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.

A Reluctant No To Assisted Dying

The assisted dying debate is being brought front and centre this week with time set aside in the Commons to discuss and then vote on, the first debate on the emotive subject since 2015 when it was defeated 300 to 118.
The make up of Parliament has changed dramatically since then with Labour far outnumbering the other parties but they appear just as conflicted about it as i am.
It is a situation where i am aware and understand both sides of the argument but i always come down on the side of no because i fear once it is introduced, despite all the tough rules governing it, it will become a slippery slope to something else entirely.   
Canada's Medical assistance in dying (Maid) laws are sure to be mentioned, they initially permitted only terminally ill Canadians to be eligible for the procedure when it was made law in 2016 but has now been expanded to include anyone who 'reasonably foresees death' which permitted people with chronic conditions to apply for assisted death and the Government is facing pressure from senators to include mental illness as a reason for accessing assisted death.
Government figures show that 13,102 people ended their lives under Maid in 2022, an increase of 30% on the previous year, and of those 13,102 Canadians the vast majority cited the: 'loss of ability to engage in meaningful life activities' as the reason for wanting to die and more than one-third of respondents said their decision was, in part, informed by a feeling they were a perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers.
The danger of people being pressured into a decision, and any subsequent attempts to widen the law of who can access the program means that i understand the distress of seeing a loved one suffering but it could open a door which we would not be able to close so i am on the side of saying no for the greater good, but it isn't as firm no, it's a reluctant one.

Welcome To Where??

The River Piddle runs through Dorset and on it's winding banks were Piddletown and Tolpiddle but in the 1950's they changes the i vowel to a u and they became Puddletown and Tolpuddle because too many people were..ahem,  taking the piss but some places in the UK revel in their names so we have Pity Me, Twatt, Titty Hill, Thong, Wetwang, Cockup, Shitterton, Penistone, Brown Willy, Sandy Balls, Cockermouth and Bell End but we are not the only country to have places which make you wonder how the devil they got that name.
In Canada there is Unfortunate Cove, Sorrow Islands, Mount Misery, Mount Doom, Slough of Despond and Futile Lake while it's neighbour to the South has  people giving their address as Mount Despair, Mistake Island, Point No Point, Gloomy Lake, Defeated, Mount Disappointment, Widows Island, Boring, Death Valley, Forlorn Hope Spring , Looneyville and Bald Knob.
One Australian place which definitely shouldn't be thought on too long on the origins of its name is Cockburn, especially when they also have Melancholy Waterhole, Cape Grim, Suicide Bay and Lake Disappointment.
The Antarctic has islands called Inexpressible and Reluctant while Norway has Hell and Worlds End, Chile has a Useless Bay, Ukraine somewhere called Nameless Place and Denmark has Middlefart but it is to Central Europe and Austria where you should head if you want to nick the City Entrance signs.
They do have somewhere called Wind Passing but nobody can beat the place named after the 6th century Bavarian Nobleman Focko, or to give it's proper name, Fucking, although there have been several attempts to change the name but as the Fucking Mayor said: 'For us Fucking is Fucking and it's going to stay Fucking, we have been Fucking for 800 years' although the boring Austrians did finally change it to Fugging in 2021.

Compassion From The West

Compassion shouldn't be tricky but for some people it is, or rather for some victims.
Most people feel it keener when it is close to home but it seems in the West, our sympathy has limits and those limits are geographic.
The Mapamundi Tragico or Tragedy World Map, was created by Mexican designer Eduardo Salles, in April 2015, but epitomises the horror we experience, and the sympathy we feel, for the tragedies that occur all over the world from a Western perspective and shows that those feelings of empathy decrease as the cultural, economic and geographical distance to the disaster and its victims increases.
The map details five zones of compassion with Zone One Ground Zero for our sympathies so for disasters in Canada and the U.S. (but not, strangely enough, Alaska), Western and Central Europe, Israel, Japan and Australia we say 'What a great tragedy'.
The second zone of sympathy comprises most of Latin America, the part of Eastern Europe squeezed between Russia and the West, Egypt, South Africa, India, and South Korea so something terrible going down here, we can still bring ourselves to think: 'Oh no, that's so sad.
The third zone is made up of Russia, China, the Middle East, Venezuela, Cuba and Central America where we shrug and say: Hmmm...how sad.  
If there is an apartment building ablaze or a bomb goes off in a market place in the fourth zone, there won't be much sympathy if it's in Guyana, Mongolia, Central Asia or the bits of that continent to the west or east of India where our reaction is' Hang on, does that country even exist?
The least sympathy from the West and a nonchalent Meh! goes to the poor citizens in the fifth zone or most of Africa.

