A work colleague of mine was talking last week about the creative power of using ai writing programs he used it to generate a template for a questionnaire for work and was really impressed with its ability to write out a template for him.
So with that in mind I have started to look at Ai art generating software and I am absolutely amazed by the results just from some basic prompts that I included to generate those images.
I do hope to continue to use such software to express myself in future too. One old image I have that I find really cool and inspirational is that of a polar bear swimming through ice cold waters it’s a fairly old image so I assume it is real as I have had the image since 2010.
I love the image and have in the past dreamed about polar bears too and love the fact of where they live, how dangerous and majestic they are as well as able to survive and thrive in such a hostile environment. I tried seeing could generate similar images with Ai photo generator and got the following results just in word press, its such a cool tool.
I also had a go on a Microsoft image generator and got the following results.
I also tried to generate an image of a polar bear being stared at by a wolf. The image below is using WordPress image generator.
I am just amazed by how cleaver these image generators are. Though they don’t always know what they are doing!
But mostly its impressive to view. The below image was using the Microsoft image generator this time.
When your the chosen one put on this planet by your American Christian God and then voted into office on his second time round by about 51% of the voting US electorate. Is this a huge vote against the global consensus on what is needed for the environment?
The US now has Trump in charge of deciding what happens in the court of humanity on the future of the climate of this world, a supreme court judge for an issue he has no time for and frankly does not understand and who’s interest it serves, to not care or understand anything about protecting or preserving anything to do with it either.
In reality the policy is one of seeing the environment as a mere stock or commodity to be treated like everything else as something to be bought and sold on an alter of American capitalism and exploitation. Not engaging with the attempt to protect or preserve but to be bought or sold merely for profit.
What he does will be no accident or miscalculation. He can now act as judge and jury on the future fate of this planet, by making a conscious choice to destroy past international treaties with the environment being relegated to a mere commercial product and play thing for a few dollars more a capitalist’s wet dream on the alter of Christian capitalism, but at what cost to us all?
It’s just like playing a game and rolling dice with the globe, a game that can be lost as well as won. Trump will now pick up a set of dice and roll them to see what happens next at the expense of the planet and its populations. One roll could result in no serious irreversible climate damage over the next four years while pumping out black gold from the seas and ground just to reduce the price of gasoline for consumers and make him and his buddies a lot of money.
Whereas on an alternative landing of the roll of the dice it could result in destroying recognised globally established environmental treaties, designed to save this planet and stave of irreversible global climate catastrophise. It could lead to us reaching one of many global tipping points that would result in global climate collapse in ecological systems on the planet and then to the death of us all or a serious reduction in humans ability to survive in spaces on this planet or degrade considerable this planets ability to sustain life as we know it.
While Trump might be banking on the unlikely outcome and too busy counting his profits in his bank accounts to think that the American nation is to big and powerful to be lost to a global issue and might not be affected. If he is wrong, we will all end up counting the cost and paying the price. Just when many US citizens shout out that their prayers have been answered and that their god is good capitalist Christian god and the heir to the thrown of power is Trump, who is now their president elect. I fear the god of this earth to whom I pray to on this planet has yet to give their answer back and will most likely have the last word on this matter of the climate.
We are all now left with no alternative at this moment in time, but to hope that climate scientists are wrong and have miscalculated with all the evidence presented to them that the climate is in peril and so to our ability to maintain life on this earth unless we change course and the fact that we are seeing 100 year likely storms on a yearly basis and are just about to brake another climate record for hottest global temperature on record this year is inconsequential.
We all have to hope, whether we like it or not that exploiting the climate, degrading the environment and the dismantling of globally agreed climate treaties has no irreversible consequences or a bare minimum negative effect to this world or just merely consequences that can be witnessed and then circumnavigated or reversed in some as yet unforeseen way to prevent climate collapse and irreversible habitat and species extinction. I would rather not leave the future of my home, species and plant to Trump and hope, but I was not at the ballot box when his name was put on the card.
Mr President-elect for what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.
