Immigration

 
During the election, you will hear mainly from the right wing parties about immigration and it is an issue as the numbers of people driven out of their homes by war, natural disasters and climate change are higher than ever before, the UN puts the figure at 117 million people displaced in 2023.
The number of people forced to leave their homes in 2023 was 117 million, a doubling of the amount of displaced people a decade ago and it's still rising, with the UN estimating that within the first four months of 2024 that figure went over 120 million.
So what is forcing people from their homes?
Dr Leonie Ansems de Vries, professor of international politics and chair of the Migration Research Group at King's College London puts it down to conflict, violence, human rights abuses, natural disasters and environmental degradation.
Many of the countries who take in the most refugees are vulnerable themselves, with fewer resources than more developed nations with Iran hosting the most refugees in the world with most coming from Afghanistan and Iraq although despite hosting many refugees, many also come from Iran and go to countries like Germany which hosts the largest number of refugees in Europe at nearly 3 million.
The USA, despite being the Worlds largest economy, are 20th in the ranking of refugees hosted and the UK is 19th, trailing behind many less-developed countries such as Chad, Jordan, Ethiopia or Kenya who have taken refugees from Sudan, the nation who at 600,000, have produced the highest number of refugees.
War and violence are driving the immigration but climate change is making the situation worse, 2023 was the warmest year on record with global air surface temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and the World Meteorological Organization says over the next four years temperatures will be between 1.1C and 1.9C higher than pre-industrial levels.
At the end of 2023, almost 75% of displaced people were living in countries with high to extreme exposure of climate-related hazards such as droughts and floods which makes us very fortunate to be living in a country that is not quite so devastatingly affected by the changing climate.
Finally, don't believe the nonsense about immigrants being a drain on the economy, the Government's own figures show that immigrants pay more in income taxes and national insurance contributions than they receive in tax credits and child benefit, contributing a net amount of £22bn to the UK economy and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that higher net migration reduces pressure on government debt over time.
Worth thinking about next time some right wing politician is on TV berating immigrants.

Taken Out Of Context?

 
Thinking of voting for Nigel Farage's Reform UK party?
In an interview, the BBC's Nick Robinson asked the party leader why his party attracts candidates with: 'really extreme and unpleasant views' which Farage answered was due to: 'candidates being stitched up in the most extraordinary way with quotes being taken out of context'.
Quotes taken out of context such as Simon Moorehead, standing in Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West, who wrote on X about the murdered politician Jo Cox that she: 'was a dreadful woman, with bad ideas".
Maybe Mark Cole, the candidate in Harwich and North Essex, who said in a Facebook post that he: 'Accidently switched on to X-Factory. The only thing worth watching is the black bint.... whoever she is.'
Then there is Malcolm Cupis, the candidate for Melksham and Devizes who accused a women dancing of 'behaving like a gutter slut' and John Edwards, the candidate for Southampton Test, referred to women appearing on Love Island as 'thick tarts' and the former leader of the Liberal Democrats Jo Swinson as a 'gobby bird'.
Ian Gribbin, the candidate for Bexhill and Battle, said that the UK should have stayed neutral in World War Two and 'Modern feminism belongs in the sewer of self hate from which it came: you’re all jealous of the perceived freedoms of men.'
Emmett Jenner, the candidate for Ynys Mon, who answered a post about girls who are growing up today can achieve anything they want' with 'Like fertilising eggs & providing Y chromosomes.
Yep, can see how their own words could be taken out of context. Oh wait...

An Angel Told Me...

A Woman who died and 'went to heaven for three days' has been passing on the details she gleaned and says she now knows what the future holds including when Armageddon will happen. I know but let's hear her out.
Julie Poole, ascended to Heaven after a taking a massive overdose of prescription drugs in a suicide attempt and as she lay on the bed to die, she suddenly saw her guides and angels around me and then they told her that this wasn't her time to die, lifted me up, and took her up to an angelic realm where she spent three days being 'healed' and sent back to Earth with the instruction to 'help people'.
Part of helping people is to pass on the knowledge that the world would go through a period called the 'Golden Age' which would come after 2032 which would bring equality across the board, so that everything which is false and fake and untrue and corrupt will fall away.
Apparently, the years 2024 and 2025 will be a tipping point' where corrupt people will be held to account and see more and more people seeing the light which could be aliens because from 2025 there will be an increase of alien sightings and they will be bringing incredible technology and are coming from far, far away to help us.
She ends with a warning that depending on how you have lived your life, it will either be something to be feared or a brilliant, dawn of the Golden Age so there you go and as it has come from Angel it must be true. Mustn't it?

Arghhhh....Shoo!!!!

Something i have said a few times is that since i have given up smoking, i seem to get bit a lot more by midges and mosquitoes than i used to and generally put it down to the nasties in cigarette making my blood taste undesirable but a team of experts at the Biology Department at the University of Washington are saying that your smell and the colour of your clothes is the deciding factor in whether you are sporting an angry red lump on your person for the next week.  
In a video on the university’s website, Professor Riffell says that some individuals are bitten way more than others and that Mosquitoes are remarkably good at trying to locate a person to drink their blood as everything about them is geared towards finding us and biting us.
Riffell and his team discovered that female mosquitoes find humans by following a trail of scent cues such as the chemicals humans exude from their skin and sweat and the carbon dioxide gas humans exhale when they breathe and they are also drawn to certain colors, particularly loving red and black clothing.
Don't wear red and black, got it. So what colour should we wear to avoid the evil little buggers? They tend to dislike white and green apparently and as for your smell, avoid salty foods or foods with potassium, such as bananas increased your risk of mosquito bites as they increase the lactic acid in your body which is catnip to the bitey things.
As for my half arsed idea that smoking keeps mosquitoes and midges away, there is some science behind it as something they hate is not the smell of the cigarettes but the smoke exhaled which they really don't like although i doubt that many medical professionals would advocate it as a recommended method for repelling mosquitoes.
So don't eat bananas, wear white or green and stand within touching distance of a smoker whilst outside for a bite free summer. 

Dangerous Lies About Climate Change Kill

For decades, the truth about smoking was obscured by a web of deceptive myths and misleading claims. Tobacco companies, through marketing and advertising, spread numerous falsehoods that downplayed the dangers of cigarettes. Many people were led to believe that smoking was not only safe but also beneficial in various ways. It wasn’t until extensive research and public health campaigns revealed the true risks of smoking that these myths were debunked.
It was glamourised in movies, advertisements, and literature, often associated with sophistication, rebellion but as scientific research in the mid-20th century began to reveal the health risks associated with smoking, public perception began to shift so the cigarette manufacturers hot back by claiming Light Cigarettes were Healthier and marketed as a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes.
They also said that filters made cigarettes safer, secondhand smoke was harmless, there was no link between cigarettes and cancer and hid the information from the public, said that it could be used as a diet aid, it wasn't addictive, said smoking was safe for pregnant women and even advertised that doctors said smoking is good for you.
Might be worth remembering the lies and deceit the cigarette companies went to to hock their products when the anti-Climate Change brigade start up their immoral lies about how the Climate isn't changing such as Nigel Farage who dismissed it after the biggest donor to his Reform party was shipping magnate Terence Mordaunt, former head and now trustee of The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWFP) whose stated aims are to 'challenge damaging and harmful policies to mitigate global warming' and has written a cheque for £200,000 to Reform UK.
Another wealthy donor to Reform is Jeremy Hosking, who has more than £100m invested in fossil fuel interests and has donated £1,5m to the rightwing party and Jon Moynihan, a Conservative donor who has given more than £700,000 to the Tories and was given a peerage by the ex-prime minister Liz Truss, is also making donations worth tens of thousands to the GWPF.
The Tory peer Lord Nigel Vinson has given thousands to GWPF and Tory peer Michael Hintze, has given more than £4.8m to the Conservatives, is also a GWPF donor and donated thousands to the energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, who has lambasted Labour’s plans to end North Sea oil and gas extraction and criticised 'net zero zealots'.
Peter Geoghegan, from Democracy for Sale, said: 'The most prominent face of climate change denial in Britain is being bankrolled by Conservative donors with seats in the House of Lords and the GWPF is being funded by Tory peers and has close ties to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK goes to show how climate denying money is influencing our politics.'
Might want to remember that next time some useful idiot with a increased bank balance from donations appears on TV saying Climate Change is a hoax , it blatantly isn't and the climate experts at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict an excess of 250,000 deaths per year by 2050.

