US Still Pointing Covid Finger At China

I have always found it a bit of a coincidence that the Coronavirus virus began in Wuhan which just happended to be home of a scientific laboratory which was performing scientific experiments on Coronavirus's but i am willing to go with the science and the science is saying the outbreak was exposure to an infected animal.
Despite probes by China and the World Health Organisation, US President Joe Biden gave the US intelligence community 90 days to figure out the source of the coronavirus which has infected over 215 million and killed more than 4.4 million people around the globe.
The report was made public on Friday and it came to the decision that it didn't know how it started although it is right to question just how scientifically credible a report from a nation currently desperate for a scapegoat for its own awful response and involved in a battle for global supremacy would be as it is right to question how credible China's report is considering it is under the spotlight as the source of the outbreak.
What the US report did confirm was that the virus was not 'a biological weapon', was not 'genetically engineered' and the China’s officials 'did not have foreknowledge of the virus'.
China has repeatedly dismissed the lab leak theory as an attempt to politicise the pandemic and are now demanding a similar probe to investigate American laboratories for the origins of the virus based on several studies that found traces of Covid-19 in the US before Wuhan.
The earlier WHO probe described the likelihood of the coronavirus escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan as 'extremely unlikely' but for some they never accepted that and have long made their own mind up that China is to blame as we saw under Donald Trump who first floated the idea and named it the 'China Virus' while doing very little to protect his own citizens from it, hence the lofty position at the top of the deaths league.
I expect the game of trying to pin the blame on China will continue as it is convenient for America to do so as a distraction but it seems to be on it's own as the rest of the World seem to be happy to follow the findings from the WHO, the only independent and medically experienced author, that the origins were from an infected animal.

A Covid Autumn

As the summer ends and the autumn approaches, it all sounds very familiar as cases of COVID-19 are rising and we all know what happened last winter when cases, hospitalisations and deaths rose through the roof and cases are at an even higher level than they were at this time last year so we are setting out into Autumn and Winter with the bar raised much higher so is it time to panic?   
Scientists are saying that the vaccination program is doing precisely as they hoped but cases and deaths will certainly get even higher but the crucial difference is the relationship between cases and deaths which are very different from last year.
Public Health England put the daily total of new infections at 38,281 but the majority of these newly infected are under 25 and as they are in the best position to withstand the virus, the deaths are not coming at the same rate, approx 100 per day, as when the new infections were in the over 50s and deaths was running at over 500 a day and that is due to vaccinations.
The potential fly in the ointment is the length of time the protection lasts, scientists are stating a decline after 3 months and boosters will be required but as we shift in the more cooler Autumn months, the numbers are going to be scary.

Special Guest Blogger: St Moses the Black

I assume that in the 1700 years since i was alive black people are now treated the same as whites but back in my day blacks were treated as sub human and a lower order than the whites so not unexpectedly we went off the rails sometimes and i was considered a bad apple on account of all the murdering and robbing i did but i started off as slave of a government official in Egypt who dismissed me for theft and suspected murder of another slave.
I say suspected because there was no such thing as reasonable doubt or burden of proof then and anyone could be found guilty of any number of crimes and the victim could not speak up prove my innocence mostly due to him being dead from having my knife in his neck at the time, but still.
In order to make ends meet i became the leader of a gang of bandits and we would roam the Nile Valley, spreading terror and violence and as i was a large, imposing figure, not many people resisted when i waved my knife in their face and demanded their money.
On one occasion a man caught me making my getaway which annoyed me immensely so i ran back but seeing a huge black man waving a knife screaming that he was going to kill him gave him a clue of what was about to happen and he had the sense to make a run for it to fetch the authorities so instead i killed four of his sheep and ran off to escape.
Obviously, a big black man ugly enough to make an onion cry covered in sheep's blood wasn't going to be that hard to find so i hid out amongst some monks in a colony in the desert and i was impressed that they fed me and accepted me so i asked to join them, became a Christian, was baptized and joined the monastic community.
One time the Abbot ordered the brothers to fast but some brothers came to me saying they were hungry so i prepared a meal for them but some neighboring monks reported to the Abbot that i was breaking the fast and when he arrived he took one look at me and backed out babbling that he just realised that the divine commandment of hospitality out-ruled his orders to fast. Damn straight it did.
Some years later a group of thieves wanted to rob the monastery where we were living but i caught them off guard and singlehandedly beat them all to a pulp and dragged their bloodied bodies to the chief monk to ask what to do because after-all it wasn’t a monkly thing to kill them and the head of the monastery said to forgive them and send them away, which surprised the robbers so much that they all apologised, converted and became monks too.
My death at 75 was a noble act, another group of bandits attacked the monastery and the brothers wanted to defend themselves, but i told them to retreat rather than take up weapons and i would stay behind to fight off the warriors so i stood there alone and prayed for Gods arse kicking help.
Now God might be good but he isn't that good because a 75 year old man screaming 'come on then, you want a piece of me' to a horde of tooled up warriors ended about as well as you imagine.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Louis of France

