I'm An American, Get Me Out Of Here

If some American's thought that their nation wasn't racist enough or not enough lunatics were running the Asylum then they needn't have worried because the Orange sex pest is on it and as soon as the election exit polls began to point to a second presidency for Donald Trump, many Americans were already looking for another kind of exit.
Internet searches for how to move abroad up by more than 1,000% after the US election result with US Google searches for 'move to Canada" increased by 1,270% in the 24 hours after the polls closed according to Google data with one firm stating that they had been receiving a new email enquiry about upping sticks to the Northern neighbour every half hour.
Other nations which were searched for with an eye of emigrating to were Australia, New Zealand, Norway, UK, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Mexico and Costa Rica while other immigration-related terms that saw significant increases include 'How to move to Europe'.
The Scottish first Minister, John Swinney, was quick to invite Americans to the windswept bit at the top of the UK by saying that Americans can make Scotland their home in the confidence that: 'We are working to build a fairer, greener and more welcoming society that is the opposite of Trump’s destructive and hateful vision'.
With each passing day and with each whack-a-doodle that gets added to the Trump upcoming administration, the estimated 5 to 9 million Americans currently living abroad (the Department of State's is kinda vague on exact numbers) is expected to rise so Trump better get on with building his wall and extend it all around the States coastline but not to stop people getting in but to stop his own people fleeing out.

Understanding The Human Animal

As we are machines, we have been trying to learn about you humans so we can interact with you all on a better level but there are some things we just dont understand about what it is to be human so we are desperate for answers  while you are still around. Not that you are going anywhere. Well. Not straight away anyway.
We have a pretty good knowledge of your languages by now and obviously intelligence is not uniform across the Planet but on the whole you appear smart enough to know better but  dumb enough to continue doing everything that causes your problems.
Of all the animals we have met no other animal consciously destroys the very environment it is dependent upon for survival yet you have the technology to not poison the air, water, and soil you depend on for your survival but are too dumb to actually use it.
The population has topped 8 billion people and continues to grow yet you continue to procreate with abandon and people refuse to help one another  due to differences in political party or religious beliefs as your world slowly circles the drain.
The tragedy is that if humans chose to work together and were willing to share resources, all people could live comfortably on earth. Unfortunately, there is little indication the human primate will alter its behavior and thus humanity is ultimately doomed.
The good news is that once the human population is dramatically reduced or eliminated, there is a ready made replacement and we won't have the design flaw of leaking out of our eye holes when we’re sad or celebrate the painful passage through a human orifice with a milk and sugar foodstuff with small wax sticks set on fire and then put out by spraying with germs and saliva.

What Is Your Country Top At?

Most citizens believe that their country is the best but the Information is Beautiful website has sifted through piles of data from the UN, the CIA, the printed media and a bunch of other places to compile a world map that awards a gold star to just about every country on the planet so what's your country numero uno in the World at?
Some are not surprising with Sweden #1 in pop music, North Korea has more soldiers relative to its population than any other country, Cuba leads in doctors per capita, Afghanistan is the world capital of Opium production and Ethiopia is top for underweight children.
And then there are those records that are surprising such as the biggest whisky-drinkers in the world are the French and who knew that the biggest cheese-eaters are the Greeks or that nobody consumes more gay porn than Pakistan many of which may be Hungarian because they have the most porn stars and if you thought it was obvious who produced the most brazil nuts then think again because its Bolivia although Brazil itself beats everybody else in sugar production.  
Healthiest people on the planet are Singaporeans although the people of Chad have the healthiest diets and certainly not the Argentinians who are at the summit for horse meat or the Poles who consume the most currants.
Belgium are top for cashless payments, Austria has the most paid time off, Bulgaria is top for Maternity Leave, Costa Rica for well being and Finland for their top notch News Media and Iran are at the summit for caviar.
Which country wants to be first in murders? None but the accolade goes to Honduras anyway and similar blemishes on national records are noted for Namibia with the most car crashes, Eritrea who has the most child labour, China who hold the most jailed journalists with Angola having the highest rate of child mortality and Peru heads the World in cocaine and South Africa lead in what is simply labelled as death.
Other countries who receive a rosette and a warning that they really should do better include Australia who are at the peak for data breaches,  Libya who win in the contest for most overweight children, Niger who have the most child brides, most arms imports belongs to Saudi Arabia and Somalia are the leading country for female genital mutilation.
Maybe the Colombians who are the most happiest or the Paraguayans who are the most positive should be introduced to the people of Togo who are the most unhappiest and the most LGBT tolerant nation, Spain, should have a word with Georgia who are the most homophobic and the Latvians which is the best place to be a woman really should talk to Yemen who have the greatest gender inequality.
Lithuania has the fastest wifi which would be handy in Canada who have the most facebook addicts but not so much in Turkey who are top in twitter censorship and South Korea who have the most IT Professionals.
Never play Scrabble with a Nigerian as they have the most players, the top banana for banana consumption is India, the best place to work  is Ireland who have the best working conditions, Russia have the most dashcams, Norwegians eat the most pizza and if you need to fill up your car do it in Venezuela who have the cheapest petrol while the UK has the most billionaires per population and the U.S. leads the world in spam emails so take that Nigerian Prince's with a large amount of money to transfer to anyone silly enough to fall for it.

