I Blame The Parents

The Swedish migration minister, Johan Forssell, knows exactly who is to blame when children break the law, the parents.
Forsell has built a reputation on claims that parental responsibility is the only real way to prevent crime and even said that parents should be held legally accountable for the crimes of their children and advocated for harsher punitive action including harsher punishment for minors but it was those damned lefists who deny the role of 'parental responsibility as a method for crime prevention and the best way to prevent criminality is attentive parents who give their children love and set clear boundaries'.
Guess what happened next..go on..try to work out what happened next to the right wing gobshite screaming at parents for the actions of their children.
Give up? Well...his son was exposed as active with violent far-right and neo-Nazi groups and pictured making Nazi salutes so as good as his word, his father Johan took his own advice and dished out some harsh parental responsibility.
Actually, scrap that, what he did was say he was clueless that his own child was involved in neo-Nazi groups and blamed Social media platforms instead for what they are doing to our children.
He is now refusing to resign from the Government so what we can take from that is when the dipstick says parents should be held to account for the atrocious actions of their children, he meant other parents, obviously.

Oh Dear

Donald Trump claimed he had warned Vladimir Putin over any attack on Ukraine, saying: 'If you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of Moscow' and he also claims he made a  similar warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping if Beijing was to invade its neighbour Taiwan.
The White House also announced they were imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for releasing a report earlier this month which showed how US companies were aiding and enabling Israel's genocide in Gaza .
Threatening to start World War 3 and sanctioning someone for showing American complicity in a genocide, that's the Nobel Peace Prize in the bag then.

Special Guest Blogger: Tsutomu Yamaguchi

There are two types of people in this World, the glass half full and the glass half empty types and some may say that i was one of the most unluckiest men in history and others say i was the luckiest but i lived to be 93 but i almost checked out twice in 1945 and earned the label as the man who got nuked twice and survived.
August 6, 1945 and the war was winding down, the Japanese were negotiating an end to hostilities and i was a 29-year old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and was on a a business trip in Hiroshima which was deemed a safe place as it was a civilian city with no military significance so i was a surprised as anyone when the United States dropped the world’s first Atomic Bomb and incinerated the city.
I was about two miles away from the epicenter of the blast which killed 140,000 of my fellow citizens, but I was nevertheless temporarily blinded, left with my eardrum destroyed and horrific burns over much of the top half of my body.
The next day, i suffered more radiation exposure as i made my way to the city center in an effort to find a way to hightail it back home to the safety of home, home being Nagasaki.
Us Japanese are an industrious lot and i was back at work three days after the nuclear holocaust that nearly killed me. Then, while detailing the events of the prior few days to my boss, a familiar blinding light suddenly filled the room as a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another 100,000 people and devastating the city so thoroughly that, in the words of our mayor: 'Not even the sound of insects could be heard'.
I spent many years wrapped in bandages for my resulting skin wounds, and i went completely bald from the radiation and when i died of stomach cancer it was said that it stemmed from all the radiation I suffered but when you escape certain death twice when a quarter of a million of your citizens never, I  can't complain too much.

Stay Cool Britain

Yellow heat health alerts, warning of impacts on vulnerable people, are now in force with temperatures expected to hit 34C (93F) in the UK this weekend and are valid until at least 15 July .
Good luck trying to get to sleep in that but you could try a fan if you can stand the whirring noise or throw open a window if you don't mind an insect party in your bedroom.
I go for the pillow case i the fridge for 60 mins before bed tactic which works fine if you drop off in the first 30 minutes or so and a cold water bottle helps but something i hear a lot but never understood is drink a  hot cup of tea to cool down.
A while ago I asked some people from hot countries if they drink hot drinks to cool down and the resounding answer from people who should know was WTF...ARE YOU MAD !!!!
The science behind it, as it is, is that by drinking something hot, you bodies core temperature increases so you sweat and sweating cools you down but as the sweating only cools you down to the temperature you were before drinking the tea elevated your temperature in the first place, it's quite pointless and if someone hands you a hot cup of tea when your hot, you would be better off waiting for it to cool down and pouring it over yourself.
So it's Factor 50, a cold water bottle and emptying out my husbands tins of beer from the fridge to make room for my pillow it is then.

