Today Is...St Andrew's Day

When a countries national animal is the Unicorn then you do have to wonder about it but today is Scotland's national day so och aye the noo and all that.
Some folk do find the Great Britain or United Kingdom thing confusing, Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales and the UK is all the above along with Northern Ireland and i am sure there is some easy way to remember it but there is no mistaking the difference between England and the cold and wet bit at the top of the British Isles, aka Scotland.
Their Saint is Andrew who was apparently at all the big events when the long haired, bearded hippy called Jesus came along and is depicted in the famous Last Supper painting, that's him third from the end on the left with his hands up in surprise but not as surprised as when he found himself crucified not long afterwards on a X shaped cross rather than the T shaped one Jesus died on but no coming back alive for him, his dad wasn't important enough obviously, but it did get him to become part of the flag of Scotland.
The story goes that Óengus II led an army of Scots into battle against the Angles, led by Æthelstan, and he prayed for victory and two white clouds formed an X shape in the sky and they took it that Andrew was blessing them and they won the battle and was so grateful they made him their patron saint, set a white X against a blue background on their flag and named a golf course after him.
Since the Union of England and Scotland, the Scots have been trying to gain it's independence ever since and at the last referendum in 2015 the then leader, Alex Salmon, said we wouldn't be able to keep our nuclear weapons there anymore.
Being the kind and caring people that we are, England keeps all its most dangerous weapons in another country, that country being Scotland and if Scotland went it's own way, England will have to keep all our weapons of mass destruction elsewhere which wasn't so much of a problem, we would still have Northern Ireland and Wales just sitting there.
Turned out the Scottish couldn't tear themselves away from us oh so lovable English so enjoy your day Scotland, remember to drink responsibly which to a Scotsman means stopping the whisky and moving onto lager when you go blind.

Today Is...Thriller Album Released

I was never a massive Michael Jackson fan but his songs were part of my teenage years, especially the Thriller Album which came out today in 1982 and especially the title Song which those of us of a certain age remember the musical show 'The Tube' and occasionally they would show a late night version to show videos that couldn't be shown in polite tea-time company.
Thriller was one such recipient and i remember a girls night of alcohol stolen from parents drinks cabinet and cheese and onion crisps while we watched the full, 15 minute depiction of Zombies dancing around to a very catchy tune but then the whole album was great with amazing songs like Human Nature, Pretty Young Thing, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, Billie Jean and Beat It as well as Thriller.
Admittedly, 1982/83 was the Michael Jackson high water mark and to anyone under 30 he was the weird and creepy guy who paid off the family of one of the children he was accused of sexually abusing and dangled his own child over a balcony but there was much more to him than that. He gave us the moonwalk, hung around with a chimpanzee called Bubbles and was a walking advert for not having plastic surgery.
He did make zombies cool again but for many of us him being a suspected child abuser always trumped his music which means that this is what he became because as hard as it is, sometimes the crimes are just so bad that it is practically impossible to separate the man from the music.
He undoubtedly was talented and this album was amazing and is linked to so many of my memories in the early 80s but his freakish appearance and the accusations of child abuse overshadow his music and so serious were the claims, that it is probably the right outcome.

Today Is...Margaret Thatcher Resigns As Prime Minister

Such was the dislike of the Conservative leader that even years after she was seen in tears peering out from the window of a taxi as she was driven away, the mere mention of her name still stirs people to show their disapproval of her.
I made the joke that when she died they would have to bury her under a disco as so many people wanted to dance on her grave which was very harsh (funny though) so after 11 years in the British Hot seat, what was she remembered for?
Possibly the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren which earned her the nickname 'Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher' or 'Maggie's millions', the 3.3 million unemployed, the highest number of out of work Britain's since the 1930s as the country plunged into recession following her election and led to riots on Britain's streets.
As riots greeted the start of her tenure, the sounds of public protests and charging riot police also saw her out with the poll tax riots, quickly abolished by her successor John Major.
The miners strike was a big part of her legacy, closing or privatising 150 of the 174 coal mines resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and devastating entire communities while some could say that the Falkland Island conflict which gave her flagging popularity a boost just in time for the upcoming General Election.
The case could be made for allowing the US to station nuclear missiles at Greenham Common, supporting apartheid in South Africa and the General Pinochet regime in Chile as well as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and the introduction of section 28 which banned promoting the acceptability of homosexual relationships but for me, her must destructive policy was the widespread privatisation she pursued. 
She spread the myth that privatisation would provide a more efficient and cheaper way to provide services and set about selling off nationalised utilities such as gas, water, electricity, British Rail, British Telecom, British Aerospace, British Airways, British Steel as well as the coal mines, ports and British Petroleum.
Someone did make a movie of her time as Primie Minister though called the Iron Lady which contained scenes of a Conservative government that some people may find distressing but on it's release there was some protests outside cinemas but most of us treated it with dignity and decorum and just satisfied ourselves with vandalising the movie posters.

Today Is...The Berners Street Hoax

On a drunken night out once, a friend bet me £10 that she could jump over a park bench and when she got out of hospital with her wrist in plaster i did pay up because she may have gone arse over tit and landed in a crumpled heap wailing in pain, she did actually jump over it and a bet is a bet but it isn't anywhere near the bet Theodore Hook made with his friend today in 1810.   Theodore bet his friend one-guinea that he could transform any house his friend chose into the most talked-about address in a week and with 54 Berners Street chosen, Hook went to work.
At 5am a sweep arrived to sweep the chimney, then a few moments later, another sweep presented himself and then 10 more. As the sweeps were being dismissed a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers,vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying.
Following them to the house was fishmongers, shoemakers and over a dozen pianos and an organ and the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London, also arrived.
The narrow streets soon became severely congested with tradesmen and onlookers and every Police Officer available was brought in to disperse the people and stop further trades people arriving and just as things seemed to be calming down, at 5pm hundreds of servants arrived for a non existent job which paid an extortionately high wage.
To win the bet, Hook had sent out thousands of letters requesting deliveries, services, visitors, and all manner of services all on the same day and the mayhem led to authorities and newspapers offering a reward for the capture of the trickster behind the 54 Berners Street Hoax.
He was never named and ended the day a Guinea better off.

Today Is...John Elwe's Dies

You may be wondering who John Elwe's is but you have certainly heard of the character based on him because he was visited by everyone from the Muppet's to Blackadder on Christmas Eve as he is A Christmas Carol's central character, Scrooge, the miser whose visits from spirits force him to change his ways.   Elwes was a British 18th Century politician who, despite being fabulously wealthy by inheriting a fortune, hated spending money and would go to bed at sundown to avoid having to pay for candles, bought no new clothes and was always seen in filthy rags, would buy cheaper spoiled meat and once fought a rat over the rotting corpse of a hen that it had dragged out of a river, would walk everywhere rather than hail a cab and would stay in whichever of the properties he rented out who did not have a tenant at the time.
Elwe's lived to the age of 75, but the doctor who attended his deathbed said he would have lived at least another 20 years if he had spent some of his money on taking care of himself.
The name of Scrooge was inspired by an inscription Dickens found on a tombstone of Ebeneezer Scroggie while he was writing the story.