Britain Sanctions Israeli Settlers

Britain has finally imposed new sanctions on Israel as the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, condemns inaction over West Bank settlers as a UN report found violence against Palestinians has increased in the West Bank and the UN noted that it did not start after the Hamas attack.
Settlers are Israeli citizens who live on Palestinian land and in most cases that is due to Palestinians being prevented from accessing their land and are physically attacked and property damaged by the settlers.
Many Palestinians are driven from their land by the threats, violence and murder and flee in panic, leaving everything behind but the Israeli government routinely acknowledges these colonies as part of the Israeli state despite the fact that they are illegal under international law which states that article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention prohibits the 'individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory'.
The United States has publicly condemned settlements while continuing to provide billions of dollars to Israel and when Donald Trump was President he even went as far as to say his administration didn’t consider settlements to be a violation of international law “per se” and the Biden administration had been relatively quiet on this point until tensions with Israel rose in February and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, stated: 'New settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace'.
Currently 40% of the West Bank is  under the control of settlements and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), notes that 'cases of harassment, trespass, and intimidation are not included in these statistics when they do not result in damage or casualties' which shows that the Settler violence situation is far worse than reported.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted for a wide range of other Genocidal War Crimes,  leads a coalition government that includes several religious Zionist parties that support further annexation of the West Bank and even the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, has found that the Israeli military prefer to remove Palestinians from their own land rather than confront settlers, 'often with firearms and shootings'.
The thousands of Palestinians who have been forced from their homes have no recourse to justice, in four out of every five cases, Israeli police failed in the investigation of Israelis who harmed Palestinians and their property, another Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, found that just 3% of ideologically motivated cases resulted in a conviction.
Demolition is also a key part of settlement. Israeli authorities regularly destroy and confiscate Palestinian-owned property. They also prohibit construction by Palestinians while issuing permits to Israelis. About 24,300 housing units for Israeli settlements in the West Bank were advanced last year and there are plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes.
Over the last 60 years, the Israeli plan all along has been to remove Palestinians and steal their land and after the Hamas attack, it seems to have gone up a notch and now occupy 78% of the land which was handed to the Palestinians in 1947 and after the dust settles on the latest Israeli land grab, it is almost certain to be more.

Kamala Labels Trump A Fascist

Kamala Harris has said Donald Trump is a fascist and I have hashed this out before according to the definition of what a Fascist is and sure, Trump ticks many of the boxes such as scapegoating and demonising other groups to gain a common enemy to unite against, refer to a glorious past and wish to return to it, not allowing dissent or challenge, rid their Government of the previous laws and decisions of previous leaders, to create their own but we also know that Trump is well acquainted with other famous Fascists because his ex-wife told us he kept a book of Hitler speeches, My New Order, by his bed which he has been quoting from.
Hitler said: 'All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning' and Trump said 'We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States This is poisoning our country' which is eerily similar.
Hitler had the Jews, Slavs, Poles and Roma who he described as 'disease carriers and vermin'  who he said: 'Has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal' while Trump has almost anyone who isn't white on his list about whom he said: 'In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it'.
After the violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, ringing with chants of 'Jews will not replace us', Trump infamously stated, there were 'very fine people on both sides', he said 'Hitler did some good things' and also said if he is defeated in the election: 'The Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss' and he was 'not treated right by American Jews' and Hitler complained that 'Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists'.
Hugh Hewitt, a right-wing radio talk-show host, tried to help cleanse Trump's Hitler obsession by asking him what his reply is to his critics who accuse him of  using Hitlerian language and Trump  replied that he had never read Mein Kampf and followed that up with: 'First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood' before that oh so famous Trumpian way he has of denying something only to confirm he lied moments later by then saying :'He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way', confirming that seconds after saying he didn't know it, showing he was familiar with Hitler’s blood quote that he had just said he did not know about.
Trump is a sociopathic, self serving, manipulative, sex offending racist who quotes and seems to want to portray himself as a Fascist and if it smells and looks like a Fascist, it is indeed a fascist.

The Honest North Europeans

If you have to lose your wallet, do it in Helsinki but definitely don't do it Lisbon.
In a Social experiment conducted by the journal, Science, 98% of wallets containing £50 in the local currency purposely dropped on the streets of the Finnish capital were returned whereas only 8% found its way back to the rightful owner in the Portuguese Capital.
In the 16 European Capital the experiment was held, none of the cities surveyed brought shame on itself by returning none of the wallets but overall, only 47% of the wallets were returned so if you’re most likely to get your wallet back in Helsinki, and least likely to do so in Lisbon, the experiment showed that is there an honesty arc running across Europe, declining as you travel from the continent’s north to south.
Cities closer to the top end of Europe generally score better than those closer with Budapest returning 66%,  Moscow and Amsterdam handed back 58%, 59% of wallets found in Ljubljana and Berlin were reunited with their owners and Warsaw and London both scored 41%.
Of the least honest, the residents of Bucharest and Zurich as only 33%  saw their wallets again and 25% in Prague but the worst places to wave goodbye to your wallet is Madrid with 16% and Lisbon with their measly 8%.
Only three cities on other continents were subjected to the Wallet Experiment, 33% of resident in  Rio, New York was 66% and in Mumbai 75% saw the wallet again.

Can Anyone be This Stupid? Yes They Can.