I managed to get a lot done in my life from being the King of France for nearly 25 years to somehow getting a city in a place that didn't exist for another 500 years named after me and between that fighting the British and managing to go on multiple Crusades which is how i managed to get myself a Sainthood, literally crusading my way into the Church's big book of Saints.
Both my parents were religious zealots and when my father died and i inherited the throne i was expected to continue his strict religious oversights as the 'lieutenant of God on Earth' which came with the crown.
As a bit of a pray wasn't going to cut it, i introduced new laws which made blaspheming punishable by mutilation of the tongue and lips and ordered the burning of some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other important Jewish books but the Pope wasn't satisfied and suggested that i join in on the crusades against the Muslims currently going on in the Middle East.
By the time i got my act together the Christians were on Crusade number seven and with hindsight i maybe should have asked more questions about what had happened at the other six over the previous hundred years but you know how it is when you are going on a trip abroad so off we went to Egypt with a thousand of my best men and we were swiftly captured by the Egyptian army and more than the entire yearly revenue for all of France had to be paid for my ransom which was a tad embarrassing.
Being that massive ransoms for captured Kings who make almighty cock-ups of Crusades are expensive, i kicked out all the Jews who were charging interest on loans in France which now had to be paid to me instead of them so i put away the Francs i earned and the Pope came along again and said such a shame about the seventh crusade but i have a feeling that an eighth would be super successful.
Probably to nobody’s surprise, number eight worked out even worse than the first time and my army managed to land in Africa, where my brother Charles persuading me to attack Tunis where i promptly came down with a fatal case of dysentery and died.
As per the customs of the time, my heart and intestine were removed and the flesh was boiled from my body and the bones and human offal was transported back to France for burial.
Despite being really, really bad at Crusades, nevertheless, with all the mangled blasphemous tongues and the faint smell of burning Jewish books in the air all in the name of God, i managed to get myself venerated as a Saint, potentially only one of a few Saint's ever who died of the squirts on his way to war.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Genesius

It is said that the Bible is a humourless book but i don't know, it had Samson in it and he brought the house down.
As you can probably guess by that brilliant intro, i am the patron saint of comedians which is pretty cool considering some of the things some of my fellow Saints are patron of but how i became one is a real thigh slapper.
I had a reputation as one of Rome's greatest comedy actors and my act was mocking the Christians, my joke about all the atheists are lucky God's not real and the difference between Jesus and a picture of Jesus is that it only takes one nail to hang the picture always went down a storm and i was hired by Emperor Diocletian to star in a play that made fun of Christian Baptism and i was there on the stage just about to launch into my joke about a Christian, a pagan and a Jew walk into a tavern when i suddenly felt a huge weight on my chest.
I lay down and above me a bunch of Angels floated down and they were holding a huge book which they said contained all my sins against God and the only way to save my soul was to be baptized straight away which i did, right there and then on the stage in front of Emperor Diocletian.
Being a Christian in 4th Century Rome was about as popular as being a bacon sandwich salesman in Judea and it was safe to say that the Emperor was not too impressed by my conversion and my subsequent refusal to carry on making jokes about Christians therefore laying aside my favourite joke 'What time of day was Adam created? Just a little before Eve'!
Diocletian had me arrested and tortured to force me to renounce my new found faith but i said no and he said that was fine and we went and had a drop of wine at his place and a good laugh about the whole thing- just kidding, he chopped my head off but i had the last laugh because i was made a Saint of comedy.
A few of my acquaintances have asked why i was made the patron saint of comedians when my big act of sainthood was to stop a comedy performance but i point out that Jerry Seinfeld has his own show on the Comedy channel so what's their point.
Well that's my story and i will end with Amen, i could say Awomen but then that's why we have Hymns instead of Hers. Thank you and i'm here for eternity. Is this thing on? Seriously, could you turn this thing on?

