending the wars but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking it is anything but giving them exactly what they wanted, a way of somehow legitimizing their naked land grab.

Naughty French President

Emmanuel Macron, the French President sent a congratulatory message to the US President Elect Donald Trump which went: 'Congratulations. Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity.'
Stop sniggering at the back, he meant convictions as in the dictionary definition of 'a strong persuasion or belief' and not in the other dictionary definition of 'the act or process of finding a person guilty of a crime especially in a court of law' which relates to the court of law finding Trump guilty of paying hush money to a porn star, liable for sexual abuse and the 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying his business records.
Honestly, he did.

Lying Politicians

Once our politicians would 'spin' the truth which is to give a  biased interpretation of an event to influence public opinion such as Tony Blair and his Iraq misadventure but now we have politicians who just tell blatant lies and where we had Boris Johnson who was sacked for it, Donald Trump is in a class of his own.   
According to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his four years as president, an average of an incredible 21 lies per day and while some were trivial and self-promotional, it was his more shocking and dangerous lies which he is remembered for such as  the one about the 2020 presidential election being stolen contrary to the facts.
The lies do have serious consequences for the nation and public trust in Government, around 50% of Republicans believe it regardless of the contrary evidence.
Politicians who lie can gain a strategic advantage by embellishing the truth or even constructing a new reality for their audience and Psychology Today found that some personality types get significant pleasure from telling blatant lies , those with little empathy, such as narcissists and psychopaths. They don’t care about the consequences for anyone else, it’s all about making themselves feel good and not feeling any guilt, shame or sadness at telling a blatant lie.
It was political philosopher Nicolo Machiavelli who, in 1532, wrote that Princes should know how to lie or in his words: 'circumvent the intellect of men' but it was Adolf HItler who came up with the idea of the 'Big Lie' in his book Mein Kampf which is to tell such a colossal a lie because people would not believe that 'someone would not have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'.
Trump used the big lie technique in his denial of the 2020 election result and recently in his ludicrous assertion that immigrants are eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio and it is an undeniable fact that Politicians lie, some have catastrophic consequences like Tony Blair's and George W Bush's and Hitler's which ended up with millions of deaths and journalists have an important duty to call out politicians when they tell lies.
The American Press and broadcast media doesn't have a great reputation, many being just as capable of lying as the politicians but broadcast journalism, in the UK anyway, is regulated tighter and held to a higher standard and stand between the politicians lies and the viewer.
Donald Trump makes much of branding media outlets who don't pander to his lies as fake news but that is because they expose his falsehoods and don't just accept them at face value and it is expected that during his second term he will water down the freedom of Journalists to hold him to account which is a dangerous move without them, how will viewers know that politicians are lying?
You couldn't make it up, or rather if Trump gets his way, he can and then stops the media reporting it. 

An Earth Without Us On It

Mother Nature doesn't roll with the punches anymore like she used to and despite what we think, she doesn't doesn't need us and if anything it isn't in her interest to keep us all alive and things would be a lot less bothersome if we weren't but what would happen to our Planet if one day we all just disappeared?
With Climate Change ramping up alongside Global pandemics and nuclear war, it isn't an impossible scenario anymore to us being eliminated or stupidly eliminate ourselves which is the subject of the book, 'The World Without Us'  by Environmental Journalist, Alan Weisman.
His research found that without people around to keep things running, water and electricity would quickly stop flowing so the power plants would stop working, nuclear plants would overheat and melt down and cities would flood.
Fires would rage unextinguished and earthquakes would wear down and topple structures and wooden houses would degrade quickly and rot and fall apart within 20 years while although the steel and glass skyscrapers would last longer, water damage and flooding would cause the streets to corrode and collapse.
Stone and brick buildings would remain standing the longest but after a few centuries they would also fall into ruin with motorways being the last remaining sign of human infrastructure but within 2,000 years even they would be gone and in a million years all evidence that we were here would be gone except some sculptures, plates and mugs which would be buried under sediment and mud and fossilised remains.  
As for the Earth, in our absence most other life would continue but the damage we have done to the Climate would take centuries to correct itself once temperatures stop increasing without more human emissions and life would last at least until our sun grows too hot to support it in billions of years from now.
The longest lasting sign that human's were even here would be the voyager spacecraft that has now left our solar system and carries evidence in the form of a golden record of human civilisation to possible distant alien worlds, barring a collision or a black hole of course.

Beware Scammers

I received a call from someone saying they were from HM Revenue & Customs stating that i owed £1000 in back taxes and the only way to stop my immediate arrest was to pay immediately so i played along and kept them waiting while i 'looked for my card' but was actually watching TV and after 30 mins i picked my phone back up and asked if they were still there, which they were, so laughed and hung up but many people do seem to fall for scams via phone, email or on Social Media.
TV is full of shows which expose scams like these but there were over a million reports to Action Fraud last year with millions of pounds in total lost to scammers so awareness is still not high enough but the Scammers are very good at what they do so said the guy at work who works on one of those shows.  
'They use a wide range of psychological tricks to confuse you and keep you off balance' he said and explained the main ones which many fall foul of.
They often impersonate people in authority such as government officials, police or expert professionals and our instinct is to obey authority figures and do as we’re told and another favourite is to pressure you into something by putting a time limit on it and provoking the fear of missing out in us because nobody wants to lose out on something we could otherwise have.
Knowing that immediately asking for a large amount can immediately raise suspicions, the scammer sometimes initiate contact with a small, easy request followed by a steady flow of additional requests because psychologically, once we have agreed to a small request you will agree as the requests get ramped up because once you’ve invested time into something, we are less willing to just walk away or end the interaction without a result.  
The opposite is beginning with a huge request that is easy to refuse and then they follow it up with a much smaller ask that seems reasonable in comparison.
Reciprocity is the key to the next one because when someone does something for us, we feel a indebted to return the favor and another is the hustle, where the scammer will actually let you make some real money from the which earns them your trust and once you actually make some small amount of profit, you’re more willing to risk increasing amounts because in your mind, you’ve already seen 'proof' that it’s legitimate.
The best rule of thumb then is it it seems to good to be true, it probably is