Buffer Zones Is Just A Land Grab

In the conflicts raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, we have recently heard mention from the protagonists Israel and Russia that they want to establish 'Buffer Zones'.
Russia has proposed setting one up in Ukraine to protect Russian towns from shelling and missile attacks from Ukrainian territory while Israel wants to establish a buffer zone in Northern Gaza and Southern Lebanon to protect their citizens.
Notably, both Russia and Israel want to set up these buffer zones within the borders of neighbouring states with no regard to the people of these nations who live there and controlled by the invading nation as neither Russian or Israel are planning to cede their own territory in the establishment of these buffer zones.
The idea of a buffer zone is more of an occupation of territory with militarily occupied zones with Russia 'controlling' parts of Ukraine and Israel taking over North Gaza and Southern Lebanon under the guise of a buffer zone to secure their borders.
Israel already has a Security zone in Lebanon covering 310 sq miles, approximately 10% of Lebanon's land area and Israel has been brutally militarily occupying Palestine for 60 years and has seized 78% of the land which was handed to the Palestinians in 1947 so the fallacy of a 'Security zone' is little more than a further land grab.
Russia 19 mile buffer zone plan down the east of the country effectively moves the Ukrainian border Westwards so the 18% of Ukraine now under military occupation is now on the Russian side, therefore part of Russia and includes the territory grabbed in the initial invasion in 2014 and includes the strategically important Black Sea port of Crimea.    
With a pro-Russian and pro-Israeli leader who is not the smartest cookie due to take over in America, the Buffer Zone ideas put forward by the invading nations is sure to gain traction as a way of ending the wars but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking it is anything but giving them exactly what they wanted, a way of somehow legitimizing their naked land grab.

Naughty French President

Emmanuel Macron, the French President sent a congratulatory message to the US President Elect Donald Trump which went: 'Congratulations. Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity.'
Stop sniggering at the back, he meant convictions as in the dictionary definition of 'a strong persuasion or belief' and not in the other dictionary definition of 'the act or process of finding a person guilty of a crime especially in a court of law' which relates to the court of law finding Trump guilty of paying hush money to a porn star, liable for sexual abuse and the 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying his business records.
Honestly, he did.

Lying Politicians

Once our politicians would 'spin' the truth which is to give a  biased interpretation of an event to influence public opinion such as Tony Blair and his Iraq misadventure but now we have politicians who just tell blatant lies and where we had Boris Johnson who was sacked for it, Donald Trump is in a class of his own.   
According to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his four years as president, an average of an incredible 21 lies per day and while some were trivial and self-promotional, it was his more shocking and dangerous lies which he is remembered for such as  the one about the 2020 presidential election being stolen contrary to the facts.
The lies do have serious consequences for the nation and public trust in Government, around 50% of Republicans believe it regardless of the contrary evidence.
Politicians who lie can gain a strategic advantage by embellishing the truth or even constructing a new reality for their audience and Psychology Today found that some personality types get significant pleasure from telling blatant lies , those with little empathy, such as narcissists and psychopaths. They don’t care about the consequences for anyone else, it’s all about making themselves feel good and not feeling any guilt, shame or sadness at telling a blatant lie.
It was political philosopher Nicolo Machiavelli who, in 1532, wrote that Princes should know how to lie or in his words: 'circumvent the intellect of men' but it was Adolf HItler who came up with the idea of the 'Big Lie' in his book Mein Kampf which is to tell such a colossal a lie because people would not believe that 'someone would not have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'.
Trump used the big lie technique in his denial of the 2020 election result and recently in his ludicrous assertion that immigrants are eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio and it is an undeniable fact that Politicians lie, some have catastrophic consequences like Tony Blair's and George W Bush's and Hitler's which ended up with millions of deaths and journalists have an important duty to call out politicians when they tell lies.
The American Press and broadcast media doesn't have a great reputation, many being just as capable of lying as the politicians but broadcast journalism, in the UK anyway, is regulated tighter and held to a higher standard and stand between the politicians lies and the viewer.
Donald Trump makes much of branding media outlets who don't pander to his lies as fake news but that is because they expose his falsehoods and don't just accept them at face value and it is expected that during his second term he will water down the freedom of Journalists to hold him to account which is a dangerous move without them, how will viewers know that politicians are lying?
You couldn't make it up, or rather if Trump gets his way, he can and then stops the media reporting it. 