Elections, winners and losers, are happening all around us. In a few days time there will be a huge global future defining election in the USA. Where as in the UK the Labour Party and what we like to think are a socialist leaning leftist side of our democracy won an election a few months ago and have just had their first financial budget in which they look to define who they are and what they will do to the nation of the UK, how they will invest in people, projects and public services. Whilst at the same time politicize issues such smoking as a social evil that deserves to be taxed, chasing and detaining boat immigrants that deserve to be processed and sent back from which ever version of hell they have been forced to flee in the first place and also the panto of continued punishment of those in receipt of financial benefit by the state.
One such potential new policy by labour is to have career advisors in mental health wards so after people that have had a major psychological breakdown for whatever reason or circumstance can then be provided a dose of patronising information and propaganda, on why they are a failed unemployable human being and what they need to do to be a good little take a pay packet home earner. Such a type of policy has no compassion or care about it and will more likely result in more deaths and pain through the front door of the health service a sort of culling of those in need by those in power.
Another seriously damaging policy of Labour is to the inheritance tax changes for farmers taking money out of farming families on their death bed. This will result in many farmers no longer being able to hand down to the next generation an inheritance of a farm kept in families for generations. Admittedly farmers never vote for the Labour party and never will, but trying to rake in money by destroying family businesses is cold hearted and a brutal short sigted policy, that will very much come back to haunt the Labour party, probably quicker than it expects it to. There will be many farmers angry and potentially ready sooner rather than later to protest about this issue with the concept of taking money of dead farmers through an inheritance tax being taken over their dead bodies quite literally I’m sure there will be resistance to this and not forgiven by the farmers for the damage it will do to their farms and families.
The weird thing in politics though is that although those being targeted now who will may lead to the downfall of a future Labour government probably kept quite when the Conservatives were slowly destroying the walls, ceiling and foundations of our schools, hospitals, rivers and roads. The necessary evil about politics and human nature is people do not like to speak out, protest or show dissent unless or until they feel what is politically happening directly affects them.
This week has seen one of the greatest injustices in a British court in modern history. On Thursday 18th July, five people were given the highest sentences for nonviolent protest this country has ever seen. They were on trial for holding a zoom call, calling on others to take action to raise the alarm about the greatest threat humanity has ever faced: the climate and nature crises.
These sentences were handed down just days after the new government’s policy of no new licensing for oil and gas infrastructure was announced. In a world of sound, evidence-based governance, none of this needed to happen. With prisons at breaking point and the new government acting urgently to address this, how can these sentences be seen as anything other than insanity? The sentences, ranging from 4 to 5 years, are higher than those given to many who commit serious sexual assault.
The defendants were denied the right to explain to a jury why they took the action they did, making a mockery of the right to a fair trial, with the judge saying that the Crown Prosecution’s agreed facts on climate collapse – including that the world has gone beyond 1.5 degrees for 12 consecutive months – were “neither here nor there”. These five brave, defiant people, like all nonviolent protestors, are fulfilling a necessary service by alerting the nation to the grave risk we all face, as scientists in their droves express their fear that many of the Earth’s systems are already at breaking point.
Immediately after the verdict, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders issued an extraordinary statement: “Today marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”
According to the Office for National Statistics, 74% of people in the UK want urgent action on the climate crisis. Until a couple of weeks ago that majority was blocked by a Prime Minister who used climate – an existential threat – as a wedge issue in an election he lost. This new government has inherited a suite of recent legislation that conflicts with International Human Rights Law, and has put everyone’s right to peaceful protest at risk. The new government can address this now, as they have with fossil fuel licensing.
The world stands at a crossroads and so does our democracy. We write in support of Chris Packham and Dale Vince’s request for an urgent meeting with you, to be recorded so it is transparent to the public, to discuss the jailing of truth tellers and their silencing in court.
July 9th 2010 is a date that comes up on my computer pictures timeline for a wonderful visit from Portsmouth to the Island of Alderney on a tall ship no less when I was 34 some 14 years ago now.