Today Is...International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

The United Nations 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women defines violence against women as 'any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life'.

The MeToo movement was an important step top bring powerful men to justice and bring awareness to violence against women but a 2018 analysis by the UN and World Health Organisation found some frightening statistics:

30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime
27% of women aged 15-49 years have been subjected to some form of physical and/or sexual violence by their partner
38% of all murders of women are committed by their partners
6% of women report having been sexually assaulted by someone other than their partner
10% of women in the EU have experienced cyber-harassment
45,000 women and girls worldwide (56% of the total) were killed by their partners or other family member
32% of women globally, 736 million, have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their life
26% of women aged 15 and older have been subjected to violence from their partner
16% of young women aged 15 to 24 experienced this violence in the past 12 months
Less than 40% of women who experience violence seek help of any sort
Less than 10% report physical/sexual violence to the police.
15 million adolescent girls worldwide, aged 15–19 years, have experienced forced sex or sexual acts
200 million women and girls aged 15–49 have undergone female genital mutilation.
82% of women parliamentarians globally have experienced some form of psychological violence from death, rape, assault, abduction threats
65% had been subjected to sexist remarks, primarily by male colleagues in parliament
73% of female journalists have experienced online violence
22% demale journalists had been attacked or abused offline
60% of victims of human trafficking are women or girls trafficked for sexual exploitation

Today Is...Black Friday

When i was a kid the High Street had New Years Sales in January and then these became Boxing Day Sales in December but now the shops have the Black Friday sales in November which may be good for shoppers picking up cheaper Christmas Presents, but i do wonder just how the shops benefit.
By having the sales after the busy present buying Christmas period, shoppers have to pay full price for items earning the shops the best mark up but now they sell their wares cheaper meaning less mark up and hitting their profits.
The reasoning i heard is that it gets people into the stores and they make more purchases but that is the same if they held their sales after Christmas, the shops would still be packed if it's November or January only the stores still would have had that pre-Christmas kerching.
I have noticed in town this afternoon that not all shops are even partaking on Black Friday, mostly the big names are the ones with the signs in the windows and Moody’s Investors Service has warned that 'although the sale brings forward purchases from closer to Christmas, it is at lower margins, and is therefore credit negative for the retail sector overall and rarely positive for companies' and suggests that for many retailers 'their overall profitability and brand values are better served by avoiding involvement altogether'.
So a boost in November is followed by a dent in December spending so i fail to see the lure except for the competition that if a rival is discounting, then they will have to discount also or risk losing out altogether but that hardly seems a healthy position especially as so many well known High Street names are closing their doors permanently anyway due to lack of a profit.

Today Is..First Smartphone Introduced

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 the first Smart Phone being introduced today in 1992.
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (or IBM Simon) was released today in 1992 and despite being labelled a PDA (personal digital assistant), it is generally referred to as the first true smartphone although in true technology fashion, nobody could buy one for a further two years due to software problems.
Once available, it sold 50,000 units at $599 a pop which is expensive when you consider that it looked like a brick so was hardly easy to slip into your back pocket and the battery lasted only an hour as long as you never went mad with the calendar, clock, maps or made too many calls, sent too many emails or checked the news too often.
Obviously smart phones are much smarter now but there was something else...hmm..what was it...oh year, smartphones are apparently ruining our memories.
Before the smart phone genie got released from the bottle and disappeared over the hills and scarpered far away, we would write things down in a diary or on slips of paper and shove them in our pockets but now we just set a reminder on our smart phone instead and get notified in the morning of where we are supposed to be, with whom and why we were 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 songs from the 80's.
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 my meeting with this morning at 11am...and it's now 7pm...damn, another over-running meeting excuse coming up i reckon.

Today Is... Feast Day Of Saint Marina the Monk

As the child of wealthy parents, Marina didn't want for anything but after her mother died, her very devout Christian father raised her and as she approached marriageable age, her father intended to find her a husband and then retire to the Monastery of Qannoubine in the Kadisha Valley of Lebanon.
When she learned of his plan she asked why can't she live as a monk with him and he explained as monks are men it literally took balls to become a monk and she didn't own a pair of them so she shaved her head, changed into men's clothes and called herself Marinos and he was like all whatever, Monks wear baggy robes and aren't in the habit of poking about at each other's genitals so took her with him to the monastery.
The other monks never suspected her and attributed her soft voice to long periods of prayer so she got away with it until her father died and she was given more responsibility by the Abbot such as attending business with other monasteries in the area.
One day, the Abbot sent her to attend to some business in another region but as the journey was long, she was to spend the night at an inn.
That night, the only other lodger was a soldier of the eastern Roman front who disappeared into the room of the inn keeper's daughter, seduced her several times from what she could hear through the thin walls, and as neither of them used protection because it hadn't been invented yet, instructing her to say that if she
got pregnant, then to blame the cute young smooth-faced monk monk down the hall.
As it turns out she was and she did blame Marina and the Abbot banished her from the Monastery although she could have explained that anatomically it couldn't have been her but her mouth, unlike the innkeepers daughters legs, stayed firmly shut.
The other monks convinced the Abbot to allow her to return as long as she did all the cooking, cleaning and carrying water in addition to regular monastic duties which she did until she became ill and died.  
The Abbot ordered that hrr body be cleaned and her clothes changed for the burial and it was while they were undressing her that they made a discovery which made them feel like dicks, or rather not feeling one, which alerted them that she was a woman, so no penis and therefore no pregnancy.
She is now the unofficial patron saint of the LBGT community.

Today Is...World Philosophy Day

Before Science there was religion but over time, as Darwin sailed around the Galapagos Islands, Copernicus gazed up at the sun and Galileo set up his telescope, religion fell over time and time again and science replaced it as the thing to turn to for the answers.
Philosophy is somewhere between the two, questioning matters concerning our lives but as science by its very nature is all about continuing to find the answers to questions, philosophy also has largely gone the same way as religion and become irrelevant.
While philosophical musings were common in more unenlightened times when man's knowledge was more restricted, it is hard to think of any philosophical question that Science today couldn't answer or wouldn't be able to answer in the near future.
The questions religion and philosophy attempt to answer all began with the word 'Why' but the questions science attempt to answer begin with 'How' and base their answers on proof and evidence as they currently understand them. 
That is why philosophy has gone the same way as religion, replaced by Science answering the How questions which in turn makes the Why questions redundant and for a time when we were not advanced or knowledgeable enough to answer them based on the evidence which is why we had strange people like Diogenes who thought too long and hard that he went a bit loopy and gave up all his possessions and clothing and went to live in a barrel where he died demonstrating that a person could hold their breath until they died (he was right) and Plato who studied all of the most puzzling questions in life like why are we here, what is reality and what happened to that massive bit of land off the coast of Gibraltar called Atlantis.
Descartes pondered on whether we were just brains in a vat that thinks it's living in the real world and came up with the most famous philosophical quote ever ' I think therefore i am' which means you must exist because you are thinking about possibly not existing.
Voltaire was sent to live in England for his crimes against the state for his ponderings on religion because the officials figured that sending a Frenchman to live in England would be a far worse punishment than any prison sentence they could offer which to be fair, is a fair shout. 