Goodwill Towards Biden Didn't Last Long

We had such high hopes for Joe Biden, mainly because he wasn't the awful human Donald Trump, but things have gone South very quickly for the American President.
Everyone and his dog has said his actions in leaving the Afghans high, dry and murdered in their beds was a grotesque act of abandonment made worse by his dreadful defence of his actions by claiming that nation-building was never a US aim when it went into Afghanistan which was very much not what the architect of the war, George W Bush, said, he called it: 'the ultimate nation-building mission'.
Possibly Joe was sleeping when that was said and he missed it, he always look like has just woken up to me but apart from men armed with RPG's currently shooting people at Kabul airport, he is not finding many people who agree with his actions.
While Biden was placing the blame on previous presidents and Afghan leaders and soldiers, in the UK House of Commons, almost across the board the decision to withdraw was condemned, the Germans called it 'a debacle', China said it was a 'negative move' and even Latvia chimed in calling the American decision chaos and causing additional suffering with only Israel refusing to condemn Biden, instead hoping that as he now has thousands of troops kicking their heels, he may turn them Iran’s way.
As i said previous, Biden can be roundly and quite rightly condemned for his decision to play along with Donald Trumps decision to withdraw troops from the nation they invaded 20 years ago but the finger of blame should be pointed at the President who decided that following 3,000 deaths in New York, Afghanistan should be on the end of the American response in what he called 'The War on Terror'.
This war took in Afghanistan and Iraq, then Obama who not only increased the Afghan Conflict but helped the same people they were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to victory in Libya and then armed them in Syria.
Donald Trump kept the pot bubbling but for all his pussy grabbing faults, he did not actually start any new wars and although he may not have pulled out of Stormy Daniels, he did set in motion pulling out of Afghanistan and now Joe has stayed awake long enough to actually do it and returned Afghanistan to the exact same place where it was when it all started, with the Taliban Government in control.
Since 2001 America has been shedding allies, credibility and respect as its reputation suffers another blow which China will be keen to exploit and are already making great inroads with their soft-power so this could be seen as yet another step in the fall of the Americans who since 1991 had been the sole super-power and should have made so much with it but instead squandered it spectacularly.

Elon Musk At It Again

Elon Musk has announced the imminent arrival of the Tesla-Bot, a 5ft 8in humanoid robot named Optimus penciled in to be debuted next year which has been designed to eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks and made from lightweight materials and designed to be 'friendly but also easy to run away from with a movement speed of around five miles per hour'.
At no point did any of the journalists in the room say: 'What? Hang on Musky, why should we want to run away from it?
Musk has previously warned about the dangers of AI, predicting that AI will very soon surpass humans abilities and then 'things will get unstable and weird', and then he himself introduces a humanoid robot capable of unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks like taking over the world or chopping up everyone in the household like vegetables and roasting the human pieces in the cooker.
The machine can carry up to 150 lbs or 10 stone so us humans had better start bulking up because then when it goes rouge and starts acting out the Terminator movie, it wouldn't be able to carry us very far if it catches us slower runners.
Forget the diet humans and start piling the chips onto your plate as it could literally save your life! 

£2.1 Trillion Debt Not A Bad Thing Apparently

There was an economist on TV the other day talking about the National Debt and how it had reached £2.1 trillion and the UK Government is currently borrowing a further £30 billion a month which i thought probably explains why Boris Johnson has given up on on the Covid-19 and thrown the doors open and to hell with our health.
I mentioned it to an Economist friend who tried unsuccessfully to explain to me that the debt is not anything to worry about because we are borrowing from ourselves so really no need to rush to pay it back.
Bearing in mind that i spent the whole conversation looking confused and saying 'i don't get it' i may have got it completely wrong but the jist of the argument is that a Government 'borrows' money by writing on a piece of paper (called a bond) that the government promises to buy back on a specific later date and these pieces of paper (bonds) can be bought back with new pieces of paper (new bonds) with later buy-back dates. Our debt then is a good thing because we are investing in our future.
Seeing i was about to say 'WTF are you talking about!' he tried an analogy which went something like this.
You have your £150,000 house with a mortgage but you want to add a new patio or a swimming pool so you borrow the money by borrowing a further £20,000 to pay for the improvements so your debt has gone up to £170,000 but the value of the property is now £200,000 due to the improvements.
The Government is therefore 'borrowing' money in order to make the improvements to the country so we are improving and increasing in value what the future generation will eventually inherit as we can't default on the debt so everyone is a winner and the problem would be if we were not in debt because that would mean the Government was not making the improvments.
It ended with me asking if that's the case, why the Conservative Government under Theresa May and David Cameron gave us a decade of severe Austerity because 'we had to pay off the debt'.
A shrug and a curt 'Because they were Tory w*nk*rs?' was the only thing he said that i understood.
I can't even pretend to understand it and as i said at the start i may have grossly misrepresented what he said but i left none the wiser who we owe £2.1 trillion to and who is stupid enough to lend us £30 million every month.