Alderney is the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands. It is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency. It is 3 miles long and 1+1⁄2 miles wide. The island’s area is 3 square miles, making it the third-largest island of the Channel Islands, and the second largest in the Bailiwick.
I was staying in supported accommodation in Chepstow in South Wales at the time of the trip to Alderney, after having come out of a hospital stay, due to struggling with my mental health back then. Though I am pleased to say that that was the last time I spent time in hospital due to my mental health and had I not been staying in accommodation in Chepstow I would never have been invited to sail on the ship.
I was well on the way to recovery when this trip to Alderney took place and it really was a great adventure and a real privilege to go there on the working tall ship. I have just spent the last two hours trying to work out the name of the charity that we sailed with and also the name of the boat. Which I am pleased to say I found out eventually.
It turns out the boat is called as already mentioned in the title the Queen Galadriel and was originally built in 1937 in Svenborg, Denmark and was named Else first after the Captain’s daughter. She traded as a cargo vessel around the coasts of Denmark and Norway, initially as a motor sailor but after 1956 under motor alone. In 1983, she was bought by The Cirdan Sailing Trust and went into service, renamed the Queen Galadriel. The Ciridan Saling trust still run her today and groups or individuals can still pay to go on trips with her.
Back in 2010 the weather was stunning when we sailed out to Alderney, really hot, but with a cool breeze on the ship so you did not really feel the heat too much when sailing. Alderney was such a lovely place to visit also, with the beaches there being really special as well.
I really enjoy trying to understand and paying attention to politics – even though it is perhaps normal or fashionable to express no interest or have no view. But for me politics does matters, democracy matters and having a view and interpretation matters.
When you have a political discussion with someone or listen to the views of others in the news it’s exceptionally rare to agree or not find disagreements or points to have further discussion upon and maybe the increased amount of disagreements and diversity of opinion is what some people love about politics and on the other hand the disagreements and diversity of opinions is what puts some people of politics!
I have so far in my life voted in 7 general elections have supported 2 political parties so far and might end up supporting a third party in the next general election. Considering how interested I am in politics and democracy I feel my actual input into the political and democratic system is very small.
When I was 18 I was a member of the Liberal Democrats a smaller party in the UK that you could have summed up being a left leaning party that believes in personal liberty for individual and advocates a change to the voting system of the UK so as to see proportional representation and more people have their views represented in the house of commons and also believes in the funding of political institutions for the benefit of all. One of the things that put me off them is when they went into power with the Conservative party which resulted in from my perspective a considerable amount of damage to the UK, where as others can argue through majority rule the British people got what they asked and voted for with Brexit when we left the European Union and introduced Conservative policies to cuts in taxes and damage public services due to lack of vision, investment and resourcing.
I have never been a member of the Labour party but I have voted for them in a general election and been served by a local Labour MP called Ben Bradshaw he was culture minister in the last labour government well over 14 years ago and is now stepping down and making way for a new local MP at the next general election. So most elections in which I have voted for have been for the Labour candidates and this election I will likely give my vote to the green party candidate in Exeter. I have regularly voted for local city councillors that are members of the green party and fortuntly they were elected to stand in my local city council. I have been a paid up member of the green party now and respect and believe in the principles and points of view of the green party. So on the election I will be choosing to vote with my principles and vote green or vote to beat the conservative and vote Labour.
I am more of an anti-Conservative party voter than I am a pro one particular party voter, I am a member of the green party because I believe they are a progressive party with practical solutions on how to invest in and protect our environment and have policies on the local, national and international level that reflect this. But mostly I am an anti-conservative voter, if the greens seek to protect the environment then the conservative party seek to damage the environment, society and people within my own community so as to benefit from that damage financially themselves and such policies and actions I find repulsive.
