Madness Of 2.5%

You sometimes look at the World and the people running it and you think everyone has gone nuts which is exactly what i thought this morning when i saw that the British Government are upping Defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP, or £87 billion.
In 2020, the UK government announced a reduction of Foreign Aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP citing a severe economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to returning to spending 0.7 per cent when the fiscal situation allowed and in 2023 £888 million was spent on humanitarian assistance.
Obviously they consider the fiscal situation still hasn't allowed them to put it back to 0.7% as they have been dishing out 0.5% ever since but somehow it has improved enough to allow them to drop 0.5% on buying weapons.
So reduce the amount paid out to actually save and improve peoples lives but increase the already staggeringly obscene amount we pay to take and destroy them.
The Treasury confirmed that it would be partially funding the extra defence spending by cutting the civil service headcount by more than 70,000 although the entire pay-bill of the civil service is around £14bn a year, making it unlikely that even deep cuts could make a dent in the extra £75bn needed.
The Civil Service, the Governments actual workforce, is already understaffed and at breaking point which is why it takes up to 6 months for your Tax Return to be dealt with and any repayment issued and months for your passport to be dealt with and why the backlog in the Home Office has resulted in  Asylum applications taking so long that the Asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels while they await their decision.
It really does boggle my mind that in a nation already creaking through Conservative Party austerity and cuts, they plan to make even deeper cuts to afford to buy bombs, missiles and bullets. Sheer and utter madness but you know some people will be cheering it while the infrastructure literally falls down around their ears through lack of funding.

See Trump And Think FAT SWINDLER

The Donald Trump court case currently under way in America can be confusing but i have come up with a handy Acronym which explains it all, FAT SWINDLER.

F is for Four which is the amount of years Trump could face if he is found guilty
A is for AMI who is the publishing company of the National Enquirer who were involved in the scheme to suppress any damaging stories about Trump
T is for the other woman, playboy model Karen McDougal who was given $150,000 for her silence over her affair with Trump

S is for Sexual Assault which is what Trump admitted to doing, saying he would grab women's genitals
W is for Witch Hunt which is what Trump repeatedly calls his trial
I is for Interference which is what prosecutors claim he was trying to do when he falsified his records 
N is for New York where the trial is being held
D is for Daniels, the porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford who was given £130,000 hush money by Trump
L is for Liar which is what the main witness and the man who made the payment to Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, is being painted
E is for Entries for the hush money payments made under 'legal expenses' in the Trump company books
R is for Records which the FBI seized showing emails, tax documents and business records relating to the hush money payments

There you go so every time you see the former President on the TV just think 'FAT SWINDLER' and it will all make perfect sense.

How Many Is Too Many?

Us humans are a hardy bunch, in the post 'History In 800,000 Year Old Air Bubble', i mentioned how approximately 70,000 years ago the entire human population was reduced to a few thousand following
a super-volcano eruption which caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode with temperatures dipping by -4.1°C (−7.4 °F).
A number of genetic studies have found that the human ancestor population greatly expanded from only a few thousand individuals that existed about 70,000 years ago and in 2022 we passed the 8 billion population mark so it may have looked a bit dicey for us but we did okay after all, maybe a bit too well because while it took all of human history until 1804 to reach 1 billion, we have been making up for lost time ever since.
In 1927 we numbered 2 billion, then 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998, 7 billion in 2010 and by 3037 it is projected we will hit the 9 million mark.
From 1 billion in 1804 to 8 billion in 2022 is only a matter of 218 years so we really didn't hang about with the reproducing and it was partly thanks to modern medicine and sanitation reducing infant mortality rates and medical science not coming up with the first modern contraceptive until the 1960's
The steep climb in the human population has not come without problems, such as polluting our land, air and sea's and using up the Earth's resources at an increasing rate.
Earth Overshoot Day, August 2nd in 2023, marks the date in the calendar when the human demand for Earth’s natural resources exceeds what the planet can generate within a year and today we need 1.75 planets to provide the natural resources for our consumption for a year. By 2030, we will need 2 planets.
According to the UN’s medium projection our population will peak around 10.4 billion in 2086, and will remain at this level for the remainder of the century although the 'high' end of the projection is  
14.8 billion by 2100 and the 'low' end 8.9 billion which is still way above the calculation that the ideal size of our species using the Earths resources would be around 2 billion people so are there now just too many of us?
The uncomfortable answer to that is obviously yes but that comes with the proviso that there are too many of us in the current way we are living so we need to be smarter and not use so much of the Earth's resources and ramp up the renewable energy sector whilst not polluting the only Planet we are capable of living upon which bizarrely, we seem reluctant to do but with humanity set to be around for many more centuries yet, reliant on a super-volcano literally not cooling our heels, we will have to find a way to rub along together and protect our environment to survive.

Sunak The Socialist?

Reform Party leader Richard Tice has branded Rishi Sunak 'a socialist'. Now i consider myself a bit of a Socialist and on behalf of Socialists everywhere i say i have given your words some thought Dicky and have concluded that you are a moron of Biblical proportions as Rishi Sunak is about as much of a socialist as Boris Johnson is truthful.
I also see Mr Tice that you are now calling yourself a climate change skeptic rather than a climate change denier in the belief that it makes you sound less of a fruitcake and yes, we all saw you get ripped
a new one by the woman from the Green Party on Question time the other day when she questioned you on your scientific background to make such claims and your slack jawed..erm..erm..erm reply will be shown on TV for decades, like that other right wing numpty Mike Graham who claimed you could grow concrete. Comedy Gold.  
Frankly if you're a supporter of him i hope you're kept away from anything sharp before you hurt yourself but then on second thoughts, as Tice's Far Right Party is attracting members from a Conservative Party who have moved so far to the right to be within touching distance of your crackpot beliefs, then let’s hope you continue to spill nonsense like this to be lapped up by the idiots who will split the Tory vote and make it even easier for Labour to get elected. Nice one Dick.

