The Word Of God You Say?

More than eight hundred times the Bible uses the phrase: 'The LORD says …' so we are on pretty safe ground to assume that the believers consider the book to be the word of God but a quick look at the timeline shows that it is more the word of whoever decided it was the word of God.
The early Christians were actually a offshoot of the Jewish faith but as their movement gained followers, they thought that they could 'break away' and form their own separate religion and began making changes from the Jewish text to differentiate themselves and began circulating stories about Jesus, many of which were borrowed from other religions at the time by enthusiastic followers but nothing was written down until around 150ad when Marcion of Sinope puts in an appearance.
He set about gathering together all the stories going around about Jesus and his gang and chose the stories he liked and rejected or edited the ones which he never and put them all together to create the first Bible, or Testament.
By the 2nd Century, the Christian Church was beginning to get itself in order and wasn't keen on all the stories Marcion chose which were mostly of a 'Feel God's wrath' type so decided to keep most of them but create a 'New Testament' which showed their Gods more cuddly side and set about picking which stories to include in its new edition.
The Bishop of Antioch, Serapion, was pivotal in choosing what went into the New Testament and after weeding out texts that did not align with his idea of the newfound concepts of God, they settled on four anonymous texts to which were assigned the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and edited them to fit their new peaceful and loving God.
By the 3rd Century, Clement of Alexandria thought their Holy book was looking a bit thin so added a few more Gospels and Tertullian and Origen chipped in a few more .
By the 4th Century, the New Testament was coming together but there was disagreements over whether the Book of Revelations should be included with its prophesy of Apocalypse and all manner of things the bishop of Alexandria, Dionysus, called 'barbarous'  but was finally included by the synods of Hippo and Carthage at the end of the Century where it was decided that this with its 27 Books was now the final edit and nobody may add or take away from it.
They also threw in the decision that anyone owning anything else was 'heretical' and would be arrested but some versions still omitted some stories and put in their own until 692ad when the Holy Sees of Constantinople and Antioch told them to fall into line and by the way OUR version is the only one you can use.
In the 16th century, Martin Luther  tried to get some chapters removed as they had 'nothing of the nature of the Gospel about them' but the Catholic Church at the The Ecumenical Council of Trent in 1546 stamped all over the idea saying the 27 books in the New testament were going to stay and anyone who doesn't like it could always be excommunicated.
Not bad then for a book which started out as a collection of made up stories about other Gods and other deities with their own Christian God copied and pasted in as a replacement and then heavily edited to show him in the best possible light but no so much the Word of God, more the Word of whoever had editing privileges that particular day.

Hey Donald, Leave Our Songs Alone

I remember Donald Trump being told to get his chubby little hands off songs by several musicians when he ran for President in 2016 and he has the same problem again this year with an array of musicians coming out and demanding he stop playing their songs at his rally's.
Abba have now joined Celine Dion, Beyonce, Phil Collins and the family of Isaac Hayes and Sinead O'Connor in telling Trump to not play their songs but the most unfortunate is the Smiths because they had a song titled 'Your The One For Me Fatty' which would have been prefect for the crowd to sing as he waddled onto the stage but alas, not anymore.    
Last time out the musicians included Adele, Neil Young, Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N' Roses, Luciano Pavarotti, Nickelback, Ozzy Osbourne, Prince, Queen, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty and The White Stripes and even the Village people told him to stop using their songs in his bid for the White House, Michael Stipe of REM went with: 'Go f*** yourselves you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign' which certainly put across his objection.
The right wing has always been short on musical talent, the left, like the devil, always had the best tunes so it shouldn't be any surprise that the Trump campaign is only attracting singers who are wearing boots and a cowboy hat but in America songs from 1928 and before are now out of Copyright and can be used so maybe he should take a look at the choices but i think i found the perfect one for him.
A 1890 song by LM Luse called Orange, i would go with that one.

Not Looking Back in Anger

I was not that much of an Oasis fan even at their height, i preferred Pulp out of the small group of Britpop bands at the time but the Oasis songs were okay (Don't Look Back in Anger , The Importance of Being Idle, Wonderwall ) but the brothers were a couple of morons and that doesn't seemed to have changed much in the intervening years and after years of between Liam and Noel Gallagher has ended with the inevitable: Oasis on a Noels 'Pay-A-£20m-Divorce Settlement Tour'.
Usually i try my hardest to separate the total douchebags from their music but i have a real problem with the Gallagher brothers and mainly because i don't think they were good enough for their music to outweigh their big fat stupid gobs.
They were pretty popular at the time amongst the 'lads', with Blur and Pulp aiming towards the more intelligent end of the Britpop market and Oasis going for the beer swilling yobs type which is another reason i'm not overly keen, that sort of behaviour was moronic at the time and now the fans will be middle aged and it is an even worse look but each to their own, i imagine their are bands and music i like they don't so that's fair.
Easy to say then that i won't be spending £75 to go watch them in concert but there does seem to be a  dearth of British bands around now so i can honestly say they are the biggest band in the UK at the moment and good luck to them.  