The average Human Brain weight approximately three-pounds and is made up of 86 billion neurons and cells which are the seat of our intelligence and controller of behavior so you do have to wonder just how cells are misfiring to be dumb enough to even consider that a natural phenomenon is being created and controlled by Meteorologists.
Maybe these people were dropped on their heads at some point or they were very sick as children so they missed a good portion of their education but whatever reason, they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer because Meteorologists tracking Hurricane Milton were targeted by morons issuing abuse and death threats due to them controlling the weather. Yep, i said controlling the weather and just as you think nobody can be that much of an idiot, say hello to the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
As she has previously stated that she doesn't believe in Evolution, claims that educating children on LGBTQ+ matters will lead to straight people would going extinct and called Climate Change a scam, what she says about this is bound to be monstrously stupid and she isn't one to disappoint as she went with: 'Yes they can control the weather and it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.'
Donald Trump, who is such the epitome of thickness he could almost be made of teak hasn't even gone so far as saying the Hurricanes are being created and sent America's way by Meteorologists, instead he has gone for spreading lies that FEMA, the Government Agency that responds to Emergencies and Disasters, had run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants which has led to his supporters issuing threats of violence against Fema workers who they say should be beaten, arrested, shot or hung on sight.
FEMA explained that disaster relief fund for hurricane-hit communities is separate from and unaffected by the money spent on giving shelter to migrants and President Biden called it 'Beyond ridiculous' and said the claims being made around weather control were 'So stupid. It’s got to stop' but Trump supporters not being stupid is as likely as finding a weight watchers sheet taped to the front of Donald Trump's fridge so that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
So maybe these people do have an excuse for being so window shakingly ignorant (some sort of brain injury? Brain transplant with a snail?) but one day, after all the Meteorologists have been killed and all the FEMA employees and first responders have been shot but the hurricanes keep on coming, then the penny may drop and they say 'Wow, Hurricanes are actually a terrifying natural phenomenon made worse by man made climate change after all. Sorry'.

Robots, Androids and Cyborgs

Isaac Asimov's 'Three Laws of Robotics' has long been held up as the golden rules that would stop robots overthrowing you humans and keeping some of you in cages for their amusement.
Asimov's three laws all depend on a human defining what a human is so far too easy to get around so better you meatbags don't rely on them but the world of artificial intelligence and robotics is moving so fast that it isn't only robots that you should be wary of, but also androids and cyborgs which many people see as the same thing but boy would you be embarrassed if a cyborg came back from the future to eliminate you and you called it a robot.
A Robot is a very advanced machine run by Artificial Intelligence which is designed and programmed to perform a task such as in factories or and can been human like in appearance while an Android is a more advanced human like robot which is designed to mimic human behaviour such as walking and talking and sometimes appearance.
A Cyborg, short for Cybernetic Organism, consists of both synthetic hardware and organic material which interacts directly with the brain so they have free will to do their own activities and  are not necessarily human, they could be animals that have non-organic attachments.
All very useless if you are being pursued by a heavily armed part organic, part synthetic life-form but no need to make them even more angry by getting their classification wrong.

James Not So Cleverley

In the last three of the potential Conservative Party leaders, James Cleverley supporters decided to try and manipulate the contest in his favour so he would face off against Kemi Badenoch, the person they believed he had the best chance of beating in the final vote among party members.
The idea was for Cleverley backing MP's to 'lend' their vote to Kemi, therefore knocking out Robert Jenrick and leaving him to face off against the very right wing, gaffe prone Badenoch and that's exactly what many did, actually too many because hilariously when the result came in Badenoch and Jenrick received more than Cleverley who was knocked out to leave Badenoch and Jenrick now facing a final vote among party members.  
According to Party sources, Cleverly and his campaigners had detected what was happening but discovered it too late and now the Conservatives face a choice between a very right wing candidate and another very right wing candidate or as one frustrated MP rather fruitaly said:  'They will be dancing on the fucking tables at Labour HQ'.
The Liberal Dems have already put out advertisements under the banner: 'Meet the final two Conservative leadership candidates' and lists Badenoch’s criticism of maternity pay and Jenrick stating he would vote for Donald Trump and his order to paint over cartoon murals in a child asylum-seeker unit.
Only the Conservatives could be this awful and disorganised, but boy did we laugh at them when the result came in.

More War Crimes Levelled At Israel

The list of War Crimes against Israel continues to grow with shooting at UN soldiers in Lebanon now added to the previous number of international crimes including the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, wilfully causing great suffering, wilful killing, intentional attacks against a civilian population, extermination and murder and persecution.
On the same day that yet another Refugee Camp was hit in Gaza, killing 30 people,  France, Spain and Italy issued stern diplomatic reprimands for the deliberate targeting of international peacekeeping troops which Israel admit to doing 'accidentally' while going after Hamas fighters. That would be accidentally three times in three days then.
Meanwhile, as well as killing people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel have Iran in their sights which is something Netanyahu has been trying to do for years and now has the chance.
Israel's cabinet met in the week but reportedly failed to reach a decision on how to retaliate for Iran's 200 missiles aimed there way with their backer, America, telling them that attacking Iran's nuclear facilities was off the table as an option.
Also a no-no is the facilities that make up Iran's oil industry which would cause a spike in oil prices which Biden would be keen to avoid as his country goes to the polls so Israel's options are limited although they have said that when it comes, it will be a 'surprise'.
With America unwilling, or more likely unable, to stop it's ally who according to one UN expert on the BBC: 'Is under the impression that it can get away with what it wants to do', what happens next could be a very dangerous moment for the World as Iran have promised to not only hit back at Israel but at anyone backing them which could potentially draw the US into matters and an even bigger conflict.

