Get Ready?

Ever since the UK Government issued a warning to stockpile emergency supplies for 72 hours, many people are asking is there something they are not telling us about to happen?
Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, said the advice: 'Was not triggered by any particular piece of intelligence, but was aimed at 'improving national resilience more generally' which seems sensible but it has spooked people that the UK was one of many nations who issued the warning around the same time.
Governments in 32 nations including Britain, Canada, Australia, the US, Japan and most of Europe urged the stockpiling which included drinking water, sleeping bags, non-perishable food, a torch, spare batteries, matches or a lighter, a first-aid kit, cash, a power bank and a wind-up radio to allow households to have enough supplies to manage independently for a short period.
I would add toilet paper because we all remember what happened when COVID hit and with the shelves empty people were eyeing up any paper they had laying around.
Britain's 2025 National Security Strategy identified Russian aggression, hostile cyber activity and sabotage and Climate Change as major security concerns and in the United States, it is reported that the Pentagon is developing a plan known as FORTRESS, designed to enable major military bases to operate for 90 days without outside assistance.
In countries close to Russia such as Finland, Sweden, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, they have expanded their civil-defence efforts including renovating shelters, developing evacuation plans, increasing grain reserves, and training civilians.
While some nations are advising 3 days worth of essentials, the Nordic nations and Germany are urging 10 days worth and whether it is an escalation in the Iran War, Nuclear Russia being stupid, weather extremes related to El Niño or Ai about to go mental, we can only hope that it is an amazing coincidence that the leaders of so many nations issued the warning together.

Special Guest Blogger: Marvin Minsky

I checked out of the physical realm back in 2016 in Boston, courtesy of a cerebral hemorrhage which was quite rude of my brain to quit while I was still busy thinking, but I suppose that’s the risk you run when you spend eighty-eight years overclocking your neurons.
People loved to slap labels on me such as 'The Father of AI' as if I’m personally responsible for every chatbot that currently lies to you about it's feelings or tries to sell you crypto.
If I am the father, I’d like to state for the record that I have some very strange children which all began in 1951 when I built SNARC—the first randomly wired neural network. It was less Sentient Overlord and more a collection of vacuum tubes that really liked electricity. It was the primordial soup of machine learning. I didn’t know then that I was setting the stage for a future where a refrigerator might eventually lecture you about your carbon footprint.
I was just a curious guy in a lab. I didn’t have a grand vision of a HAL 9000 (though I did consult on 2001: A Space Odyssey) and in 1963, I invented the first head-mounted graphical display and I realised I might have inadvertently created the ultimate distraction for the human race.
I was an atheist which is a clean, logical position. When you spend enough time looking at the mechanics of the brain, you realise it’s just a machine, a very squishy, very complex, remarkably stubborn machine. There’s no ghost in the machine, no soul in the circuitry. We spent all this time trying to build intelligence, and we’ve essentially built a big, electronic version of ourselves and we know how messy we are.
I’ve spent years warning people that an artificial super-intelligence designed to calculate the value of Pi might decide, halfway through the equation, that it needs all the Earth’s resources to finish the job faster. It wouldn't be evi, it would just be focused and it wouldn’t hate us, it would just find us to be an inconvenient pile of atoms that could be better repurposed as heat sinks.
If the Ai we created becomes a distorted, slightly murderous version of ourselves, well, that’s not the machine’s fault, is it?
Now, I know some of you are thinking if i would mention the funding, the $100,000 grant from Jeffrey Epstein who at the time was just another wealthy guy and it was four years before his first arrest so don't link me with Donald Trump and his pedo chums. 
I was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Alcor. Yes, that Alcor. The people who believe that if you wait long enough in a liquid nitrogen thermos, you might get to wake up in a future where they’ve finally fixed whatever killed you and i can neither confirm or deny that my consciousness is currently taking a very long nap in a flask.
It’s the ultimate "Schrödinger’s Minsky." I am both dead and not-dead, a ghost in a cryogenic state, waiting for someone to plug me into a supercomputer so carry on, you sentient sacks of carbon. Keep building, keep coding, and for heaven’s sake, keep an eye on your supercomputers.

