Nice One Humza

You do have to wonder what was going on in the Scottish First Ministers mind when he sacked the Greens from his Government.
With the SNP's holding a majority of 1 in the Scottish Parliament, by sacking the two Greens for being too left wing, he went from a minority Government to one with less seats than the opposition who must as thought it was Christmas, Birthday and Hogmanay all rolled into one and immediately put in for a vote of no confidence in the SNP leader Humza Yousaf,  and the Greens, still stinging from their ousting said they would vote with the opposition against Yousaf.
With parliamentary arithmetic now against him he tried to talk around the only ALBA member to join him but she must have remembered that when she left the SNP, he said she was 'no loss' and told him to do one so Yousaf was left with little choice but to jump before he was pushed and resigned.
Immediately the SNP went looking for a candidate to replace him and the early favourite is Kate Forbes, the same woman who was forced to back down in her leadership campaign last time due to being too religious and getting herself in a heap of trouble by espousing views which included being against abortions, premarital sex, same sex marriage and trans rights which she disagreed with due to her deep seated faith.
With a general election looming,they are now looking towards John Swinney who only retired a year ago to spend more time with his family to come back as an interim leader but whatever happens, it really is in tune with the madness that has been happening with politics south of the border. 

What's So Great About Britain Then?

Britain was a rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of continental Europe but today in 1707 the Scots joined up with Wales and England and we became known as Great Britain but still remained a rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic.
Before any Scots make jokes about how it was them who made us Great, it referred to the increased size of Britain rather than how magnificent it was now we had bagpipes and haggis in the mix but over time the 'Great' in our name has become more of the how distinguished and illustrious us Brits are rather than the additional 30,078 square miles tagged onto the top end of England but other nations may wonder just what is so Great about us Brits, well let me explain.

The seaside. All countries that have a coastline have a seaside and most have piers but it was us Brits who came up with the idea of the Pleasure pier, some of which were built while Napoleon was still stomping around Europe and Beethoven was just finishing his 6th Symphony and was starting work on his 7th.

Sport. We gave the World football, rugby, cricket, field hockey, squash, tennis, badminton, darts, snooker, golf, rowing, boxing, curling, horse racing and something called Bandy whatever the hell that is. Sure the rest of the World are now better than us at all of them without us Brits, they wouldn't have the sports to be better than us at.

Comedy. If there is one thing us Brits excel at, it's having a strange sense of humour and the sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humour can be an acquired taste i agree but we laugh at things which are funny, unfunny, tragic or just downright stupid which is why we have shows such as Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, The Young Ones, Allo' Allo', Monty Python and Father Ted to mock pretty much everything from religion to War to Interstellar Space.

The BBC. The oldest national broadcasting organisation in the world and easily the best thing you could spend 46p a day on for no annoying ad breaks.  

Music. Yes we have not only come up with bands such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Sex Pistols, Muse, Black Sabbath and ELO but we do have a knack of coming up with some amazing guitar players also so pluck your g-string proudly Slash, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore, Mark Knopfler, Matt Bellamy, Johnny Marr and Tony Iommi to name a few.  

Chocolate. I don't know what everyone else does to their chocolate but wow you are bad at it.  

Inventions. We can turn on the light bulb in the living room and watch the television while drinking some cool beer from the refrigerator or go on a computer on the World Wide Web to watch trains or discover the theory of evolution or Gravity and explain it on the telephone in the English language thanks to British inventors.

Punk. Without British bands like the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Stranglers to inspire later generations, today's music would be...well...even worse.

Rhyming Slang. Only the Brits could take a perfectly normal thing, find something that rhymes with it and then shorten it even more so we could ask about your plates and not mean your kitchenware, your boat and not mean the ones with oars, your Gregory and not mean your relative and mention Bristol's and Hampton's and not mean in any geographical way whatsover.

So Britain has many faults, the food, our politicians, the right wing numpties and our not so pleasant history of slavery and empire but there are a few things we can point at and say, yeah, maybe we are not so bad after all .