American Action Just Prolonging Awful Wars

America has passed a bill to release £49 billion to Ukraine which the UK Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, called: 'a vital step forward'.
The US House of Representatives also approved bills to send foreign aid to Israel and provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians in Gaza which puts them in the bizarre position of financially backing the nation which is responsible for the Palestinians needing humanitarian relief in the first place.
Why they are supporting one nation which has been brutally invaded by Russia whilst also supporting Israel who are the invaders and actually committing genocide is some twisted logic but while the
conflicts may physically be a thousand miles away from each other, this action will have the same effect of prolonging both these horrific atrocities.
Yet despite 32,000 deaths in the Ukraine conflict and over 34,000 in the Palestinian, Israeli war, the money and arms to continue the fighting does not come with any for stipulations for making peace
in either of the battles where Ukraine is vastly outnumbered and outgunned and Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble and seem intent on destroying what's left with no thought to the slaughter of people they have been actively trying to destroy for the last 65 years.
Why are the American Government, and most of the West, so keen to keep Ukraine and Israel fighting rather than using whatever leverage they have to at least try and bring an end to the wars?
Joe Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu and his government won' t restrain him, he has destroyed Gaza and acted a genocide against the Palestinian people and yet still he can rely on Biden for financial backing while Ukrainians continue to die in a war that they cannot win.
Nobody seems to be offering an end game to either side and handing over weapons and bankrolling one nation to kill more of another nation makes me very uneasy while i have yet to hear of anyone making any overtures of peace talks to end the carnage.

Kid's Questions Not Answered

Being a mother, i have had questions posed to me by my children which i have been unable to answer, such as who finds Jerry Seinfeld funny and why does Johnny's Dad always go around to see Tommy's Mum after his Dad has gone to work although neither make an appearance in a list of the top 10 questions asked by kids parents struggle to answer.
A study by OnePoll found that on average mum and dad face eight questions a month from their offspring which they find difficult to respond to, either because they don’t know the answer or are too embarrassed although it also found that while 47% of parents just respond with an honest 'I don’t know', 28% try to cobble together an answer while 35% tell the youngster to Google it, 23% Google it themselves with another 23% admitting to just making something up and 11% go for that old of favourite of saying: 'im busy go ask your Mum/Dad'.
The study found 'what does God look like?' is the question most likely to leave parents stumped, followed by 'where do you go when you die?', 'What are black holes?’, ‘why is water wet?', 'why do people die?' and 'how did the world begin?' close behind.
'Where do babies come from?', 'why is the sea salty?' and 'why is the moon sometimes out in the day?' completed the top ten.
Other questions which leave parents scratching their heads include 'why is the sky blue?', 'what makes the earth spin?', 'how do planes fly?' and 'Where does wind come from?'
I did plan to answer all of the above questions but i'm far too busy so go ask another blogger.

We Deserve Better

Conservative MP, Mark Menzies, has today quit the Tory Party and stepped down as an MP after being accused of misusing campaign funds which means since the 2019 election, there have been multiple serious allegations levelled against serving MPs, the people who make the laws.
The allegations include drugs taking, corruption, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexting, sex harassment, child-sex offences, rape, thuggery, domestic violence, bullying, serial groping, fraud, perverting the course of justice, drunken yobbery, watching porn in the Commons, attending the Commons while knowingly infected with Covid, handing MPs’ private details to a blackmailer and now misusing donor funds...and these are just the ones i can remember off the top of my head which which we know about!
My question would be why does the job of an MP attract a disproportional larger amount of thugs, liars, perverts and crooks than other professions and my second question would be why can’t we do better than the shower of miscreants we currently have?

History In 800,000 Year Old Air Bubble

Air bubbles trapped in Ice Cores taken from Antarctica give us a lot of information and as they go back over 800,000 years, that is a lot of information but scientists have been using it to date major Global events, or rather for the previous 799, 800 years because they measure Carbon Dioxide and it all gets rather hazy after the late 18th Cetury because us humans began pumping the stuff out.
'As the snow was falling, it also trapped pockets of air' says Amy King, a research scientist for the British Antarctic Survey and by drilling into the ice, scientists can extract a long cylinder of ice and analyze the air and gasses from the past as a sample sample of the atmosphere as it was at that time.
The air trapped in the ice reveals information about things like droughts and volcanic eruptions charts the progress of human industry as traces of metals such as copper and lead begin to appear from mining and smelting operations as well as for our large scale use of leaded petrol as well as the rising and decline of CO2.
King explains that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a balance between the things that emit carbon dioxide and things that absorb carbon dioxide such as forests so when there is a massive reduction in human population, there is less CO2 as the forests grow back over land which was previously agricultural land and more CO2 was absorbed by those plants, thus reducing carbon dioxide levels across the world and this is recorded in the ice bubbles.
Around 70,000 years ago, humanity's global population dropped down to only a few thousand individuals due to a massive supervolcano plunging earth into an ice age and pandemics such as the Black Death which killed between 40% and 50% percent of the entire population of Europe and these are recorded in the ice cores.  
While events once had the ability to alter Earth’s atmosphere, due to there being a much larger background emissions of carbon dioxide today compared to the previous 800,000 years as for the previous 799,800 years the concentration of atmospheric CO2 naturally was between 180-280ppm and but since approximately 1850 it has been rising steadily and today it stands at 410ppm meaning we have managed to do in under 200 years what nature couldn't do in 800,000 which puts a massive hole in the numbskull argument that rapid Climate Change and rising CO2 is a natural occurrence that has been going on for tens of thousands of years.

Cloud Seeding In UAE

 
The United Arab Emirates was on the receiving end of a colossal storm during the week which dumped a years worth of rain (5.59 inches in a nation that averages 4.7 annually) in just one day on the country, causing floods and four deaths and questions are being asked whether the UAE's practise of Cloud Seeding was the culprit.
The UAE have been trying to increase precipitation by sending planes through clouds where they spray chemicals to try and make it rain and days prior to the downpour, meteorologists at the National Centre for Meteorology said they flew seven cloud seeding flights and for some that's the smoking gun they needed to pin the blame on the daft plan.
Not so quick said an array of meteorologists who said that cloud seeding can't create clouds from nothing and seeding encourages water that is already in the sky to drop as rain so if the experts don't think seeding was to blame, what do they think was?
The Met Office pointed firmly at Climate Change and the effect of cloud seeding was negligible and said that rising global temperatures are leading to more extreme weather events such as this around the world which may be worth remembering the next time some wally tries to argue that Climate Change isn't a thing because unfortunately it is and even more unfortunately, it is something we have done to ourselves despite decades of warnings of what would happen. Yep, we really have been that stupid.