A conservative will often boast about what freedoms they give to you while they profit considerably at your expense when governing you. It is argued that we live in a capitalist society and it is the only way to live. But I do not think it is that simple I would argue we are consumers not capitalists. We produce goods and services to be consumed and that way of existence can be managed and governed to ensure that the system is safe for the environment and the citizens that live within in e.g. safe water to drink and safe places to work and live. A capitalist mere profit is king society does not care whether the water is safe it only cares whether it is profitable or whether your work or live is safe only whether it is profitable to the economy. We should aspire to work towards a consumer led society not capitalistic profit at the price of everything else society it is damaging road to destruction of this planet and must be voted against and spoken out against at every opportunity.
The world is forever changing, for some this presents opportunities and for some it presents threats. It is not just about what is happening but it is about how you perceive it to be happening or how you are informed or misinformed on what is going on.
With increased technological developments taking place as well as a communications network like none ever developed on our planet prior to the last 20 years with the internet, TV and telecommunications. We can now see, hear and be informed within seconds or minutes of developments on earth that we might never have been informed about or might have possibly only learned about after the event years later in history books or documentaries.
So our means of communicating changes has changed as well. Our climate is also changing, as again to our ability to be informed of those changes. We were not always aware of big earthquakes, volcanoes, storms and hurricanes affecting places around the globe. But now with 24 hour news it’s very much a news filler item to watch the suffering of others around the globe in these horrific condition and not only that but due to global climate chaos they are actually happening more frequently too.
Industrialisation of work force and artificial intelligence developments making AI better than humans at doing jobs we once thought we could do for life? So not only do we have to worry about will we earn enough to be attractive and provide for another partner or family, we now could end up finding that our career passion the job we love doing is ultimately not able to be done by us any more and has been outsourced to a PC or machine of some other type.
So these issues are happening and one main inevitability is that change is constant and continuous, you cannot stop change from happening but you can engage to what is changing and reflect on it, accommodate it, do your best to manage it in your life or try to understand it and how it effects you.
One way I get my head around understanding changes going on in the political world is by supporting and advocating for changes I want to see by joining a political party such as the Green Party, or becoming a member of a charity such as Moor Trees. Though my contributions may be small in the scheme of things, they still matter and contributing to a bigger picture for potential positive change in a way I would like the world around me to be shaped. Change is not always negative and great and beautiful things do come into this world when changes are able to be made and realised.
Another way to perhaps be aware of change and understand how it affects you is to read, listen and watch news articles and stories. Though not always a pleasant thing to do and best not to put your interpretations all into one basket of news sources but to take from a variety of sources. The newspaper review on BBC news or UK Sky (Not Murdock owned or dictated to news) can be informative when they discuss the next days headlines with some interpretations of what those headlines are. I tend to find the more you just listen to one persons perspective though the more chance you have of being misinformed, manipulated or indoctrinated into another’s view when its far more important to try and think for yourself.
One final little point is regarding if the world is changing for better or worse are we at the end of time? Or the end of days or is an apocalypse around our corner. Well I hope not but again that’s just a matter of opinion. People have feared, expected or written about living in the end of days, a war that will end all war or Armageddon being around the corner for thousands of years in religious circles and I can only assume if you believe in a certain deity then you have also had to be prepared that it’s only a matter of time before they call last orders at the global bar and closing time on all earth, man and existence as we know it. If you don’t believe in said god then you will alternatively think that’s an impossibility of a God that does not exist to call time on something that they have no power over because they are not here to do it! Finally on this point about whether we could be entering a time of growth, goodness, fear or darkness.
Well I don’t believe in a god that could destroy its own creation as a promise it made to its people. I don’t believe in a god that puts some people on the side of being good people due to where or who they were born from or came from and others on the side of evil due to where they were born or who they were born from or came from. I really just don’t accept that the god I pray to, believe in or work for and live by could be so narrow minded! The god I believe in is not fighting for Armageddon against an inherent enemy but fighting for justice for all of life and creation.
Yep it’s true on the plus side I am one more step closer to being an adult and on the downside it’s err true I am one more step closer to being an adult.
