Mandela WAS a Communist

It always amused me that back in 2003 there were right wing American bloggers, the better dead than red types, bestowing all sorts of accolades upon Tony Blair ignorant of the fact that he was the leader of the Labour Party, a bunch of Socialists.
Now it is with much amusement it is happening again with Nelson Mandela and doubly amusing that back in the 80's it was the right wing pin up, Ronald Reagan, who was slapping the label of terrorist on Mandela, supporting and calling the South African apartheid regime that Mandela was trying to bring down as 'essential to the free world'.
Bit of a conflict there for the right, even more so when it was the Communist Soviets backing Mandela's fight while the West largely cosied up to the likes of P.W. Botha and blocked UN resolutions condemning the regime. 
As well as being a Communist, 'The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind' he once said, Mandela was also no fan of the USA or Israel, saying of the United States: 'If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings'.
Of the plight of the Palestinians against the Israeli regime, Mandela called Yasser Arafat 'the outstanding freedom fighters of this generation'.
Friendly with Fidel Castro he said: 'Long live the Cuban revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people'.
Doesn't particularly sound like the normal sort of person the right wing would praise so highly but if they insist on lauding him to the highest, they may find some of these quotes handy to put beneath the pictures of him.
How about 'Under a Communist Party government, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey' or they could go with: 'The victory of socialism proves that we too can achieve this important goal' or how about: 'Communists everywhere fight to destroy capitalist society and to replace it with socialism, where the masses of the common people, irrespective of race or colour, will live in complete equality, freedom and happiness' or my personal favourite: 'The communists were the only political organisation in South Africa willing to treat blacks as humans'.
Whichever they choose, nice to see the Right appreciate an anti-capitalist Communist who considered Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro amongst his hero's.

Vicar Breaks The Santa News

I do have a small amount of sympathy with the vicar who has caused uproar in Chippenham after breaking the news to a group of primary school pupils that Father Christmas doesn't really exist and was based on the legend of Saint Nicholas.
One angry parent said: 'We wouldn't just walk into the church during one of his services and tell everyone there that Jesus isn't real, it's not his place to tell the children that'. 
Other parents have their children out of a Christmas concert at the church in protest.
Canon Tatton-Brown's slip came as he delivered his annual festive address to pupils but his equipment broke down and he had to make it up on the spot and decided that the story of Saint Nicholas would do the trick and launched into the story of how Father Christmas was based on the gift giving Saint Nicholas.
It was when kids started crying that he realised what he had done and issued an apology to parents stating that he was very sorry to hear of the trouble following his assembly and he fully supported parents who want their young children to enjoy the Christmas stories, including Father Christmas, and he had no intention of undermining their belief in the reality of Santa Claus'.
It does seem it was an error by the vicar but not done with any maliciousness and he misjudged his audience, especially if he had to make it up on the sour of the moment.
That said, it's another example of how religion and Christmas are bizarrely becoming disentangled.

Cigarettes And Alcohol

The Office of National Statistics have issued their annual Family Spending Report and worked out that the average household in the UK spent £489 per week in 2012 with housing, food and fuel taking up most of the outlay but just what did we fritter the rest of it away on?

£10.10 mobile phones
£7.80 spent on alcohol
£6.20 on cigarettes
£4.70 was saved
£4.60 spent on pets
£4.20 on vegetables
£4.20 on takeaway food
£3.60 on cakes
£3.50 on hairdresser/beauty treatment
£3.20 spent on gambling
£3.20 on fruit
£2.70 given to charity
£2.60 spent on visiting cinema/concerts/theme parks/museums/theatre
£2.40 on confectionery
£2.30 on garden equipment/plants
£1.85 on newspapers
£1.40 on books
£0.90 on magazines

Topping up mobile phones, boozing and smoking are where the money goes, at least we are not wasting it.

Lighten Up Over Selfie

I can't really see why everyone is getting so angry over the leaders of Britain, America and Denmark taking a seflie as they sat at Nelson Mandela's memorial.
The whole stadium was full of South African's waving flags and singing and dancing, it was a joyous occasion celebrating a life, not a funeral so as much as i dislike Cameron and Obama and feel completely indifferent to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the mock outrage is an embarrassing overreaction although i do think Michelle Obama looks as if she is in a bit of a strop, probably because she wasn't asked to be in it.
If it happened next Sunday when the actual funeral takes place, that could be considered disrespectful and worthy of critcism but otherwise lighten up, jeez, it was a party.

World Turning Vegetarian

Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, George W Bush, Ivan the Terrible, Bin Laden and Genghis Khan where all meat eaters while Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Aristotle, Diogenes, Plato,Pythagoras, Socrates and Voltaire were all vegetarians.
What this of course means is that all the evil people in the World have meat in their diets and all the good ones shun eating animals so all we need for a planet full of good people is for everyone to go on a vegetarian diet and research from Packaged Facts show that meat consumption is declining.
Reasons that people are being less carnivorous are put down to an increase in the risk of heart disease, rising meat prices, increased awareness of cruel animal conditions, environmental impact of meat rearing and the rise in vegetarian celebrities such as Beyonce and Brad Pitt.   
The report found that consumers have been eliminating meat from one or more meals per week and reducing the size of portions served and since 2007, meat consumption has fallen by approximately 12.2%. 
We still eat way more meat than is good for us or for the environment and it doesn't do many favours for the animals that end up on your plate but a 12% in six years is significant, especially if the trend continues and we should be celebrating that we are heading towards a World with more rice and beans eating Da Vinci's, Gandhi's and Plato's and less beef and pork eating Hitler's, Genghis Khan's and Idi Amin's.

