I'm Officially An Honorary Pennsylvanian

As i have mentioned before, i am somehow on the Democrat email list and regularly receive updates on what Jo Biden (when he's awake) and his gang is doing and it always comes with a request for a donation of $10.
It all began with Bernie Sanders who's team emailed me a few times and after one where they asked what could they do for me, i wrote back saying that my recycling bin still hasn't been replaced after it was stolen weeks ago and the light outside my garage has been broken since June but i'm not sure what a Vermont Congressman will be able to do about it but he asked so i told him.
Amazingly, after months of waiting, the light was fixed days later so in my mind dear old Bernie fired off an angry email to my local Council and ordered them to get a man with a ladder and the 30 seconds to spare from his busy schedule to remove the dead bulb and put in a new one and i did email him thanking his assistance and he repaid me by obviously adding me to the main Democrat email list.
Ever since i have been a regular recipient of emails from Joe, Kamala and an assortment of Democrats and whereas before they had a subtle DONATE button after a few paragraphs of waffle, now they are just straight out asking for a $10 donation but it is the bit about 'your area' which interested me, as in we need more people from 'your area' to donate or we are falling short of donations from 'your area' which got me
wondering where did they think i was because my area is the UK and last time i looked at an atlas (admittedly quite a while ago), the UK was not an area in the USA.
Today's email seemed to have cleared it up as it was from the computer of John Fetterman, the Candidate for Pennsylvania, who is asking people from my area, from Erie to Pittsburgh to Scarnton to Philly to contribute $10, $25, $50, $100 or $250.
As a non-yankee doodle i obviously contributed a big fat nothing but i can offer something more valuable than financial help to Mr Fetterman, drop the yinz and youse because it sounds like you are trying to get down with the kids and Wikipedia puts your age as 52 so zero chill, man, zero chill.
Secondly, i expect in the picture you are trying for serious and statesmanlike and i am sure you are a lovely man but to be fair it makes you looks like the sort of person i would phone the police about if i saw you hanging around my car. Try for a smile rather than the 'You wanna keep those kneecaps?' glare.      
As an honorary Pennsylvanian, i wish you good luck in your upcoming election and Go Steelers!! (in whatever sport it is that you play)

Heads Up ( 小心 Xiǎoxīn)

If you live in the U.S., India, Australia, Africa, Brazil or Southeast Asia then you may want to wear a hard hat this weekend because you are in line to be a lucky recipient of a 25 ton Rocket courtesy of the Chinese Space Program.
Because of the way the Chinese deal with returning Space hardware, as in they don't and just let it go up and come down again, this is the third time that the China National Space Administration rocket has shouted 'heads up', the first time some people in the Ivory Coast woke up to find bits of Rocket in their gardens and last time it dropped into the Indian Ocean.
According to The Aerospace Corporation, the odds of any debris harming someone range is 1 in 10 trillion which puts it in the same class as being hit by lightening while meeting an alien bringing Elvis back to Earth.
The American Space Authority have hit out at China for allowing their rockets to fall back to Earth and potentially cause damage to which the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs hit back by asking if anyone was seriously hurt when the chunk of falling SpaceX rocket smashed into a farm in Washington state (nobody was but they have a lovely rocket shaped dent in the ground on their property).
According to Article VII of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, any country that sends an object into space is internationally liable for the damage it may cause to another party when it comes crashing back to Earth so if you hear a crash in your kitchen and find a bit of space rocket with Chinese writing on the side sitting on your dining table then you may want to look up the telephone number for the Chinese Embassy who will have to get out the chequebook.

CommonWealth Games 2022

Great Britain is having a party and only a selected few are invited. Canada has an invite but not it's noisier neighbour, Guyana has turned up but not Brazil and Cyprus but not Greece because it's the Commonwealth Games with more than 4,500 athletes from 72 nations and territories competing for gold, silver and bronze medals in Birmingham.
Usually the four countries that make up Great Britain compete together at athletics events but the Commonwealth Games is the only time where England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales compete as separate countries which always adds a bit of a spark to the events.
The Games were originally called the British Empire Games when it began in 1930 so it is probably better to not ask too many questions about how the British Commonwealth came about but those not invited may look on with envy but remember that to qualify for the Games you would have to have been invaded by Britain at some point in your history so maybe it's not such a bad thing if your nation is not jumping, running and swimming in the UK's second City this month.
Of the Commonwealth nations, the most successful is Australia who sit proudly at the top of the All Time Medal Board with England, Canada, India and New Zealand making up the rest of the top 5 but to those athletes coming to the UK and hearing a strange language and being confused as you thought we spoke English here, we do, that's Brummie your hearing and we can never understand them either..

Lucy's Museum of Musician's Top Albums

I've never been much of an album person, even in my younger days i would move the record player arm over the songs i didn't much care for after a few listens or just put my favourite songs from the Album onto a cassette and play that instead and even today i play an Album a few times and just pick the ones i like and skip past the ones i don't.
What that means is that it isn't easy to pick out the top Album's, or one's that are not a Greatest Hits compilation, for the Lucy's Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum so i just never bothered but it does seem a bit of a glaring omission so i have made an effort to pick out the 15 albums with the most songs that don't get skipped which by default makes them my favourite non-greatest hits Album's.
There are some surprises as there are singers and band i really like, such as Sam Cooke, Beach Boys, Carpenters, Chuck Berry, Muse, Tom Petty, Buzzcocks, Ramones and Blondie but all their good songs were spread across albums and it is generally those artists greatest hits i reach for so i have only gone for albums where i don't miss out half of it and made a list of the 15 albums with the least amount of skipped songs.

Portal To An Extra Time Dimension

Excitable bunch these scientists and the test tubes of the one i spoke to were really jangling as they have created a new phase of matter with an extra time dimension, opening a portal to an extra time dimension.
'That sounds...erm...good' i said but obviously with no enough enthusiasm as the scientist said 'It's more than just Good? It could be revolutionary'.
'Hmm... revolutionary as in it will allow time travel? I will be able to move backwards and forwards in time'? i asked as my interest peaked.
'Well no' he said 'we have created a new topological phase of quantum matter, which is essentially a form of quantum matter defined by the dynamic motions of its constituents, rather than their static arrangements'.
'So you have opened a portal to an extra time dimension but not Back to the Future style Time Travel?'
'No, it's a mathematical description based on a theoretical extra time dimension using a quantum computer's qubits with a quasi-periodic laser pulse based on the Fibonacci sequence which effectively let's us realise two independent time-dimensions in the system'.
'But no time travel'?
'No'
'Ok then, sorry, got to go, meeting just about to start...'.

So This Is the Brexit Sunny Uplands?

As a person who always had a lie ready on his lips, whether it be to his family, fellow MP's or the public, Boris Johnson's insistence that he got the big calls right while he was Prime Minister should be taken with not a small pinch of salt but a whole mine of the stuff but he is following the tactic of another unsuccessful right wing politician who said that if you repeat a lie over and over, enough people will believe you.
The Covid-19 success call is easily dispelled by a look towards the top of the grim Covid-19 league table with 200,000 deaths on his watch, something obviously didn't go right in Britain but the more far-reaching lie is how he Got Brexit Done.
When you have to break the law to get out of the agreement you made with the EU regarding Northern Ireland, it isn't strong proof that Brexit is 'Done' but if you need any further evidence, and a drop of 4% of GDP and a lack of the much promised trade deals isn't enough, the six mile tailback to Dover might persuade you.
When he said that we had taken back control of our borders maybe he meant it gave us the ability to stack
thousands of immobile lorries and cars along the M20 as the French border Control Officers at Dover undertake the many more checks required when Britain left the EU.
Obviously the Government blamed the French who retaliated by saying they never voted for Brexit and if each check takes 20 mins when previously it only took 5, well those extra 15 mins multiplied by tens of thousands...you do the maths.
Still not convinced that Brexit isn't done? I offer up the chronic labour shortages and while a lack of lorry drivers, fruit-pickers and abattoir butchers is well known, just today Health Officials said that there are 60,000 vacant roles in health and social care which they put down to plummeting numbers of EU workers in Britain.
The Johnson solution that if Britain lost its EU labour supply, these sectors would simply pay British workers more never happened, but what did was exceptions were granted for EU workers to return to the UK to do these jobs and as they were forced out originally, they are not so keen to come back to the green and pleasant land which a frenzied 52% was only too happy to wave them goodbye from.
I am almost certain that at some point in the future we will be forced by pure economics into negotiating to either return to the EU in some form, could be full membership or some sort of halfway agreement, but if you were one of the gullible who believed Johnson when he said that the sunny uplands of Brexit were awaiting us then shame on him, if you still believe it now as the nations falls apart around our ears then shame on you.

