Another Bad Week For Trump

American's have enjoyed the antics of their crazy, charismatic, colourful, controversial and morbidly obese President for almost four years now. How they laugh as Donny axes another member of his staff investigating him. See them chortle as he sends tear gas police into peaceful demonstrators so he can have his picture taken outside a church. Hear them bellow a loud guffaw as he defends slave owning Confederates but there are signs the love affair is turning sour as he sits a full 14 points behind his Democrat rival, Joe Biden, with a November election looming on the horizon.
These last few days have been particularly desperate for Trump and his bleach drinking supporters as his comeback rally in Tulsa flopped, outsmarted by a bunch of teenage K-Pop fans half the world away.  
Reeling from that he then faced another scandal relating to Russia, this time that he was not aware that the Russians had been offering bounties to the Taliban to kills American soldiers. This changed from not knowing to not being told it verbally when it was revealed that he had been told about it in March but in Trump's attention span of a gnat world, if nobody actually verbalizes it or puts it in pictures in his intelligence briefing each morning, it can't be true.
As he battles that fire and tried to pretend that the 126,000 Americans are not 126,000 ex-Americans thanks to his mind-numbingly terrible Coronavirus response, he posts a clip of a Trump fan screaming WHITE POWER and then deletes it saying he never heard the old guy shouting it when the camera zooms in on him, it can be hard to miss something when it is as subtle as that.
Finally, Iran have issues arrest warrants for Trump in relation to the death of Qasem Soleimani's in January by a drone attack so he should be on the look-out for any Iranian police waving a pair of handcuffs on the White House lawn in the coming months.
With a tell-all book from his niece soon to hit the streets, it's not been a good couple of days fopr thjer self-confessed sex-fiend but come November, when America gets a grown up in charge, admit it, you will miss the big lug because he may be an inept, incompetent moron and an all round awful human being but he makes things interesting, well for those of us not unlucky enough to have him running
our country anyway.

Special Guest Blogger: Hedy Lemarr

With only 500 words it is hard to know where to start as i crammed lots of things into my life. 
I began as an actress and made a film, Ecstasy, which was so erotic it was immediately got banned, then married an evil arms dealer and helped invent the technology you're probably using to read this now.
My acting ability bought me to the attention of a wealthy arms dealer who was selling arms to the Nazi Party who i married but he was an idiot and banned me from acting and tried to destroy all the prints of Ecstasy saying what i did was wrong, he was selling arms to the freaking Nazi's. 
I did get to meet Hitler and Mussolini though and heard about the use of torpedoes and radio-waves but how they were too easy to jam, i suggested possibly a constantly changing and moving frequency would be hard to jam but they smiled politely and told me not to worry my pretty little head over such things.
By then my husband bored me so i ran off to Paris to restart my acting career but most importantly i met a scientist and while explaining about my lunches with Hitler, told him about the problem with the Nazi torpedoes frequencies being jammed and how by simply using frequency hopping, the problem could be fixed.
Between us we patented the technology and approached the U.S. Navy with it, with the intention of helping them blow up Nazis but they also just smiled politely and suggested instead my services would be better used just looking pretty as a pin-up girl to support the troops overseas.
I went back to work in films and had a successful career and now have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame wedged between two actors who absolutely did not invent that thing that makes your WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth devices possible.
So the next time Katie Price or Kylie Jenner is talking on TV, pay close attention as they just might be inventing the cure for cancer, they probably aren't but you never know.

Special Guest Blogger: Captain William Bligh

My crew did have some sore misgivings about my poop-deck on the HMS Bounty but i just told them to put some talc on it and off we went but anyone who has read the book or seen one of the several films made about that trip will know, it didn't go particularly well for me.
I have been painted as some sort of bully but i just did what all ship captains did back then, work the crew half to death and have them flogged if they didn't do what i said but to be fair flogging the crew is pretty much page one on the 18th Century British navy guide to being a Captain.
The simple truth is that i was considerably less flog-happy than my peers but sailing a ship around the World is miserable, it took months to sail to Tahiti and once we got there, it was a sunny paradise with beautiful beaches and even more beautiful women and we had to stay there for five months waiting for some banana plants to grow.
So the crew had plenty of time lazing in the sun, getting wasted and getting it on with the natives and then i come along and go okay crew, put down the luscious women and fruit and back on the ship for a 6 month sailing back to Blighty and scrubbing decks and getting flogged and trying to not die of scurvy and they went 'F*** that' and dumped me overboard, and went steaming back for more sweet Tahitian tushy.
They probably didn't expect me to survuve let alone navigate the crappy raft they set me adrift on 4,000 miles back to civilization but somehow after all that, i become known as the bad guy.

Criticize Israel, Not Jews

At some time this week, Wednesday seems to be the day penciled in, Israel are planning to annex 30% of the occupied West Bank, an action which is being widely condemned everywhere except America where the Donald Trump Government are perfectly okay with it.
I have been boycotting all things Israel for many years now, going out of my way to check the country of origin sticker and if it says Israel, i put it back but some people on the left have a problem with separating Israel and Jews.
On the same side of the coin, Israel and supporters of Israel deliberately conflate the two and equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism in an attempt to shut down criticism of the Israeli Government's actions when it goes about it evil business against the Palestinians.
If the Netanyahu Government do go ahead with their illegal annexation, going on previous reactions, attacks on Jew's and Jewish property will increase due to the wrongheaded assumption that Israel and being Jewish are the same thing.
Being Jewish does not make you an Israeli as being Roman Catholic does not make you Italian so it disappoints me that some people are incapable of engaging the few brain-cells that they possess and cause mindless violence against an innocent population just because of their religion.
It is much the same ignorance that sees Muslims targeted after Al Queada or Islamic State attacks so be angry, protest, boycott and condemn Israeli actions to anyone who will listen but don't take out your anger on innocent people who are probably as disgusted at Israel as you are if you only bothered to ask.
Let the Israeli supporters shout antisemitism at those of us appalled at Israeli actions towards Palestinians for the past 70 years, criticizing Israel’s aggressive policies, the Palestinian deaths and military occupation does not make anyone antisemitic and supporters of the Palestinians shouldn't be shut down.
It is those defending the repulsive and loathsome Israeli government who are on the wrong side, not us.

Libyan Fallout Continues

Awful news that yet more people have been stabbed and killed in Glasgow following the attack in Reading, both awful events perpetrated by Libyan Asylum seekers.      
Quite rightly both men are being condemned for abhorrent actions but nobody is asking the question why were Libyan's here claiming asylum in the first place?
Simply, and in no way to excuse the evil killers, if Britain under David Cameron, France under Nicolas Sarkozy and America under Barack Obama had not launched the war to carry out regime change in Libya in 2011, it is unlikely that refugees like these two would have come to Britain at all, what they did here was a direct consequence of what we did over there.
It was the Western intervention debacles in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and the ongoing chaos we created that produced a wave of refugees across the World, a point which is never mentioned conveniently for the British government and therefore many miss the link between the terrorist butchery in our streets with wars fought in far away places.
I can't repeat enough that the actions of these two men, one who was shot dead by police, is their responsibility and should be condemned as such but to wash our hands or not even acknowledge the reasons they were here in the first place is highly disingenuous.