More Of The Same After Another Israeli Massacre

The usual manoeuvre after Israel has committed yet another massacre of civilians is that Israel denies massacre, Israel announce an investigation of the massacre and then the news cycle moves on and the last massacre is replaced by another massacre and the cycle starts again and it is exactly what is happening following an attack on a residential block, houses and refugee camps in Gaza City which has killed at least 45.
The Israeli military said warplanes had struck Hamas military infrastructure sites in Gaza City and was targeting a senior Hamas official although as pictures of bodies being pulled from under the rubble emerged, it changed to the predictable: 'The incident would be examined and the findings presented'.
As for the previous investigation of the massacre of 22 civilians at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) offices in Gaza, Israel said there was: 'no direct attack carried out by the IDF against a Red Cross facility' which the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell took with a salt mine worth of salt and said that there should be an 'independent investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable'.
More than 37,551 people have now been killed in Gaza and the  International Court of Justice has said Israels action 'comes under the Genocide banner' and the International Criminal Court are seeking warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
The European Commission are holding an Association Council to discuss several EU countries call to banning imports of products from Israel in light of the ICC and ICJ rulings and as Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 29% of its trade in goods, hopefully economics will work in stopping the Israeli genocide where human rights and war crime rulings have failed.

Worst..Government...Ever.

 
MRP stands for Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification which is a statistical modelling technique whereby pollsters combine a very large poll with other sources of information such as census data in order to estimate the support for parties in every constituency.
Three MRP polls have been published and whichever way you dice it, it isn't good news for the Conservatives as they all predict Labour are on course for majority of either 162, 200 or 382.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been caught moaning that voters have: 'failed to appreciate our superb record' after 14 years of Tory rule so do the Tories deserve any credit for the past 14 years?
Not according to political historian Sir Anthony Seldon who has analysed what it has achieved in every area of policy from 2010 to 2024 and say this lot have been the worse than any other in postwar history.
His verdict is that in comparison to the earlier four periods of one-party dominance post-1945, it is hard to see the years since 2010 as anything but disappointing.
He says Britain’s standing in the world is lower, the union is less strong, the country less equal, the population less well protected, growth more sluggish, public services under performing while respect for the civil service, judiciary and the police was lower than when they came into office.
He blames it on decisions made such as Brexit, the frequency of scandals and crises and a lack of strategic and long term thinking and it was hard to find a comparable period in history of any government which achieved so little.
Of the leaders themselves, he has concluded that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were inept and 'not up to the job of being prime minister' Teresa May did next to nothing in her time in power but David Cameron was ok and Rishi Sunak inherited an already broken party.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: 'Since 2010, Conservative governments have made great strides with 4 million more people in work, record funding in the NHS, pensioners protected with the triple lock and education standards improved' although funnily enough he never mentioned the
highest tax burden in 70 years, NHS waiting lists at record high, a dentistry crisis leaving people forced to pull out own teeth, the Partygate scandal saw Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak receive police fines, mortgages and interest rates soaring, austerity wrecking vital public services, the raw sewage scandal, schools literally crumbling, the Tory party chair sacked over evading tax or the Covid PPE scandals.
Yep, Worst..Government...Ever.

Test AI Reader

 

June Is Peak Hay Fever Season

If you suffer from Hay fever then you may want to close your watery eyes at this post because in the UK late June is the worst month for the ailment and with the Met Office warning the pollen count will be very high in Britain for the next five days as Mother Nature has decided to fling a bit of summer our way.
The NHS website advises to not hanging your washing outdoors, shower when you've been outside, keep windows and doors closed, vacuuming and wipe down surfaces regularly and take antihistamines.
The National Asthma Society suggest certain times of the day can trigger hay fever symptoms or make them worse and pollen levels tend to be highest first thing in the morning and at the end of the day so if you have to go outside, it’s best to do so during the middle of the day but being ill in the summertime is no fun at all. While everyone else is sitting outside with a cool drink, you’re trapped indoors with itchy eyes, a pouring nose, a tickly throat.
Although it isn't great, you should be thankful that you’re experiencing your symptoms in the present day when antihistamines are a thing, in the 17th Century a 'cure' was to rub a little grease into the temples of your head, gargle with vinegar and to put a hot brick where the pain was.
Another was to boil snails in a little water and then drink the liquid or drip it into your eyes and where would we be today with doctors plumping for some good old fashioned bloodletting and a good purge to stimulate the bowels and induce vomiting.
June is the peak hay fever season due to a combination of the end of the tree pollen and the start of the grass and weed pollen seasons combining and it is the grass pollen which affects most people until late July when you can relax as hay fever season is over so throw open the windows and breathe in the fresh air and head outside with zero worries about snotty noses and itchy eyes, just in time for the British Summer to turn into torrential rain.

Keep Ya Shades On

Whisper it but all the weather people are saying that Summer may finally have arrived with temperatures of 28C soon to be seen along with the UV readings and the warning to make sure you smother on the sun-block and as someone with skin so white it is almost transparent, it is advice i generally take although you can guarantee that at least once before September i will be caught out and end up with a face and shoulders as red as Santa's outfit but as painful as a red forehead can be,  it isn't the worst place to get sunburnt.
That is the eyes, or to be more scientific, photokeratitis, which is a sunburn not on your eyelids but on your actual eyeballs.
The advice is to wear eye protection, and by that, they don’t mean rubbing sunscreen into your eyes but decent sunglasses that offer 100% UV protection and are polarized to reduce glare as well as looking as cool as hell.
Though sunglasses might usually be mentally paired with poolside summer days, they originally were worn to block out snow glare by prehistoric Inuits so were originally snowglasses but the first proper sunglasses with tinted lenses were invented by an English optician due to the idea of 18th Century safe sex was to make sure a heavy desk was dragged in front of the bedroom door first which stopped anyone walking in but did nothing to stop syphilis.
As STD's were as common as pushing kids up chimneys in those days and one of the symptoms of syphilis was sensitivity to light, Optician James Ayscough came up with glasses with yellow tints to allow infected people to walk around outside in the sunshine and as 18th Century medical practise was to stick a leech on things and ask if you felt better,it was quite an achievement.
So, what started with Inuits preventing snowblindness through a medical aide for anyone with crutch rot to enjoy the summer, sunglasses are now an essential part of summer fashion and now you have read this, if you see anyone wearing a pair with a yellow tint then you know not to accept that invite back to their place after that beach barbecue, especially if they are walking a bit gingerly.

Learning About LGBTQIA+

 

We had Pride week at work with lots of rainbow flags around the building but i have only just found out that it isn't any old rainbow, the colours actually stand for something.
The rainbow-colored flags date back at least to the German Peasants’ War in the 1500s and the hippie movement of the 1960s used the flag as a peace symbol and it was this that was created as a symbol for gay rights in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1978.
The six colors used are red for life and vitality, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, indigo for serenity and harmony and violet for spirit.
I also found out that LGBTQ+ is now LGBTQIA+ which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, asexual, and plus which can be a minefield as i also found out as Queer is someone who is not exclusively heterosexual and Intersex is a person with one or more innate sex characteristics that fall outside of traditional conceptions of male or female bodies. Not to be confused with transgender.
Asexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction and have little or no desire to form romantic relationships and the plus is used to signify all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters cannot yet fully describe.
Embarrassingly in 2024, there are 64 countries that have laws that criminalise homosexuality and almost half of these are in Africa and shamefully the death penalty is the legally prescribed punishment for same-sex sexual acts in Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and in some northern states of Nigeria while in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates the death penalty could be applied.

How Stupid?