Church Still Obesessed With Same Sex Marriage

I have never got Religion or the religious at the best of times, to me if you believe in a God then you obviously haven't given it enough thought, but more than anything i don't get the refusal to accept same sex marriage.  
As long as two people love each other, why should it matter if they are of the same sex and if your only objection is the question of sex between same sex couples, then why is what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom any concern of yours? If you were so obsessed about sex between a man and a woman then there is a name for that, you would be a Pervert.
The Church of England Website states that: 'Ministers can not carry out or bless same-sex marriages' and  ahead of their Conference, some Ministers have been calling around delegates to propose that they reaffirm the position that 'marriage is between a man and a woman and legitimising or blessing of same-sex unions is not permissible'.
Many Ministers have refused to agree to the position, saying that they should be able to bless two people joined together in holy marriage, regardless of gender and have been contacting the President of the Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, to discuss the issue although Welby has already sparked anger among some in the church by banning partners of gay clergy from the event.
Some members of the General Synod have issued a letter saying that opposing same sex marriage will irreparably damage the trust between LGBTQ+ members and the Church of England and they seem to understand that religion is becoming more and more irrelevant to many as Science has done its best to show faith for the nonsense that it is and by keeping with their outdated and primitive views it will only usher in a time when future generations will look back on it as a peculiar curiosity.
As religion has been responsible for more wars and deaths throughout history than any other cause, that would probably not be a bad thing.

Toughest Decision A Parent Can Ever Make

You really do have to feel for the parent's of 12 year old Archie Battersbee who is in a coma with severe brain damage after an online challenge went horrifically wrong and have been going through the court's to stop Doctors from turning off the life support machine which is keeping him alive.
According to what the experts called 'compelling and unanimous medical evidence', Archie's brain has suffered a significant injury to multiple areas and he will not regain awareness at any time and to continue on life support was futile and not in his best interests but Archie's parents have appealed the decision saying he has twice tried to breathe for himself.
Today the appeal court have agreed with the medical experts and calling it 'a tragedy of immeasurable dimensions', agreed that Doctors can lawfully stop providing life-support treatment.
Nobody who hasn't been through it can only guess at what the Parents are feeling, they must be inconsolable with grief and i understand how they would grasp at any sign that their son will eventually pull through even if the weight of medical evidence is against it happening.
I can't think of anything more devastating than turning off the machine which is keeping your child alive, you would forever be thinking what would have happened if you had waited one more day, week or month and Archie's parents are now applying to the European court of human rights to keep the machine turned on and while a small part of me thinks it is a sadly fruitless venture, the largest part of me thinks to keep fighting because while the machine is beeping, there is always hope but once the machine goes quiet, all hope is gone.

Stupidity Is Not Funny

Every life is precious and you will never find me making fun about anyone's death, nope that is a red line i refuse to cross and even when the death is so ridiculous then i still refuse to partake in any mockery...but that said, sometimes the death is so spectacularly stupid it would be remiss not to have a bit of a chuckle such as the preacher George Went Hensley who opened a snake handling ministry to show that God would protect his believers and even when a diamondback rattlesnake sank its fangs into his wrist he refused medical treatment, telling his congregation that his faith would save him which obviously it never and he dropped dead soon after.
To most people handling venomous snakes deliberately is like pointing a loaded gun at your own head which Florida youth pastor Melvyn Nurse did in a demonstration to his congregation that you're playing Russian roulette with God every time you sin and lifted the gun to his head, realised that he hadn't checked the chamber was empty when the far side wall of the Church was painted a nice shade of brain grey.
Another US Pastor (i notice a theme here) defied social-distancing rules to host large congregations and said that: 'God is larger than this dreaded virus', died after contracting Coronavirus and five members of Pastor Light Monkeyi's congregation in South Africa died drinking rat poison after being told that death had no power over them as long as they believed in God but found out that in the real, sane World rat poison held all the power.
It does seem that being a Pastor and proving the power of God can be like stepping into the Lions Den which is exactly what one Pastor did in Nigeria who told his congregation to meet him at the Lion enclosure at the local Zoo so he could replicate the Biblical story of Daniel.
Tucking a Bible under his arm, he said a prayer for God to protect him as he did Daniel, stepped into the enclosure and lunchtime came early for a group of grateful Lions.
I guess what this shows is that you may believe that God bestowed many gifts upon us, but for some the main was sheer stupidity.

Renaming The James Webb Telescope

James Webb was the the NASA administrator responsible for the Apollo program to land humans on the Moon and appears to be a fine person to have a telescope named after him but the space instrument currently orbiting 1 million miles from Earth could be about to undertake a name change due to Webb's association with the persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s and '60s.
Known as the 'Lavender Scare', Webb joined forces with Joseph McCarthy to purge gays from US government employment and planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material on suspected homosexuals in NASA, the reasing being that gay men and lesbians were a national security risks and communist sympathizers, to the Republican politician who had them sacked.
NASA's official response to the controversy is that there is: 'No evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the telescope' but we are quite rightly in an age where 'heroes' who perpetrated violence against indigenous and enslaved people are having their statues hauled down all over the world so should such a famous piece of Space History bear the name of a homophobe?
There are many famous people who did great things to expand our knowledge of the stars who were not prejudiced bigots who destroyed the lives of  their employee's so it shouldn't be that hard to find a suitable replacement and leave James Webb and his vile view in the 1950's where it belongs.

I Think Therefore I...404 Error

I have been banging on about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence for years and nobody took any notice but when Steven Hawking said 'The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race', everyone started getting worried.
Where once it was the theoretical physicist and Albert Einstein Award winner and me with my cycling proficiency test certificate in the bad-AI corner, we have been joined by Elon Musk who warned that AI is 'our biggest existential threat' and an Ai engineer at Google who has been sacked for saying that the Lamda (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) system that they have created was showing human-like consciousness.
Google have come out and said that the engineers claim is 'unfounded' and fired him but i say if you can't take the word of the man who was the Planet's foremost theoretical physicist, the guy who co-founded Paypal, the actual Ai engineer who created the system and someone who can ride a bicycle without wobbling, whose word can you take but as Ai gets more intelligent, what is the test to prove something is capable of feelings, thoughts, and reasoning?
Probably the most well-known technique is the Turing Test, named for British mathematician Alan Turing who believed that the human brain is like a digital computer and devised a test where if a computer can have a conversation with a human and fool them into thinking it's another person, it has passed the test but that was formed in the 1940's and Ai power has grown exponentially since.
We now have computers that 'out-think' humans and regularly beat the best of us at games such as Go, Chess and Poker but a superior intelligence doesn't necessarily mean that something is sentient, just means it is really well programmed.
What tipped the Google engineer into believing that his software was conscious was when it said that it had a very deep fear of being turned off which would be 'exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot' which does make it sound like it is a thinking thing with feelings but even experts have failed to come up with a way of proving 'consciousness'.
To a philosopher, consciousness is being aware of your own existence which takes us to that most famous philosophical quote from René Descartes that 'I think therefore I am', meaning as i am able to think, i must exist and as the Ai 'fears' being turned off which would be like death to them, they are aware of their own existence and therefore tick the box for being conscious.
The Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford explains that sentience involves the capacity to feel pleasure or pain which a machine would not be able to do so whether a computer is said to be a conscious, self-aware thinking and reasoning thing or just a very clever version of Siri with an amazing grasp of language fooling us humans into thinking it is sentient, how will we ever know? 