2024 Paralympics

I'm going to miss most of the Paralympics in Paris this year as more than 4,000 athletes representing more than 150 nations compete across 22 sports and participating will be a Refugee team.
Russia and Belarus are banned although you will still find a couple dozen Russian and Belarusian athletes competing as neutral athletes and if they win any medals then the song that plays will be an instrumental anthem written for the Games.
Athletes who can’t compete for their own country due to political reasons may participate as part of the Refugee Olympic Team which contains 36 athletes representing 'the world’s displaced population' and include participants from Iran, South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and Cuba.
A question i asked at the Olympics was if a member of the Refugee team win gold then what anthem will they have the (i assume) Olympic flag raised to and apparently it would be the Olympic Hymn which i didn't even know existed until about 10 minutes ago.
Anyway, i have the same bet with my Australian colleague regarding who will finish higher up the league table and we can assume China will top it as they ended the last one with more than double the British tally in second place but i am confident that i will be winning back the money i lost when Australia finished above us at the Olympics.

Answering The Hermit Priest

 
In 2004, Johannes Schwarz became a Priest in Lichtenstein and in 2014 he found a small hut in the Alps and gave up all the trappings of 21st Century life and stayed there and remains there today 'raising his mind to God'.
Living as hermit and feeding himself with the vegetables he grows in the small garden outside his hut, he has spent 8 years meditating on those timeless questions, 'What is the meaning of life' and 'what is our purpose here on Earth'.
Now i can help him here but as an atheist i will therefore not be going down the flowery God route but the meaning of life is to go from the cradle to the grave being the best possible person that you can be, to do the best you can for yourself and others and when your life ends, knowing that during your allotted time on the Earth you made other peoples lives better for you being in them.  
As for our purpose, we are merely animals amongst many on the planet such as dogs and cats (albeit more intelligent) and their purpose is the same as ours, to keep our species going by having children and caring and nurturing them to adulthood where they can continue the circle of life.
There you go then Johannes, both explained and i didn't need to climb a mountain and ask the Universe for the questions so wave goodbye to your cucumber and marrows and come back to Civilisation
because i am no biologist but living alone thousands of feet up the side of a mountain isn't going to help with keeping the human race going.

Kamala Outside America

Where before the American President Joe Biden stepped backward and Kamala Harris stepped forward, America seemed to be heading towards a disastrous second term for Donald Trump but things seemed to have turned around and  polls have the Democrats in the lead.
The White House staff must be sighing with relief because of the bill to reinforce the chairs for Trump's ample frame would have cost a fortune but  most Americans should be also because a man who was found guilty for Sexual Assault and is a convicted Fraudster while leading his campaign with how he would be dictator on Day 1 doesn't suggest he would be a good choice for leader.    
What the next President does in America is no concern of ours and as for Kamala, i neither know nor care much about her apart from she smiles and laughs a lot which isn't a bad trait to have but being American President does come with some responsibility outside of the countries borders so where does she stand on issues which would affect the rest of us?
As the second largest Global polluter and with Climate Change really starting to put the bite on the Planet, America releases 6bn tons of CO2 annually (China is top with 14bn tons) so it is great that Ms Harris has long advocated for tough laws to protect the environment and while a prosecutor in California, sued oil companies for environmental damage.
She also called fracking to be banned and to funnel funds towards renewable energy and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programs so we hopefully will get a Green President serious about mitigating the worst effects of Climate Change
She is a supporter of Nato and supporting Ukraine in it's war against Russia and appears to be a lot less on friendly terms with the Israeli genocide currently going on in Palestine, being an advocate for a two-state solution and calling for an end to the war in Gaza which she said was: 'a humanitarian catastrophe for Palestinians'.
While serving as vice-president, she has been more open to criticising Israel during the Israel-Gaza war than her boss and held what she called: 'frank and constructive talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu' when he visited Washington in July which is diplomatic parlance for telling him to stop being such a murderous dick.
As for the rest, as i said it doesn't concern us and she can do what she wants with their bat-shit crazy gun laws, immigration, tax rates and the such because i'm over 3,500 miles away so fill your boots there Kamala but in the things that does affect me, she seems ok so i know who i'm rooting for, and it isn't the obese orange faced sex offender.