God Had A Wife?

We have been watching the brilliant Lucifer and all the Biblical characters are there, Satan, Mazikeen, Lilith, Cain, Eve, Uriel and other named Angels and demons and then suddenly up pops God's wife and i was 'God had a wife?'
As i have a man of the cloth literally on my doorstep i went and asked him and got the vague answer that in the old Jewish texts, when God was going by the name of Yahweh, they ruled side by side as a divine man and wife and her name was Asherah and there were statues to both everywhere in ancient times but for today Christian's and Jews there is only God, so what happened?
'Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together' according to an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion so it seems that she was edited out of the Bible when the Christians began taking bits and pieces from the Jewish text for their own religion, in some cases referring to her as a sacred tree in an effort to hide her although references to her did have to be edited out in later versions of the Bible because they missed a few references such as in Deuteronomy 33.2-3, when she is said to be 'at his right hand his own Asherah'.
After being written out of the Christian Bible, to further kick her further away from her ex-husband, she became morphed into a Pagan goddess and worshiping Pagans was a huge no-no and any statues to her had to be destroyed because of the whole False Idols bit of the commandments.
Obviously, today's Christians don't want to know that their top banana has an ex-wife knocking around and definitely don't want to acknowledge the 70 kids they supposedly had together, preferring to concentrate on the 1 Godly offspring which was a result of making a 14 year girl who was betrothed to another pregnant because that is so much better apparently.

UK Should Avoid Backing Israel Aganist Iran

The Iran strike on Israel was a bit of a strange occasion. They signposted to America what they were going to do hours in advance which gave Israel plenty of time to get their defences ready, and then sent relatively slow moving drones which were thankfully sitting ducks to be shot down before they reached their destination. Hezbollah did not launch a barrage of rockets to tie up the Israeli Iron Dome as anticipated so overall it looks more likely it was an Iranian message to their own people that they hit back at Israel for what they did in bombing the Embassy compound in Syria.
What Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu, will do in response is now a topic of debate but whatever they do, Britain should not be involved and stay well away from what could spark off a major conflict with multiple players on either side and we would be forced into fighting on behalf of the nation conducting a genocide.
What the Iranian action has done is move the focus away from what Israel are continuing to do in Gaza where the death toll has topped 33,000 and the warned of famine in the North has now arrived and the UN blame Israel for delaying aid delivery and  the European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, accusing Israel of intentionally using starvation as a weapon of war.
The Save the Children US president said, after American aid was refused delivery that she had: 'never seen anything like the level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance' and Amnesty International stated that children are dying from malnutrition and the result of an Israeli 'engineered famine'.
At the start of this phase of a conflict, an Israeli military occupation which has been ongoing for decades, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said 'We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly'.
Devastatingly, they have been true to their word so the ICJ should be on the case and doing whatever it can to force Israel into today's version of  the 80's pariah South Africa.

Trumps Truth Shares Tanking

It is undoubtedly true that when it comes to business, Donald Trump has a sort of opposite Midas touch where whatever he touches turns to crap but it didn't seem to put off his deluded supporters who paid for shares in his Truth Social network and then watched on as it tanked regally.
Experts warned wannabe investors that the company didn't  have the fundamentals to back up its obscenely high valuation and Trump Media had lost $58 million in 2023 and made just $4.1 million in revenue but Trump supporters are not known for their smarts and the company has lost more than 60% of its value from its peak of £61.98 on March 26 when it started trading publicly to $26.95 today.  
The Trump company has now announced a massive new influx of 21.5 million shares which will further substantially devalue existing shareholders’ stakes which must annoy Investors who put their cash into the former presidents Truth Social stock.
Analysts have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump's cash grab was nothing more than a scam and that investors should stay far away yet there were plenty of Trump supporters who believed that the shares were, and still may, go through the ceiling but even if it doesn't, some seem happy to show their support for Trump even if it costs them dearly.
See, not too smart when they are out of pocket but Trump stood to make £3bn, now down to $2bn and falling fast so you know what that Truth Social share certificate says about the person holding it?
Yes. Yes, you do. And it’s not that you are in possession of a nest egg or a badge of honor that you helped out your favourite sex offender, it says that you are unlikely to trouble any Brains Trust meetings.  

Footloose In Chechnya

The Chechyn Culture Minister, Musa Dadayev, doesn't figure in many of my blog posts but he is a man who walks to the beat of his own drum, as long as that beat isn't less than 80 beats per minute (BPM) or more than 116 because he's gone and banned all music that is 'too slow or too fast' to conform to the Chechen mentality.
He has now given music artists until 1 June to rewrite music that doesn't meet the criteria to allow them to continue performing it in public which must be a nightmare for Chechen radio stations who will be unable to play many Rythm & Blues (average 70 bpm) Reggae songs (75 bpm),  Jazz (135 bpm), Disco (120bpm), Techno (135 bpm) or Rock (125 bpm) although Hip-hop with an average bpm of  85-115 will be perfect so Cypress Hill and Run DMC should be expecting some royalty checks paid in Rubles shortly.
The BPM of a song can be measured roughly by playing a song for 15 seconds, count how many times you tap along to it (usually the drum beat) and then after 15 seconds times it by 4 to get the beats per
minute although i would avoid  'Thousand' by Moby which holds the record of 1,015 bpm.  
It got me thinking if i, god forbid, ever ended up in Chechnya with my MP3 player, what songs would have a rather large customs officer standing over me ordering me to delete before they let me in and  
that's most of the punk stuff such as Green Day (Average 133 bpm), the Sex Pistols (average 150 bpm) and Ramones (Average 180 bpm) would have to go as would most of the decent Rock and Metal stuff such as Metallica's Whiskey In The Jar (133 bpm) and Madhouse (164 bpm) by Anthrax so of my Top 10 in the Lucy's Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians, who could i continue to listen to in my Grozny hotel room?
Sweet Child O' Mine (123 bpm) is out as is Hotel California (148), Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll (170), Teenage Kicks (135), Anarchy in the UK (134), Platters Only You (71) Johnny B. Goode (168), Manic Monday (122) and the only two that would be left are I Don't Wanna Grow Up by the Ramones (91) and Stairway to Heaven (82) which isn't great.
My first thought then was to scratch Checnya as a holiday destination next year but on reflection, a country where you can go and legally not hear Disco, reggae or jazz...hmm, lets not be hasty with binning that Chechnya brochure.

