Protest Israel, Not Jews

Awful knife attacks against two Jews yesterday in Golders Green and Keir Starmer turned up today to pass on his sympathy to the Jewish Community and was heckled and accused the government of failing to keep Jewish people safe.
He replied that the Government will strengthen the visible police presence in Jewish communities and  prevent hate preachers from entering our country and speed up sentencing on antisemitic attacks but i don't know what else the Government can do although one  
One Jewish community leader says the language used by the media to describe the Middle East conflict had put targets on the Jewish community's back and called for us to be careful with our words, especially using the word 'genocide' to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza conflict.
Unfortunately, what Israel is doing in Gaza IS a genocide so it has to be called what it is, anything else would be disingenuous so we can't just overlook that, have to call it what it is.  
According to the Home Office, Jewish people are six times more likely to be the victim of a religious hate crime compared to any other major religious group and most concerningly, religious hate crimes targeting Jewish individuals appear to be on the rise. Between 2021/22 and 2024/25, police forces across England and Wales recorded a 25% increase in these crimes.
One Jewish leader even went as far as blaming Keir Starmer for not joining in the Iran War with America and Israel which flies in the face of the majority of the British Public who back the decision not to get involved.
The problem is, in some minds, Israel and Jews are conflated to mean the same thing and it doesn't help when people like Netanyahu are quick to paint any attack on Israel as antisemitic which it isn't, the demonstrations and protests are against what Israel are doing in the Middle East, nothing to do with Judaism or as tjhe protests against the Iraq and Afghan Wars were not protesting against Christianity because America and Britain were conducting them.
It is somehow breaking the link in the sick minds of some people who are unable to see the difference between the two, that's what the UK Government can do, not ban marches against the Israeli Genocide, it will take some sort of education of the complete difference because until then, this will keep sadly happening.   

Iran War Silver Lining

If anything good is to come out of the Iranian conflict, is that it has focused minds that fossil fuels are not good although we may get to the result through economics rather than because we are destroying our planet.
The United Nations today said that the conflict in Iran has: supercharged the boom in renewable power' and with perfect timing the Automobile Association announced that electric vehicle numbers in Britain have hit a record high of two million amidst a worldwide buying spree and further news that Britons have installed new solar power at the highest monthly rate in 10 years. New electric vehicle sales in March were up 66% in Germany and 69% in France and by 72% in Italy as as the rising cost of petrol highlights the cheaper power available from a plug.
Oil and gas prices have soared as Trump and Netanyahu's disastrous conflict in Iran chokes off about a fifth of global oil  supplies and spreads misery.
'Those who've fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom' the man from the UN said and the energy secretary of the Philippines agreed, saying that the conflict had: 'Accelerated the development of renewable energy and storage is both a strategic necessity and a national imperative and France this week published a national plan to phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.
At the world's first-ever conference dedicated to ditching fossil fuels, held in Colombia this week and attended by 56 countries, it was announced that: 'The crisis has accelerated trends that were already underway' and that 'the universal theme is turning away from global energy markets and into regional ones where nations feel they can better guarantee their security' which obviously is a disaster for the Gulf States but then better for the rest of us, so that's fair.

Not An Ai Post

I was shocked to discover recently a blogger i regularly visit has been using AI to generate their posts and even worse, i didn't realise until they told me. I then found out that many more bloggers are using AI and had me wondering how could we tell?  
Long gone are the debates about whether AI can effectively mimic humans, it can and it is getting harder to prove if something was made by a human so how will we ever be sure we are reading something a real person wrote because i really don't want to be going to blogs or reading posts if they are not created by a human, what's the point in that?
Some type of new Turing test would ne nice to prove a machine did all the hard work of writing the post so how can we prove to others in the digital world that you are a human and the content you create is from my own brain and fingertips tapping on a keyboard?
One way is that the machines are almost perfect grammatically and never make mistakes so they won't misspell a word, make a typo or put a punctuation mark in the wrong place so maybe that is where the test is although if you proof-read your own work enough, you will iron out any grammatical errors anyway so it isn't fool-proof.
If a post is too perfect then we could use it as a test of human authenticity so maybe we should throw in a few errors or clunky, awkward sentences or use the wrong homophone but the downside to that is we dumb down to prove we are not a machine which can't be right because nobody should deliberately forget what we spent years in school learning so we must come up with another way, but i'd be buggered if i can think of one.  