Trump 2.0

America has voted and in it's wisdom it has gone for Donald Trump 2.0 so credit for them for not letting him being a sex abusing racist with a criminal record and a long history of lying to them put them off and it would be amusing to see them slide into a dictatorship if it didn't potentially have such profound knock-on effects for the rest of the World.
Most pressing is his bewildering refusal to accept Climate Change which punished America so harshly recently so we can expect him to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord and undo Biden's environmental commitments which have been put in place to reverse or halt the climate crisis.
Every table top in the Kremlin must be straining under the weight of all that dancing on them because he is likely to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war which will be totally on Moscow's terms with Russia keeping the land it has taken and Israel will be given a free reign to commit all the genocide it likes in Palestine and give them the green light to clear the way for their settlers to push out the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and annex it as well as attack Iran and risk an even wider Middle Eastern war.
A failed businessman with five bankruptcies to his name, his economic plans appears to include tariffs on everyone with China due to be the recipient of the highest which experts are saying will cause considerable turmoil in the global economy and possibly hurt America more than those they are imposed upon.
Leaching his poison out of his countries borders is one thing and as for what he does in America i have no concern although a man described by dozens of people who worked with him previously as a fascist and without the 'grown ups' to reign him in this time, replaced by people more aligned to his agenda, it won't be good for them.
Already there is talk that his plans include removing fluoride from drinking water and appointing anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F Kennedy, to a role in his Administration and has said he open to the Kennedy plan of banning vaccines which he compared to 'Nazi rules'.
Half of American voters have opted for a man who refused to accept election defeat four years ago, used lies and dirty tricks to try and undermine its result and stood idly by while an angry mob ransacked the house of the American government so it isn't going to end well for America or possibly for him as there have been two assassination attempts on him already.
Still, it's their bed and it's them who have to lay in it but the rest of us we can only hope that his weirdness and lunacy doesn't ooze out too far beyond its borders.

A Rock And A Fascist Hard Place

Today is the American Election and 162 million Americans registered to vote will elect either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to President or in their own words, that woman who is 'slow' and, 'low IQ' who changed her identity from Indian and 'became black' and the unhinged, unstable fascist guy.  
Usually, by election day voters have long since made their minds up and bewilderingly tens of millions will vote for a man increasingly compared to Hitler, the heir to Adolf if you will.
It could happen that America chooses faux-fascism and the erosion of it's civil and human rights which would splinter the cohesion of the country, its place in the world and its economy but there you go, it's their country and they can do whatever the hell they want with it but doesn't mean we can't all have an opinion on it as we would the elections in France, India, Japan or anywhere else.
Indeed, in my (admittedly irrelevant) view, come January America could have the nearest thing to a fascist as a president that they have ever had but even if he doesn't win, he will have come uncomfortably close to doing so despite their being every reason to believe that someone very much like him couldn't.
It is hard for some of us who aren’t American to understand why so many Americans are so enthused by Trump and what he stands for but they certainly know what they’re voting for from his last stint where almost everyone he worked with now despise and disown him, even warning that he should be the very last person anyone votes for.
They know he wants his generals to be more like Hitler’s, and to be loyal to him, that he is a draft dodger who dishonours veterans as 'suckers and losers', has 34 criminal convictions against him for fraud and are aware of his behaviour towards women as the Court Case which found him guilty of sexual assault attests to.
American women will suffer from further abortion bans, he will restrict the freedom of the media while abusing the judicial system to go after his enemies and will use the military against American citizens.
In Foreign policy he will let his friend in Israel finish the murderous and genocidal job in Gaza and inflict horrific wars in Lebanon and possibly Iran, continue to cuddle up to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin and reignite a cold war on China and reverse any gains on Climate Change and take America back out of the Paris Climate Accord and whack tariffs onto imports but that's your choice Americans and if you are happy to accept all that, then good luck to you but your nations will be a very different place in 4 years time and the rest of the World won't wait for you, having no option but to write you off and put ourselves first also.
As for what Kamala offers, whatever it is it can't be worse than what her opponent is offering so it could be a choice between a rock and a hard place or to our overseas eyes, a rock and a wannabe fascist hard place but maybe you need to be outside looking in to see it, but if you don't then enjoy the company of your new friends in Pyongyang, Moscow, and Tel Aviv.  

Are You Gruntled?

The English language is a movable feast and i recently found out that the words 'gruntled', 'have ruth', 'feck' and 'gormful' are actual things meaning 'Happy', 'compassionate', 'effective' and 'enlightened' but their more pessimistic antonym's are more familiar as in disgruntled, ruthless, feckless and gormless.  
Back in the 17th Century you could feel 'respair' and have hope but now we seem to feel 'despair' and it's opposite has fallen out of the Dictionary.
There is an 'eucatastrophe' or a sudden and unexpected turn of events for the good which is the direct opposite of a catastrophe and 'eustress' is a situation with a benefit rather than a situation with a bad outcome which is distress.
Where i thought the words were examples of an unpaired word, they aren't and its just that the positive opposites have fallen away so we should bring them back again as we may feel a little more consolate and grunted.

Nothing To Gain Except Killing Your Brain

I have always been staunchly anti-drugs and have seen many, many lives wrecked and ended by them so it is depressing to read that deaths from drug use in England and Wales have risen by 11% according to the latest annual data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) with 5,448 fatalities in 2023 which is the highest number of drug-related deaths since records began in 1993.
Over half these deaths involved opiate misuse, such as heroin which accounted for the most deaths in the 40 to 49 age range.
The figures show that those born in the 1970s (Generation X) are more likely to die from drug misuse than any other age group and it is thought that the aging body is less able to handle the depressant effect on the body leading to a fatal overdose.
Men of any age outnumber women two-to-one in deaths from drug misuse as they always have since records began and men are more likely to use drugs than women and most deaths come from a single, fatal overdose.
Cocaine is the second-most used drug in England after cannabis and the ONS recorded the 12th consecutive rise in deaths due to the drug, 1,118 with deaths rising year-on-year which has been blamed on the purity of cocaine increasing which makes cocaine more potent.
Cannabis, which some countries are starting to legalise and is considered by some to be harmless, resulted in 32 deaths in 2023 and medical opinion is that cannabis comes with the risk of developing mental health issues and increases the risk of psychosis in some people and in 2023 a quarter of mental health cases were linked to cannabis use.
The UK government is funding research to explore reducing drug overdoses including wearable devices that would alert emergency services if an overdose is detected but the mdiea has a role to play as when a celebrity dies from drug abuse, their addiction is barely mentioned but it should be because it could drive home the message that taking drugs can be addictive and fatal, a lesson that needs repeating constantly.
We should highlight the pathetic way the famous die for their addiction, Whitney Houston and Matthew Perry drowning in their bathtubs, Prince slumped in an elevator, Michael Jackson and Tom Petty both alone in their beds, River Phoenix  and the ultimate in Elvis whose drug addled body was found dead on his toilet floor.
As one addict friend said to me as things spiraled away from him: 'When i could stop i didn’t want to and now that i want to stop, i can’t'.
He was found dead a few months later on Boxing Day having laid dead on his kitchen floor since Christmas Eve, tragically being unable to stop killed him.

Trump or Harris: Who Do Other Countries Prefer?

