I don't know much about Joe Rogan but from what i have heard he is being portrayed as the typical boorish, loud mouth with ignorant views on things like Covid Vaccinations and Climate Change and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell don't like him for spreading misinformation around Coronavirus.
Reading his Wikipedia entry, i expected a ridiculous Trump like character and it says he started out as a comedian and supports same-sex marriage, gay rights, women's rights, universal health care and universal basic income and even endorsed Bernie Sanders during the last Election and in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, he firstly said that young and healthy people should not be concerned about
getting COVID-19 and then apologised, withdrew his remarks and called himself 'a moron'
Where the controversy comes in is his support on his podcast for non-endorsed medical treatments for COVID-19 such as Ivermectin, a drug usually taken to treat parasitic infestations which led to a spike in poison-related hospitalisations of people who had self-medicated with Ivermectin designed to treat ailments in livestock.
With his podcast having 1 million listeners, his words have a far reach and in 2020 he signed a $100 million deal with Spotify which is where singers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have now ordered their music be removed from as the streaming giant was allowing 'irresponsible people to spread lies that are costing people their lives'.
Even singer James Blunt has weighed in, showing a surprising sense of humour that if Spotify doesn't immediately remove Joe Rogan, he will release new music onto the platform.
Rogan doesn't sound like your normal, uneducated right winger who usually spouts off inane nonsense about things they know nothing about but due to his reach, what he says is very influential so to actively promote non-endorsed medical procedures which are actually resulting in peoples deaths is highly dangerous although the Invermectin he endorsed is not the Invermectin that his listeners have been buying over the counter and stupidly ingesting.
Spotify, having shelled out a fortune to host his podcast, have probably done a cost analysis and worked out that the money earned by listeners to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell back catalogue is chickenfeed compared to what they make from Rogan so they can wave goodbye to those two with no real ill-effect but things may get interesting if some bigger names join the boycott.
Rogan, for his part, should make it crystal clear that the Ivermectin he supports IS NOT THE LIVESTOCK STUFF YOU BUY OVER THE COUNTER SO DON'T BE SO EFFING STUPID TO TAKE IT because in a country where 4 people died drinking bleach after the terminally stupid Donald Trump endorsed that, these things obviously need to be spelt out and it may not sooth Young and Mitchell but it could save some lives.
As I said at the start, i know nothing of Rogan and he may have some other views i vehemently disagree with but it seems it is a problem he could easily go partway to fixing and he showed before that he is not averse to correcting himself and calling himself a moron when necessary.
The upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics starting on 4th February will operate under some really strict social distancing rules to prevent the Games from becoming a super-spreader event and as such athletes have been instructed to minimise hugs, high-fives and handshakes although it seems that having sex is fine because each athlete will find five free condoms in their hotel rooms.
It has long been a tradition of the Olympic Committee to promote safe sex, the delayed 2020 Olympics in South Korea handed out 160,000 free condoms to athletes, but at the same time, China has a responsibility to keep people apart during the pandemic although to be fair, most couples can have sex without high-fiving each other or shaking hands.
It has been suggested that the athletes take them home as Olympic souvenirs but you can picture the scene when they return home and excitedly claim: 'Look darling, no medals but i have brought home a souvenir from the Olympics, three Olympic condoms' and darling saying questioningly...'Hmm...Only Three?'
Everyone got all excited on Tuesday when it was reported that the Sue Gray report into the Downing Street law breaking was set to be released imminently, but as Tuesday turned into Wednesday and then Thursday there was still no sign of it.
The question of where the report had gone were being asked and Boris said it wasn't him, he hadn't seen it and the MET Police said it wasn't them guv, they had no objections to Gray's findings being published in full even though they were investigating at least 7 of the 17 'Parties' that were held in No 10 during lock-down.
Today though the MET said actually as they were investigating the Parties, the report will have to omit the 'most serious illegalities' which they are looking into so not to prejudice their own investigations but other than that, Sue Gray can publish her report on the other Downing Street parties.
Presumably then Sue Gray is loading Parties.doc into Word on her computer and is busily making use of the delete button and having to realign all her pictures while warily keeping an eye on the clock on the wall.
Many Conservative MPs are waiting to see the outcome of Ms Gray's inquiry before deciding whether to call for a vote of no confidence in Bojo but they may have to wait a while longer but it is nice that the Police are finally doing something after initially refusing to investigate Downing St for weeks despite all the overwhelming evidence.
It is being suggested that there has been a stitch up between the MET and Boris Johnson, pointing to the launching of the investigation right before Sue Gray’s report is due and then delaying and squashing the most damaging bits of it while anger at the Prime Minister is still high.
Boris, for his part, is trying desperately to get people to look at what is happening on the border of the Ukraine rather than him and his Birthday Party and is probably the only person outside of the Kremlin wishing Russia would hurry up and invade already.
As a grown up i really should be more interested in things like economics but whenever i try and find out about things like interest rates i find my mind wandering elsewhere and considering things like if i took out both my eyes and pointed them at each other, what would i see and the whole conversation is wasted.
With that in mind i sat down with a Financial Expert today fully prepared to clear my mind of everything and concentrate on why interest rates are so high and what it means for us.
Before the first chart came out i was resisting the urge to yawn and then i noticed that she was wearing some lovely stylish red kitten heel shoes which complimented her red pencil skirt, they looked expensive and probably were, this woman would not be wearing Matalan shoes.
Jolting myself back to reality, the conversation had moved onto consumer spending and mortgages with some up and down lines which she had drawn at some point so i mentally shook myself down to listen properly and learn.
Something about charges on other forms of credit, such as credit card loans, bank loans, and car loans and...wow, that's a fancy pen, a fountain pen i think, wonder if it's a Christmas present, Christmas seems such a long time ago now and we are almost at the end of January already...'so if the cost of a £100 coat rises by £5, then inflation is 5%'.
I nodded, scribbled 'Coat' on my pad and waited while she wrote one to five on a sheet of paper and said: 'Firstly its economies coming out of Covid restrictions and the increase in...', that sky looks grey, hope it doesn't rain, i was hoping to nip to the hairdressers on the way home tonight as i won't have time tomorrow, i got that thing at 9am, who the hell arranges a meeting at 9am on a Saturday morning, oops, she looking at me and asking me if i understood that bit, better nod and look like i'm writing things down.