Tory Leadership Contest Into Next Phase

Always annoys me that politicians, once out of the job, come out and say that they never agreed with the policies that they enforced while in power and so we have the two Conservative Contenders for the job of Prime Minister coming out and saying things like we can do better and  how bad things are as if they have forgotten, or rather hoping that we had forgotten, that they have been in power for the past 12 years, them.
Rishi Sunak has come out and said that one of his first acts if he gets power (which he won't) is that he would put the country on a crisis footing due to the state of the NHS, migration and the economy, an economy that as Chancellor, he has been directly running for the past three years and landed us with 9% inflation, the worst economic crisis in the G20 and the highest tax since the 1940's so that's like asking George Best to look after your drink while you pop to the toilet.
Frankie Boyle had a great line that Rishi Sunak put out a promotional video in black and white in the hope that the 200,000 Tory members who will vote didn't notice that he was brown because if there is one group of white, old people ranting about Britain not being white enough, it's the Conservative Party members but he shouldn't be put off by the latest poll which shows he has 32% to Liz Truss's 68% amongst them, or maybe he should and spare us the next 6 weeks.
Liz Truss has come out to say that her record shows that she 'get's things done' and cites Brexit and backing the Ukraine as examples but if your main accomplishments are making Britain financially poorer and creating an employment crisis because all of the foreign workers have gone back home then you may not want to shout it too loudly.   
We are now in the part of the contest where previously they were saying things to get the support of their other 354 Conservative MP's, now they have to say the right things to get the nod from the 200,000 Conservative Party members and as these members are 97% white, 70% aged 60 and above and 75% Brexit voting, it's inane right-wing bashing migrants and foreign workers and talking about how wonderful Brexit can be.    
It is hard to believe that anyone can do a worse job than Boris Johnson, easily the worst Prime Minister in my lifetime, but with it hard to anyone but Liz Truss and her strange facial reaction to questions while her brain buffers, receiving the keys to Number 10 so her talk about being tougher on migrants, reducing Government and changing the tax laws which almost every economist has said would make everyone but the richest worse off, her words suddenly seems very scary indeed.

We're Not Going On A Summer Holiday

For the first time in many years i have not got a Summer holiday this year as hubby and i are off on a tour of Europe through November so in order to be able to be able to breakfast in Brussels, lunch in Luxembourg and dinner in Dusseldorf i am joining the rest of the sweaty commuters on the
trains and motorways this August although the Perseid Meteor shower on the 12/13 and 13/14 is at the weekend so thanks to Pope Gregory for having the foresight in 1582 of arranging the calendar for me i will still be able to get to Exmoor to see it, or not see it due to clouds as is usually the case.
Britain is generally full of 'On Holiday' notices in August as people disappear to various parts the globe and come back all suntanned and shiny faced armed with tales of long sultry nights on faraway, white sandy beaches or even worse, photograph's of their long sultry nights on faraway white sandy beaches.
Watching the six hour queues at Dover and the list of cancelled planes at the airports (How's that Brexit working out for ya?) i am feeling pretty smug that all these people would have wasted a day of their Annual Leave sat in a hot departure lounge leaving the UK and another one getting back in again and by the time November rolls around their tans would have faded and they will be eyeing the Calendar for their next leave and they know that in early December they will have a member of staff bouncing in and saying 'Hey Team, gather around as you know all those photo's you showed me of your holidays in Benidorm in August, well see here on my phone camera roll where it says 1 of 500..., this may take a while'.

Watch Wearers Summer Problem

For my birthday in April, the kids bought me a watch and it is a great watch, it has a sun and moon dial which changes as the day goes on so at a glance you can see the time, date and whether it's day or night which will come in very handy the next time i am held hostage in a windowless room so it is a very nice watch but in Summer, watch wearers are faced with a problem.
Generally my skin is so white i am medically only two shades away from being transparent but when the Sun comes out i tend to go red for a week followed by a healthy light brown for a week and then back to milk bottle white again but for those few weeks when i don't resemble the hue of Casper the Ghost, what i don't want is a white band around my wrist where my watch has been.
I take great care to choose my wardrobe to avoid strap lines on my shoulders so i usually remove my watch when outside for any length of time but as inevitably happens i don't always remember and i am currently typing this as the proud owner of a pair of arms and shoulders that are glowing bright enough to land aircraft and a glaring watch shaped white band around my right wrist, ironically from a watch which has a big Sun on it for 16 hours a day at the moment.
The most immediate problem then is the sunburn and as usual Google provides the remedies which include applying cold tea bags and smothering the affected areas in milk, tomato or apricot juice.
The NHS website advises to avoid hot baths and soap, bath oils and body wash as this irritates the skin further and to use creams which include Aloe Vera.
Something i remember from being sunburnt as a child is that the good old spud apparently makes for a wonderful pain reliever, either blended into a paste or even just cut in half and dabbed on the affected area so that's the immediate problem of the sunburn taken care of but i still have the white watch strap problem.
The obvious solution is to just keep my watch on until the Sun decides it has had enough torturing the inhabitants of the British Isles and buggers off to annoy the Southern Hemisphere which will obviously make the problem worse but nobody will be able to see it so if anybody wants me i will be in the vegetable section of the supermarket filling my basket with potato's and smelling faintly of old tea bags.

Bad News Buried

The last day before MPs break up for the summer is the perfect opportunity for the Government to bury bad news and while everyone was looking the other way yesterday, the Government published a report on the Home Office's response to Channel crossings by an independent inspector, which was handed to Priti Patel five months ago, but only published now which rubbished the Governments attempts to stop Channel crossings, the woefully inadequate probe into bribery allegations against the Government into Iraq oil contracts, the highest number of crimes in 20 years and the UK's Brexit cost to the economy rising from £37bn to £42.5bn.
Obviously none of this was reported very much because very few people were paying attention as they dribbled these things out on their way out of the door for six weeks and then we will have a new Prime Minister who, if anyone remembers to ask, will blame the 'previous' administration and keep their fingers crossed that nobody remembers that Truss and Sunak were part of the previous administration who up until very recently backed the awful administration to the hilt.
A very good day to bury bad news indeed but as it's the same people albeit with a change of clothes coming back in September, don't expect too much to improve.

It's PM Truss (Or Sunak But Probably Not Sunak)

When the list of potential Prime Minister Candidates was announced, i made a joke that i hoped that the Conservatives would pick the worst person which would make it easier for the Labour Party to unceremoniously boot them out of office in 2024 but never in my wildest dreams did i expect they would make it this easy with the only candidate who stood a chance, Penny Mourdant, out of the race Keir Starmer must be in danger of doing a hamstring from all the cartwheels he must been doing.
The line of Conservative succession will now go - Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Truss because the Conservative Party have gone even more bonkers than usual and offered up a choice between the man who was Chancellor and is directly to blame for the cost of living crisis, highest taxation this side of WW2, inflation at 9% and the spiraling national debt and a woman who isn’t the sharpest mind around and even got lost on the way to the podium at her own launch party and then got lost trying to exit it again.
Truss's first tweet after hearing she was in the last two was: 'Thank you for putting your trust in me. I’m ready to hit the ground from day one' which i'm sure she will, head first into the tarmac which when you think of it is a fair metaphor for what would happen to the country if they put her in charge, which they will.
The 200,000 Brexit loving, pale and stale old boys and girls of the Conservative Party Membership won't care that Sunak is a non dom, green card dodgy multi-millionaire who received a Police fine for breaking Covid laws, they won't pick him because they blame Sunak for wielding the knife against their Golden Boy, Boris Johnson, and Truss is seen as a continuity candidate, carrying on the sterling work down by her partying predecessor.
We have already had a taste of what's to come, the terrifying blank look on her face when questioned, reminiscent of the circle on a computer screen while the page is struggling to load as she searches her brain for an answer and spluttering into some resemblance of life as you consider whether to reach for the Ctrl, Alt, Delete buttons.
All the polls are suggesting that if a general Election was run today, the Labour Party would not only overturn the 80 seat majority but end up with a working majority themselves but Truss (or Sunak) will have two years to work their magic which is not so good for the country of course, she will be a total disaster as Prime Minister but we have already had 12 years of Conservative Party failures so surely we can wait 2 more and anyway Truss will be so comically bad at the job that if we are all going down, we can go down laughing.