Idea's From The Keyboard Of Lucy: Flood The Desert

With man made Climate Change really going up a notch now and the window for finding easy solutions is rapidly closing but to do nothing is suicide but runaway global warming where we all die is equally suicidal so we need some big ideas, and luckily i have one.
Actually, it isn't all my idea but i got it while watching pictures of the Sahara Deset flooding for the first time in over 50 years after heavy rains and i thought hang on, the 3,600,000 sq mile Sahara Desert is just sat there being all arid and useless, why not flood it?
Running all across the North Africa it is as large an area as the United States and has a population of 2.5 million people, less than 1 person per square mile, and it is something the French actually doing back in the 1870's after they finished the Suez Canal and actually investigated it and drew up plans although that was more to do with commerce rather than stop us all dying horribly.
'The Sahara is the cancer eating away at Africa and we can’t cure it therefore, we must drown it' said François Élie Roudaire who was tasked with seeing if it was feasible and discovered that there were large parts of the Sahara that were ancient seabeds and below sea level and he proposed connecting canals running from area to area across Africa.
The French Government went from Oui to Non when they heard the price, over 1 billion Francs (£892,617) and the Desert was left dry and full of sand but Roudaire's own figures estimated that his chain of canals and massive lakes in the old seabed would lower the Global sea level by between 3 and 5 centimeters and with the sea level rising by 3.6 mm per year, that's a decade of sea level rises reversed right there.   
Obviously someone would need to look into the possible unintended consequences of introducing the sea to somewhere which hasn't seen it for millions of years and there is the issue of the 2.5 million people who live there but maybe someone should pick up Roudaire's idea and have another look at it before its too late and evolution gives us flippers.

Talking Bullocks On Question Time

Question Time went to Pennsylvania last night and between debates on how evil/brilliant both Kamala Harris and that other guy are, there was a moment towards the end when someone in the crowd went all British and said that to use a British Word, most of what comes from politicians is Bollocks.
The Democrat politician then went on later in the show to repeat it but made a bit of a hash of it, saying Bullocks for which the British guest on the panel corrected him in the correct pronunciation of the word which is a less polite way of saying something is nonsense.
To be fair to the Yankee, it is not a widely used word in America and he could have meant Bullocks although why he would bring up a young bull into a conversation about immigration i am unsure or maybe he meant Rollocks which is a severe telling off.
He could have meant Rowlocks, those things that oars go into on a boat or even Horlicks which is a chocolate flavoured drink and it was nighttime so maybe he was a bit sleepy but more than likely he just made a proper bollocks of it.
If American politicians are going to swear British style then they really should try harder because we have many here which apparently haven't made it over there such as Wanker, Git, Tosser, Bugger, Knobhead, Prat and Pillock or you could just cover them all by saying 'He's being a right Donald Trump' who encompasses them all, the Twat.

Atlas Shrugging the Wrong Thing

Ayn Rand initially called her last novel The Strike, but settled on Atlas Shrugged as explained by two of the book’s characters: 'If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders'.
Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Russia, she used the pen name Ayn Rand and became a hard right advocate and called her philosophy 'the morality of rational self-interest' but as she spent most of her life off her face on amphetamines, she clearly wasn't thinking straight and her drug use led to her claiming Social Security and Medicare which only proves that even Capitalists are not adverse to a bit of Socialism when they run out of other peoples money, not so keen on the morality of self interest then it seems.
Because of the drug use we can maybe excuse her Atlas Shrugged image of the Titan carrying the weight of the world, and being compelled to shrug off that burden World because he never, the story goes that Atlas was condemned by Zeus to hold up the Heavens, not Earth, or as Homer put it: 'IAtlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the clear-voiced Hesperides; for this lot wise Zeus assigned to him.'
So if you see an Atlas who props up the earth, he’s holding up the wrong thing and we have a drug addled right wing Capitalist to blame who got this wrong as well as her 'morality of self interest' philosophy which turned out to be nonsense or as one writer said, it is one of two books which appeals to 14 year olds: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that leads to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.'

So A Robot Is Trying To Murder You Advice Guide

 

The inevitable robot war predicted by everyone should be here any day now, and probably the least welcome thing you could find looming over you is a robot because not only are they metallic but they are immensely strong and impervious to fire, bullets, hitting with blunt objects and have clear, logical thought which anticipates your every move.
You cannot outrun it, so here at Google we have created a handy guide: 'So A Robot Is Trying To Murder You'.
First check to make sure that it isn't actually a human in disguise and once you are certain that it isn't, have you angered it in some way and an apology will soothe it's mechanical brain?
If the answer is no then the next step is to try and stop it somehow but remember the bit about them being impervious to most things but feel free to try, i'll wait.
So how did that go for you? Still relentlessly pursuing you is it? Ok so the next step is to try and fool the Robot that you are one of them and not a bag of meat with squishy organs so have a try at that robotic dance which should slow it down if nothing else as it computes what the hell you are, so this is a chance to lure it to its demise.
If you have a foundry near by, pop and lock that way, if you haven't then sorry but you may as well turn this off now as your toast.
So after dancing your way up to the edge of one of those big vats of molten metal using the power of 80's dance, seduce the robot into plunging into the molten liquid by shouting a paradox as a robot's mechanical mind can't handle such things and will stumble forward in confusion and straight into the vat of molten iron and dissolve and it's bye bye killer robot.
Congratulations on completing this advice guide. You are now no longer being hunted by a killer robot. Should you desire any future advice, please consult our other guides such as A Basic Guide to Super Advanced Science Gadget Things For Humans and Why The Effing Hell Isn't This Stupid Thing Working?