Damn You Taranis!!!

Climate change can be blamed for many things and unless you was smoking behind the bike-sheds in those science lessons you would remember the science teacher explaining that warm air holds more water vapour which will come back to us in the form of heavier and longer bouts of precipitation and as Scotland finds itself on the wrong side of the Jet Stream for most of the year, it gets more than its fair share of downpours which a certain football team in the lowlands of Scotland is claiming as an excuse why its games keep getting postponed.
Dundee FC is situated beside the North Sea and after their Scottish Premiership match against Rangers was postponed for a second time as the pitch was deemed unplayable and therefore putting the kibosh up Sky TV's scheduling and annoying the 4,500 Rangers fans who had made the 80 mile trip to Dundee s Den's Park, the club pointed to this being the fifth fixture they have had to call off and pointed their finger squarely at the increased rainfall brought about by climate change for the problems.
Fair enough you may think, if your patch of grass is situated in a place where the MET figures shows it rains on average for 125 days of the year then you should expect a warning climate to have an effect but it kind of falls down when your neighbours, Dundee United, whose ground is 200 yards, is perfectly playable and have not had any games postponed there this season.
Now it could be that being 200 yards closer to the North Sea means that Dundee FC is impacted more than its neighbour, possibly there is a geographical reason why the rain clouds get to Den's Park and then inexplicably empties themselves of rain before reaching the other Dundee's team Tannadice Park or maybe the Celtic God of storms, Taranis, is a St Johnstone fan or, and this may be a bit of a long shot, but maybe the people behind Dundee FC are guilty of not shelling out for a decent pitch and are pinning the blame on something they vaguely remember during those long ago science lessons. Just a thought.  

Labour Shouldn't Take Supporters For Mugs

The Angela Raynor Capital Gains Tax dodging accusations rumbles on and as big as a fan of her and Labour i am, if she did deliberately avoid paying her share of tax when she sold her home, then she should resign or be sacked immediately because the (hopefully) incoming Labour Party have to been seen to be squeaky clean after years of them highlighting Conservative Party corruption, sleaze and dodgy dealings.
The worst possible outcome would be for Raynor to be found guilty and then refuse to put her hands up and admit to and fall on her sword because that would leave Labour open to allegations that they are as corrupt, sleazy and dodgy as the Conservatives and the biggest Labour selling point is that they are NOT the Conservatives.
That she has not presented the 'advice' she was given that she had no Capital Gains to pay when she sold her house and killed the 'chatter' immediately is concerning and just allowed the Conservatives and their friends in the right wing media to target her and initiate a Police investigation and reminding her that when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were being investigated by police over Partygate, she suggested they should stand down.
Keir Starmer is currently supporting her although he has claimed that he hasn't seen the 'advice' personally but MP's in the Labour Party had better get used to this level of scrutiny, and how they are dealt with by the senior Politicians, because it is only going to grow.   
I hope Raynor is innocent and i sincerely hope that HMRC and the Police find her not guilty of any tax dodging but as Tony Blair discovered, us Labour supporters will ditch you if you don't play by the rules we believe you should be playing by.

Iran And Israel Face Off

The Israel war in Gaza has many subplots with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel nibbling at each other and the Houthi's in Yemen attacking Western shipping and the West bombing them i return but while they have been simmering just below boiling point, the latest developments between Israel and Iran are threatening to explode alarmingly.
Iran have vowed to respond to Israel killing senior Iranian commanders when it bombed the diplomatic compound in Syria and the World is waiting to see what Tehran will do next and what the response from Israel will be with many nations warning their people in Israel to be ready to leave the country at short notice.
'We will make them regret this crime and other ones like it, by God's will' warned Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which drew a response from Israel that if Iran attacks it, Israel will: 'respond and attack in Iran' and then the United States weighed in, putting Iran on notice that it will: 'help defend Israel'.
American media, quoting unnamed US sources, have spoken of an imminent Iranian assault against Israeli targets, with a wave of drones and missiles but the Ayatollah faces a choice because every action it is considering comes with a risk.
Iran's usual response, is to mainly hit back through its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houtihi's but in January it fired missiles at a Mossad Spy Agency base in Iraq but a direct attack on military targets in Israel is not expected to be on the way, rather operations against Israeli embassies and interests elsewhere in the world and increasing support for it's proxies already fighting Israel.
Another option could be that Iran bides its time, keeping Israel dangling and continually running up and down it's enemies security measures in anticipation of an attack that may, or may not, arrive at some point but military experts are saying Iran is too canny to attack Israel itself, it will bide it's time, let everyone believe that something will happen soon only for it to happen somewhere else at a later date.

