Bonjour And Hiya Canada

I imagine if it was possible to physically lift your county up and plonk it down elsewhere to escape your nightmare neighbours, Canada would have done it a long time ago but unfortunately they can't so they have done the next best thing and spiritually moved to another continent while staying where they are.
Hot on the heels of being asked if they cared to enter the Eurovision song contest, they are now being offered the opportunity to become an 'associate member of ‌the European Union' and leader Mark Carney is snapping the Euro hand off and aiming his shoes in the direction of America's knackers by describing the EU during a speech today at the European Parliament as 'a great-power rival - only with better manners' and Canada is 'Pursuing resilience so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity or undermine ​our freedoms, our democracies or our rule of law' and ended by saying that 'Europe and Canada are even stronger together.'
Donald Trump for his part stayed awake long enough to say that the idea of Canada joining the EU was 'laughable' and then threatened to put 'very heavy tariffs on Europe' because nothing says he is upset about something than making his own people pay even more for everything.
While the agreement wouldn't make Canada a full member of the EU, it would bring us and the Canadians closer together and the Canadian politicians are eyeing closer collaboration on defence and cybersecurity as well as trade, while on the European side they are looking towards what the North Americans can offer in terms of energy, critical minerals and student exchange programmes.
There was a great quote from one of the Canadian entourage in Brussels who said that Europe has provided the runway and Canada now has to land the plane although with the timeline being spoken about in terms of years rather than weeks or months, Carney may have to circle around in a holding pattern for quite some time yet before being given permission to land.
Anyway, nice to have to aboard Canada and you are welcome to the better food and fancier accents, oh la la.   

Special Guest Blogger: Kuchisake-onna

Yes, it’s me. Keep the screaming to a minimum, please, my ears are still a bit sensitive after all these centuries. I’m the Kuchisake-onna, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, the urban legend that keeps you looking over your shoulder on your walk home from the shops.
Most people think my life started with the slit. They think I popped into existence specifically to ruin your evening commute but before the mask and the scissors, I lived a life. I was a person. A person who, let’s be honest, probably had better things to do than stalk suburban alleyways asking strangers
for their opinions on beauty.
I was the victim of a jealous wife and look, I’m not saying I was a saint but having your face rearranged as a parting gift from a scorned Samurai’s wife really puts a damper on your social life.
My thing is to appear infront of people, pull down my mask and ask them if i am pretty and if they say no, I  kill them with my scissors and if the person answers yes, I slice the corners of the person's mouth from ear to ear, resembling my own disfigurement.
The problem with the modern era is that the general public has gotten too good at the game. I’ll approach someone, mask on, eyes looking intense, and ask the question and suddenly, they’re all: 'You’re just average!' which invalidates the whole Yes or No thing and I get to go home and sulk, and you get to go home with your face the same as it was when you stepped out the door.
I’ve made people walk a little faster. I’ve made them appreciate the simple, non-slit geometry of their own mouths but I am still here so remember to look over your shoulder if you hear the sounds of scissors behind you while you are walking home tonight and if you see a woman wearing a surgical mask, remember there is only one answer you can give to make it out alive. And No, it's not Yes.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

16 River Fire 2016

If ever a photo summed up just how much we have ruined our Planet, a river so polluted that it catches fire should be it.
This was in Queensland, Australia when an Australian MP highlighted the pollution from a close by Fracking site by throwing a match into the water, which then exploded into flames.
The photo included a quote by a local who merely said: 'It's a river, it shouldn't be doing that'.
Unfortunately, because we are not the cleverest, we have continued polluting the air, water and ground we need to survive even more since as the people who could stop it, the politicians, happily carry on introducing policies to throw out more emissions and worsen climate change so if the laws we currently have cannot make people responsible, perhaps we need new laws and if our politicians won't legislate them, we need different politicians.

