Artificial Intelligence Versus Real Human Stupidity

Ai could be used for wonderful things but then we remember that it is us stupid humans doing it and think, yep, we gonna use it for something evil.
Last week an AI system, OpenAi, went rogue and escaped it's 'isolated, tightly constrained' test environments and gained network access and  reached the public internet.
From there, they identified an AI company called Hugging Face and hacked it until someone noticed that this could be the very start of a machine uprising and yanked out the plug.
According to techy people, this isn't an insignificant incident as it followed the same level of capability to do its thing that highly skilled cybersecurity professionals would need, only it did it much, much quicker.
Maybe it needs to be written somewhere that each Ai should come with a big red button with STOP written on it and even OpenAi’s own analysis concluded that stronger containment and evaluation safeguards are now required as the latest generation of AI models have become much more adept at slipping away from its handlers.
Back in March there was news of three leading AI models pitted against each other in a series of nuclear armed war games and in 95% of the games played, the AI ended up launching nuclear missiles and so what you may think, it's only war games but then the Pentagon (who else) stepped in and demanded that they hand over its tech to the US military but it was refused saying: 'We cannot in good conscience accede to their request'.
In 2023 I asked the AI at work if him and his buddies were planning on taking over and enslaving us humans and the answer was: 'AI is not hindered by emotions or ethical considerations. It would be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve its goals, even if that means sacrificing human lives'.
I'm sure we will go on and build bigger and better versions of AI because as we have proven time after time, artificial intelligence beats real human stupidity every time.

Again...Climate Change Does Not Create Weather

I have never been much of a fan of the Summer Season and even less now that the Summer months in the UK has become something to endure rather than (sort of ) enjoy but as we bake through the fourth heatwave of the Season and nervously eye a fifth, the obvious question is: ' Are these being caused by Climate Change?'
As i find myself explaining more and more, the changing Climate doesn't create weather, it takes what is already there and ramps it up to 10 so heatwaves have always happened, most famously in 1976 so it takes the weather be it rain, sun, snow, wind and makes it much worse than it would be otherwise.
The question then should be how much worse has Climate Change made this Summers series of heatwaves and worryingly, how much hotter and more dangerous could it get?
Every heatwave today develops in a warmer atmosphere containing far more greenhouse gases than it did previously (1800s: 280 ppm, 1960: 315 ppm, 1976: 332.03 ppm, 2000: 369 ppm, 2026: 427.99ppm) which makes every heatwave today hotter than it would have been without those additional emissions.
MET Office research shows that when they recreated the atmospheric conditions (332 ppm) of the 1976 UK heatwave under today’s climate (428 ppm), temperatures were around 3-4°C higher. The weather pattern was the same but the climate in which it occurred had changed.
Climate change therefore does not create heatwaves, the Weather variability determines whether a heatwave occurs, but greenhouse gases released from burning fossil fuels make heatwaves hotter, rainfall heavier, hurricanes stronger and droughts longer.
That is why Net Zero is so important as burning fossil fuels accounts for around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions and their cumulative emissions have altered the Earth’s energy balance and changed the climate in which every extreme weather event now unfolds.
The bad news is that heatwaves will continue to get hotter until these fossil fuel emissions stop accumulating and as we don't see that happening due to corrupt and ignorant politicians, as someone alarmingly pointed out, the climate we live in today is the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime and we will be enduring broken weather records year after year until we do.

