Boycotting America

 
At my local extreme left wing Stalin loving Communists Party meeting it was mentioned how in view of America being run by Fascists and backing the Genocidal Israel and sucking up to Putin's Russia while introducing tariffs on everyone and generally being dicks, we should boycott all things American.   
We was going to put it to the vote but being Communists, we just told everyone to do it anyway but we had a problem when we tried to devise a list of things to not buy which had Made in USA stamped on it.
In response to Trump's tariffs, the EU is lining up tariffs on imports of US cranberries, orange juice, sweetcorn, peanut butter, bourbon whiskey, cigarettes, cigars, cheroots, cosmetics, motorbikes, boats, jeans, leather footwear, swimwear, underwear and steel products but as none of the above in our homes are American, i guess we have unwittingly done our bit by not buying them anyway but we agreed that the next motorbike we buy is not a Harley Davidson or our next packet of cigarettes Lucky Strikes.
Leaving it to one side with a suggestion that we will just carry on not buying things made in America until we can find something made in America we can purposely not buy we moved on to avoiding American culture such as TV and movies.
Staying away from American comedy shows is quite easy, to be frank those guys are just not that funny and as most of their comedy shows are cheap rip off of our own, we can just watch the far superior original anyway but TV shows will be harder, I am only on Season 6 of the brilliant Supernatural so will avoid them once I have finished with Sam and Dean adventures and as there are 15 seasons, it could be a while yet.
Musically i will struggle as almost permanently going into my ears (or rather the one working one anyway) are bands such as Green Day, Guns N Roses and the Ramones and i recently found my way to the Megadeth discography but luckily Canada, Australia and Britain has some great musicians so out goes Billie Joe Armstrong and Billy Joel and in comes Billy Idol and Billy Bragg.
Facebook, Twitter and Whatapp accounts have been deleted en mass and our Apple and Google mobiles phones will have to go and be replaced with mobiles from Huawei, Nokia and Samsung and my HP Computer will now be a Lenovo, Acer, Fujitsu, Siemens or Sharp.
The final agreement was not to use the words Trump or Musk so we will no longer play Trumps, Top Trumps and Trumping will be a trouser trumpet or tooting and any perfume with a strong sweet musk will now be simply called a smell and orange's, tangerines, mandarins and other Orange coloured fruit will be banned from our fruit bowls.        
Hopefully this boycott will only need to be until 2028 when an adult will regain the American Presidency but until then, as Billy Bragg sang: 'Bring up the banners from the days gone by'.
Wow, its going to be a long 4 years. 

This Is Just The Trailer For Climate Change

Only a quarter of the way through the new year and already Globally we have had the hottest January on record, wildfires in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, floods, heatwaves and droughts and Cyclones further south than we can expect affecting Australia so extreme weather is our new reality.
Global average temperatures are already 1.75C above the pre-industrial average which is a reality check given that leaders are still declaring that they want to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.
The changing Climate comes with serious implications which are manifesting and slowly unfolding now and as bad as it seems, this is just the trailer for the devastating main feature, it is no longer a future possibility that can be avoided, people are dying and having their lives destroyed now.
In 2022 Pakistan was hit by unbearable heat just shy of 50°C and drought before violently destructive flash floods displaced 33 million people in a week, only to be followed by landslides that destroyed key infrastructure.
In this era, we can expect more severe and frequent extreme events and disasters which will affect everyone regardless of where you live so Society has to change to survive the upcoming disasters because Climate change is now beyond our ability to reverse, all we can do is learn to manage it but we can't say we were not warned, I am amongst many who have been banging this drum for decades but have been mostly ignored by the Governments who could actually make the changes, now it's here and getting worse.
The further bad news is that even if emissions are reduced to zero immediately, the impacts of existing emissions are 'locked in' and we face temperatures rising to 2.7 degrees which means in your grandchildren's lifetime, climatic temperatures will be higher than anything any human would have faced over the past 11,300 since modern human civilization developed years according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who analysed data from sediment cores drilled in lake bottoms and sea floors and from ice cores.  
Humans tweaked the nose of Mother Nature by unbalancing her Earth but the planet ultimately will be fine, we probably won't be and quite frankly, the Earth would be better off without all those strange little humans messing things up for her.
As for people like me who are told to pipe down as we are scaring the children with all our doom and gloom, I say good, hope we do but blaming us is a classic case of shooting the messenger, the blame is squarely on the shoulders of the people who could have done something decades ago and instead did nothing, and still don't.