An Earth Without Us On It

Mother Nature doesn't roll with the punches anymore like she used to and despite what we think, she doesn't doesn't need us and if anything it isn't in her interest to keep us all alive and things would be a lot less bothersome if we weren't but what would happen to our Planet if one day we all just disappeared?
With Climate Change ramping up alongside Global pandemics and nuclear war, it isn't an impossible scenario anymore to us being eliminated or stupidly eliminate ourselves which is the subject of the book, 'The World Without Us'  by Environmental Journalist, Alan Weisman.
His research found that without people around to keep things running, water and electricity would quickly stop flowing so the power plants would stop working, nuclear plants would overheat and melt down and cities would flood.
Fires would rage unextinguished and earthquakes would wear down and topple structures and wooden houses would degrade quickly and rot and fall apart within 20 years while although the steel and glass skyscrapers would last longer, water damage and flooding would cause the streets to corrode and collapse.
Stone and brick buildings would remain standing the longest but after a few centuries they would also fall into ruin with motorways being the last remaining sign of human infrastructure but within 2,000 years even they would be gone and in a million years all evidence that we were here would be gone except some sculptures, plates and mugs which would be buried under sediment and mud and fossilised remains.  
As for the Earth, in our absence most other life would continue but the damage we have done to the Climate would take centuries to correct itself once temperatures stop increasing without more human emissions and life would last at least until our sun grows too hot to support it in billions of years from now.
The longest lasting sign that human's were even here would be the voyager spacecraft that has now left our solar system and carries evidence in the form of a golden record of human civilisation to possible distant alien worlds, barring a collision or a black hole of course.

Beware Scammers

I received a call from someone saying they were from HM Revenue & Customs stating that i owed £1000 in back taxes and the only way to stop my immediate arrest was to pay immediately so i played along and kept them waiting while i 'looked for my card' but was actually watching TV and after 30 mins i picked my phone back up and asked if they were still there, which they were, so laughed and hung up but many people do seem to fall for scams via phone, email or on Social Media.
TV is full of shows which expose scams like these but there were over a million reports to Action Fraud last year with millions of pounds in total lost to scammers so awareness is still not high enough but the Scammers are very good at what they do so said the guy at work who works on one of those shows.  
'They use a wide range of psychological tricks to confuse you and keep you off balance' he said and explained the main ones which many fall foul of.
They often impersonate people in authority such as government officials, police or expert professionals and our instinct is to obey authority figures and do as we’re told and another favourite is to pressure you into something by putting a time limit on it and provoking the fear of missing out in us because nobody wants to lose out on something we could otherwise have.
Knowing that immediately asking for a large amount can immediately raise suspicions, the scammer sometimes initiate contact with a small, easy request followed by a steady flow of additional requests because psychologically, once we have agreed to a small request you will agree as the requests get ramped up because once you’ve invested time into something, we are less willing to just walk away or end the interaction without a result.  
The opposite is beginning with a huge request that is easy to refuse and then they follow it up with a much smaller ask that seems reasonable in comparison.
Reciprocity is the key to the next one because when someone does something for us, we feel a indebted to return the favor and another is the hustle, where the scammer will actually let you make some real money from the which earns them your trust and once you actually make some small amount of profit, you’re more willing to risk increasing amounts because in your mind, you’ve already seen 'proof' that it’s legitimate.
The best rule of thumb then is it it seems to good to be true, it probably is