Special Guest Blogger: Greek Nymph Callisto

I’m the original, mythological, slightly tragic, and, let’s be honest, profoundly unlucky Callisto. Former nymph, erstwhile companion of Artemis, and eventual celestial real estate (long story).
If Greek mythology were a dinner party I’d be the guest who showed up fashionably late, got accidentally turned into a bear, then flung into the sky by Zeus in a panic move. Literally and metaphorically over my head.
I was a nymph. Not a particularly famous one but a run of the mill woodland nymph just walking through forests looking ethereal, occasionally startling shepherds, and trying not to get turned into a tree.
I joined Artemis’s crew, goddess of the hunt, eternal virgin, and frankly her expectations were high. Total abstinence, zero tolerance for romance, and a strict no-boys-rules which would’ve been fine, if Zeus hadn’t had the self-control of an American at a free gun show.
Zeus  disguised himself as Artemis herself to get close to me. Let that sink in. Not as a handsome mortal, not as a swan, not even as a golden shower, no, he went full undercover goddess.
Long story short: deception occurred, I was blessed (cursed?) with a child, and Artemis found out. You’d think she might’ve had a word with Zeus but no. Off I go, transformed into a bear and sent packing into the woods
The life of a bear is not quite the majestic, spiritual experience people imagine  and as the years passed. I roamed. I hibernated. I developed a taste for berries and then enter my son, Arcas.
Grown up, hunting in the woods, and entirely unaware that the angry bear charging toward him was his dear old mum. I’d like to say we had a tearful reunion. Instead, we had a near-fatal misunderstanding and a very awkward near-mauling.
Enter Zeus (again). In what can only be described as divine panic, he grabs us both and whoosh, hurls us into the night sky. Literally. No warning. Just you’re both constellations now. Deal with it.
And so, I became Ursa Major which looks like a saucepan with legs so never trust a god in a disguise and if you’re going to be immortalised in the stars, at least insist on a flattering angle but at least i’m literally written in the stars i suppose.

Special Guest Blogger: King Christian VII of Denmark

One finds oneself with a surprising amount of time for reflection once one is, well, dead. The celestial paperwork is minimal, the duties are non-existent, and the company, is a bit stuffy.
From my vantage point I’ve had the chance to peruse the history books. And I must say, the press I’ve received is simply dreadful. Mad Christian they called me, and The Insane Monarch. So little imagination! So dreadfully blunt. One prefers to think of myself as… unconventional.
It all began, as these things do, with a childhood. My dear mamma, a British princess through and through (which explains my fondness for a decent cup of tea), did her best.
But there’s only so much one can do with a child whose primary interests include climbing curtains, holding conversations with busts of Roman emperors and developing a sudden, inexplicable passion for cobbling. They tried to teach me statecraft. I found it a bore. They attempted to instill in me a sense of gravitas. I found it chaffed. I was a prince, you see, not an accountant. The whole point of being royalty is to avoid such tedious nonsense.
Then came marriage. A splendid way of securing alliances and my dear Queen Caroline Mathilde, was a lovely girl. Rather serious for my tastes, given to a furrowed brow and an alarming interest in philosophy. I did try to engage with her, I truly did. I’d regale her with my latest theories on why sparrows conspire to steal one’s left shoe, but she always seemed preoccupied. A shame.
The real star of my reign, of course, was a chap by the name of Johann Friedrich Struensee. My physician. A terribly ambitious man who meant to be looking after my humours, which, I grant you, were in a state of perpetual disarray. But he got a taste for power, the old boy. He looked at the machinery of the state, then looked at me who was probably trying to teach the court dog to sing sea shanties at the time, and thought, Right. I can do this.
And do it, he did.
Looking back, one has to admire the sheer audacity. Struensee, with the quiet collusion of my dear wife simply took over. He issued decrees, reformed the government, abolished torture, and gave the press entirely too much freedom. All while signing off with, By order of the King.
I was aware of all this obviously. It’s just… why bother? Struensee was far better at it. He enjoyed it, bless him. Why get my hands dirty with budget cuts and agricultural reforms when you can dedicate your time perfecting the art of entering a state banquet by sliding down the banister?
While other monarchs were poring over maps, I was curating a collection of hats so magnificent it would make a peacock weep. While they were debating trade tariffs, I was perfecting my Royal wave.
My later years were, frankly, a relief. After the dramatic fall of Dr. Struensee (a rather messy business involving a drawing and quartering that quite spoiled my appetite), my stepson and various others decided I’d had quite enough fun. I became a figurehead. A magnificent, be-wigged ornament. And it was glorious. Finally, peace and quiet. All the prestige, none of the paperwork. I could spend my days in Rösseldorf castle, happily engaged in shouting at the statues in the garden and demanding my horses be fed chocolate.
My death, when it came, was terribly anticlimactic. A stroke, they said. One moment, I was correcting a footman on the proper polishing method for my snuffbox, and the next… poof. The great curtain call. Rude of the body to give up so suddenly, I thought, but there you have it.