Today Is...International Space Station Launched

When we are not doing stupid things like making nuclear missiles mankind has made some impressive leaps in the relatively short time we have been on Earth and amongst our very best moments has been the development of Spacecraft although that development only came about as a way to deliver death upon another nations inhabitants but let's paper over that because since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we have gone on to send man-made machines to view every Planet in our Solar System, landing on some of them, as well as setting foot on the Moon and launching a Space Station that circles our Earth every 90 minutes.
Since its launch in 1998, the ISS has been speeding at 17,100 mph above our heads and i receive texts from NASA's Spot The Station website to let me know when it is within view in my part of the UK and most nights i see at least one passing but now us sky-watchers have other pieces of technology to look for in the shape of China's Tianhe-1 Space Station or one of Elon Musk's Sky Link satellites.
When NASA mothballed it's space program due to costs everyone turned to Russia to get our astronauts into Space including Britain's very own Tim Peake who spent six months in space before plunging at 17,400 mph towards Earth in a 'special chair' which was not as safe as the chair that i am set in i bet.
While up there, there was live link-ups in which Tim, floating in front of an ISS camera, could speak directly to children themselves in a project called The Cosmic Classroom which gave children the chance of posing questions, the most popular of which seemed to be around how he used the toilet.
With Britain, America and Russia coming together on the International Space Station, it appears after recent events that Space is the only thing that unites us but with each amazing, remarkable and important space mission, it takes us a step closer to leaving this polluted and rapidly warming ball of rock.

Today Is...International Men's Day

Today is International Men's Day, a time to stop, pause and reflect on just what the men contribute to the lives of us women.
First up is that oh so cute way they ignore manufacturers instructions and just soldier on swearing, hitting things with a hammer and blaming the packers for giving them the wrong bits. So what if there are bits left over, who doesn't like a lopsided bookcase that looks as though it will collapse if a book got anywhere near it.
Then there is the frustrating habit women have of slowly flicking through the television to see if there is anything worth watching so thank the lord we have men to dive-bomb through all 150 channels in two minutes and settling for golf or snooker and then falling asleep within ten minutes leaving us women to plod through the channels ourselves yet again.
While ancient men went hunting sabre tooth tigers and other dangerous animals to impress their women, modern man's version is throwing things in the air and catching them in their mouths. Doesn't matter if it's sweets, nuts, cigarettes, grapes, it can't go the short distance between hand and mouth without first being launched up to the ceiling and caught in their mouth in an impressive display sure to make us women go weak at the knees, risking eyes and teeth if our hero's coordination goes awry with that last walnut.
Not being blessed with a penis i can only guess at just how difficult it is to aim the short distance between your midriff and a toilet bowl with a drop distance of less than 2ft. As all men seem to have problems with it i can only assume it is very difficult indeed so don't worry you poor darlings, Bathrooms have lino flooring for a reason.
Finally men's bodies are very different to women's bodies which is why when we get a cold we can carry on shopping, doing housework and doing the cooking but when a man gets a cold his only option is to lay on the sofa moaning and writing his last will and testament, the precious lambs.
So let's celebrate men and thank our lucky stars that if we want a bottle opened or to park the car that we have left in the road because the parking space was too small, they are always there for us, God bless 'em.

Makes Sense To Tories I Guess

Tax levels are at a 70-year-high, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Rishi Sunak is under growing pressure from Tories to get them down before the next general election where they face a regal drumming.
Sunak then is leaning on his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to do something in this weeks Autumn Statement and being the compassionate Conservatives they are, he has a plan to reduce benefits which will detrimentally affect 53% of the population while scrapping or reducing Inheritance Tax which will benefit
4% of the Population.
The chancellor has warned he will have to make 'difficult decisions' but he will also have to answer some difficult questions as to why he's benefit cut will save the Government £2bn while his inheritance tax cuts will cost them £3bn and with even my iffy grip of maths and economics, leaves the Treasury £1bn worse off.  
Inheritance tax, or Death Duty as it is also jauntily known, is payable on any estate over £1m and the more your estate is worth, the more tax you pay or rather you did, which means the richer you are the more of a tax cut your remaining spouse will receive.  
Ken Clarke, a former chancellor and about one of the only Conservatives i have any time for, has come out and criticised the plans, saying it’s not the tax cut he would choose and leaves them open to the most appalling criticisms for giving tax relief to those families that are lucky enough to have members of it with capital above the limit and not pay any significant amount of tax on the inheritance.
The Conservatives are currently 20 points behind the Labour Party and taking away from 53% of the poorest in society to give to the 4% with over £1m will make sure that isn't closing anytime soon.

Today Is...Mickey Mouse's Birthday

Walt Disney had a pet mouse as a kid but his first cartoon was of a rabbit called Oswald which he sold to Universal who he thought stitched him up so he made up his own company and replaced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit with Mortimer Mouse who looked suspiciously identical to Oswald but with mouse ears instead of rabbit ears.
His wife said Mortimer was a sucky name so he changed it to Mickey but failed to find a distributor for the first couple of cartoons but the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie with his newly named Mickey Mouse, was released today in 1928 and hit a chord for some reason and was snort-milk-out-of-your-nose hilarious for most in those simpler times and Disney was off and running but not all his cartoons were a success and the critics seemed to hate most things he did.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs almost bankrupt him straight away (review: badly drawn) but it was a roaring success with the public and he followed it up with Pinocchio (review: superior to Snow White) and Fantasia (review: Vulgar) but both films sunk at the box-office and his company was once again facing bankruptcy.
Dumbo was the turning point and did well which was lucky because Bambi (review: the worst insult) bombed and they were back in hock again so it was lucky he was getting paid by the FBI for grassing up 'Communists agitators'.
Cinderella (review: nostalgically lovely charmer), Alice in Wonderland (review: Will drive lovers of Lewis Carroll to frenzy) and Peter Pan (review: Slaughtered Barrie's book) pulled him back to profit and then he hit upon the idea of an amusement park full of the films characters and Disneyland was born.
Such was the success that he began planning for a city fit for the future of the world to inhabit but before it got off the drawing board the chain smoking caught up with him and he died of lung cancer and was cremated two days later, not cryogenically frozen, Cremated.

Today Is...International Students' Day

The student life can be amazing, exciting, terrifying and thrilling and the aim is to prepare them for the world of work which stretches out in front of them like a blank canvas but as many adults will tell you this really is the best time of your life.
Once you leave education it is frowned upon to climb trees, drink slush puppies until you get brain freeze, fall off bicycles, eat Doritos until you are sick, run through the park sprinklers, hold burping competitions and seeing how many crisps you can fit in your mouth at one time so enjoy the time when you can still eat ice cream with your hands without being shunned.
All those lessons can be boring but at some point you will need to take an exam but there could be some help at hand from the Patron Saints so when you are sitting in a draughty hall with an exam paper on the desk in front of you, you could try praying to St. Thomas Aquinas who is the patron of scholars, so he’s obviously a good one to have a word with but St. Albert the Great is better if you are taking a scientific discipline as he is the patron of science students specifically.
You could do worse then seeking out St. Francis de Sales if you are an English scholar as his specialty is writing but computer students should have a go with St. Isidore of Seville, the patron Saint of technology, computers, and the Internet.
As students are notoriously bad at timekeeping Saint Vitus as the Saint for oversleeping should be on your list as should be the patron Saint of exams, Joseph of Cupertino but you could also just pay more attention in lessons, either way is good.