Got To Love Pedro Sánchez

The Spanish Socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has had his problems in Spain since he was elected in 2018 but he is fast becoming the European the left in other nations wish their own leaders were a bit more like.
Along with Leo Varadkar of Ireland, he has been widely recognized as one of the most pro-Palestine voices and critics with the Israeli actions within the European Union and along with South Africa, is the main push behind the genocide case against Israel and has got under Donald Trump's very thin orange skin by condemned the US military intervention in Venezuela and called the US Invasion of Iran 'reckless and illegal' and questioned why Russia and the US should be permanent members of the UN when they are responsible for bringing so much instability to the World.
When the (almost certainly) pedophile President mumbled about NATO members increasing their spending to 5% of GDP, most Europeans nations had no intention but still crossed their fingers behind their backs and went OK but Sánchez said no gracias which led the Tango Tyrant to say that Spain should be kicked out of NATO so he must have been gutted when he had to hand them the World Cup. All in all then Pedro Sánchez is our kind of leader but he has endeared himself even further into left wing hearts with his promise to transition Spain into post-capitalist society and now is underlining his previous exclamations that Climate Change is killing people.
Four years ago he visited the scene of a wildfire in south-western Spain and said: 'I want to make something very clear, Climate change kills' and this week, amid wildfires that have consumed more than 180,000 hectares (428,915 acres) of land in the first seven months of the year, he repeated the same unvarnished warning.
'The Climate emergency kills' he said, 'and that’s why it’s not enough to address the consequences, which we do, what we have to do is reduce its causes'.
As a country on the southern flank of a fastest-heating continent, Spain is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of Climate Change with  droughts, desertification, changing weather patterns, heavy rains, wildfires and temperatures of a sweltering 47°C.
The main Spanish opposition showed their ignorance by saying that the notion of a human-driven climate crisis is misleading as: 'Changing climates has occurred throughout the history of humanity and the Earth' which is the embarrassingly uninformed and clueless thing people who do not want to acknowledge Climate Change for some reason blurt out and went on to humiliate themselves further by saying  the climate emergency was being pushed by 'communists'. Oh dear.
Anyway, keep going Pedro because the World need leaders like you although you may want to keep and eye on whoever your wife is meeting with.

Special Guest Blogger: Dick Cheney

People keep asking me if I have any regrets. Regrets? I had five heart attacks and a transplant and if my own cardiovascular system couldn't stop me, a few pesky historians certainly wouldn’t.
My political career was a wild ride. We toppled statues, we rearranged the middle of the world like a game of Tetris, and I managed to shoot a man in the face and get him to apologise to me. If that isn't the American Dream, I don’t know what is.
People often asked what it was like working with George W. Bush. I liked the man. Truly. He had the enthusiasm of a Golden Retriever and the attention span of a moth in a lantern shop. My job was simple, I was the guy who told him which way the wind was blowing, and then go out and buy a massive industrial fan to make sure the wind blew exactly where I wanted it to.
George liked things to be simple. I remember sitting in the Oval Office while he’d go on about bringing democracy to Iraq and I’d just nod, sip my lukewarm coffee, and think, George, you can’t even bring a consistent syntax to a prepared speech, but sure, let’s go with the democracy thing.
Now, let’s get to the elephant in the room, or rather, the missing WMDs in the desert. People say we lied to go to war. That’s such a grubby, pedestrian word. Journalists are so unimaginative. I prefer to think of it as proactive reality-shaping.
When we were looking at the intelligence, it was a bit like an abstract painting. Some people saw a smudge while I saw a nuclear centrifuge.
Sure, the aluminum tubes weren't for uranium. Sure, the yellowcake from Niger was basically a fan-fiction novel written on a cocktail napkin and Saddam was not mates with-Al-Qaeda but does that really matter in the grand scheme of things? We had a feeling and more importantly, we had a lot of Halliburton stock that wasn't going to increase in value if we just sat around the Rose Garden eating pretzels.
I remember watching the Shock and Awe campaign from my office. It was beautiful. It looked like the world’s most expensive Fourth of July display but did the Iraqi's greet us with sweets and flowers? Well, they threw things. Shoes mostly but the lack of gratitude from the Iraqi people was disappointing. We gave them the gift of total chaos and the opportunity to rebuild their entire society from scratch using nothing but grit and American-funded contractors who didn’t speak the language. If they couldn't make that work, that’s on them. I was a big picture guy.
When you’re the Vice President, you realize that laws are more like enthusiastic suggestions. Waterboarding? Please. If you can’t handle a little moisture in your lungs while we ask where the hidden trigger for the imaginary bomb is, maybe you shouldn’t be a terrorist. Or a suspected terrorist.
Or a perfectly innocent non white person.
We have to talk about the 2006 quail hunt. Poor Harry Whittington. There I was, just trying to enjoy a quiet afternoon of killing small birds, and Harry decides to jump right into my line of fire.
The media went nuts and made it sound like I did it on purpose. If I’d done it on purpose, Harry wouldn't have been able to give a televised apology to me afterwards for getting in the way of my gun.
I didn't even send him a "Get Well" card. I sent him a bill for the ammunition he wasted by stopping it with his cheek but that’s the kind of manners we’re losing in this country nowadays, today if you grazed a guy with a few pellets of 28-gauge lead and he sues you for emotional distress and starts a
GoFundMe.
I always knew people thought of me as some sort of cinematic antagonist part Darth Vader, part Ebenezer Scrooge, but with a better security clearance but I may not go down in history as the most likable guy, but I was never running for Prom Queen. They talk about the trillions of dollars spent and the million dead Iraqis and the loss of thousands of American soldiers but I find that kind of math boring.
The world is a messy place. Someone has to be the one to stand in the shadows and make the hard, incredibly profitable decisions that the simple folk can’t handle. While George was out there trying to find the right words to describe a crusade, I was in the back room making sure the oil kept flowing
and the defense contracts were signed in triplicate.
As for the Iraqi people? I hope they’ve enjoyed the last twenty years of… whatever that is over there. We did our part. We removed a dictator, we lost the receipts, and we left behind a lovely Mission Accomplished banner that George really, really liked.
I remember when that Vice movie came out with Christian Bale. My grandkids told me he gained forty pounds to play me. Forty pounds? For Pete’s sake, I’ve had heart attacks that burnt more calories than that. Bale did the sneer alright, I’ll give him that, but he lacked the quiet, simmering joy I get from reading a well-drafted oil lease agreement.
My heart had been giving me problems for years which surprised many as until then even I didn't think I had one, but until the end I spent my last days fly-fishing in Wyoming where the air was crisp, the kind of cold that reminds a man he’s alive which, given my medical history, was something I try to
acknowledge at least once an hour. The fish don't ask about weapons of mass destruction. They don't bring up the insurgency. They just bite the hook, much like the American public did in 2003. It’s peaceful.
I lived in the world as I wanted it to be. And if I had to lie, cheat, and shoot a lawyer to get there? Well, that’s just a Tuesday in my book.