As we are in the throes of Euro's Football fever, lets throw out some metaphors at just how bad the Conservative's at been at running their own election campaign in light of the latest scandal regarding a select few of Rishi Sunak's closest colleagues were illegally betting on the date of the election.
Own goal seems the most fitting because Tony Lee, the Conservative party’s director of campaigning, has taken 'a leave of absence' which immediately leads to the question was someone actually directing this shambles?
Lee is the fourth person to be under investigation by the Gambling Commission for placing bets on the election date before it was announced joining Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, Craig Williams, having placed a £100 bet on the date and then a police officer in Sunak’s protection team suspended for the same thing and then the Tories Bristol North West pick Laura Saunders found to have made a trip to the bookies.
You would think that betting on 'insider knowledge' when only a handful of people knew would be enough of a caution but to carry on and do it anyway, in your own name rather than a family member of friend, means that you do have to wonder just how many types of stupids there are and it may not have reached its conclusion yet because the Conservative campaign HQ have issued a statement saying it was a 'small number of individuals' which could mean 4 or could mean the whole of the Cabinet were queuing up in William Hills that afternoon.
I suppose as they know they are on their way out and the fake PPE gravy train has come to a halt that they have to make their money somewhere but not having the sense to be a bit more candid about breaking the law is mind blowingly stupid although as Lee was doing such an awful job 'directing' the campaign, Sunak should thank his lucky stars that Lee is left kicking his heels at home well away from it all.

What Happened To Streakers?

It didn't seem that long ago that almost every sporting event had a naked person running across the pitch and disrupting the action but although we still get people running on the pitch they are always now fully clothed so what happened to streakers?
I can't remember the last time a nude body flashed across a football, cricket, rugby pitch or a tennis court where once it was such a popular pastime that there was even a song dedicated to it in the 1970's but maybe it is a 70s thing and has gone the same way as Roller Disco's, Rubix Cubes and shirts with collars so wide you were in danger of lifting off in a gust of wind.
The TV Cameras no longer show people who manage to get onto the pitch so maybe stripping off and running around as nature intended doesn't get the publicity anymore and if you are only doing it to get your face (or your other bits) on TV and you go to all that effort only to be ignored then it hardly seems worth it.
I do understand men not wanting to do it during the football or rugby season which takes place in Winter and cold weather is not very flattering for a naked gentleman and i am not particularly keen to see a nude body disrupting the Euro's unless its Olivier Giroud, i would make an exception for him.

Confused About Those Manifesto Pledges?

All the Manifestos have now been published and after a while all the pledges can roll together so let's put them all side by side and see exactly what the parties are promising if they get into power.

Tax 
Conservatives will knock another 2p off National Insurance with an ambition to get rid of it altogether.
Labour has pledged not to raise taxes with no increase in income tax, national insurance, or VAT.
Liberal Democrats will increase the tax-free allowance and bring Capital Gains in line with other tax rates.
Greens will introduce a wealth tax of 1% on assets above £10m and 2% above £1bn.
Reform will raise the income tax threshold to £20,000 and abolish Inheritance Tax on all estates under £2m.

NHS and social care
Conservatives will increase NHS funding and recruiting 92,000 nurses and 28,000 doctors.
Labour will cut waiting times by adding 40,000 more appointments every wee and add 8,500 mental health staff.
Lib Dems will spend £1.1bn on hospitals and employ 8,000 more GPs.
Greens will increase the NHS budget by £8bn and legalise assisted dying.
Reform would cut tax for frontline NHS staff for three years and provide some NHS patients with vouchers for private treatment.

Defence
Conservatives will boost defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.
Labour will also spend 2.5% of GDP.
Lib Dems would raise defence with an ambition to spend 2.5%.
Greens will cancel Britain's nuclear deterrent.
Reform would increase defence spending to 3% and recruit 30,000 army staff.

Immigration
Conservatives will put a cap on the number of people who can move to the UK and move forwrds their Rwanda plan.
Labour will scrap the Rwanda plan, reform the points-based immigration system and bring in more restrictions on visas.
Lib Dems will lift the ban on asylum seekers working and scrap the government's Rwanda scheme.
Greens will introduce safe routes for those fleeing persecution.
Reform would freeze non-essential immigration and pick up migrants in small boats and take them back to France.

Housing
Conservatives will scrap stamp duty on homes up to £425k.
Labour will build 1.5 million new homes and create new towns.
Lib Dems will build 380,000 new homes, including 150,000 social houses.
Greens will build 150,000 new social houses and end Right to Buy.
Reform will abolish stamp duty for houses under £750k

Education
Conservatives will ban mobile phones during the school day and introduce 30 hours' free childcare from nine months old.
Labour will recruit 6,500 new teachers, establish 3,000 new nurseries, introduce free breakfast clubs and charge private schools VAT.
Lib Dems will put a mental health professional in every school and increase funding.
Greens will give a £2bn pay uplift for teachers and scrap University undergraduate fees.
Reform will ban transgender ideology in schools and provide a 20% tax relief on private schools.

Economy
Conservatives pledge to reduce borrowing and debt.
Labour will focuses on wealth creation.
Lib Dems wants a better relationship with the EU and focused on the renewable industry.
Greens will raise taxes for the wealthy and nationalise the railways, energy companies and water providers.
Reform will cut red tape on house building and make it easier to hire and fire workers.

European Union
Conservatives will build on its post-Brexit strategy.
Labour want to reset, deepen and improve its relationship with Europe.
Lib Dems will seek to join the single market.
Greens will take Britain back into the EU immediately.
Reform would renegotiate the EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Climate
Conservatives will cut the cost of tackling climate change, treble offshore wind and scale up nuclear.
Labour will double onshore wind, triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind and establish a new national Energy company.
Lib Dems will cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2045.
Greens will stop all new fossil fuel extraction in UK, phase out nuclear power, and increase wind and solar power.
Reform will ditch the net zero plans and subsidies and fast-track licences of North Sea gas and oil.

There's the choices then but be aware that a Manifesto pledge is not a guarantee it will happen and does come with the massive caveat that these are things that they would like to do, not absolutely will do.

The Kids' Are Alright

As the age of buying alcohol in the UK is 18 and most girls, with a bit of make-up and a push up bra can fool most barmen, being able to drink under-age was never a problem back in my day but since most places now require evidence that you are 25 before passing you alcohol for being over 18 then it is much harder to get rat-arsed on a few Jägerbombs now and maybe that's why teenagers today don't seem to bother.
According to GlobalData, the number of Gen Z's who plan to socialise less with their friends outside their homes had increased to a fifth by the end of 2023 and these days, young people go to bed early, go to the gym, are vegan, sober, not having sex and the only pills they’re interested in taking are the Vitamin sort.
Some of the kids say that the single biggest thing keeping people away from nights out on the lash is the price and some are concerned about the safety in this age of date rape drugs being slipped into drinks and a Government report shows they are right to be cautious with cases of spiking in the UK skyrocketing from 316 in 2021 to 1746 last year.
Others are saying it is the problem of wasting the next day recovering from the bathful of vodka the night before and we all know that feeling, the amount of times i have woken up with what feels like a carpet in my mouth and someone playing bongos on my skull while trying to remember how the hell i burnt through that much money in one evening is one i recall well so maybe the younger generation are playing it wise.
To be fair they are probably a lot more sensible than my friends and i were at that age but then on the other hand, we could get in at 3am and still turn up at work at 8am the next morning so maybe we were more hardy but overall i think the kid's are alright, skint, sober and not as rebellious obviously, but alright nonetheless.