Today Is...LSD First Synthesized

Science has always been a double-edged sword, with advances like penicillin, electricity and TV balanced by napalm, nuclear weapons and TV's showing Piers Morgan but sometimes it throws up a bit of a strange one which neither benefits or hinders mankind, but wow does it make you feel good.
In 1938, Albert Hofmann was goofing about with some mould growing on bread when he did that mad scientist thing and thought to myself 'I wonder what it tastes like' and ate some and started to feel a bit weird so he packed up his things and rode home, rather wobbly i presume, on his bike.
A few days later, he decided to see what the hell that strange stuff was so he took some more and began hallucinating, all the pretty colours communing with nature and spiritual enlightenment, but unbeknown to him he had became the first known person to synthesize and ingest lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
He continued to take small doses of LSD throughout much of his life, and always hoped to find a use for it but apart from floating away with the fairies, he never did but the CIA tried.
They noticed that the during trials for treason, the most compliant Russians on trial were, to put it modestly, off their tits, and rather than passing it off as too much vodka, they figured out pretty quickly that he had been doped into testifying.
The CIA launched an extensive, decades long research program focused on Hoffman's LSD named Project MK-ULTRA with a goal of mind control with the goal of getting someone so high that they'll kill themselves if they asked them politely.
Despite the copious amount of drugs ingested, Hoffman died aged 102 and not only invent LSD but also hippies and the associated tie-die shirts and psychedelic music of the 60s and 70s.

Why We March For A Ceasefire

It's just a lovely, family picture of brothers and sisters and cousins sitting outside of their Gaza home one Friday afternoon.
On 22nd October an Israeli air strike struck the family home, killing 21 people and resulting in of the 10 children in the family photo, 7 of them are now dead.
Israel says that it takes steps to mitigate civilian casualties but as almost 12,000 civilians have been killed since the bombardment began on October 8th, they are obviously not doing it very well and the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has called on Israel to stop killing babies, women and elderly people in Gaza.
The march for a ceasefire has nothing to do with backing the murderous terrorists of Hamas or the genocidal killers running Israel, it's to stop innocent people being killed because whether they are slaughtered in a Kibbutz or buried under their homes in Palestine doesn't matter to those who have had their lives so mercilessly cut short.
All they and their grieving families know is that are no longer alive so the killing has to stop, Hamas has to get out of Palestine and the ultra right wing maniacs running Israel have to be ousted and both sides need sensible people to run them and get together and search for a way for Israel and Palestine to live in peace together because it has been shamefully going on for 75 years, stirred up by people like Iran and America who need to stop supplying the weapons of war to either side and start making sure this contemptible situation is solved.

Today Is...Day Of the Imprisoned Writer

If there is one good thing about being imprisoned, it certainly gives you time to pursue your hobbies whether that's tattooing yourself or bulking up in the Prison gym but some guys make a little better use of their time like writing some of the most influential works of literature ever.
Sir Thomas Malory was an MP who found a much more lucrative career was to rob and kidnap his political rivals but the long arm of whatever passed for the 15th Law caught him and he spent two years in prison writing Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the most famous medieval versions of the story of King Arthur Christopher Marlowe has long suspected to have had a hand in Shakespeare's plays and he was a famous writer when he wasn't getting drunk and brawling with anyone within punching distance which is how he ended up in prison and to pass the time wrote Doctor Faustus and may have written some more if he hadn't been killed in yet another drunken brawl days after his release from prison.
The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, served time for 'seditious libel' and as the Marquis de Sade was in and out of prison all his life for things you wouldn't be able to mention in front of your grandmother, he had plenty of time to knock out his books which bought 'Sadism' into existence.
You couldn't swing a cat without hitting a literary genius in a 19th Century Russian Prison and Fyodor Dostoyevsky must have dodged lots of cats during his 8 year stint in a Siberian Prison Camp for revolutionary leanings but he did come out and write Crime and Punishment based on is experiences but staring at the inside of a prison cell worked for Oscar Wilde, when he was charged with two years for sodomy and gross indecency with men, he come out with The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Victor Hugo never went to prison as such but he did force himself into self imposed imprisonment, ordering his servants to lock him in a room each day until he had finished a certain amount of pages of Les Miserable's and The Hunchback of Notre Dame although as one was turned into a musical and the other an opera, i don't know what it is about his books which made people want to sing them.
Probably the most famous and far reaching book written in a jail cell was done in 1925 by a soldier who was committed to a German prison for attempting to overthrow the Government. Nine months into his five year sentence, Adolf Hitler walked out of the Landsberg Prison with Mein Kampf tucked under his arm and big, catastorohic plans to put his book into action.

Today Is...World Diabetes Day

As there is a history of Type 2 Diabetes in my family there is a very good chance it will be coming my way with each passing birthday and knowing what could be in my very near future i have been reading the International Diabetes Federations (IDF) report and it is quite stunning that an estimated 415 million people are living with diabetes in the world, which is estimated to be 1 in 11 of the world’s adult population and expected to continue rising dramatically.
In America alone, more people die from diabetes every year than from AIDS and breast cancer combined and in the UK since 1996, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has risen from 1.4 million to 3.5 million rising to over 4 million when you count the many people likely to be living with undiagnosed diabetes which is 6% of the UK population or 1 in every 16 people having diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes.
The IDF currently states that the top countries with the highest amount of people with diabetes are China with 109 million, India who have 69 million diabetics, USA 29 million, Brazil 14 million and Russia 12 million and that diabetes is currently the fifth most common reason for death in the world.
In the UK it is currently estimated that around 10% of the NHS yearly budget is contributed to the treatment of diabetes which equates to £9 billion a year or £173 million a week.
As the secret to keeping diabetes at bay as long as possible is a low carb diet and it is a pretty strong incentive to give our increasingly dicky livers, and the over-stretched NHS, a helping hand and cut back on a few of those sweet things.

Today Is...World Kindness Day

If you listen to the news or read the newspapers you could be forgiven for thinking that us humans are a bunch of selfish meat sacks but you sometimes hear of a story that makes you think we are not all bad, well, apart from SUV drivers obviously.
Just before Christmas, in a Tim Hortons coffee chain in Winnipeg, Canada, a drive-through customer decided to pay for the next customer in line during a random act of kindness.
The next person caught on and on hearing that his coffee was free, paid for the next in line instead.
The acts of kindness continued for three hours and 228 continuous customers.
'We don’t know who started it, but that’s the beauty of this act of generosity' said a company spokeswoman 'It was the start of something wonderful.'
Then, just when you dare to think there may be hope for us yet, you read that it came to a stop when one man refused to pay for the next customer’s three coffees although he had received four free coffees.
You just know he was probably driving an SUV as well.