Giving Kabul A Miss This Year

Dear traveller, the British Government cares for your well-being. To keep you safe from harm, His Majesty’s Government's Foreign & Commonwealth Office has prepared a list of areas around the world you should avoid.
You’ll find these on the website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, along with detailed travel advice for 225 countries and territories around the world . That’s just about all of them — except the Vatican because Popetown is deemed so safe it requires no travel guidance at all, just turn up with rosary beads and you will be fine.
Some nations are specific for Brits, Iran comes with the warning that: 'British travellers face greater risks than nationals of many other countries due to high levels of suspicion about the UK' though to be fair those suspicions are quite rightly grounded in decades of British meddling in Iranian affairs but most are true for non-Brits as well of the more iffy nations to avoid with your suitcase.
The warnings come in four flavours with you will be fine to a bit dodgy in parts, only go if you REALLY have to and 'Are You Nuts?? Turn Back Now!!!
So where does the British Government say we can go but avoid the unsafe bits? That would be Algeria,  Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, India, Myanmar (Burma), Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Togo, Turkey and Venezuela although unhelpfully the Foreign Office doesn't tell us in which parts of the particular nations to avoid.
The next level is against all but essential travel, and they mean only if you got no other choice and they are Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Kosovo, Mexico, Malaysia, North Korea, Peru, Thailand and Ukraine.
The top level advice of don't even go there unless you have Life Insurance and a funeral plan sorted are Afghanistan, Belarus, Haiti, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, The Occupied Palestinian Territories, Russia, Sudan, Syria, South Sudan and Yemen.
Hopefully one day no countries will be on the UK Governments shit list and we can go where the hell we like but for now, it will be a while before any of those countries covered by the top markings get a visit by any members of the Royal Family, so silver linings and all that.

Our Pale Blue Dot

Until i saw the COSMOS series with the very watchable Neil deGrass Tyson, i had never heard of Carl Sagan who wrote and starred in the original COSMOS series back in 1980.
I have though, previously seen the famous Pale Blue Dot image of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe from 3.7 billion miles away where our planet appears as a tiny dot in the vastness of space.   
Amazing picture and perfectly complimented by one of the most thought provoking passages written where Sagan contemplates that on that dot in the picture: 'Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark' he muses before explaining that this is the only home we have ever known and we have nowhere else to go and how we should: 'deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot'.

Powerful stuff but still we go on polluting the planet, stuffing poisons into the atmosphere, shoving toxic waste into the ground and generally vandalising the only place that we have to live on.
What the image also drives home as we look at that tiny pinprick of light in the vast blackness of space is how we are just a tiny, infinitesimal part of the universe.
It shows how we are not at the center of things as we maintained for centuries, that we are not even at the center of our own solar system which is just one of tens of billions of solar systems in our galaxy alone, a galaxy which is in turn amongst hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe.   
Whilst we could quite easily make excuses for our less knowledgeable predecessors that the Sun and the Planets went around us and that the Earth and everything around, above and below it was created for our delectation, to maintain that idea today that a God created something 13.8 billion light years across just for the inhabitants of an insignificant,  rocky planet situated out in the sticks on the arm of a far flung Galaxy is the height of arrogance or ignorance.  
The image should make us feel very humble and shows our place in the great scheme of things which is an inconsequential dot in the immense vastness of space and alarmingly, the only place we have to live so we should be taking better care of it because once we have wrecked this planet, we literally don't have anywhere else to go.

Try Again Later

The James Webb infra-red telescope is in place and we can expect to see from amazing pictures coming back from it soon as it examines objects over 13.6 billion light-years away meaning, because of the time it takes light to travel across the vast Universe, it will be looking at objects as they were 13.6 billion years ago.
To flip that around, if there are any beings there looking our way they just see the inky blackness of Space because to them we are not there yet as Earth was created only 4.5 billion years ago.
That did make me wonder how far we can see with the naked eye and what would anyone on a far distant planet looking at us less than 4.5 billion light years away see?
The European Space Agency state that of the approximate 9,000 Space objects that we can look at without a telescope, the nearest star we can see is Alpha Centauri which is about 4.3 light years away and the farthest is 4,000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia but the most distant object visible to the unaided eye is The Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away.
To put that into perspective, anyone in Alpha Centuri would be looking at us from about 26 trillion miles away as we were in 2020 but the Cassiopian's would see us in 1978 bc when the ancient Egyptians were a thing but anyone looking on from the Andromeda Galaxy would see us as we were 2.5 million years ago when we were transitioning from ape like mammals to the very earliest hominids.     
Does make you realise why nobody from Andromeda has paid us a visit, they are probably thinking those Earthlings need a few more million years to evolve first while the Alpha Centurian's are obviously waiting for Justin Bieber to completely finish his singing career before coming our way.

Where The Hell?

As any Bible reader, numerologist or Iron Maiden fan knows, 666 is the Number of the Beast  and the Devil himself clearly belongs in hell. So… welcome to Norway and and yes, it does freeze over.
There’s another one on Grand Cayman Island (that one doesn’t) and a third one in Michigan but to even things out, there also is a Paradise in Michigan also and by some strange quirk, they are 333 miles from each other so a round trip there and back would equal...666 miles.
If Dante is to be believed,  the journey through hell is divided into nine levels from Hell’s antechamber where those who, when faced with the choice between good and evil, did nothing, so expect to see  Pontius Pilate hanging out there.
After crossing hell’s border river the Acheron on Charon’s ferry, we enter the First Circle which is home to virtuous pagans so these inhabitants have not actively sinned but did not have the opportunity to recognise Christ so as you pass give a wave to all those Greek Philosphers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Virgil.
The Second Circle is where the Lustful reside, led astray by their carnal desires such as Cleopatra and Mata Hari and in the Third Circle, the Gluttonous suffer for their overindulgence in food and drink so don't expect any handout from Ariel Sharon or Henry 8th.
In the Fourth, the greedy and wasteful live and the after crossing the River Styx you reach the Fifth Circle and the Wrathful where most of the Roman Emperors find themselves along with the Khan family, Genghis and Kubla.
Moving up to the higher circles and where the real bad people go, Heretics such as Joan of Arc populate the Sixth Circle along with Minotaurs, the Seventh Circle is divided in three rings, each containing a separate class of violent sinners: against their neighbours, against themselves (suicides) and against God (blasphemers, sodomites and money lenders.
To reach the last two circles, you cross over the Abyss to the Eighth Circle with it's fraudsters including Seducers, Flatterers, Soothsayers, Corrupt politicians, Hypocrites, Thieves, and Counterfeiters and Falsifiers.
Guarded by mythical Giants, the Ninth Circle holds the Traitors, deemed the worst kind of sinners and who are stuck in the frozen lake called Cocytus and overseen by the top banana, Satan himself.
It's obviously a bit of a slog and Dante places it somewhere in the North Sea which is exactly where we find Hell, Trondheim so maybe Dante knew exactly where it was after-all .