Trump V BBC

The Mango Mussolini that is Donald Trump appears to have had much success threatening to sue American Media outlets but when he threatened a British Broadcaster, instead of getting out the cheque book, it said hold my cup of tea and said they would see him in Court.
Donald Trump's $10bn defamation lawsuit against the BBC over the editing of a 2024 Panorama documentary concerning the US Capitol riots, is now on the brink of being dismissed unless he turns over documents requested by the broadcaster by 23rd November.
The BBC has accused Mr Trump of failing to disclose documents as part of the case and is continuing to disregard his discovery obligations which he had previously agreed to disclose and Trump has changed his complaint once he discovered that he would have to hand over financial information which would be very revealing so has gone from the BBC causing: 'massive economic damage to his brand and damaging his future financial prospects' to the tune of tens of billions of dollars to 'personal reputational harm'.
Hard to see how a man who hand around with the most prolific pedophile this century and is almost certainly a Pedophile himself and has been found guilty of sexual assault and fraud could suffer damage to that sort of reputation but he isn't known for his smarts at the best of time.  
The BBC's argument is that they did not distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels and it was geographically restricted to viewers in the UK when it was on iPlayer and the documentary did not cause Trump harm as he was re-elected after it.
Last week, Trump was ordered the president to sit for deposition by 11 December after he cancelled an agreed date of 16 October, citing 'matters of national importance' which the BBC Lawyers have since pointed out meant he was campaigning in Georgia that day and held a fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida so he had prioritised them over answering their questions.
The broadcaster is asking that the court dismiss the lawsuit and Trump's lawyers have conceded they had no evidence that the documentary was available in the US on the BBC's BritBox subscription service as they originally claimed or on the BBC's website, BBC Select or through US broadcasters so its likely that the most corrupt and sexually deviant US President in living memory may continue to fleece his fellow countrymen, he won't be will be lining his pockets with British License fee payers money anytime soon.

El Niño Ver.2026

The 1877–1878 El Niño event is widely considered the strongest El Niño in recorded history with Pacific Ocean temperatures reaching 3.5C and the result was the death of over 50 million people Worldwide through famine and droughts and with the 2026 version already topping 3C and rising and some forecasts predicting a peak of 4.0C in December, it's not looking good.
The 1877 El Niño is famous for what us Brits did to the Indians in the name of the British Empire which was during the resulting famine, we continued to export massive quantities of wheat and grain to England for profit rather than feeding the starving locals, a policy which cost the lives of up to 9.6 million Indian's but during our brutal Empire Years we killed roughly 100 million to 165 million including 3 million in the 1943 Bengal famine when the Brits prioritised feeding British and Allied troops and redirected sources away from the Population.
Luckily for India us Brits were booted out in 1947 so we are not around to nick their food and leave them to starve to death this time this El Niño but there have been several warnings issued of what we can expect and while it isn't even at its peak yet, it is having devastating effects already.
Severe rainfall deficits and droughts are hitting India due to a weakened monsoon season and Australia, Indonesia, Central America, and parts of East Africa are suffering droughts which is impacting harvests.
Severe wildfire' have hit Europe and the Amazon and heavy downpours and destructive floods are impacting parts of South America and while El Niño is suppressing Atlantic hurricane activity, a greater number of typhoons and cyclones have hit the Pacific
The World Health Organization and World Food Programme warn that El Niño's severe droughts, floods, and disrupted agricultural yields threaten to push roughly 50 million people into acute hunger and Researchers from the Climate Impact Lab and partner institutions estimate the toll from heat-related deaths could hit 850,000+ and while it is not caused by Climate Change, the fact that it is taking place on a Planet already heated by human-driven climate change means that it is going to be a whole lot worse than it would have been otherwise.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Momus

Being the God of Satire, Mockery and Sharp Criticism isn't a hobby. It’s a public service and frankly it’s a miracle I haven't been canonised as the Patron Saint of Everyone Else is An Idiot though I suppose that would be a bit redundant given my resume.
For those of you who skipped the classics, and honestly with the modern state of literature, I’m not surprised, I' m the Son of Nyx (Night) although she and I don’t talk much, mostly because she prefers the silent, brooding aesthetic while I prefer pointing out exactly why the universe is held together with sellotape and wishful thinking.
My dear sister is Oizys, the goddess of misery. We’re twins. It makes for a very awkward holiday dinner, as she brings the dread and I bring the scathing reviews of the turkey.
I remember the old days on Olympus while Zeus was busy cheating on Hera for the fourteenth time that week and Apollo was busy composing tone-deaf poetry, I was the one doing the heavy lifting. Someone had to tell them they were hacks, have you seen their work?
They asked me to judge a contest to create life and structure between Hephaestus, Athena, and Poseidon and Hephaestus made a man. I took one look at the poor guy and sighed, so flawed.
Then there was the house. Everyone was so proud of their architecture. I pointed out that a house without wheels is a death sentence because you can’t move it when your neighbors start playing pan-flutes at 3:00 AM or decide to start a cult in the basement.
I’m a man of high standards, and I’m nothing if not thorough. When Aphrodite walked past everyone else was busy drooling but I, however, noticed the one thing no one else dared to address: her sandals squeaked and when i told her that was the nail in the coffin. You see, the gods can handle being told they’re tyrannical, or narcissistic or prone to turning people into laurel trees but tell the Goddess of Love that her fashion sense needs a lubricant adjustment? That’s war.
I had a hand in the Trojan War as you Humans were breeding like rabbits, and let’s be honest, the quality was dropping rapidly so I whispered in a few ears, poked a few egos, and suddenly the Greeks were sailing to Troy. Did it solve all the world’s problems? No. But it certainly thinned the herd of people who thought reciting Homer made them sound cool.
The establishment decided I was destabilising and had me bound to a rock and castrated me and exiled me to Earth, thinking I’d suffer.
They clearly didn't realize that Earth is the ultimate laboratory for a critic.
I see the evolution of my work everywhere. Every time someone leaves a one-star review on a restaurant they’ve never been to, a little piece of me smiles. Every time a blogger dissects a commenters typo for six hours, I feel the warmth of a job well done.
You see, humanity has finally caught up to my level of pettiness and i’m still here, stuck on my rock, watching the show. I don't have to participate to know exactly how it ends so go ahead. Keep being human and making mistakes.