Liverpool Not The Spirit Of Shankly

There seems to be a disproportionate number of Liverpool fans who are around my age but that's because when we were growing up in the 70's, Liverpool were winning everything.
With my colours already firmly attached to the mast of Arsenal, seeing Liverpool continually win things and having boys who had picked Liverpool as their team wind me up for being a football loving girl and an Arsenal fan while their lot picked up pot after pot did grate and i spent many years hoping that Liverpool would fall from grace, and took a great deal of satisfaction when they did.
Over time Manchester United have replaced Liverpool in my affections of the team to make me chuckle when it falls flat on it's face but now after threatening for a few seasons, Liverpool are back on top and out of the woodworm have come all the Liverpool fans, the ones who sneered at me in my homemade Arsenal top with a wonky number 7 on the back which my mum made me for PE in the 70s.
So grudging congratulations to Liverpool, even through my blatant bias i can see you were the greatest team this year and it would have been harsh to deny you the big prize through the pandemic so you deserve all the praise and plaudits you are getting.
That said, as one scouser was saying today, don't try and pass it off as a triumph of the Shankly principles, a famous Socialist, because if you were to ask Shankly what he would do in a global pandemic that threatens to bring the economy to its knees, the answer would not be to piggyback on a government scheme to stop mass unemployment when you are the world’s seventh-richest club. Liverpool, along with Tottenham and Newcastle were only one of three Premiership teams to furlough their non-playing staff to save £1m when they had an annual wage bill of £310m.
So not the team of the people or a team forged in the image of Bill Shankly, a team who kicked a ball around the best and hit the opponents net more times than their own got hit over the course of a season so shut up, dance around singing for a while and try not to draw attention to the fact that your club was one of the few happy to get the taxpayers of the country to pay the wages of the little guys at your club while still paying the millionaires their full whack.

Special Guest Blogger: Whitney Houston

I didn't know until later on that Osama bin Laden was supposedly obsessed with me and fantasized about marrying me and Saddam Hussein was also a fan and used a cover of my version of 'I Will Always Love You' as his campaign song during his 2002 re-election.
I would like to think that people really responded to Saddam's choice of campaign song and turned out in massive numbers because the dictator playing that song from The Bodyguard but that's not as insane as Bobby Brown being the adult voice of reason in my household.
The Bodyguard was made at a time in my life when people thought that Kevin Costner was cool and that Bobby Brown was the only person in our marriage doing drugs but i did say that i didn't do crack but wow did i sniff, smoke and inject everything else.
I did so much coke that my nose hairs would have been worth more on the black market than almost anything else but up until i lost it completely, i had hit after hit and then when i lost it, i still had hit after hit but of a different kind. 
The bit in 'I Will Always Love You' still sends shivers down peoples spines and people still say wow, Whitney sure did have some great pipes on her and i did, that was how i died although my death was officially classed as an accident caused by drowning in the bath and the drowning bit was a mistake but the cocktail of drugs i took before i got in the tub, i certainly meant.

Grab The Hammer And Chisel

Just a thought as America is looking at putting some terrible wrongs right from its past and yanking down statues and monuments to slave owners and in a previous post i noted that on some of the American money, the $1, $2, $20 and $50 dollar bills, the faces of slave holding Presidents were gurning back at Americans as they paid for their canned cheese or chlorinated chicken.   
Just as some inappropriately named Forts are facing an overhaul, i see an even bigger problem in South Dakota that may need to be addressed, bigger as in 60ft high and staring down from the side of a mountain.
Looking out from Mount Rushmore are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and while the last guy is certainly not on anyones radar as being involved in slave trading, Lincoln actually did everything to free the slaves, when it comes to Washington and Jefferson, oh dear.
George Washington, the first President, was a major slaveholder with 317 under his control and Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 and although Theodore Roosevelt never directly owned any slaves, he purposely did nothing to create political and social equality for blacks as he considered them 'altogether inferior to whites'.
Looking at pictures of Mount Rushmore, the three offenders are on the right with Lincoln seemingly on his own on the right hand side of the monument so it wouldn't be that much of a burden to remove the three and leave Honest Abe up there or with a bit of creative licence and a very sharp hammer and chisel, transform them into more deserving examples of American heroes.

Not Our Fault Guv, Honest

When the Conservatives won the election in 2019, they probably didn’t foresee a pandemic on the list of challenges they would be facing while in office and as we are currently languishing third in the awful league of death, it shows.
Boris Johnson and inept crew have come in for some major criticism for their handling of the Covid-19 crisis and they have acted like a man, taken it on the chin, stood up to be counted and blamed everyone else and as the death toll has began to rise again, it's down to 'people taking liberties' with the social distancing.
So the general public not keeping the 1m+ rules to heart are the current scapegoats but there have been plenty of other groups who the Government have point the finger at since March.  
The lack of Personal Protective Equipment was not down to the Government allowing stocks to dwindle to record lows and then messing up ordering more, it was NHS staff using too much of it and although on the face of it footballers don't have much say in funding the services in the NHS, they should 'take a pay cut and play their part' and 'donate directly to hospices struggling for funds' but no mention that the reason they were struggling for funds was down to a decade of chronic under-funding by the Conservative Government, that bit slipped his mind obviously.
As supplies become scarce, credible suppliers were urged to 'step up to supply the crucial things needed to fight Coronavirus, from ventilators to PPE' however many said they not only stepped up but said that their offers of manufacturing help have been ignored or missed by the government and had heard nothing back, despite reaching out in order to help produce or supply the much-needed PPE.
So the Government have pointed the finger at the public, NHS Staff, footballers and PPE suppliers for failing in their role to stop the virus but like a government advisor simultaneously breaking the law while not actually breaking the law, such contortions take a certain level of delusion and plain old bullspit to pull off.

Special Guest Blogger: Alcibiades

If there is one thing the Ancient Greeks love more than eating olives and waving our hands excitedly as we talk, it was our Hermae statues which were blocks of marble, the top of which was carved into the depiction of a god's head, while down at crotch level was a lovingly carved, heroically erect penis.
These dick statues were the pride of Athens back in my day and were placed along all the roads in and out of Athens and one night, after a hard day fighting in our wars against Sparta and Persia and few too many bottle of wine, i thought it would be hilarious to take my hammer and chisel and make a few improvements.
When i woke up the next morning, well Jenna Jameson is probably the only person to be surrounded by so many erect penis's at one time and the Ancient Greeks, not having a sense of humour, failed to see the funny side of it and although i was one of Athens best generals, the deboning of marble God's saw me handed the death sentence so i ran off to Sparta and before they threw me off a mountain, i promised to share all my secrets with them.
They made me their military advisor and all was going well until i discovered that Spartan wine is even stronger than the Athenian stuff but this time there was only one penis and that was mine which ended up inside the Spartan Kings wife and so with another death sentence on my head, i ran off to Persia and did the same trick of telling them i knew all the secrets of the Spartan Army and helped them defeat Sparta in many sea battles.
In alcohol terms Persia was as dry as a Vestal Virgins gusset and why have two death sentences when you can have three so i persuaded the Athenians to take me back, telling them i knew all the secrets of the Spartan and Persian armies, which they did and the divine dong-smashing was forgiven.
After a few mishaps which meant the entire Sparta Fleet was destroyed, none of which were penis related for a change, i legged it back to Persia planning to apologise and do the usual but a shower of arrows wasn't the welcome i was expecting and i died.
So drink responsibly kids and if you can't and you wake up with a hangover and surrounded by erect penis's, i warned you.

Yank Them All Down

I have said a few times that i am not in favour of statues and when i become ruler of the World i will remove the whole lot of them anyway but as my doomsday device isn't quite up to speed yet, i have to look at then the same as everyone else, or those that havent been yanked over yet anyway.
It is quite right that anyone with an evil past is removed but i expect you could name anyone from history and find something about them that isn't very favourable.
If nothing else the movement has made us more aware of the statues in our vicinity where previously there was  a kind of blindness to the people we saw memorialized on plinths but now we look at statues of long-ago luminaries and wonder about the people in these urban monuments that we barely noticed.
How many people knew of the grim backstory of Edward Colston, i certainly never and a surprising amount never knew of Winston Churchill's less than glorious past and i have never understood why Oliver Cromwell has a statue in Westminster, he massacred 41% of the Irish population just for being Catholic.
I would be hard pushed to name a single historical British figure who i want want to see immortalised, certainly nobody related to the military or the British Empire, i can think of no politicians worthy and certainly not any Royals, musicians or sports stars.
Probably just easier to either remove all statues altogether (my solution) or just have fictional characters like the one of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens or Paddington Bear in London but as Paddington was from Darkest Peru, he would upset the Little Englanders with his coming over here, eating all our marmalade.

