Kamala Outside America

Where before the American President Joe Biden stepped backward and Kamala Harris stepped forward, America seemed to be heading towards a disastrous second term for Donald Trump but things seemed to have turned around and  polls have the Democrats in the lead.
The White House staff must be sighing with relief because of the bill to reinforce the chairs for Trump's ample frame would have cost a fortune but  most Americans should be also because a man who was found guilty for Sexual Assault and is a convicted Fraudster while leading his campaign with how he would be dictator on Day 1 doesn't suggest he would be a good choice for leader.    
What the next President does in America is no concern of ours and as for Kamala, i neither know nor care much about her apart from she smiles and laughs a lot which isn't a bad trait to have but being American President does come with some responsibility outside of the countries borders so where does she stand on issues which would affect the rest of us?
As the second largest Global polluter and with Climate Change really starting to put the bite on the Planet, America releases 6bn tons of CO2 annually (China is top with 14bn tons) so it is great that Ms Harris has long advocated for tough laws to protect the environment and while a prosecutor in California, sued oil companies for environmental damage.
She also called fracking to be banned and to funnel funds towards renewable energy and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programs so we hopefully will get a Green President serious about mitigating the worst effects of Climate Change
She is a supporter of Nato and supporting Ukraine in it's war against Russia and appears to be a lot less on friendly terms with the Israeli genocide currently going on in Palestine, being an advocate for a two-state solution and calling for an end to the war in Gaza which she said was: 'a humanitarian catastrophe for Palestinians'.
While serving as vice-president, she has been more open to criticising Israel during the Israel-Gaza war than her boss and held what she called: 'frank and constructive talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu' when he visited Washington in July which is diplomatic parlance for telling him to stop being such a murderous dick.
As for the rest, as i said it doesn't concern us and she can do what she wants with their bat-shit crazy gun laws, immigration, tax rates and the such because i'm over 3,500 miles away so fill your boots there Kamala but in the things that does affect me, she seems ok so i know who i'm rooting for, and it isn't the obese orange faced sex offender.

Wasn't Me

I thought that the New Government would get around a year to blame any problems on the last Government and when the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, came out almost immediately and said that the economy she had inherited from the Conservatives was worse than she imagined and there was a £22bn shortfall it was expected.
That she then published the Official figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility to show that the UK bought in £327bn in taxes but spent £406bn to back up her 'It wasn't me, it was them' mantra then it  
drove home that we may well be facing a pretty grim budget on the horizon.
Having already made a manifesto pledge to not increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT then it is some of the other taxes we should be looking at for where the extra revenue will be coming from but
as it is either bring more in or pay less out, there are a few options.
The Conservatives went for the pay less out option and spent over a decade slashing and hacking at everything which worked as well as it sounded as almost every Government Department is now under-staffed and places like the NHS are seriously underfunded and waiting times are at the worst in NHS history.
Labour then seem to be looking at the bring more in option and Capital Gains tax seems to be the favourite as it was mentioned before the Election and the Conservatives tinkered with it to bring down the amount you can 'Gain' before paying tax but Labour are apparently looking at making the tax rate the same as the income tax rate.
Inheritance Tax and Pension Relief are also up for discussion which would effect 1.4% of the population in the case of the Inheritance Tax and anyone paying tax at a higher rate in the case of the Pension Relief which wouldn't necessarily scare to many people and would raise taxes but not for the vast majority.
I don't envy Rachel Reeves having to balance the books or how she will do it but it does seem quite prudent to front load the bad news when you can still blame the former Government when the memory of Liz Truss trashing the economy is fresh in the mind.   