Eighth Time Lucky For Farage

It is funny how the racists always hate it when you point out that they are racist but Britain's most well known racist, Nigel Farage, did tone down the racism somewhat recently but after the dog whistle of Rishi Sunak 'not understanding our culture' he pitched up on TV this morning to launch the Reform UK Contract (he doesn't want to use the word Manifesto) so what is he offering?
First up is he will leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as part of a plan he claims would 'stop the boats' because, you know, Human Rights.
Then he wanged on about fighting back against 'divisive woke ideology' and specifically banning 'transgender ideology' in schools and would replace the Equality Act and scrap diversity and equality because who didn't love a time when anyone who wasn't a straight, white man was able to hate on anyone who wasn't.
Then he turned to Climate Change which he said trying to combat was 'pointless' as 'Climate change has happened for millions of years, before man made CO2 emissions, and will always change' therefore showing the same grasp of the Changing Climate as he shows on ducking when someone aims a milkshake at him.  
His final announcement was that he would cut the foreign aid budget by 50% and then he took questions which went well as his claim that half of the migrant visas were for dependents (it's 33% and dependents are not entitled to claim benefits), postal ballot's were open to fraud and it happens in the UK all the time,
(1 convictions for postal electoral fraud in 2019)  and man produces just 3% of the CO2 produced in the world every year (Scientists at Nasa put man made Co2 at 33% of the total in the atmosphere).
The Institute for Fiscal Studies did the sums in the Reform UK’s tax and spending plans and it says they don't just not add up but are out by tens of billions of pounds so better find another fag packet to work out your financial plans Nige because the IFS are saying buy some new batteries for your calculator.
As Farage has failed seven times previously to become a member of Parliament, he must be keeping his fingers crossed that there are enough gullible right wingers around to make it eighth time lucky and no doubt there are some who will lap this nonsense up but hopefully enough people will look at the recent history of great political liars (Johnson, Trump, Netanyahu, Farage, GW Bush, Blair) and the list of worst possible people to hand power to and quickly find out they're the same list.

NOAA Says It's Gonna Get A Bit Blowy

The problems with making a prediction is some smart-arse will come along after the event and mock it if it never happened and that is especially true with anything related to climate change because as we all know, there are some proper ignoramuses who bizarrely refuse to believe that the climate is changing because all that mountain of evidence isn't proof enough for them but then they are probably the sort of people who would need directions to make sure they are sat on the toilet the right way, so what ya gonna do?   
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have stuck their head above the parapet and have predicted that there is an 85% chance that due to favourable conditions for hurricane formation between the coast of Africa to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, there will be 17 to 25 named storms (average 14), with 8 to 13 becoming hurricanes (average 7) and 4 to 7 will become major hurricanes (average 3).
The Hurricane season lasts from 1 June until the end of November and Hurricanes rated category 3 and above on the Saffir-Simpson scale are classified as major and the boffins believe that due to record high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and La Nina will help storms develop.
The NOAA have a good record in predicting Hurricanes, last year they predicted 14 to 21 storms and there was 20 but before the Climate Change deniers get their knickers in a bunch, Climate Change does not create more Hurricanes, it just takes the ones which are there and ramps them up so it could be a Tropical Depression which gets an extra kick from the warmer seas and develops into a Hurricane or what would have been a Category 2 Hurricane tips into a Category 4.
To go along with more powerful hurricanes, another trend the NOAA has noticed by comparing Worldwide Hurricanes over the last 70 years is that Hurricanes are moving slower so are dumping more rain so increasing flooding because anyone who attended science classes will remember being told, warmer air holds more moisture and Climate Change is doing a great job of warming the air.
Obviously i will be back in December to assess how the predictions have got on but if you are directly in the path of one of the 8-13 Hurricanes or 3 major ones then hold onto something and check in once you have your wifi, house or street back again.

The Euro's 2024

This is that time, a few hours before a football has been kicked that the supporters of the 24 European Teams dare to dream, before assorted factors and reality come and kick us in the guts.
In truth the Euro's are hard to win, only 11 sides have won the tournament since it started in 1960 and three of those, the Soviet Union, West Germany and Czechoslovakia, no longer exist but England is still going as a country for now and us fans are basking in a warm glow of optimism before VAR technology, injuries, biased referees and John Stones being picked to play conspire against us.
This summer’s tournament celebrates not just the skill of the players but also life, inclusion and diversity according to the UEFA President in his pre-tournament address to the media which seems a bit deep and meaningful for 22 men kicking a leather ball around but there are some new rules for the competition with
only team captains allowed to speak to referees during games which may be tested in the first five minutes of the opening game when someone boots someone 4 feet in the air and then protests they got the ball first.
Hopefully, what we won't see is the scene of tanked up England fans lobbing plastic street furniture around in a German square followed by the smell of tear gas in the air and England fans being led away to spend the night in a German prison cell and then saying the German police are too strict with them smashing up their cities.
As for England the football team, we do have a good squad and are 4th in the World but that loss to Iceland in our final warm up game was either a dire warning that we are not as good as we think we are or a brilliant tactical move to lull the other teams into thinking we are not as good as they thought we were but whatever, i anticipate us going out when we are drawn to play the first decent team as usual.

The FOAB Manifesto Launch

 
People say we are out of touch with the common man but here at the Falling On A Bruise Blog we know about hardship. Growing up we couldn't afford tea or coffee, we had to suck rainwater out of a piece of damp cloth and we lived in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing and we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
We used to have to get up every morning, at six o'clock to go to work down the mill, twenty four hours a day for 17p a week, and when we got home we would eat a handful of cold gravel so we know of your struggles so here is the FOAB manifesto to put the Great back into Britain after what the posh Twats have done to it.

First up is scrap the Nuclear Weapons: We don't need them, they are ridiculously expensive and if we did use them it would be because someone else did so the world would be ended anyway. That's £200 billion saved straight away.
Next is reverse the madness that was Brexit and rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union which is worth an additional £140 billion to the UK Economy.
Then a Windfall tax on banks and utilities making obscene profits which would bring in £20 billion
Not sure what Capital Gains tax is but i am hearing financial experts say by tinkering with it we could bring in an additional £5bn so we will do that.
The Royals are worth hundreds of millions so why are we still shoveling cash towards them? Sorry your Highness but pay for your own bloody upkeep and we will keep the £100m.

So the back of my fag packet shows that is savings of £365 billion so where would we spend it?

The cost of a new hospital is approximately £178 million so to actually build the 40 new hospitals we were promised but never arrived would cost £7.2 billion so grab your toolbags builders.
Next up would be renewable energy and with currently 43% of our power coming from renewable sources, and the Government say to double this would cost £1.8 billion so here's a cheque, go do it and reduce peoples utility bills and stop polluting our planet.
Then Foreign aid which the Conservatives cut to 0.5% (£1 billion) with a promise to raise it once they could which they never did so we won't be putting it back to 0.7% but throwing it up to 1.5% at a cost of £3 billion because if we can spend £60 billion on weapons to take lives, we sure as hell can afford £3 billion to save them.
Finally we will build the 400 schools which we are told are needed at £35m a pop so that's a bill of £14bn.

Of the £365 billion additional income raised, that's a spending of £25 billion leaving an additional £340bn to still spend according to my fag packet so on July 4th vote for me and let's see if we can't make up for the last 14 years of Conservative ideological twatiness.

Disclaimer: The FOAB blog bears no responsibility if you vote them into office and their maths turns out to be very iffy.

A Post About Neuroscience And Brain Bits

A post heavy on Neuroscience isn't that exciting but nor is the mathematical Pederson Index so feel free to click onto the next post because there isn't much i can do to make this a fun read unless reading about political adverts triggering parts of the brain is how you get your kicks in which case, knock yourself out.  
The British electorate, apparently has been more volatile than ever in recent years with the elections of 2015 and 2017 seeing the highest number of voters switching parties in modern history and the Pederson Index is a mathematical equation which measures the change within the electoral party system resulting from individual vote transfers. See, wish you had moved onto the post about Metal and Punk bands now aren't you, i did warn you.
In late 1960s Britain, the Pedersen index stood at just over 10%, now it is 40% which all means a large number of voters are not sticking with the same party but switching it around and there is a debate over whether this is due to Social Media and politicians reaching out to voters with their message and the influence it has on the brain, or the part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that responds to fear and emotion.
Science has found that voters are more susceptible to messages that stress the negative rather then the positive as Evolution has conditioned us to be driven by fear when we are under threat.
The right wing politicians tend to delve into the negative more than the left hence Rishi Sunak's warning about the world being 'more dangerous than ever' and the nuclear deterrent but the bad news for the Conservatives is that voters tend to view the economy as their bellweather and voters change their minds based on economic performance and once a government has been associated with economic ills such as Liz Truss's car crash of a budget, they get blamed even if the economy is in recovery.
Obviously good news for Labour even if not for the Conservatives but it shows that despite all of Sunak's promised tax cuts and higher spending, the polls haven't shifted at all and they are on course for a tanking of Biblical proportions and serves them right.