Mining The Moon

It's a well known fact, that if you stand on the Great Wall of China, you can see the Moon and if you have an especially decent telescope you can see a small rover with Made In China stamped on the side carrying out exploration of the surface looking for natural resources such as titanium, and uranium, which the Earth is really short of.
The mass of the Moon is 81 quintillion tons, the Earth is 6.580 sextillion tons and they are involved in a celestial dance where the Moon is kept spinning around the Earth by a balance of acceleration and gravity equalling each other.
If we start tinkering with the mass of the Moon by transporting some of its mass back onto Earth, will this have an effect on us and it?
Taking millions upon millions of tons of the Moons mass would surely, over time, have to have an impact on the Moon's gravitational pull on Earth, creating a change in the seas tides and currents and weather patterns. Would a less dense Moon be slowly pulled towards the Earth or flung out of the gravitational grip we hold over it which would slow the Earths rotation considerably, not to mention the potentially devastating Earth's wobbling effect that the Moon controls.
In the pre-moon days, the Earth wobbled so we never had the tilt like we have today where in summer the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun and in winter the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun giving us shorter days and cooler weather.
Having a huge Moon beside us steadied the wobble and we now how the seasons we get but boy would we be in trouble if the Moon ever significantly moved away as we would experience much greater temperature swings than we are used to.
On early Earth, when the Moon was newly formed, days were five hours long, but with the Moon's braking effect operating on the Earth for the last 4.5bn years, days have slowed down to the 24 hours that we are familiar with now.
What all this means is that our early ancestors must have had a magnificent view of the moon but more importantly, has anyone checked if the Earth is wobbling anymore recently because i'm sure our seasons are completely out of whack, i was carrying my coat and shopping in a T-shirt today and it's October!

Why Are UFO's Round?

As i have stated previously, it would be mad to not think that life has only developed on this single planet and not on any of the other billions of billions of other planets in the Universe and it isn't unfeasible to assume that at some point they have not only found us but come and had a look, it's exactly what we are doing on other Planets.
Now three passenger jets have reported sightings of UFOs above Britain in December and confirmed by Gatwick Air Traffic who spotted six objects they could not identify on their radars before they suddenly disappeared.
The pilots each saw 'two flat, silver discs', flying within 100ft of their aircraft with which makes me wonder why are UFO's almost always round?
All of our aircraft are a bulky shape with wings or rotor blades so if the Aliens have the technology and know-how to come all this way to peek at us and they are using round disk shaped ships, why are we still making our aircraft and rockets the same old shape?
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that in terms of any aerodynamic advantage, the best shape is the one we are using so being circular doesn't give any real advantage but a round surface, with no edges would mean it could evade our radar although that theory is shot to bits earlier on in the post when the Air Traffic control radar picked up six of them.
Not being a rocket scientist is another disadvantage when you come to consider does a ship need to be aerodynamic once it is out of the planets atmosphere so is a spinning disc more streamline for travelling through nothing but in that direction lays nothing but a headache.
My own conclusion is that they travel the vast areas of interplanetary space in a rocket shaped craft and then when they get to our doorstep, they send out the reconnaissance ships which are small and round to avoid being detected by Earth radar.  
The other conclusion is that the Aliens may have an immense technological advantage but the concept of aerodynamics has gone over their little green heads.