All Time Paralympic Medal Table 2021

 

If you haven't had enough of watching super-fit people run, throw things and swim really fast then you are in luck because the Paralympics is about to start on 24th August.
Just as they did with the other Olympics, they are insisting on calling it the 2020 Olympics despite it being held in 2021 but i am willing to cut Japan some slack because they spent all that money on infrastructure only for Coronavirus to stop any fans entering the arenas.
There have been 15 Paralympics since the first one in 1960 and Great Britain sit second behind the United States in the all time medal table with Germany third.
Once again the Japanese in their wisdom have decided to schedule the events to Japanese time so it will all be happening while most of Europe is asleep but as it is being televised on Channel 4, it will be another case of waking up and checking my phone to see what we have won overnight.
 

Special Guest Blogger: King Saint Stephen

I was the last Grand Prince of the Hungarians and the first King of the same Hungarians and the first member of the Royal family to become a Christian but i wasn't the turn the other cheek kind of a guy, i was a more likely to stick a sword through it so when my father died my cousin Koppány and a few thousand of his heavily armed friends tried to take the throne but i said i would fight him to the death for the throne and as it happily turned out it was to his death as i put an axe through his head and quartered his body and place one bit of it at the gates of my Palace.
I was coronated with a crown sent by the Pope himself but as Hungary was a pagan place, the thought of a Christian king didn't go down too well with the locals and i fought many wars with the tribes and chieftains including my Uncle Gyula the Younger who was backed by the Roman Emperor.
I encouraged the spread of Christianity by handing out severe punishments for ignoring it because the church wasn't the gentle and accommodating organization we know and love today, it was be pray to the baby Jesus or arrange for your family to clear up the bits of your head laying on the ground.
During my time i collected Holy relics and had bits of Saint George and Saint Nicholas so it was only right that when i died a bit of me was preserved to be sent on tour.
My body was moved from its tomb in St. Stephen's Basilica and whisked away to the crypt beneath it but when the body was being moved, it was discovered that my right hand was perfectly intact and it was wrenched from my wrist and locked away with the rest of the treasure and the other chopped-off Saints body parts.
Apparently my hand was stolen years later and when the hand was recovered in Romania, the ring i always wore was missing so nobody can be certain if it's actually mine or some lucky peasants because they couldn't find mine as it ended up in the stomach of a hungry pet so the hand they are parading around today could be mine or could be the hand of someone else, because a hungry dog ate the real one but its the thought that counts.

Blame Where It's Due For Afghan Debacle

As Afghanistan spirals into a bloody mess, the blame for the whole debacle is being apportioned with Donald Trump getting it from the left for his useless deal which meant he had an agreement with the Taliban to remove American troops who then pulled out of peace talks and just waited for the Americans to leave and the right are throwing abuse at Joe Biden for keeping with the awful Trump plan to pull out the troops.
As the right spit their venom at Biden and the left at Trump, the real architects of what is unfolding on our Television Screens are sitting at home with their feet up, one George W Bush and Tony Blair.  
It was the less than savvy son of the other President George Bush and his poodle Blair who decided to go after the Taliban to force them to hand over Bin Laden in 2001, the same deranged nutters who made the offer that the Taliban would be left in power if they handed him over to the United States and then refused an offer to hand him over to the Pakistan authorities.
They who could not get the backing of the United Nations to attack Afghanistan so with no UN backing, declared it a NATO operation and began bombing Afghanistan.
So everything that has happened between 2001 and now in 2021 was due to the chuckle brothers Bush and Blair who kicked off the whole debacle and as much as i detest Trump and his supporters, i don't blame him or Biden for what is happening today, sure the withdrawal has been messy and ill-thought out and the biggest losers will be the Afghans and the Afghan women especially but every President after Bush inherited the conflict and have dealt with it differently.
Obama actually widened the conflict, Trump bungled the ending of it and Biden has been left with the pieces but did absolutely nothing with them, the British, who were always the junior partner, have to go along with whatever the much more numerical Americans do so have removed themselves also, unable to fight alone without the Americans.
As both Bush and Blair followed up this atrocity with the Iraq War, neither should be left in peace and to our credit, Blair has had to keep his head below the parapet ever since and i don't know what Bush is doing but wherever they are, i hope they are watching a TV screen somewhere and feeling a pang of guilt for what they kicked off, it's doubtful because i don't believe either has the capacity for compassion and empathy but blame where it's due, and that's the couple of warmongering idiots in power in 2001.

