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How excellent

Adultery is set to become legal in the state of New York with politicians poised to scrap the crime of infidelity among married people.

So now they’ll spend more time fucking each other rather than the country.

Sorry, obvious joke is obvious.

Slightly dangerous, no?

The far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party scored a rare political victory in Saxony after a Leftist opposition councillor announced he was “going for a joint” and missed a vote.

Dresden city council debated a motion on Friday calling for asylum seekers to be given payment cards rather than cash to buy food and supplies.

The proposal had been put forward by the AfD, which Germany’s intelligence service has officially designated a Right-wing extremist party in the state of Saxony.

Sure, the purpose of the intelligence lot is to collect intelligence and warn on hte basis of that. But, umm, the bureau of the esbalishment gets to define what is an allowable set of political policies?

Hmm.

Disappointed?

There is only one problem. There is no such book. I cancelled the contract to write it in 2022 when I had long Covid and had no energy to work on it over very many months. Once I got better I decided not to revive the project because there was by then too much else to do in catching up with time lost. So, this book does not exist. I have told Amazon and Wiley. Meanwhile, please do not try to buy it. You will be very disappointed if you do.

Dunno really, a book not written by Spud sounds quite enticing.

When is the Nesrine Malik column on this?

‘Here, there is no future’: ethnic cleansing and fresh atrocities drive exodus of thousands from Darfur
Almost a year since conflict reignited in Sudan, its terrified people are crossing borders to Chad and beyond. An increasing number are trying to reach Europe as food supplies dwindle in the refugee camps and the eyes of the world look elsewhere

The Guardian has an Anglo Sudanese columnist, one big on telling us all about racism, migration, oppression and even slavery. Don’t we all look forward to her story of why her own Arab Sudanese are being so beastly to the non-Arab and blacker Sudanese?

Get me a feather

So I can be knocked down:

Playground bullies do prosper – and go on to earn more in middle age
Five-decade UK study finds that aggression at school leads to better-paying jobs, while those with emotional instability went on to earn less

No, that’s wrong.

Children who displayed aggressive behaviour at school, such as bullying or temper outbursts, are likely to earn more money in middle age, according to a five-decade study that upends the maxim that bullies do not prosper.

They are also more likely to have higher job satisfaction and be in more desirable jobs, say researchers from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

That might be right.

It’s not that having been a bully leads to such things. It’s that the same character traits lead to both such things. And, umm, that aggressive and even o verbearing men do better is such a surprise, yes?

Even by Russian standards this is bad

Vladimir Putin said Russia had arrested all four gunmen responsible for the shooting that killed 133 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, claiming that the perpetrators of one of the worst terror attacks in the country’s history planned to flee to Ukraine.

In his first public comments on the terrorist attacks that shocked the nation, the Russian president made no mention of Islamic State’s claim to have carried out the attack.

Instead, Putin suggested without evidence that Ukraine may have been involved in Friday’s attack at the Crocus City Hall just outside Moscow, saying that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for the terrorists to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine before they were apprehended.

“They tried to hide and move towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,” Putin said in a televised address.

A “window” eh? Someone sut the wire in preparation for them being able to get through?

Imagine – no, just go on – imagine that the FSB had that level of data. Then why didn’t they have the data about their coming the other way?

Tractor statistics stuff.

Hmm, OK

Hotel room shampoo bottles to be banned in Northern Ireland but not in the rest of the UK
New EU net-zero laws on packaging waste will also see plastic shrink wrap and sauces in plastic sachets prohibited under Windsor Framework

Great, so we’ve a natural experiment here.

Hands up anyone who thinks it will be honestly studied?

Tsk

I actually quite like Dan Scardino – been interviewed by him twice and all that. But:

The most striking point made at this year’s forum came in a seemingly innocuous comment in the event’s opening speech. The director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Dr Qu Dongyu, questioned why, with more than 1,000 known varieties of banana, the world mostly depends on just one, a species called the Cavendish. That needs to change, he said, hinting that we are all part of the problem.

Cavendish is not a species, it’s a cultivar. And yes, this is important:

Most people don’t question why every banana they’ve ever eaten looks and tastes pretty much the same. Most of us will never try a blue java from Indonesia with its soft, unctuous texture and flavour of vanilla ice-cream, or the Chinese banana that is so aromatic it’s been given the name go san heong, meaning “you can smell it from the next mountain”. The demand for low-cost, high-yielding varieties has resulted in vast monocultures of just one type of globally traded banana, and this is true of many other crops as well. Homogeneity in the food system is a risky strategy, because it reduces our ability to adapt in a rapidly changing world.

Unlike wild bananas, which grow from seed, every single Cavendish is a clone, the offspring of a slice of the plant’s suckers growing below ground.