The Bayeux (Canterbury) Tapestry (Embroidery)

Strange to see a visiting President given a State visit and nobody protesting or holding up banners decrying his orange coloured skin or him being a sex offender but this is the French President and not the weird one with little hands and we seem to like the French guy.
In exchange for a visit to Buckingham Palace and a slap up dinner, he is offering to lend us the Bayeux Tapestry to gawk at but to be honest, i have seen it and to be polite, it's not as impressive as you may think.  
The bit everyone looks for first in the 230ft long tapestry is the section where Harold has the arrow in his eye but accounts at the time had Harold skewered through the heart by a Norman Knight, his head chopped off while his guts were strewn across the ground and his left leg cut off at the thigh. Oh, and then his corpse was castrated just for good measure but that's a lot of needlework so instead they just knitted an arrow in his eye instead.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the rest of the Bayeux Tapestry isn’t 100% reliable, for a start it’s not a tapestry it's an embroidery and it's from Canterbury and not Bayeux and you can only assume when William the Conqueror was told he was to be presented with an epic work which had taken years of painstaking labour by dozens of devoted artists to commemorate his victory other the English, he wasn't expecting some fancy needlework.  
Could explain why he didn't display it in the Royal Palace and had it shipped to Bayeux in France and why you never hear the line that history is embroidered by the winners.

Peace?

Benjamin Netanyahu has presented the nomination letter he sent to the Nobel Peace Prize awarders stating that: 'President Trump has demonstrated steadfast and exceptional dedication to promoting peace, security and stability around the world'.
That would be the mass murdering leader of Israel who has an arrest warrant against him for genocide in Palestine and crimes against humanity who is openly discussing creating a concentration camp to ethinically cleanse the region supporting a sex offender and fraudster who has not only been providing the weapons to commit the genocide but initially made the suggestion for the ethnic cleansing and recently instructed bombs to be dropped on Iranian nuclear facilities in a pre-emptive strike to stop them building the nuclear weapons that his own intelligence community said they were not doing.   
So far over 300 candidates have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year and if the Committee decide that Trump is more worthy of the Prize than the other 299 for 'bringing peace to the region', then the Swedish definition of 'Peace' must be very different to the definition the rest of us use.

Why Not A Wealth Tax?

The idea of a Wealth Tax had been mentioned a few times but nobody has ever implemented it but Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are widely thought to be considering it and most tellingly have refused to rule it out to help balance the books when asked about it.  
Keir Starmer has repeatedly said that those with the broadest shoulders should carry the largest burden which tugs at every old Socialists heart as what we should be doing anyway but how would it work?
A wealth tax, so it was explained, is aimed at reducing economic inequality to redistribute wealth and to raise revenue and is a direct levy on an individual's, household's or business's total net wealth, rather than their income.
Advocates of the tax propose an annual 2% tax on wealth above £10m which has been calculated as affecting 20,000 people but would raise £24bn a year which is equivalent to putting 2p on income tax.
In Europe France, Italy , Norway,  Spain and Switzerland have a Wealth Tax but the argument is that if you squeeze the rich, then they bugger off elsewhere with their money but also up for consideration is a one off Wealth Tax and the one shot economic boost that would give but another alternative is to just get the tax rates fair in the first place.
At the moment the British tax system seems tilted towards the rich with only the higher rate payers receiving tax relief for Gift Aid and pension contributions, the basic rate tax payers get nothing for charity donations or putting into a pension and anyone earning up to £125,140 pays tax at 40% while anyone above that to any amount only pays an extra 5%.
Whether it is a one off or a repeated annual tax then i can't see why Labour are just thinking about it when the options are annoy 20,000 people and raise £24 billion or put 2p on income tax and annoy every working person in the country.