A Problem Like Afghanistan

With the Taliban taking over cities with horrific speed, the Defence Secretary said that he did not rule out further military action in Afghanistan, especially as he strongly suspects Al Queada will become a feature in the country.
The Government have convened a COBRA Meeting to discuss what is happening in the country that the UK joined the US in invading in 2001 but from where i am sitting, what we can do is very little.
With two thirds of Afghanistan now in Taliban hands, and the Capital Kabul expected to fall soon, what we have done is send 600 UK troops to help evacuate Britons, America have sent 3000 to do the same which brings to mind the images of the fall of Saigon with the US staff being airlifted from the roof of the embassy.
The whole 20 year misadventure has been a debacle from the beginning, the reasons highly dubious in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the inability to establish a functioning Democratic Government have allowed the Taliban to just wait it out until the UK and America leave and then pounce to fill the vacuum left behind which they are now doing and rapidly regaining all their losses rendering the conflict pointless.
The options seem to be postpone the withdrawal to stay and protect the nation that we invaded or pull out and leave it to its fate at the hand of a fundamentalist and murderous religious cult.
Neither option is particularly palatable but it is a problem that we caused and it feels the greater of two evils to just wash our hands and wave them goodbye, wishing them luck with a barbaric terrorist group.
The bottom line is it is our mess and we should help clear it up.

UK Gun Laws Must be Reviewed After Plymouth

After the horrific scenes in Plymouth, the Home Secretary has said that there will be questions to be asked, the first one i would think is why a Crane Operator had a firearms license in the first place.
The facts of what happened are slow to come out but we know that Jake Davison's first victim was his mother before he went on to kill another 4, including a three year old girl and her father, before shooting himself dead with his pump action shotgun.
The UK has some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, which means mass shootings are very rare but they have happened before, the last one 11 years ago but apart from police licenses handed to farmers, clay pigeon shooters and hunters, it is illegal for anyone else to own them.
To gain a license the person must be over 18 and apply to their local police force, who will assess that they do not pose a threat to public safety and have a good reason to own the gun and any previous criminal convictions for any aggressive or anti-social behaviour or even motoring offenses, must be taken into consideration along with two people of good standing to act as referees and medical records scoured for ensure they are medically fit to own a gun but despite all that, Davison was granted a license last year. In 2020, 306 firearms license were granted in the UK and 982 certificates revoked.
It may turn out that he had the license for one of the above or he never had the license for the pump-action shotgun he used but the police are still trying to find a motive and are currently looking at his links to online gun sites and 'incel' groups where he expressed hatred for his mother.
He recently posted that: 'Mass shootings are new phenomena that cannot be directly blamed on guns'.
The facts will come out but our already tight gun laws must be looked at again because obviously they are just not tight enough.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Clare of Assisi

I was born into a rich family but after hearing Francis of Assisi preach during a service, i decided to dedicate myself to God and i approached him afterwards and asked him if i could join his order so he cut my hair and exchanged my nice clothes for a plain robe and veil and he sent me to a convent of the Benedictine nuns of San Paulo, near Bastia.
My father wasn't best pleased and came to drag me back home but i clung to the altar of the church screaming and Francis intervened and peeled me off the masonary and sent me miles away to another monastery in Subasio out of the reach of my father and given a small dwelling.
News soon spread and women would come to live in our enclosure and i founded the Order of Poor Ladies and considering this was the early 13th Century, it was a full time job and while many of the poor's only worldly possession was a pot which had Do Not Fill With Urine written on the side of it, what they did have plenty of was disease and i would often come down with whichever unpleasant malady was doing the rounds.
It was during one of these bouts of sickness that i was laying in bed wiping snot and flem from my nightdress and wondering how the mass i was too sick to attend was going when i heard chanting coming from the corner of the bedroom.
I set my vomit bucket aside and stared into that corner and saw the Mass being performed right on the wall of my room in glorious technicolour which is why i was named the Patron Saint of something called Television which is something a Scotsman came up with 700 years later.
Unfortunately nobody invented it earlier, it would have made those quiet nights in the monastery go a lot more quicker but we had enough excitement when the Roman Emperor Frederick II sent his army to attack us.
I prayed for the local's to defend us and they did so thanks God but i then endured a long period of poor health and i died on 11 August 1253 at the age of 59 which presented a problem for the Church when they granted me Sainthood because that day was already the Feast Day of Saints Tiburtius and Saint Susanna so they moved mine to the next day and then thought bugger it and bumped the Saintly pair off the saints calendar and moved me to August 11th, sorry guys.