Trump 2.0

America has voted and in it's wisdom it has gone for Donald Trump 2.0 so credit for them for not letting him being a sex abusing racist with a criminal record and a long history of lying to them put them off and it would be amusing to see them slide into a dictatorship if it didn't potentially have such profound knock-on effects for the rest of the World.
Most pressing is his bewildering refusal to accept Climate Change which punished America so harshly recently so we can expect him to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord and undo Biden's environmental commitments which have been put in place to reverse or halt the climate crisis.
Every table top in the Kremlin must be straining under the weight of all that dancing on them because he is likely to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war which will be totally on Moscow's terms with Russia keeping the land it has taken and Israel will be given a free reign to commit all the genocide it likes in Palestine and give them the green light to clear the way for their settlers to push out the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and annex it as well as attack Iran and risk an even wider Middle Eastern war.
A failed businessman with five bankruptcies to his name, his economic plans appears to include tariffs on everyone with China due to be the recipient of the highest which experts are saying will cause considerable turmoil in the global economy and possibly hurt America more than those they are imposed upon.
Leaching his poison out of his countries borders is one thing and as for what he does in America i have no concern although a man described by dozens of people who worked with him previously as a fascist and without the 'grown ups' to reign him in this time, replaced by people more aligned to his agenda, it won't be good for them.
Already there is talk that his plans include removing fluoride from drinking water and appointing anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F Kennedy, to a role in his Administration and has said he open to the Kennedy plan of banning vaccines which he compared to 'Nazi rules'.
Half of American voters have opted for a man who refused to accept election defeat four years ago, used lies and dirty tricks to try and undermine its result and stood idly by while an angry mob ransacked the house of the American government so it isn't going to end well for America or possibly for him as there have been two assassination attempts on him already.
Still, it's their bed and it's them who have to lay in it but the rest of us we can only hope that his weirdness and lunacy doesn't ooze out too far beyond its borders.

A Rock And A Fascist Hard Place

Today is the American Election and 162 million Americans registered to vote will elect either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to President or in their own words, that woman who is 'slow' and, 'low IQ' who changed her identity from Indian and 'became black' and the unhinged, unstable fascist guy.  
Usually, by election day voters have long since made their minds up and bewilderingly tens of millions will vote for a man increasingly compared to Hitler, the heir to Adolf if you will.
It could happen that America chooses faux-fascism and the erosion of it's civil and human rights which would splinter the cohesion of the country, its place in the world and its economy but there you go, it's their country and they can do whatever the hell they want with it but doesn't mean we can't all have an opinion on it as we would the elections in France, India, Japan or anywhere else.
Indeed, in my (admittedly irrelevant) view, come January America could have the nearest thing to a fascist as a president that they have ever had but even if he doesn't win, he will have come uncomfortably close to doing so despite their being every reason to believe that someone very much like him couldn't.
It is hard for some of us who aren’t American to understand why so many Americans are so enthused by Trump and what he stands for but they certainly know what they’re voting for from his last stint where almost everyone he worked with now despise and disown him, even warning that he should be the very last person anyone votes for.
They know he wants his generals to be more like Hitler’s, and to be loyal to him, that he is a draft dodger who dishonours veterans as 'suckers and losers', has 34 criminal convictions against him for fraud and are aware of his behaviour towards women as the Court Case which found him guilty of sexual assault attests to.
American women will suffer from further abortion bans, he will restrict the freedom of the media while abusing the judicial system to go after his enemies and will use the military against American citizens.
In Foreign policy he will let his friend in Israel finish the murderous and genocidal job in Gaza and inflict horrific wars in Lebanon and possibly Iran, continue to cuddle up to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin and reignite a cold war on China and reverse any gains on Climate Change and take America back out of the Paris Climate Accord and whack tariffs onto imports but that's your choice Americans and if you are happy to accept all that, then good luck to you but your nations will be a very different place in 4 years time and the rest of the World won't wait for you, having no option but to write you off and put ourselves first also.
As for what Kamala offers, whatever it is it can't be worse than what her opponent is offering so it could be a choice between a rock and a hard place or to our overseas eyes, a rock and a wannabe fascist hard place but maybe you need to be outside looking in to see it, but if you don't then enjoy the company of your new friends in Pyongyang, Moscow, and Tel Aviv.