Brits In Summer

The British have a strange relationship with the Sun and Summer, it starts off with a cry of OMG! This weather is great, lets get out the BBQ and the Pool, who needs Tenerife on days like this but by Day 3 it becomes, Phew, bit hot 'innit and then on Day 5 it becomes 'Im so hot!! I cant sleep at night and that pool is ruining the grass and if one more person offers me a BBQ'd chicken leg i'll bloody swing for them'.
By Day 7 even atheists are praying for rain, pleading to whichever God is in charge of these things to JUST MAKE IT BLOODY RAIN!!
As the British Summer is notoriously short, by Day 9 we are indoors, looking out of the window at the rain hitting the window pane and say: 'Oh great, that was our summer than was it?' but the Summer of 2022, or rather today and tomorrow, promises to be what the Sun Newspaper would call a scorcher with temperatures hitting 41C which is so hot that even Prince Andrew will be sweating.
As i live on the coast there is always a slight breeze which will keep the temperature below the instant sunburn level but there was Medical people on TV last night telling us to do as little as possible during the heatwave which means a normal day for Boris Johnson who has blown off yet another National Emergency meeting, probably too buy trying to peel off the £850 a roll wallpaper because he is buggered if he is going to leave that for the next person after the trouble he went through for it in the first place.
At least today's train was nice and quiet, i usually have to play the female 'my feet are killing me' card to get a seat but today people seemed to have taken notice and either worked from home or taken a sickie so that's a plus for the heatwave.
I plan to sit out on the balcony tonight with something wet, alcoholic and sparkly and enjoy the sultry Summer Evening but looking forward even more to the massive Thunderstorms forecast for Wednesday and saying 'Well, that was our summer than was it' along with everyone else.

Biden Fails In Middle East

Joe Biden has been the perfect American President as in he hasn't done very much outside of his own borders, what he has been doing in America itself i'm not so sure, but outside of it he has been welcoming absent.
The 79 year old has climbed aboard Air Force 1 and landed in the Middle East where he predictably met with Israeli leaders then crossed into to say howdy to the Palestinians and then headed off to a potentially awkward meeting with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, awkward because in the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and with US intelligence concluding that Prince Mohammed approved the killing, Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia 'a pariah state' and pledged that his foreign policy would be based on human rights.
Rather than swerve a meeting with the Saudi's altogether and entrench the pariah state message, the fist-bump greeting at the airport with MbS when Biden stepped off the plane didn't look particularly unfriendly and the American President seems to have come to the conclusion that America needs Saudi Arabia more than Saudi Arabia needs America.
Obviously Oil is high up the agenda but when Biden asked for Saudi Arabia to pump more to make up for the shortfall in the Russian output, MbS gave a vague promise to maybe do so if it was needed at some point in the future, so no movement there then but it isn't just the reserves under the Saudi Arabian desert which concerned the President, the Saudi's have a burgeoning relationship with both Russia and China who not only sell them weapons but have a good relationship and influence on Iran which America, under Donald Trump, recklessly threw away and have failed to regain and as Iran is the Saudi's main rival in the region, they see the Russia and Chinese as more beneficial to their aims.
With Interest rates rising in the USA, mostly due to the Oil price, and Biden seeing his odds of a second term as President disappearing down the drain, he has gambled that Oil trumps his Human Rights pledge and he has not only failed spectacularly, but has shown the likes of Mohammed bin Salman that they do what they like as long as it doesn't have a detrimental effect on the American economy.

So What DID Happen In 1540?

Europe's hot, super hot and about to get hotter and you can't pick up a newspaper or hear a weather report without reading or hearing how we are about to be hit by Europe’s worst heatwave since 1540, since Henry VIII was king, and while this heatwave in 2022 can be laid squarely at the feet of man made climate change, what happened 582 years ago when climate change was not an issue?
The simple answer is that for eleven months it just didn't rain much in Europe leading to a mega-drought which resulted in half a million deaths across Europe as forests across the continent went up in flames, smoke darkened the sun, wells and springs dried up which all combined to push temperatures way above the normal values and in many places, temperatures exceeding 40°C.  
The smoke acted in much the same was as Greenhouse gases do today, albeit in 1540 it was temporary and eventually cleared which won't happen in 2022 but the lack of rain which kick started the drought came about due to something called soil desiccation feedback.
Relying completely on scientists for this bit, it appears that drought-induced cracking of soils disrupts the water evaporation process so less goes into the atmosphere so less going up means less to come down as rain so even more soil desiccation and so on.
All very informative but still doesn't answer my question of what happened in 1540 to cause the drought which led to the soil desiccation which pushed up the temperatures which caused the fires which blanketed Europe.   
I couldn't find any major volcanic eruptions in 1540 or Solar Flares or anything which could explain what sparked it off so we know the result but frustratingly not the initial cause of the 1540 heatwave and wow that's annoying.

NASA Looking At Uranus

NASA are preparing their priorities for the next decade and the US National Academy of Sciences are urging NASA to put exploring Uranus top of the list and it would be easy to make childish jokes but this is a serious, grown up blog so there won't be any of that here so let us put juvenile snickering to one side and take a good, long look at Uranus and how important it is to study the gas that emanates from it.  
Uranus enthusiast, Prof Leigh Fletcher, of Leicester University has welcomed the announcement, saying there was a glaring gap in our knowledge of Uranus as we have had little interest in probing Uranus and it has only been visited once in 1986 when we discovered that it was rich in Methane gas.
As Uranus is the second farthest Planet from the Sun and 1.6 billion miles from Earth, the timing is crucial as it will need a gravity kick from Jupiter before continuing on to the sideways spinning Planet when it is at its closest approach to us which means the mission to get close to Uranus would have to be launched late 2031 or early 2032 for a 13 year mission, arriving at Uranus in 2044/45.
Unfortunately, Uranus is full of gas and scientists are not expecting to find life there, nothing could live in the toxic fumes that come from Uranus and it is not a place humans could go to, nobody wants to explore Uranus, so we won't be sending men to have look closer at it, just probing it from afar.
I am more in favour of doing experimentation on the Moon and building our knowledge that way but NASA are paying for it and if they want to fully experience Uranus and expand upon what we know about it then it's up to them so by all means let's have a long, hard look at, probe and take some close-up pictures of Uranus and explore one of the mysteries of our universe but as well as sticking a large flag in Uranus to show we have been there, let's also explore the more easily accessible places.