They Did Try To Tell Us

With the IPCC Climate change report making for some very uncomfortable reading about what we are facing, nobody can say we weren't warned.

1824 - French physicist Joseph Fourier warns of the Earth's natural 'greenhouse effect'.
1861 - Irish physicist John Tyndall shows that certain gases create the greenhouse effect.
1896 - Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius concludes that industrial-age coal burning will enhance the 'man made greenhouse effect' and raise temperatures by a few degrees Celsius
1900 - Swede, Knut Angstrom, discovers that even at the tiny concentrations of certain gases can produce greenhouse warming.
1938 - British engineer Guy Callendar shows that temperatures had risen over the previous century caused by CO2 concentration.
1955 - US researcher Gilbert Plass announces that CO2 concentrations could increase temperatures by 3-4C.
1957 - US oceanographer Roger Revelle and chemist Hans Suess state that 'Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment'
1958 - Charles David Keeling begins measurements of atmospheric CO2 concluding that CO2 concentrations are rising.
1965 - A US President's Advisory Committee panel warns that the greenhouse effect is 'a matter of real concern'.
1975 - US scientist Wallace Broecker publishes a scientific paper warning of the dangers of 'global warming'.
1988 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed to collate and assess evidence on climate change.
1989 - UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warns in a UN speech of CO2 in the atmosphere and calls for a global treaty on climate change.
1990 - IPCC report that temperatures have risen by 0.3-0.6C over the last century due to humanity's emissions.
1992 - At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, governments agree to 'prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system'.
1995 - IPCC Report concludes that the evidence suggests 'a discernible human influence' on the Earth's climate.
1998 - UN report that the average global temperature reached 0.52C above the mean for the period 1961-90.
1998 - Publication of the 'hockey stick' graph indicating that modern-day temperature rise is unusual compared with the last 1,000 years.
2001 - IPCC report finds 'stronger evidence' that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause global warming.
2007 - IPCC's report concludes it is more than 90% likely humanity's emissions are responsible for climate change.
2008 - Keeling project shows that CO2 concentrations have risen from 315 ppm in 1958 to 380ppm in 2008.
2011 - UN Data shows concentrations of greenhouse gases are rising faster than in previous years.
2013 - The Mauna Loa Observatory reports that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has surpassed 400ppm for the first time since measurements began.
2013 - IPCC's report says scientists are 95% certain that humans are the cause of global warming.

We really can't say that we weren't warned.

Sexy Andover

Awards are handed out to many people for many things and it is always nice to get your back slapped but lovehoney (global leader in sexual happiness who ship orders in discreet, boring brown boxes direct from our warehouses straight to your door) have handed out their own awards to celebrate those who get slapped onto their backs. Or up against a wall. Or on the bonnet of a car. Actually, almost anywhere because the award for the UK's sexiest city has gone to Andover.
If your thoughts of sexy turn to a glistening medallion poking out from a silk shirt open to the navel and nestling between the hairs of a chest wig then you really should take a trip to the North Hampshire town where they have gone wild for sex toys and French maid outfits.
Anyone who has ever been to Andover will be looking at a map to see if there is another Andover but it is that place where a young James Blunt grew up in the shadow of the Museum of the Iron Age and the home of the Hampshire Golf Club and now named as the recipient of tons of sex toys and sexy lingerie.
I have been to Andover a few times and it is nice enough, i found the women to be quite classy, in most of the pubs and clubs they used the car park for dates and hardly ever the pinball table unlike some places i have been but it is none of our business if Andovian couples are adding handcuffs and buzzy things to their bedroom repertoires although i admit that the idea of handcuffing my husband to a bed and gagging him is very appealing.
I could leave him there, shut the door and watch my new 'A Town Called Eureka' boxset in peace.

