Critics and first-time smellers often describe the odor as resembling sewage, rotten eggs, raw onions, garlic, old gym socks, or hot garbage. Fans, however, may perceive subtle sweet or floral undertones.

The essential qualities of a good typeface balance visual beauty with practical function. This is just plain ugly and makes Comic sans look elegant. Using this crud is as acceptable as attending a funeral dressed as a clown.

Reminds me of Trump.

Trump knowledge

During an October 2026 campaign rally in Ohio, he stated, “I know more about everything than anybody in this room, anybody anywhere in the world,” though he briefly considered that a local housewife might know more about business than him. The Military & ISIS: Claimed to know more about the military and ISIS than military generals. Taxes & The Tax Code: Claimed to understand the tax code and tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president. Lawsuits: Declared himself “the king” regarding lawsuits and legal matters. [ Infrastructure & Renewable Energy: Asserted he knows more about infrastructure and renewables than any human being on Earth Drones & Technology: Stated, “I know more about drones than anybody,” alongside claims about tech and safety systems Grass & Golf Courses: Claimed in 2025 that he knows “more about grass than any human being” due to owning golf courses globally Other Subjects: Additional topics have included Facebook, polls, the “other side” of politics, steelworkers, campaign finance/contributions, and the word “apprentice”.

You can watch a compilation of these statements via the ‘Nobody Knows More’ Than Trump About Anything: A Supercut on Youtube.

Trump may be the most knowing man on the planet. Trump knowledge. During an October 2026 campaign rally in Ohio, he stated, “I know more about everything than anybody in this room, anybody anywhere in the world,” though he briefly considered that a local housewife might know more about business than him. The Military & ISIS: Claimed to know more about the military and ISIS than military generals. Taxes & The Tax Code: Claimed to understand the tax code and tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president. Lawsuits: Declared himself “the king” regarding lawsuits and legal matters. [ Infrastructure & Renewable Energy: Asserted he knows more about infrastructure and renewables than any human being on Earth Drones & Technology: Stated, “I know more about drones than anybody,” alongside claims about tech and safety systems. Grass & Golf Courses: Claimed in 2025 that he knows “more about grass than any human being” due to owning golf courses globally. Other Subjects: Additional topics have included Facebook, polls, the “other side” of politics, steelworkers, campaign finance/contributions, and the word “apprentice”.

You can watch a compilation of these statements via the ‘Nobody Knows More’ Than Trump About Anything:

Well said.

You may like this. “From a distance, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, which has just sold at Christie’s in New York for $432,000 (£337,000), looks almost plausible. Up close, however, the paintwork becomes a grid of mechanical-looking dots, the man’s face a golden blur with black holes for eyes. Look into those eyes. They show no sign of feeling or life. Did a computer make this? The answer is yes. The first artwork generated by AI to be sold at Christie’s, its impressive price would seem to suggest that in future we will get computers to make art for us. Robot van Gogh will harmlessly cut its ear off and robot Picasso will be a genius, minus the misogyny. Is this the future AI art visionaries such as the French collective Obvious, which programmed this “painter” by getting it to compare its own work with 15,000 pre-20th century portraits, have in mind? Or are they just, God forbid, making a fast buck from gullible art collectors? Because believing the algorithm that knocked this up to be in any meaningful way an “artist” is like thinking your voice-interaction programme is out to get you. Dream on. Computers would need to replicate human consciousness before they could replicate the funny thing humans do called “art”. Art is a way in which human consciousness expresses itself, and is equally true of the earliest cave art, Rembrandt’s portraits and Duchamp’s urinal. And that is what is missing from Portrait of Edmond Bellamy. Art is a way humans communicate ideas, perceptions and feelings to each other. It has no existence outside the human passion to communicate. So in what meaningful sense can an AI replica of certain physical traits of old master paintings be called art? For a robot to really make art, it would need an autonomous mind that was emotional as well as rational. No AI developer has yet claimed to be anywhere near achieving that and if they ever do, their creation will probably have better things to do than paint portraits – like destroy humanity. Maybe afterwards robots will invent their own kind of art, but it won’t be some poor pastiche of human genius. It will be beyond anything we organics could imagine." guardian ai generated portrait.docx

'The Trump regime continues to attack all the independent institutions in this country that have traditionally served as buffers against tyranny – universities, non-profits, lawyers and law firms, the media, science and researchers, libraries and museums, the civil service and independent agencies – threatening them with extermination or loss of funding if they do not submit to its oversight and dictatorial demands. Trump even instructed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support. We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground. Trump is still actively destroying the economy. His proposed tariffs are still raising prices. His attacks on the Fed chief, Jerome Powell, persist in causing tremors around the world. Trump wants total power, even at the cost of our democracy and economy. His polls are plummeting yet many Americans are still in denial. “He’s getting things done!” some say. “He’s tough and strong!” Every American with any shred of authority must loudly and boldly explain the danger we are still in.