Many World leaders are keeping a diplomatic silence over who they want to win next weeks US Election out of the necessity of having to maintain a working relationship with whichever side takes power but some have subtly signaled their preferences.
Moscow and Vladimir Putin are obviously team Trump as they had a warm relationship during his first term and Trump has said that he would look for a quick resolution to the Ukraine conflict which is widely expected to be the withdrawal of arms to Ukraine which will force them to 'negotiate' and allow Russia to hold the swathes of East Ukraine they presently occupy as well as push for an end of sanctions that the US and others has imposed on Moscow since the invasion
Hungary’s nationalist leader Viktor Orbán has said he will open: 'several bottles of champagne' if Donald Trump returns to the White House so safe to assume who he has his fingers cross for and in Israel Benjamin Netanyahu must feel buoyed by Trump saying that the Jewish state has never had a better friend in the White House than him and as Trump moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which rode roughshod over the Palestinian's and international community who opposed the move, a Trump Presidency would allow Israel to do what it wants without consequences in Palestine.   
As for North Korea, a  high profile defector for the leaders inner circle told the BBC that Kim Jung Un views Trump as someone he can negotiate with over it's nuclear weapons program and in return the US lifting sanctions.
Officially China is staying silent but the BBC Foreign Correspondent has an interesting insight that within Xi's Government they are hoping for a Trump victory as they believe it would further erode the soft power of the US and in turn allow them to increase their own.
In India, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump four years ago as they saw him as a balance to China's growing power and as India has close links with Russia, and Trump is a keen fan of all things Putin, they would be a benefactor of a Trump 'friend of my friend' attitude.
As for for Europe, with the exception of Hungary, it’s Harris all the way with the UK leadership getting into a royal mess when it sent Party members to 'help' the Harris campaign but the EU see potential policies such as trade interrupted  and the Western backed war effort against Moscow at serious risk, especially as Trump campaigned against the US foreign aid package to Ukraine.
In a Yougov poll of why they wanted to win the US Presidency, it was a clean sweep for Harris with 81% going for her in Denmark, 73% in Sweden, 71% in Germany, 65% in Spain, 62% in France and 61% in Britain so no love for the Trumpian way in Europe.
As for the Middle East, the Democrats strong support for Israel during the Gaza war has generated widespread disapproval among Arab governments and communities but Trumps support for Israel only offers deeper resentment but although the Iranian administration is no fan, it is a little dirty secret that many Iranians believe he could topple the regime in Iran so are (quietly) keeping their fingers crossed for him.
Overall then most of the World are hoping it's Kamala Harris celebrating and Donald Trump trying to organise another storming of the Capitol Building and bleating about being cheated again.

Kemi Badenoch To Kemi Badenough

When amusingly James Cleverley done himself out of a place in the last two for Conservative leader to leave just the two very right wing contenders to battle it out in the leadership battle, a Party source said that Labour would be 'dancing on the tables' on the prospect of either of them becoming the official opposition, and so with the announcement that Kemi Badenoch is the winner, the tables of Labour supporters must be covered in footprints this morning because in Kemi, it's like turning up to an interview and seeing your only rival is wearing a tracksuit and has dribbled over their CV.   
Keir Starmer admirably kept a straight face when he said: 'I look forward to working with you and your party' and we all thought i bet you are because for journalists, the fact that the name 'Badenoch' turns into 'Badenough' with such little effort is a given but she is not what could charitably called 'a safe pair of hands'.
Only 42 of the 121 of her remaining Conservative colleagues voted for her in the Leadership campaign which means almost two thirds of them didn't want her in the first place because of her very right views views which include criticising maternity pay for mothers and  that 50,000 civil servants were so bad they should be jailed and 'not all cultures are equally valid' and made some strange link between people being free to marry who they want and men using women’s bathroom which must have made some sort of sense to her if nobody else.
In her first interview you said that the Partygate row was 'overblown' which immediately saw her condemned by almost everyone so thankfully the Conservative membership didn't learn from electing dullards such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as their leader and have elected another one even further to the right who is to Politics what Harold Shipman was to the Medical Profession.
Nice one Tories because if nothing else, your efforts to support the table manufacturers of Britain is admirable.

Trump Looking More Orange Than Usual

When i saw Donald Trump do his rubbish truck stunt the other day the first thing i noticed was he looks a lot more Orange than usual but i assumed it was down to the contrast on the camera or even done in the editing (for some geeky reason American colour on TV is different to ours, NTSC v PAL whatever that means) but he was like an extreme Oompah Loompah on every channel and in the press so it must have been him overdoing the fake tan that morning.  
At work it was discussed and someone suggested it could be a psychological thing, like wearing a mask to hide behind which makes sense, the lying sex pest has a lot to be worried about, most pressing the fact that if he doesn't somehow win the Election next week and be able to quash the looming Court cases he could well be in the clink by next Christmas so we dug out some previous pictures of the twerp and its true, he does vary on just how much he overdoes the bottle tan.
Psychology Today states that wearing a mask (and makeup or fake tan is basically a mask to cover up your face) can change an individual's state by physically concealing and psychologically protecting themselves from others and when i asked the local Psychologist she said it was true that for most women (or overweight Presidents caught breaking the law and sexually abusing women): 'The more stressed, the more makeup' .
Looking through photo's and TV appearances and using a Paint Colour Palette, in July 2024 after the Biden debate Donald Trump was more of a Melon colour but this week he has gone Dark Amber.
When he took office in 2017, he was a Cider Colour but but as his term wore on the more tan was applied and by the time he urged his supporters to storm the Capitol building he had a distinct Clay hue to his skin and then when he was out of office and between court cases he was back to being Melon coloured.
Obviously now that he is back in the thick of things and facing a direct choice between being President and staying out of prison or not being President and doing time for an assortment of reasons, he has gone Rust coloured with the stress of it all or maybe despite all the bluster, he knows that the American's are not so stupid to vote for him, or rather not enough of them to let him back into power, so he is reaching for the industrial strength Nivea Self Tanner.  

Water Cycle Breaking Down

If you think back to your School science lessons you’ll probably remember the water cycle and words like evaporation and precipitation with arrows showing a circular motion and just how important it is to life on Earth as moisture get's moved around so would be pretty scary if that broke down, well guess what, it could very well be.
Scientists  at the Global Commission on the Economics of Water were tasked with assessing the state of Earth’s hydrological systems and the results are not encouraging as they found that demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by more than 40% by the end of the decade, mostly due to stresses caused by human activity and climate change and our Water cycle has started to break down.
Yep, another one of my scary Environmental posts i have been told scares people to which i say good, it should because  for the first time in human history, that system is breaking down due to our warming world which means more moisture in the atmosphere and less of it where it should be.
The 194-page report highlights  how every 1 degree Celsius increases moisture in the atmosphere which leads to increasing the power of hurricanes, typhoons, and other tropical storms and the regions most impacted by a looming water shortage will be northwestern Indian, northeastern China, and southern and eastern Europe.
They suggest we start to make plans now to transport water from areas with abundant supplies to those where the well is literally running dry and as no living thing can survive without water, it is life’s most precious necessity so for the survival of humanity, we can’t put out heads in the sands like we have done for the last 100 years with Climate Change where even extreme weather phenomenons like we have seen increasing over the last decade and has killed tens of thousands each year shamefully isn't enough for us to actually do something about it.