'Ok, and finally the Bank of England are responsible...', good, she said finally, i really do like those shoes, would go great with that white blouse i got from Next last summer..bugger, she's putting her pen down and asking me if there is anything i want to go back over?
I closed my pad quickly and said that she explained it really well and thanked her for her time and made off quickly back to my car where i opened my pad to see the single word 'Coat' written.
So in short, inflation rates are rising due to people in Covid hit economies buying more expensive coats...or something like that.
Back in the early 90s, theorising that a person could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past facing mirror images which were not his own, and so Dr Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping that the next leap will be the leap home, but alas, he never returned home.
Quantum Leap was one of the golden shows of the 90s along with programmes like Buffy and Frasier that i either made sure i was home to watch or set the video for and although i am not fond of rebooting shows, preferring to leave them in the past and not ruin the memory, the rumour is that Quantum Leap is coming back and continuing from where it left off almost 30 years ago.
Sadly, Dean Stockwell who played Al has gone to that great Quantum leap accelerator in the sky but Scott Bakula has apparently signed up to pull on Sam's Hush Puppies again and that would work for me although towards the end it did seem like the team was running out of ideas and started doing 'celebrity' jumps such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Lee Harvey Oswald.
They are also doing the same thing with Frasier, continuing the series as 'of now' with Frasier leaving his radio show in Seattle although the joy of Frasier was the supporting cast such as Niles and Daphne and no news if they will be appearing in it also.
No news on Buffy but as that was the perfect TV show, i hope that it never gets the nod and that stays firmly in the past as nothing they could make could recapture that and would be painful to see Buffy and the Scooby Gang as no longer beautiful, funny teenagers fighting the forces of darkness.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament so it was a good thing when five nuclear weapon-possessing countries released a joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding an arms races.
The statement from he United States (10,500 nuclear weapons), Russia (14,000), the United Kingdom (200), China (241), and France (300) said that that they take their responsibilities as nuclear-possessor states seriously and reiterated that: 'a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought' and backed their commitment 'to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.'
Nice words but they ring a bit hollow when you consider that all five are modernizing or expanding their nuclear arsenals which isn't really actively reducing the current global stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Some have pointed out that in this time of high tension among some of the nuclear states, the statement
is welcome but it is hard to make a case of why in the 21st Century we still need nuclear arms apart from the status it provides so it appears that we are holding on to these extraordinarily dangerous weapons not out of necessity but because of the cachet and feeling of superiority it gives us.
It does seem a huge risk to hold onto weapons which if used would likely end life on Earth and it seems the people with them have no desire to give them up, despite what they may say.
A poll from musicMagpie has found that while parents are still putting their young ones to sleep with the help of fairy tales designed to ease us them into dreamland but many altering the ending due to them being just too scary.
The top tales that now come with parental alternative endings are Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs and The Gingerbread Man believing it’s 'cruel' that Red, the Gingerbread Man and two the three pigs end up getting eaten.
Also on the list are Peter Pan, Rumpelstiltskin and The Pied Piper of Hamlin who tricks children into following him, Cinderella, who was forced to do all of the chores and Sleeping Beauty as she is kissed without her consent and even Pinocchio is changed as he runs away from home and lies to people but even these stories are toned down versions of the originals.
In the actual stories, The Pied Pier of Hamlin has him drowning the children of a village when he doesn't receive payment for ridding the town of a rat infestation while in Pinocchio, Geppetto is jailed for child abuse, Pinocchio squishes the talking cricket with a hammer for preaching to him and after he runs away, is kidnapped by bandits who hang him from an oak tree and leave him until he dies.
Little Red Riding Hood never makes it to Grandma's House and is eaten by the wolf, Peter Pan murders any children in Neverland who break his rule of 'never growing up' and Rumpelstiltskin, so angry that the Millers daughter has guessed his name, grabs his own legs and rips himself in half.
In the original Sleeping Beauty tale, she is raped while unconscious by the Prince and rather than kiss is awoken by the crying of the twins she gave birth to while asleep and Cinderella kills her first stepmother, her ugly sisters cut off their toes and heels to try and make the glass slipper fit and at the wedding of Cinderella and the handsome Prince, two pigeons peck out their eyes.
Not much singing, dancing or fairy dust in these tales but lots to make sure the kids sleep with a night light on.
Sad news about Meat Loaf but even sadder is the news that he died of COVID-19 and was one of those who never took the threat of the disease seriously.
He wasn't an anti-vaxxer, i never heard him spew anti-vax propaganda, although he was anti-mask and anti-lockdown saying lockdowns were 'political' and masks were 'useless'. He also posted a clip of Eric Clapton and Van Morrison’s anti-lockdown song, Stand & Deliver, writing, 'Listen and Learn'.
Being an ignorant arse isn't a crime but when you have an audience such as he had, anything you say will be amplified and as he was suffering from health issues including asthma, to rage against masks is sadly ignorant.
His vacinne status has not been published and he did say recently in an interview: 'If I die, I die', which in hindsight was really, really stupid because he should've cared if not for himself then for his family.
It does detract from him slightly, i always quite enjoyed whenever he showed up on TV, he seemed a real fun guy and he had some decent songs, '2 Out Of 3 Ain't Bad' and 'Dead Ringer For Love' especially, but for whatever reason he paid the ultimate price for his ignorance and has become a warning of not taking COVID-19 seriously and that's probably the saddest thing of all.
It is said that politics is showbusiness for ugly people and although that may not be true for Canadian Justin Trudea who is a bit of a looker, he isn't that popular in his own country and sits at 7th in the top 10 of the least popular World Leaders according to a poll by data intelligence firm Morning Consult.
Although the views on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were not offered by their fellow countrymen, the top most unpopular five in their homeland was Boris Johnson (United Kingdom) 69%, Emmanuel Macron (France) 59%, Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) 56%, Moon Jae-in (South Korea) 54% and Pedro Sánchez (Spain) 53%.