Turbulent Times Ahead

Climate Change is responsible for many disastrous things but when a friend of mine mentioned to me that she seems to be feeling much more Turbulence when she flies when she used to i wasn't expecting it to be too blame.
In 2024, researchers from the University of Toulouse analysed historical atmospheric models and discovered that the climate conditions that cause severe plane turbulence have been increasing over the past decades, and those conditions are projected to get worse.
Since satellite data collection started 40 years ago, severe turbulence in the North Atlantic has increased by around 55% and the number of turbulence-related injuries since the 1980s have doubled with more hospilisations for broken bones, heart attacks, sprains and spinal injuries
Google states that the technical definition of severe turbulence is any up-and-down movement of a plane that applies a force greater than 1.5 g's to the occupants of the plane when a plane passes through a pocket of variable-density air.
Air turbulence occurs when a plane hits pockets of variable air density around the skies of the jet stream and as global warming heats up the seas and skies near the equator, the temperature differences in the jet stream's lower and higher latitudes become more extreme. Such differences amplify the strength of the jet stream, and, in turn, increase the strength and frequency of its air density.
Not sure if engineers can make changes to a plane to make it less susceptible to turbulence but if not then it has to come down to the computer weather modeling to advise the pilots of areas to avoid although estimates put the current accuracy to forecast unstable air at around 75% of the time.
Karma maybe that the problem is caused by global warming which was helped along by air travel which is a major contributor to global warming in the first place.

Why People Keep Trying To Kill Donald Trump?

By my reckoning, last night at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner was the 5th attempt to kill Donald Trump but before you have any sympathy for the self-confessed sex pest, warmonger and (probable) pedophile, a quick reminder of the things he have said on the sad demise of other people, on Robert Mueller: 'Good, I’m glad he’s dead' and to the widow of a soldier who had just died, 'He knew what he signed up for' and then there was the time he dismissed military cemeteries as 'filled with losers' and 'suckers' for getting killed while the killing of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Trump suggested Reiner had died from 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' so when someone does finally get a clean shot at him, he shouldn't expect too much sympathy.
We don't need to go into the reasons of why people keep trying to take out the Tango Tyrant, it is obvious that he is the ultimate bell-end but if the White House Correspondents' Association dinner was the fifth, what happened at the other four?
Attempt number one was in 2016 when a 20-year-old British man tried to grab a police officer's gun at a rally in a Las Vegas casino and later said he was trying to kill the then presumptive Republican nominee.
The second was in July 2024 in Pennsylvania when a gunman inexplicably missed the massive blob of the body of the third fattest President and shot him in the ear instead which forced the President to embarrassingly wear a Sanitary Towel on his ear for a week afterwards.
Number three came just two months later in September 2024 when a man hiding in bushes with an AK-47-style rifle attempted to assassinate Mr Trump as he played golf in West Palm Beach, Florida and the fourth in February 2026 when a 21-year old man was shot dead by the Secret Service after trying to unlawfully enter Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida armed with a shotgun and gas canister.
Then came yesterdays attempt and you do have to wonder if in a moment of quiet reflection Donald Trump will sit and ponder on just why people keep trying to kill him and consider changing his ways, or, as is more likely, he will just carry on being a complete dick and rely on his security people bundling him out of harms way. If you answered carry on being a complete dick, well done, you win.  