Special Guest Blogger: Hermann Goering

Us Nazis did some really crazy stuff but apparently not enough for some people who think that me and my pals did other, even crazier things on top of the stuff that we actually did do.
We never had a secret base in Antarctica, in the centre of the Earth or on the moon. Why would we build a base in a desolate, uncivilized place when we already had France to build a base in?
We were not taught everything we knew by aliens. The Third Reich was never buddy-buddy with ET, our technology for jet propulsion came from Wernher Von Braun who was then secretly recruited to your side after the war along with along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians to build an intermediate-range ballistic missile program.
So we were not meeting up with aliens in our secret Hollow Earth base by way of Antarctica but i was Hitler's number one man and such was my fame that the drink i liked the most was named after me, firstly Goering-Schnapps and then officially given the name of my title, Reichsjagermeister, in English 'The Huntsman' although they now call it just Jagermeister because nobody wants to be asociated with the Nazi's and my temperamental boss.
In the aftermath of the war, there was a scramble among us former Nazis to prove that they hadn't really meant it, honest, but the judges at Nuremburg were not buying it and when they turned down my request to be executed by firing squad, they refused and said i was to be hung so i bit down on a cyanide vial and it was a case of goering, goering, gone.

Nirvana Unplugged Leaves Me Unenthused

The guitar that Kurt Cobain played in the Unplugged session has been bought for $6m by an Australian businessman making it both the most expensive guitar and piece of memorabilia.
I was a huge Nirvana fan at the time, the brilliant Nevermind Album, the image, the easy on the eye Kurt Cobain and the whole Grunge scene that they sat proudly atop of.
The one thing that was not so good, and it has not improved with age or repeated listening, was the Nirvana Unplugged set where the $6m guitar featured.
I'm sure that the debate will start up again about just how good it was but i remember being disappointed at the time and as much as i enjoy watching Kurt Cobain sat on a stage playing his semi-acoustic guitar, listening to it today it still fails to enthuse me.
Nirvana's music was all about the several thousand decibels of power behind them and the Cobain formula of soft verses and raucous chorus.
Everything about this performance just seemed tepid and while we waited in vain for the big hits like 'Teen Spirit' or 'Lithium', we got 'Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam', 'The Man Who Sold The World' and a handful of vague, unknown songs and it just left an empty feeling.
I am not knocking the Unplugged series, i thought Alanis Morissette was outstanding, as was REM, but if Cobain had not taken his life shortly afterwards, this set would be viewed as a mistaken diversion from the real, angrier thing.
Their strength and appeal was in their energy, drive and pounding guitars but this album gives a false impression and will sadly be forever placed alongside their far superior earlier output.

British Common Sense

Ironically, i live a pebbles throw from the beach but i spent the best part of today elsewhere but looking at the pictures on my phone it is probably a good thing because they were so busy that several councils had to declare an emergency and literally kick people off the sand.
A perfect storm of stupidly hot weather, an easing of lock-down and vast swathes of people still being on furlough meant that the South Coast was the go to place today but the crowds may count themselves lucky if they go back home with only a bad case of sunburn.
Makes a mockery of the words of the British Prime Minister who said that he was trusting 'in the common sense of the British people' because a bit of sunshine and we showed as much of that as someone going on a 60 mile trip to test their eyesight.
The UK experienced a record UV level of nine today and is being blamed on a combination of just passing the summer solstice so the sun is particularly high in the sky, ozone depletion across the northern hemisphere and the European wide lock-down recently reducing pollution levels which stops the UV being scattered quite so much.
So out came the shorts and flip flops and the preference of getting a tan and frolic in the sea rather than steer clear of Coronavirus but don't worry if Covid-19 passed you by this time, it will be making a comeback very, very soon.

July 4 - Haircut Day

The guide for Pubs, restaurants, hairdressers and hotels opening has been released and it clearly states that the reduction of the two-metre rule to one metre only applies with 'additional mitigations' such as face masks which could make for some intersting conversations in pubs and restaurants.
Music is also banned so customers do not need to 'unduly raise their voices to hear each other' and singing is also banned in Churches but i'd like to think that is more to do with nobody is particularly in a rush to hear another rousing rendition of The Lord's My Shepherd.
Hairdressers and barbers can reopen and as the options since 23 March has been to trust your spouse with the scissors or relive those 70's pictures of your parents, will be well received.  
There is a big list of other services and what they must do to stop us all from giving each other Covid-19 again but they made the error of putting the hairdressers close to the top so the rest was a blur of yeah whatever. 
We haven't even got the joy which was the Governments 5pm Conferences anymore seeing as they have stopped them but as one persons said, the BBC will start showing Pointless at 5pm again so no change there then.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Elagabalus

Yeah, what's up, i was made the emperor of Rome even though i was barely 14, which was well wicked and i did the typical teenage gnarly things such as holding feasts in my crib and serving live parrots, flamingo brains and mice and before each meal i would consult with a slave how each feast would go and by consult i mean rip open his guts and as they spilled on the floor 'read them' and most said that my jackdaw pudding was going to be scrummy, ace!
Another favourite was to hide a lion in a room and tell my guests to go look at a statue or painting in there, those who survived the lion would join us for the feast, although the food could be a bit rock hard but that was because i would serve bits of wax and rock made to look like food and while they picked their teeth up off the ground i got the real food which was actually really nice, what was i like?
To be fair after being mauled by lions, eating parrots and avoiding slipping on slave guts, i gave them doggy bags, bet you can't guess what was actually in the bags...woof woof...dead puppies, so minging.
I chained naked women to chariots and whipped them as they pulled me around but i was a teenage boy, of course i was going to have naked women pulling me around, what teenage boy wouldn't.
To make myself more popular with the people of Rome i invented my own lottery so you could be well minted like me or you could win a slave or a house but doing all that good stuff got real boring real quick so i spiced things up a bit with the wins including dead pets, boxes full of bees or poisonous snake, it's well random, sweet.
Because i was most def so fantastic, the Senate tried to remove me but when i ordered the execution of anyone involved, they jumped me and chopped off my head and threw my body in the Tiber, most def a bit harsh and not cool.
Boom Boom Bang Bang baby, that's me then so stay in touch yeah.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Mary

My dad, Henry VIII, famously stuck two fingers up to the Catholic Church and founded the Church of England so he could divorce my mum Catherine of Aragon, but after my half-brother Edward died, the rules of succession declared me the first English monarch in history to possess a vagina and pair of breasts (my dad's moobs don't count).
Being the ruler with fallopian tubes didn't work out so well for me though as i was a Catholic and with a Catholic back on the throne, the Protestants organised a coup against me which i quashed by burning many of them at the stake, earning me the nickname 'Bloody Mary' although there wasn't much blood but there was a stench of BBQ-ing human hanging around the courtyard for weeks afterwards.
I spent five years on the throne and in that time i burned 300 Protestants who were concerned that i would return England to Catholicism, which i did of course, but remained confusingly the Supreme Head of the English Church.
I married Philip who was a cold-hearted man, on my death from Ovarian Cysts he wrote 'I felt a reasonable regret for her death', but not enough reasonable regret to stop him trying it on with my half-sister Elizabeth who told him to go do one, clever girl.
There's no denying that an awful lot of Protestants were killed during my reign, but i was really no worse than my successor, Queen Elizabeth, who executed just as many Catholics as i had Protestants but everybody was okay with that.
Probably the legacy of my life would be a cocktail containing vodka, tomato juice and Worcestershire sauce but what with the lack of blood at my executions, Crispy Fried Mary would be more appropriate.