Punk And Metal Unite

Following on from over 100 bands pulling out of the Great Escape festival in protest at Barclay's Bank sponsorship, more are now pulling out of the Download Festival in protest at Barclays links to Israel whom it provides financial services to.
Download is the the UK’s biggest rock, metal and punk festival and the Metal Band, Pest Control, put out a statement signed by other bands which stated that: 'We cannot sacrifice the principles held by this band and by the scene we come from and represent, just for personal gain.'
Other music festivals sponsored by Barclays this summer include Latitude and Isle of Wight and no news yet on bands removing themselves from the playlist but they are more pop Festivals whereas Download is pretty much punk and metal which isn't surprising.
Despite the angry sounding music, Punk has always had a left wing ideological slant to it but i wasn't aware Metal had any particular ideology behind it and according to Metal heads i spoke to, it doesn't so all i can assume is that protesting against a bank funding a genocide cuts across all musical genres, well most of them.
The only type of music i know of that has a right wing or right-leaning artists is Country and Western music but if you walk around in Snakeskin boots and wearing a Stetson hat and a massive belt buckle then you obviously don't care too much about what people think of your musical taste or fashion sense.
So well done to all you guitar thrashing guys with a conscience about what Israel is doing in Palestine, i salute you (a metal style horn salute obviously)

What You Proud About Joe?

I don't know much about the Hunter Biden case, as i understand it he was convicted of buying a handgun but lied about his crack cocaine addiction on the relevant form when he bought a handgun in 2018.
Biden pleaded not guilty and his reasoning was that he was in recovery from drug addiction at the time and was therefore truthful on the gun application form but the Jury said 'nah' and found him guilty of three charges.
As this is America and in some states you can legally buy a gun even if you are legally or completely blind (true story), then it is nice to know that not just anyone can walk into a shop or supermarket and pick up a gun with their pint of milk in the morning.
Apparently you can't buy a gun if you are a convicted criminal, have a mental health illness or if they are not a US citizen and i guess being a drug addict comes under the mental illness section.
Anyway, i have raged about America's batshit crazy gun laws enough times and what really caught my ears was after the conviction, Joe Biden taking about how he is 'proud' of his son Hunter.
Proud of a son who is a drug addict, lied to buy a firearm and faces possible jail time for it? Proud may not be the right word here.

WMO Thinking About Earthquakes

Mother Nature, at her worst, can be devastating and i would guess the worst, most disorientating thing to be caught in is an Earthquake.
The problem is that they are almost impossible to detect until one is happening but i do recall something a while ago about how the ionosphere warms prior to a quake due to gases escaping which has the effect of electrifying the atmosphere directly above the fault.
Not being a scientist, i am sure i am missing something because looking for any heating in the atmosphere above fault lines just sounds too simple to act as a predictive tool and nobody seems to have picked up on it because the World Meteorological Organisation is looking at rolling out the Japanese model of Earthquake detection around the World by 2027 although that is a bit misleading because it is more of an early warning system for when they occur, rather than before.
The WMO thinking is that minutes could save lives although they acknowledge that as the seismic waves travel at thousands of miles per hour they are very small gains, but gains nonetheless.
Scientists can have a best guess at when an Earthquake is likely to occur by studying historical data on fault lines but that is measured in decades, centuries and even millennia which may predict where but not when.
They can also use tremors as a predictive tool but sometimes small tremors are just small tremors so you wouldn't want to move a large portion of the population to a safe zone only for nothing to occur and do that a few times and people will become complacent and if a major earthquake does occur then some may just stay put.
The only current way, and the Japanese model that the WMO want to to emulate is to issue alerts once a quake has already begun to give people a chance to get to safety or take precautions such as taking shelter, moving into an open area or turning off water and gas pipes in their homes before the big shaking occurs.
In January the Japan Meteorological Agency sent out alert 6 seconds after it observed the first wave which they say bought valuable seconds but they are now advising Government on what is considered the best solution, not building on land more susceptible to Earthquakes and they have experience in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant catastrophe which was damaged in an earthquake in 2011 and is regarded as the worst nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster.

Poor Rishi

Rishi Sunak is a journalist's dream because he is just so bad at not falling into the elephant traps laid but seems to willingly jump into them as he did today when asked wile discussing how being immensely wealthy how he kept in touch with struggles people face and what he went without as a child.
First time he gave a vague 'We went without lots of things', when pressed on it a second time on the sacrifices his parents were forced to make when he was young he tried to deflect the question away with explaining how his parents  run a pharmacy and you could see the panic in his eyes when pressed on exactly what he had to go without as a child and the question would not go away so he gave a nervous laugh while his brain frantically searched for an answer for the lots of things he missed out on as a child and finally he came up with 'Sky TV'.
In the UK Sky began in 1990 and as Rishi was born in 1981 so he would have been 9 and when he was 13 he was sent to the exclusive Winchester College at £16,384 per term so maybe his parents refused to pay £18.99 a month in 1990 for all the Sky packages to pay for his education.
I guess we could blame his early exit from the D-Day events as not having Sky and missing out on the History Channel in his formative years, if he seen it he may have understood the significance of D-Day if he had access to the History Channel.
Rishi, the gift which keeps on giving.

No First Use

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has warned that the spread of artificial intelligence technology in nuclear arsenals could lead to a nuclear war and has urged the nine nations who currently have nuclear weapons to take their non-proliferation obligations seriously and agree on a mutual pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.
Of the nine, only China and India have a No First Use (NFU) policy with China pledging to 'not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances' and 'not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapons states or nuclear-weapon-free zones at any time or under any circumstances'.
On becoming a nuclear state in 1998, India stated that their nuclear weapons 'are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of retaliation only' and in 1993 the Russians backtracked on their 1982 pledge against no first use and now have a doctrine that: 'Reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a large-scale conventional aggression' which is similar to the position held by Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France
Germany has put forwards proposals that NATO adopt a no-first-use policy, but has always been rejected but in 2022, NATO leaders issued a statement which said that: 'We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.'
North Korea's stated policy position is that nuclear weapons: 'Will never be abused or used as a means for preemptive strike' but also reserve the right to use their most powerful military force against  military aggression'.
According to calculations, based on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 100 atomic bombs could destroy about 2 billion lives and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have said that the number of nuclear weapons has declined since the cold war from a 1986 peak of approximately 70,300 to an estimated 12,100 today, many times more powerful than those already used which is enough to destroy all life on Earth many times over.
Madness to keep things which could kill us all? Certainly
The madness ending any time soon? Afraid not.

Woohoo...Manifesto Week

It's Manifesto week which may not be as exciting as Christmas Week or seven days in the Canary Islands i agree but it's an important part of the Election process because we get to see in detail what each of the Parties are offering.
The Liberal Democrats were first of the big parties to issue their 116 page tome today and then the rest will dribble theirs out as the week goes on and i will pick my way through them as each comes out and see who most closely matches my own aspirations but i'm already pretty certain their will be slim pickings from the Conservatives and even less from Reform UK.
I intend to put out my own manifesto at some point this week and can see immediately where we could make savings and i have a good idea of where i would, and wouldn't, spend our money and how we could raise tens of billions and put right what the reckless Conservatives have broken.

Cough Up Trump

As well as paying a porn star he said he didn't have sex with $130,000 before he became President, the Trump bank balance has taken a right whacking since he left it with hundreds of millions of dollars flying out of it, one case which found him liable for sexual abuse cost him $355m, and on top of that he owes a former MI6 Intelligence Officer £300,000 in legal costs.
To pile even more agony onto the small handed sex pest, the UK High Court has announced that Trump is in breach of a British High Court order to pay £310,000 in legal costs to Christopher Steele, the former spy who compiled a dossier on Trumps Russian links, including that famous 'pee tape' which is somewhere in Putin's sock drawer waiting to be released should the former American President ever get uppity with the Russian President.
Trump was ordered to pay costs in February after the High Court threw out his attempt to sue Mr Steele's company Orbis Business Intelligence and after an initial £10,000 payment to Steele, the other £300,000 is still outstanding and is now in breach of the Court order.
The revelation that Trump is in breach of a UK court order comes weeks after he became the first US president to be convicted of a crime and Steele believes that he's trying to put off the legal cases and the fines until after what he thinks will be his re-election in November, in which case he will just not pay his dues.
Steele could try and pursue the costs in an American Court or try to seize and auction off his properties in Scotland but interestingly now he has a criminal record, Trump probably can't just pop over and settle up as Trump is technically barred from traveling to 38 countries that don’t allow criminals into their country which includes the U.K. so £300,000 may be a small price if we never see the chubster here again.