UK and US No Longer The Good Guys

Within weeks of taking over as the new Government, the Labour Party  restored funding of UNRWA and dropping the previous governments’ plans to challenge the right of the International Criminal Court to seek an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over war crimes in a welcome move but they have yet to suspended arms sales to Israel.
Today, Foreign Office diplomat Mark Smith resigned in protest, warning that the country may be complicit in war crimes saying: 'There is no justification for the U.K.’s continued arms sales to Israel yet somehow it continues', and with 58% of the country  support ending arms sales to Israel and the British government receiving advice from its own lawyers that Israel was in breach of international humanitarian law in Gaza, the Government is on the wrong side of the argument.
The new Foreign Secretary will only commit to 'a comprehensive review to assess whether Israeli war crimes might have been committed in Gaza' but in a stark reminder of how long Israel have been pounding Palestine, the UK had suspended arms exports previously in 1982, 2009 and 2014 over concerns of war crimes although that the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza today where more than 40,000 people have been killed, dwarfs that of the circumstances that led to previous arms embargoes.
In the US at least a dozen officials have quit their posts in the last several months in protest of Washington’s policies on the war and  the Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has faced growing calls for the U.S. to impose an arms embargo on Israel which would have a greater effect as the U.S. provides considerably more arms to Israel than the U.K. with just last week the Americans agreeing to send $20 billion of arms to Israel.
Why Israel has such a hold over nations when the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court are talking of an Israeli Genocide in Palestine and after over 6 decades of military oppression and it's leaders  facing arrest for War Crimes but after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now backing a genocide, it will be quite some time before either country can have the nerve to say they are the good guys.

Ai Sex Bots

 

The growth of AI and robotics is not growing fast enough for some humans who welcome the advantages robots can bring to humans because they want to have sex with them.
Analysis of more than 200,000 chatbot conversations shows how the new tech is actually being used and a huge amount of AI chatbot use is sexual in nature, so much that programmers have created an AI companion app called Replika, which is fairly open-minded about responding to dirty talk.
There are currently companies selling adult, female sexbots, and they explain that they can help the type of people who's girlfriends usually come  with a footpump have safe sex and lessen exploitation and sex trafficking, decreasing instances of predatory behaviour and curb the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
If the rise of the robots isn't scary enough for you, the creepy men most likely to use them for sex are asking for robots who look, and act, even more human-like because the pasty face brigade, the lonely, the miserable and men who wear Hawaiian shirts have given up trying to woo the female population with their knowledge of calculus and being able to recite the script from Star Wars and are preparing for a ready-built girlfriend.
There are fears that an entire class of humans may emerge who will not know how to interact with the opposite gender and may never have sex with other humans so very much like today's computer programmers come to think of it but i do wonder if the sex-bots will be self cleaning but it is best not to dwell on that thought too long.

What's In A Name?

A translation firm is offering prospective parents the chance to check their preferred baby-names don’t mean anything embarrassing in other languages and will check the meaning across 100 languages.
When it comes to picking a name for your new baby, so many factors come into play as you try to choose something unique, a family name or one that can be easily twisted into another funny or embarrassing word by foreigners writing a mickey taking blog post such as:

Amber means bucket in Estonia.
Becky in the Philippines is a young, gay man.
Bill is the Dutch word for buttocks
Bobby is pig in Indonesian.
Cara Is Arabic for shit.
Chloë means bollocks in Morocco and toilet in Germany
Dom is Dutch for stupid.
Fanny in the UK is a woman’s genitals.
Freya means ugly in Portuguese.
Gary in Japan is diarrhea .
Gil means snot in Poland.
Kai means egg in Thai.
Kiki means vagina in the Phillipines .
Lisa is the Greek word for rabies.
Loki means asshole in German.
Lou means a toilet in the UK
Mark is Norwegian for worm.
Mona in Italy is a woman’s genitals and a female mokey in Spanish.
Peter means to fart in French and fellatio in Argentina
Pippa in Italian means masturbation, sex in Swedish and blow job in Greece.
Randy in the UK means horny
Siri is penis in Georgia and bum in Japan.
Tessa Danish word for urinate.
Tod/Todd is German for death.
Willy in the UK is penis.

What Is Project 25?