I must admit my collection of books is and has always been very eclectic mix for example I have a book of poems from a great local Exeter Poet called Steve Carnell – who a while back used to do the open mic circuit and read out his awesome poems on great drunken lad’s nights out he is an awesome guy and once close friend –but as times move on so did he.
Book of Poems called the 23rd Mojo by Steve Carnell
The next wonderful human that I know or knew who wrote another awesome book is the lovely Barbara Haddrill – She wrote an eco travel book called Babs to Brisbane about her eco travel to of all places Brisbane in order to be a bridesmaid at her friend’s wedding. Babs is such a wonderful talented and inspirational person.
Babs to Brisbane by Barbara Haddrill
My next book is not by someone I know but I think the front cover title changed and influenced my entire life from the day that I read it to this. It’s called ‘The only planet of choice’ – it’s at the very least a mind opening spiritual and philosophical fantasy concerning the evolution of earth, you, me and the universe – the choices that we make and how they impact on everyone and everything and ripple through time and space and at most it is something so much more than that!
My next book was a gift from my mum to make my book collection look a little more sensible and again adult like. It’s called RSPB Handbook of British Birds. I found it very handy when trying to identify the birds along my street and on my bird table during lockdown back in the old days of covid lockdown times.
My fiaal book that I am showing is a dream dictionary and I have a few of these but this is by far my favourite one which is by Russell Grant and is his Illustrated Dream Dictionary. I’m on my second copy of this book now as the first fell apart from me waking up too many times in the middle of the night and grabbing it and quickly trying to see what it thought about my dreams and then chucking it back on the floor when I had finished and went back to sleep. To this day I swear I am not sure if one of those darn dreams or nightmares has come true yet! But it was always interesting to read the interpretation and Russell Grant always put a positive spin on dreams and nightmares’ which from an early age I have found comforting.
Oh well onwards and upwards. Well speaking of onwards and upwards or flashing outwards with less brightness I think my TV might be on the blink and the back light might be about to give out – looks like another adult purchase might be on the cards – oh bugger, TV Don’t go dark on me just yet.
South West Water was formed in 1989 when the water industry in the United Kingdom was privatised. It is responsible for the supply of the region’s drinking water, the treatment and disposal of sewage, and the protection of inland and bathing waters. You would think something like water would be a great industry to be involved in, potentially profitable for those running it while also being a public good where customers benefit from clean water in the tap, in their rivers and at the beaches.
Sadly that is not the business model that exists and it make me think if a human capitalist organisation can fail to run something as simple and beneficial as the water that you drink then what other private companies also failing to run or do damage to our eco systems when operating. I know that to exploit an individual whether customer or employee is to produce profit, it therefore logical to assume that many organisations do inflict damage on the environment as a means of making money and generating profit.
Pollution in the UK waterways is a major problem and at a time of increased global climate change and damage and degradation to eco systems, the pollution pumped into our local waterways by the water industries is continuing to cause damage and illness to living organisms.
Earlier this year South West Water was given a £2.1m fine for pollution offences which is the largest ever fine imposed for environmental offences in Devon and Cornwall. Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) a marine conservation charity working with communities to protect oceans, waves, beaches and marine life. It was created in 1990 by a group of Cornish surfer’s. According to Surfers Against Sewage the issues causing the sewage pollution crisis are that the UK’s antiquated sewerage system is woefully inadequate. Water companies have failed to invest to protect the coastal and river environment. They instead rely on a network of around 18,000 licensed sewer overflows to routinely discharge raw sewage into rivers and the ocean. In 2021 alone sewage discharged into rivers and seas 370,000 times for a total of 2.7 million hours.
Polluters have simply been profiteering from polluting. Water companies have paid out an eyewatering £60 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last 30 years. And CEOs are often granted six figure pay packets every year. And to make things worse, the government are now allowing water companies to self monitor their environmental performance resulting in ever increasing abuses of the system. In 2021, Southern Water were fined £90 million for serial misreporting and the Environment Agency and Ofwat have launched the largest ever investigation of water company behaviour after water companies admitted they may have illegally released untreated sewage into rivers and waterways. The weak enforcement of existing regulation from consistently underfunded and under resourced environment agencies means there is no effective driver to ensure water companies change their behaviour.