All of thosew 1,000 cultivars – not species – of banana are sterile in this same sense. The Blue Java also – for example – suffers from Panama Disease.

There are indeed the two ancestral, wild, bananas who propagate by seed. But they have, through varied cross breeding, produced those 1,000 types. And, you know, if you’re going to write a book about the problems of genetic diversity in our foodstuffs – Dan’s project – this is one of those things that you really need to get right at the beginning, no?

A possibly interesting little detail

Chinese AI experts are circumventing Joe Biden’s export bans to obtain advanced microchips, academic papers have shown.

High-end AI chips made by the US tech giant Nvidia have been used by an employee at a blacklisted Beijing company as well as academics at China’s national science institute, according to studies published online.

The Biden administration has barred Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips in China amid a global race to develop powerful AI systems and concerns about possible military uses.

However, four academic papers published on the open access science website ArXiv in recent weeks demonstrate experiments done in China using Nvidia’s H100, the company’s most powerful AI chip.

The studies include using AI systems to solve logic problems and carrying out tests of their mathematical ability.

While the researchers are using the H100 chips in small numbers – eight chips or fewer, compared to the thousands that have been acquired by US tech giants – the studies show that they are having some success circumventing US controls.

The people who run the varied US export control programs – for nuclear, military, dual use and so on and on – are not entirely insane. Yes, yes, I know, bit of a revelation that.

If you can buy it retail then it’s not controlled. On the obvious grounds that if you can buy it, from the shelf, at Walmart (or, OK, Frys) then there really is no damn point in trying to control who can get on a ‘plane with it. Sure, we might even want to control still, but as it’s obviously lunatic to think that we can let’s not bother.

Can you buy these chips retail? Well then…..

Buttress? Yes

On Friday, shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corp, a listed cash shell, voted to approve a merger with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the company behind Mr Trump’s social network Truth Social.

It means TMTG will join the Nasdaq exchange as early as next week. Mr Trump will own a majority of the combined company with a stake worth around $3.5bn.

Mr Trump has until Monday to pay a $454m bond to a New York civil fraud case and authorities could seize his assets if he does not pay. He must pay the bond as he seeks to appeal a ruling that he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets.

While he would not be able to sell his shares for six months, the merger of TMTG and Digital World may buttress Mr Trump’s finances.

It’s fairly standard that you cvan borrow up to 50% of the value of a holding of a listed stock. More if it’s a major stock.

I have to admit that the pain and grief there’s been in getting this Truth Social merger with Digital World has surprised the hell out of me. Given the ease with which these things usually go through the year – or is it two? – delay here has been seen by me at least as part of that legal warfare against Trump. An insistence that he not be allowed to benefit from anything…..

Man’s an abject buffoon

The Guardian reports this morning that:

Overall, during the year [2022-23] 12 million people were in absolute poverty [in the UK] – equivalent to 18% of the population, including 3.6 million children – levels of hardship last seen in 2011-12 after the financial crash.

Growth will not solve this. We know that wealth never has and never will trickle down.

Sigh.

Ignorant, ignorant, twat.

So, erm, abject stupidity then?

Radical pay-what-you-can restaurant faces eviction from mill it refurbished
The Long Table says it took thousands of hours of work to turn derelict site into a community space, but landlord has now sold it

Erm?

Tom Herbert, the co-founder of The Long Table, said the community had ploughed in thousands of hours of work and as much as £300,000 in cash over three years in order to transform Brimscombe Mill from a derelict site into a bustling social centre.

“It had been derelict for 30 years, roof falling in, no services, no electricity, no water,” Herbert said.

“It had been used as a place for local kids to hang out and play their music. There were people sleeping rough in it, it had human excrement in it. The place was a shithole basically, that no one else wanted.”

OK:

Faced with security problems that made the site a liability, the landlord gave The Long Table and its partner businesses a five-year lease, with a break clause at years three and four, at a near peppercorn rent of £15,000 a year. “The community rolled up their sleeves, people put in cash … it was just amazing,” said Herbert.

“We spent several hundred thousand [pounds] on making the building habitable, fixing up the roof, fixing up the flooring, which had big puddles in it and great big holes, painting the whole thing white so it looks clean, and then a lot of electrics and putting in a kitchen and things like that.”

The work was done in good faith, said Herbert, and on the hope that there would be the opportunity to extend the lease, or to be given the option to buy it if the landlord chose to sell.

Ah, yes, abject stupidity then. Capital investment on hte hope, not the nailed down contract.

There’s a reason us Bathonians think the Stroud people aren’t all that birght. Over and above their being too close to Slad.