Science Proving God?

If you have ever tried to reason with a religious person, you will know that no matter what you throw at them, they will not change their mind or even consider that they have been sold a Pup and that's fair enough, they apparently see it as some sort of test of their faith but they do wonder why everyone doesn't see what they do, or rather don't see, but believe in it anyway.
I recently heard an argument that science, rather than dispelling religion, has strengthened it which is an interesting argument, to me it is like saying just because Charles Darwin spelt out how man evolved, it doesn't mean that we didn't come from Adam and Eve fully formed but then the religious mind is sometimes a wonder to behold.
The argument is that as science closes the gaps on what was once put down as the work of God, this actively points toward the existence of a God as people are still having religious and supernatural experiences which gives room for belief.
They go on to explain that as Science shows that if the physical laws and constants of the universe were even slightly different, life on Earth and existence itself would be impossible which strongly suggests that it was designed by God for our benefit.
Trying to explain that life only began once the conditions on Earth were right for it to thrive rather than the Earth's conditions being changed to fit life doesn't seem to compute with them and the gaps in our knowledge has been closed through science over the Centuries and will continue to do so.
There is a famous example of religious folk flipping things with the Gods Spectacles analogy where God, while designing humans, put our ears at the side of our head so we could wear spectacles rather than we wear spectacles because we handily have ears on the side of our head to hang them from.  
The classic example I always fall back on with Supernatural experiences is Angels, something which 30% of British people and 70% in the USA believe in and many have said to have seen.
Asked what they saw they will explain a human shaped being bathed in celestial light and always with wings rather than the HP Lovecraft horror as described in the Bible as wheels within wheels, the rims of which are covered in eyes and some having four faces so the Angel's they picture is the portrayal of them by Renaissance painters who gave them wings as a way to identify them from the regular people in the painting.
Religion is therefore a collective game of Chinese Whispers which each generation being told, and believing, what they are told by the generation before them without, it appears, stopping to think for themselves about it at all.

Stephen King The Soothsayer?

I do love a good Stephen King novel even if he does tend to bloat his books these days and you can read 30 pages which go nowhere and you think well i could have skipped that bit but back in 1982  he was in his pomp and he put out a novel set in a dystopian United States called The Running Man and based it in 2025.  
In 2025 the American nation's economy has tanked, Climate Change is running away and the country is run by power-crazed despots who pump out misinformation and propaganda and run a Game Show where contestants are on the run from a crew of assassins and if you survive you win a massive cash prize, get caught and your grisly death is live-streamed.
To be fair he isn't far wrong in the 2025 he envisioned.

Stay Out Of The Black And Into The White

You don't find many answer to the Climate Change Crisis in women's magazines but i came across an article in one of my Mum's old Good Housekeeping magazines about keeping cool in Summer.
The jist of it was if you want to stay cool in Summer, the colours to wear where White, Red or Orange which will reflect the heat away from you and keep you cool while avoiding Indigo, Violet or Black which will absorbs the heat and make you only feel hotter.
If the white reflects heat why are we not painting all roofs of our buildings white to reflect the sunlight and reduce  the need for air conditioning?
Research indicates that making surfaces more light-reflecting can have a significant impact on lowering extreme temperatures, very important as our Summers are only going to get warmer and why stop at roofs, our roads are all black and there are 262,300 miles of them in the UK trapping heat.   
Anyone who lives in a  City will know how hot it gets there, 'Walkin' on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head' as the Lovin' Spoonful elegantly put it or as much as 3°C warmer as the MET Office less lyrically say if you prefer.
'The creation of lighter land surfaces could help to lower extreme temperatures in much of Europe says the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and New York introduced rules on white roofs into its building codes as long ago as 2012 and cities such as Melbourne, Australia are encouraging owners whiten roofs to cool individual buildings for the benefit of their occupants.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado looked at what might happen if every roof in large cities around the world were painted white, and found that it would decrease the maximum daytime temperatures by an average 0.6°C.
It may not be enough to ward off climate change, that genie is out the bottle and battering us already but it could buy us some times to come up with a solution to our own stupidity so why are we not clambering up onto roofs and sloshing about the white emulsion?
A look at the weather tomorrow reminds me I live in the UK, where it is cold for 6 months of the year and rather than air conditioning we have heating blazing so having a roof which will make it cooler isn't a very bright idea.
Ok, fair enough considering I am sat here in a cardigan over my thick pyjamas so maybe just you places with warm climates do it and let those of uas in cold and windy, rain-swept islands off the coast of Europe keep our black roofs.
Doesn't mean we can make our tarmac roads white though, surely someone can come up with a way to make tarmac white instead of black.