Scott Morrison of Australia was also in the nagtive with 52% and then the dishy Justin Trudeau on 51% with America's Joe Biden polling 49% approval although if he stayed awake a bit longer he may just be able to find that 1% to nudge himself level.
It isn't all downhill once you get the keys to the big house though, Mario Draghi of Italy has a lowly 33% disapproval rating and it's even better for Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico on 26% and feeling the love of Indians is Narendra Modi who hit 21%.
I am normally a fan of the nudge theory, where a public policy involves using behaviour and psychology to influence the behavior of people to help achieve goals, it gives the person a choice but they are aware of the consequences if they don't so i supported the idea of a Covid Passport which would allow people certain advantages if they could prove they were vaccinated.
The Government never really went down the subtle nudge avenue though and are now facing up to 80,000 NHS staff, 10%, being sacked due to the 'be-vaccinated-or-lose-your-job' order.
As the NHS was chronically understaffed anyway, the ideas of losing a further 80,000 is frightening so something will have to give and the Royal College of GPs are arguing that the deadline was not the right way forward and should be delayed to prevent the staff shortages.
NHS staff must have a first jab by 3 February and be fully vaccinated by 1 April to continue in their current roles but we may be seeing the first signs of the Government blinking because the instructions have been slightly amended to face the sack or be redeployed into a non-patient facing role.
The Prime Minister also said on Wednesday that healthcare workers had a 'professional responsibility' to get the jab but then mumbled very softly to a question regarding losing so many staff, that he would: 'reflect on the way ahead' which i guess means even he wouldn't be able to try and fudge his way past such a monumental 80,000 health workers shaped hole in NHS staff like he has the Downing Street Parties.
If Johnson fails to heed calls for a rethink, he could very well lose his job before all those health service staff lose theirs.
If i ever wanted to visit the bit of Moon that i own, i would need to spend millions on a rocket and as i don't think my boss would allow me to claim it on expenses i would need to just forget it or find another way to cover the 250,000 miles to the Moon.
Luckily there are plans to develop alternative methods of travel to our interstellar neighbour although i don't think i will be volunteering to test them out.
Under consideration is a space elevator which was first proposed by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895 which is a platform that goes all the way from the ground to a space station orbiting Earth but as you will still need a rocket to land on the Moon it doesn't really solve my problem.
Next up for consideration is the space gun which would literally shoot people from a tube into space although the required force to propel a human out of the Earths atmosphere would instantly compress a person by half, leading to death which is not an ideal solution so thanks and we will let you know...not.
The launch loop is an interesting idea, it looks like a roller coaster which goes from Earth, up out of the Earths gravitational pull where you would launch off and then back down again but you still have the issue of going from the top to the Moons surface so still no good.
A company called World View has an idea that i have always wondered why it isn't used, a massive great helium balloon.
So it may take 2 hours to reach the top of the atmosphere rather than the 4 minutes oif a rocket trip but imagine the views but the World View people do have a warning that they still have to work out how to work out the safety measures against the balloon falling back to Earth or flying off into space ao we will put that one in the maybe pile.
Nikola Tesla did come up eith the idea of an orbital ring which encircles the Earth with
several points along the ring would be connected to ground stations here on Earth. Elevators would be installed in the ground stations to allow us to travel into space and this idea has become the basis of something called the Space Fountain.
They have the ground and space stations of Tesla's idea but without the elevators, instead they use an upside U shaped chamber in a tube, a ball and water usign the principle of a fountain with the ball pushig the chamber remaining atop the water which would be forced up the pipe by the weight of the water behind it.
All very promising but i think i will for something less likely to end in my guaranteed death thank you.
Hear that sound? It was the noise of Rosary Beads being dropped in shock all over the UK as the Commission on Religious Education have said that Religious Education in schools needs a major overhaul and should be renamed Religion and Worldviews and include the study of Atheism.
The conclusion is based on less pupils taking religious studies at A-level and new data suggesting that more than half the population has no religious beliefs whatsoever.
The recommendations have been presented to the Department for Education and includes an increase in government funding to train new and existing teachers in Atheism but i could save them a few quid over the course of a 39 week school year so the first lesson in Week 1 is: 'Listen up kids, there is no God, the whole religion thing is a massive myth so you can now spend the next 38 weeks learning something which is actually useful to you'.
As usual a few of the more excitable religious groups are attempting to putting a holy spanner into the works, the Catholics complaining that: 'The quality of religious education is not improved by teaching less religion' which is sort of the point, it shouldn't be improved, unless they have some proof to back up their guy, it should be presented as a 'belief' as in you can believe in this, or that, up to you, you choose.
The Board of British Jews said the report was 'flawed' and would 'dilute religious education through the inclusion of all worldviews in an already tight teaching timetable' so their concern is the extra lessons and not that people would realise just how crazy their views are, that's nice of them.
A report from Germany who scrapped religious education in the 1970's found that abolishment significantly reduced religiousness but there was no impact on moral or ethical views.
Religion has hugely shaped our societies for millennia and not for the better as any look at a history book or a glance at what is going on in the name of religion on the news so its decline should be welcomed.
A few years ago the pensionable age in the UK was shifted from 65 to 67, then 68 and then setted at 70 but there are thoughts within the Conservative Party that it should go to 75 as 'people are living longer' although the bit about 'and all these pensions are costing us a fortune' is implied rather than said aloud but currently the cost to the Government for state pensions is £170 billion and they would save tens of billions if there was no so many pensioners still alive to claim it.
The pension system was designed in an age when workers spent their lives toiling and then died a year or past blowing the candles out on their 65th Birthday cake but as life expectancy creeps upwards, the younger generation are heading for a new era in the workplace of a career that runs from 16 to 75, a 59 year career if you don’t have a handsome workplace or private pension so you can take your creaking
knees out of the rat-race sooner.
It may not be a problem if you enjoy your job but the people who work past retirement age because they enjoy their job is thin on the ground, the vast majority still dragging themselves into work each day for financial reasons, they seem to be averse to starving or freezing to death it turns out.