Government Not Following The Science Anymore

Two weeks ago when the idea of reducing the 2m rule was mentioned the Government held a review with SAGE, the Medical team advising the Government and the medical professionals said that the virus was still too widely in circulation and the 2m should stay.
Rather than putting an end to it, the Government then held another review, this time with Economists who advised that the 2m rule was preventing such places as pubs, restaurants and hotels from opening fully and the 2m rule should be reduced to at least 1m.
As Boris Johnson said in announcing the reduction and reopening of leisure facilities, he fully expects a spike in the number of cases and will be keeping the new measures under review but i understand the case that it is a balancing act between a possible increase of the risk of people getting the virus and the risk of people losing their jobs, businesses closing and children missing out on more time at school but the Government so far have been so terrible at every step in the crisis, you do wonder if without a working app and a track and trace system which is patchy at best, this is another example of the Government's shoddy approach to the crisis.
That many do not honestly trust their country's Government to keep us safe is a dangerous state of affairs especially as all the problems are self inflicted with acting too late and too slow to suppress infection sufficiently to knock it out and crippling the economy and then relaxing early because it can't carry on the damage to the economy so has to open it up almost guaranteeing a second wave in the autumn.
SAGE and the scientists should be shouting from the highest point long and loud that they did not sanction it because 'we followed the science' will be the mantra used to deflect blame them when it all goes horribly wrong.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Pius XII

I was the guy who had the misfortune of wearing the funny hat during World War II and was accussed of being a Jew hater despite the Church and the Jews going way back, our founder was Jewish for cripes sake!
It was hard to be called 'Hitlers Pope' just because i refused to condemn him during World War 2 but that was mainly because i was 'accidentally' mislabelling Jews as Catholics and issuing them travel visas and as Hitler was a bit murdery and because he was crazy, not stupid, or not that stupid, i wanted to keep him sweet to carry on issuing travel visas to Catholics (aka Jews) in Nazi territories.
If i had publicly spoken out against the Holocaust then Catholics would have had such an easy time getting out of Germany so i had to convince the world, but mostly Hitler, that i had no beef with his plans.
As if that wasn't enough, i also had the Jews screaming at me for trying to convert them to Christianity but i couldn't scream 'SHUT UP, I'M SAVING YOUR LIFE IDIOT' as nothing bring you to the attention of a Nazi then to have a Jew causing a scene. 
I did attempt a long-distance exorcism on Hitler, but it unfortunately failed so tried for an assasination attempt instead, teaming up with some in the German military intelligence but the fact that there was a queue for trying to kill Hitler at that time doomed the plot, the SS found out about it and ordered me killed but fortunately for me before they got around to it Hitler was laying dead in a ditch somewhere and his once favourite Pope was free to carry on talking up the big guy and his 14 year old baby's momma.

Special Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Bathory

Scientific reasoning was not so advanced in 16th Century Hungary so to many minds back then, wanting to bathe in the blood of young female servants and the daughters of local peasant to recapture a long lost youth made perfect sense so sorry we lived in a time when the best doctors advice to avoid the plague was to carry a lucky rabbits foot.
I was a countess, widely regarded as a bit of a babe in my time but as i aged my looks went south and to make it worse my castle staff was mostly beautiful young women in the prime of their lives and the rumour was that i tortured many of them to death and then drained them of their blood and took a bath in it, the number mentioned is 650 which may explain my suspiciously high turnover of staff.
Equally suspicious was the fact that all of my accusers were people who wanted my stuff and after the death of my husband, my accusers now owed me money to me as i was left with his fortune and collecting his debts with the largest debtor being the King himself.
His Royal Highness got together a group to 'investigate' me, a group of similar debtors and members of my own family who were ticked off at my new wealth who amazingly 'discovered' that i had been killing my servants girls and that i was a witch and one expert eyewitness testimony told how they had seen me having sex with the devil himself which showed how reliable they were but it was the offer of getting me out the way which was made by my family who promised to cancel the Kings debts that was the clincher.
I was never put on trial for murder, the King decided that i was put on house arrest for the rest of my life, which due to 16th-century medicine, thankfully wasn't long as they refused to let me keep my rabbit foot.

Special Guest Blogger: Robert Johnson

The main thing people know about me is that i supposedly made a deal with the devil to become the Worlds greatest guitar player but if there was a deal at the cross roads that night, and i'm not saying there was, but IF there was, the songs i sang included 'Me and the Devil Blues', 'Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)', 'Hellhound on My Trail' and 'Cross Road Blues' so make of that what you will.
According to the rumour i was a real lousy guitarist and that much i can confirm, one musician i played for said i was embarrassingly bad but i was in awe of the brilliant musicians around me and i met a man who instructed me to take my guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight where a man would meet me.
I had nothing to lose so off i went at midnight and there was a man standing there who took my guitar and tuned it and then played a few songs and then returned the guitar to me and said i would know be a master of the instrument in exchange for my soul.
Obviously, i assumed he was a nutter and had read to much Faust but him tuning it meant that what i played was now in key and my guitar playing improved 100%.
I went on to record 29 songs including 'I Believe I'll Dust My Broom', 'Dead Shrimp Blues', 'Malted Milk' and 'Milkcow's Calf Blues', i may have been granted a mastery of the guitar but my song naming left a lot to be desired.  
Three years after that night, i was laying dead by the side of a road, poisoned by a bottle of whiskey laced with strychnine by the jealous husband of a woman i flirted with.
The obvious question is was it worth it? On the plus side i am regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time so yeah, i just wished i had made the deal include some better songs, being known for songs about Milkcows, Brooms and dead Shrimps is not that cool. 

Football's Back But Not The Same

Football's back but i don't really know if it should be but the Government need something to distract from all the people dying that they can't bring themselves to count properly.
Obviously my team, Arsenal, had their first comeback game against Manchester City and got duly thumped as expected but watching the game on TV with no crowd it did all seems very surreal and i'm not sure i liked it and not just because once David Luiz came on it was just waiting for the inevitable oops moment from him.   
There did seem to be a rush to get it back going again, fueled mostly by the threat of clubs having to hand back millions of pounds of TV money if they never finished the season.
We now got wall to wall football but apart from the Arsenal games, i won't be indulging and if the 20/21 Football season is going to be the same, and it is looking as if it probably will, it is doubtful i will be paying that much attention next year either because it is just not the same.
There is talks of Health passports on your phone to show that you are Covid-19 free to allow supporters back in but why would anyone take that chance of being amongst 60,000 others just so you can watch a game which is probably going to be available on TV somewhere anyway.
Obviously Tottenham fans will be used to watching a game with very little atmosphere but the rest of us who support and watch proper football teams, it's not football as we know it and this could be where i find other ways to pass my Saturday afternoons.

Making America Seriously Sick Again

In some ways i do feel some sympathy for Americans, they have a man leading their country who really has no regard for their safety during a pandemic so as the amount of cases and deaths continues to go up, he is opening up the US and holding rallies with his only concern being him plonking his rotund backside in the Oval Office for another 4 years come November.
He is holding a rally tonight in Oklahoma, while America is still ascending the first curve of the pandemic, complete with waivers that anyone who catches Coronavirus from the 10,000 mass gathering cannot sue his campaign and the handing out of masks at the venue although this comes with a notice that they don't have to wear them.
I am almost certain there will be the usual dog whistle racism and blaming of China and everyone else but him for the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in the World which will be greeted with enthusiasm by the useful idiot Trump supporters, but then i think hang on, all those people in one place giving each other the disease are Trump supporters, why should i care if they fall ill?
To be honest, i couldn't care less, they deserve all they get if they are that stupid, but it is their families i am concerned for, the ones they are taking the disease back home to afterwards along with their MAGA Hats and little American flags.
Boris Johnson in the UK has been awful, he has made a mess every step of the way but even he is not as bad as Trump who has gone from calling it a hoax to advising people drink bleach to calling together tens of thousands of people in one place to hear him spout nonsense about why he should be given the keys for another four years in charge.
As he lags behind Joe Biden at the moment it seems like it is the Democrat election to lose but then i thought that about George W Bush and he got back into power after the debacles that were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so who can tell but i say let Trump hold rallies and let tens of thousands of Trump supporters turn up and crowd together, if he doesn't care about his own supporters falling seriously ill then why should anyone else.
I would just say if your relatives are going tonight, then make them stay in the garage for the next 14 days before you let them back in the house.