"Donald Trump has spent a decade poisoning American politics, destroying reputations, threatening opponents and bending the Republican Party to his will. Today, finally, America turned on him. But the sheer scale of his humiliation could prove every bit as devastating as the reckoning now awaiting him. In the USA there are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here. That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has many months in power. In his inaugural address he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element. As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in future it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he returns in some way, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a very long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.’

“I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is. I do not wonder anymore. He won for that exact reason. He was not a candidate. He was a mirror. If you were a racist, you found your guy. If you were a misogynist, you found your guy. If money was your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart was armoured shut, you found your guy. If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy. If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy. If you were a rapist, you found your guy. If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy. If you had done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy. If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy. If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy. If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy. If you were a conman, you found your guy. If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy. If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy. If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy. If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy. If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy. If you had never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy. If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy. If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy. If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy. If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one. This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated. Trump did not create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate. He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity. If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That is the part that should chill the spine. Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power? We were living in a fool’s paradise. We aren’t anymore." — Michael Jochum

Agree totally. ‘The most uneducated buffoon in history stands at a podium, bloated with self-importance, lips pursed like a carnival barker ready to sell turd milk to the unsuspecting. He grins a grotesque smirk stretched across his face as he scrawls his name onto a hollow decree, a sham celebration of the dismantling of knowledge itself. The Department of Education falls, not with a bang, but with wheezing verbs, suffocated under the weight of his own staggering ignorance. Surrounding him are the usual suspects: cowards in expensive suits, servile sycophants clapping like trained seals, and racist opportunistic ghouls picking clean the bones of democracy. Liars, fools, and thieves all parasites fattening themselves on the hardships of the many. They stand in rigid formation, dead-eyed and soulless, their allegiance sworn not to country, not to principle, but to power, and the dark, festering rot that clings to it. And there he is the convicted wrong, the living embodiment of septic tank spew, his voice a noxious fog of grift and grievance. He lectures the world on right and wrong, irony clawing at the walls, desperate to escape the grotesque theatre of his moral void. The stomach turns, the air curdles, and for a moment, history itself recoils watching, in horror, as the great American experiment teeters on the precipice, led by a man who couldn’t spell “precipice” if his life depended on it.’

'Consider if you go the New Testament for instruction on how to live, you are told to give away all your possessions, make no plans for the future, reject your family if they disagree with you, and stay celibate if you can (see respectively Matthew 19.21, Matthew 6.25, Matthew 12.48, and 1 Corinthians 7). This is the outlook of people who sincerely believed that the Messiah was going to return next week or next month, anyway very soon. It is an unlivable ethic, and when after several centuries the Second Coming had still not materialised and hope of it had been deferred sine die, more was needed in the way of ethics. Where did it come from? From Greek philosophy – not least from the Stoics – and from the Roman Republican virtues of probity, honour, duty, restraint, respect, friendship and generosity that Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, and countless others wrote about and enjoined ceaselessly. ‘Christian values’ are largely Greek and Roman secular values. So Christianity is not even Christianity.

An associated point reinforces this. The early Christians, such as St Paul, were Jews. They believed that when you die, your body sleeps in the grave until the Last Trump, at which points the graves open and all the dead rise to be judged. St Paul said that the faithful will ‘see no corruption’ – that is, their bodies will not rot in the grave. But anyway, at the Last Trump when all rise, the faithful will be clothed in ‘new bodies,’ resplendent and fine. But “When Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire (which it very quickly did; it was legalised by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, and made the empire’s official religion by Theodosius IX in 381; within the next few decades all other religions were proscribed) and churches were being built apace, all requiring relics of the martyrs and saints, these latter were found to have rotted (‘seen corruption’) in their graves. This embarrassing problem was quickly got over by importing another useful idea from Greek philosophy: Plato’s doctrine of the immortal soul, which entered Christianity via the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and his followers. That is why, starting from several centuries after the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians believe in such a tianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy. It would in fact it would be right to say that ‘we are Greeks and Romans’ and meant that we are defined by the following words – and therefore concepts – of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopaedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography…take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine, and culture, and it derives from the language – and therefore the ideas and the history – of ancient Greece and Rome.’

Anthony Clifford Grayling

Evidence for your assertion? Research including meta-analyses of multiple studies shows that empathy is a trainable capacity that can measurably improve through structured education, practice, and social-emotional learning. Schools, workplaces, and medical institutions use specific programs (such as role-playing, active listening exercises, reading literature, and film-based discussions) to boost emotional literacy and perspective-taking. Schools in Denmark set aside one mandatory hour per week for a dedicated class called Klassens Tid (Class Time) for students aged 6 to 16. Problem-Solving & Listening: Rather than focusing on grades or traditional academic subjects during this hour, students sit together to discuss personal or group problems, practice active listening, and find collective solutions to issues like bullying or social exclusion. Around 60% of schoolwork in Denmark is group-based, emphasizing teamwork and supporting peers rather than individual competition. Finland treats empathy as a core competency woven into daily school life rather than a stand alone subject. Students analyze characters’ emotions during reading, mediate their own peer conflicts, and practice emotional resilience through hands-on projects and peer mentoring.

Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another person while keeping them distinct from your own.