Lying Men (And Women)

You can’t argue with the science…museum because they conducted a survey to ascertain facts about lying and they discovered that men lie 30% more than women and on average tell around 3 whoppers a day or 1,092 lies a year which is a lot of deceit lads.
The poll also found that the people the men play fast and loose with the truth to the most are their mothers with the top three lies being 'I’m on the way', 'I had no phone signal' and 'I’m stuck in traffic' and the poll also found that no woman has ever told a lie in the history of the World so the rest of this post will be about men spouting off a lot of porkies to all and sundry.
Actually, that's a lie right there because us women have our fair share of commonly uttered lies too. More often, according to the same study, women tend to lie about how they feel with 'I’m fine' top of the list followed by 'I didn’t drink that much', 'It wasn’t that expensive' and, on receiving a crap gift, trotting out 'It’s great, just what I’ve always wanted' which obviously means it will be appearing in a charity shop window tomorrow.
So us ladies lie less than mendacious men but where we do agree is that it is OK to lie to spare somebody’s feelings so 'Of course you’re not going bald' or 'I have no idea how your 'Best of Country & Western' CD ended up behind the Fridge' is us being nice to each other.

12 Years For A Plan B

I don't know who came up with the figure but apparently we need £43,100 a year in our retirement to live a happy and comfortable old age so with 12 years to go until i can open my Happy Retirement cards, my options are to start some serious saving or come up with a Plan B.
The state pension is currently £221 a week, or just under £11,500 per year which is the 17th in Europe where Luxembourg sit in first place, paying their pensioners £5,211 per month and to get it you must have paid Pension Insurance Contributions for at least 10 years so that's an option, i could go work in Luxembourg for the last 10 years of my working life but that would mean learning Luxembourgish so may have to rethink that.
I could do what many pensioners have to do and keep working for ever but that won't leave much time for sitting around moaning about the younger generation and endlessly telling them how everything was much better in my day so that's not ideal.
The Taxpayers Alliance  issued a report which shows that over a lifetime, an average earning employee will pay £107,045 in National Insurance Contributions (NIC) which means i would have to live until i am blowing out the candles on my 78th Birthday Cake to receive more than i paid in else it goes into  the big pot named Government Coffers to spend on whatever they want.
I therefore have another 12 years to work out my Plan B for a comfortable retirement but luckily, there is a nice government in power that cares about it's elderly people, unfortunately it’s in Luxembourg.

Arming Israel Makes Us Complicit In Genocide

If a country is committing genocide, as defined by International Organisations such as the United Nations and the highest court in the World as well as countless human rights groups, then if you knowingly continue to supply that country with the weapons to continue it then you are complicit in committing that genocide so when the British Foreign Minister states that Britain will not stop selling arms to Israel, then we become implicated in what they do with the weapons we give them.
After over 33,000 deaths in Gaza including over 200 aid workers and 100 journalists, pressure is mounting on Israel’s allies to halt arms supplies with Joe Biden's America by far the major supplier, providing an estimated 68% of Israel’s foreign weapons with Germany, providing around 30% while Britain and Italy send an estimated 1.5%.
As well as weapons, America has provided $158 bn of financial support since the second world war and immediately after the Hamas attacks in October,
passed a bill that would provide $14.1bn in Israel-related supplemental spending, $3.5bn in foreign military financing, and $801.4m for ammunition procurement although it is currently tied up in the Senate.
Human Rights Lawyers in America are pointing to Section 502 (B) of the US Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits aid to governments engaged in gross human rights abuses and the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which forbids the state department or the Pentagon from providing funding to foreign units that have committed, according to 'credible information', human rights violations which is just , one of the many accusations Israel are accused of performing in Palestine. In February 2023, the Biden administration issued a Conventional Arms Transfer (Cat) policy stating that the US would not transfer weapons where they were deemed likely to be used to commit 'grave 'breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such' but unlike Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain and Belgium who have all announced they would stop shipping weapons to Israel, the arms flow continues.
One reason put forward is that punishing Israel risks alienating pro-Israel Jewish voters in an election year although that is coming at the expense of pro-Palestinian voters who are threatening to desert Biden over his stance on the war.
It is abhorrent that there are some nations who are decrying what Israel are doing in Gaza while providing them with the weapons to continue doing it and shamefully my own country is amongst them
and the murderous slaughtering of innocent Gazan's will continue long after any ceasefire, as has been happening for the past 60 years because this never started on October 7th, Israel has been killing and bombing Gaza for 60 years with weapons provided by it's allies and unless the Palestinian state is recognised and given security at the UN, it will continue long after any ceasefire.

Who Doesn't Love A Goat?

Christmas has gone and so has my husband's birthday which is a shame because one thing he has always wanted is a goat and there is an Italian island who are literally giving them away.
To be honest, whether he did want a goat or not i'm not sure but if one was under the Christmas tree he would have no choice but my motto is you should never look a gift Goat in the mouth and the Italian island of Alicudi has too many and is giving them away free to anyone who can arrange to pick one up.
Goats outnumber the Island population by 6 to 1 and the Mayor has come up with the idea of giving the goats away to anyone willing to take one as he explained: 'We absolutely do not want to even consider culling the animals, so we are encouraging the idea of giving them away'.
Nice man but goats can be a good source of milk and cheese and apparently their leavings are particularly good for fertiliser but the main benefit is they eat anything so you can feed them your food scraps, stuff you find at the back of the cupboard, your husbands gawdy Hawaiian Shirt or that assignment which is late but has been carelessly left on the table, bad goat (good goat).
As we don't have a garden it is a moot point anyway and i'm the only one who used to empty the cats litter tray so i'll be damned if i would cleaning up after a goat so it might be a nice thought but for me it's back to 'accidentally' losing my husbands colourful shirts behind the wardrobe and pretending to look in my bag and swearing i picked up that report this morning.  

Put The Kettle On, Be There Soon Europa

Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's Enceladus are the two most likely places where we would find life in our Solar System as both are thought to contain liquid water beneath their ice sheets , have a stable orbit and geothermal activity but we will never know if life exists on either of them unless we  throw a few missions their way, so that's exactly what scientists are doing with Europa the first of the Moons to be the recipient of spacecraft from Earth.
Europa is approximately 90% the size of our Moon and Nasa believe that there could be a liquid saltwater ocean containing twice as much water as Earth’s oceans and in October, Nasa’s Europa Clipper  will be making the 6 year, 484 million mile trip with the tools to not only detect it but see if there is any alien life swimming around in it or at least the ingredients of the building blocks for life.
As Europa launches huge plumes of 'water' off it's surface, the plan is fly Europa Clipper through one of these and analyse its composition, looking for bacterial cell material which would indicate life is, or was, present and lead to some further investigation and one of the greatest scientific discoveries.
Exciting stuff although by the time Europa Clipper gets there in 2030, by then we may have people living in a Moon outpost because after a far too long lull, Space Exploration is getting interesting again.

