Articles from THE BLOT REPORT
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Electing a potential dictator
The problem with the US political system is that every four years they elect a president whose power is almost unlimited. Now the US Supreme Court has granted presidents immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office. This not only gives Donald Trump a free pass for his past crimes, but sets a dangerous precedent for all future presidents. Before Trump, no one had even argued that presidents are absolutely immune from criminal liability after they leave office.
Vance’s move?
As almost everyone who can read knows, the Mango Mussolini has inflicted tariffs on numerous countries around the world. However, several of the tariffs have been aimed at places with no trading relationship with the United States., two of which are Heard Island and the McDonald Islands1.
A little help
The electric car maker Tesla was created by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who reputedly sought to make electric cars that were fast and fun to drive. The company was officially incorporated in 20031.
In January 2008, both Eberhard and Tarpenning were forced out of the company at the behest of investor Elon Musk, who subsequently took over as CEO2. Their departure was supposedly because of their inexperience in running such a company.
Racism and misogyny regime
Everybody except those living under a bush know that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and processes have been in the firing line of Trump’s uncontrolled assault on US democracy. This has manifested itself in numerous ways, with pressure being brought to bear on numerous organisations and businesses to dump their DEI policies.
Paedophile regime
QAnon is a multifarious conspiracy theory originating in forum posts on the far right wing website ‘4chan’ in October 2017.
Querying machines
A couple of years ago, I got into a discussion about Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a couple of people who write computer code (in Python) as part of their jobs. They suggested that I could use it to kick-start rants on this blog. At the time, ChatGPT was the AI version in the headlines, and they suggested that I should use it. Initially, I wanted to find out how I could get it to work for me, so I queried it about its capabilities.
Still continuing
The decline in religion is something that interests me greatly, as anyone who reads this blog can attest. I originally wrote about in in 2019, with an essay on the decline of religion in the Anglophone world, wherein I tracked the proportion of the population who, according to the census, had no religious affiliation. In 1966, only 0.8% of the population reportedly had no religious affiliation whereas, at the time the last census for which data was available (i.e.
Murder by stupidity
In 1998, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues published a case study in one of the most highly respected medical journals, the UK’s Lancet. This paper suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose children to behavioural regression and pervasive developmental disorder (i.e. autism).