So as the Government look at ways to save money, they have already looked to scapegoat the unemployed/disabled/foreigners/EU for taking your taxes so expect pensioners to become the new bad guy for living too long but my sympathy is with anyone born after 2000 as they will be the ones who’ll have to work when they’re infirm and dribbling down the front of their uniform.
Unless of course robots take all our jobs but i was warned of that when i was a kid and it hasn't happen to me yet so find a job a robot can't do, not mine though, i got years of doing the same thing i have done for the past 30 odd years.
Those who had been reading this blog for a while, and if you haven't where have you been since 2007?, but if you have then you will know that i am the manager/promoter/tea lady of the Best Band In Heaven™ which is made up of the best musicians and singers who have taken the trip upstairs through the Pearly Gates.
As God is always keen to exploit new musical arrivals the line-up has changed a few times since the band was formed in 2007 and the current line up is Jon Bonham on drums, Lemmy on bass, Joe Strummer on guitar and Jimi Hendrix on lead guitar with Prince as the front man, i had Freddie Mercury stood there in his lycra doing that punch thing but i was overwhelmingly over-ruled as Mr Mercury was not a person God was happy representing his paradise due to the whole man laying with man thing so he pulled rank on me and it's the pint sized squeaky guy instead of the far superior mustachioed Queen singer.
Luckily for us, although admittedly not for him, Meat Loaf died today so as soon as he had finished being measured for his halo i swooped and offered him the lead singer role, which he accepted.
The band are currently on a 9 night tour of Valhalla and i have told Prince that he will be free to explore other opportunities once it ends so we will have a new look line-up for this Easters tour of Jannah so if you are Islamic, tickets are selling fast so make sure you get yours soon, not too soon though as you have to be dead first but you really don't want to miss crowd-pleasers such as 'Right Next Door To Hell' and 'Sympathy for the Devil', they always go down a storm up here.
Hitler once said if you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one which is a lesson people like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and the guy at the local garage have taken on board but there is another quote i like even more by a lady on the train this morning, 'They are so stupid that even they must realise how stupid they are'.
She was obviously referring to Savid Javid's decision yesterday to try and distract attention away from the regular piss up's in Downing Street by throwing Covid-19 restrictions, and therefore us, under a bus.
The lie the Conservatives are hoping that if they say enough times people will believe is that they have been proven correct to not bring in restrictions over the Christmas and New Year period and now because of that success, they can lift all of the restrictions and life can return to as normal as it can after a pandemic.
On the 1st December in the UK there were reported 48,374 positive cases, 123 deaths and 7,381 in hospital and yesterdays figures were 108,069 positive cases, 359 deaths and 18,979 in hospital so i'm not sure what they are using as a measure of success but more than double the number of positive cases and almost trebling the number of deaths and hospitisations does not scream success to me and certainly not time to life the restrictions.
You would need to be all kinds of gullible to not see that this is an attempt to distract from Boris Johnson's self inflicted disaster and i have yet to discuss it with anyone who doesn't believe that is exactly what this is and as for Sajid Javids insistence that Omicron is 'in retreat' and they can do this because the 'data allows it', that's not what the experts are saying.
The British Medical Association said it 'risks creating a false sense of security' which will 'inevitably increase transmission' and the NHS Confederation said 'now is not the time for complacency about this virus".
The NEU teachers union called it 'premature' while the UK'ss largest care home operators said they would ignore the Government and defy any attempt to weaken self-isolation rules while even the the Department of Health and Social Care said it was 'confusing' and Professor Martin McKee of the Independent Sage group said he was 'worried' by it while another Sage scientist, Prof Stephen Reicher, just summed it up with 'crazy'.
Boris said he would he would rather see bodies pile high than take the country into another lock-down and it seems he may get his wish, and to end on another quote: 'There's not a pill you can take; there's not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever' unlike the old and the vulnerable who are not forever but will be prematurely thrown under the bus, into a Crematoriums oven or into a hole in the ground
to save the PM's neck
Usually, the Conservatives losing a loony right winger is a cause for celebration but why has Bury South's Christian Wakeford come over to the Socialist Labour Party? Socialists are all about Equality and fairness which is the exact opposite of the Conservatives who are all about self and greed and to hell to everyone else so on the face of it i can see nothing we would agree with him about.
Maybe he has changed his mind and realised that right wing policies are downright awful and spiteful but that side of the political fence don't normally have such a change in their shriveled up hearts and the They Work For You website shows he has a voting record any right wing imbecile would be proud of
In the two years since he became a Member of Parliament, he has voted voted three times against measures to prevent climate change, three times against measures to reduce tax avoidance and even voted against enabling domestic abuse victims to have access to benefits and is anti-EU, voting for a stricter asylum system.
This is not even close to being a voting record of someone fit to be a Labour representative as the Momentum campaign group pointed out saying: 'He should be nowhere near the Labour Party'.
Why Wakeford would want to join our ideologically opposite side i don't know, there are other right wing parties he could join, but more confusing is why Keir Starmer would welcome such a revolting hard right MP to our Socialist Bosoms, unless he is planning to sack him and call a by-election in Bury South but that seems unlikely so bit of an own goal their Keir, we don't want him.
Around 360 Million years ago Great Britain was lying at the Global equator which would have been the perfect time to develop a space launch site but we missed that opportunity and are now situated 3,826.26 miles north of it which is not ideal for slinging things into space which is why in the 60s we set one up in Australia but gave up after the very first launch.
With companies like Virgin, SpaceX and Blue Origin now joining the big boys of NASA, ESA, CNSA and Roscosmos firing up the Space exploration programs, they all need somewhere to be launched from and Britain is joining in by building Space Ports to launch rockets carrying satellites into space.
The people of the Shetland Island in Scotland and Cornwall are the first to wake up to find a launch site on the doorsteps but Wales will soon have one plonked into Snowdonia with four more being built around the UK and they are all expected to become operational in 2022.
The UK Government have ambitions to capture 10% of the global space market, worth £3.8 billion to the UK economy, by 2030.
Due to Britain's northern latitude, our location provides excellent access to polar orbits around the Earth
although it is a bit worrying though that rockets are delicate instruments that need to be launched in ideal weather conditions with no strong winds and rain and we are placing a few in Scotland, has any of the planning people ever been to Scotland? Rain and strong winds are it's natural climate!