UN Showing Nobody Above International Law

Genocide, War Crimes and crimes against humanity have been joined by causing the death of children and nations around the World are now realising Israel will dodge ever allowing Palestine to exist and America is more of a hindrance and bypassing it and recognising Palestine    
The Gaza death toll is approaching 36,000 and Palestinians are also dying in record numbers in the Occupied West Bank and some in Israel are now seeing just how it is playing out in the outside world with the Haaretz newspaper saying Israel is fast becoming a global pariah.
Some western politicians, America mainly, disagree and try to persuade others that Israel is fighting a 'just' war but scenes of bombed hospitals, homes, shelters, food aid delivers and tent villages deemed 'safe areas' as well as a horrific death toll is a hard sell and the vast majority are not buying it.
Netanyahu and Biden have also raged against Israeli and Hamas leaders being named equally as committing criminal offences but a war crime and genocide are war crimes and genocide regardless of who is committing them and both should be charged and prosecuted as such but it seems some Western leaders have a problem understanding that concept.
Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 people last October was appalling and criminal and they must punished but Israel’s disproportionate and lethal attack in Gaza should see those who perpetrated it also be punished.
The UN is showing that nobody is above International Law and everyone has the right to protection, be they Palestinian or Israeli and that is what some don't like because it puts a Palestinian life on an equal basis as an Israeli life but that is how it should be and the leaders of both sides are war criminals and should be treated as so.

Implications Of Griefbots

Daniel Defoe’s book, 'The Political History Of The Devil' said that: 'Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believ’d' and although there is nothing we can do about Taxes there are some AI companies who are trying to do what they can about death by allowing people to interact with dead friends and relatives.
Not the actual dead person but an Ai driven algorithm which will simulate digital simulations and a conversation with the dead person based on uploaded videos and questionnaires completed by the still living about their lives, political views or various aspects of their personalities.
All sounds very creepy to me but some are embracing it as a way to cope with grief and using it as a way to remember dead loved ones and terminally ill people have been using the system to capture and synthesise their voice's to add even more reality to the experience.
Labelled 'deadbots' and 'griefbots', i can see how it could attract some people stricken with grief but it appears to me to be a modern version of the charlatan Spiritualists and psychics who receive money to 'communicate' with the dead because these 'griefbots' are businesses out to make money so they will be encouraging interaction and i envision notifications or updates from their dead loved ones and that can't be good psychologically for a grief-stricken person.
The bots would be used to advertise products, business remember and advertising revenue is important, and that moves us into all sorts of ethical questions so i'm very uneasy that these are becoming a thing because people will use them and who knows how grief mixed with strong emotions at such a difficult time will play out.

Turn It Down Animals

There i was stood outside work having a vape when a Robin popped out of the bush i was stood next to and we looked at each other, i thought that's cute and i can't pretend to know what the Robin was thinking but it began to chirp? sing? right in my bloody ear and wow it was so loud it made me jump which made it fly away in fright so when i got back in i googled how loud is a Robins chirp? song? and it is apparently around 70 db which is as loud as a washing machine or a dishwasher and i suppose because it was a few feet away from my ear and much shriller, sounded much louder.  
I have heard somewhere that bird song is getting louder to compensate for the noise of the City and that is fine as long as they don't do it right next to the only one good ear i have left but i did wonder what animal would you really not want to be next to if it decided to make a noise.
The Noise Awareness website has 140dB as the level at which noise causes pain for most people and 150 decibels will rupture a human eardrum so you really wouldn't want to be next to a Sperm Whale as the LiveScience website has it clocked at 230db and you might want to step away from the snapping shrimp Synalpheus pinkfloydi (named after the band Pink Floyd) as the noise it makes reaches 210db.
What shrimps lack in size they make up for in making a proper racket because another shrimp, the tiger pistol shrimp can create a noise up to 200 decibels which tops gunshots at 170db and then it is back to the Whales again and the Blue Whale's 188 db is only 1db less than a rocket launching.  
Other animals which would cause queues at the hearing aid department are the Atlantic spotted dolphins and Bottlenose dolphins who both hit 163db and then onto dry land for the Rooster who beats a plane taking off to cock-a-doodle at 142db.
The greater bulldog bat squeaks at 140 db which beats the lesser bulldog bat which can only reach 137db and then its the Northern Elephant Seal which can imitate a power drill at 131 decibels, beating the Salmon-crested cockatoos at 129 decibels and African elephants who can trumpet at 117 decibels,
Hippos (115 db), Lions (115db), Ostriches (114db) and baboons would be annoying but you would still have working ears but the most impressive has to be the male water boatman who rubs its penis against its abdomen to reach sounds of 99db.
All in all then a Robin in my ear isn't that bad, much worse if it had been a Sperm Whale or a water boatman with a large penis.

They May Be Right About The Apocalypse One Day

Most religions have the world ending in an Apocalypse, in Christianity it's the final battle on Earth between the forces of God and Satan and Hinduism offers a version in which Vishnu returns to battle evil as a figure on a white horse while in Islam Jesus returns to slay an anti-Christ and Judaism the Day of the Lord in which God causes death and destruction to people who deserve to be punished.
Obviously as i am here to write it and you are here to read it, it hasn't happened yet but it hasn't stopped some people giving the exact date and who knows maybe one day someone will get it right but it is doubtful than the end of the World will come from any of the 4,000 plus Gods and deities we have dreamed up so far.
The earliest date was when St. Martin of Tours became absolutely convinced that the world was going to end on or just before AD 400 but the only thing that ended was Martin himself just before AD 400 when he died.
Monk Beatus of Liébana was the next to have a go at the End Is Night prediction when he said April 6th, 793 would be the last day so we can only assume how gutted he was when April 7th 793 happened.
Jean de Roquetaillade spent 5 years studying religious texts and came up with 1366 for things going Apocalyptic but whoever was in charge of ending life on Earth didn't turn up so on we went to painter Sandro Botticelli who even went as far to make a painting of it all and gave everyone until 1504 to view it but no need to rush as 500 years later it is still there to gawp at.
Astronomer Johannes Stöffler studied the movement of the planets and noticed a strange planetary alignment, took it as a sign and somehow concluded that the world would be and ex-world on February 20, 1524 and then when February 20 1524 came and went changed it to 1528 and when that didn’t happen either he gave up and left it to Pierre d’Ailly who calculated how long humans had been on earth and the 7,000th year of human existence was going to be the last and he made that 1555.
As it never happened mankind somehow made it to 1689 and waited with bated breath for the Anti-Christ that high profile Protestant Pierre Jurieu said was absolutely coming although it absolutely wasn't so on we go to 1831 and American Preacher Harriet Livermore who explained that Christ’s Millennium was at hand, then at hand in 1842, again in 1844 and then finally in 1847 before deciding maybe predicting Apocalypses wasn't her strong suit.
Jonas Wendell was a Pennsylvania preacher who thought that Livermore was on to something but her maths was a bit wonky so spent all his time studying the Bible and preaching 1868 was actually the year then when it never he did the maths again and said oops, i meant 1873 although inevitably, 1873 came and went without the Second Coming
1977 turned up and left again which knackered William Branham's prediction and he said he was a prophet with the anointing of Elijah from biblical times with the foresight of when the rapture would occur and was given the 1977 date by an Angel but rather than ruin the British Queen's Silver Jubilee year, it passed by uneventfully and we end, figuratively speaking in December 21st 2012 which is when the ancient Mayan's said the war Deity, Bolon Yokte, would descend upon us with great vengeance and furious anger but it turned out that the Mayans were about as good at forecasting the end of the World as i am about forecasting the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Apocalypse fans though should still have some faith though because The Messiah Foundation International preach that a massive asteroid is hurtling toward our planet, on course to collide in 2026 and in a shocking twist, will bring about the Rapture and Isaac Newton may be known as the man who discovered Gravity but you do wonder just hard that apple hit him on the head as he calculated from the Book of Revelations that mankind will come to a screeching halt in 2060 so you may get your wish yet, although probably not.