Right Look Back, Left Look Forward

The terms politically Left and Right originated in the French Revolution with the National Assembly divided into supporters who wanted change sat to the left and the supporters who wanted to maintain the status quo sat to the right.
If you look at the political slogans today then you can still see that thread running through so for example the Right talk about 'Taking Back Control' and 'We Want Our Country Back' while the Left go for slogans like 'Britain can be better', 'A better plan, a better future' and 'Britain's Future'. 
In America, which has an election around the same time as us,  you have Republican Donald Trump regurgitating his 'Make America Great Again' slogan for 2024 while in 2020 Biden's was 'Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead' and his 2024 offering is 'Let's finish the job'  which shows the Right looking back to a supposed better time and the Left looking ahead for the supposed prosperous times.
There was a recent study published: 'Ideology shapes evaluation of history within the general population' which asked participants from the Italy, Mexico, Poland, UK, US and South Africa to judge whether society would improve over the next 25 years and in every country, right-wingers evaluated the recent past more positively than left-wingers and left-wingers were more optimistic about what humanity could achieve in the near future.
In one experiment for the study, a group of participants were encouraged to reflect on the recent past and again viewing it positively or negatively split down left and right lines with the right-wing participants became more nostalgic about traditional communities, the hierarchical order, stronger family ties and about traditional culture, the state of the economy and left-wing participants less so.
The left wing participants, although more positive about the future were also more concerned of the future dangers in areas such as the economy or climate disasters.
The researchers conclude that this explains why it’s so common for right-wing politicians to appeal to voters with promises to take them back to the good old days, and for left-wing slogans to tell voters to prepare for building a better future.
All makes sense and the Labour Party have already unveiled their slogan for the General Election which is 'Build a better Britain' but the Conservatives are still working on theirs which is probably sensible as their last one was 'You Deserve Better' which was a bit of an own goal considering they had been in power for the past 14 years.
Seems like the left-right ideology of France in 1789 still applies today.

Show The Evidence Or Come Clean Angela

The British Tax System is a bit of a minefield which i why i pay someone to do mine and avoid coming home to find someone from HM Revenue & Customs wheeling my TV out the door to pay a tax bill so i have no idea if Labour's Angela Raynor has been caught red handed not paying her Capital Gains bill when she sold her home and moved in with her husband, but i know a man at the Tax Policy Associates who does.   
Ms Raynor says she took professional advice and said: 'I was not liable for capital gains tax because it was my home and the only one I owned' and the HMRC website states that: 'You may have to pay Capital Gains Tax if you make a profit (‘gain’) when you sell (or ‘dispose of’) property that’s not your home' so simply i asked him if Angela Rayner failed to pay CGT on her house sale and the answer was an unsatisfactory, she may have, it depends.
We know Angela Rayner bought her house for £79,000 in 2007, married in 2010 and moved into her husbands home and sold her property in 20215 for £127,500, making a profit of £48,500 and this is where it gets murky because she chose her husbands address as her main residence, meaning that was where she lived so her other home was a 'second home' and when sold, Capital Gains would have been due on it, an estimated amount of between £3,000 and £1,500 once expenses, improvements and other things are taken into account.
It could be that she spent more on improvements and expenses than being estimated therefore she doesn't owe anything but with Labour seeming to be heading for power, they don't need a scandal over whether the Deputy Prime Minister 'dodged' paying her fair share of tax akin to the Nadhim Zahawi case to explode in their faces before they even set foot in the door.
Angela, who i have a lot of time for, should either publish the advice she got and clear her name or get further advice from a  tax expert and if she made a mistake, hold her hands up, admit to it and make good the tax she owes because most people would understand that our tax system is fraught with difficulty and a mistake was made, what the British people won't accept is a politician gaming the system to avoid paying tax while forcing them to pay it.
Let's not start a Labour Government with a call of they are just as corrupt as the ones we just voted out. 

End Of The World (Again)

The end of the world is coming and it will start in Illinois on Monday according to some of the conspiracy theories running rampant about the coming solar eclipse.
Republican congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene, says she thinks it is a sign from God that America needs to repent its sins, saying: 'God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent.
Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come' which is wonderfully whack-a-doodle but right-wing commentator (it's always right wing commenters), Alex Jones, is flapping his gums about
globalists 'using the solar eclipse as a justification for the nefarious plans they intend to carry out'.
Obviously not wanting to be outdone in the crazy stakes are the religionists who are saying that it is the end of days and Monday will be the end of the world, starting in Carbondale, Illinois but before
you laugh, they have evidence.
Apparently they have mapped the eclipse's path of totality and it either six, seven or eight (depending on who you read) places called Nineveh and Nineveh is mentioned in the Bible so the theorists are
leaping to the conclusion that it really isn't worth many any appointments for Tuesday.
I would go out on a limb and say i think you will be okay to make their dental or hairdressers appointment because, and whisper this quietly, a full eclipse takes place roughly every 18 months or so
and i think we would have noticed if the World ended after a previous one so i think you will be alright.