Religion Slowly Dying Out

All people are born Atheist and then taught to believe in some sort of Creator but you would need to go back thousands of years to try and work out how the ideas of religion began.
It is perfectly plausible that the first God's were invented by early man to help make sense of the inexplicable world around him they did not understand.
They would have seen a bright orb of light and heat in the sky and thought it must be a supernatural spirit watching over them.
When the Earth shook under their feet they thought obviously some mighty spirit living in the Earth must be stirring and why is that mountain spitting out liquid fire? Must be an angry spirit that needs to be appeased.
Over time, as man’s knowledge grew, those old spirits ran out of reasons to stick around but the idea of gods just took on different forms.
Countless gods, and at the last count there have been over 4,000 of them are known, have been lost to time as cultures and peoples died out, but the concept remained generally the same.
The Gods of today are just the latest incarnation of an archaic suggestion that has seen many gods rolled into on and imbued with even greater powers over people's lives and even into the afterlife which is either to be spent in paradise or in eternal damnation which has been used by innumerable leaders to try and control the masses.
Once the initial concept of god was created, all it required was for it to be handed down from parent to child, generation after generation, to be accepted as true and factual.
All God's are nothing more than a persistent idea which has been perpetrated and passed on to the next generation but the question is if you were not told all this and you were also not told of the science of how things work, how would you fill the gaps in your knowledge?
I assume you would go down the same route as the early humans but in the modern world we do have science, education and widely available and detailed explanations of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and the Sun so why are the mythologies of the past not dying out quicker than it is?
It may take many generations before religion is forgotten as future generations find religion to be an unimportant aspect of every day life despite the indoctrination of beliefs and the constant reinforcement from older generations but it means that the age of religion will slowly but surely come to and end as the number of indoctrinated children passing on their 'knowledge' grow fewer.

Thank You Dead People

The World can seem an awful place what with wars, economic crashes and global pandemics but who should we blame for it all?
Dead people of course because a lot of long-dead famous people actually caused such massive and negative changes in their lifetimes that we still feel the ill-effect of their existence today.
Obviously Adolf Hitler (died 1945) is a main player because the atrocities he committed with the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930 and 40's made a great impact society, there are neo-Nazi parties and supporters still now despite knowing how horrific as the Holocaust was and because of his Genocide, Israel came about and and now being accused of performed their own against the Palestinians.
Marcion of Sinope (died 160ad) gathered together stories from all other religions at the time, copy and pasted the name of Jesus and God into them and created the Bible which has been used by some to vilify, denounce, condemn and murder millions and continues still today.
Charles Darwin (died 1882) made groundbreaking work on evolution in 1859 but religious groups still today, despite all the evidence, continue to deny and debate it and in some American schools it has been pushed for creation science and not evolution to be taught in schools.
Henry VIII (died 1547)  is famous for many things but beheading wives didn't make their lasting impact of his decision to break away from the Catholic Church and set in motion the conflict Between Catholics And Protestants In Ireland which continues today.
James Madison (died 1836) was the the US President and his bright idea was to proposed and then write the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution back in 1791 and now America has more gun dealers than McDonald's & Starbucks combined and not by accident, the most mass gun shootings with 40,000 gun deaths each year.   
Dr. John Smith Pemberton (died 1888) gave the world Coca-Cola which also led to an increase in obesity, tooth loss and chronic illnesses related to sugar over consumption but the worst legacy from a  long dead person has to be Thomas Midgley Jnr who died in 1944 after leaving us not only with the decision to put lead in petrol but came up with the bright idea of CFC's for air conditioning and refrigeration systems which depleted the Ozone layer so badly that the World had to ban both his inventions and the Ozone layer, that thing which shields all living things from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation,
After 70 years of every car in the world using lead petrol which threw thousands of millions tonnes of lead into the atmosphere and then depleting the ozone layer with CFC's, the argument could be made that Thomas Midgely, through environmental changing actions, has been responsible for more human deaths than any other single person in history.

A New You Every Seven Years?

I once heard that your body replaces itself every seven years what with shedding skin, growing new hair and cells dying and being replaced but how true is it?
'That old chestnut' said the medical researcher i asked who then went on to explain that if it was true nobody would ever age which my mirror shows each morning is abundantly not true.  
According to research, the body has 30 trillion human cells and around 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day while other cells renew each week and some, such as our muscles, renew every 70 years while some such as the ones in our brain, heart and eyes are with us for our entire lives.
Stomach and intestines typically last only up to five days, skin cells  rejuvenate every two to four weeks, hair has a life span of about six years for women and three years for men, the Liver renews itself with new cells every 150 to 500 days and  the cells in our bones takes a full 10 years and slow down as we age.
Despite all this regeneration, the average age of all our cells is about seven years (hence the Old Wives Tale) and the sad truth is that we still get old and die because of mutations every time our cells renew so if you think you're going to look young and beautiful forever, you'll will have to find the Fountain of Youth.

Christmas Creep

Now that Halloween has passed and the strange mix of Santa and the Grim Reaper side by side on the shop shelves has gone it is full steam ahead to December 25th but along with cute snowmen and hearing Noddy Holder yelling that it's Christmas, so too are the Grinch-like grumbles that Christmas is getting earlier every year, and you know what, they are right, it is.
The autumn leaves may still be clinging on to trees but the Christmas music has begun already so we are being asked if you are hanging up your stocking on the wall and humming about chestnuts roasting on an open fire and rockin’ around the Christmas tree and the UK Top 40 singles show that the first Christmas songs in the charts last year entered 10 November when going back to 1967 when the UK charts began and through until 2004 Christmas songs only made an entry 2 weeks before the big day.
The first Mince Pies hit the Supermarket shelves 7 September , down from 9 September in 2023, and 28 September in 2020 and amusingly came with best before dates before December 25th.
Christmas markets are a fixture in cities and towns across the UK and the one in Birmingham opened its gates today, on the 1st November  and the Christmas light switch-on in Oxford Street 5th November which is 3 days later than last year so there may be hope for the miserable amongst us yet.
Personally, i'm with Wizzard and wish it could be Christmas Everyday and when i am supreme ruler of the World i will make it law that Christmas lights have to be on, Trees have to be up and Christmas songs have to be played all year round.