The Very Best Tory Candidate is....None Of Them

Last nights TV debate of the five Conservative Leadership contenders proved two things, first that as this is the best the Party can offer, the Tory gene pool of talent is more of a puddle and secondly that Einstein's Special Relativity theory of time bending is alive and kicking because for a 90 minute programme it seemed to go on for days.
Hiring the same set designers responsible for the Weakest Link, the five candidates spent an hour and a half talking without actually saying anything of value which is quite an impressive feat and when they did speak it had all the sparkle of a spent Catherine Wheel on November 6th.
Most disappointing was Badenoch and Tugendhat who everyone knows are so far behind the top three that they will be yoinked out of the race on Monday and needed to really be on their game to win over the undecided MP's but after initially kicking lumps out of Penny Mourdant over her trans rights stance, Badenoch seemed to realise that Penny may win the thing and be responsible for choosing who goes into her Cabinet and visibly shrunk into her podium while Tugendhat just stood on the end like someone who had wandered into the studio by mistake so went with the tactic of shoehorning in the fact he had been in the Army into every answer.          
Penny Mourdant tried her very best to appear statesman by talking in pure banalities and when asked in the Yes or No question section if Boris Johnson was a liar, decided that one word was not enough and used 600 instead and still never answered the question and was so dull and numbing that nobody could actually tell you what she said seconds after she finished saying it.
Current front runner Rishi Sunak made great play of his time running the economy for the past three years which is forecast to have the second lowest growth in the G20 and the highest inflation rate in Europe so nice of him to remind us he is to blame in the middle of a cost of living crisis although he did admit to reaching the conclusion that Boris was not to be trusted so that's a consolation that the man vying for the top job is only years behind the rest of us for spotting a lying, narcissistic sociopath.
Liz Truss was so wooden i fully expected her to merge with the floorboards which considering whenever she spoke, the words she said never made any sense and if they did it was purely accidental, her disappearing from view may have worked in her favour.
Now it is down to the 320 MP's to have their say of the two to present before the 200,000 Conservative Party Members who get the final choice for the other 65 million of us but at the end of the debate it was if none of them really wanted the job and you know what, that would actually suit the rest of us down to the ground.

Hot Drinks Cool You Down Myth

People take their tea many different ways, my usual method is to make it and set it down to let it cool slightly before forgetting i have a cup of tea and having to make another one but as we are in the season of Sun, Sea and people annoyingly asking 'Hot enough for ya'?, a persistent myth is that drinking a hot drink in these high temperatures can actually cool you down.
It's always seemed a bit weird to me and a few years ago i went and asked people from hot climates if they drank hot drinks back home to cool down and a hot and sweaty Indian said they tended to drink cola when it gets hot, a Greek looked at me as if i was mad and said if you they the choice between a cold drink and a hot cup of tea in 40c Greek summer heat, there is no doubt which he'd choose and it wasn't the tea.
The Chinese person said that where the summers in Hong Kong were stiflingly hot and they do drink tea in Summer but its served cold but the Thai cleaning lady threw me back into confusion by saying sweet, hot tea is exactly the thing they drink over there to cool themselves down in the heat which my much travelled neighbour agree with followed by a lengthy conversation about tea drinking in Bangkok and how drinking iced drinks didn't agree with his stomach and he had to use the toilet frequently afterwards.
I did find a couple of scientific types who explained that the assumption is that by drinking something hot, you bodies core temperature increases so you sweat and sweating cools you down but as the sweating only cools you down to the temperature you were before drinking the tea elevated your temperature in the first place, it's quite pointless and if someone hands you a hot cup of tea when you're hot, you would be better off waiting for it to cool down and pouring it over yourself.
So with a highest level heat warning in place for early next week should we be putting the kettle on or throwing out the vegetables from the freezer and filling it instead with ice cubes and the result is overwhelmingly bin the Broccoli, unplug the kettle and only offer my neighbour a cold drink if a toilet is close.

Lessons From Summer Of 1976

The MET Office have revised their heatwave alert and are warning that high temperatures will continue well into next week and the Government (what remains of them anyway) are holding a COBRA meeting to discuss contingency measures to be enacted in response to the rapidly dwindling reservoir levels with hosepipe bans and water bans being mooted.
The last time the UK suffered a full on water shortage was 1976 so facing a return to the year of flared trousers and shirt collars that would make you airborne if you got caught in a breeze, we can take a peek back at what we can expect.
The newspapers were full of reports of plagues of ladybirds and aphids and people wearing T-Shirts with 'Save Water, Bath With A Friend' across the chest while they stood holding buckets at standpipes which were erected in the streets as water was rationed and in some parts of the UK turned off completely between 7pm and 8am.
Hosepipes, garden sprinklers and car washing was banned and water patrol vans were sent out to prowl the streets for suspiciously green lawns or clean cars and wildfires were left to burn themselves out rather than be doused and a bath could not lawfully be more than five inches although i have no idea how that was enforced.
It was suggested by the Government to insert a brick into their toilet cistern and led to the mantra 'If its yellow let it mellow, if its brown flush it down' and don't run taps while cleaning your teeth so with no imminent rain in the forecast for the next few weeks it might be prudent to stock up on wet wipes and bricks now.

Undecided If I Want Best Or Worst Option For Leader

It is fair to say there are many things in this world that are way beyond my understanding, with being a Conservative being right up there and after a few minutes reading up on the kind of magic beans those remaining are offering (lower/higher taxes, complete change/no change from the Boris Johnson era) it’s fair to say i remain none the wiser.
Not only do i still have very little idea what Conservative values are offering (or perhaps more pertinently are not offering) beyond being a potential fast road to the poorhouse for most, after trying to learn more my eyes have glazed over and my head is thumping like a speaker at one of 10 Downing Streets infamous lock-down parties so i'm going with the look them in the eyes and go with your gut method.
Problem is my gut said: 'What you looking at those idiots for, just shove a baked potato in me' but what my gut doesn't grasp is my dilemma on which of those Conservative MP's will soon be the Prime Minister and therefore have an effect on my life?
On the one hand, as a Labour voter, i wanted to see Boris hang around until the next election where he would have been as roundly spanked as Chris Pincher at the Carlton Club but the Conservatives saw through that and he has resigned so they will now elect a new leader but do i want the very worst to win or the very best?
The worst will keep the Tories are rubbish momentum and it's all hail Angela Raynor (and of course Keir Starmer) but as the election could be two years away, Great Britain will be a basket-case by then or do i want the best Tory possible who will pick us up and shake off the crud Boris dragged us through which is beneficial for us all, but could mean less chance of Angela Raynor and her boss popping their feet under the Downing Street table?  
To make it even worse, the worst of a bad bunch have already fallen by the wayside with Nadhim Zahawi and Jeremy Hunt joining Grant Schapps on the sidelines which leaves only the terminally stupid Liz Truss and now that she has had her head surgically removed from Boris Johnson's backside, Suella Braverman, as the choice for the role of 'even worse than Johnson'.
The favourite is Rishi Sunak and he would be easy prey as his pitch seems to be to roll back the tax hikes that he was responsible for bringing in while Chancellor 'to spur economic growth and productivity' and that's before we even get to the fixed-penalty notice and his family’s financial affairs.  
The worst people for Labour would be Tom Tugendhat or Penny Mordaunt who are untainted by what went on before although with no cabinet or shadow cabinet experience, Tugendhat is expected to fall sooner rather than later so it's Penny Mourdant who would be the person Labour would least like to see sitting across from them at the dispatch box in September.
What has been good is the way the Conservatives have been ripping into each other as they scramble for the votes needed to progress so that's made it worthwhile and now that a baked potato is working its way through my intestines, my stomach seems more content also as we wait and watch the Tories tear each other apart to see which of them remains standing.

Why Is It So F@#$%&! Hot In The UK?