Invoking The 25th

The 25th Amendment of the US Constitution has been spoken of for quite some time but this is the first time it's gotten any real press as far as I can tell and it is plain to see that  he is clearly unhinged, the unhingediest man to ever sit his fat arse in the seat of the Oval Office.
We all know Trump has been doing loads of terrible things this entire time but it seems that threatening to destroy Iranian civilisation was a step to far for some people unlike backing a Genocide, ICE abductions, Trade Wars, ending US Aid, bombing schools, being shown to be a (probable) pedophile in the Epstein Files and arguing with the Pope and depicting himself as Jesus.
Could it be that Trumps implied threat of going nuclear was enough to awaken people to finally do something about the remarkable Orange politician with a record of sexual assault and fraud and is obviously in cognitive decline seems obvious although he has always been a very stupid man with the moral compass and attention span of a brain-damaged whelk who acts like a petulant child when he doesn't get his own way?
The 25th Amendment states that if the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet reckon the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, they can boot him out however they need a two thirds majority vote of the house and the senate and the Republicans will never go for that nor the incompetent, sycophantic useful idiot's in his cabinet who do nothing to restrain his madness.
The whole ball rolling has to start then with JD Vance to save everyone by declaring Trump unfit and replacing him with...checks notes...JD Vance?
Can't see it myself but then i couldn't see the current chaotic, disastrous, exceptionally poor debacle we see today happening either so don't waste good money on betting on the 25th happening, the man is so morbidly obese that a bet on Cholesterol finally doing it's thing instead seems much safer. 

Special Guest Blogger: King of Sparta Tyndareus

I’ve been sitting here for eons, listening to Achilles prattle on about his one tiny heel, while Socrates keeps asking rhetorical questions no one wants answered.
I was born in Sparta, a place where the average citizen is sculpted like a Greek god and my claim to the throne was pure nepotism. Father was Zeus and I inherited the crown not because of any great deeds or divine right, but because Sparta’s version of a royal dynasty was Zeus did it.
My most notable achievement before ascending the throne? Mastering the art of avoiding the plague of infant exposure (yes, Sparta’s famous for leaving unhealthy babies on the side of a hill. Harsh, but effective if you’re into attrition).
I once married a woman named Leda. In my defence, she was a queen, a goddess, and possibly a swan in disguise. It was a match made in Olympus but result was a family tree so convoluted it would make a Game of Thrones fan weep. There was my step-daughter Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, then Pollux, Castor, and a few other demigods.
My bad luck that the Trojan War happened. Entirely. My fault. You see, I had this little rule: if a suitor wanted to marry Helen, they had to swear an oath to defend her honour forever. A great idea, until 100 men showed up, swore oaths, and then spent three decades sulking in a tent when she got abducted and sparking the Trojan War. My brilliance knew no bounds.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nobody remembers you for your leadership skills, especially if you die in a classic way.
My daughter Clytemnestra’s husband decided to kill me in a fit of poetic justice. I’d raised the lad like a son, only for him to return the favour by stabbing me. I assume he thought it was a Greek tragedy moment, but honestly, I died while reaching out for the cheese board.
The History books mention me as  the man  murdered by his son-in-law but I wasn’t built for the brutal discipline of Leonidas or the tactical genius of Lysander.
No, I was built for drama and my life was full of irony, murder, and the occasional swan with a lifetime of dodging daggers and died thinking, Maybe I should have just left the kid on the hill.

Not Learning From Last Energy Crisis

Ever since Benjamin Netanyahu discovered he had a simpleton in the White House and they joined forced to start the Iran War which blocked upo the Strait of Hormuz, we have heard much about the energy crisis in the 1970's but i was more into watching Scooby Doo back then so it passed me by so what did happen back then?
In October 1973, in response to Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on all nations aiding Israel which led to severe oil shortages and a significant spike in global oil prices, profoundly impacting economies worldwide.
The crisis triggered stagflation, impacting growth, high inflation and rising unemployment.
The shortage left many homes and schools without heat and some institutions closed during winter months and cities were plunged into darkness during blackouts.
You would have thought that all this would have concentrated minds and ushered in a new age of renewable sources so nations were not so countries were not so dependent on fossil fuels but what Trump's and Netanyahu's foolishness is proving, we never so we can only hope that this time around, we do and ramp up the Solar, tidal and wind power and then we can tell the Middle East to stick their oil where the sun doesn't shine because our power will be coming from where it does.