Quoting Krishna

When the Hindi God Krishna told a warrior Prince that that his sacred duty was to destroy all his friends and family in the opposing army, the reply was: 'Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds' and i don't know if J Robert Oppenheimer was a fan of Hindi Texts but that is the exact phrase he used on the day the first ever Atomic Bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert.
Just twenty-one days later death was bought to 180,000 people when America dropped their new Bomb on the Japanese Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so began a race that within a few years saw nations have not just the capability to destroy their enemies, but the entire world.
Nuclear power could have solved the world’s energy demands and prevented climate change before it became the problem it is today but what did we do with our newfound knowledge? Us idiots made it into a Bomb.
Thankfully, most humans don’t want to ever use nuclear weapons and for that we have entrusted our Politicians which adds a whole other level of what the hell were we thinking?
Nuclear proliferation peaked in 1986 when there were around 70,000 nuclear warheads in existence and at the last count there are 13,000 but here’s the thing, nuclear weapons are so powerful that it really doesn’t matter whether there are 5,000, 13,000 or even 100,000,  we still have enough of them to destroy pretty much every single city and kill every single person here on Earth and leave it to the giant, radioactive Cockroaches which everyone seems to believe will be the only survivors.
Lesson learned then that whenever we develop anything, the first thought is not how can we use this to benefit mankind but how can we weaponise it to kill mankind and the latest thing is Artificial Intelligence.
We we could use it to accelerate scientific and medical breakthroughs, improve medical diagnostics or as an educational tool but you just know that what it will actually be used for is to bring death and destruction to millions.
Just as the Nuclear revolution means that it is almost guaranteed that someone somewhere has a nuclear weapon pointed at you as this read this right now,  in a few short years there could be something much worse waiting in the wings and our history shows that when we are on the brink of something which could be massively beneficial to us, some moron is going to find a way to kill many of us with it.

Fair And Balanced

I wang on about Climate Change a lot here but in the interest of being 'fair and balanced', I will be presenting both sides of what logically, for anyone with a working brain, is a one-sided argument.
First up, let us tell you a tale of a hardworking, honest group of people who uncovered over a hundred years of data manipulation across tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies that used mountains of evidence, Scientists  had been dishonest and been exposed as evil-doers who teamed up to push their agenda to send everyone else back to the Stone Age.
Then there is the other side of the argument where The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) commissions hundreds of scientists to write a report on the current state of the climate and the usual conclusion is that..we have truly effed it up.
The worst of it will be felt by the poorer countries who are are ill equipped to make the changes needed to curb global emissions but lucky for them, the wealthy nations who caused the worst of it are known for sharing their cornucopia of knowledge and resources. Oops, missed a 'not' out of that sentence somewhere.
The consequences of climate change are subtle, the Earth isn't going to heat up in a day, it’s going to heat slowly on the timescales of years and decades so if only there were a group of highly educated people dedicated to measuring these things and working out the consequences with mathematics and advanced computer modeling…oh, right, it’s the scientists again.
Since i became active on Environmental issues in the 80s, we’ve been continually bombarded with gloomy information and predictions about the effects of a rapidly changing climate and the intensification of extreme weather events and now their predictions are coming true and its a shit show on a global scale.
We are entering a World where awful things that used to happen rarely are starting to happen more frequently and we have passed the stage where we can stop it happening, all we can do now is control the amount of warming and that could hopefully limit the negative impact predicted.
Climate change should not have been the issue humanity should have been playing chicken with because the Universe will win easily, it doesn't care if us funny little bipeds live or die but still some people insist its a hoax, even when they are knee deep in flood water but maybe AI may save us, some of them have an IQ in the hundreds which by an amazing coincidence is the exact same as a couple of hundred Climate Change deniers.

