Celebrating What Exactly?

The UK Supreme Court have reached a judgement on what makes  a woman a woman and clarified that the definition of a persons sex was purely biological in character but should it really take the highest Court in the land to tell us what nature already decides?  
It was strange to see celebrations on the judgement and some people calling it a victory for truth and feminism when it is obviously a conflation of a persons sex and their gender.
The definition of a woman is ultimately a biological one and comes down to Chromosomes, XX you are female, XY and you are a male and it really shouldn't be this difficult with politicians tying themselves up in knots about wombs and ovaries and genitalia.
While you can never change your sex as that is biologically cast while in the womb and you are destined to forever have the pair of Chromosomes you were dealt, you can change your gender but that is a whole other discussion and this does nothing to quell that as we will still have the problems such as pronouns,  toilets or changing rooms but ultimately it is down to the person involved to identify with whatever gender they feel more comfortable with as the ruling from the World Health Organisation defines.
Last year the NHS announced that they will be using the medical definition of a persons sex and will be working towards same sex hospital wards based on the patients biological sex so as the Courts decision was based on biology, feels a case of we knew that already so I am a bit confused over what people were actually celebrating.

Special Guest Blogger: Michelangelo

I was famous in my day for perfecting the human form, such as creating the masterpiece David out of a giant chunk of marble and the not-so-little painting called The Last Judgment, and one you might have seen where God’s outstretched finger is reaching for Adam's.
As a bambino, my father owned a marble quarry so I was always around stone but my father wanted me to work as a medic or Government official but i wanted to do something creative so I talked him into sending me to Florence to be with people like Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio on an apprenticeship.
I was thirteen then which is kinda late for an apprentice but not to blow my own trumpet, but i was absolutely brilliant from the start and as I was able to draw anatomical parts to perfection, I was quickly outperforming other famous painters of Florence and I was in demand from the Churches who needed the best artists as decorators although i did think of myself as more of a sculptor.
When Leonardo left Florence I was the rising star, the bees knees, the dogs bollocks and various other good parts of animals so when he returned to see me with many commissions he got a bit uppity and we even had a few words when we ran into each other on a bridge and Leonardo mocked me for my gruff manners and unrefined ways and I replied he should run away as he has a history of that as he never finished what he started.
I did have a bit of a reputation of being hot headed and hard to work with, i took on no pupils or collaborators and when i created The Pietà i wrote 'MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI FLORENTINE, MADE THIS' on Mary’s sash because I overheard someone say the work is done by Cristoforo Solari so that night I take a chisel and leave my mark.
David is probably the world’s most famous sculpture but all anyone asks me about is his winky being a bit on the small side. If you were naked and about to fight a giant called Goliath wouldn't the stress of that make you shrink up a bit?
After finishing David, I took on some huge projects but as it was only me I never got around to finishing most of them as many patrons become broke, or died, during the projects and when Pope Julius II asked me to carve 40 statues for his tomb I tried to open a new quarry at Pietrasanta but he then changed it to a bronze statue of him then he forget about that and said do something special at the Sistine Chapel so i spent four years on my back painting the ceiling an cleaning paint out of my beard.
I did do a lot of male nudes and wrote poems professing my desire for other men, heck, i even used male models to sculpt my female figures so make of that what you will but i never married and after leaving Florence I spent my remaining years in Rome, where i worked primarily as an architect and created the Capitoline Square and dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, though neither was finished at the time of my death which was very Leonardo of me.

Space Ass-tronauts

When I saw the picture of Katy Perry holding up the daisy in the Blue Origin penis shaped space ship I thought that picture is going to be iconic and it was a great picture but once they were back on Earth 11 minutes later it all went very wrong.
One said that she didn't really have words for the experience but when she did find some they were: 'I looked out the window and we got to see the moon'.
Other insights came from Perry, who served up the 'feminine divine' and being 'super-connected to love' and 'Making space for future woman' and 'Space is going to finally be glam' but the absolute butt clenching moment was when she said 'We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.'
Another one, i'm not sure which because by now I was chewing my cushion,  said that she wanted to test out her hair to make sure that it was OK so she skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure it would be good.
And they were not finished yet because there was SO much more of it. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule' and  'I think it’s so important for people to see us like that'.
The real scientist/astronaut's must have been mortified and felt so diminished by this but great picture though.