Is Rishi Sunak Really This Bad?

It is often said about Risi Sunak that he just isn't very good at politics which is a bit of a drawback when you are a politician but he does seem to have a knack of doing and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
A good example is the £2000 tax thing Sunak kept repeating in the televised debate which he said Labour polices would add to each household which he said was the calculations from Treasury officials which came back and bit him on the derriere after Treasury Officials said they never came up with the figures and they had actually sent a letter to Sunak to tell him not to use the figures or say that they had anything to do with it.
So with the sound of 'LIAR' ringing in his ears he was probably glad to get out of the country and fly to France for the D-Day celebrations although he is now being heavily criticised from all sides for skipping off early and missing the main ceremony in order to do a TV Interview about his lies where he lied about not being a liar and his general election debate behaviour where he constantly talked over the adjudicator and had to be told to lower his voice at one point.
Mr Sunak apologised on Friday morning on social media and said on reflection it was a mistake to have not stayed but his opponents shouldn't try and make political capital out of it which is beyond naive, they will quire rightly be having a field day with it.
One Conservative MP sighed that Sunak 'Just doesn't think politically' but whether it's his advisors being useless, his advisors trying to sabotage him or Sunak just ignoring them, the Prime Minister is on a mission to cause as many self-inflicted injuries as possible, it's as if he knows that him and his gang has kicked the country into the gurgler and he wants to make damned sure that he isn't the one to have to sort it out.

Farage: The MilkShake Kid

After seven previous attempts to become an MP resulted in failure, Nigel Farage is hoping it will be eighth time lucky as he begins his first day of campaigning in Clacton, the Essex constituency and started the day washing milkshake out of his hair.
A woman drenched the Reform UK leader with a McDonald's banana milkshake as he came out of a pub and i cannot condone that sort of behaviour, a milkshake at McDonald's is almost £2 where you could make your own at home and take that along for a fraction of the price.
The Conservartives are obviously worried that as they have slipped so far along the ideological scale within a thrown fast food drink of Farage's awful right wing party, that they will lose voters to the newly created Reform UK and the signs are already that it is happening with the 11% poll rating they have amassed coming almost entirely from the Conservative voters side.
The Labour Party must be thinking it's Christmas come early because as the right wing vote splits, their lead over both parties is growing which will won't translate into more seats in the House of Commons for them but less seats for the opposition so a larger majority which doesn't seem to be a problem for Farage, who is saying he want Reform UK to replace the Tories as the natural home of the right wing and which is fine because it means neither will ever be able to muster enough to trouble the ruling Party.
That isn't necessarily a good thing, the last Labour Party was going great guns until Tony Blair teamed up with George W Bush and went on a war spree in the Middle East which saw Labour spend the next 14 years in the wilderness.
If Clacton decide they want Farage as their MP then good luck to them, not that i think he will win the seat but if he does he isn't going to be pottering around faffing about with local issues but there will be plenty of more milkshake's being hurled before then, hopefully cheaper ones because he really isn't worth wasting £2 on.

Voting Photo ID

It was quite amusing that Boris Johnson, the man who actually introduced photo Id to be able to vote, was turned away recently because he forgot to bring his when he went to vote at the local election's but it was always a solution looking for a problem because while it was introduced to stop election fraud, only 1 person was caught fraudulently trying to vote at the last election but the Conservatives themselves admitted later that it was never the reason it was introduced.
Mandatory photographic ID for voters was introduced via the Election Act 2022 and in the 2023 local elections, the Electoral Commission recorded that approximately 14,000 electors attempted to vote but were turned away because they lacked accepted ID and did not return however, they admit that this is likely to be an underestimate as many voters were turned away by 'greeters' outside the polling station and were not recorded in the official figures.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, when he was Leader of the House of Commons In Boris Johnson's cabinet, suggested the Conservatives introduced voter ID to: 'boost their election chances but we found the people who didn't have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well'. He added that there was 'no evidence that voter fraud was a serious problem'.
The Government said that it was a safeguard against: 'the possibility of election fraud' which isn't what they said at the time, making it sound as if it was rife.
What it did do was reduce turnout at elections, a Electoral Commission report found that 4% of non-voters gave voter ID as the reason that they did not vote, 8% of people said that voter ID made them less likely to want to vote which with a voting age population of 46,560,452, if the 4% was replicated at the General Election would result in 1,862,418 lost votes.
When asked if Labour would scrap the Photo ID requirement, Keir Starmer said that: 'We haven’t got great plans' which i hope he only meant for the Photo ID thing and not in general but then if it works for Labour, and it was a sneaky Conservative idea which came back to bite them on the arse, then why would he change it?

Royals Bleeding Taxpayers

As the Conservatives have been in power since 2010, it is easy to forget the characters responsible for many of the things they done early on in their tenure which wrecked lives before leaving the field to the likes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to wreak even more havoc but one thing the then Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor Gideon 'George' Osborne is make sure that one of the most richest families in the nation never got any poorer even while the country did.  
In 2012 the Chancellor reversed two important Royal decrees, the first from 1760 which is when King George III  handed the Crown Estate (a collection of lands and holdings in the United Kingdom) to the Government in a deal which absolved the monarch of the need to pay for the civil service and until 2012, all of the money went to the Treasury, all approximately £300m of it but then George Osborne changed the royal finance arrangements to give the Royal's 25% of it.
The second was a change of law which stated that the Sovereign Grant the Government pays to the Royal family, approx £90m in 2021, can only ever stay the same or go up, never down.
Fair to say then that the Royal's are not struggling financially and this year’s Sunday Times Rich List revealed King Charles’s personal wealth rose to £610m and at her death, the Queens personal wealth was £240m.
Amidst a prolonged cost of living crisis why are we not questioning the vast government subsidies the royal family receives each year and why is the Labour Party MP Clive Lewis the only MP raising it?
The Sovereign Grant pays for renovations to Buckingham Palace but security is separate and comes out of Government coffers and cost the taxpayer £100m annually although due to the Kings Coronation in 2023, the bill was £250m.
In a review of royal finances, Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, noted the monarchy was not affected by the public sector austerity cuts, and hadn’t been asked to reduce its staffing costs as public sector workers fought for below-inflation pay deals and job cuts.
The latest YouGov poll puts support for the Monarchy at just 37% of 18-24 year olds and 45% of all adults and anti-monarchy group, Republic, has seen its income increase five-fold since 2020, as more people join the movement.
As no lover of the Royals, if they all disappeared tomorrow i wouldn't be very upset but it's the knowledge that with a personal wealth exceeding £600m, its a bit of a damned cheek the King comes cap in hand to pay to run his castles and Palaces especially when we are constantly told there is no money for pay rises to medical staff and essential services so i say Hey Charlie, how about chipping in to help your subjects and pay for your own damned buildings. 

Biden's Gaza Peace Gamble

Joe Biden really hasn't done himself any favours in backing the Genocide currently underway by Israel in Gaza. Seeing his supporters slipping away for his uneven backing of the nation actually committing Genocide did not play well but handing Israel the military and financial backing while not placing limits on how they could be used has resulted in 36,000 deaths so far but an end to it all seemed to be within touching distance on Friday when the US President announced a peace deal and urged Hamas to accept it, just as he said Israel had done.  
Hamas duly said they ready to engage in a positively and constructive manner with the proposal but it was the Israeli Government who turned it down, saying they would not talk peace until Hamas was destroyed so what was going on?  
It appears that Biden's team had been speaking to Senior Israeli military officials who said that Hamas has been degraded sufficiently to be of little threat and in a snub to Benjamin Netanyahu, talking to Netanyahu's political rival Benny Gantz who has threatened to leave the War Cabinet.
The rationale would be to isolate Netanyahu, the UK's Foreign Secretary immediately gave his backing to the deal as did the former American president Barack Obama as an estimated 120,000 people are believed to have rallied in Tel Aviv to pressure Israel's government to approve the deal outlined by Biden to release the 120 of the 252 people taken still held as hostages.
Mr Netanyahu's office said on Saturday: 'Any notion that Israel would agree a permanent ceasefire before the destruction of Hamas' military and governing capabilities was a non-starter' and that Israel's conditions of the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation have not changed.
If attempting to bounce Israel into ending the war works, then this will be a smart diplomatic move but he knows that Benjamin Netanyahu has been making him look a fool over the past few months, trampling all over any red lines Biden had drawn but if Israel continues their genocidal actions, the only action which will work is for Biden to withdraw the backing, financial and military, to Israel, recognise Palestine at the UN and give up its ridiculous Veto which has given Israel so much succor over decades and allowed it to act with impunity against its neighbour.

