A Small Island Man

 I'm only three episodes in, but wow! This is really a stellar piece of drama. It's disturbing to watch, and even more disturbing is its power to resonate within myself. I sat through the first three episodes shouting at the screen whenever I saw Donny making the kind or nice decisions that would inevitably lead him into ever deepening and disastrous situations. We are all born naive. Our attitudes are formed and influenced by the environment we grow up in. For me, that meant a typical upper working-class, small 'c' conservative family. My mother, bless her, had exceptional potential for a far more bohemian artistic life, but that never got to see the light of day that would allow mum to flourish. Mum was kept locked up in a "housewife" existence by economic necessity controlled by a fairly 1950s patriarchal system. The remainder of my childhood environment was still stuck in a yesteryear antagonism and disgust of anything other than straighten-up-and-fly-righ...

I called out the inappropriateness of these aircraft carriers as part of the UK defense strategy two years ago. In the 21st century of high-precision self-guided missiles and torpedos, this ship would be a sitting duck without a large support operation to protect it and even then it would remain vulnerable. If it were sunk, it would result in a tremendous loss of life and a devastating blow to national morale and reputation too. Whilst deployed, it would need only one small armament to put a hole in its deck to render it useless for aircraft takeoff and landing., It now turns out that the UK has insufficient resources to provide the support requirements HMS Prince of Wales requires for it to be deployed safely. Some people have made huge amounts of money off the back of this. I have to wonder if top-brass advisors' palms were greased or perhaps the defense contractors rolled out plush red carpets with juicy incentives. HMS PoW has spent most of its time lame in port. It has never ...

Last night, I descended into the depths of a harrowing nightmare, where the chilling specter of war haunted every corner of my subconscious. In the eerie landscape of my dreams, I found myself visiting Serbia and in the middle of a war zone, desperately attempting to shield my loved ones from the merciless onslaught of violence. I was in a taxi and being taken to an underground car park and an area containing industrial plant and heating equipment for an office building above that had been razed by bombing. Local inhabitants were living a subterranean life of terror and taking shelter from incessant bombing and mortar attacks. On the street, mortars were flying into crowds. Some of the mortars were just empty shells, but some of them were armed and ripped people apart. You just never knew which mortars were real, but everyone was a weapon of psychological warfare designed to terrorize and destroy any human hope. As often in dreams, the precise details were not clear. I did not know who...

Popular Conservatism as espoused by humanity's foul skid mark Jacob Rees-Mogg and his group of self-obsessed, ecocentric, sociopaths, whose moral compasses only ever point in the direction of self-interest. "Any rational, democratic leader would naturally aspire to garner public support and advocate for policies that resonate with the populace. However, the term 'populist' has been tarnished, relegated to a label of disdain rather than admiration. It is portrayed as undignified and lacking in intellectual depth, as though the role of a politician is akin to administering unpleasant medicine to an unwilling patient. This patronizing attitude epitomizes the challenges of contemporary politics and underscores the imperative for a movement like Popular Conservatism – or PopCon, as it's abbreviated – to emerge." Source: Jacob Ress-Moog https://conservativehome.com/2024/02/06/jacob-rees-mogg-its-time-for-popular-conservatism/ In reality, the notion of delivering bit...

Last night, we watched series one of the BBC drama "Time." It depicts life in a British prison, and you can find the storyline and reviews online at the following links: - BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p09fs2qh/time - IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13138834/ The drugs, violence, and fear inside the prison looked very similar to what I have seen in an undercover documentary that explored an English prison. We send criminals to prison to remove them from society while they may pose a continued danger, to punish them for their crimes, and ultimately to reintegrate them into society after rehabilitation. How can we expect to rehabilitate offenders so they can rejoin modern civilization by sending them into an uncivilized, nineteenth-century hellhole where understaffing, drugs, and violence often necessitate resorting to violence for survival? The system is broken. Mainstream media and right-wing politicians stir up "Tough on Crime" slogans to appeal to...

  NAME brexit - Remove the United Kingdom (UK) subsystem from the European Union (EU) system SYNOPSIS brexit [OPTION] DESCRIPTION The brexit command removes the UK subsystem from the EU system. UK's exit from the EU starts by spawning an A50 process. Once the UK subsystem is removed from the EU system, a number of process privileges are automatically revoked. These include amongst others: Freedom Of Movement Single Market Customs Union Goods Standards Harmonisation OPTIONS -f --force Forces the brexit command to start the UK's exit from the EU, even if the UK Parliament has not voted to do so.  -jc --corbyn  Use a three-line whip to immediately trigger the A50 process without performing any safety checks. -p --prorogue issues a kill -9 to kill the parliamentary process before it can interfere with brexit. -h Displays a help message and exits. --cancel Cancel the brexit process (not implemented) EXAMPLES To start the UK's exit from the EU: brexit To force the UK's exit f...

Found on facebook- can vouch for it's authenticity Classifying AI as a simple probability machine and castigating it for regurgitating data as plagiarism misses a fundamental aspect of what contemporary AI has achieved. Specifically, ChatGPT and neural network AIs have confirmed that given enough time, complex behavior can emerge from very simple building blocks - "we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution." to quote Carl Sagan. The genius of modern AI was to introduce errors into the system (not always choosing the most likely outcome) this gives rise to what appears to be the very model by which life evolves, that is replication, variation, and selection. As for being given enough time for evolution; time within the context of AI evolution has become compressed by the super-exponential growth in computing power. It has taken 3.7 billion years of evolution from the first signs of life on planet Earth to reach a stage whe...