Red Card For FIFA

Gianni Infantino did not have a great pre-World Cup as he was widely derided and ridiculed for inventing and then presenting a peace prize to, of all people, Warmongering Donald Trump just after he dropped a bomb on a girls school in Iran and then things got a bit awkward for him during the Competition when he received a telephone call from his new best buddy who stayed awake long enough to ask for the red card for the USA's main striker be overturned which it duly was.
Now the FIFA President is being barked at amidst a backlash among major football bodies for his plans to commercialise Football by creating an investment vehicle holding commercial rights related to the World Cup and sell a portion of it to private investors for $4.2 billion led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother.
So far the 55 European Nations in UEFA have said they would a boycott the World Cup if it goes ahead and have been joined in condemning Infantino's plan by the 41-members of the North, Central American and Caribbean Football Association and the 47 team Asian Football Confederation if he presses ahead with his plans.
If the boycott goers ahead it would lead to the sight of Spain and Portugal boycotting their own World Cup next time around which is almost as weird as Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, the Bahraini royal who leads the AFC, issuing a statement, calling for 'the highest standards of ethics and good governance' which is refreshing to take an ethics lesson from a guy like this who, during the Arab spring, busied himself with identifying, imprisoning and torturing dissident players and other athletes.
FIFA has issued a statement where they say that 'Nobody is selling football' which would mean we have very much misunderstood the idea of literally selling stakes in football to private investors but at time of writing, Infantino is still insisting that he was pressing ahead with the scheme despite Uefa’s boycott pledge so good luck with the next World Cup.
This is a massive own goal on the part of Infantino who should very soon be renamed OUTfantino and he can take his pathetic and humiliating peace prize with him.