Special Guest Blogger: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I owe my literary career to being a doctor, as it was during my time as a doctor and Eye Specialist in Portsmouth that i began writing my Sherlock Holmes novels. The people of Portsmouth must eat a lot of carrots because my practise was rarely visited and so each day, after praying for a conjunctivitis epidemic, i would spend my time writing tales of a Detective named Sherringford Hope and his sidekick Ormand Sacker.
It was my wife who suggested Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson were better names and publishers came in and my career took off so i packed in the medical business and wrote full time.
Despite writing i also managed to find time to play in goal for Portsmouth and play cricket for the famous Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Authors XI alongside J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne, in one match the ball hit a tin of matches in my pocket and caught my trousers on fire, talk about a no ball, if i hadn't whipped my trousers off sharpish it would have been no balls at all.
It is interesting how much the English language has changed, back in my day ejaculate meant to utter a short emotional statement but today it means something very different so if i had known i probably wouldn't have had Holmes and Watson ejaculating all over with such abandon.
I had Holmes referring to Watson’s ejaculations of wonder and Watson often ejaculated in the direction of his fiancee and even i can see how in the 21st Century the sentence 'I dropped off to sleep when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up' could cause confusion and the less said about Mrs. St. Clair’s husband ejaculating at her from a second floor window in 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' the better.
Apart from Sherlock Holmes and my many ejaculations, i am also famous for fairies, with two teenage girls who produced a picture of them playing with fairies in their garden. 
I guess i should have used my analytical mind and just dismissed it instead of writing a whole damned book about why fairies are real but the real sting was that the girls who faked the photos cut out the fairy pictures from a book that included one of my own short stories, i did ejaculate quite forcibly when i heard that.

Special Guest Blogger: Jeffrey Epstein

It is quite difficult being one of the most notorious sex fiends and pedophiles in human history but i appreciate Lucy giving me the chance to put right a few things although she has warned me that as court proceedings are ongoing, she may have to edit this post but i want to say a few things about the celebrities involved and what happened that day of my death.
I was one of the most connected men in the World, my little black book had celebrities, royals, Presidents and men of real influence so to think that i would take my own life was ridiculous, i had been prosecuted before and got a 13 month suspended sentence so i was hardly looking at spending the rest of my life breaking rocks.
When they moved out my cell mate that day, then the Guards who were supposed to look in on my every 30 mins failed to turn up for three hours i suspected something was afoot and knowing some of the powerful people i had the gossip on...well, i heard a xxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxx the neck and xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxx  xxxxxx xxx xxxx like a girl xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx x xxx xxx and i was dead.
Of course with my death the threat that some famous names would be implicated such as xxxxxx xxxxxxxx, xxxx xxxxx, xxxxxxxx xxxxx and would you believe xxxxxxx xxxxxxx!
Yep, they all were at my parties, xxxxx xxxxxxx liked the girls to dress up as schoolgirls which wasn't difficult as most of them was but even i, as depraved as i was, drew the line with xxxxx xxxxx and his perversion, no amount of cleaning would get ever those sheets clean again.
One of my best clients, xxxxxx xxxxxx, offered me x xxxxxxxxxx and stayed with me for a whole weekend and then had the nerve to deny he knew me, he didn't say that when he was xxxxxxx the xxxxx xxxxxx and having a xxxxxx xxx xxxxx while xxxxx xxx x xxxx.
Anyway, i'm sure the truth will out at some point, they didn't get the entire collection of notes, photos and videos, if they just look behind the xxxxxx in my xxxxxxxx at xx xxxxxxx then i'm sure they will get a nice surprise.

Special Guest Blogger: Emmeline Pankhurst

Women didn't win the right to vote with just polite rhetoric, we were downright militant and engaged in active acts of vandalism such as smashing windows, arson, detonating pipe bombs, sabotaging communication lines, and plotting to kidnap of members of Parliament.
In one day British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith narrowly missed being cut in half by an axe thrown by one of our members and then had to be dragged from a burning theater after we set fire to it during his speech.
The prisons held 250 suffragettes but it kick-started the process which eventually led to women's suffrage and general agreement that, yes, women were members of society and all it took was protesting and disturbing meetings of old white dudes.
We even learnt Jiu-Jitsu after watching our colleagues get beaten, imprisoned, force-fed, and sometimes even killed by the police and some got so good at it that they became my own personal bodyguards armed with clubs, following me the length and breadth of the country.
It was a hard struggle and we won but if you don't think that our tactics were very ladylike, you are free to say it but i hope you're good at dodging axe's.
All women want is equality but even today, 100 years after we grudgingly got given the vote, things aren’t looking altogether fabulous for us girls but one day a man may find a way to satisfactorily explain to their mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters why he doesn't believe in equality for women.
After all the way men have treated women throughout all of human history, men should be glad we only want equality and not payback.

Special Guest Blogger: Martin Van Buren

I was the first president to be born a citizen of the United States and married my own cousin (we were a very close family) but my story begins with the President who came before me, President Jackson, and the gift he received of a 1,400-pound wheel of cheese which fermented for more than a year while Jackson took out an advertisment in the paper to invite the whole country to help him eat his cheese.
It was said that you could smell cheese from a half mile in every direction from the White House and once Cheese Day arrived, more than 10,000 patriotic citizens answered their call of duty and it took the crowd two hours to devour the enormous piece of cheese.
Jackson then handed the keys to the nation over to the incoming president, me, and he was glad to go because thanks to the 10,000 cheese eaters thoroughly grinding the stuff into the mansion's carpets, couches and tapestries, the White House stank for weeks.
Due to this i installed the very first bathtub in the White but different nations have different standards for what qualifies as a great leader.
The French quite like a president who cheats on his wife, the Russians prefer dictators and it seems that the American people like their Presidents to stink because the public lost their shit over this and i was attacked for regularly bathing by William Harrison in the next Genral Election.
The bad publicity of me actually not smelling like a pig worked as 78% of the voters chose Harrison so i left office after only one term but with my head held high, a magnificent set of sideburns and offensively squeaky clean.

Special Guest Blogger: Marcion of Sinope

I was surprised when i got an email asking me to give my observations of my time on Earth as i had been pretty much written out of things despite inventing the Bible as it is known.
Before me, the Christian Bible as you know it didn't exist, there was just hundreds of different stories, mostly bad rewrites of stories from other religions with Jesus and God's name copy and pasted in to replace the names of the other Gods so i decided to create two separate volumes of the best stories into two separate books, the first showing 'Old God' to be a murderous belligerent, basketcase and then the 'New God' who became the malevolent creator, full of compassion and love.
I also wanted to remove all traces of Jewish influence out of this Bible so i picked the best stories and presented the Old and New Testaments although being a member of the Marcionite's which was a rival to the emerging Catholic's, it has undergone several rewites to add more stories such as Jesus birth to a virgin which the Catholics 'borrowed' from India's Buddha and Romes own Mithra, Garden Of Eden from Persia's Ormuzd, Noah's Ark swiped from Babylonian's Utnapishtim and Jonah and the Whale plagarised from the Hindu's Saktideva but it gradually evolved to the Book that gets thumped today.
In my time there were a lot of different competing Christian sects all with a different view of both the universe and Christ but by clever funding of the Emperor Constantine to mash all the competing sects into one, the Christianity that you ended up with is the Christianity of today and it was my book that is used as the text book for the whole thing.
Well the bits of my books they left and the bits nicked from others religious books but my books are the main bit.

Why We Should Declare War On New Zealand

What the British need is a decent leader because heaven knows we haven't got one at the moment but looking around the globe they are in very short supply but there is a plot being hatched to get the only one worth having, New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern.
The plan is to declare war on New Zealand and then immediately surrender and under international law, any country that defeats another in war becomes the de facto government.
Ardern has been widely praised for her response to the COVID-19 pandemic and her reaction to the terror attacks last year while Boris Johnson has run a Government campaign so awful that it is now in the top three of deaths in the World, killing more people than the government can bring itself to count properly.
The petition has been set up on change.org to 'Declare war on New Zealand and immediately surrender' and says 'The British Government has shown itself to be completely incapable of controlling the COVID-19 virus outbreak in the UK. The New Zealand Government has on the other hand carefully controlled the outbreak therefore if the UK declares war on New Zealand and then immediately surrenders Jacinda Ardern and her Government will have to take over running the UK and will do a much better job than the present bunch of clowns'. 
As she was part of the policy advising team for Tony Blair, she knows her way around the British Government so it wouldn't be that much of a change so come on New Zealand, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!!