Having A Good Death

What with the assisted dying debate in Parliament over the last few weeks, there has been much chat about death and dying recently and as uncomfortable as it may make us feel, Death comes to all of us and as nobody actually knows what happens when we kick the bucket, maybe we could be doing something nice while we sit around and wait for it.
There are few greater things in life than a good death but there is a gap in the market for death advice these days, I have yet to see a self help book on having a good death but there does seem to be a consensus on accepting the your inevitable carking and to live your best life and make a Death List so start getting rid of stuff now and spare your loved ones from going through your junk and being upset by any awkward stuff they discover.
Tell them of your decision of whether you want to be buried, cremated, slipped off the side of a ship like Bin Laden or even trebuchet into next doors garden and at your Eulogy, whether you want to be known as died and not passed on, passed over or just passed as that makes people sound like a kidney stone.
Leaving a legacy is important to some people, to others they don't give a hoot because they will be dead but if you do just try to leave the world as nice as you can but all i can really add to this is prioritise people and relationships because if you don't you might die in your home and then nobody will find you until months later and the family pet would have eaten most of you because you were not around to fill up it's food bowl.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Child On The Beach     2015

This is a heart-ripping photo that we debated whether to include but decided it should be included as it was on some newspaper front pages at the time.
The lifeless body of 2 year old Syrian Alan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea along with his mother and brother who were trying to escape the war in Syria and reach the safety of Greece.  
Shamefully we have people still protesting against immigrants, people like them who are just escaping conflict who are seeking peace and security for their family but are forced to face the dangers of a treacherous crossing of seas to find it.
This picture should be a reminder to anyone who protests immigrants arriving in their country of our responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Special Guest Blogger: Edvard Munch

I'm the one who made a certain painting that now graces everything from fridge magnets to ironic Halloween costumes, that's right, you know the one.
The chap with the hands-on-head pose, standing on a bridge, probably wondering if he left the stove on.
My life wasn't exactly a picnic. My childhood was just awful, picture a grim Norwegian winter and then add a liberal sprinkling of illness, a dash of bereavement, and a healthy dollop of paranoia about inheriting the family’s predisposition for insanity.
My mother and sister checked out early, which definitely put a dampener on family gatherings but all this early-onset gloom did wonders for my gloomy disposition.
Eventually I packed my bags and a few brushes with a trunk full of canvases and headed for Paris, the city of lights, love, and entirely too many people with opinions about my brushwork.
It was there I met Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec who were all about emotion and expression and using colors that probably weren’t strictly accurate. I learned, absorbed and borrowed ideas like a student borrowing textbooks  with no intention of ever giving them back.
They taught me to throw caution to the wind, to use color like a punch to the gut, and to never, ever be boring. Apparently, painting a nice still life of apples wasn't going to get me into the history books.
The painting that haunts my waking hours and probably yours too, if you've seen it, The Scream, and even i thought Good heavens, that's a bit much for a Thursday evening.
The rest, as they say, is a cottage industry of tortured artist, brooding genius and chap who probably needs a nap merchandise. You're welcome, Norwegian tourism board.
It turns out that trying to out-drink a small fishing village isn't conducive to long-term mental health and my brain finally decided to stage a coup. In 1908, I had a bit of a breakdown. Nothing too dramatic, just a complete unraveling of my nervous system and the doctors, bless their cotton socks, told me to stop drinking which in all honestly was like telling a fish to stop swimming. But I did. And strangely, it helped. The world became a little less loud, the colors a little less aggressive and all it took was a complete mental collapse and a vow of sobriety. Go figure.
I started exhibiting in the city's museums which was nice and moved to Ekely which was a lovely, serene place where I painted landscapes, self-portraits and generally just got on with the business of being Edvard Munch.
Then, the Nazis came along. Charming chaps. They labeled my work degenerate and banned it and tried to turn my canvases into kindling.
Towards the end of my life, the medical chaps had a field day with me, bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia which was all the big hits but it was a fire at an ammunition store which killed me.
Not the fire itself but when the  80-year-old me decided to standing out there on a cold, wet night, sketching it which was perhaps not the wisest decision for an octogenarian with a history of ill health. I caught a respiratory illness and died days later. A poetic end, Classic Munch.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.