Nigel Farage Eating Them Rather Than Talking Them

As luck would have it we are out of the country from 20 November until 10 December which means i will not be able to watch i'm a Celebrity this year and as Nigel Farage is going to be in it, that the lucky part.
Last year the awful former Health Secretary Matt Hancock was in there and he quite rightly got picked for every trial in the first week and then the public found he was actually quite good at them and disappointingly didn't storm off in a hissy fit whenever his name was read out to eat a Kangeroo's anus or have his head dunked into something unspeakable and quite unexpectedly, people began feeling rather sorry for him and he ended up in third place although the later Covid inquiry reminded everyone what a monumental dick he was.
I would hate to see that happen to Nigel Farage because he WILL be picked for every trial at the start and the last thing i want to see if people to say 'Actually, he was quite a good sport about it all' and start voting for Britney Spears sister who is apparently rocking up in Australia also.
Hopefully he will get a termite in his ear in the first trial and be 'medically retired' or Alex Beresford will do what he did to Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain and point out that his political arguments are complete horse hockey and he will flounce off the show.
Either way, i won't be here to see it and i won't be getting bloodied fingers from continually tapping the I'm A Celebrity app to get him to eat bollocks rather than talking them.

Today Is...Scott Of The Antarctic's Body Discovered

Scott's mission was to be the first to reach the South Pole and to secure for the British Empire the honour of the magnificent achievement, basically to stick it to Johnny Foreigner and prove why Britain is the only country with Great in it's name although with hindsight, it was all a bit of a balls up.
Beginning 200 miles away from the Pole wasn't the best start and the thin woollen jumpers were a mistake and as the Norwegians took dogs and were big girls blouses, he decided his lot would use horses instead and the big, heavy wooden sleds which stuck to the ice were not his brightest idea and the food supplies were insufficient for the long trek but by George they stuck out the British stiff upper lip gave it a good go, even though the stiff upper lip got frostbitten and fell off along with various other body parts.
As they were preparing he said to the gang that with all this top notch British equipment it was almost making the venture too easy and he would take a massive punt that they would easily beat Amundsen and his gang.
Captain Oates and the rest of them called him something very similar to a massive punt when they arrived at the Pole and saw a bloody great Norwegian flag poking out the snow, the other group having got there five weeks before them.
On the way back Captain Oates said that he was just going outside and may be some time, if they had known he wasn't coming back at all then they could have eaten his share of canned fish and maybe they wouldn't have all starved to death and found as human ice lollies weeks later.

Violence At March From Right Wing Morons

How a march calling for peace and end to a war where one of the most powerful militaries in the World is bombing 2 million people they have walled in can be called a Hate March is bizarre enough but then we are dealing with the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who maybe thought she was helping out her Government colleagues by trying to get the Police to ban the march which was embarrassing her colleagues who have a policy of letting Israel continue to bomb whoever and whatever facility they want.
Fist Rishi went with it is disrespectful to March on Armistice Day because it should be a day to remember the war dead which people pointed out seemed a bit of a dunderheaded thing to say you shouldn't march to call for a ceasefire when we are trying to remember those who have died in wars but all the time Suella Braverman is in the room, he is not the most idiotic one there.
Suella first attempted that the Police should ban the March but the Police just shrugged and said they had no problem with it so she then went with it would disrupt the presentation at the Cenotaph and the two minute silence to which the Protest organisers said their march was miles away from the Cenotaph and was starting 2 hours after the two minute silence so she finally went with it would turn into public disorder and violence and it did, but not from the 800,000 anti-war protesters who the Police reported gave them 'no issues' on the March.
What happened was the 92 people arrested were the right wing groups who turned up at the Cenotaph according to Police: 'intent on confrontation and violence' and fought Police, threw missiles and trespassed on the Cenotaph itself before going off to confront the demonstrators.
Braverman is facing rising calls to resign and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is blaming Suella Braverman for the right wingers clashes with police saying: 'The scenes of disorder we witnessed by the far-right at the Cenotaph are a direct result of the home secretary’s words. The police’s job has been made much harder' and even Rishi Sunak who is under increasing pressure to sack has has come out and condemned the English Defence League (EDL) for 'the violent, wholly unacceptable scenes we have seen'.
My concern was always that the mindless thugs with a shoe size larger than their IQ and who generally target Jews, Muslims and anyone else not a white English type, would take Suella Braverman's words as a dog whistle to turn up and cause the demonstration to degenerate into a running battle and therefore allow the Suella to say she was right about it ending in violence and disorder but as the only violence came from her own side, the side she openly courts in her bid for the leadership, then hopefully she will be unceremoniously bundled out the door and into oblivion shortly before she is followed by the rest of her god awful Conservative colleagues.

Today Is...Remembrance Day

With today being Remembrance Day, it is the right time to ponder on what Remembrance Day was originally intended for, to reflect upon the madness and futility of war and remember the dead from all sides, both military and civilian.
Over time, as we have become embroiled in conflicts that our leaders have found hard to justify, the sacrifices of the past have been used not to deter us from war, but to lend legitimacy to new wars, using the image of the fallen to encourage new recruits to their armies and to try and silence dissenters by lionising the young men and women who will be sent to fight and possibly die on foreign battlefields.
This serves the interests of those who, for political reasons, want to encourage our involvement in foreign wars by tossing out the usual cliches such as 'defending our freedom' and 'keeping us safe'.
It's been almost 80 years since we fought a war which had anything to do with defending our freedom, our freedom or safety was not at stake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Kosovo and nobody can argue otherwise, although the politicians and useful idiots did at the time.
Given the dubious and dangerous nature of the West's (mainly Britain and America's) foreign policy, the best thing we could do to help our military is by not disengaging our brains whenever the government tells us we have to invade a country who are not threatening us, preventing the sad and pathetic scenes of young men and women in flag draped coffins being repatriated.
By automatically labelling anyone who puts on a uniform and holds a gun as a hero serves to promote worship of soldiers and glorifies and feeds the fantasy that military service is honourable and those that engage in it are unquestionably heroes.
If the requirement for heroism was to grab a weapon and fight a war then the term could be applied to the Islamic State fighters or the Taliban, even Hitler's troops would fall under the category of 'heroes'.
Far be it the Western soldiers being in danger, it is the unarmed civilians who are most at risk, the military are trained for war and are heavily protected while civilians have to do whatever they can to survive while the military with advanced weaponry and in recent cases of drone attacks are thousands of miles away, destroy all around them.
Heroes are people who bring around change against all odds, those who refuse to be browbeaten or forced away from their ideals, those who have helped change the consciousness of thinking on topics such as racism, homophobia, women's rights, slavery and tyranny and did so at at great personal risk.
For the past 80 years, our soldiers have not been defending their land or their homes, they have been defending Western ‘interests' as defined by their Governments who hold the power to decide whether to send other people's sons, husbands, wives and daughters to kill and die.
All the talk of these men and women being 'heroes' just obscures the fact that the soldiers are just pawns in political games and perpetuates the cycle of death and destruction and clears the way for the next war.
'Lest we forget' may be the oft spoken slogan at ceremonies to remember the fallen but the message has changed far too much from the original meaning to make Remembrance Day just another attempt to try and sway the public into supporting the recent and future wars our politicians decide on.