Wragg's Willy Wrangles

What do we know about the MP William Wragg's apology as some of his fellow MP's throw a protective arm around him and praise his 'courageous' and 'brave' apology?
We know that he met someone on the Grindr dating app and after a few exchange's, to use Wraggs own words, the person 'gained compromising things on me' which is a less crude way of saying he asked for dick pics, and the MP gleefully dropped his pants, grabbed his iPhone and posed.
So far, so Member of Parliament but this is where it now gets interesting because now that they had gained the compromising things, the recipient of the photo's of the Honorable Member's Member, began to blackmail him so what is a disgraced MP to do?
Obviously immediately going to the Police never crossed Wragg's mind so instead he opted to start obliging his blackmailer request for the personal mobile telephone numbers of other MPs, Westminster staff and political journalists.
Scotland Yard confirmed it was in contact with Parliament following reporting of unsolicited messages to members of parliament for which Wragg's weak explanation was that he was scared and he was sorry that his weakness has caused other people hurt.
One MP actually went on TV and rather than demand he vacate his position for dropping his colleagues in it by handing out their private numbers, said: 'I think everybody would accept, including William, that he's made a mistake' and how it was: 'far better that somebody recognises their mistakes rather than tries to hide behind it'.
Rishi Sunak is yet to comment if recognising that he had thrown his colleagues under the bus to try and save his own neck is brave and courageous but Wragg is not expected to lose the party whip over the matter, meaning he can remain in the Conservative Party but if i was one of the colleagues who he had handed over their number, then he had better keep those pictures of his todger as a reminder because by now it would be floating down the Thames.

Putting The Fun Into Funerals

Themed funerals are becoming more of a thing and i attended one's where everyone was asked to wear Christmas jumpers and you walked in behind the coffin to the sounds of Mariah Carey singing she wishes it could be Christmas everyday and as solemn and miserable an occasion it was, it did seem to make it more of a celebration of the persons personality than a staid and conventional funeral.
It wasn't to everybody's tastes, the traditional view amongst some is that funerals are meant to be sombre, austere and joyless but it seems the days of the traditional funeral may be coming to an end, the last one i went to actually called it a FUN-eral and stipulated no black clothing and bring along your funniest antidote for the wake afterwards.
It may not please the church and it was apparently quite a job to get a vicar willing to oversee the proceedings that insisted no tears, no dwelling on loss and it was a gathering to rejoice and have a good laugh at what happened when she was alive but if vicars are not happy donning a Snowman jumper then they are really going to struggle with wearing a Darth Vader mask and doing the sermon in the voice of the Dark Lord of the Sith which was one request revealed in the funeral directors list of the funerals they are being asked to facilitate.
Some of the deceased's wished their funerals to have a sci-fi and fantasy theme, with others asking mourners to show up in suspenders and stilettos for a Rocky Horror-themed ceremony.
There was a request by a naturist for everyone to be naked and there are a growing number of requests for 'Santa' to officiate and to conga out of the ceremony.
Mark Screeton, CEO at SunLife said: 'Over the past 20 years we have seen more and more great examples of how people make their loved ones funerals really personal' and i think it is a great idea because the last funeral was certainly a celebration of my friends personality, i have never laughed so much at a funeral but it is hard not to raise a smile when a coffin made to look like a mobile phone disappears behind a curtain to the sounds of Celine Dion singing 'My Heart Will Go On'.

Top God

Since man first looked around and thought, i wonder how all this got here? they have been thinking up Deities to try and explain it and then convince each other that this one is the 100%, absolutely guaranteed right one and on most occasions in their zeal to prove their God is the most loving and peaceful they have slaughtered and massacred believers of other Gods, in a loving and peaceful way of course.
The people at GodChecker have a list of pretty much every Supreme Being that has tried to persuade it's followers that the Big Bang never happened and the Earth was actually made by them a few thousand years ago so they could now stop believing all the overwhelming mass of scientific evidence about evolution and the creation of the Universe but of the 4000+ Gods, who are the ones at the top of the Holy Hit Parade?
In a Top of the Pop's countdown voice with less Led Zeppelin music and more Angelic choir, here are the Top 10 Gods and at 10 we have the Slavic Chernobog who lists his hobbies as being the Lord of Evil and causing calamity, disaster, bad luck and misfortune wherever he turns.
At 9 is Yoruba Godess Oya and when she isn't controlling the weather, she likes to spend her time overlooking funerals and lung disease and she is joined in the top 10 by another Yoruban, Obtala who is teetotal after the whole getting rip snorting drunk and missing out on creating the World, but he did get to create men and women so you can blame him for Piers Morgan.
He may be the top banana in Norse Mythology but Odin is at number 7 in the list who, when he isn't out riding his eight legged stallion, is kept up to date with Earthly goings on by his two ravens and his son Thor may have an impressive hammer but it isn't as good as the one weidled by the God at number 6, the Chinese God Monkey who has the one used to flatten the bed of the Milky Way and uses to give a headache to any demon stupid enough to get in its way.
Top 5 and at 5 it's the Greek Tithonus who went from being a mere mortal to marrying the Godess Eos before being turned into a Cicada by Zeus so that must have been an exciting couple of weeks for him and Norse God of mayem Loki may have a TV Series but was last seen having serpents venom dripped on him in a cavern where he is tied up with his sons entrails.
Yoruba God Shango is many things, god of thunder and war mainly, but he is also known to play drums on the clouds and does like a spot of dancing so a bit like Keith Moon is many respects and just missing out is The Yoruban Orishas who are not one God but more of a cocktail of 1,700 Gods who got together to run the Earth but had to hand it over to someone else after 16 days as they realised they didn't have a clue what to do with it.
At the top of the God Charts, the Numero Uno, crème de la crème pre-eminent God is the Norse Warrior and head Valkyrie, Freya. She is a love Goddess who loves soft music, flowers and going at it like a rabbit with dwarfs, other Gods, mortals and giants if those rumours are to be believed and if you die on a battlefield you could find out yourself because she gets first pick of any slain warriors to go to her palace for...let's call it recuperation.
Special mention to my personal favourite, Voodoo God Baron Samedi, who is just outside the Top 10 because who doesn't love a rum drinking, cigar smoking skeleton in a top hat and a black tailcoat wearing dark sunglasses.