 
I keep hearing about how Donald Trump is poised to enact the Project 2025 manifesto should America be mentally impaired enough to vote him into Office again but i have never really been very sure what it is about and Donald Trump himself has seemingly tried to distance himself from it , saying  he disagrees with some of the things they’re saying , calling them absolutely ridiculous and abysmal and then confusingly that he didn’t know anything about it or want to.
Project 2025 is a right wing think tanks manifesto which makes 'recommendations for the next conservative president' and they note that 64% of their recommendations from Project 2016 were implemented by, guess who...Donald Trump.
But what exactly does the 900 page document actually recommend 'the next conservative president' does when in office?
Well it starts by raging against Marxism in American institutions and wants to deconstruct the Administrative State by abolishing the Department for Education and Department of Homeland Security as well as scrapping the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and close the US Secret Service’s field offices.
Next they say they would 'restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children' and they plan to do that by deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights from every piece of legislation that exists.
The basis of sex in education programs to be amended to define ‘sex’ as meaning 'only biological sex recognised at birth' as 'radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today' and public education employees and contractors can only using a name for a student and use the pronoun which is on their birth certificate.
It also calls for the next President to disregard same-sex couples and subsidizing single-motherhood and create policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families and all regulations that outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity (including transgender identity) and sex characteristics should be rescinded.
As for abortion, they want Planned Parenthood to receive no Medicaid funds and outlaw mailed abortion pills and reverse government approval of chemical abortion drugs.
They next want to end 'Climate fanaticism' and end the war on fossil fuels and subsidies on electric vehicles and scrap carbon capture programs as environmental extremism is 'anti-human' and the number of climate-related bodies to be downsized or 'eliminated'.
It then wants to hold China accountable and collect damages for trillion of dollars for the Covid-19 virus, which it says was a 'genetically engineered virus' and eliminate visas being issued to Chinese students to prevent espionage and ban Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat.
On the military, it wants to increase military budgets and form a 'Space Force Academy' and reverse policies which allow transgender people to serve in the military.
They suggest aggressively building Trump’s border wall, stop funding the Palestinian Authority, strengthening relations with Saudi Arabia, a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of America’s involvement in all international organisations such as the World Health Organistaion who 'support the oppression of basic human rights'.
So all in all, Project 2025 is pretty crackpot and they would need a proper moron to even consider their recommendations and even Donald Trump isn't that stupid. Is he?

Stoic Advice For Gen Z

If you are aged between 12 and 27 then you are officially the unhappiest of all the age groups according to scientists at the Dartmouth University who have studied data from 43 countries and concluded that Gen Z are the least happy.
The current thinking was that happiness is U shaped with people most happy in their younger and older years and dipping in Middle Age but  the new research has suggested that young adults today are at their lowest happiness almost at the start of their life and face an uphill battle to achieve greater happiness as they age.
Researchers have pinned the change to around 2014 to 2017 when record numbers of young people, particularly young women, began seeking help from mental health services and researchers are not sure what particularly happened around that time and why it affected young women especially.
I have had a look through the year 2014 on Wikipedia and i think there may be a clue on February 28th when the number of people in the U.S. using mobile devices to access the internet overtook those using desktop computers and was followed globally two years later in 2016.
Whereas you actually had to have access to a computer previously and they were generally at school or in the living room of your family home, social media became easily accessible through something which was always to hand and could be accessed anywhere.
If we had social media on tap back when i was a teenager then one look at my Facebook page back then would have seen me shunned by polite society but luckily it wasn't and any teenage indiscretions are lost in the mists of time along with my bare-faced lying so we never had the pressures teenagers have today with their mood swings, obsessive crushes and social anxiety played out in front of the whole World on social media.
A staggering 49.5% of today's youngsters meet the diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders with 31.9% of them experiencing anxiety disorders and 22% exhibiting severe impairment or distress and at such a tender age you are not equipped to handle the vitriol and maliciousness which often comes over social media.
I say to the Gen Z-er's, as bad as things seem now, they will get better or at the very least you will be better equipped to handle them and follow the sage advice of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius who said: 'If you are distressed by anything, the pain is not due to the thing itself but your reaction to it and it is you who determine your reaction'. 