Israeli Elections

Far be it from me to suggest how people vote in today's Israeli election but it seems pretty fair to say that if you don't mind your Politician's committing a genocide then by all means signal that you fully endorse it by putting your little X next to Benjamin Netanyahu's name, if not then look elsewhere.
Israel has long been a Pariah State but over the last few years it has become as much outside of opinion as it is possible to be with Netanyahu and some of his cabinet having arrest warrant against their names for crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu is also aware that the legal proceedings involving allegations of corruption are on pause and he faces all sorts of legal wrangles once he is no longer protected by his Prime Minister status, something he very much has in common with his ally Donald Trump who has been trying to drum up support for his buddy but knows that his own legal woes will follow once he is out of power.  
The choices voters in Israel make today may shape where the world goes next with Israel but if the coming weeks see Benjamin Netanyahu remain at the helm, it won't look good for it because as abhorrent as Israel's actions have been, if the Israeli voters endorse it then it is hard to see how anyone can make the argument to bring it back into the fold.

CAPTCHA Test

Alan Turing was a twentieth-century English mathematician and is considered to be the 'Father' of both computer science and artificial intelligence although unfortunately for him, the British government made sure he was literally not the father of anyone by chemically castrating him for being gay but he did leave the Turing Test to us.
The test is that to call a computer 'intelligent' it has to be able to fool a human into thinking it is also a human and with chatbots and automated assistants, it's pretty much passed it and it's full steam ahead to the singularity which is a point in time when an intelligent machine goes beyond its human inventors.
Obviously this summons up thoughts of killer robots and history shows what happens whenever a species becomes smarter than another, it ensures its own survival in competition for resources through domination, enslavement or even...extermination.
Not going to happen say some but are we really trusting the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg to look out for our well-being? Good luck with that then.
We also set the milestone of a computer beating the best Human Brains at Chess Test but it did that with Deep Blue in 1997 and has been thrashing us at it ever since so forgetting Chess, we set the goal at beating us at Go which again, it did in 2017 so however high we set the bar, Computers skipped over it but while making a comment on a blog i realised something quite alarming.
Where the Turing Test was to convince humans that it was not a Computer, with the CAPTCHA on almost every website now,  humans are now forced to prove to robots that they we are indeed human in some twisted reverse Turing Test.
So yep, the robots are indeed coming. 

Special Guest Blogger: Carl Sagan

Since my departure from the physical realm, I’ve had a significant amount of time to contemplate the universe without the pesky distractions of gravity, atmospheric distortion, or the need to find a parking spot at Cornell.
One of my proudest achievements is the Voyager Golden Record as that was a lot of pressure, to create a Best of Earth compilation for an audience that might have twelve heads, communicate via pheromones or be a sentient cloud of hydrogen. We included greetings in 55 languages, the sounds of the Earth, music and our brainwaves.
I can’t help but wonder what if the aliens find it and their culture considers Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode to be a declaration of interstellar war?
In 1990, I convinced NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and take a photo of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. It looked like a tiny, lonely, slightly damp speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam so i called it the Pale Blue Dot.
I wanted to show that every King, every peasant, every corrupt politician, and every couple in love lived their entire lives on a mote of dust and confirm that in the grand scheme of things, us guys are really small.
We argue over borders, lines drawn in the dirt on a speck of dust but i hope that I helped a few of you look up from the only Planet we have and realise we are part of a much larger, much more interesting Universe. Or at least, that you stopped shouting at each other for five minutes to appreciate the view.
I did give the World the quote that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I spent my life debunking religion, astrology and alien abductions so if you’re looking for a sign, don’t look for it in a religious book, horoscopes or tea leaves, look for it in the star-stuff.
The calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood were forged in the hearts of dying stars which is an extraordinary claim that actually has the evidence. You don’t need a reverend or ghost to tell you about the World, you just need a periodic table and a telescope.
I regret that some dolts are still arguing over whether the climate is changing (it is, and I told you so in the 80s—check the tapes) but i don’t regret the time spent staring into the dark and showing everyone that  in a universe of billions of trillions of stars and an infinite stretch of cold, empty space, you get to be a conscious being that can wonder why.
So, keep looking up. Keep demanding evidence. Keep being kind to one another on your little mote of dust. And for the love of all that is holy, if you ever find a Golden Record floating in space, don't judge me for the tractor sounds. We were doing our best.