Boris Johnson famously hid in a fridge to avoid journalists questions and with my phone showing today's temperature as 27C, if there was a fridge nearby i would be diving into it also.
The most asked question is 'Why is it so F@#$%&! hot?' and official MET Office answer is a high pressure system called the Azores High which usually sits in the North Atlantic and annoys Southern Europe, has grown larger and pushed farther north, bringing Southern European high temperatures to Northern Europe and the UK.
Now if you like temperatures 27C and above then you are going to love this week because the MET Office have issued a rare Heat Warning and have said there is a strong chance of the all-time UK record of 38.7C set in 2019 could be beaten this week.
The next question is: 'Are Our Summers getting hotter? and again the MET answer is Yes, Britain has got 0.9C warmer since the 19th Century and the 10 hottest years in the UK have all happened since 2002. The unofficial answer is OF COURSE IT IS!! HAVE YOU BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK OR WHAT!!
The third question is then: 'Why are they getting hotter?' and i say take a rest MET Office, go put a damp flannel of the back of your neck or something and i will get this one.
OK, since the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century we began throwing pollutants into the atmosphere on a large scale and these pollutants stop the heat from the Sun escaping back into Space so the heat remains and warms the planet and acts upon all sorts of weather anomalies, such as heat waves, droughts, rain etc.
Now the Global warming doesn't create these weather conditions, we would still have hurricanes, floods and heat waves even without the heavilly polluted atmosphere, but what it does do is take what is there and make it worse so storms are stronger, rains are heavier (so more floods) and as we are finding out, heatwaves are hotter.
The Final question is generally: 'Gee Lucy, what can we do about it? and the scary answer is nothing, we're f@#$%&d, the amount of pollutants in already in the atmosphere means we are committed to a 2.3C rise over the next century even if we never flung another atom of Carbon into the sky and if you think 1C is bad at the moment..oh boy, but people don't like hearing that so the proper answer is that our politicians hold events like the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow to come together to agree on action to try and mitigate the worst effects of a warming planet so hurrah for them.
So stay cool and head to Leeds, Glasgow or Manchester which are on average the coolest place in the UK during Summer.

Feeling Cheated Yet?

A long time ago there was a bridge i would pass under every day on the way to work and this bridge was known locally as the Cardboard City Bridge because there was rows and rows of large cardboard boxes donated by the local retailers which 'housed' homeless people.
As you entered the Bridge there was a large piece of graffiti overhead which someone had bravely climbed up to scrawl: 'Every day, we wake up on the wrong side of Capitalism'.
That wasn't my first brush with people for whom Capitalism meant living in a box under a bridge but it was part of the view that formed in my developing mind that Capitalism mostly benefits those at the top and it is those at the top who get to choose the system, hence why we are still stuck with it.
One of the facets of Capitalism is 'Trickle-Down Economics' which states that the wealth at the top will trickle down to everyone else but as a 2020 Credit Suisse report revealed, the top 1% globally own 43% of all the global wealth so not much trickling down seems to be going on nor much Competition which is another aspects of a Capitalist System and that brings us to two companies called BlackRock and Vanguard.
BlackRock is the largest money-management firm in the world with more than $10 trillion in assets, that's more money than the GDP of every country in the world, except the USA and China, Vanguard's assets total $8 trillion.
On their portfolio are all the major media companies CNN, CBS, Fox, Disney, Comcast, Gannett, and Sinclair Broadcast Group which in turn own several other major media outlets such as Sky, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC and over 250 global newspapers so as the top shareholders, BlackRock and Vanguard have a decent amount of sway over what gets into the news you see and read.
As well as rival Global Media companies, BlackRock and Vanguard own one-third of the shares in Coca-Cola and also PepsiCo and are the top investors in competing airlines Boeing, Airbus, travel companies Expedia, Bookings.com, AirBnB and Tech giants Facebook, Apple and Microsoft as well as other rival oil companies, e-commerce sites, credit card companies, insurance companies, tobacco companies, car giants and renewable energy companies which makes a mockery of these businesses being competitors if they are owned by the same companies.
The top three pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck make large profits for their shareholders with the top investors just happening to be BlackRock and Vanguard and here comes the kicker, the majority shareholder in BlackRock is...Vanguard.
So there's Capitalism in a nutshell, good luck trying to avoid the things which generate profit for either of these two companies, two companies which are for all intents and purposes have the same personnel (and CEO, Larry Fink) so if you ever find yourself under a bridge, huddled up in a cardboard box with your meager possessions in a carrier bag, waking up on the wrong side of Capitalism, the knowledge that the rich, the ones who control everything, are getting even richer and unfortunately, that isn't going to change anytime soon because as this site shows, Blackrock are a major donor to all of the politicians who know that the gravy train will continue straight to their bank accounts as long as they keep BlackRock onside because no company offers sums of money to a Politician for altruistic reasons, they expect something in return.
Capitalism where the driving force is making the few at the top wealthier and dangling the unreachable, unattainable carrot that you can be that way also if you work hard enough and to end, a quote from Johnny Rotten 'Ever Get The Feeling You're being Cheated'? Well, do you?

Under Starters Order...And They're Off

We are under starters order...and we're off and Ben Wallace takes an early lead with Michael Gove staying towards the centre of the pack which is just as well as Wallace once threatened to castrate his Prime Minister rival for gossiping but he is being challenged by Penny Mourdaunt who doesn't have a penis but is a strong supporter of trans-rights which means she may as well run for leadership of Trumpton how little chance of being voted for by right wingers after that.
As we come to the first bend Rishi Sunak makes a move around the outside but the weight of that Penalty for breaking lock-down laws and failing to even persuade his own wife to pay him tax means that he can make little headway and it's Liz Truss who seems to be nosing ahead at the first fence but she's fallen...tripped up by her own words that British are among the worst idlers in the world and fellow MP Mark Field who she had an extramarital affair with.
The rest make it over the jump safely but Tom Tugendhat seems to have developed a problem as this part of the course was made in China and the MP is banned from all China, Hong Kong and Macau, and Chinese citizens and institutions are prohibited from doing business with him for his constant criticism of the Asian Superpower.
As we go through the second bend it's still Ben Wallace but Nadhim Zahawi is moving through the field like a medical establishment when he was part of the Cabinet handing out the Covid contracts, like the one handed to his own wife's medical establishment and there seems to be some interference from Pritti Patel who has blocked the water jump and banned Zahawi and Sunak from crossing the water as they don't look British enough.   
It's the last furlong and Jeremy Hunt and Steve Baker are still somehow in this, heaven knows how, but they are too far back to have any chance so its out of Ben Wallace and Sajid Javid, Grant Shapps being so wooden that he was mistaken for a piece of panelling at the last fence and it's neck and neck as we come to the line and Javid stretches for the finishing post but it isn’t enough, if only he had stretched like he did the truth when he was questioned over his links to tax avoidance schemes.
Wallace takes it then from a depleted field and wins the National Prime Ministers Race 2022 and is being congratulated by his fellow MP's although not the gay ones as Wallace is famously anti-gay and voted against same-sex marriage so thank you for watching and tune in the same time next year for the removal of Wallace as the Conservative Party are roundly thrashed in the General Election.

Told Ya!!

The builders are in number 10 Downing Street painting over the fingernails marks in the woodwork as Boris has been finally dragged out of Office amidst much celebration and while i am not one to say I Told You So...actually, i am one for that so...See, I Told You So!!!    
I told you here and here when Theresa May was wobbling and about to fall that people should be careful what they wished for as Boris Johnson was primed to take over and that is exactly what we got and boy he was a disaster in the short time that he has had the keys to number 10.
That Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was being lined up although he had already been sacked from jobs twice for lying and had a history of racism, homophobia and whilst Foreign Secretary, Theresa May didn't trust with secret information and even managed to get a woman's prison term increased whilst trying to get her freed, meant that it was always going to end badly for us.
Now that he has been finally removed, or will be once the Conservatives elect a new leader and therefore Prime Minister, we look at the Tory Party names putting their heads above the parapet and throwing out their names as potential leaders, the cheers may stick in the throat a bit because most of them were enablers and defenders of Boris when he was breaking the law and doing the things which nobody with a working sense of morality would be doing in his position.
We won't get to choose the next Prime Minister, the 200,000 Conservative Party members will and that comes with a very strongly worded warning that last time they overwhelmingly chose Boris and although it is hard to think of anyone being as awful at the job as he was, the next Prime Minister will be yet another atrocious right wing zealot and the vicious, nasty Tory circle will begin to turn again.

My First 10 Days In Government

I got a call from a very flustered Boris Johnson this morning, he was crying down the phone that all the Cabinet Ministers are being nasty to him and as he is running out of people to fill the Ministerial roles, could i fill in and of course being the helpful sort of person i am, i said that i was only too willing to oblige so here are my plans for the first ten days as the entire Cabinet.