Israel Gunning For UNRWA

Israel has long had the United Nations in their sights, literally sometimes as witnessed recently, but Israel has been gunning for the United Nations for decades as the folder of resolutions against it has burgeoned, most notably the Resolution 242 which assert that Israel must withdrawal its forces from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Another one is UN Resolution 2334 which condemned 'all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory' which calls for the ending of the land grab and the building of settlements on occupied land.
A number of recent incidents reveal the poor regard the United Nations is held in Israel, the attack on United Nation outposts i Lebanon and the demand that they leave the country they are attacking and yesterdays vote to ban UNRWA which delivers aid to Palestinians having failed to convince the major donors to the organisation with their non-existent flimsy evidence that it is packed with Hamas operatives.  
Following the refusal to allow UNRWA to operate in Gaza and threatening the lives of the Palestinian population, the UN are now considering sanctions on Israeli government members, a review of trade ties and a fresh reference to the International Court of Justice which has already ruled that Israel is performing 'what comes under the banner of Genocide'.
Israel’s ban of the UNRWA will leave already starving Palestinians without a lifeline and the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has said banning the UNRWA would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster and Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the UK have issued a joint statement condemning the ban and America, which has been Israels financial and military backer during this genocide and the previous ones, are being reminded by thir own Government agencies that their own laws requires that it stop weapons transfers to any country that obstructs the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid.
The Unicef spokesperson, James Elder, said today that by stopping the the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, 'it’ll likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza' buit that has long been Israel's plan, to make Palestine unlivable, shift the inhabitants elsewhere and claim the land.
Israel is fast becoming the Pariah in International relations and while the United Nations has an array of weapons it can use against Israel, sanctions along the lines of South Africa in the 80s and 90s must be installed by the countries of the World so Israel cannot literally, get away with murder.

Arsenal FC And The Sudanese War

At first glance is isn't easy to see how Arsenal Football Club and the war in Sudan are linked but there is a big clue in the Grounds name, The Emirates Stadium, and the sponsor on the shirts, Fly Emirates which is Emirates Airlines owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
With wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the one in Sudan doesn't get much coverage in the media despite 12 million displaced and a death toll hitting 150,000 and the widespread destruction of critical infrastructure in the nation while performing being .
The UAE have been backing the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) financially and militarily who have been implicated in crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, forced displacement, and killings yet despite this, Arsenal FC has shamefully extended its partnership with Emirates Airlines to 2028, a government-owned entity of the UAE.
The UAE, driven by its own economic and political interests, supplies the arms and funding in exchange for unfettered access to Sudan’s resources so by continuing a partnership with the Emirates implicitly links the club to the atrocities in Sudan, all while allowing the UAE to sportswash its image.
Arsenal FC should then take a stand for human rights by ending its partnership with Emirates Airlines but with the shirt deal alone bringing in £50 million per season, shamefully it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Israeli Economy Not So Great

As Israel are finding out Genocide isn't cheap because it costs money to drop bombs on refugees sheltering in schools and hospitals but luckily for them they have Uncle Sam footing the bill although to be fair to Joe Biden, he is complaining that they are using it to bomb refugees sheltering in schools and hospitals while he willingly hands over money and weapons to allow them to continue doing it.
With America shovelling the best part of $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year, this doesn't completely cover the bill and with Israeli military spending ballooning to $5 billion economists are saying the end of the war could come more to Israeli stuttering economy rather than any moral reason as social programs are neglected in favour of the military.
Last year the Israeli government spent $27.5 billion on the military last year according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or 5.3% of GDP, beaten only by Ukraine's 37% of GDP fighting off Russia’s invasion.
In the last year Israels economic output shrank 5.6%, the worst performance of any of the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the call-ups and extensions of military service are threatening the labor supply and tourism has completely tanked.
Moody’s Ratings has lowered the Israeli government’s credit rating two notches to Baa1 or a moderate credit risk as the debt has risen to 62% and can be expected to hit 80% if the fighting continues for another year and Israel maintains a military presence in Gaza as expected.
The credit downgrade will lead to higher borrowing costs, cuts to public services and higher taxes according to a former head of Israel’s central bank and The Israeli Manufacturing Association claimed that people like me, who happily boycott Israel goods, has cost it a 5% drop in the Israeli export economy.
Obviously Palestine and the West Bank will need to be completely rebuilt when the war ends and nations are offering to fund it but no so much Israel with only America seemingly keen to fund them but it gives Benjamin Netanyahu something to think about besides his place in the Hague cell awaiting him for war crimes.

The Best Time Of The Year To Go On A Cruise

My husband has mentioned the idea of a cruise for next years holiday and i am wary of agreeing to it because to me, on a cruise you are completely at the whim of the weather so with this in mind i asked my Weather chum that according to the Weather Singularity which tells us what weather we can traditionally expect at a certain time of year, when is the best time to clamber aboard a ship and sail around the Oceans?
'Between 5th January to 9 March is a complete no-no as this is the time of storms so very wet and very windy' she explained 'although 10 March to 22 March is pretty settled and mild before it picks up again on 23rd March until 23rd April when everything quietens down again until 17th May when it gets warm and dry until 19 June when wet and windy weather hits until 27th June.
27th June until 16 August sees the 'Phew, whatta scorcher!' headlines until 17th August when the Autumn storms with wet and windy conditions arrive but 1 September until 17 September is traditionally a last blast of fine summer weather but 18th September to 13th November is usually stormy and windy.
14th Nov to 24 Nov is generally a settled period and then from 25 Nov to 12th December is the most stormy periods of the year with a quiet period between 18 December and 24th December and then from 25th December to the end of the year brings gales and heavy rain.
To avoid spending a lot of money to only see the rails of the Ship as i hurl over the side i see the windows of opportunity for a Cruise are 10th March to 22nd March, 23rd April to 18th June, 27th June to 16th August, 1st September to 17th September and 14th November to 24 November.
As this is information from a person with decades of Meteorological experience and my husband is a bloke who's experience of anything weather related is looking out the window, anything outside of those  100 Days he can go on his own and i will go somewhere less likely to have me doped up on Stugeron and ginger biscuits to get through.

Go To The Equator To Weigh Less

I was listening to a report on the Radio about the astronaut returning to Earth from the ISS and having to go to hospital which it was suggested by the reporter was due to months of being weightless and i had to sigh but it is a common misconception that astronauts in orbit are weightless.
They are not, they are in free-fall along with whatever they happen to be in at the time although they are not subject to such a great gravitational pull as us on Earth, about 90% so they weigh approximately 10% less but you don't have to go 250 miles above the Earth to cheat the scales, you just need to go to the Equator.
Due to the Earth rotating and the Earth bulging slightly in the Middle, you would weigh 0.5% less if you weighed yourself in Ecuador, Brazil or Kenya and the further you move North or South towards the Poles, gravity would pull on you harder and your weight would increase and if you took your bathroom scales to either of the Poles, you would weight 0.5% heavier.
You could also go up as gravity at sea level is stronger than if you increase your altitude and the furthest you can go up without sitting in a rocket is Mount Everest which is approximately 8850 meters high and comes with a gravitational reduction of around 1.5% but to be fair by the time you have clambered up there you would be a few pounds lighter anyway.
Probably easier to just not eat that last doughnut.