Anyway, my CV is already in at Spaceport Cornwall and the Shetland Spaceport and i have already been practicing my counting backwards from 10 so beam me up Scotty.
The Government may have reported 150,000 Covid-19 deaths within 28 days of a positive test but their own Statistical agency, the Office of National Statistics, put the number of at 175,000 for all deaths where the virus was mentioned on the death certificate.
The ONS gives a useful breakdown of all Coronavirus deaths so what does the data tell us about the unfortunate 175,000 people whose deaths have been recorded to date?
Age
122,500 or 70% of the deaths occurred in those aged 75 or older meanwhile, deaths among those aged 44 and younger made up under 2% of the total, or 3500 deaths.
Vaccination status
For the first 10 months of 2021, for every 1 death of a vaccinated person, 28 deaths were for the unvaccinated
Gender
Men made up 94,433 or 54% of total coronavirus deaths.
Geographical
The death rate was in the north-west of the UK and among the four nations of the UK, Wales recorded the highest death rate.
Deaths by occupation
Male and female workers in the care and leisure sectors and other public-facing jobs experiencing higher death rates
Deaths by ethnicity
The ONS shows that minority ethnic people were at a higher risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19 compared with their white counterparts with the mortality rate was highest among black men, then black women and then South Asian groups before white men and then white women.
It was a amazingly fortuitous piece of timing that just as Party-gate was breaking and his head was head was being called for on a spike by his own side, someone in Boris Johnson's close family went down with Covid-19 so he had to isolate for 7 days.
Far be it from me to suggest that the first thing he did when he got home from his half arsed apology and grilling in the House of Commons was to grab one of his kids crayons and scrawl a second line onto a Lateral Flow Test but it has conveniently kept him away from TV cameras and journalists for a week which would generally be a good thing but i'm not even sure why he is isolating.
The official NHS guidance is if you live with or have been in contact with someone with COVID-19, you will not need to self-isolate if you are fully vaccinated and are just required to do daily rapid lateral flow tests (1 a day for 7 days) to protect yourself and others.
He is obviously fully vaccinated so maybe he is just choosing to stay away from everyone in an abundance of caution but that is unlikely as many of his colleagues have gone down with it and he carried on and he was quite keen to 'let the bodies pile up' rather than stop people working previously so maybe he has Covid-19 again, in which case we should probably be told.
Whatever the reason his face is not gurning out of my TV Screen, i wish Keir Starmer would stop calling for his resignation, i am not one to quote Napoleon that often but his 'Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake' quote is perfect for this situation.
As a Labour supporter, i don't want him to go, the next election is still two years away and i want him to stay bumbling around being awful and acting as a constant reminder to people that while this Johnson Government couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, they did a great job of organising many of them in number 10.
Labour is 10 points ahead in the polls so just leave him there and don't give the Tories the new guy bounce, shut up Kier!!
People are asking if Russian forces are getting ready to invade Ukraine and considering that there are 100,000 Russian troops and artillery circling Ukraine it seems like it and the rhetoric coming out of Moscow warning of military measures and saying its patience with the West is at an end and the US is warning of unprecedented sanctions isn't helping to calm down the situation.
So what’s behind the conflict between Russia and Ukraine? After the 2014 revolution, the Ukraine chose to break away from Moscow’s political orbit and the Ukraine has been making eyes at the EU NATO and that Russia s main beef is that would put NATO right in Russia's back yard which Putin said would cross their red line.
Putin has promised 'military-technical measures' which are widely expected to mean deploying troops to Cuba and Venezuela in America's backyard while America have said that direct conflict with American troops is not on the table but they would impose unprecedented sanctions if Moscow gives the troops the nod to enter Ukraine.
The US are warning that they have intelligence that Russia are preparing to fabricate claims of an imminent Ukrainian attack on Russian forces as a pretext for invasion and has provided Russian passports to 500,000 people in the eastern rebel-held areas of Ukraine which they could use to justify any action as protecting it's own citizens.
Whether Biden and Putin are the modern day equivalent of John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but it has a ring of the Cuban missile crisis which came to an end when Moscow withdrew its missiles in exchange for Washington removing US missiles from Turkey and hopefully it will have the same peaceful solution.
It probably won't come as a surprise that the early Christians tagged their guy into most Roman Festivals such as Christmas and Easter and today is another where they saw the Pagan celebration of Cervulus where they would dress up as animals and dance through the streets and thought, we should have some of that so created the Feast of the Ass to celebrate all the donkey-related stories in the Bible.
Now you probably think there can't be that many donkey stories in the Book but there are 72 including the story in Genesis where Abraham asks two young men to keep an eye on his ass while he goes for a bit of a pray. Later they 'laded every man's ass' and then there is the story of Issachar who is a strong ass and Moses was no weakling in the ass department because he put his wife and his sons upon his ass
and took them to Egypt.
There is the famous bit in Exodus about not coveting other people asses and how anyone trespassing for ass 'shall come before the judges' so they were pretty strict on ass trespassing in those days although it does say later that you can rest you ass on the seventh day.
In Numbers Moses tells God that he has not taken, nor hurt, any ass although Balaam did, he smote it a few times with a firm stick but God wasn't so happy about that, Numbers 22:28 shows he sent an Angel to 'open the mouth of the ass'.
Deuteronomy asks that 'What shalt thou do with asses?' and then answers it own question by saying thou should 'lift them up again' but no plowing else the ass shall be: 'violently taken away' so leave the ass plowing to another day Christians.
The book of Joshua 6:21 is not so kind and tells of when all asses in the city were utterly destroyed but they get their own back in Judges when Samson and his ass slay a thousand men.
In Samuel, someone called Jesse took an ass laden with bread to Saul and one person in the book took his ass to the King for his lame servant although in Kings-1 13:13, a king told his sons to saddle his ass to ride and whilst out riding came across a lion who respectfully left his ass untouched.
Job shows that all the wild ass was let loose and in Hosea, Ephraim only has a wild ass for company but they had no problem in Zecharia, they had a plague of ass and in John, Jesus finds a young ass so there you have it, the Bible is full of asses so celebrate the Feast of the Ass, i am reliably informed that Sticky Buns are in order.