Special Guest Blogger: Gao Jianli

During the Warring States Period, I lived in Yan which was a small and fairly weak state in the north-east of China, King Zheng armies were not particularly pleasant to Yan and a committee met and a plot was hatched to assassinate the King.
The chosen assassin was my friend Jing Ke, and it all went horribly wrong. Jing Ke was killed, and Yan was overtaken by the Kings troops rooting out the committee and as a close friend to Jing, i knew that my days were numbered if i was recognised so i changed his name and found work in a wine shop.
I may not have been a great planner but i was a master at playing the Lute and my fame grew quickly which with hindsight was not so clever given i was trying to maintain a low profile but finally King Zheng heard about the wonderful lute player in Yan and commanded an audience which is when things went wrong very quickly because someone in the King's Palace recognised me as an associate of the former attempted assassin and I was immediately arrested.
Fortunately for me, the urge to brutally lop off my head was set against my wonderful lute playing so we reached a compromise, i would live as long as i continued to play for him oh, and they would pull my eyes out to render me harmless which i weighed up as better than the alternative .
So, i continued as the King's lute player, faithfully playing my lute from a safe distance from the Ruler and as time went on, I gained the King's trust and he beckoned me closer and closer so he could hear my beautiful music which is when i hatchd my plot and began slowly filling my lute with little bits of lead and bided my time to act.
After a few weeks my Lute was heavy and by now i was literally playing at the Kings feet and when i finished that day, i stood up and with a mighty swing, aimed my lead-filled lute at the King's head.
Being blind, i obviously missed completely but the big man with the axe never and i was executed on the spot.

Improving Democracy

Politics is a vital part of all our lives, almost everything depends on political decisions from how we travel to how our children are educated to how much tax we pay on our wages and we are always told that if we don't like what the Government is doing, then we can always vote them out of Office.
That sounds great in practise until you consider that  once in power a Government is there for four or five years until the elections roll around again and having no way to force an election if the Government turn out to be a duffer is my biggest gripe but it isn't just me, a poll from Pew Research asked 30,000 respondents in 24 countries if they were satisfied with how Democracy was working in their country and 65% replied that it sucked so they asked a follow up question: 'What do you think would help improve it?'
The overwhelming answer in 19 nations was 'better politicians' and by that they mean ones that are more responsive to their needs and are more competent and honest.
Second was curbing the influence of special interests and combat corruption and in third place is focusing policy on economic conditions such as taxation, inflation, wealth inequality.
The fourth answer is better informed citizens who are more willing to participate in politics and fifth is greater citizen representation by making it easier to vote and the people consulted more via referendums on important topics.
I agree with the poor standard of politicians and christ the UK have had more than their fair share over the years and i am behind the more referendums part, I have banged that drum for years but in truth there are many forms of Government, some are better than others, but we can look around now and honestly say something has to be better than what we have but with AI becoming more important in running our lives, there must be something said for removing humans from the decision making process because we have made a bit of a pigs ear of it so far.

Special Guest Blogger: George Foreman

The road from ruthless boxer to grill master isn't a very well worn one but it is one i made with a little stop to meet Jesus in between.
As one of seven children, we grew up poor and the way i sort out of it was by taking things that other people had by threatening to beat the crap out of them if they didn't hand over their money but as lucrative as mugging was,  it was an advert on TV bought with the money i nicked off other people that changed my life.
The TV ad was for an organization called the Job Corps and i signed up and did some training for jobs like bricklaying and carpentry and got a job in San Francisco, California and after work i would go to the local gym and one evening they were showing the Ali fight against Floyd Patterson and i thought, 'You can earn money for punching people'? So I thought i would have a go at it.
Turns out i was good at it and got picked to go to the 1968 Olympics and got to the final where i beat a scary guy from the Soviet Union and turned Pro.
In my first 32 fights i won they all, 29 by knockout but then i had the brilliant and unbeaten Joe Frazier stood in front of me and so i slapped him about for two rounds and the referee stopped it before I killed the man and i was crowned the World Champion.
One thing a boxing champion needs is an adoring fan base but i didn’t do anything to help this along, i was pretty anti-social back then and saw no reason to get warm and cozy with the fans.
The big name at the time was Mohammad Ali and we got offered $5 million and the location was set as Zaire, mainly because the promoter Don King was pals with the dictator there.
The Rumble in the Jungle they called it  and Ali sat on the ropes for seven rounds while i punched him and then exhausted, he knocked me out in the eighth.
I carried on fighting after the loss but after one bout, and feeling like i was going to die,  i asked God to spare me and if he did I would hand over my boxing prize money to him.
Obviously i lived and became a  minister at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ but i had that promise to hand over my Boxing purses so aged 38, i made  a comeback and put my healthy lifestyle down to reducing the fat in my diet and that opened the door to my next venture, as a grill salesman for the George Foreman Grill which made me more money than my entire boxing career.
My last TV Appearance was on the The Masked Singer dressed as a Venus Fly Trap but i died  as a two-time world heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist with 81 fights, 76 wins and 68 by knockout and to some i was a Boxing Legend, to others, the guy who made grills on an angle.