Solitude is being by yourself by **choice **for peace and restoration, whereas loneliness is an unfulfilled biological need for connection. Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment where an incarcerated person is isolated in a single cell for 22 to 24 hours a day with little or no meaningful human contact. In confinement is not a choice.

So what.

This is a Uk perpctive. The new prime minister has pledged to end decades of neoliberalism (the great concept espoused by Rand, Friedmann, Hayek then Reagan and Thatcher). It is both rare and refreshing to hear any UK PM say any thing like this. I am fearful about the extreme ignorance, simple mindedness, and gullibility of some of the electorate. They are completely blind to the effects of neoliberalism, which is the main guiding force behind the bumptious and odious Farage, and fascist/racist Reform party who believe that competition is the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised; public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages, such as education, inheritance, and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. As written in today’s Observer, "People don’t want much. They want someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work and something to hope for.” And Tim Forcer added "That would be a welcome change from much of UK politics, where many promote views that assume we mostly want someone to hate, someone to envy and someone to despise.”

Sorry.

Hand written.

“In the decades since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the GOP perfected exploiting racial divisions. Few politicians have embraced this tactic as explicitly or ruthlessly as Donald Trump. By reviving deep-seated racial and cultural grievances, he forged what is now known as Southern Strategy 2.0. While his rise and first term were marked by inflammatory rhetoric and symbolic measures, his second term has taken a far darker turn. Since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has waged a brutal, state-sanctioned war on immigrants combining overt racism with draconian policies that flagrantly disregard due process. In what follows, we trace the evolution of Trump’s strategy from subtle dog whistles to aggressive state violence. Trump has long been known for discarding subtlety in favour of explicit racism. From his 2015 campaign launch speech when he infamously described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals to his repeated calls for a “Muslim ban,” his rhetoric was always designed to exploit the fears of a segment of white voters. Those early statements served not merely as inflammatory sound bites but as clear signals to voters drawn to a brand of nationalism rooted in racial resentment. Even as he built his image as a defender of traditional American values, his language was steeped in contempt for the nation’s increasing diversity. Claims that immigrants were an existential threat to American economic and social stability became the underpinning of his appeal to white, working-class, and rural communities. Over time, the dog whistles he once used in carefully coded language gave way to a more head-on assault one that leaves little doubt about his priorities. Today, as his second term unfolds, that overt racism is not just rhetoric but now underpins policies that curtail the rights of communities of color and immigrants. Whereas in previous years, his words served as markers of tribal identity, they have now evolved into a legal and institutional program of exclusion. The transformation from talk to action is as clear as it is damaging.cv Throughout his first presidency, Trump implemented policies that pushed the envelope of conservative immigration enforcement The “zero-tolerance” policy at the U.S.–Mexico border, with its deeply controversial family separations, became emblematic of his willingness to use state power to satisfy a racially charged agenda. However, these measures pale in comparison to the actions of his current administration. Since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has escalated its assault on immigrants to levels never seen before. Nearly three months into his second term, his government has commandeered the full force of executive power to reshape immigration enforcement. The administration has now implemented a policy that systematically dispossesses potentially innocent immigrants of their legal rights. In an unprecedented move, individuals apprehended on U.S. soil are being removed without the due process guaranteed by the American legal system. Rather than relying on established deportation channels—processes designed to balance security concerns with fairness—Trump’s operatives send these immigrants directly to a notorious detention facility in El Salvador. Critics and human rights advocates have compared this facility to a modern-day gulag. The administration has not hidden behind red tape or excuses; President Trump himself has proudly taken credit for these measures, asserting that they serve the dual purpose of protecting national security and preserving an “authentic” American identity. This is not merely a tweak to existing policies. The new program has involved both the intensification of border enforcement and a broad campaign of interior raids targeting undocumented communities. Sanctuary cities have been red flagged by federal investigators, and large-scale operations have been launched to uproot immigrant populations with little or no connection to criminality. The consequences are severe. Families are being torn apart; vulnerable individuals are detained without a chance to challenge their fate in court. By linking immigrants to crime and portraying them as invaders who threaten public order, the administration has found fertile ground among its core supporters. Fear is being weaponized as a tool of mass mobilization. The narrative is not one of legal reform but of racial dominationa policy calculated to reinforce the notion that non-white immigrants are aliens to the American experiment. This strategy is a deliberate escalation over past measures, marking a profound, state-sanctioned breach of both legal and moral boundaries. Embracing White Nationalism A cornerstone of Trump’s Southern Strategy 2.0 has always been his tacit marriage to extremist elements. Early in his political trajectory, he demonstrated a willingness to embrace far-right nationalist rhetoric. For example, after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville—where white supremacists clashed with counter-protesters, resulting in the death of activist Heather Heyer—Trump’s response claiming there were “very fine people on both sides” was widely interpreted as a vote of confidence in extremist ideologies. Such moments, once dismissed as political missteps or careless remarks, now resonate with renewed significance. The administration’s current policies are a natural evolution of that earlier radicalism. By bypassing due process and deploying aggressive tactics against immigrants, the government validates the extremist perspective that sees racial purity as essential to national identity."