Prince Andrews latest attempt to play the get out of trial free card and avoid facing Virginia Giuffre’s sexual abuse lawsuit has been rejected by the judge and now he faces a reputation damaging civil case in America.
As much as Andrew and the Royal's want the case to go away, it is now full steam ahead to the court but Andrew could delay proceedings by tying events up with an Appeal which will just keep him and the accusations in the spotlight for years to come.
As a court case will trawl through Andrew's history, which could prove very uncomfortable for someone who reveled in his nickname of 'Randy Andy', he could just refuse to testify but that would very much go against him with the jury and as a potential criminal case could follow it would not be a wise move.
The lawyers are now saying that the only possible way to make it all go away very quickly would be a settlement where both sides could agree to an amount that would bring proceedings to a close without a decision needing to made in a court of law but while that may be acceptable in America, Brits see it in a very different way and judge it as as a tacit admissions of guilt.
Legally there is no admission of guilt attached to an out of court settlement but to many it is paying for the problem, and a likely guilty verdict, to go away due to the accused holding a very weak case they wouldn't win in court, if they had a strong case they were confident of winning then why make any payment to the accuser at all?
If the Prince does take that route and pays out hundreds of thousands to Virginia Giuffre, he will forever be, in British eyes at least, the guy who sexually abused a minor and then bought her silence to avoid prosecution.
A question i have been asked three times now is can the Queen remove Boris Johnson, the man we are referring to, for now at least, as the Prime Minister?
I always answer that i doubt it due to antiquated rules established around the time of the Magna Carta and the whole Oliver Cromwell thing but i thought i had better checked so i looked up the House of Commons Library which say's no she can't sack him but there was a but...
While the Prime Minister may be head of the government appointed by The Queen, there are certain residual powers retained by the monarch from bygone days where if the UK Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence in the house, and then 14 days later loses another one, it should sound the starting whistle on a general election and the matter is put to the electorate to resolve.
If after the two votes of no confidence, if the Prime Minister refuses to resign, then the Queen can't sack him but can invite another political leader from the same party or the shadow Government to try to form a government and then if they win a vote of confidence from the members in the Houses of Commons, the Queen swears in the new Prime Minister replacing the old one.
This leaves the ultimate power of appointing and dismissing Prime Ministers in the hands of the elected representatives in Parliament and the Queen therefore can't do anything until a second vote of No Confidence has been tabled and succeeded and only then if Boris refuses to pack up his bags and leave Downing Street.
It is unlikely the Labour Party will pushing for a vote of no-confidence, it is in their favour to leave a hugely unpopular leader on the opposition benches hemorrhaging votes so it will probably come from the Conservative Party itself and the 1922 Committee who can call a vote of no-confidence if 15% of Conservative MPs (54) send a letter requesting one.
This will stop a General Election they would probably lose and keep a Conservative Government in place until at least the next election in 2024.
Another day and another leaked report of a Party at Number 10 while prosecuting the rest of us for it, this time an email on 20 May 2020 to 'make the most of the lovely weather' and 'bring your own booze' for a knees-up for in the garden of Downing Street for 100 of Boris's closest friends.
The email was sent 55 minutes after the end of the live televised coronavirus briefing when Oliver Dowden reminded people they were only allowed to meet one other person from outside their household, as long as it was an outdoor public place and two-metre social distancing was maintained but it is believed that around 40 staff ultimately attended the event that evening, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, showing up, according to eyewitness reports.
Senior civil servant Sue Gray is currently investigating other alleged lock-down breaches by the government so this is another one to add to the list along with the May 2020 'wine and a cheeseboard' party, the November staff members gathering and the November leaving party for a No 10 aide and the December Christmas Quiz for No 10 staff and the one that started it all on 18th December which Johnson vehemently denied happening until a video emerged of his press secretary Allegra Stratton joking about it.
Johnson now has the line that 'we must wait for the inquiry to do it's job' to brush it all under the carpet for now but at some point he will find out that a potential 100-person boozy gathering while telling people to watch their family members die on an iPad then buried them with only six mourners at graveside funerals was not a wise move.
I really should remove myself from the Democrats email list especially as the amount they are asking me to donate has gone up from $7 to $10 although i do enjoy seeing that many other people from my state have already donated and i should join them, who knew that so many people in the State of Great Britain are throwing money towards the Joe Biden gang.
The latest one wangs on about the real chance that Donald Trump may well be President again at some point and they really, really need my $10 to go towards making sure that doesn't happen but i am of the thinking that if America votes him back in after the bang up job he did last time he squeezed his morbidly obese body behind the Oval Office desk, it's their own fault.
Why anyone would want to vote for him is beyond me, surely there are not that many people without the required intellect to put their cross next to the name of the man who made America such a laughing stock again is there?
I know there are some low IQ right wingers who wouldn't vote Democrat if they were the last party on Earth but that doesn't mean they HAVE to vote for the man who admitted to sexual assaulting women, actively encouraged an insurrection which left people dead and whose response to the a Global Pandemic was to blame and withdraw American funding from the organization whose job it is to fight Global Pandemic's and advised ingesting a litre bottle of Harpic instead, just abstain from voting altogether.
If the Democrats can't find someone who can poll higher than an inept racist, incompetent moron and an all round awful human being then they should pack up and go home and if enough American's look at him and say 'y'know what, i'll, give him another go' then America deserves all it gets and that will be another long drop further down the drain as it violently implodes and the World moves on without it and no amount of $10 bills from people thankfully not American will sort that out.
In January 2021, the UK became the first European country to pass 100,000 deaths and today after adding another 313 to the grim toll, the UK have noe also become the first country in Europe to pass 150,000 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Britain is now the seventh country to pass the milestone after the US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru.
The Governments figures could even be an underestimate as separate figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have been 174,000 deaths registered in the UK where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate.
Britain is registering an average of 150,000 new cases every day and Scientists are predict the the peak for infections will come in 1-2 weeks around time with the peak for hospitalisations a week after that and peak deaths towards the end of January another week on.