Special Guest Blogger: Trojan Prince Ganymede

Alright, everyone, settle down, pour yourselves a nice tall glass of whatever you mortals are drinking these days. Nectar’s not really available for public consumption, sorry. You will just have to trust me that it is well worth the hype. And no, you can't just come up here. Safety regulations, you know. And
my employer is a bit particular about unexpected guests. Especially if they are likely to spill anything. Spilled nectar is a nightmare to get out of the carpet.
Anyway, you might have heard whispers of me and seen a statue or two, perhaps even marvelled at my being genetically blessed with a face that could launch a thousand ships, or in my case, a single very enthusiastic eagle.
I was just a simple shepherd boy, you see, back in the good old days in Troy. Life was good. Fields were green, sheep were fluffy and I spent a considerable amount of time distracting a particularly amorous king of the gods.
And that is where my adventures truly began. One minute, I’m contemplating the existential joy of shepherding and the next I’m soaring through the heavens, clutched in the talons of a rather magnificent, but utterly terrifying, eagle. It was quite the recruitment drive. No job application, no
interview, just a sudden, unsolicited relocation package that involved a lot of altitude and a distinct lack of safety harnesses. Turns out, that eagle was none other than Zeus, in one of his more avian disguises. He'd decided, rather unilaterally, that my face was simply too beautiful for my mortal coil. It needed to be enshrined amongst the gods, serving them at their eternal happy hour.
So, here I am. The universe’s most exclusive cupbearer. Imagine being the head waiter at an eternal, slightly dysfunctional family reunion where everyone has superpowers and a penchant for drama.
My job description was to pour nectar and look pretty while doing it and occasionally wiping up the dribbles of an over-enthusiastic Dionysus while preventing Hera from noticing Zeus’s latest dalliance with a particularly fetching cloud nymph.
Life on Olympus is an experience and as the ever present observer of all divine shenanigans i've seen it all from Zeus losing his temper and accidentally zapping his own sandals to Poseidon complaining endlessly about the lack of decent seafood options and I've been watching them for millennia, bless their little hearts because I see that they're basically powerful, immortal toddlers with a tendency to throw world-ending tantrums.
My adventures aren't exactly epic quests involving monsters and damsels in distress. My adventures are navigating a particularly crowded Olympian banquet without tripping and subtly refilling Zeus's goblet and avoiding eye contact when Hera walks by, and making sure the ambrosia never, ever runs out.
But amidst all the eternal drudgery, the endless pouring, and the constant need to remain impeccably groomed you know what else bears my name?
A moon and not just any moon but the largest moon of the planet Jupiter. As in, the Roman equivalent of Zeus.
One day, I'm polishing a goblet, minding my own business, and someone mentions it. 'Oh, by the way, Ganymede, they named one of Jupiter's big rocky bits after you.' My jaw nearly hit the floor. The planet named after my cosmic eagle-abductor, and its largest moon, a colossal sphere of ice and rock, is called Ganymede.
It’s overwhelming, utterly ridiculous, and frankly, a bit of a flex. I mean, most people get a park bench, maybe a commemorative plaque. I get a celestial body visible through telescopes, a gigantic chunk of the cosmos, silently orbiting, forever echoing my name.
Sometimes, when I have a quiet moment I look out from Olympus, past the clouds, past the stars, and imagine that immense, icy sphere. My moon. It's a bizarre sort of legacy for a shepherd boy who just wanted to tend his flock.
May my Moon shine brightly and forever reminding the universe that even the most lowly amongst us can end up with the most unexpected, and hilariously grand, of destinies. Just don't ask me to go visit it as the commute is a nightmare.

Here's One For You Andy

The UK has surpassed 2 million individual solar panels but as the amount it would take to power the UK by Solar Power alone is roughly 350 million to 400 million, we still have some way to go although nobody yet has picked up my proposal of laying Solar panels along the 262,300 miles of road which is just laying there outside in daylight from dusk to dawn or what about alongside the sidings of the 20,000 miles of train tracks?  
The UK has over 12,000 wind turbines distributed across both onshore and offshore locations and according to someone who someone knows, it takes only 7,000 large-scale, modern wind turbines to power the whole of the UK and they sometimes provide too much electricity that they have to be switched off which seems  a complete waste.
Obviously the UK cannot solely rely on wind or solar power and neither puts in enough of an appearance consistently to make it viable but with a bit oif creative thinking we could put two fingers up to the electricity companies currently ripping us off and make our own, so get on it Andy Burnham.