Avoid This Post If It's Your Birthday Today

How many people do you share a birthday with? If there are roughly 8 billion people on the planet and there are 365 days in the year (forget leap years, my maths is shaky enough as it is without adding that into the sums) and i make it on average 219,178,082 share a birthday and if you one of them who are celebrating another trip around the Sun and are reading this today then many happy returns of the day and how you feeling?
I ask because i have just become aware of something called the birthday effect which is the chances are you’re going to die on your birthday.
The birthday effect is a recognised statistical phenomenon from research in Switzerland, Japan and the United States which discovered that your risk of dying is higher on, or near, your birthday, 13.8% of a greater risk actually.
The US study, using Social Security details, found that women were more likely to die in the week immediately after their birthdays than in any other week of the year while men were more likely to die in the week before.
The theories are that birthdays lead to celebrations, which can lead to increased alcohol consumption, which can lead to increased death by any number of means or that seriously ill people view birthdays as survival milestones and tend to succumb on the days or either side of it or more boringly, death certificates with the date of birth entered where the date of death should go by mistake.
Renaissance painter Raphael died on his 37th birthday, William Shakespeare on his 52nd and Ingrid Bergman on her 67th so if today is your Birthday, don't leave it to the evening to blow out the candles on your cake, you know, just in case.

Asking God What Went Wrong?

Always amazes me how some of the more religious types in society say that there's is all about love and peace and then prove it by slaughtering each other to prove it and none more so than in the Middle East where we set up a country for a religion following a horrific genocide against them, only for them to then militarily occupy the people they shared the land with and inflict their own genocide against them so i think what would their God think about it? So i asked him.

'You're really the god in these parts where all these religious killings take place?' i asked and the big guy sighed 'Yes but in my defence i thought it would be so easy, you know. Just one small planet and making people out of clay and old toenails and things but with all the sin and sinning i drowned the lot in a flood and thought I could start all over again. Do it properly. But it's all going completely wrong.'
'Quite depressing, really' i agreed and he nodded and continued 'I did try shouting, smiting, getting angry all the time but then i changed tack and went all love and peace but it turned out that if you actually stopped the smiting, people wandered off and worshipped someone else. Hard to believe, isn't it? They'd say things like: 'Things were a lot better when there was more smiting' and 'If there was more smiting, it'd be a lot safer to walk the streets'.
'There are lots of other gods so why not share the burdan with them?' i inquired.
'There are and by now i thought i would be semi-retired and sitting on mountaintops and casting thunderbolts and all the rest of it like those other chaps. Although very hard thing to steer, lightning. Mostly we waited until a thunderbolt happened to hit some poor soul and then said it was his fault for being a sinner. I mean, they were bound to have done something, weren't they?'
'Well...I guess so' i agreed.   
'There would be a bad weather front, a few silly shepherds would happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and next thing you know it was standing room only on the sacrificial stones. I mean, I tried. God knows I tried, and since that's me, I know what I'm talking about, i even made commandments which boiled down to 'Thou Shalt Really Try to Get Along with One Another'.
'How'd that work out for you?' i asked
'Not great' he replied blowing his nose. 'The first lot that tried it was slaughtered by the followers of the god in the next valley who told them to kill everyone who didn't believe in him'.
'So what's you next plan to clear up the mess you made? i wanted to know.
He shrugged and replied: 'I'm thinking to hell with it all, I'd go to another planet and do it all more sensibly' and with that he bid me farewell and walked away whistling God Only Knows by the Beach Boys.

This post comes with a massive nod to TP and the Archchancellor, Bursar, The Dean, the Librarian and Ponder Stibbons of the Unseen University.

Iceland Most Peaceful...Again

The Global Peace Index measures 23 quantitative and qualitative indicators including military expenditure, relations with neighbouring countries, human rights, prison population and murder rates to find the most and least peaceful countries in the world and as usual 2023 ended with Iceland at the top of the peaceful pile with Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand and Austria making up the rest of the top 5.
Unsurprisingly Afghanistan is at number 163 and the least peaceful along with Yemen and Syria with Ukraine recording the largest fall, down 14 places to 157th place.
The Peace Index counted 91 countries now involved in some form of conflict, with the Middle East and North Africa the world’s least peaceful region and Europe the most peaceful region.
Amazingly, despite everything they have suffered, Palestine is ranked at 134th, only 3 places below the United States of America, while Israel stands at a lowly 143rd, only two places above Myanmar who also stand accused of Genocide.
Interestingly, the five permanent members of the UN who have the final say in the most important decisions concerning global war and peace do not come out very well from the survey.
The UK are the highest at 36, then France at 67, China is 80th, USA 131st and Russia are inside the bottom 10 in 158th place so maybe we should consider removing the bizarre UN Veto these countries hold at the UN (and pull out whenever their own interests are of concern) and let the people in Reykjavik, Copenhagen, Dublin, Wellington and Vienna run world affairs for a while.   