Today Is...Henry Morton Stanley Locates Explorer Dr Livingstone

Dr Livingstone was an avid reader of religious and explorer texts as a kid and became a missionary and was persuaded that the heathen African's needed saving so off he sailed off to South Africa and set up a missionary and got immediately attacked by a lion but the African's didn't seem that bothered about learning about God so he decided as he was there he may as map the African rivers instead.
With the help of some African guides, he set off down the Zambezi and discovered a waterfall which the locals called the Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders") but he kindly renamed it Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria for them. Despite almost dying from a fever and suffering almost daily attacks from spear chucking African tribes, he eventually reached the Indian Ocean, having mapped most of the course of the Zambezi and returned to Britain a hero and wrote up his story with an artistic flourish and the Royal Geographical Society presented him with their gold medal and if he had just stopped there he would have been both rich and famous but he had the explorers itch and not just from the lice.
He set off on another expedition to Zanzibar to find the source of the River Nile and upon arrival he was extremely ill and was saved by Arab traders who gave him medicines and carried him to an Arab outpost where he caught pneumonia and Cholera and the guides he hired decided that they weren't as curious as him where the Nile started and nicked off with all his supplies.
Undeterred, he set off alone mapping out rivers and marshes and fending off every disease the jungle could throw at him when he found a tribe who weren't used to seeing too many white people and offered to feed him if he sat in a roped-off enclosure for the entertainment of the locals.
Years later rumours reached back home that a white man was seen in the African jungle and another explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, went looking for him and finally found him crippled with dysentery and he greeted him with 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
That phrase became famous but no so much the answer which i assume was something like 'I don't suppose you bought any toilet roll did you?
Most accounts end this story here as he refused the rescue and wandered back into the jungle where he promptly died of malaria which is why they usually leave that part out.

Today Is...Germany Day Of Fate

Germany is a beautiful country with it's forests, mountain ranges, rivers, beaches and beer halls especially Oktoberfest but if you are there in October make sure you are over the border by today because the 9th of November has something against Germany with a series of events that have proved turning points in the
European Nation.

In chronological order, 1848 saw the execution of Robert Blum who the leading figures of the democrats in Parliament and ended the German March Revolution which was fighting for improved working and living conditions.
1918, as the imminent defeat of the Germans in World War I, the abdication of Wilhelm II was announced and two separate Parties, the Socialists and Democrats, declared themselves in charge and civil war resulted in the Wiemar Republic.
Five years later in 1923, the then little known leader of the NSDAP Party called Adolf Hitler attempted to overthrow the Government in the Beer Hall Putsch and was sentenced to five years in prison but was released after nine months for good conduct and under his arm a book he had spent the months writing, Mein Kampf.
The Night of Broken Glass in 1938 saw synagogues and Jewish property burned and destroyed on a large scale and more than four hundred Jews were killed and thousands arrested by SS members.
1969 and terrorist organization Tupamaros West-Berlin places a bomb in the Jewish Community Center in Berlin although fortunately the bomb fails to explode.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and ended the separation of Germany and fatefully, David Hasselhoff showed up to give a Concert.

In Germany the day is now called Schicksalstag (Day of Fate) and is now a day of remembrance in Germany for the victims of Nazism.

Most Important Lesson From Covid Inquiry

What is coming out loud and clear from the Covid inquiry is just how awful the Government were during it.
Almost every witness before the Select Committee have said how poor the Government performed or how little concern they had for the public health, despite Boris Johnson's denial's that he said he would prefer the bodies piled high than have a lock-down, it has now been confirmed that he not only said it but suggested he go on TV at the start and actually be injected with Covid to show that it wasn't that dangerous at all.   
As Johnson was a serial liar than nobody believed that he never said it anyway so that isn't much of a surprise but so many Civil Servants and Medical Officers now coming out and describing in detail just how awful they were does make me wonder why the hell didn't anybody say it at the time?
There have been 231,683 Covid deaths in the UK, the 6th highest in the World, and we had the warning and time to prepare as it swept across Asia and Europe before it got to us but we ended up with the second highest death toll in Europe with only Russia above us.
The Inquiry was set out for us to learn from the mistakes so we don't make them again if another pandemic strikes but the most important lesson we can learn is not to elect someone who is so woefully unfit to be our Prime Minister in the first place.

Why The Pro-Palestinian March Must Go Ahead

 I have never really understood how anyone could defend Israels action against the Palestinians over the last 75 years, to me they are giving backing to a brutal regime which has killed tens of thousands, stolen land and committed one of the worst atrocities since WW2 which ironically was against the very people who are committing the genocide now.
Whether the Palestinians will ever see their own state while America continue to back Israel is unknown, the debate is whether they will ever see North Gaza again as Israel seem to claim land and build settlements with every conflict but as the grim death toll raises above 10,000, the protests are ramping up with protests all around the World as the call for a ceasefire goes unhindered, 100,000 in Britain alone last weekend but if the Government get there way there won't be any this weekend because they are trying their hardest to get it stopped due to it being Armistice Day on Saturday.
The demonstration leaders have said that they won't be marching anywhere near the Cenotaph and are actually miles away and will march in the opposite direction and it wont start until hours after the wreath laying ceremony. The police have even said that there is no justification for banning the demonstration because there is no reasonable belief that it may result in serious disorder, damage or disruption.  
Unfortunately the Government may well get its serious disorder as far right groups are planning to turn up in central London to oppose the pro-Palestine march, many circulating a call to: 'Make sure you’re there on Saturday. It’s down to the British people to stand up for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. If we don’t make a stand this weekend, we may as well surrender to the mob. Don’t let them win'.
Those attending the pro-Palestine marches in recent weeks have been calling for a ceasefire in the war that broke out last month after Hamas killed 1,400 people, mainly civilians, in Israel and took more than 200 hostages. Ten thousands of civilians in Gaza have been killed in the Israeli retaliation since.
The Prime Minister doesn't want a hundred thousand people protesting against his decision to give unequivocal backing to Israel so you can understand why he is keen to stop it, stating that he finds it disrespectful to march on Armistice Day when we remember those who have died in wars but to me that seems to be the perfect day to call for a ceasefire and stop the killing of more civilians, no matter where they are in the World.

Today Is...Typhoon Haiyan Hits Philippines

I once got pulled up for calling a mid-latitude storm a hurricane because hurricanes develop in a different part of the Atlantic but it is pretty safe to call what was that hit the Philippines today in 2013 a Typhoon because all the headlines at the time were screaming: 'Catastrophic damage to be caused by Typhoon Haiyan'.
The fastest speed at which the tropical cyclones (Hurricanes and Typhoons) can blow naturally on Earth is around 235 miles per hour (378 kilometers per hour) and Haiyan was measured at sustained winds of 195 mph, with gusts up of to 235 mph which makes it the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded at landfall and a storm which reached the theoretical maximum naturally occuring wind possible.
The Super-Typhoon left at least 7,000 people dead and caused billions of pounds worth of damage and was a powerful reminder of the Earth's natural power and the extreme weather events becoming more frequent and intense.
The thing with Climate Change is that it doesn't mean there will be more Typhoons and Hurricanes, it just takes the weather that is already there and ramps it up to 10 or in the case of tropical storms, takes it to Category 5.
As is quite wrongly sometimes said, Climate Change is not making the tropical cyclones but it is creating the perfect conditions for them to thrive when they do arrive due to higher water temperatures, warmer air holding more moisture and rising sea levels which increase storm surge and flooding.
The intensity of tropical cyclones, measured by their lowest central pressure, has five of the top 10 coming in the last two decades and tropical cyclones have been developing faster due to the warming Ocean's, rising from a Tropical Storm through the wind scale quicker.
Another consequence is due to the increasing warmth of the ocean and air, tropical cyclones are slower moving so, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that they are 10% slower today and linger longer so they dump more rain over a certain area instead of moving on quickly.
As the climate continues to change, Ocean temperatures will continue to rise and the warmer the water the stronger the tropical cyclones become resulting in more rain, flooding and wind damage so Climate Change won't create more Typhoons and Hurricanes, but it will make the ones that we do have more powerful and we are seeing that today and scarily, we are only at the start of the big, dramatic climate changes.