MASA...Making American's Stay Away

After a British woman was held at Immigration for 10 days, the British Government has updated guidance for travelling to the United States but it seems that we are all one step ahead of the Government because travel from the UK to the US has dropped by almost 15% from this time last year according to official figures from the US National Travel and Tourism Office who are concerned, saying it could have a chilling effect on Tourism.
Travel from Canada to the US has dropped by 36% and trips from the US to Europe have also, down almost 13% compared with the same period last year but that is being put down to the World becoming hostile to American tourists in the age of Trump.
Some say because Trump has trashed his own economy and tried to do the same to the rest of the World, American tourists are worried about how they will be received, the  website Business Insider interviewed Americans about their experiences abroad and they do say that since January, they have been treated in a less friendly way and not just in Europe but Canada, Asia and Australia.
I can offer some advice though for Americans coming to Europe and this come's from American's who are here already, tell people you are Canadian.
To our European ears Canadian and American accents are the same so say: 'American? Nah, Canadian Eh Buddy so can you point me to the nearest Timmies? 'and you can avoid any of those difficult questions about politics and mad guns laws.
You may want to leave the red MAGA cap at home also and you may want to avoid Denmark and Greenland altogether, you really don't want to be going to them places.

I Predict The Minority Report

The Minority Report is a novel by Philip K. Dick where three mutants are plugged into a machine and foresee all crime before it occurs so police can arrest suspects before they can commit any actual crimes.
The UK Government obviously thought that sounded like a good idea because apparently they are creating a 'murder prediction tool' to identify people most likely to become killers or commit serious violent offences.
The scheme being implemented by the Ministry of Justice comes with the catchy name of 'Sharing data to improve risk assessment' and the existence of the project was discovered by Freedom of Information requests from Statewatch who are a pressure group whose mission is to ensure democracy, civil liberties, personal and political rights, free movement, freedom of information, equality and diversity.
The government says the project is at this stage for research only and will: 'Provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis' but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions.
The project, commissioned by Rishi Sunak, uses data from the Prison Service, Probation Service and data from Greater Manchester police and collects information on types of criminal convictions, the persons age and health markers such as mental health as well as names, gender and ethnicity.
That the Police will depend upon a Computer regarding a person based on events that have not yet happened is worrisome but then so is the current way of finding criminals which in the current institutionally racist force is simply are they not white? Then GUILTY!!!

Mentally Unstable Rourke Out

 
It wont come as a surprise that Mickey Rourke has been booted out of Big Brother, the man was an eviction wait to happen after his homophobic rant against JoJo Siwa, insulted Patsy Palmer's cooking in front of her, weight shaming Donna Preston and now acting in an unacceptable and threatening behaviour towards Chris Hughes.
During a Pirate task Hughes looked at him and Rourke walked over him, stood directly in front of him telling him not to eyeball him and calling him a C***.
From the off, the way he was leering at presenter AJ Adudu as she announced him to the crowd on opening night , it was obvious he wasn't fully in control of his mental faculties and how he made it through the ITV Psychological evaluation to ensure he was psychologically able to enter the house only they will know but it quickly became evident that he wasn't.
There are now calls for Tory MP Michael Fabricant to be bought back to replace Rourke which makes it hard to believe that in a popularity contest, the Tory MP is the one people like more?
Special mention must go to Chris Hughes for sticking up for JoJo against Rourke's homophobic bigotry because it takes a lot for someone tell another, older and more famous man that he’s out of line.
I am sure that ITV will say all the right things but tonight's episode will be a viewing bonanza for them, despite how uncomfortable it is to see someone with obvious mental problems be evicted from the house.

Shame On You If You Still Support Israel

Since the atrocity by Hamas against Israeli civilains in October 2023, I’ve been writing about Gaza and have been writing about one atrocity after another as Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves and kids are being killed in their beds.
I don’t know what is really left to say at this point after 18 months of endless carnage but it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war or as Israeli call it, 'self-defence'.
What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, genocide as a litany of experts have stated yet still nobody seems determined to end it.
Palestinians aren’t just being murdered by US-supplied bombs but since Israel cut off the meager amounts of supplies of aid they allowed in as well as cutting off water and electricity, this is now an attempt to starve the Palestinians until they 'voluntarily' agree to leave en masse to somewhere else and leave Palestine free for the Donald Trump visions of building hotels and casinos alongside Israeli settlements on the site of the mass murder.
Overnight the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City was hit by multiple missiles and Israel trotted out the same nonsense about Hamas using it as a Command and Control Centre as a justification although they never provide any evidence and the doctors and medics state it wasn't but as the only hospital that was still functioning in Gaza City, the war on Palestinians Healthcare has taken an even darker turn.
The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, was among those who condemned the strike, calling Israeli attacks on medical facilities 'deplorable' and comes hot on the heels of the massacre of fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Despite the initial strong denials, that only came to light and exposed the Israeli outright lies as it was filmed by a Red Crescent paramedic in the last minutes of his life and then the mass grave of the medics who were shot at close range and buried along with their vehicles to try and hide their war crimes.  
Since October 2023, the death toll of health workers in the Gaza Strip has reached the grim number of 1,060 and health facilities have been targeted and destroyed, and a report from Healthcare Workers Watch identified 384 cases of unlawful detention of Health workers.
In the opinion of the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, 'This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.'
After 18 months you probably already know where you stand on all this but if you are happy to stay silent, simply look away or actively back the murder, starvation and genocide of your fellow humans, if you still support Israel while knowing all of the above out of some bizarre religious reasons or ignorance then shame on you.  