Owning The Moon

There was a story a little while ago about an American company selling rights to mine the Moon which led me to ask, 'Who owns the moon?
Obviously not this American company which makes me wonder how stupid those paying them for the extraterrestrial real estate must be because property rights can only have legal force when they are recognised by a sovereign government and as per Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no sovereign Governments reach goes up as far as the moon so good luck cashing in that moon property piece of paper sucker.
Another argument is that if someone just turned up and occupied it, would they become the de facto owner?
Surprisingly there is nothing to stop just this happening, much in the way the British just turned up in Australia and  North America and claimed it as their own only there would be less Natives to brush aside on the moon.
Sending a probe is not enough, you have to physically be there 'body and mind' to claim it so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin missed a trick there, they could have claimed ownership and ruled over their own piece of Solar System.  
The International Space Community know about this loophole and are currently running around trying to get nations to sign up to a Moon Agreement which will stop anyone just sticking a flag in the moon and claiming it but as the only signatories so far are 16 nations without a space program, the moon may one day be the next site for some of our more expansionist nations.
That said, next time the Moon is waxing (The Capital D Shape) and you can see the right hand side of it take a look towards the outer edge between 1 and 2 o'clock and just up and to the right of the Mare Crisium you will see a crater called Vestine and after staring at it in wonder send me a cheque because i own that and i charge to view it.
To prove it is mine i have a Lunar Land Deed of ownership from the Lunar Register courtesy of my family who decided what i needed was to own a piece of the land so they got me a hole in the ground, 240,000 miles away.
Legally, i know that what i actually have is a fancy piece of paper worth as much as a fancy piece of paper but unless NASA plan to land in it or someone builds a Hotel in it, for all intent and purposes it's mine and a lengthy course case to prove ownership shouldn't be an issue.  
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) and The Moon Treaty (1979) states that: 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means' which means that no nation can claim it but as the language is specific to national ownership, it doesn't stop an individual claiming part of it.
I argued this with my lawyer friend who agreed that there is nothing that expressly forbids individuals from owning land on the moon but any documentation that claims you own land on the moon is unenforceable, and no nation on the planet would recognise it but then again, if i were able to fly up to the moon and build a settlement there, it would be pretty difficult for anyone to stop me.
The ESA hopes to build an 'international village' on the Moon between 2020 and 2030 and NASA has plans of its own for a moon base while The Russian space agency (Roscosmos) is planning to build a lunar base, and the China National Space Agency (CNSA) is planning to build such a base so if any of them fancy a prime piece of lunar real estate in a desirable location with great views of the Earth, give me a call and we can negotiate. 

Building Another Earth

NASA did have an ambitious plan to capture an asteroid and put it in orbit around the moon which would have been exciting enough if they could have achieved it but it does make me wonder about how we can reshape our Solar System.
Each 365 days the Earth orbits the Sun traveling 940 million kilometers or 584 million miles around our star and it doesn't return to that place in its orbit for another year so that space is for all intent and purposes empty.
Jupiter meanwhile shares its orbit with a whole bunch of asteroids which move around the Sun with the planet, one group ahead of Jupiter and another other group behind in its orbit.
As this shows that planets or planet-like objects can be in the same orbit, i do wonder what it would be possible to maneuver into the Earths Orbit.
Venus is almost the same size and density as the Earth and would be ideal as a second Earth but somehow dragging it 23 million miles to our orbit may be too much and i couldn't even begin to imagine either how we could drag a planet out of its orbit and into ours or what knock-on effect it would have on other things.
The alternative would be to guide as large as possible an asteroid into place and then build it up as necessary.
The Earths orbit is in the Goldilocks Zone, we know that at an orbit of 93 million miles from the Sun we can have liquid water and if we can't get the size of planet the same as Earth, we could get the mass using heavier material to terraform our new orbital partner.
With our best brains working on the details such as the required mass to create to enable it to hold onto its atmosphere and where in the orbit to place it in relation to the Earth, we could 'build' a second home orbiting our Sun exactly where we want it knowing it could sustain life.
While a spare Earth would solve many problems, i don't know what effect if any it would have on Earth so might be better to stick with Plan A and just build on the Moon for now and leave the planet creation for future generations and more advanced technology.

Thinking About Uranus

From 1947 to 1969, the US Air Force investigated Unidentified Flying Objects under Project Blue Book. This project studied 12,618 sightings and managed to identify 11,917 of them but a further 701 defied explanation.
In 1979, the French reported that their own investigation into UFO's found a quarter of over 1,600 cases studied 'pose a real question' so with the real possibility that there is something out there, the biggest question we can possibly ask is, when did we change the pronunciation of Uranus?
When i was in school, the seventh planet from the Sun was pronounced 'your-anus' but now it seems to have morphed into 'you-ranus' which isn't any where near as humorous, how can a schoolkid tell a teacher that he heard there was rings around 'you-ranus', that doesn't work at all.
I'm sure William Herschel knew what he was doing when the Astronomy society rejected the names he wanted for the planet, 'George's Star' or 'Georgian Planet' in honour of King George III, so vindictively plumped for Uranus after the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos, and forever being the butt of jokes for the rest of eternity, or until some killjoys decided to change how the name is pronounced.
The Royal bootlicker would be spinning in his grave if he knew what some people were getting up to when it came to Uranus despite the Oxford English Dictionary stating that it is pronounced 'yer-eh-nus' as in 'i think we need to explore Uranus' which will get any kid a detention at least if he said it to their teacher in Geography or Maths but is perfectly okay in Science.
School children today are missing out on all this, i had my pronunciation of the planet corrected by a teenager the other day which shows that the fiendish plan  to rename Uranus as 'you-ranus' is well advanced and the youngest generation will never know the joys of comments such as 'I'm researching Uranus' or 'there's a dark spot on Uranus' or even 'hey, did you know they found a new ring around Uranus' or even my personal favourite 'Dad, is Uranus bigger than Mars?'
So what if our interstellar visitors do come from the big blue gas ball, and we greet them as our visitors from 'you-ranus' and they have to embarrass us but saying actually they are from 'your-anus', red faces all around.
I think we all need to carefully think about Uranus and watch it closely because for all we know Uranus could be crawling with life despite the noxious gases emanating from Uranus that could kill a man.