Today Is...Marie Curie Born

Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie in 1867, she was known simply as Marie Curie and was a Polish Physicist and Chemist who went on to conduct pioneering research on radioactivity and discovered radium and polonium.
If you were a strapping gent looking to improve your virility in the early 20th century then your options included shoving a radioactive pellet up your rectum which she recommended and she was a Nobel Prize winner so who wouldn't trust her advice?
She named the new elements Polonium, after Poland which was her native country and Radium after the Italian word for Ray as it would give off a beautiful shimmering glow.
Her discovery went far beyond remedies for floppy male bits, her new elements found there way into all sorts of consumer goods that went into other orifices such as radium water, toothpaste, make up, heat pads, beer, nail clippers, children's toys, starch, cigars, polish, headache tablets, razor blades, butter and of course radium coated condoms, for use after inserting the radium suppository obviously.
It was later found out that radium and polonium came with minor side effects such as leukemia, fragile bones, cancer and death which put a large dent in her burgeoning career, she even received a letter from Albert Einstein telling her to ignore the haters which was easy to do as she could literally see them coming a mile off and the ones who made use of the radioactive Suppositories had a particularly tell-tale walk.
Her husband, Pierre, said that she was looking more and more radiant each day and he wasn't wrong about that as she was dying from aplastic anaemia where her red blood cells were being killed off following a high exposure to radiation and now her body is buried in a coffin lined with an inch of lead as her remains are still so radioactive.
Most of her clothes, furniture, and laboratory notes are still dangerously radioactive and stored in lead-lined boxes and will be for the next 1600 years but they can never take away her discovery of radium, well not until the year 3620 anyway.

Today Is...Abraham Lincoln USA President

Known as Honest Abe, he is known for wearing a really big stove pipe hat which he saw Isambard Kingdom Brunel wearing and decided it looked cool and would make him stand out in the crowd though that probably made John Wilkes Booth's job a lot easier, not hard to miss a 6ft 4" man sat with a chimney on his head even in a dark theatre.
The Bill & Ted film's did give him a catchphrase, 'Be excellent to each other' and 'Party on Dudes' which was much more catchier than 'four score and seven years ago' which nobody can ever work out (It's 87 years).
Something he did take serious was the effects of excessive drinking, something which killed his mother who had a drink addiction, she would drink milk by the bucketful and carried on with the demon milk until it killed her, milk sickness the docs called it.
Lincoln was held in such esteem that his face adorns the $5 note and a 60ft version stares down from the side of a mountain in South Dakota alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt and while Lincoln is certainly not on anyone's radar as being involved in slave trading and actually did everything to free the slaves, when it comes to Washington and Jefferson, oh dear.
His assassination after 4 years of being called Mr President by actor John Wilkes Booth who was mightily ticked that Lincoln was abolishing slavery, may have been a sad, sad day for America but it was a great, great day for Andrew Johnson who because the President the second he hit the opera house floor.

What If...US Election Questions

The US Election is a year away and the question being asked is as Donald Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four separate trials which are all likely to take place next year, if he ends up in prison, can he still be President?
According to media outlets in America, it depends on whether he is convicted on Federal charges or State charges, Federal charges and he could pardon himself but if he is jailed in one of the two state cases, he would have no power to but being an inmate at the time of the election doesn't exclude him from still running in a presidential election which raises the weird situation of being President and a Prison inmate.
If his lawyers manage to delay the trials until after the election, as they are trying to do, it would be almost impossible to prosecute a sitting President which would mean at least 4 years until the cases could be picked up again which leas to a second, more uncomfortable question as by then Trump will be 82
in 4 years.
It has been mentioned many times that Biden and Trump are old and although Biden is looking increasingly doddery and Trump showing early signs of mental challenges, there are no declared health issues but what if something did happen to them in the run up to the election?
According to the American Constitution, if either of them died or falls seriously ill after 1 January 2024, then they would still be on the ballot because you can run while dead or hospitalised even if you can't be sworn in and there is a precedent for it.
In 2000, a Senator was killed in a plane crash on his way to a campaign event but was still elected and 'served' until a special election was held 2 years later so it seems that neither death nor prison will prevent Biden or Trump becoming the 47th President.

Who Has Killed The Most People In History?

It's a grim question but who killed the most people in History? The candidates range from despotic leaders to imperial rulers, all of whom killed millions of people during their bloody reigns and usually Adolf Hitler is amongst the candidates but in the awful league of mass killers of fellow humans gathered from Wikipedia, The Orwell Foundation and National Science Foundation, people who have deaths attributed to them through the conditions within the country due to national or international policy or by active killings by force, Hitler is not in the top 3 which is headed by Mao Zedong (80,170,000 deaths), Genghis Khan (60,000,000) and Joseph Stalin (42,673,000) and then Hitler is fourth with 25,495,692 deaths under his rule.
 
Another Mongol, Timur Khan, round off the top 5 with 20,000,000 deaths but they are not the only leaders who saw millions die during their reign, down to Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh at number 20, the death toll is in the millions and includes someone the British seems to hold up as a hero in Winston Churchill at number 10 (7,000,000 deaths), Saddam Hussein (2,000,000) who is just ahead of 17th placed George W Bush who's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan led directly to 1,200,000 deaths.  

The rest of the league table includes names you would expect such as Benito Mussolini (628,000 deaths), Idi Amin (500,000), Ivan the Terrible (260,000), Vlad the Impaler (100,000) and General Pinochet (40,018) and the leader who is currently at 45 in the list of people responsible for most human deaths, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose policies have seen 21,928 killed under his rule, a number which is currently increasing daily.