Health & Safety Christmas

Andy Williams may consider it the most Wonderful time of the year but the NHS are warning that it is also the most perilous time as well.
The emergency department at Southampton General Hospital, said that every year over the festive period they deal with a host of injuries from burns from exploding Christmas tree lights to zips caught on eyelids as people struggled to try on a new jumper.
Also on the list are burns from the oven, older people choking on their turkey and nasty hand and limb injuries caused by cackhanded people trying to get stones out of fruit.
Others have turned up at accident & emergency with eye injuries from poking themselves with Christmas tree branches while getting presents from under it and glitter fragments in the eye from cards or craft activities.
Every year, about 1,000 people are injured by their tree reports the The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and around 350 people a year are hurt by Christmas tree lights.
Approximately there were nearly 1,400 candle fires in homes across the UK, injuring more than 500 and over 5000 people suffered food poisoning.
Have a Holly Jolly Christmas but don't eat the holly berries, they are poisonous.

Another Load From The UK

We never really got to hear just what David Cameron sold to the Chinese on his trip over there last week, but i'm sure he managed to shift something to them, we do have a lot of tat here.
Something we did hear about but strangely not something the Prime Minister was trumpeting was the deal to sell the Chinese £45m-worth of British pig semen.
Turns out that something the British are good at is handing out sperm as we also export bovine semen to countries including Albania, France, Indonesia and Kenya as well as sending dog semen and horse semen to a spattering of other countries.
Not sure i want to know how it is collected and transported though, i just hope the farmers wash their hands before handling the cheese and milk at the Farmers Markets.
Thinking about it though, it's fair enough that we send sperm to France because they sent us Jean Michel Jarre in the 1980's and he was a whole other load of w**k! 

Bye-Bye Moon

It is thought that the Moon was formed when a proto-planet about the size of Mars collided with the early Earth around 4.5bn years ago. The debris left over from impact coalesced to form the Moon.
In the pre-moon days, the Earth wobbled so we never had the tilt like we have today where in summer the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun and in winter the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun giving us shorter days and cooler weather.
Having a huge Moon beside us steadied the wobble and we now how the seasons we get but boy would we be in trouble if the Moon ever moved away as we would experience much greater temperature swings than we are used to.
The good news is that the gravitational force of the Earth keeps the Moon where it is, the bad news is that the force is ever so slightly not enough to keep it there permanently and the moon is slowly creeping away from us.
The debris from the Earth that went into making the moon originally coalesced, out satellite sat much closer to the Earth, 14,000 miles away and over the past 4.5bn years it has shifted away to where it sits now, 250 million away from the Earth.
That averages out as the Moon spinning away from the Earth, at the rate of 3.78cm (1.48in) per year and as the Moon waves us good bye, the Earth's spin speeds up the faster it spins, the more it wobbles.
On early Earth, when the Moon was newly formed, days were five hours long, but with the Moon's braking effect operating on the Earth for the last 4.5bn years, days have slowed down to the 24 hours that we are familiar with now.
What all this means is that our early ancestors must have had a magnificent view of the moon but more importantly, has anyone checked if the Earth is wobbling anymore recently because i'm sure our seasons are completely out of whack, i was carrying my coat and shopping in a T-shirt today and it's the middle of December!

Satanic Statues

In Britain we do like a clock on a building. If there is a bit of brickwork exposed, we stick a clock on it.
Similarly, we also like statues and you can't move around the country without seeing some long dead military person or other standing there in plaster looking all military and in some cases with a road bollard plonked on its head.
What we don't have to my knowledge is a statue of the devil unlike Madrid where a statue dedicated to none other than, Lucifer the 'Fallen Angel' stands proud and it may be joined by another one in Oklahoma where Satanists plan to erect a statue to stand alongside a Christian monument that has been plonked outside the statehouse.
The Satanists are arguing that said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms although and Government officials are saying that if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint'.
Sounds fair to me, you can't have one without the other but while the 10 commandments from Christianity are relatively well known (no covering your neighbours ass etc), there are also commandments the devil worshippers follow called The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth.

    1.  Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.
    2.  Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.
    3.  When in another’s lair, show him respect or else do not go there.
    4.  If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.
    5.  Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.
    6.  Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.
    7.  Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.
    8.  Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.
    9.  Do not harm little children.
    10. Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.
    11. When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop.
 
All very respectable and strangely not a single mention of pitchforks up the jacksy so i say go ahead Oklahoma, let the devil worshippers put up their statue and let them run the local radio stations as well because God knows Satanic Heavy Metal music is far better than that religious happy clappy crap.

A Bit Of Britain In America

Around 200 years we packed all our convicts and religious people onto ships and sent one east and one west.
The convicts found a piece of land, batted the natives aside and named it Australia while the religious people found a piece of land, batted the natives aside and called it America.
Australia never really got going but America is now a thriving country but it is not too proud to fondly remember old Blightly and there is a place in Florida that not only flies the Union Flag but will flog you a packet of British biscuits while your there.
The British Shoppe sells all things British but especially tea which is quite ironic considering the last time a load of British tea landed on those shores it ended up floating in Boston harbour.
It's nice to know that ex-pat and holidaying Brits can still still get a decent portion of spotted dick when the mood takes them and tasting a Faggot once again will always remind them of home.
Nothing says British cuisine quite like Toad in the hole, bubble and squeak, Jellied Eels and Mushy Peas so why not pop along to The Great British Shoppe and fill your basket with British wares.
Make your American friends jealous by spending a lazy afternoon looking at pictures of Queens while lapping at Earl Grey and surrounding yourself with a couple of large, juicy faggots and dragging on a fag or two because its things like that which makes Britain Great.