The Premier League Is Back

The referee has blown his whistle and the 2021-22 season is underway with Manchester City playing Leicester City for the right to claim the first piece of Silverware which comes in the shape of the Community Shield.
As the Manchester City owners have hit upon the strategy of shoveling a quarter of a billion pounds at the manager for handing £100m to Aston Villa for Jack Grealish and £150m for Harry Kane, i hope Leicester end the day singing about how the Community Shield is coming home but i doubt it.
Much is made about what a great manager Pep Guardiola and he has been a great success wherever he has been, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now Manchester City although as he has spent over £1 billion since becoming the City manager in 2016, there would be some harsh questions if he wasn't smirking whenever he wandered by the Etihad Stadium trophy cabinet.  
Manchester City are not alone in spending the owners money on players to buy success as the big six have been doing it for the past decade, this off season alone Jadon Sancho has moved to Manchester United for £73m, Arsenal signing of Ben White for £50m, Spurs £47m deal for Cristian Romero and Chelsea's potential purchase of Romelu Lukaku for close to £100m.
As an Arsenal fan is is quite galling to see them lay off 55 staff to save money and then write a cheque for £50m to Brighton but that will be forgotten if he finally sorts out the Arsenal defence.
The website Transfermarkt has looked at the spend of the big six in the Premier League since 2011 and worked out how much each trophy they have won cost the club so the biggest spenders have been Manchester City who have spent £1.27 billion and won 10 Trophies at a cost of £127 million each.
Chelsea spent £1.19 billion for their 8 trophies at £148 million each, Manchester United have burnt through £1.13 billion to win 4 trophies so each one costing £335m each, Liverpool's £884 million has seen a return of 5 trophies so that's a bill of £176m each while for Arsenals £768 million outlay, the Emirates Stadium trophy count of 4 means each one cost the club £192 million.
The last of the Big six is Tottenham who have spent £669 million and for a hole that size in the Spurs bank account they have won nothing at all, nil, not a single thing, nowt, zilch, not a dicky bird, sweet Fanny Adams, zip, nada, diddly-squat, not a sausage bupkis, sod all.
I agree that the money sloshing around football is obscene and the tens of millions being spent on a single player is disgusting but funnily enough, if the cheque is signed by Daniel Levy and is coming from Tottenham's account i am surprisingly okay with that.

 

One Moonlit Night In 1812

Way back in 1812, Great Britain was fighting a war with America and a key battle was going on at Stoney Creek in Ontario which the British won and forced the Yankee's to retreat out of Canada to the other side of the Niagara River and keep Canada out the hands of the burger eating war monkeys America.
Things may have been very different and Canada could have become part of America and missed out on 200 years of the metric system and visits from very iffy Royal Prince's and it is all down to a bunch of hysterical cock-ups one moonlit night in June.
Backed by a large group of Native American Indians, the chisel jawed British set out to make a sneaky attack on an American camp as they were heavily outnumbered and a surprise attack was their best chance of success against vastly superior numbers of Yankees but the Native Americans did their war cry as they approached which is apparently a thing with them but it alerted the sleepy Americans who put down their burgers and hot dogs and formed a line of defense as best they could, which turned out to be not that good at all.
A melee ensured and one American General, John Chandler, rode his horse out into the bedlam to try and direct his troops but rather predictably his horse wasn't bullet proof and was quickly shot out from under him and he fell to the ground.
Exposed and in the middle of huge fight with musket balls zinging around his ears, he decided that his muddy breeches offered very little protection so dashed back behind the lines try and rally his men to stand strong but when he got there he noticed that he didn't recognise any of the men and that they were all speaking with British accents who couldn't believe their luck and politely informed him that he was under arrest for the crime of being American and that it would be best for everyone involved if he just came along quietly.
The second in command, William Winder, was now bumped up to the job of top American banana and was now even more determined to beat the devastatingly handsome British so strode heroically into the emplacement to direct the artillery only to hear the words: 'Oi mateys, cor blimey me old china, we only got us another one of these yanks fellas' as he was surrounded by the British gunners whose base he had walked straight into and he was captured in the exact same fashion as his predecessor only minutes before.
Now with no leadership, the American troops decided they could just win it without Generals and attacked who they thought was the British but was actually another American troop who was rushing to their rescue.
The British stood on the side, supping tea and dunking biscuits while watching as a fierce battle ensued between the same side for an hour until both decided that they could not defeat this 'British army' and finally retreated leaving the British to look at each other and ask 'WTF just happened?'
America decided to leave Canada to the British after that and concentrate on their own country and Canada went on to become the nation we know and love today and act as a constant reminder to American's that if it hadn't chucked our tea in the river and gone warmongering mental all those years ago, Canada is the country that America could have been.