Cheering For Bernie

I do have a lot of time for Bernie Sanders ever since he got a long time missing light bulb fitted outside my garage (long story) so in any argument between him and the Israeli Prime Minister currently slaughtering civilians in his Genocide tour of Palestine, there will only be one winner in my eyes, and it isn't the one sat in Tel Aviv.    
It all began when Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that US Universities were being overrun by antisemitism on a scale comparable to the rise of Nazism in Germany and Israel is being falsely accused of genocide but the Jewish Sanders hit back by saying that it wasn't antisemitism to hold the Israeli leader accountable for his extremist and racist policies and it was insulting the intelligence of the American people to try and claim it was.
'No Mr Netanyahu' he explained in is video, 'it is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that, in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed over 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 78,000, 70% of whom are women and children' and then spent the next 2 and a half minutes listing a catalogue of destruction of infrastructure, hospitals, universities and schools, along with the killing of more than 400 health workers and blocking humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza, causing thousands of children to face malnutrition and famine.
When the two candidates the American people are facing are one who can barely make it though a sentence and another who is a currently facing jail time for criminal fraud charges and was recently fined $5 million for sexually abusing a former magazine writer, someone like Sanders stands head and shoulders above both of them and at the very least no garage would be without a light bulb.

Peace For Everyone Between Every River And Every Sea

George W Bush, after the 9/11 attacks, had a line where he would try to cowl people into supporting his attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan by saying you were either with him or against him and the same sort of thing is going on now with the idea that if you are not supporting Israel then you are supporting Hamas.
Obviously nonsense and there was an American student on a campus just after the American polices unnecessarily overhanded brutality on protesters who said something which i thought hit the nail on the head for most of us wanting to see an end to the bloodshed in the Middle East, saying she wanted: ‘peace for everyone between every river and every sea'.
The media doesn't help by labeling protests as 'pro-Palestinian' or 'anti-Israel', during the Iraq War there were 'anti-war' and 'peace protesters', not 'pro-Iraq' or 'anti-UK' protesters and Britain and America supply Israel with weapons with which the Israeli's have killed  tens of thousands of people, decimating homes, hospitals and schools but these actions are not portrayed as 'anti-Palestinian', although that is who they are firmly dropped and fired onto on what the highest court in the World, the ICJ, has ruled in all likelihood falls under the banner of genocide.
So support for the Palestinians is not support for Hamas who must be removed entirely and nor is it anti-Israel or antisemitic which is another trope which gets thrown around to try and stop any criticism of Israel but what is unmistakable is that the safety and security of Israeli's and Palestinians are dependent on both states being safe, secure and run by people who want to see peace.
Hamas and this Israeli Government both have the same agenda of prolonging a conflict which has been going on for decades, namely they are killing and punishing the 'other side' to keep themselves relevant and in power, the ones who can stop the atrocities coming across the Gaza–Israel barrier wall.
The only solution to a hopelessly one sided battle which has been going on since the 1940's is for Palestine and Israel to realise that for both to live in peace, both have to be safe with leaders interested in ensuring a peaceful co-existence with their neighbour and that isn't Hamas killing as many Jews as possible or Netanyahu inflicting a murderous genocide on the Palestinians.