Boris Johnson has tweeted on the milestone death toll, saying: Coronavirus has taken a terrible toll on our country and each and every one of those deaths is a profound loss to the families, friends and communities affected and my thoughts and condolences are with them'.
Amazingly his thoughts and condolences don't stretch to actually doing anything about it as the Government are still not making any move towards making any further restrictions and are actually making plans for 'living with Covid' which includes stopping giving out free lateral flow tests and urging people back into offices.
Professor Andrew Hayward, who advises the British government as part of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the statistic was 'absolutely tragic' and 'I think we could have done better'. You think??
Gabriel Boric is set to become Chile’s youngest ever president which usually wouldn't cause too many waves this side of the Atlantic but the left are getting excited that they will have one of their own in power very much along the lines of the brilliant and successful Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
In a country that had America's and the UK's favourite dictator and human rights violator, General Augusto Pinochet, the 35 year old self declared Socialist is looking to make some big changes in the nation that has been raped and pillaged by the West in the name of Capitalism.
In his success, Boric has the raised the ghost of Chavez in saying that he will deliver a programme that focuses on social justice, human rights, the environment support for LGBT rights and feminism while diminishing private participation in critical sectors including the highly lucrative lithium extraction, with a view to nationalising them and establish a universal publicly funded health care system along the lines of the British NHS, increase the minimum wage.
He is a firm believer in Palestinian rights, arguing that Israels actions are 'genocidal and murderous' and will look to ban the import of products made in Israeli settlements.
He could do far worse than look to emulate the magnificent success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, a look around the mess of things that the current crop of right wing world leaders are making shows that, but i have yet to hear of anything that i don't like about him so i wonder if Chile is interested in doing a swap for our own terminally awful Prime Minister. Nah, thought not.
There are plenty of picture's from the 90's of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a self confessed sex pest with a convicted pedophile and a sex trafficker and Trump even said that Epstein was a terrific guy who likes his women on the younger side and wished Maxwell 'well' after her arrest.
In the Maxwell trial 'Jane', testified in court she was introduced to Trump by Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein had claimed that he was the one who introduced Trump to then-Slovenian model Melania Knauss which opens up another can of worms but it is another photo which is causing Prince Andrew to sweat. Or not if his story is to be believed.
The news channels have been speaking to American lawyers over the decision the judge is likely to make regarding if the trial of the Prince on charges of sexually assaulted on Virginia Giuffre on three occasions when she was a minor. It is hard to find one outside of Andrews own team of lawyers who thinks it will be successful in not having to face the charges in a civil court.
If he does 'get away with it', it would be thanks to the $500,000 of a dead pedophile but if he doesn't, then he will defend himself thanks to his mum who is paying his legal bills for the saga and will probably cough up the multi-million dollar payment he will have to make.
As we pay the Queen tens of millions a year for the privilege of living in castles and waving at foreign people, we are therefore paying for what Andrew called a 'catastrophic error' in his BBC interview.
I'm not much of a Royalist but i think i will be joined by many more if Her Majesty spends our taxes which we shovel towards her to pay for Prince Charles toothpaste squeezer or new hats, on paying money for her sex offending son if he is found guilty.
I don't know very much about the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and what i do know isn't very flattering but credit where its due and he is due credit for his action over tennis player Novak Djokovic, hilariously newly nicknamed as 'Novaxx' Djokovic.
Whatever his exemption from the Covid-19 vaccine was, the Australian's were not buying it and declared that the tennis player: 'had failed to provide appropriate evidence to support his exemption from a requirement to be double vaccinated against Covid' and swiftly took his to a quarantine hotel and cancelled his visa.
Although the basis of the medical exemption has not been released, the federal Government have said that a recent Covid infection was not an acceptable reason not to be fully vaccinated which seems to explain why he thought he would be exempt as Djokovic had Covid earlier in 2021.
The rules for entry to Australia are simple enough even for him, it states that: 'People must be fully vaccinated, as defined by Atagi, to gain quarantine-free entry into Australia', he wasn't double vaccinated so out he goes, it really isn't that difficult.
'There should be no special rules for Novak Djokovic at all. None whatsoever' Morrison had said and Djokovic was in with the anti-vax nutters when he said that he was opposed to vaccination and wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine.
The president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, bizarrely said that the whole of Serbia was with him and they were everything they could to see to end the tennis players harassment and Djokovic’s father went even further and said that his son was being persecuted and that the Australian government was stomping on Serbia and the Serbian people. The apple didn't fall far from that tree obviously!
Rafael Nadal summed it up well when he said that Djokovic had known the requirements for months and if he had wanted, he could be playing in Australia without a problem and Andy Murray also showed little sympathy by saying: 'We were told they were the rules. If you want to play, you have to be vaccinated'.
Patience is finally running out with those who are willfully unvaccinated, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, said just the other day that he planned to 'piss off' unvaccinated citizens and as the next Grand Slam is the French Open, Djokovic will hopefully be swapping kicking his heels in a Melbourne Hotel room for kicking them in a Parisian one instead unless he rolls his sleeve up soon.
The problem with living on a planet that is careering through space is that we are not the only ball of rock zinging around the place and as the dinosaurs found out, occasionally one of those which comes crashing through the atmosphere is big enough to cause us a problem and every now and then we hear of one coming uncomfortably close to us such as the 1km wide asteroid (7482) 1994 PC which is currently skimming by us.
There is no standard measurement for asteroids so this one is described as being two and a half times the height of New York’s Empire State Building but how large must an Asteroid be to exterminate all life on Earth?
Scientists estimate that the object that did for the Dinosaurs was between 11 and 12 km wide and created a huge dust plume that completely covered the globe and blocked out the sun which gives us a benchmark of how big it would need to be before we start panicking but even smaller ones could still cause massive damage.
NASA scientist say that a space rock just 0.8 km wide would pulverize all man-made structures up to a kilometer of where it landed while a larger rock (three or four Eiffel Tower's for example) would flatten everything within 8 km from the point of impact.