The top 54 people in History who have been responsible for the most human deaths either through national or international policy are therefore as follows:

1    Mao Zedong - 80,170,000     China        1893-1976
2    Genghis Khan - 60,000,000    Mongolia    1162-1227    
3    Joseph Stalin - 42,673,000     Soviet Union    1879-1953
4    Adolf Hitler - 25,495,692     Germany     1889-1945
5    Timur Khan - 20,000,000    Mongolia     1336-1405
6    Chiang Kai-Shek - 18,522,000     China        1887-1975
7    Hideki Tojo - 14,000,000    Japan        1884-1948
8    Hirohito - 14,000,000     Japan        1901-1989
9    Leopold II of Belgium - 13,000,000      Belgium        1835-1909  
10  Winston Churchill - 7,000,000    UK        1874-1965

11    Suharto - 3,418,000        Indonesia    1921-2008
12    Pol Pot - 3,400,000     Cambodia    1925-1998
13    Omar al-Bashir - 2,530,000       Sudan        1944-
14    Ranavalona I - 2,500,000    Madagascar     1788-1861
15    Mengistu Haile Mariam - 2,000,000     Ethiopia    1937-
16    Saddam Hussein - 2,000,000     Iraq        1937-2006
17    George W Bush - 1,200,000    USA        1946-
18    Théoneste Bagosora - 1,100,000     Rwanda        1941-2001
19    Nikola Mandic - 1,088,000     Croatia     1989-1945
20    Ho Chi Minh  - 1,082,000     Vietnam        1890-1969

21    Josip Broz Tito - 802,000      Yugoslavia     1892-1980
22    Benito Mussolini - 628,000     Italy        1883-1945
23    Heng Samrin - 383,000     Cambodia    1934-
24    Michel Micombero - 300,000      Burundi        1940-1983
25    Ivan the Terrible  - 260,000      Russia        1530-1584
26    King Salman - 230,000       Yemen        1935-
27    Francisco Franco - 227,321        Spain        1892-1975
28    Syngman Rhee - 200,000      South KOrea    1875-1965
29    Siad Barre - 200,000      Somalia        1910-1995
30    General Ran Min - 200,000     China        310-352

31    Bashar al-Assad - 199,901       Syria        1965-
32    Tomás de Torquemada - 124,621      Spain        1420-1498
33    Vlad the Impaler - 100,000      Romania        1431-1477
34    Jean-Bédel Bokassa - 90,000          Central African Republic    1921-1996
35    Francisco Macías Nguema - 80,000         Equatorial Guinea    1924-1979
36    Ferdinand Marcos - 80,000       Philippines    1917-1989
37    Henry VIII - 72,000        England        1491-1547    
38    François Duvalier - 60,000        Hiati        1907-1971
39    Rafael Trujillo - 50,000        Dominican republic    1891-1961
40    Ahmed Sékou Touré - 50,000      Guinea        1922-1984    

41    Maximiliano Hernández Martínez - 40,000     El Salvador    1882-1966    
42    General Pinochet - 40,018        Chile        1915-2006    
43    Hissène Habré - 40,000      Chad        1942-2021
44    Enver Hoxha - 25,000      Albania        1908-1985
45    Benjamin Netanhyahu - 21,928   Israel  1949-
46    Fulgencio Batista - 20,000        Cuba        1901-1973
47    Fidel Castro - 10,723         Cuba        1926-2016
48    Vladimir Lenin - 10,442,168    Soviet Union    1870-1924
49    Grégoire Kayibanda - 10,000         Rwanda        1924-1976
50    Tiberius - 9,500         Ancient Rome    42bc-37ad

51    Caligula - 9,000         Ancient Rome    12ad-41ad
52    Johnny Paul Koroma - 6,000         Sierra Leone    1960-2003
53    Nero - 5,750        Ancient Rome    37ad-68ad
54    Claudius - 2,935          Ancient Rome    10bc-54ad

Today Is...Guy Fawkes Night

The plan was to blow up King James and his entire family at the State Opening of Parliament because he was Protestant and Guy Fawkes was Catholic and the King really hated Catholics, he seemed to think that we were always plotting something.
The gunpowder plot was a comedy of errors with the idea being to roll 36 barrels of gunpowder down the Thames, sneak it into a cellar of a rented house below Parliament and then wait for the House of Lords to open then creep back in, light the fuse and run away, blowing up the King and all of the Parliamentarians.
Would have worked too if it wasn't for one of Fawkes plotters writing to his MP brother telling him to take the day off on the 5th as it was going to be blown sky high.
Guy Fawkes was caught red handed entering the cellar below Parliament with a match and he was charged with high treason and the judge ordered that he be hung until he was halfway between living and dead, then his genitals cut off and burnt before his eyes and his bowels and heart removed. Then he would be decapitated and his quartered and the dismembered parts of the body displayed so that they might become prey for the fowls of the air.
The execution didn't go to plan as after the initial drawn part of the sentence, the hanging broke Fawkes neck killing him instantly but undeterred, the Government still had his genitals removed and burnt before quartering him between four horses and gutted anyway.
As it turned out it gave us Brits the great tradition of Bonfire Night when we pile up all those old wooden gate posts that have been in the shed since they blew down in February and set fire to them along with an effigy of Guy Fawkes or whoever we don't like that particular year.
Celebrities and politicians are fair game for the flames, as are sportsmen and anyone in the news but as usual the Catholic Church find the whole thing distasteful and anti-Catholic.
I have been attending bonfire and fireworks party for decades and i can't recall any anti-catholic sentiments being muttered as the flames licked around the paws of the poor teddy bear chosen to wear a mask and adorn the top seat of the bonfire because due to Health and Safety rules we can no longer burn real Catholics and have to make do with burning effigies instead.
I'm certain that most people who attend Guy Fawkes' Nights celebrations don't do it out of some hatred of Catholics, simply a chance to go 'ooh', 'aah' and 'whee' at a few overpriced fireworks and watch a teddy bear make the ultimate sacrifice.

Today Is...Howard Carter Find Entrance To Tutankhamun's Tomb

When the Egyptian boy King Tutankhamun was encased in his tomb in 1325bc he was buried along with a warning that said 'Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence' written in hieroglyphic's at the entrance which Howard Carter and his gang saw and then ignored because Owl, Owl, Squiggly line wouldn't have seemed that threatening in the early 20th Century.  
The journey which ended up with Carter dragging out the mummified corpse of an Egyptian King which had been snoozing in a sarcophagus of solid gold for over 3,000 years began when he teamed up with Lord Carnarvon to excavate the Valley of Kings but they were not getting anywhere until 1922 when a water boy stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock.
They dug it out until the top of a doorway was found, a door with Tutankhamun's insignia stamped on it along with the curse but they pressed on and ignored the statue of Anubis, the guardian of the dead, looking over the body but decided any curse would have expired by now and to show how much they disregarded it, when his anthropologist pal Sir Bruce Ingram visited, he presented him with a paperweight with a mummified hand inside it.
Ingram's house burned down soon afterwards, followed by a flood when it was rebuilt and Lord Carnovan's demise when he died of an infected mosquito bite was put down to coincidence and another expeditions financier's suicide was considered probably due to something else while George Jay Gould, dying of a fever shortly afterwards and Carters secretary dying was both purely a result of 1920's medicine.
The death of Carter's pal Aaron Ember and his family all dying in a house fire was pure coincidence and Lord Carnarvon's half-brother, Aubrey Herbert, going blind and dying from Sepsis was poor timing as was the death of the guy three days after X-raying Tuts Mummified body.
Admittedly, if you believe in these things then all those unfortunate events from fire and pestilence within 12 months of dragging the corpse out of a door which warned of deaths from fire and pestilence doesn't look good but as Carter lived out his life in luxury and died in a comfortable bed 20 years later, it wasn't a very good curse.