Boris And The Thatcher Dead Cat

The Conservatives, under David Cameron, had a technique called the Dead Cat strategy where they would try and hide something unpalatable by saying or doing something less unpalatable to divert the anger towards the 'dead cat on the table' rather than the more damaging thing they were doing at the time.
To many Boris Johnson is just an oaf whose brain and mouth are not properly connected because he does come out with some real gaffs like today in Scotland when he said that Margaret Thatcher's closure of the coal mines in the 1980's was part of the battle against climate change which has got all of the former mining towns devastated by the closures up in arms.
So with everyone now discussing what he said about Margaret Thatcher, or the dead cat he lobbed on the table, we are not discussing yesterdays announcements that energy prices will rise hundreds of pounds for millions of people across the UK in October, right at the start of the cold weather which was a Margaret Thatcher privatisation policy, or we are not discussing the president of the UK's upcoming climate change conference traveling to more than 30 countries in seven months, many of them on the official Government red list, and then used an exemption for ministers to avoid quarantine on his return, the same one Boris tried to use himself recently.
Also going under the radar as we argue about Margaret Thatcher green credentials is the messy roll out of vaccines for 16 and 17 year olds but most likely is the flippant answer avoided him having to answer the question of his parties Climate Change strategy which saw the government scrap its original strategy a couple of months ago and having to admit that his government cut the green homes grant and has fudged the deadline for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Maybe i am wrong and Boris Johnson is just prone to saying ridiculous things at inopportune moments but as Dawn Butler pointed out in Parliament, Boris Johnson had 'lied to the country over and over again', for which she was asked to leave the chamber while Boris and his cronies were left inside it to carry on deceiving, lying and spouting untruths.

Kheyli Mamnoon (Thank's America)

Back in 2003, so it didn't look like some kind of bullying warmongering jerk to all it's UN besties, America was desperately trying to get the World on its side to go after Saddam Hussein's Iraq and it cartwheeled through many reasons before giving up even trying and just bombed it anyway.
One of the many excuses they came up with was that Saddam had nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stashed away just waiting to be used on any unsuspecting nation that looked at it the wrong way and despite UN weapons inspectors looking into every into nook and cranny, they kept coming back empty handed.
America, growing frustrated that they were being prevented from a bit of war on the grounds of no justification whatsoever, kept saying they know Saddam had them because they had a picture of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam himself shaking hands after a meeting where America gave them the damn stuff.
Fast forward a few years and we end up in the Presidency of the most inept and clown-like man ever to drop his clinically obese body behind the Oval Office desk and Donald Trump's got Iraq's neighbour Iran in his sights and he withdraws from the nuclear agreement because the guy before him negotiated it and he was black and you know, racist douchebag in charge.
So now with someone who is less likely to incite a race riot or sexually assault female staff members in the White House, the Iran deal is being pieced back together to prevent Iran producing a nuclear bomb but unlike Iraq who we were told wrongly had the technology to develop nuclear weapons already, we know Iran does because America had given it to them.
In 2000, the CIA hatched a plot called Operation Merlin which included 'handing' plans for building a nuclear missile to Iran which was riddled with subtle errors and would set them back decades trying to work out why the damned things were not working.
The tough part was getting the faulty plans to the Iranians so they recruited a Russian nuclear physicist and showered him with enough Rubles for him to agree to slip the blueprints to the Iranians. Being a top notch nuclear physicist, the Russian guy looked at it and advised the Americans that the plans contained errors but they just said that's fine, give it to them anyway and sent him on his way to a waiting transport plane.
Now all they had to do was sit back and watch the fun as the Iranians scratched their heads and got nowhere but what they didn't plan for was the Russian being a helpful and conscientious chap who thought he'd do everybody a favor by fixing the little mistakes therefore handing over to the Iranian government an actual, working blueprint for a nuclear weapon, with all the faulty bits helpfully fixed.
I haven't heard anyone say we know the nation we really don't want to have the technology to build nuclear weapons has it already because because we gave it to them yet and the CIA denied the story and called it absurd but then charged the officer who leaked the story but at least there are no photos this time.