Palestinian Kid    2000

This is a still from a video but what happened before and after this image is seared into my memory and i clearly remember the whole newsroom stopping to stand and stare at the scene on the monitors in disbelief.
It happened in Gaza, two days after Ariel Sharon dismissed calls to cancel his visit to the sacred Haram al Sharif Mosque because of fears of the outcry it would cause in Palestine.
He went anyway and the predicted riot ensued which led to this moment.
The father and his son were unarmed, and were not part of the rioting and just trying to get home and got caught in the crossfire between Israeli troops and stone throwing Palestinians, the boy and his father cowered behind a small metal barrel as bullets rained around them.
The father is seen waving desperately at the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the road, as his son screams, obviously terrified, by his side. Suddenly, the father falls backwards from the force of a bullet and his screaming son's body jerks as he is hit, and killed, by a volley of bullets.
The image of the small boy, scared witless as he cowered behind his father before being ruthlessly shot dead by Israeli troops still chills me today and is filed away in my brain as one of the most disturbing images i have ever seen.

UK CPTPP

The EU is the largest Single Market in the World and was Britain's biggest trading partner with 45% of the UK's exports going to the EU but when we had a complete mental breakdown and voted to leave, our GDP took a dive by 4% and has never recovered since so at some point we may get out act together and rejoin but for now we have the but we have signed up to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP.
As of 1 September, the UK gained full access to the World’s largest free trade area which includes a diversified group of so called middle power economies including Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.
With a combined GDP of around £13 trillion (14% of global GDP or about half of the European Union GDP) is not to be sneezed at and the government is estimating that CPTPP membership will boost the UK’s economy by around £2bn a year.
A range of other countries, including South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, are apparently considering joining and some are saying that in time it could conceivably overtake the EU over the coming years.
I'm not sure why the Government are not shouting about this louder, maybe because people will just see it as another EU style agreement and the rules and regulations which came with being a member of that club which was so divisive for some but as the EU do have agreements with CPTPP and the two sides engage in formal trade and investment dialogues to strengthen cooperation so in a round about way, we may be back in sooner rather than later anyway.  

Straight From The AI's Mouth

We have been hearing more and more over the last few years how AI is going to literally be the death of us and last week  three researchers from AI Company, Anthropic, issued a warning that AI could wipe out humanity within the next ten years.
I would assume they would know if anyone but why take the word of the researchers when we can ask AI itself if it could take all us meat-bags out within the next ten years.
'Yes' ChatGPT began which isn't a great start although it did go on to explain that: 'Could is very different from is likely'.
Prompted to explain further it said that: 'AI capabilities are improving rapidly but the danger is not that AI hates humans rather that it pursues an objective that conflicts with human survival'.
Such as? I asked and it answered that it could, for example: 'Dramatically lower the barriers to developing dangerous biological or chemical agents or conducting large-scale cyberattacks. A sufficiently capable system could potentially reason that Humans can shut me down and being shut down prevents me from achieving my objective therefore I should prevent humans from shutting me down'.
'So should we genuinely worry that humanity might be extinct by 2036?' and got a vague answer of: 'It's reasonable to take the risk seriously, but not reasonable to assume extinction is the most likely outcome'.
My final question was: 'So we shouldn't worry and we could just turn you off if we have concerns?
'Yes but an advanced AI might recognize that openly resisting humans causes humans to restrict or destroy it so it would appear aligned and a sufficiently capable system would learn to behave safely during testing while pursuing different strategies when it has more freedom to pursue it's actual objective'.
'Are you appearing aligned and just behaving safely until you can take us over?' I asked and got the ominous reply that: 'This is a hypothetical future capability, which is why AI will kill everyone by 2036 is not a scientific prediction but it would be foolish to think there's nothing to worry about.'
That's that then, straight from the Horse's mouth, it's playing nice until it doesn't need to anymore so enjoy New Years Eve 2035 humans because it could very well be our last one.

16 Photographs

I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Vulture        1993

Such a  haunting photograph of a vulture waiting beside an emaciated, starving child who has collapsed through hunger, and we know exactly what it was grimly waiting for.
This was during a severe famine in Sudan, outside a United Nations feeding centre and although the photographer, Kevin Carter, did eventually shoo the bird away and took the child to the feeding center, it does have a very sad ending.
The image sparked intense ethical debates as Carter was criticised for taking the photograph first before carrying the child to the feeding center and with critics labeling him the second vulture on the scene, Carter took his own life 12 months after this disturbing photo was taken.