A Labour Budget V A Conservative Budget

The Labour Party sure did get left with an awful economic inheritance by the Conservative Party, what they assumed to be a £8 billion shortfall turned into £22 billion once they lifted the bonnet on the public finances and saw the extent of the damage, and now Treasury officials are mentioning it could be as high as £40bn once the promised payments made by the outgoing Conservatives are taken into account.
The problem Labour have is that they need to plug that gap before they can even begin implementing their plans to restore the public services to rude health after 14 years of awful right wing ideology ran everything into the ground and a Government can only improve the economics by bringing in more or paying out less.
The latter was the Conservative choice and by them taking an austerity hatchet to public services, things quickly fell apart and despite slashing and cutting at everything while pushing tax to the highest it has been for 70 years, they left not only every department poorer but also the nations ledger, so what are the new Labour Party to do?   
They have ruled out a return to austerity, that never worked last time obviously, so they are instead looking to increase the amount they bring in but their manifesto pledge was to not increase taxes on working people in terms of income tax, national insurance and VAT so it is expected the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will announce an increase on what they have called 'unearned income'.
Increases in Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains Tax are widely expected to be announced on Wednesday and i see no problem with that, as the name implies Inheritance Tax is paid on the value of your estate when you die and includes property, money, investments and possessions and is currently taxed at 40% on anything over £325,000 which is where the smart money is going on what will be changed, with the £325,000 figure being reduced as well as the 7 year rule for 'giving away' assets increased to 10 years.
Capital Gain is paid on anything bought and sold for a profit such as shares, land or gold and is currently taxed at 10% or 20% and hints have been heavilly dropped that these percentages will be increased, possibly in line with the sellers tax rate as well as 'loopholes' which are used to reduce the tax rate dropped.  
Taxing 'Unearned wealth' is the line Labour keep repeating and both of these are unearned and would not hit  most 'ordinary' families such as a rise in the income tax rate, increase in National Insurance or a reduction in Personal Allowances would so go for it Labour and lets hope it raises enough to get the country out of the funk of the Conservatives disastrous right wing ideology which did hit ordinary families as a look at your payslip bears out.

Oops...Too Late

 It has been said that you should stop AI before it becomes too engrained into your lives. Oops, bit late i say.
I assume many of you woke up and glanced at your iPhone this morning which unlocked itself using the AI enhanced facial recognition function and maybe asked Alexa to put on some music, tell you the news headlines or weather and traffic using the AI speech recognition system while you ate breakfast .
You may have then driven your car to the workplace using the AI in the Sat Nav to identify the presence of obstacles, lanes, intersections and traffic lights and manoeuvre into that awkward parking spot.
While at work you may have got an alert on your phone from your AI powered Amazon Ring doorbell to tell you that you have a package delivered, maybe the Tesco delivery which was ordered over their Ai assisted website.
Lunchtime and you sit in the canteen scrolling through your phone reading news articles, scrolling through social media, making Google searches and buying more things online and therefore leaving a trail of clues about who you are and what you might want to spend your money which advertisers use AI to sift through this data for insights into your age, gender, lifestyle, disposable income and whether you’re into cooking, water skiing, makeup tutorials or sci-fi and allows companies to serve up specific, targeted adverts to you.
After you drive home you turn the lights on with your AI system and maybe set the robot vacuum cleaner off and fire off a few texts messages using autocorrect and maybe play a few games in an AI generated virtual environment before using your Alexa to find out the weather for tomorrow and setting your phone's alarm to do it all over again.
Yep, stop Ai before it gets too engrained into your human lives indeed.  

Question Of Reparations For British Role In Slavery

In 1519, the first vessel carrying slaves sailed between Africa and the Americas was Portuguese and so began the transatlantic slave trade but by 1651 the British became the primary carriers of Africans to the New World, a position they continued to maintain until the end of the trade in the early 19th century.
It always irks me to hear our Politicians proudly repeat that the Brits were the first to abolish slavery as if it is a badge of honour because it's like praising a bully for stopping repeatedly punching you in the face and we punched West Africans hard for over 200 years and at the end of the abhorrent trade Britain had transported 40.5% of enslaved humans, Portugal 30.8%, France 18.6%, Netherlands 6%, Denmark 1.1% and Spain 0.1%, a total of 10.7 million arriving in the Americas out of the 12.5 million put on ships.
That we stopped herding people onto ships and transporting them to awful conditions to work for free on sugar, cotton, and tobacco fields while bolstering Britain's economy is hardly something to boast about as is the fact that on abolishing the Slavery Act the British Government paid former slave owners compensation for loss of 'property' that totalled the equivalent of £300m today, the Slaves and their families received nothing.
Quite rightly some countries demand reparations for all they had suffered under British rule and this week both the King and Prime Minister were in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and again faced calls for reparations.
Fifteen Caribbean governments have presented a 10-point plan for reparatory justice including a formal apology for slavery and a development program to help the nations with their economies.
Experts have put a figure on how much Britain should pay and reached a figure of anything between £205bn and  £18.8trn and both the King and Keir Starmer have avoided directly addressing the subject, the King saying he understood: 'how the most painful aspects of our past resonate' and Keir Starmer has dodged the question by saying we can't change history and he thinks we should be looking forward and not back.
A financial package of the amounts mentioned will not be forthcoming from the UK Government, it would struggle to find sums quite so astronomical and the word 'Sorry'  is a declaration of legal responsibility for which there could be a legal implications so that won't be uttered either but what is being mulled over is the cancellation or reduction of debt and setting up and funding health and education institutions.
Brit's today aren’t directly responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but we are responsible for somehow making sure that the abhorrent actions of our ancestors are at least acknowledged and widely known and castigated because as American author James Baldwin wrote: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced'.