Special Guest Blogger: Orville Wright

My brother Wilbur and i invented the airplane and i predicted that the airplane would make war so terrible that i didn't believe any country will again care to start a war but rather than putting an end to war as i thought, i lived just long enough to see one of my flying inventions drop an atomic bomb and vapourise an entire Japanese City so that didn't go quite as i thought.
Someone who doesn't get any credit is my fellow American Octave Chanute who had been tinkering with flying machines for years and published the very first history of aviation before anyone had actually taken flight and he even designed a plane which some students later reconstructed and flew it for over a minute which means that he probably designed the world's first functioning airplane, four years before we flew ours.
We contacted him for advice as we designed our own machine and modeled our glider after his designs and to thank him we patented the designs as our own and stopped writing to him. Octave who?
We got our plane airborne for 12 seconds, 10 feet above the ground for 120ft with me flying the plane while Wilbur stayed on the ground watching, we both became famous but not straight away, the local newspaper didn't even bother writing about it.
We started out with a bicycle repair shop and even designed and sold our own bike which allowed us to finance the plane but after we proved we had the first flying machine, we quite soon had another first when i crashed and killed my passenger, the first airplane fatality.
We spent the years after suing companies who tried to copy our design and ignoring Octave what-his-name but my last flight was in 1944 on a Lockheed Constellation which the pilot made a point of sarcastically mentioning had a wingspan of 126ft, longer than the distance of my first flight not that i cared, i was famous, he wasn't but most importantly, neither was Octave whats-his-face.

To The Left, ALL Lives Matter

I'm not certain how the Black Lives Matter became a left v right thing although as i have noted here ad nauseum, not all racists are right wing but all the racists are on the right wing and as one of the chants from the self-identified right wing protest yesterday was 'We Are Racist', seems like many of them turned up to spend Saturday afternoon lobbing bottles at police and urinating up memorials. 
I had a discussion of sorts with a small group of protester yesterday and tried to argue that as they were protesting against anti-racism protests, that puts them on the same side as the likes of Edward Colston, the slave trader whose statue was pulled down last week but they didn't see it that way, they seemed to think they were somehow protecting England, an England where people who forcibly snatched black people from their homeland and shipped them halfway around the World are celebrated obviously.
That's the problem with being terminally stupid, you may think you're not but you're actually too ignorant too realise and consider yourself smart but in reality, you're just window-shakingly stupid.
I will never understand the right wing mind or the people who hold right wing views, why would you? The left is all about sharing and equality for all and making things fairer for everyone but the right wing seems to be about keeping things unequal and to hell with everyone else as long as you and yours are okay, the mindset most often seen in children before their minds mature.
I have no problem with statues of the less savoury members of British history being removed, statues are built to commemorate and celebrate people and some of the people standing in city centres should certainly not be celebrated but if you are actively protesting against the anti-racism movement, anti anti-racism, that makes you at worst a racist or at best ignorant and very much part of the problem but it doesn't mean you have to become a left winger, just stop being a dick would help enormously because to the left, ALL lives matter, even yours.

Special Guest Blogger: Ferdinand Magellan

Sixteenth-century Europe was heavily dependent on spices, and cloves and black pepper so when Spain's eastern route to the Spice Islands was blocked by the Portuguese, the Spaniards luckily had me who, as any history teacher will tell you, led the first expedition to sail all the way around the world.
I set out to find a western route to the Spice Islands, and obviously they succeeded, because there are like 300 varieties of spices on your supermarket shelves and i reckon you don't even know what half of them are, Asafoetida anyone?
Technically i did sail around the World, or at least my body did because i went and got himself speared in the leg, arm, neck and face while attempting to introduce Christ to the lives of locals in the Philippines who it turned out, didn't want me to.
So the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the globe was actually the 18 members of my crew left alive out of the 237 who started who remained on Victoria after my death, Victoria being the only ship left out of the five that left Spain, and arrived back in Spain over a year later.
Three years at sea can do a strange thing to a man, living together for many months on the open seas with women just a fading memory, you end up with a ship full of horny sailors who either start looking at skates mouth alluringly or you take matters in hand to find another way to relieve your sexual frustrations or they drank themselves into a stupour and it seemed there was a lack of skates on my journey because everywhere i went on deck, i was stepping over seamen and if that isn't bad enough, there was also the drunk sailors to avoid stepping on also.

Slave Owning US Presidents

The Star Spangled Banner with it's line 'The Land Of The Free' did not become the official national Anthem of America until 1931 which is fortunate for 12 US Presidents who dodged criticism of hypocrisy at the time for owning very much not free slaves.
The first President, George Washington, wouldn't have lied if you asked him how many slaves he held as he was a major slaveholder with 317 which is almost half as many as Thomas Jefferson who not only owned over 600, but fathered six children with one who was the half sister of his late wife.
James Madison had over 100 and although James Monroe supported sending freed slaves to the new country of Liberia, he kept his 75 slaves a lot closer to home while Andrew Jackson owned 200 slaves and was an active slave trader up until he became President.
Martin Van Buren had the one slave up until he managed to escape but William Henry Harrison kept a tighter reign on his 11 and supported slavery as did John Tyler who paid good money for his 70 and wasn't going to give them up.
The 25 slaves owned by James K. Polk had no chance of being freed as he supported slave-holders rights and although Zachary Taylor refused to expand slavery, as he already had 150 he didn't need to and Andrew Johnson convinced Abraham Lincoln to exempt his area from the Emancipation Proclamation as he needed the 8 slaves that he kept as did Ulysses S. Grant who controlled 5 slaves while fighting the American Civil War.
With Washington on the $1 dollar bill, Jefferson on the $2, Jackson on the $20 and Ulysses S. Grant's image on the $50 dollar bill, it may not be just badly named Forts which should be facing an overhaul.

Protecting Statues Apparently

The frontier town that is Central London is a tense place this afternoon. Tumbleweed blows along  Downing Street, and shopkeepers raise the shutters in anticipation of trouble. It all started two weeks ago in a Minneapolis Street, when a black man got a knee across his windpipe for almost nine minutes by a lawman.
Since then the stench of racism has hung heavy in the air around the World, while up on Boot Hill the gravediggers prepare to bury the tarnished reputation of slave traders and historical racists.
Only one side can save the town from bloodshed - it's the right-wing, and they are riding into town on their high high horse as we speak. They knew there would be trouble when they heard that the statue of Winston ''I hate Indians' Churchill was in danger of being removed.
Pausing to light a cheroot and adjust the brim of his hat, one right winger paused his posse to explain 'We are not racists, i live next door to a black man'.
Unfortunately for the self-appointed protectors of slave traders and racists, the Black Lives Matter crowd saw what was coming over the hill and dispersed peacefully so with nobody to attack and racially abuse, the right-wing posse battled the police instead and tried to get at the statue of Nelson Mandela to show just how much they are against destroying statues by trying to destroy a statue.
Obnoxious white men attempting to brutally stop Black and Brown men from demonstrating against being discriminated against, Winnie would approve.

Special Guest Blogger: Keith Moon

I was all for a quiet life, i just never got one because wow were they some messed up days in the 70s.
One of my early school reports called me 'Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects with a tendency to show off' and i proudly carried all three of those things into adulthood, a retarded idiot who showed off until the end.
At one of our early shows Pete Townshend smashed his guitar in temper after accidentally breaking it so not to be outdone, i kicked over the drum kit which went down well with the crowd so i did that after every show.
If i wasn't drunk i was high and sniffing shitloads of hallucinogenic drugs up your nose can affect your senses so when i took the drum trashing up a level and loaded gunpowder into one of my bass drums, turned out i used way too much and it exploded and set Pete Townshend's hair on fire and embedded a piece of cymbal in my arm.
It was me who began the rock and roll tradition of wrecking hotel rooms and throwing the furniture out the windows but my favourite trick was to flush powerful explosives down toilets, no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe from me.
My most famous spree came on my 21st Birthday in Michigan, where i started a food fight, fire extinguishers were set off, guests thrown into the swimming pool and we managed to turn a piano into firewood and one second i was sat in a Lincoln Convertible Car on the lawn beside the pool and then next thing i know i'm sitting in the Lincoln Convertible wondering why the pool is suddenly flooding in the windows and noticing wet pool tiles close up. That got us banned from every Holiday Inn around the World.
I died in Harry Nilsson's place, three years after Cass Elliot had died there and lived up to that famous Who lyric, 'I hope i die before i get old' and the 32 Clomethiazole sedative tablets i took achieved that.