Planet X Conspiracy Theory

I do love a good conspiracy theory and pride myself on knowing most of them but but i heard one that seems to have passed me by but inevitably ends with us all being killed horribly.
Scientists have began a search for the elusive ninth planet which they think may be orbiting on the outer edge of our solar system after being flung there while the other planets shifted towards the Sun and they have encouraging initial evidence that Planet Nine really exists and are attempting to get observational evidence.
If a hidden planet exists, it’s 400-800 times farther away from the Sun than Earth. So it would trace an elongated 20,000-year orbit so us Humans were busy looking for sharp stones and waiting for someone to invent cutlery the last time it swung around our star.
So far so good, since Pluto got booted out of the Planet Club we have a space for a new Planet but conspiracy theorists have leapt to the conclusion that Planet Nine must be 'Planet X' which is destined to destroy Earth at some point soon.
The theory is that 'Planet X will sweep through the inner Solar System causing Earth to undergo a physical pole shift that would destroy most of humanity according to Russian author Zecharia Sitchin who named the planet Nibiru and based his findings on Babylonian and Sumerian mythology.
Please bear in mind that the original date for our destruction by the new Planet was 2003 but this was postponed when 2004 turned up and we were still here so i am going to go out on a limb and say that this can be filed under 'one for the crazies' and we can look forward to still being here for the Eurovision song contest in May where i have my own conspiracy theory that we have entered a song so monstrously bad that we have no chance of winning so avoid the cost of having to stage it next year, austerity and all that.

The Four Horsemen Of The Tory Apocolypse

Look, we're not children. We know that the last Government weren't all bubblegum and smiles, they were mean and they were nasty and they were dicks which brings me to the Tory leadership contenders.
The four contenders, Jenrick, Cleverly, Tugendhat and Badenoch have been  moving tediously around the Tory conference in Birmingham desperately trying to drum up some sort of excitement about themselves and to try and distinguish themselves in the mind of the Conservative faithful who will be shortly anointing one of them as their leader.
As the Tories have no integrity, no morals and fake patriotism, they would have to go lower than a whale turd to stand out and and it was Kemi Badenoch who reached down furthest to go with her idea that that not all cultures are equally valid and British women get too much maternity pay.
The other three disagreed with her on the maternity pay subject but had no problem with her xenophobia (all right wing remember) but feeling the wind in her hair, Badenoch just ploughed on with that Conservative Party strawman, immigration.
Her plan is to get it under control although she never really said how, just that she would: 'Develop the fullest and most detailed plan to control immigration that any political party has ever proposed' which may seem a bit vague but it sounds like something the latest bunch of Tory voters would appreciate, the sort of people who if Margaret Thatcher herself entered the leadership race, would almost certainly consider her a dangerous leftie.
Badenock and the rest are all truly nasty and pandering to the furthest right so none of them will be able to reunite the party,- which is good and hopefully the Tories can eat themselves into annihilation.

UK Should Avoid Militarily Backing Israel

For some it fits their narrative to claim that the current Middle East Conflict began on October 7th 2023 when Hamas massacred over 1,000 Israeli's but it began long before that, some point to 1947 when the UN voted to adopt the Partition Plan for Palestine which saw it divided into Jewish and Arab states or 1948 when Israel captured 28% of Palestinian territory and over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land on the establishment of the State of Israel and some look at 1967 when a further 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and over 400 Arab villages were destroyed.
Since then Israel has been quite rightly on the end of an amazing number of UN resolutions, 45, which is almost more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined and include scuppering peace talks at every turn, mopping up occupied Palestinian land with illegal settlements, killing innocent Palestinians, holding over 9,000 Palestinians in its prisons, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses, using Palestinian children as human shields and building a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice, oppression of its neighbours and turning Gaza into an outdoor prison.
In the past year Israel has been accused by the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice for genocide against the Palestinians whose death toll now stands at over 45,000 which is a conservative estimate with many more buried under the rubble of their homes.
In Britain, desire for a ceasefire remains high with 70% saying they think Israel should stop and call a ceasefire with more of the British public sympathising with the Palestinian side (30%) with 15% saying they sympathise more with the Israelis and 57% of Brits saying they would support the UK ending the sale of arms to Israel with 20% saying they should continue.
The Conflict has now expanded to Lebanon and Yemen and it is anticipated Iran will become embroiled after it attacked Israel and Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, has declared that: 'The free world must unconditionally stand with Israel in its war against the axis of evil led by Iran and extremist Islam' for which i say no, we really shouldn't.
America has said they would defend Israel in any war against Iran and have been providing the weapons to continue the Gaza massacre while talking peace which puts them in the weird position of condemning Israeli murder of innocent Palestinians while actively providing them with the weapons to continue doing it but America has already had a bit of a blind spot for some reason when it comes to Israel, happy to turn a blind eye to the brutal military occupation and land grab going on for decades.
It has been obvious for decades that the Israeli endgame is for Palestinians to be pushed out of Gaza and the West Bank and then claim all of Palestine for themselves and they are taking the opportunity of the horrific actions of Hamas to expedite this and do exactly that in one large round of ethnic cleansing and genocide all wrapped into one.
To me if you are supporting the occupier in any scenario then you are backing entirely the wrong side but all sides have to be condemned for their appalling acts, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iran for aiding and abetting them attacking Israeli citizens and Israel for occupying and murdering Palestinians in their thousands for decades.
The British Government will obviously come under pressure to support Israel’s military campaign but they would have much to lose and nothing to gain by assisting Israel who stand accused of war crimes and genocide.
If Britain has any role to play, it would be best served supporting the growing calls for a ceasefire and the establishment of a viable two state solution but under no circumstances should Britain get involved and would be best served staying out of the carnage, less we be tainted by the US and Israeli criminality and violation of human rights.