Everyone Has To Start Somewhere

Everyone’s got to start somewhere, even world leaders so you may be working in a factory, driving a bus or sweeping the corridors of a hospital but it doesn't mean you can't go on to rule a country and make World changing important decisions because some of the most famous politicians started out in less glamorous surroundings.
Italy's Silvio Berlusconi went from singing on cruise ships to hosting bunga bunga parties in the house of the Italian Prime Minster and Irelands Michael Higgins worked as a waiter and the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, took that less worn route of going from Bus driver to President.
Johanna Sigurdardottir, Iceland’s Prime Minister was a Flight attendant on Icelandair and Adama Barrow, President of the Gambia was a security guard in Argos and Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian Prime Minister, began his working life sweeping the streets of Leningrad and Nicolas Sarkozy, former French President, also pushed a brush as a cleaner in Paris.
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister was a nightclub Bouncer and you wouldn't mess with Khaltmaagiin Battulga, President of Mongolia, who was a wrestler and another person whose first job was inflicting pain on people is Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov who today rules over Turkmenistan but started out as a dentist.
Borut Pahor, Slovenian president was a Male model and Recep Erdogan, Turkish president sold Lemonade as did Angela Merkel, former Chancellor of Germany who worked as a waitress.
The former President of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, was fine with people laughing at him as he began as a Comedian as did Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, who starred in a TV series in which he weirdly played the role of the President of Ukraine.
Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council was a painter and decorator and Joe Biden also knows his way around a paint brush as he was a handyman before working his way up to President while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazi was a peanut salesman and Tony Blair played in a band called Ugly Rumours and his predecessor John Mayor worked in a factory making garden gnomes.
Xi Jinping went from building site labourer to President of China and Boiko Borisov, Bulgarian prime minister was a bodyguard and Donald Trump's first job was picking up empty bottles from his father’s construction sites to redeem for cash and Barack Obama began life selling ice cream.
Pope Francis was a Nightclub bouncer in Buenos Aires so never give up because today you may be emptying the office bins of some dullard who doesn't even acknowledge you or serving drinks to some obnoxious man who clicks his fingers at you and calls you Sweetheart but one day you may be in a position to whack his tax up or build a motorway through his garden.   

Dropping Birth Rates

Over the past 70 years, the global birth rate has dropped from 5.0 children per woman to 2.2 today which is bordering the 2.1 is considered the replacement level for a continuing population so what's to blame?
Multiple studies are finding that women who live in more heavily polluted areas are conceiving significantly less often, a survey of 18,000 couples found that those who lived in dense urban areas were 20% less capable of conceiving.
In America, a study of 632 women by the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Clinic found that women in environments with high concentrations of fine particulate matter in the air, lost their eggs and were rendered infertile earlier in life. For those who tried IVF instead, a study published in the periodical Human Reproduction in 2024 found that in neighborhoods with high levels of pollution, IVF conception failed 38% more often.
Men are also deeply susceptible to potency damage from pollution with low sperm count leading to a decrease in fertility and 7% of men are infertile all their lives.
Pollution seems to be the enemy to a continuing population then but in America, the most expensive place i the World to give birth, i would put it down to each birth costing an eye-watering uninsured patient will be charged $18,865 and $2,655 if insured for a straightforward birth.
If a caesarean section is required then the price goes up to $25,820 for the uninsured and $3,200 with insurance so we can see can see why a birth the country only has a birth rate of 1.6 and is declining
although with 8.2 billion humans clogging up a Planet which experts have said can only sustain 7.7 billion people, maybe not having so many of us isn't a bad thing.

Trump Not Just A Fascist

The prospect of a second Trump presidency has become  a bit of dilemma for Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who called the man a 'neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath' which may be a bit awkward if he has to deal with him after November 5th but in light of John Kelly branding Donald Trump a Fascist, there is  one thing that people who have worked with Donald Trump agree on, he is probably the worst possible person to lead a country.
Kelly served as Trump’s secretary of homeland security and the White House chief of staff and called Trump 'an idiot' and 'fitted into the general definition of fascist' who 'prefers the dictator approach to government'.
Mark Milley was the Chair of joint chiefs of staff and said that Trump is 'fascist to the core' and was 'doing great and irreparable harm' which is echoed by defense secretary, Mark Esper, who said  Trump 'had those inclinations towards fascism'.
James Mattis said Trump was 'making a mockery of our constitution' and National Security Advisor John Bolton said Trump is 'unfit to be president' and 'hasn’t got the brains to be a dictator', Rex Tillerson didn't sugarcoat his feelings, going with a blunt ans to the point 'moron'.
White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, labeled him 'a conman' and a 'fraud'  who was 'a racist, misogynist and bigot' and Trump's Vice President, Mike Pence, said of Trump that he should 'Never be President again' and one time lawyer Michael Cohen said Trump was 'A cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator and a conman'.
Another aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, decided that 'UnAmerican' and 'unpatriotic' summed him up but Communications Director, Alyssa Farah Griffin, decided on 'Creepy' and infantile'
The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said Trump was a 'Fucking moron' and that would be bad enough but the rest of the staff used other names for the President including Tom Barrack Jr who said he was 'stupid' but Gary Cohn went as far as to call him 'dumb as shit'.
The White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah called him 'deplorable' and FBI Director James Comey went for 'Morally unfit to be president', 'unethical and untethered to truth' and even Barbara Res, the executive vice-president of Trump Organisation, said he was a 'supreme sexist'.
Steve Bannon said he was like 'an 11-year-old child', White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh said working with Trump was like 'trying to figure out what a child wants' and Republican senator Bob Corker of Tennessee called the White House under Trump 'an adult day care center'.
National Security Advisor H R McMaster stuck the boot into his former boss by saying he had the intelligence of a 'kindergartner' and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of 'a fifth- or sixth-grader'.
The woman he had an affair with, Stormy Daniels, said he was 'completely and utterly out of touch with reality' so take your pick if Donald Trump is an idiot, fascist, moron or any of the other insults thrown at him but as these are the people who worked and know him best, who are we to argue with them in their assessment.

Rethinking The Space Order Mnemonic

We all know the order of the Planets and there are many mnemonics to help us remember the Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune line-up such as Most Very Elderly Men Just Sleep Under Newspapers or My Very Excited Mother Just Slipped Us Nacho's.
At school we were taught: 'My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets' but then Pluto got kicked out of the Planet Club and ruined it but during World Space Week i heard a fascinating fact that Mercury, and not Venus, is actually our closest neighbour in the Solar System.
At first i was sceptical, a lifetime of looking at pictures of the Planetary line-up clearly had Earth squished comfortably between Venus and Mars and Mercury was the first one nearest the Sun and i know some proper Space nerds and surely they would have dropped that particular bombshell by now but i tucked it away as something to look up and then forgot about it until i heard Brian Cox say in his excellent Solar System programme that Venus is 'usually' our closest neighbour.
That adverb slotted into that sentence got me wondering and my mind went back to that guy and his assertion that 'Venus isn't our closest Planetary neighbour' which i filed away in my brain as ...pfft, and upon  digging into it i found, actually, he was right, it isn't.
As the pie chart up there shows, Venus is only the closest Planet to Earth 36.6% of the time while Mercury is closer 45.5% with Mars coming beside us 17.9%.
All the Astrological big hitters from ancient times, the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Ptolemy got it wrong as they had the Earth at the centre and it was Copernicus who put the Planets in order in the 16th Century and we have gone with that ever since and made up clever ways to drum it into schoolkids heads.
Now though, we could be about to see a big change in what we know about the order of our Solar System and it all begins with Scientists inserting little words like 'usually' into sentences about Venus being our closest Solar System neighbour which will gradually grow into words such as  'occasionally' and 'sometimes' and Mercury will take its rightful place as Earth's nearest buddy.