Special Guest Blogger: Rudyard Kipling

I'm probably most famous for The Jungle Book but the Disney version was very different to my story where rather than Mowgli disappearing into the village forever and living happily ever after with his own people and leaving Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther in the dust, in my version the village Mowgli tries to return to banishes him back to the wilderness, and he and his Jungle friends come back and destroy the entire goddamned village, Disney went with their own less murdery interpretation of that.
I feel i should try and explain my poem White Man's Burden which refers to the viewpoint that it is the responsibility of the white man to drag the savages kicking and screaming into modernity, even if it kills them, which to be fair it mostly did.
Some took it as me being racist which is nonsense, i just took the view that the white race is morally obligated to rule the non-white people on the planet in order to encourage their economic, social, and cultural progress and their heathen religions should be replaced with the far superior Christianity.
See, explained that like i was being kind, saying that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized, so what's wrong with that?
That idiot Mark Twain was against me, saying he was shocked that i should promote the propagation of the Gospel to replace other religions and that we should try to Christianise the Christians first but hey, Old Twainy never won a Nobel Prize for Literature but i did so what does he know.

Is America Great Again Yet?

The question ‘when was America ever great’ has been posed so let's take a look and see if we can answer it.
America became America in 1776 so we have a pick from 244 years although the criteria isn't easy to nail down.
George Floyd's niece was obviously looking at it through the eyes of race and America with a history of Slavery, the KK and it's all round terribleness towards anyone not white, the easy answer is it's never been great, always been awful.
Donald Trump, the man who started the whole make America great again buzz, is probably looking at things through an economic viewpoint and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that the only year there was no national debt was 1837 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the lowest ever unemployment was under Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1967 at 2.50% and the lowest poverty rate came during Richard Nixon's Presidency in 1973 with a record low of 11.1% of the population in poverty. 
Regarding wars and conflicts, in its 244 years America, wikipedia shows that it has not been involved in a war or conflict somewhere for only 18 years, at peace for a paltry 7.4% of it's existence and none of those years chime with the years of the best economic measures so we still can't nail down when America was great.
The final measures would be approval of the President and when the voters were most happiest with their lot and that would be Harry S Truman who had the highest approval rating of 91 in 1945 and as 1945 was also one of those rare years when America wasn't actually at war with someone, that would make 1945 the year that America was last great, at least in the eyes of Americans.
Not very scientific but with race protests filling the streets, a current debt of $24.95 trillion, 13.3 unemployment rate, 12% poverty rate, conflicts ongoing in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemini and Libya and a President with a record low approval rating of 45, America certainly isn't great again just yet.

Special Guest Blogger: Peter The Great

Due to having a mentally nutty brother, i became Tsar aged 10 sharing power with my half sister but she was overthrown and one of my first rule changes was to introduce some fashion sense.
When Henry VIII began wearing long trousers in England, Russia was a long way behind in the fashion stakes and as they were a sign of power, i ordered every man to put some damn trousers on.
To be fair, fashion wasn't the only thing we were behind on as Russia's territory was massive, it's population was pretty small and mostly comprised of farmers, with only a small fraction of all Russians living in towns and i saw trousers as a way of bringing Russia into the 18th Century, so issued a decree commanding everyone at every level of society to wear pants, other than clergy and peasant farmers.
That meant no more long cloaks or whatever the hell the farmers wore but as well as leg coverings, i taxed beards (moustaches were tax free) and suddenly, Russian men were forced to wear leggings and shave their facial hair at all times, despite Russia's climate being brass monkeys pretty much all year round in Russia.
Basking in the glory of a trousered and goatee free nation, i declared myself Emperor of all the Russians and then built a great military which i used to smack around the Swedes and pummel the Persians but i did have a bit of a dicky bladder which was made worse by wading into the cold sea to save some drowning soldiers exacerbated my bladder problems and ultimately caused my death.
My legacy would therefore be launching an empire that lasted 200 years until the Soviet Revolution of 1917 and it all started with long trousers.

Statues In General

I'm not much of a lover of statues and i don't buy for a second the argument that those of the people currently standing around in parks and city centers should be left there as a reminder of our past indiscretions.
They were built and prominently placed to honour them, i doubt many people knew the dark stories behind Colston or Rhodes until the furor blew up about them but leaving them in place just seems to condone them, literally placing them on a pedestal.
Apart from racists and slave traders, many of our statues are of long dead military personnel and i am with the pigeons on what we think of celebrating them.
Brits do have a strange compulsion to put things on Statues, usually wigs and traffic cones, the nearby Charles Dickens statue is a regular recipient of a comic relief red nose and is currently sporting a face mask but if we are going to have statues, pick people who have benefited mankind such as Darwin, Newton, Watt, Fleming, Shakespeare or Nightingale, all people who made enduring contributions to our existence and should be celebrated front and center on 40ft high columns, not some Admiral who mowed down Johnny Foreigner a few centuries ago.
I say a rule of thumb should be if your ships transported 84,000 men, women and children to slavery then the statue is probably not of someone who should be celebrated and to say it was a different time then, it was, but doesn't mean it was right then, just means people were more able to get away with it then. 

Special Guest Blogger: Cecil Rhodes

I might be dead but i know why i have been asked to write here today, it's because i'm British and as i said 'being British, we won the first  prize in the great lottery of life' which may sound a bit arrogant but i didn't mean it that way, i meant it was because we were better than everyone else.
I went to live in Africa due to my asthma and the British climate wasn't good for me, the Great in Britain isn't there because of the weather and a chance discovery proved that diamonds were not only a girl's best friend but did brilliantly for me also, it made me so much money i started buying land but the problem was the land had people who were not White British living on it.
With all the good grace you would expect from a white Victorian-era diamond magnate, i bought over white folk and gave them land while reducing the amount of land a black person could legally own. 
Then i ingeniously changed the voting rules so the blacks could vote only if they owned enough land, which they obviously never, see the previous sentence.
Oh, then just in case they ever started that wanting to vote in their own country ball rolling again, the sweetest plum in the up-yours basket was when i introduced a tax that increased sharply with the size of the hut they lived in which didn't go down well but i explained that life isn't fair, nor will it ever be anyway, i've got lots of money and am very famous and you're not so shut up and dig.
I ended up buying, controlling and lording it over 850,000 square miles of the earth's surface and called it after myself, i wanted Cecil Rhodes African Peninsula but the initials didn't look good on the flag so ended up going with Rhodesia instead.
I treated my people well, the white settlers in Australia and North and South America slaughtered their indigenous people but i did what i did out of an undying love for my fellow Rhodesian's and Britain and if anything i didn't know the strength of my own love, like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, if he had access to millions of pounds, powerful firearms and an army.
When i died aged 48 us Brits had maintained their position as the supreme race and the ultimate accolade, statues were built of me including in Oxford University which as i saw today, still draws thousands of students, many of them black, to gathering around it, singing and staring up at the man who bought a little piece of Britain to the Africans, not a good bit obviously, somewhere like Essex possibly, but it still brings a tear to this Brit's beady little eye.