Jeebus

To me, heterosexual dating culture’s obsession with height has always been one of its most baffling features (among many).

In general and thus normally men are taller than women. So, a few hundred thousand years of humanity have got used to that idea. This is then reflected in cultural norms.

It’s as if the bird has never heard of path dependence.

I can’t expect society to stop rewarding tall men for being tall, but I do think women (and everyone) can make a difference by interrogating their own desires and expanding their stringent boundaries. It not only opens up your dating pool, it opens you up to different kinds of people and experiences. It’s time for tall men to have to prove themselves like everyone else, and it’s time for the rest of us to be more like Zendaya.

Ah, yes, she really does believe that society is born anew in each generation, the tabula rasa.

Yes, obviously

William Shatner: ‘Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu’

This probably isn’t original but I liken it to jazz.

In music you’ve the three, rhythm, harmony and melody. Play all three straight and it’s not jazz. Hold two constant and play with one – say Dave Brubeck with rhythm or Jaques Loussier with melody – and it’s jazz. Yes, yes, that’s very simplistic and so much so that it’s wrong but it works for me as an analogy. And when you try to play with two holding one constant it’s often very odd and sometimes just wondrous. Playing with all three at the same time gives you freeform which is just noise.

So too with sci-fi. Having humans acting humanly in a weird environment is sci-fi. Having humans acting like a fairy story in a weird environment is probably sci-fantasy. As is also non-humans in a normal one and so on.

Playing with all three – one story I recall had non-humans in another universe tryinmg to break through into this one (no, not following Rincewind) because theirs was dying and that was just a word salad – freeform.

Appealing to Sir Pterry also works here. We’re Pan Narrans. But it’s stories about us that interest. So, good stories are going to be about us – perhaps in a weird environment.

Sure

A senior Ukrainian army official who allegedly embezzled more than £1 million meant to buy rations for the military has been detained.

The suspect, named locally as Oleksandr Kozlovsky, was working as the head of a military department that procured food for soldiers before his arrest.

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation claimed he had used the funds to buy an apartment in Kyiv, a dozen plots of land and a car instead of spending the money on supplies for the military.

Both Russia and Ukraine are grossly corrupt by our or any reasonable standard.

From gossip – and yes, gossip with those who would if not know at least have a very clear idea – the Russian military is grossly more corrupt than the Ukrainian, even if at more general government level that was the other way around a few years back.

That Ukie food supply is bent is therefore not a game changer. Either on the ground – is it more or less bent than the Russian matters – not in any support level outsiders might want to give. Note “any support level”. Whatever conclusion we have already is not to be changed by this detail is what is meant.

This is indeed what will happen

A British expat has been shot dead by police after pointing a gun at them outside his home in Pennsylvania.

Officers opened fire on Gregor Fleming, 44, after he “displayed a firearm” and moved towards them on March 7 in Hampden Township.

He died immediately, with his American fiancee, Kelly Thompson, 47, a medical assistant, witnessing the shooting.

Pennsylvania State Police have begun an investigation but Ms Thompson refused to criticise their handling of the incident.

She told the Daily Record: “I watched everything happen. He left the police with no choice.

“They told him to drop the gun several times and he refused. He started walking towards them with the gun and they had no choice but to do what they did.

“It’s an image burned in my mind that I will never forget. I watched the love of my life die right in front of me.”

Absolutely glorious

The court was told that he had wired instructions from a hotel in St Tropez to his City dealers to buy 1,000 tonnes of coca at a cost of £343,000, but the price fell and he had lost £36,000.

The Times subs might want to revist that. Entirely, and obviously, glorious though it is as a typo.

Horrors

‘Our bills have tripled’: UK’s first Turkish mosque fights to survive in London
Young people are slowly stopping attending Dalston mosque that could be forced to accept developers’ offers, says owner

Gosh.

The mosque was first built in 1903 and was initially used as a synagogue for the Jewish community. By the 1970s, the building was abandoned and taken over by Erkin’s father, Ramadan Güney, who turned it into the UK’s first Turkish mosque. “In those days, it was thriving, it was heaving with people and support. There were no financial issues back then,” said Güney.

Building changes use a couple of times a century. Ho Hum.

Güney said: “I’m not here for money, if I was, I would have sold the building and gone. It’s a mosque, it shouldn’t be up for sale, it shouldn’t be interfered with. It’s a sacred place.”

But you bought it Matey.

Twat, twat, twat

Plans for regulator illustrate inherently political nature of football
Jason Stockwood
Sport does not exist in a vacuum and football clubs will always be powerful emblems of our communal identity

Cool! So, as the communal identity already exists there’s no need to communalise it by having a national – and politically driven – regulator, is there?