Ch-Ch-Changes

Human life has changed so much in modern times. If someone could parachute in from an earlier century it would be a whole new world and even more to the first Homo Sapiens from 315,000 years ago but outwardly, we don't seem to have evolved much from the hairless primates that were our forefathers.
You could be excused for thinking that humans have therefore stopped evolving but the outward appearance may not have changed much but inside their have been many changes with resistance to diseases and the Darwin 'survival of the fittest' and adapting to the environment.
Genetic studies suggest that humans are still evolving and we may not have grown fins or wings like some species, but over time evolution has blessed us with a better sense of smell, bigger brains and
a keener immune system which isn't as cool as wings i agree, but are still very useful things to have.
Another examples of recent human evolution are a recently acquired Lactose tolerance and over 70% of European or European-descended adults can drink milk whereas before intolerance was the natural state of things which must have been awful, black tea and dry cornflakes!
As for what evolution has in store for our future generations, the scientists predict we will likely live longer and become taller, as well as lose muscle and bone density and our jaws and teeth will shrink
and our brains will continue to get smaller but looking at some people around, that evolutionary process started quite a while back.

I ❤️️ Pyongyang

We are off to Scandinavia for our Holidays this year but when we are planning next years trip, North Korea could be on the list because the country is set to open its borders to tourists later this year.
It has been noted that just as Britain is doing its damnedest to kick out foreigners, the most Totalitarian country on the Planet is welcoming them which doesn't show us in a good light when Kim Jong Un is more foreigner friendly than the morons who tried to burn down Asylum hostels and waved 'foreigners out' banners here a few weeks ago but it wouldn't be worth explaining it to them, far too many syllables in totalitarianism for them to understand but to be honest too many in moron also.
Calling itself a 'Socialist Utopia', Tripadvisor is the best place to got to find out what the Asian nation has to offer tourists and read reviews which are all written by genuine travelers. Honestly, they really were.  

1. Demilitarized Zone: review - The tour guide was absolutely lovable and the posters were very informative. The store nearby that sells hand painted propaganda posters.

2. Tower of the Juche Idea: review - The view was pretty spectacular. Its about the only thing you have to queue for in the DPRK but it’s definitely worth the wait. The staff were very sweet too.

3. Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum: review - Here you will learn how the evil USA started the Korean War and was totally defeated by the valiant Korean people.

4. Concrete Wall: review - The military personnel here will allow photos with them at the appropriate time; they will say when. Do what your guides say and all will be OK!!!

5. Kim Il-sung Square: review I’m very impressed about this square. Huge square for ceremony and national parade.

6. Geumsusan Memorial Palace: review - Monument to a nation's founders. Dignified and fascinating.

7. Triumphal Arch: review - No traffic around, easy to get up and down, excellent views, and the football stadium is right next door.

8. Tanjun Mausoleum: review - Dress well and do not bring any valuables or cameras into the Mausoleum as they are prohibited.

9. Kaeson Youth Park: review - The bst place to get close to the locals. Everybody's having fun and you get to laugh and scream with the Koreans.

10. Pyongyang Metro: review - Really pleasant and clean

Forget New York, Paris, Oslo and Vienna, its Pyongyang next year!!

Think It's Hot In Your City?

If you was asked where’s the world’s hottest city and you pointed vaguely to the Middle East you wouldn't be far wrong because five cities spread over four neighboring countries have passed that title between them over the past two decades.
The planet has been smashing global heat records of late and it is a fair guess that even though we are only in the eighth month of the year, the world’s hottest city in 2024  will be located inside a small square of the Planet because for the last 20 years that’s where the dubious winners have all come from.
Dammam in Saudi Arabia have won the title twice in 2007 and 2009, Al-Jahra in Kuwait was the hottest city in the world in 2016 and 2021 and another Kuwaiti City, Hawally, snatching the title in 2010, 2019 and 2020.
The Iraqi city of Basra was the world’s hottest city in 2004, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2022 and 2023 and Ahvaz in Iran was the world’s hottest city in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2018.
All five cities are within 270 miles from each other and a quick glance at today’s temperatures tells us it’s a dizzying 43°C in Dammam,  an horrendous 48°C Hawally, a baking 49°C in Basra and a parching 49°C in Ahvaz but today's winner is Al-Jahra where thermometers hit a searing 51°C.
Insanely hot but it put's our 28°C in the UK during the week where i whinged non stop about it being SO BLOODY HOT into perspective but i am happy not to live in a city where you can't run away from the heat because it is too damned hot to go outside.