So while objects hitting us less than 6km would cause massive destruction, anything above that size would mean game over for us but thankfully, NASA are keeping an eye on all potential space rocks zooming around us and say there are none they know of in our vicinity of a size that would completely annihilate life on Earth and the closest will be in October 2028 when a 2km Asteroid will pass a million km or two and a half times the Moon’s distance from Earth.
Us Earthlings can sleep easy for now then.
As today is the 12th Day, Christmas will terminate at midnight tonight. Turkey can still be obtained but Christmas trees, mince pies, tinsel, songs about Father Christmas, mistletoe, cute Snowmen that dance and chestnuts roasting on open fires are banned immediately until November.
Next up will be Valentines Day followed by Easter.
Anyone who knows me, knows also that i don't think much of Israel due to their awful genocidal behaviour towards the Palestinians. Not the country but the people who run it and the way they conduct their affairs.
To some with no real argument, that makes me an anti-Semite, that handy, overly used catch-all phrase bandied about with abandon to try and dampen any criticism of Israel as Emma Watson has found out today after after she posted a message of support for the Palestinian cause.
Predictably, the anti-Semite alarm was triggered and calls of Watson being an anti-Semite came from Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations who posted '10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite' and Israel’s current ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, who ranted about the evils of Hamas and the terror supporting Palestinian Authority.
Britain has recently rewrote the definition of antisemitism and defines it as: 'language or behaviour that displays hatred towards Jews because they are Jews' but when anyone criticises Israel, the Jews automatically scream 'anti-semitism' to try and shut it down which only waters down the shouts when real anti-semitism is spouted.
I have cringed and corrected people many times when they have failed to separate Judaism and Israel when criticising the countries actions and far worse is when they physically attack Jews whose only connection with Israel is their religion.
What some people fail to recognise is that being Jewish does not make you an Israeli as being Roman Catholic does not make you Italian so they fail to engage the few braincells that they possess and attack an innocent religion but criticizing Israel for it's actions as we criticize Russia, America or Britain if they did the same is not the same as criticizing Jews, nobody went after Christians when George W Bush and Tony Blair were at their warmongering worst and it would have been ridiculous if they had.
I once had a long discussion here with someone who tried to choke off my criticism of Israel by calling me an anti-Semite during one of the many times when Israel was pounding Gaza and his argument was that by me having a go at Israel, I was also having a go at Jews because they are the only Jewish state.
My counter argument was if that is the criteria then any criticism of England is anti-Church of England because we are the only Church of England nation.
The Palestinians are heavily criticised when they fire their rockets into Israel but when Israel seize land and build settlements on it, defy UN resolutions, kill innocent Palestinians, hold over 9000 Palestinians in its prisons, destroy farms, bulldoze homes and businesses, builds a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice amongst numerous other violations involving war crimes of using Palestinian children as human shields, deliberate bombing of civilian houses and UN buildings and targeting innocent civilians, we shouldn't stay silent.
When a country acts badly, whoever it is, it should be condemned. When a country continually acts badly, it should be continually condemned and i don't buy the right to defend itself argument, every nation in the World has that right, including the Palestinians and your right to defend yourself is on shaky ground when you are defending yourself against the people you have been murdering and occupying for the best part of seven decades.
The reason Israel is criticised so much is just has a lot to be criticised but what the Israeli Government want is for the Palestinians and the rest of us to meekly remain quiet while Israel continues to violently colonize their land in one of the greatest atrocities since the 2nd World War.
With Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty of recruiting and trafficking young girls to be sexually abused, eye's are now turning to others who were in the Epstein and Maxwell’s orbit and scribbled into their infamous Little Black Book including the Queens second son, Prince Andrew.
Other names currently feeling a bit more sweaty this morning are Woody Allen, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton who all made trips aboard Epstein’s jet dubbed the 'Lolita Express according to flight logs and have been named as visitors by staff at Epstein’s private island, dubbed Paedeophile Island by the locals.
Now making an appearance in the Epstein contact book does not show any connection whatsoever to what Maxwell and Epstein where up to but as Andrew is being taken to court by Virginia Roberts-Giuffre for having sexual relations with her on 3 occasions when she was a minor, it isn't helpful.
The Prince vehemently denies having sex with her and at one point denied having any recollection of meeting her despite that photograph of him with his arm around the 17-year old Ms Roberts-Giuffre which had the 'fixer' Ghislaine Maxwell in the background.
He also has his continued association with Epstein and Maxwell with the Prince a frequent visitor to Epstein's home after his release from prison for sex with a minor which Andrew explain in that notorious BBC interview, was due to his house being: 'A convenient place to stay' and he continued the friendship as it felt 'the honourable and right thing to do'.
The US Prosecutors have complained about Prince Andrew not participating in the case and trying to dismiss the sex assault lawsuit against him and this weekend a US Court refused his latest two attempts and ordered the Prince to turn over key legal documents for a court hearing this week.
The developments follow revelations that Giuffre’s lawyers are claiming to have six witnesses linking the Duke to Roberts-Giuffre but the Prince is yet to forward any witnesses to support his alibi that he was in Pizza Express in Woking on the night in 2001 when he was accused of having sex with Giuffre.
Pressure is certainly mounting on the Prince who may be gambling on the case being thrown out after further challenges but it isn't a good look when rather than prove his innocence in Court, he is trying everything possible to avoid the case reaching that point.
So what do you give the man who deceived, cheated and lie to the public to invade another country which resulted in the death of a million civilians and did much to ignite terrorism around the World? Well if you are British you give him a Knighthood because that is exactly what The Government have handed to Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
If Bliar as he became known, was wondering if with the distance of almost two decades the British public might finally be ready to forgive him for his role along with George W Bush in the Iraq War, he has got his answer which is a resounding no as in the 24 hours since it was announced, 250,000 people have signed a petition calling for the knighthood to be rescinded.
He has at least had the good sense to keep his head down since leaving Office, especially as last time he showed his face at a book signing he literally had to keep it down to dodge being pelted with shoes and eggs and crowds of people screaming war criminal at him.
Obviously not possessing enough common decency to turn down the award, he will bounce up to Buckingham Palace in the near future to claim it but if the Queen is struggling to think of a place to stick it, i can suggest somewhere.