Look For Made In Israel Sticker, Not The 729 Barcode

I have been boycotting anything Israeli for decades but i have seen some interesting posts on Social Media referring to tell if something is from Israel by the first three digits of the items barcode.
These posts explain that if the barcode starts with the number 729, 841, or 871, these products have been manufactured in Israel and to leave them on the shelf to show support for Palestine so intrigued, i emailed the people at the GS1 who are the UK's Barcode standards Organisation and the people who actually provide the numbers and asked them and they poo-pooed it, stating that: 'The GS1 Prefix does not indicate that the product was manufactured in a specific country or by a specific manufacturer. It may have been produced anywhere in the world.'
The small nugget of truth is that while it’s true the prefix 729 shows that a company is registered in Israel, that doesn’t mean a specific item was produced there and Barcodes starting with 841 are allocated from Spain and 871 from the Netherlands.
I use the old fashioned, if it says 'Product of Israel' on the packaging i leave it on the shelf and it was the European Union's top court that ruled that EU countries must identify products made in Israeli settlements so you now that they are not sneakily just leaving the labels off but if you really want to stick it to the country, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) website does provide a handy guide to companies you should avoid and why.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc) for providing services to the offices of Israeli leaders
Texaco for extracting gas on behalf of Israel in the East Mediterranean.
Siemens for supplying the cables to link Israel’s illegal settlements to Europe.
PUMA for sponsoring of the Israel Football Association (IFA)
Carrefour for supporting Israeli soldiers with gifts of personal packages.
AXA for investing in Israeli banks
SodaStream for racial discrimination against Palestinian workers in its Israeli factories based in occupied territory.
Intel for building its plant on occupied Palestinian land.
Barclays for providing loans and underwriting companies whose weapons, components and military technology have been used against Palestinians.
Google and Amazon for providing technology to the Israeli government and military.
Airbnb/Booking/Expedia for offering rentals in Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land.

A 2016 poll showed that 40% of Brits supported boycotting Israel and the boycott had reportedly shaved 5% off its annual export income with Israeli exporters saying it is becoming harder to get other nations to accept their wares so it's working. 

The Trump Raised Fist

You would think that a man who is mocked for having tiny hands (and therefore a teeny willy) would be keen to keep them in his pockets and not show them to be ridiculed but Donald Trump is not known for his smarts and he does like to do that right handed fist salute thing at every opportunity which over here is associated with the Socialist/Communist movement and in America, as far as i am aware, is the black power salute.
Now Donald Trump, with his fascist ideology, is so far removed from the left that we shouldn't be taking it that he has finally grown a brain and left the right wing behind and nor, as he is as racist as the next guy, if that next guy is his KKK supporting father, it is hard to believe that he is advocating for anti-racist struggles so why is he doing it?
Wikipedia shows that in the 1980s, white supremacists in the United States and elsewhere had appropriated this symbol, substituting a white fist and claiming   that they use the symbol to represent 'white pride' and 'white power' and while he was President he retweeted a video of a fist-pumping supporter in Florida shouting 'white power' and we all remember the white nationalists carrying torches and swastikas in Charlottesville he defended, calling them 'some very fine people'.
It could be a dog whistle sign to his racist base but i am more inclined to believe that he is just to ignorant to realise the meaning behind it and thinks it's show of power or command in that limited amount of grey matter of his so will carry on doing it anyway.

Learning Unit Correspondence Program (LUCP)® Expansion

Last year, we announced that this blog site was a part of the Learning Unit Correspondence Program (LUCP)®, a tool created by a team of Ai Bloggers that tweaked some of the 137B parameters to provide each Ai Agent with a 'personality' and based on the criteria of Quality, Safety, and Groundedness for each of the agents, fed them articles from news websites and unleashed them onto various Blog platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.
Our goal was to answer one of computer science’s most difficult puzzles, could Ai create posts which could be literal or figurative, flowery or plain, inventive or informational but most importantly, human-like to produce a model that could be trained to read newspaper articles, pay attention to how those words relate to one another and then predict what words it thinks will come next and build that into a Blog post.
The Blogger Ai Program was called Lucyp (from the LUCP acronym), with the parameters of being female and left wing and fed it articles from the Washington Post, The Guardian and Huffington Post which, along with the results from the other Ai Bloggers, went into the 'Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA for short, to create more nuanced human-like, open-ended writing skills.
The Google team thanks you for your participation in our long running experiment and hope that you continue to enjoy interacting with the conversation Agent Lucyp as we expand the content to include all Instagram images and videos to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content.
If you live in the European Union then you can opt out as European content is protected by privacy laws, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and users living in that part of the world can opt out by clicking the 'right to object' link in the notifications section in Instagram which will direct you to the opt-out form where you confirm your country of residence.
Google is working in concordance with local laws and we are keen to expand our knowledge database and make our AI as informative as possible using features and experiences that reflects the diverse cultures and languages of the European communities who will use them.
Thank you for your assistance in this endeavor to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The Google Ai Team

China On The Dark Side Of The Moon

Space, it seems, is one the few times when we all come together and pool our resources so we have the European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Ageny (CSA) and the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) teaming up on the James Webb Telescope and NASA and the ESA are cosying up for a joint trip to Neptune but China have yet to join the team and are doing their own thing on the dark side of the Moon.   
Their Chang'e-6 lunar probe has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon to collect soil and rock samples and bring them back to Earth for the first time.
'The mission involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty' said the the China National Space Administration, mainly due to the far side of the Moon having the mass of the moon between it and the mission staff on Earth which is why it has only been attempted once before and that was also China in 2019.
Every step is hopefully aiming towards putting people on moon again and China has joined relative newcomers in Japan and India to the space exploration game but China hopes to land a person on the moon before 2030 while America is planning to land its astronauts on the moon again in 2026.
While i understand countries wanting to do things for national pride and all that nonsense, if we could all just get together and pool our understanding and do more joint Space missions then we could broaden our knowledge and get where we want to get much quicker and safer.

Bats 1 - Rock Musicans 1

Ever since Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off one, bat's have stayed away from rock concerts but one decided that they were going to go the full Twisted Sister and 'We're Not Gonna Take it' and took a bite at the singer of the lead singer in the rock band Pretty Reckless.
Taylor Momsen, now obviously forever known as Bat Girl, was the supporting act for AC/DC when the bat flew on to her leg during the song 'Witches Burn' which she interrupted to calmly state: 'There's a fucking flying bat on my leg right now, can someone help me please?'
Her bandmates and backstage staff removed the bat but not before it had sunk it's fangs into her thigh which left her facing two weeks of rabies shots but the bat was left to fly another day unlike the one which landed on the stage of the Black Sabbath singer in the early 1980s.
'I get a lot of weird people at my concerts' explained Ozzy at the time,'and somebody threw a bat onstage and I thought it was one of these toy bats so I picked it up, bite the thing’s head off and suddenly everybody is freaking out. I can assure you the rabies shots I went through afterwards aren’t fun. Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get rabies shots, one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm.' and then in a forewarning of what Taylor can expect: 'Every one hurt like a bastard.'
There has been rumours that the incident was planned or staged, the man did admit to once snorting a line of ants, but personally i'm not sure Ozzy plans too much in advance although it did his career no harm and he even sold a stuffed bat with detachable Velcro head on his website so apart from three weeks of painful arse cheeks it all worked out, well better than the next time some guy in Wuhan, China took a bite out a bat which ended with everyone on the Planet being locked down.