And as if the stench of the sewage stink could not get any worse, the current water quality testing regimes designed to protect water users and the environment are set up to fail us. Evidence shows that we have a water quality testing regime that wilfully discounts and ignores the worst pollution events in the country and thus misleads the public about the safety of the waters.
South West Water PR gurus seem to be a million miles away from the reality above while pumping sewage into our water systems they are also pumping out press releases asking their customers to urge to conserve water and save the planet! If only SWW could take their own advice.
One thing about capitalist ventures that often fails an eco system or environment is that you cannot quantify the profitability or loss to an environment when you fail to look after it. There is no loss in earnings to having a failed ecosystem merely ever decreasing resources that you then pay more for. Regulations of a safe and sustainable system is not at the heart of how to run a profitable capitalist good or utility and yet effective regulation in a capitalist venture that ensures effective management, clean waters and the risk of having the ownership of the business taken away if the company is clearly failing to do the one thing it was created to do which is provide clean water. There is a huge risk with capitalist ventures that they merely risk putting into their calculations an amount of money put aside for paying for pollution breaches rather than using that money to prevent them in the first place. This does a disservice to the ecosystems that the water companies have been created to clean and protect and also demonstrates where capitalism is failing at the expense of our living environment.
The UK is littered with failed utilities and public goods from the 1980 and 90’s selloff and cull of public services we were peddled the view and principle that profits are good and ownership by the state bad. If these water companies were still run as a public owned utility what is happening today would be a political scandal but seeing as its a private company, the morality of the situation is just written off as a fat cat boss profiteering at the expense of its own customers and the environment, it’s what capitalists do so who really cares.
Oh and a serious increase in sea temperatures stunning and frightening scientist across the globe.
Record temperature combined with an anticipated El Niño could devastate marine life and increase the chances of extreme weather.
Entire north Atlantic has never been as warm and Global sea temperatures are spiking to levels that has scientists stunned and frightened Air temperatures too are at record highs and record low Antarctic ice.
The global ocean hit a new record temperature of 21.1 ºC in early April, 0.1 ºC higher than the last record in March 2016. Although striking, the figure (see ‘How the ocean is warming’) is in line with the ocean warming anticipated from climate change. What is remarkable is its occurrence ahead of — rather than during — the El Niño climate event that is expected to bring warmer, wetter weather to the eastern Pacific region later this year.
That means warmer-than-average ocean temperatures are likely to persist or even intensify, bringing with them more-extreme weather and marine heatwaves, which spell problems for marine life from corals to whales.
“We are probably looking at a string of record highs over the next year or so,” says Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This coming year is gonna be a wild ride if the El Niño really takes off.”
While these world is being irreparably scarred by the actions of man and life on earth changing events are happening right before our eyes in Britain were all being so wonderfully polite about it with the main topic on the weather being how good it’s got and how gloriously warm it is.
Humans in positions of power still continue to argue the toss over things that just in the real big picture way just don’t matter or won’t matter on a dead burning planet. In the UK we have an enquiry on how the government did during covid due to come out tomorrow and the former leader of the conservative party has already resigned from parliament saying the enquiry is flawed because I assume they think he was either accidently or deliberately incompetent and/or negligent.
So while Boris ditches a spine from his back and gets out while the going gets tough, in the USA the former president Donald Trump is being prosecuted for taking confidential and top secret documents out of the white house and claiming he could do what he liked while president so he did nothing wrong which is absolute rubbish and will be shown as such in any court of law worth its salt.
The only slight silver lining to these incompetent former leaders of the free world, is that both these men are not in power anymore. But alas they both aspire to come back into power, and people would again be duped into voting for them, they are full of pomp and promises, just completely lack competence and an ability to deliver. Its not as if they have not done enough damage already to their own countries and planet already!!!
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