Madness Of 2.5%

You sometimes look at the World and the people running it and you think everyone has gone nuts which is exactly what i thought this morning when i saw that the British Government are upping Defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP, or £87 billion.
In 2020, the UK government announced a reduction of Foreign Aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP citing a severe economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to returning to spending 0.7 per cent when the fiscal situation allowed and in 2023 £888 million was spent on humanitarian assistance.
Obviously they consider the fiscal situation still hasn't allowed them to put it back to 0.7% as they have been dishing out 0.5% ever since but somehow it has improved enough to allow them to drop 0.5% on buying weapons.
So reduce the amount paid out to actually save and improve peoples lives but increase the already staggeringly obscene amount we pay to take and destroy them.
The Treasury confirmed that it would be partially funding the extra defence spending by cutting the civil service headcount by more than 70,000 although the entire pay-bill of the civil service is around £14bn a year, making it unlikely that even deep cuts could make a dent in the extra £75bn needed.
The Civil Service, the Governments actual workforce, is already understaffed and at breaking point which is why it takes up to 6 months for your Tax Return to be dealt with and any repayment issued and months for your passport to be dealt with and why the backlog in the Home Office has resulted in  Asylum applications taking so long that the Asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels while they await their decision.
It really does boggle my mind that in a nation already creaking through Conservative Party austerity and cuts, they plan to make even deeper cuts to afford to buy bombs, missiles and bullets. Sheer and utter madness but you know some people will be cheering it while the infrastructure literally falls down around their ears through lack of funding.

See Trump And Think FAT SWINDLER

The Donald Trump court case currently under way in America can be confusing but i have come up with a handy Acronym which explains it all, FAT SWINDLER.

F is for Four which is the amount of years Trump could face if he is found guilty
A is for AMI who is the publishing company of the National Enquirer who were involved in the scheme to suppress any damaging stories about Trump
T is for the other woman, playboy model Karen McDougal who was given $150,000 for her silence over her affair with Trump

S is for Sexual Assault which is what Trump admitted to doing, saying he would grab women's genitals
W is for Witch Hunt which is what Trump repeatedly calls his trial
I is for Interference which is what prosecutors claim he was trying to do when he falsified his records 
N is for New York where the trial is being held
D is for Daniels, the porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford who was given £130,000 hush money by Trump
L is for Liar which is what the main witness and the man who made the payment to Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, is being painted
E is for Entries for the hush money payments made under 'legal expenses' in the Trump company books
R is for Records which the FBI seized showing emails, tax documents and business records relating to the hush money payments

There you go so every time you see the former President on the TV just think 'FAT SWINDLER' and it will all make perfect sense.

How Many Is Too Many?

Us humans are a hardy bunch, in the post 'History In 800,000 Year Old Air Bubble', i mentioned how approximately 70,000 years ago the entire human population was reduced to a few thousand following
a super-volcano eruption which caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode with temperatures dipping by -4.1°C (−7.4 °F).
A number of genetic studies have found that the human ancestor population greatly expanded from only a few thousand individuals that existed about 70,000 years ago and in 2022 we passed the 8 billion population mark so it may have looked a bit dicey for us but we did okay after all, maybe a bit too well because while it took all of human history until 1804 to reach 1 billion, we have been making up for lost time ever since.
In 1927 we numbered 2 billion, then 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998, 7 billion in 2010 and by 3037 it is projected we will hit the 9 million mark.
From 1 billion in 1804 to 8 billion in 2022 is only a matter of 218 years so we really didn't hang about with the reproducing and it was partly thanks to modern medicine and sanitation reducing infant mortality rates and medical science not coming up with the first modern contraceptive until the 1960's
The steep climb in the human population has not come without problems, such as polluting our land, air and sea's and using up the Earth's resources at an increasing rate.
Earth Overshoot Day, August 2nd in 2023, marks the date in the calendar when the human demand for Earth’s natural resources exceeds what the planet can generate within a year and today we need 1.75 planets to provide the natural resources for our consumption for a year. By 2030, we will need 2 planets.
According to the UN’s medium projection our population will peak around 10.4 billion in 2086, and will remain at this level for the remainder of the century although the 'high' end of the projection is  
14.8 billion by 2100 and the 'low' end 8.9 billion which is still way above the calculation that the ideal size of our species using the Earths resources would be around 2 billion people so are there now just too many of us?
The uncomfortable answer to that is obviously yes but that comes with the proviso that there are too many of us in the current way we are living so we need to be smarter and not use so much of the Earth's resources and ramp up the renewable energy sector whilst not polluting the only Planet we are capable of living upon which bizarrely, we seem reluctant to do but with humanity set to be around for many more centuries yet, reliant on a super-volcano literally not cooling our heels, we will have to find a way to rub along together and protect our environment to survive.