Wasn't Me

I thought that the New Government would get around a year to blame any problems on the last Government and when the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, came out almost immediately and said that the economy she had inherited from the Conservatives was worse than she imagined and there was a £22bn shortfall it was expected.
That she then published the Official figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility to show that the UK bought in £327bn in taxes but spent £406bn to back up her 'It wasn't me, it was them' mantra then it  
drove home that we may well be facing a pretty grim budget on the horizon.
Having already made a manifesto pledge to not increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT then it is some of the other taxes we should be looking at for where the extra revenue will be coming from but
as it is either bring more in or pay less out, there are a few options.
The Conservatives went for the pay less out option and spent over a decade slashing and hacking at everything which worked as well as it sounded as almost every Government Department is now under-staffed and places like the NHS are seriously underfunded and waiting times are at the worst in NHS history.
Labour then seem to be looking at the bring more in option and Capital Gains tax seems to be the favourite as it was mentioned before the Election and the Conservatives tinkered with it to bring down the amount you can 'Gain' before paying tax but Labour are apparently looking at making the tax rate the same as the income tax rate.
Inheritance Tax and Pension Relief are also up for discussion which would effect 1.4% of the population in the case of the Inheritance Tax and anyone paying tax at a higher rate in the case of the Pension Relief which wouldn't necessarily scare to many people and would raise taxes but not for the vast majority.
I don't envy Rachel Reeves having to balance the books or how she will do it but it does seem quite prudent to front load the bad news when you can still blame the former Government when the memory of Liz Truss trashing the economy is fresh in the mind.   

UK and US No Longer The Good Guys

Within weeks of taking over as the new Government, the Labour Party  restored funding of UNRWA and dropping the previous governments’ plans to challenge the right of the International Criminal Court to seek an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over war crimes in a welcome move but they have yet to suspended arms sales to Israel.
Today, Foreign Office diplomat Mark Smith resigned in protest, warning that the country may be complicit in war crimes saying: 'There is no justification for the U.K.’s continued arms sales to Israel yet somehow it continues', and with 58% of the country  support ending arms sales to Israel and the British government receiving advice from its own lawyers that Israel was in breach of international humanitarian law in Gaza, the Government is on the wrong side of the argument.
The new Foreign Secretary will only commit to 'a comprehensive review to assess whether Israeli war crimes might have been committed in Gaza' but in a stark reminder of how long Israel have been pounding Palestine, the UK had suspended arms exports previously in 1982, 2009 and 2014 over concerns of war crimes although that the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza today where more than 40,000 people have been killed, dwarfs that of the circumstances that led to previous arms embargoes.
In the US at least a dozen officials have quit their posts in the last several months in protest of Washington’s policies on the war and  the Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has faced growing calls for the U.S. to impose an arms embargo on Israel which would have a greater effect as the U.S. provides considerably more arms to Israel than the U.K. with just last week the Americans agreeing to send $20 billion of arms to Israel.
Why Israel has such a hold over nations when the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court are talking of an Israeli Genocide in Palestine and after over 6 decades of military oppression and it's leaders  facing arrest for War Crimes but after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now backing a genocide, it will be quite some time before either country can have the nerve to say they are the good guys.

Ai Sex Bots

 

The growth of AI and robotics is not growing fast enough for some humans who welcome the advantages robots can bring to humans because they want to have sex with them.
Analysis of more than 200,000 chatbot conversations shows how the new tech is actually being used and a huge amount of AI chatbot use is sexual in nature, so much that programmers have created an AI companion app called Replika, which is fairly open-minded about responding to dirty talk.
There are currently companies selling adult, female sexbots, and they explain that they can help the type of people who's girlfriends usually come  with a footpump have safe sex and lessen exploitation and sex trafficking, decreasing instances of predatory behaviour and curb the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
If the rise of the robots isn't scary enough for you, the creepy men most likely to use them for sex are asking for robots who look, and act, even more human-like because the pasty face brigade, the lonely, the miserable and men who wear Hawaiian shirts have given up trying to woo the female population with their knowledge of calculus and being able to recite the script from Star Wars and are preparing for a ready-built girlfriend.
There are fears that an entire class of humans may emerge who will not know how to interact with the opposite gender and may never have sex with other humans so very much like today's computer programmers come to think of it but i do wonder if the sex-bots will be self cleaning but it is best not to dwell on that thought too long.

What's In A Name?

A translation firm is offering prospective parents the chance to check their preferred baby-names don’t mean anything embarrassing in other languages and will check the meaning across 100 languages.
When it comes to picking a name for your new baby, so many factors come into play as you try to choose something unique, a family name or one that can be easily twisted into another funny or embarrassing word by foreigners writing a mickey taking blog post such as:

Amber means bucket in Estonia.
Becky in the Philippines is a young, gay man.
Bill is the Dutch word for buttocks
Bobby is pig in Indonesian.
Cara Is Arabic for shit.
Chloë means bollocks in Morocco and toilet in Germany
Dom is Dutch for stupid.
Fanny in the UK is a woman’s genitals.
Freya means ugly in Portuguese.
Gary in Japan is diarrhea .
Gil means snot in Poland.
Kai means egg in Thai.
Kiki means vagina in the Phillipines .
Lisa is the Greek word for rabies.
Loki means asshole in German.
Lou means a toilet in the UK
Mark is Norwegian for worm.
Mona in Italy is a woman’s genitals and a female mokey in Spanish.
Peter means to fart in French and fellatio in Argentina
Pippa in Italian means masturbation, sex in Swedish and blow job in Greece.
Randy in the UK means horny
Siri is penis in Georgia and bum in Japan.
Tessa Danish word for urinate.
Tod/Todd is German for death.
Willy in the UK is penis.