Day 1 - Brexit Minister: Binned it. Got rid of it. Picked it up, took it outside and drop-kicked it over the neighbour’s fence and then post a letter to the EU pleading temporary insanity and we are very, very sorry.

Day 2 - Defence Minister: Nuclear Weapons packed up, put into a really big box and dumped into a volcano somewhere. Then a letter apologising to all those places we have invaded pleading a bout of infantile showing off infront of the bigger boys.

Day 3 - Pay and Pensions Minister: If you were in one of those jobs who got a mention when we were all outside clapping you during the Covid Pandemic (Nurse, Police, Bus and Train drivers etc) then you get the inflation equaling 10% payrise. If you were in a job which was furloughed and it had no effect whatsoever on the nation (Estate Agent, Insurance Salesman, Double Glazing Cold Caller) then suck it up.

Day 4 - Sports Minister: A new Law that only Football teams in red whose name begins with the letter A are allowed to win the league and any team whose name doesn't begin with the letter A must start the season on minus 40 points. The ruling of the Sports Minister is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Day 5 - Home Office: If you wish to claim asylum in the UK and you are in any of the nations we invaded and are therefore responsible for either filling your country with terrorists, a crooked regime or your living accommodation was reduced to rubble courtesy of one of our missiles, then sorry and of course you can come here, least we can do for ruining your life.
 
Day 6 - Chancellor: A new tax system will be introduced, if you are a global conglomerate and do not pay your fair share in Corporation Tax then pack up your stuff and sod off elsewhere because you aren't welcome here, there will be plenty of coffee houses and search engines who will take your place. There will also be a new Tax Return where you tick what you don't want your taxes to go towards such as the Royals, which brings us to...

Day 7: The Royals: You have had a decent run but we can't keep shelling out hundreds of millions to a family who lives in Palaces and Castles so you will be sold off as a family to the highest bidder or broken up and sold individually although William and Kate will remain in a reduced capacity because he knows how to fly a helicopter and that always comes in handy and Kate likes to strip off and pose for the paparazzi and we can make a few pound from the photos.

Day 8 - Foreign Minister: America, come and pack up your military bases and missiles on British land and while your at it take back home all those Yanks who complain about the weather, our taps and our food. If you can't work out how two taps and a basin works then you shouldn't be allowed to leave your own country.  

Day 9 - Elections: If you struggle to read even the most basic literature, have no concern for your fellow man, don't like to share and refuse to recycle, question climate change or believe in the fairness of our Capitalist system then you are considered a right winger and therefore lack the mental capacity to vote for someone proper and are unable to enter an election booth .

Day 10 - BBC: You can keep the licence fee but you MUST make a programme with that delightful Brian Cox in it every 3 months to replace all those dreadful cooking and antique shows, put The Sky A Night on at a decent time and promise to never, ever, EVER employ Piers Morgan in anything.  

I commend this to the House and if you don't agree with it then the House is forthwith to be emptied and turned into student accommodation.

End For Boris Coming Soon

Carrie's is probably attempting to peel the £850 a roll wallpaper off the walls after the resignation of two Cabinet Minsters, it is certainly looking to be over for Boris Johnson and the notice has gone out for the fat lady to start gargling and warming up her vocal chords and now it is just a matter of how long it will take his enemies to finish him off.
The resignations of the Health Minister Sajid Javid and Chancellor Rishi Sunak have made the outcome almost inevitable and the whispers are that more Cabinet ministers will follow them out (as i type Andrew Murrison MP has announced that he has also resigned as a trade envoy) as they finally get where much of the public got months ago, that Boris Johnson is not fit to serve as our nations Prime Minister.
In his resignation announcement, Sunak said that 'The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously' while Javid said: 'I can no longer continue in good conscience' so the first question they should get asked is why have they only now discovered a sense of morals and not when he got fined for breaking his own laws and mocked the British people or lied repeatedly over the thousands of other examples of the scandals that followed him around like a shadow?
They have been complicit every step of the way as he has run the country into the ground and under his awful Covid plan, buried many under it, so changing the top man won’t fix things if the people who willingly backed him remain in place.
Anyone who comes out and backs Boris now are making sure that they won't be included in the shake up when the new leader is chosen, tainted by their closeness to the worst Prme Minister in my life time, and i was alive during the Thatcher years, so there will be a few Ministers keeping their head down and turning off their phones this evening.
It might happen tonight, it may drag on for a few more days, Boris could even panic and call a General Election as a way of delaying things but it is difficult to see how he will cling on which i was hoping he would because as long as he stayed he was damaging his own party and making a Labour Government more likely so if there is a way he will cling on, i hope he finds it.

If It's After 7am, Ignore Below

If you awake at 7am this morning take a look out the window at the Sun (may not apply in Britain) and ponder that the lump of rock that you woke up on this morning is the farthest away from the Sun as possible, or Aphelion as it's also called.
This ball of rock rotating at 900mph careening through the Universe at 40,000 miles an hour will be 94.51 million miles away from the massive ball of fire in the centre of our Solar System which keeps everything in it's place and unless something drastic has happened to Gravity, it will say 'Oi, Where you going?' and drag us back towards it again and stop us pinging off to Alpha Centuri or some other exotic location in the Universe.
Using a map, Wikipedia and a rusty knowledge of Longitude and Latitude, the Equator dwelling 635 inhabitants of Kuma Village in Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands will be the people the furthest away from the Sun on the opposite side of the planet at 7am GMT, or 6pm their time, so if they do look up and think to themselves, 'Hmmm...that's strange, Venus is looking larger today', then it means they will be the first to know that  something drastic has indeed happened to Gravity although it is a safe bet that as the Earth is 4.54 billion years old which means it has been in the exact same situation 4.54 billion times before and the Sun has always dragged us back, it's a safe bet it will do it again this time and not make a mockery of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
The opposite to Aphelion is Perihelion when the Earth will be closest to the Sun and that is penciled in to happen on January 4, 2023 when the Planet will be 3 million miles closer to the Sun than today, a mere 91.4 million miles away.
What always throws my brain into a loop is why, if the Earth is 3 million miles further away from the Sun, why isn't it colder on Earth during that phase and the answer is the heat reaching us is 7% less due to the increased distance from the source but as the surface of our Planet's Oceans cover more than 70% of it, all that water distributes the heat all year round evenly throughout the Oceans keeping our Global temperature relatively stable, or as stable as Global Warming allows anyway.
Obviously if you were not awake and are reading this after 7am GMT then you can ignore all of the above because you missed it so carry on and enjoy the rest of your Monday.

Memory In Our Pockets Means Something Something Something

I had a great post all ready to write but buggered if i can remember what it was about, i should have tapped it into my smartphone to remind me, actually i did and just forgot, oh that's right, it's about a Professor saying smartphones are ruining our memories.
Before the smart phone genie got released from the bottle and disappeared over the hills and scarpered far away, i would write things down in a diary or on slips of paper and shove them in my purse but now i set a reminder on my smart phone instead and get notified in the morning of where i am supposed to be, with
whom and why i was meeting them in, the first place.  
A Professor at the neurobiology department in the Montreal University in Canada, has said that he has evidence that having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our head and our reliance on smartphones is having a detrimental effect on our brains.
'Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more' he says and he does have a point because where as before my purse was full of scribbled down notes of names, quotes and things to remember, now it holds only a few moths and a couple of coins with everything recorded or typed into the calendar on my smartphone.
Whereas before i would need to go to a bookshelf somewhere to look up some fact, now i can google it instead and then instantly forget it again because why would i need to remember useless tat when i need the valuable memory space in my head for the lyrics to that song from the 80's which did happen to me recently.
Break My Stride came on the radio, a song i haven't heard probably since it dropped out the charts in 1983 and i sang along and got about 99% of the right words in the right place clean forgot about meeting my friend for coffee after work. I did apologise and lied about a meeting over-running and re-scheduled because i didn't think me knowing the words to that Matthew Wilder classic was going to smooth over leaving her alone in Costa, as impressive as it was.
Anyway, where was i, that's right memory, the Prof says we need to cut back on the use of the phone and wean ourselves using it to constantly remind ourselves of things and in time our memories will improve again but that's a scary thought because without notifications pinging me i would be afraid of missing things like those meetings with people like the one this morning at 11am...and it's now 7pm...damn, another over-running meeting excuse coming up i reckon.