Dire Science

 
The film Jurrasic Park did open a debate about whether we should bring extinct animals back to life and my take on it was the hell would we?  They went with Tyrannosaurus Rex's and Velociraptor's in the film with the results being as expected if you mix some of the most lethal killing machines ever to roam the Earth with soft, squidgy humans but luckily science isn't that stupid. Isn't it?
What they have done is take the DNA from the Dire Wolf's tooth that has been extinct for 10,000 years and combined it with grey wolf cells, edited the genes to make the animals larger and more muscular, inserted the resulting cells into domestic dog egg cells and implanted those into another dog’s womb. And lo, three Dire Wolf pups were born.
The Pups, when fully grown will weigh 68kg or 150lb and measure 6ft although they may struggle to find any Woolly Mammoths to snack on today which was one of the main food sources for their ancestors.
The company behind it, Why, Colossal Biosciences Inc, are calling it the World’s first 'de-extinction' but why they went with a more muscular killing machine that can down an elephant for dinner and not a Dodo or one of those smaller and more gentle meat eating ones is my first question.  
Some geneticists are claiming that these pups can’t be true dire wolves because they aren’t being raised in a dire wolf pack, and thus can’t fully learn true dire wolf behaviour which surprisingly wouldn't be that comforting if one was chasing after you.
What use a 6ft Wolf would be is another question as you couldn't keep it as a pet and we all know that if they were released into the wild some moronic hunter with small penis syndrome would want to shoot at it so can't really see the point apart from scientists showing off that they can do this if they wanted to.

Sweet Dreams Are (Not) Made Of This

Some people try to achieve immortality by doing brilliant things but i decided to achieve it by staying alive as long as possible and it seem,s like I am on the right track because I have suffered some insomnia most of my adult life.
Researchers at the University College London and University of Warwick have been studying mortality rates and cross referencing them with sleeping habits and found that that sleeping eight hours or more doubles the mortality risk from all causes.
The scientists concluded that sleeping for 10 hours or more per night leads to a 30% higher risk of dying compared to getting just seven hours. They also found that the participants were 56% and 49% more likely to die from a stroke and cardiovascular disease.
Their definition of  oversleeping is sleeping more than nine hours in a day with prolonged oversleeping increasing inflammation and hinders the immune system so how much sleep do they think we actually need?
The daily recommended amount of sleep that people should get depends on your age so children and teens need to sleep longer because sleep is when brain development and growth occur but for adults between 18 and 60 years old seven hours is the recommended amount and above 60 you should get eight hours.
Before I could woohoo and start planning my 100th Birthday Party, it does go on to say that less than 7 hours of sleep for an adult increase the likelihood of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even cancers of the breast, colon, ovaries and prostate as well as affect the ability to function while performing daily tasks like driving.
There is something surreal about the time spent awake when everything around you is sleeping but i generally use the time to catch up on work, read, write blog posts or just sit and watch the sun rise especially in Summer when the Sun comes up at around  4.30am  and i know it's just me and a handful of other people watching it before driving to work and leaving a trail of accidents on the road behind me obviously.

Penguins Celebrating

In his boneheaded attempt to make Americans Poor Again, Donald Trump went around slapping tariffs down until a grown up pointed out that it was a stupid idea and the markets crashed so he backed down and pretended that was his plan all along.
Obviously wasn't and there is a reason Donald Trump said he liked the uneducated but the Penguins of the Heard Island and McDonald Islands have a theory why he backed down and are claiming victory.
Last week when he had the brain fart that Americans would really like to pay more for almost everything, the Tangerine Tinged Tyrant imposed 10% tariffs on
an Australian territory with no human inhabitants, just Penguins and Seals.
The Seals kept a dignified silence but the Penguins didn't hold back and told Trump to keep his flippers off their things and organised a protest, even setting up a website @PenguinsAgainstTrump with the byline 'We love fish and hate fascists'.
The penguins become unlikely social media stars and since Trump went from saying that he definitely wouldn’t pause his tariff plans to then go and pause them a few days later,  the penguins have prevailed and have been celebrating winning the Trade War against the honey faced lunatic.
In a hastily arranged press conference, the top Penguin put down his fish to say: 'Did he really think he can take on penguins in a tariff war and win? He thought that he’s no match for Russia or China, so he’s picked on an islands of Penguins as he thought he could beat us but we beat him when he realised that we export the Ice that he has in his Diet Coke'.
Congratulations to the Penguins, we are proud of you.