Special Guest Blogger: Mary Seacole

The Crimea War will forever be known as the war which made Florence Nightingale but anyone would think that she was the only Nurse amongst the muck and bullets because i was there also although not many people seem to have heard of me.
I learnt my skills in Jamaica where my mother was a nurse but being a black woman i had to overcame the double prejudices of sexism and racism and when the Crimea war started i applied to be part of Florence Nightingales crew but she turned me down because i was black and as she wrote, association between me and her nurses was absolutely out of the question, but despite her i still went on to accomplish great things and save thousands of soldiers lives.
I set up what came to be known as the 'British Hotel' for convalescent officers behind the Crimean War’s front lines and cared for wounded soldiers on the battlefield using traditional African and Caribbean herbal remedies.
After the saintly Florence turned me down i applied to the War Office but they also refused so i funded my own way to Crimea where i would trek the battlefields under fire, to nurse the wounded, not miles back in safety like some other nurses i could name who had time to piddle around designing pretty Pie Charts.
When the war ended i was broke and had to file for bankruptcy but my story was reported in the British Press and my financial situation improved although not the racism, Punch magazine wrote a piece asking 'Who would give a guinea to a foreigner when he might bestow the money on a genuine English one' but plenty did and even more bought my autobiography despite the angelic Florence moaning that i was getting too much acclaim for my efforts in Crimea and even wrote a letter to her MP to muddy my name, lying that i had kept a bad house in Crimea, and was responsible for much drunkenness and improper conduct.
After i died of a stroke i faded from British memory, afterall they had a famous white Nurse to celebrate that fitted the English ideal of a Victorian heroine more than a dark-skinned Jamaican, and when a statue of me was placed outside St Thomas' Hospital, the Florence Nightingale Society complained that i did not qualify as a mainstream figure in the history of nursing, as she did so much to discredit me, she would have been proud that the society that bears her name is just as spiteful and bitchy as she was.

Special Guest Blogger: Marie Antoinette

I allegedly said 'Let them eat cake' when i found out the people of France were out of bread and starving which makes me sound a right bitch and then the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft repeated and then Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attributing it to me.
Because of my Austrian ancestry, i was not very popular with the French at the time anyway so when the 'let them eat cake' story came about, everyone believed it.
Rousseau recounts an episode in a bakery when he heard a great princess say, when told by the baker that the peasants had no bread, replied: 'Then let them eat brioches' and the Princess was Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV'.
So i lost my head for something i never even said, what i actually said was they're a bunch of snail eating frogs who smell of cheese, see, nothing about cake whatsoever.
I married Louis XVI when i was 14 and he was 15 and the main part of why i was so hated by the French was because the country was bankrupt due to him sending massive amounts of Francs to support the American Revolution but i did not have particular grand tastes, i liked diamonds, gold and beautiful clothes as much as the next woman and on the farm attached to the Palace i had the animals sprayed with expensive perfume but they did stink.
We almost escaped just before our execution but the guard we bribed turned out to be a untrustworthy piece of crap so off to the guillotine we went and after watching my husbands head bounce off the block and into a basket, i climed the steps and accidentally stepped on the executioners foot and
naturally apologised for my clumsiness.
Looking back now i probably should have just kicked him really, really hard in the nuts, what was the worst he could do? He was about to kill me anyway!

Edward Colston Statue In The Right Place

Statues are erected to say this person was one of Britain's very best but that's the problem with statues, if we are going to celebrate anyone with a likeness in our towns and cities, it should be people who are genuine heroes who have helped mankind, not conquered, enslaved or killed as many as possible of them so why the statue of Edward Colston was not removed decades ago is a disgrace.
Edward Colston was a slave trader who made his fortune by transporting 84,000 men, women and children from West Africa to the Caribbean in the 17th Century and his statue which until this afternoon standing in Bristol Town Centre, is now at the bottom of Bristol's Harbour after protesters pulled it from the plinth and dragged it to it's watery end.
The Home Secertary has come out and described the toppling of Colston's statue as 'disgraceful' but i would say a good guide is if the statue is a representation of someone who made money selling black people for slaves, then the statue is probably not of someone who should be celebrated.
Britain has a shameful and reprehensible past with the likes of Colston, a white supremacist who wreaked havoc in Africa and represents Britain at it empirical worst, when it was stomping around the globe and putting the natives down while they raped and pillaged the land for Blighty.
Colston's actions were abhorrent in the 17th Century and it is wrong today in the cold light of the 21st Century when we see them for the hideous creatures that he and his ilk were, so they should be torn down and thrown in the sea out of sight, i would also lob every Winston Churchill statue into the river if it was up to me.
My only concern is that the people who did it, i hope they sanitised their hands afterwards but no amount of scrubbing will remove the stain of what Britain and it's slave traders did, but making sure we don't have a 18ft bronze statue to them as a constant reminder of our previous generations racism is a great start.

Special Guest Blogger: Sigmund Freud

I gave the World the concept of Psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, repression, dream analysis, psychotherapy, the subconscious/unconscious, id/ego/superego and the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories and most of them concern sexual symbolism.
I also gave the World the Freudian slip, an unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings, usually concerning sex and offering us a look into the human psyche and discovered that it's full of cocks.
Many of my works ended up having sexual connotations, such as females wanting equality suffering a form of feminine castration complex and penis envy and smoking was just a substitution for masturbation but it is absurd to say that i was obsessed by the male genitalia or phallus, dicks, pricks, members, tools, organs, cocks, wangs, knobs, choppers, plonkers, dongs, winkles, joysticks, peckers, John Thomas's, weenies, whangs, todgers, schlongs or willies.
One of my patients had a severe leg pains with stomach and menstrual pains which i diagnosed as being caused by habitual masturbation and could be cured by an operation on her nose which resulted in recurrent nasal bleeding which were, i said were due to 'hysterical wish-bleedings linked to a wish to be loved', see that's the good thing about being a famous psychiatrist, you can say any old bollocks and they believe you. 
Things were going great penis's until the Nazis turned up to ruin things so i fled to Britain and continued my career of the patient paying me a lot of money to pour out their feelings on a couch while i nodded and took notes and concluded they jerked off too much.
In no way associated with cigarettes and penis's, i smoked only great big, long, thick cigars and it was these that did for me as i contracted cancer of the jaw and died and left the World Psychoanalysys, so-named because anyone who believes that analysis i spouted must be a psycho.

Special Guest Blogger: Sam Cooke

I didn't know much about history, geography, a science book or the French i took which is why i was never invited onto any pub quiz teams but i know you have to be a special type of talent to make a song of prisoners working on the side of the road sound like a love ballad.
Despite being a deeply religious man, i was a bit of a philanderer, during my group stage before going solo i had 3 pregnant girlfriends, all at the same time, and it was trying to get my leg over a fan that led to my untimely death.
I brought a female fan back to my room at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles for drinks and then a spot of sex but after the drinks and getting naked, i went to the toilet only for her to get cold feet and run out the room, grabbing my clothes along with hers, leaving only one of my shoes.
Being drunk, and naked except for one foot, i tracked down the manager of the hotel and demanded i be allowed to search her office for the missing girl and my clothes but strangely, she didn't like the idea of an angry, naked black man raiding her office for underwear so i grabbed her, she grabbed a gun and shot me in the chest, killing me.
Bobby Womack was my friend since childhood and was a member of my first band, and he showed up at my funeral in my car with my wife wearing one of my suits.
Three months after my death he married my wife and cheated on her with my daughter which sounds awful but to be fair, roles reversed, i would have done exactly the same.

Special Guest Blogger: Nicolaus Copernicus

If there is one thing we know about space it is that the Earth orbits the Sun and you have me to thank for that. You're welcome.
It was my book 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium' (or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) which proved not only that i was terrible at book titles but also that the Earth orbited the Sun but i was canny about it all because i knew that if i had just come out and said: 'Hey what if the Earth is not the center of the Universe and actually goes around the Sun', the Church would have replied: 'Hey, what if we set you on fire and piss on you to put it out' so i delayed the publication until i was literally on my death bed, the book was printed on the day that i died.
Although i get all the glory, the idea was first put forward by Aristarchus in about 300BC when he said the middle contained a great fire which the planets circled around but he was up against Aristotle and Ptolemy who said we were the middle and was ignored but he did get a moon crater named after him although so did i, and mine was bigger as well as an element, Copernicium.
Such was my concern that the Religious folk would batter me that i tried to get around it by dedicating my masterpiece to Pope Paul III but it didn't stop them criticizing me, to be honest i don't think they quite got the jist of it.
The main criticism was the theory wasn't compatible with the Bible because in Genesis 1:14, 'God places lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night' and the central location of the Sun was not compatible with it being described as one of the lights placed in the firmament.
Kinda missed the whole point really but then the Bible thumpers really did think that the whole Universe revolved around them.