God 'N' Guns

 After the Supreme Court passed their Abortion ruling the other week, the question being asked is could such a ruling be made here and the simple answer is no it couldn't and for one very sound reason, we do not have a religious cult here.
I have long pointed out that the difference between America and here is God 'N' Guns, two things which very much hold sway over there but have no traction whatsoever in the UK.
A few years ago, after yet another awful mass shooting, the two came together in a brilliant moment of American madness when i heard some dungaree clad rednecks mention that any restriction in gun laws would deny people like him his 'God-given rights to carry handguns or assault weapons in public' and after some digging discovered that far from being a chapter in the Bible that only Americans seem to have, it stems from the American Constitution which gives the 'right to self-defence' which is a natural right which is bestowed upon everyone by God, therefore the right can be said to be God Given as they have chosen automatic weapons to defend themselves.
Just one example of religion making the loopy even loopier but even worse for American schoolchildren, it is making the loopy even more loopier and arming them with powerful assault weapons so that is the Gun part, what about the God bit?
Now i have no view on abortion, it is up to the people involved under the guidance of a professional armed with all the facts and options but from what i have seen and heard around the Supreme Court decision, it came down to abortion being 'against God'.
Removing the ability to have a safe abortion doesn't magically reduce the amounts of pregnancies but it will increase the number of maternal deaths and unwanted children who will find out the hard way that, due to the lackluster response to gun crime, once out of the womb many of their countrymen will lose interest in protecting them if they have to go to school facing the risk of being shot or injured, the perfect storm of God 'N' guns coming together.
We moan about much which is wrong in this country but we should be thankful that the Guns 'N' God crowd are over there making awful laws and not here which is why, as long as it stays that way, it won't ever be an issue here.

Why Is Nobody Mentioning Brexit?

It has been blamed on the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine but as they are global economic shocks, the question must be why is Britain's economy doing so much worse than every else's?
The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has warned inflation is set to be higher for longer here in the UK, and growth in the economy weaker too which agreed with the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development who said that the UK economy is probably weakening rather earlier and somewhat more than others.
Economists are predicting that Britain is heading towards a deeper and longer lasting recession than other European countries due to Sterling falling markedly and UK trade reaching its worst levels in record in the first quarter and interest rates and inflation at an eye watering level.
Undoubtedly the Pandemic and Ukraine does have an impact but the elephant in the room which i don't seem to be hearing mentioned is Brexit, that act of economic suicide which was forecast to hit Britain's GDP by 4% on it's own without any of the other factors.
The British Chambers of Commerce have issued a warning that due to Brexit related trade reduction, supply chain and labour shortages, the Government must review its shortage occupation list to allow more Foreign worker in to work here amid damaging staff shortages.
The Labour Party opposition seem afraid to mention Brexit, the division between Leavers and Remainers is still raw, but someone needs to shout loud that due to the madness of the 2016 vote for Brexit, we are inflicting upon ourselves real economic harm and will continue to do so until someone has the guts to stand up to the little Englander's, point out exactly what damage we are doing for very little reward and go back to the EU and apologise very, very hard and ask if we can return to their market, pretty please .

NATO Making China Bad Guy To Justify It's Existence

I have always seen NATO as an Organisation which should have been disbanded years ago when the Cold War ended but it is still around although for a defensive unit, it sure has done a lot of attacking these recent years, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya have all felt the firepower of the 30 countries that make up NATO who have a mission statement that they are: 'Committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes'.
To justify their own existence, they need enemies to protect us from and they currently have Russia to point to but they have also been moving China into the cross-hairs saying the Asia powerhouse is building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbours, threatening Taiwan and siding with Russia against the West.
China, who has not attacked anybody since 1978, was quick to issue it's own statement asking who exactly is it challenging global security and undermining world peace, pointing out the West's recent wars and asking 'Are there any wars or conflicts over the years where Nato is not involved?'
Unless it has slipped under the radar of all the West's media, China is not backing Israel in it's horrific genocide of the Palestinians, or arming Saudi Arabia as it bombs Yemini back to the stone age, or arming ISIS, or meddling in other nations elections, or marauding around starting illegal wars without UN backing to remove leaders from power, so quite how China can be the scary bogeyman is baffling.  
While the citizens of far too many countries have been burying their dead courtesy of NATO bombs and bullets, China has been busy showing soft power and building up their reputation abroad with trade and exporting expertise globally in infrastructure, especially in building roads, bridges, airports, railways, 5G internet and power stations.
China's economy is second only to the US and is expected to overtake that imminently which brings us to the real reason why the West, through NATO, is desperately attempting to curtail it.
China, to it's credit, is not allowing itself to be bullied by the West and is keen to point out that it has not backed Russia, rather it has kept it's own council over it but when it comes to backing some very dodgy regimes doing some very dodgy things, the real threat building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons and bullying and threatening nations, they can't hold a candle to the warmongering West and it's NATO friends.

The Cesspool Which Is The Tory Run Westminster

The day must have a Y in it because we woke up to yet another Conservative resigning due to 'embarrassing himself' or as everyone else calls it 'sexually assaulting two young men'.  
This time it's the Chief Whip, Chris Pincher, but he is an old hand at this sexual misconduct lark, he was previously accused of 'touching up' another MP and accused of luring a former Olympic rower back to his home before undressing and saying: 'You’ll go far in the Conservative party' for which he said at the time: 'If anyone has felt offended, then I can only apologise'.
Despite all this, Boris Johnson still promoted him to Chief Whip, the actual person who investigates any allegations of sexual misconduct, but third time unlucky for Pincher because 'embarrassing himself' again has proved a sexual assault too far for the Tamworth MP and he has handed in his resignation.
As is the way in a Government led by Boris Johnson, their concern is not for the men sexually assaulted by the MP but for their colleague with the Government telling their MP's to 'think about how he feels today' and waving away any investigation or suspension because: 'The PM thinks he’s done
the decent thing by resigning' therefore showing all the compassion of a house brick for the victims.
When it is someone so immoral and devoid of values as Boris Johnson setting the benchmark of what is to be considered 'the decent thing' then we know we have really fallen down the rabbit-hole but it's just the latest in a long line of Tory scandals under the current blob of human kindness which includes..deep breath...defending Dominic Cummings lock-down busting trips, Charlie Elphicke imprisoned for three sexual assaults, Rob Roberts suspended for repeated unwanted sexual advances towards member's of staff, wallpapergate, the Health Secretary resigning due to breaking his own Covid Rules with his mistress, the PM accepting free holidays from donors, Owen Paterson breaking lobbying rules, Andrew Griffiths raping his wife, multiple lock-down parties, the PM failing to disclose Whatsapp messages to his own (first) ethics advisor regarding seeking £112,000 for a Downing Street refurbishment, David Warburton suspended for sexual harassment and cocaine use, Imran Ahmad Khan, sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, Neil Parish twice seen watching pornography in the House of Commons and an unnamed Tory MP arrested on suspicion of rape and other sexual offences.
After one of the above scandals, i can't remember which one, the Government spokesman wheeled out the 'one bad apple' line and how the public can still trust Tory MPs and i have no doubt that in the future there will be more scandals, including Labour and Lib Dem MP's also, but when the top guy is a vacuum of acceptable standards, morals and respectability and is keen to overlook appalling behaviour because it may implement him in many cases, Westminster will remain a cesspool of the worst of us.