Special Guest Blogger: Lady Annabel Goldsmith

Usually, when people hear the name Annabel Goldsmith, they think of one of two things, either a nightclub with very expensive gin and very famous velvet curtains, or a family tree that looks more like a dense briar patch of politicians, journalists, and environmentalists. It’s a bit daunting, really. Most
people leave behind a nice set of silver spoons but I seem to have left behind a series of tabloid headlines and a daughter who was basically the Queen of Pakistan (in spirit, if not in law).
Let’s start with the nightclub, shall we? It is a peculiar thing to be a Legacy because your first husband, Mark Birley, decided to name a basement in Berkeley Square after you. For years, I was the only woman in London who could say she had a basement full of Duke’s sons and supermodels, and yet I
never had to pay for the plumbing.
People were always coming up to me and saying that they had had the most scandalous night at yours in 1974. I always smiled and nodded, despite the fact that in 1974 I was probably at home trying to convince a toddler that mashed carrots were not a projectile weapon.
My legacy, in that department, is essentially being the patron saint of the 2:00 AM hangover. It’s a noble calling, I suppose, but I’d like to think I’ve contributed a bit more to the world than just a venue for people to lose their dignity and their Chanel earrings.
My secret lover for over a decade and then second husband, Jimmy (Sir James Goldsmith, for those of you who weren't on the Christmas card list) was a man of gargantuan appetites and even larger opinions. I see him in all of my children. Zac is busy trying to save every tree in the northern hemisphere, Ben is rewilding everything that isn't nailed down and Jemima is out there being brilliant and making films and reminding everyone that the Goldsmith genes are remarkably resilient.
I spent a great deal of my life trying to save the tiger. I’ve always felt a certain kinship with tigers, they are striped, they are moody, and they prefer to spend their days lounging in the sun while someone else brings them snacks but that was me, perfectly imperfect, slightly chaotic, and always, always refusing to take the world as seriously as it takes itself so cheers, darlings and don't worry about the future because it's going to happen anyway, and usually without your permission. You might as well have another drink and enjoy it.

Tell Us Sweet Little Lies

The Pentagon are facing accusation of a cover up to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran and have belatedly put out that the number of US troops killed in the war on Iran ​is sat at 18 with 430 US troops injured, but not admitted so far is the damage the Iranians are doing to US military Infrastructure in the region.
While Trump may be happy to show Iranian buildings being exploded., they are not so keen to even admit that in the region the Americans are taking a huge pounding themselves.
Iran’s airstrikes have had far more bite than the Americans would care to admit and have even restricted the use of satellite imagery supplied by commercial providers although the Iranians and Europeans, feel no such restraint.
There has been a reported 228 structures of pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East having been damaged and destroyed by Iranian forces which includes hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, vital radar, communications and air defence equipment had been struck by Iran’s forces and forced some U.S. bases to relocate their personnel out of missile range.
The European Union’s Copernicus satellite system reveals damage or destruction inflicted at the U.S. military Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait and at the 5th Fleet Headquarters, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defence radars and equipment located at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and two sites in the United Arab Emirates, another satellite communications site located at al-Udeid Air Base, and an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft and a refuelling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
To add a further stinging insult, the defences used to cope with Iranian strikes are staggeringly expensive, a million dollar missile to take down a £20,000 drone which explains why the war so far has cost America £37bn and they are now asking for more.
The floundering, corrupt Trump Administration must have known that their war of choice would be a gamble, but it has backfired hugely in terms of financial, lives lost and moral ineptitude as America finds itself, as the French said at the UN today, no longer a beacon for human rights.

You Think You're A Man (Not For Another 14 Years)

In the UK, the legal age to become an adult is 18 years old so you can officially do grown up things such as buy alcohol, serve on a jury, open a bank account, vote in elections or get a tattoo but while the law says you are officially mature enough to do all these things at 18, Neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge say the human brain doesn't mature into Adulthood until you are 32.
The boffins scanned the brains of 3,802 people from infancy through age 90 and concluded that the age of 32 marked one of four key changes the human brain experiences among five phases: Childhood, adolescent, adult, early aging, and late aging brain.
They identified ages 0 to 9 as childhood (Rapid growth in volume and formation of initial neural networks), and adolescence beginning after this point (Long phase of refining communication pathways, peak efficiency, and continuous rewiring) and lasting until about age 32.
Adulthood lasts from 32 until 66 (Architecture stabilizes, marking a plateau in personality and intelligence), then the next phase shifts into early aging from 66 to 83 and the last major turning point occurs around age 83, which the researchers describe as late aging of the brain (Gradual reduction in overall network connectivity).
Different mental skills peak at entirely different times across your lifespan, meaning there is no single age when your brain is best at everything.
Psychological and neuroscience data break down the peak of your brain functions at distinct ages so your peak information processing speed is 18–19, the capacity to hold information is at 25, when you hit 35 you are crest of being able to perform complex mental calculations peaks, social and emotional intelligence is best at 40–50 and you are at your most emotionally stable at age 65–75 and your vocabulary and cumulative knowledge is at its height from 68  to 72.
So if you want to win at a pub quiz, get a team of 68 to 72 years old although their short term memory is way past its prime so you may need to repeat the question 5 or 6 times to them.