AI Learning From Music Lyrics

 

A group of 1,000 music artists are protesting the use of their song lyrics to train Artificial Intelligence but looking around at some song lyrics, it wouldn't help us much anyway.

Pink Floyd singing 'We Don't Need No Education' in their song ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ shows that in using a double negative they badly do need education, and it probably wouldn't be wise to go orienteering with The Who as who knows what sort of crazy compass they were using when they came up with the lyric 'The north side of my town faced east and the east was facing south' in their song 'Substitute'.

The song 'Catch a Falling Star' tells you to not only catch it but to then put it in your pocket although the next line should warn you that as it has just reached a heat of 3000 Fahrenheit falling through the atmosphere, it will probably burn straight through your leg if you did.

Such disregard for all thing astronomical is also present in 'Save the Best for Last' where Vanessa Williams tells us 'Sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon' which it doesn't and Christopher Cross in Arthur’s Theme tells us what to do 'When you get caught between the moon and New York City'. He suggest fall in love but as the moon is about 240,000 miles away which would put you 120,000 miles out in space if you are caught between New York and the Moon, i would suggest screaming while you fall to your death as more appropriate.

Lions are nocturnal and sleep during the day so 'The lion sleeps tonight' is misleading, as is Abba's 'Waterloo' because Napoleon didn't surrender at Waterloo, he was captured by the British weeks later trying to sneak off to North America so you shouldn't trust Swedish singers with British and French history so rest assured Music Artists, most of you will be passed over.

Agent Trump...You Did Well Comrade

Nobody cares more about people than Donald Trump. During the pandemic, when asked if  he was worried about Covid spreading at his indoor rallies, he replied: 'I’m on a stage and it’s very far away' so nobody...nobody..cares about people more than him so when the beleagured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at the White House, US President Donald Trump treated him like he would a Moscow hotel mattress.
You do have to have some sympathy with the American President, one one side of the equation you have a tyrant who invaded a neighbouring country and on the other the victim of said invasion and you can only side with one, and him and the ding-a-ling who is the Vice President went with backing the Tyrant and bullying the poor sap who has seen 20% of his country stolen and has seen over 70,000 dead citizens.
It was a surprise after calling him a dictator and saying that he started the war a week ago to see Zelenskyy at the White House at all but as soon as he ignored the instructions to fawn over Trump and just sign over the Mineral rights of his nation to him, Holy roller JD Vance took the opportunity to spring the ambush and drop his rosary beads in mock shock when Zelenskyy answered his question about Diplomacy with a question of his own about what sort of Diplomacy and launched into the Ukrainian for being ungrateful and not saying Thank you to America enough.
Trump, then joined in and together they berated the Ukrainian for not wanting to sign a peace deal and hating Putin while not listening to the explanation that last time Ukraine signed a peace deal with Putin he broke it 25 times but by then Trump was off on one about playing cards while in Red Square, if you listened carefully, you could hear the sound of deranged laughter coming from the Kremlin.  
Zelenskyy then left the White House without signing any deal to surrender his nations minerals to America and went directly on pro-Trump Fox News for an interview before flying to Britain with the endorsements of almost every other leader ringing in his ears.   
Meanwhile, a certain chum of Little Donny in the Kremlin must have been very pleased with how it all went, smiling and saying: Agent Trump, you did good (and the Pee tape remains in the safe...for now).