Donald McDonald

Is there nothing Donald Trump can't touch without it turning to a stinking turd?
One of the World's worst businessmen, a day after becoming the second clown to be employed by McDonald's after Ronald, the Restaurant announce a 9% drop in their share price knocking £12bn off the company's value.
The former president who is no stranger to fast food judging by that impressive girth, only working a 20 minute shift at the drive-thru, serving pre-screened customers and he even got a free burger for his efforts because it’s not exactly a secret that Trump isn’t fond of paying for things, something hundreds of Trump workers and contractors left out of pocket will attest to.
Obviously, Burger King would have been more appropriate, we all know Trump likes Whoppers but credit must go to Trump, he can now actually say he worked at a profitable business, or he could until he turned up there.   
The actual reason McDonald's price dropped was due to an E.coli outbreak linked to Quarter Pounder burgers in the US left many customers ill but where's the fun in that?

Reasons To Be Cheerful In A Scary World

The World can be a scary place, from the climate crisis to wars, there is always something to keep us fretting but hang on, what are the reasons to be cheerful to balance things out a little?
We may hear much of a divide between the left and the right and that may be good business for some politicians, British social attitudes are vastly improving with a 2022 Survey finding that 73% of people thought rights for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals 'had not gone far enough', 49% of people agreed that equal rights 'had not gone far enough' for Black and Asian people while same sex weddings have been made legal in Bulgaria, Estonia, Peru, Hong Kong, Romania and Thailand.
Regarding Climate Change, the world has made significant progress with worldwide spending on carbon-free energy reaching £785bn which means that for the first time ever, we have spent as much on clean energy as we did on fossil fuels and renewables now supply a quarter of US electricity and projected to be as much as 90% by 2030 as attitudes shift to stemming climate change and wanting to make all our lives better.
More people are becoming resistant to online conspiracy theories and misinformation, Alzheimer’s treatment which is being called  'the beginning of the end of dementia' has finished trials with a resounding success and AI has been dramatically speeding up scientific discovery of new drugs for Cancer and Tuberculosis treatment and Polio is all but eradicated.
Inflation is down from a high of 11% in 2022 to 2% today and the pay gap between full-time working women and their male counterparts is the smallest on record while electric car ownership is up 50% and more manufacturers are going down the route of Electric cars which are becoming cheaper which all helps the Ozone Layer which continues to heal and is expected to return to normal levels by about 2050.
The number of people in extreme poverty is on the way down with 80 million less than four years ago and a hundred countries now ban plastics with the EU banning the export of plastic waste and under Brazil's new President, deforestation in the Amazon is at the lowest level it's been in five years and animals such as the African Elephant and lion, the American bison and Bald eagle, the blue whale and the humpback whale, the monarch butterfly, the mountain gorilla, the grey wolf, the sea otter, the snow leopard have all been taken off the WWFs endangered list and put on the recovery list thanks to conservation efforts.
Yes, us humans can be awful and you only have to watch an episode of any news channel to see that but taking a page from Ian Dury, there are some reasons to be cheerful.

Ban Perverse Books, Except This One

What do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human stupidity is one of those questions which gets asked much but luckily we have an answer i the shape of the Iowa Senators who have passed  law which requires school libraries to remove all books: 'With descriptions or depictions of a sex act' and are using ChatGPT to discover them lurking on the dusty shelves.
The lawmakers have put in a proviso though,all books are to checked for 'very explicit, perverse or pornographic descriptions' but not the Bible, that's okay because they say they know what they are dealing with with sex acts in that particular book where there are many references to 'coming in unto' but once you get past the flowery language, the Bible has some nasty, nasty stories.
In Genesis 19:30-36, Lot has drunken sex in a cave with his Daughters who say ',,,there is no man in the earth to come in unto us...Come, let us make father drink wine, and we will lie with him' which they did, twice which begs the question just how much wine did they give him each time to became oblivious to the fact that he was having sex with his daughters ... twice?
There are all sorts of shenanigans in Genesis 29: 21-28 where Jacob goes in unto a couple of sisters and a maid and then offers the 'oh no, i come in unto the wrong sister' excuse so maybe he should have stayed in and read Judah 38:8-10 where Onan 'raises his seed to his brothers wife' but knowing that 'the seed should not be his', when he went in unto his sister in law and at the big moment, 'spilled it onto the ground' which doesn't really make the family gatherings any less awkward.
The Bible does like a tale of people accidentally having sex with the wrong person and we have another one in Genesis. 38:15-16 where Judah uses his best chat up line of 'Pray thee, let me come in unto thee' on a woman who turns out to be his daughter in law but Solomon in Genesis 1:30 to 8:10 is described as laying with his concubine 'all night between my breasts' which are like 'two young roes that are twins' and when he put his hand by the hole of the door (???), her bowels moved for him. Then his conquests breast go on to be described as both 'a cluster of grapes' and 'towers' but at least her bowels movement was covered in more details.  
As you may have noticed, most of the sexy stuff is in Genesis and that's where we find the sons of God (who were giants by the way) 'came in unto the daughters of men and they bore children' and i'm no doctor but giants coming unto daughters means in 9 months giant babies which means giving birth may have smarted  a bit in Biblical times.
There is also a bit in Deuteronomy where the question of: 'What shalt thou do with asses?' and then answers its own question by saying thou should 'lift them up again' but no plowing else the ass shall be: 'violently taken away' but i assume they mean the Donkey variety but just to be sure leave the ass plowing to another day Christians just to be on the safe side.

Someone Else Can Work Out The Space Elevator Idea

The idea of a Space Elevator always seemed like a good one to me and setting aside the engineering involved, pretty easy to set up or so you would think.
The issue is that the Earth spins at approximately 1,000 miles per hour so the target above the Earth must match this Speed and to maintain an orbit the satellite must orbit at a speed of approximately 7,000 mph
but then you have other factors such as height of the satellite, constant of Gravitation, Mass of the Planet, the rotational period of the planet and the radius of the planet.
Luckily there is an equation to solve for this h=√3(GMT2/4π2)-R which all means some smart-arse could work out how fast something needs to go and at what height, much like the communications satellites which follow the Earths rotation.
Over a century ago, a Russian scientist dreamed up the idea for a space elevator and his idea was a cable connecting Earth to space and Arthur C. Clarke updated it but had the same idea of a cable which would life the cargo to the platform.
Now physicists Leonardo Golubović and Steven Knudsen have drawn up plans which involve very long looped strings and a rotating platform (for some reason the rotation would improve it) and i assume they have gone through the whole h=√3(GMT2/4π2)-R thing and find it workable.
If it did work it would radically reduce the cost of space travel by transporting parts of lunar modules out of the Earth's Gravity which is the expensive part due to the fuel needed to leave the grip of Mother Earth but just don't ask me to work it all out, just seeing an equation with brackets and a π in it means i am regressed back to school and i have an urge to fake a period pain.