The Genocide Defender's Point Of View

You can't keep a good woman down and it appears that it applies to awful women also because the twice sacked former Home Secretary Suella Bravermann has just been on TV saying that: 'Israel is absolutely not in breach of international law' and to even suggest it was: 'absurd and an insult to Israel'.
It is a refreshing change from that tired old thinking that always blames murder on the murderer and she seems to be taking the view that whilst humanity has become more tolerant of groups who once seemed to be on the margins of society, it is wrong that we can still be offensive about the innocent citizen murdering community.
Maybe she is hoping her ridiculous denials will put across the genocidal murderers point of view with one view being that bombing schools, hospitals, shelters and peoples homes are clearly the fault of the people who live in the areas being bombed.
Now many of us see pictures of buildings reduced to rubble with a bomb sticking out and hastily conclude the bomb had something to do with it but look carefully and it becomes obvious it was caused by the silly sods being in school, hospital, shelters or their own homes at the time.
Benjamin Netanyahu once spoke out for child murderers civil rights by informing us the Palestinians deliberately arrange the 'telegenically dead' to be filmed, to attract sympathy. So it seems Hamas stroll round bomb sites, placing the prettiest corpses on view for film crews because otherwise we’d all think: 'It's a shame i guess but then she was an ugly two year old'.
In less enlightened times, those responsible for such murder and genocide of a population it has been militarily occupying for over 60 years would be snarled at in the street but thankfully we’re growing more liberal, and if Suella and people like her get her way, no longer will genocidal maniacs feel looked down on for carrying out their basic human right to bomb a school full of children or mow down the very citizen's they have been starving when they desperately turn up at a food aid truck.

British Bake Off For Americans

As we know, we handed the American's a structured English language and the first thing they did was mangle it by taking out the letter U and making up silly words for things which already had perfectly good names so you get all the confusion over Crisps, Chips, Gas, Pants and don't even get me started on Fanny but i didn't know that America now gets The Great British Bake Off and nobody on that side of the Atlantic Ocean really knows what any of the desserts are.
The differences between what British people and Americans mean by pudding and biscuit i was vaguely aware of but a British pudding can also be black, steak and kidney, rice, a crumble, Pease, Figgy, Treacle, sticky toffee or even a Roly Poly so not that straight forward.
A biscuit is even more complicated with it being a Wagon Wheel, Malted Milk, Jammie Dodger, Party Ring, Bourbons, Ginger Nuts, Rich Tea, Digestive, Chocolate Chip, Custard Cream or even a Hobnob and some of which may be half covered in chocolate.
Apparently Americans eat biscuits with gravy so heaven knows what the hell that is unless gravy is another word for custard but even that is weird but it seems that everything is called something different so our cookery books refer to aubergines, mangetouts, courgettes, coriander and sultana's while the
Americans will call them eggplants, snow peas, zucchini, cilantro and golden raisins.
So if you hear Paul Hollywood or Pru Leith refer to toffee then think caramel, a traybake is a bar cookie, granola bar is a flapjack, pancake is a crepe but apparently Americans don't even have trifle, Eton mess or banoffee pie so if you are not accustomed to the UK palate then then you should stay well away from bubble and squeak, clotted cream, squashed fly cake, Lardy Cake, Wet Nelly and Dumplings and a Spotted Dick should be avoided at all times.

Rishi Under Pressure Supplying Israeli Arms

What will it take for Israel’s allies to say no more and stop supplying the weapons to them? Obviously not the ICJ calling it a genocide or the growing list of war crimes, the destruction of Gaza hospitals, Security Council Resolution 27/28, restricting medical and food supplies into Gaza, not the 33,000 dead civilians or the 103 journalists or the previous murder of 200 aide workers but the killing of 3 British workers may have tipped the balance in the UK because the pressure is now ramping up on the Prime Minister to stop supplying Israel with weapons.    
Conservative MPs, the former representative of the UK to the United Nations, 600 lawyers and three former High Court Judges have spoken out to warn the Prime Minister that that the UK is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel.
A 17-page letter from lawyers and members of the Bar explained that 'serious action is needed to avoid UK complicity in grave breaches of international law, including potential violations of the Genocide Convention' and even the former head of MI6 said this morning that the sheer amount of killing by Israel means: 'It is hard not to conclude that insufficient care is being paid to the collateral risks of these operations'.
The UK government has refused to publish its own legal advice on the matter but a leaked recording suggests its own lawyers have advised that Israel has breached international humanitarian law in Gaza which leaves the UK vulnerable to claims of being complicit although Rishi Sunak has only said that
that arms licences were kept under careful review according to regulations and procedures that we’ll always follow which obviously doesn't include Israel deliberately causing a famine, killing tens of thousands of people but does include the profits of UK arms dealers.

Once, Twice, Three Times A War Crime

If a country broke one International Convention then you would expect an outcry, if they broke two in the same day then you would expect the howls to reach fever-point so we wait with bated breath to see what is going to happen to Israel after it broke three on the same day.
First up was the news that Israel had finished its 'operation' at Gaza’s Al Ahifa hospital and even made a claim that the IDF didn’t kill any civilians during it's two-week long attack.
Obviously anything Israel claims should be taken with the whole salt shaker and not just a pinch of it, especially as it claimed it attacked the Al-Shifa hospital previously due to Hamas using it as a military headquarters and showed the 'evidence' as a handful of guns and tunnels, tunnels which Israel had built themselves in the 1980's and analysis of IDF footage by CNN found that Israeli forces may have moved or rearranged weapons within the Hospital before providing international news organizations access to the scene which prompted questions of just how authentic the 'evidence' actually was.
Still got hold of that salt because the claim that no civilians were killed was questioned by the WHO and immediately asked if that was the case, who were the hundreds of bodies, including 'entire families dead and their bodies decomposing in houses around the hospital' were but this was overtaken by the breaking of International Convention two with the bombing of a Consulate in Syria.
Israeli forces attacked the Iranian Consular building in Damascus killing 11 people including seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard which is a violation of the Vienna Convention, and nations stepped up to condemn the attack on a 'diplomatic institutions' but while they were queuing up to condemn the first two, Israel went and broke a third one with the bombing and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers, killing seven.
Obviously mistakes happen but the car containing the aid workers were travelling in a de-conflicted zone in cars branded with the WCK logo in movements coordinated with the IDF and was leaving a well know food warehouse and Western Governments were quick to respond just in case the Israeli's did something else atrocious.
The EU said they condemned the attack despite all the demands to protect civilians and humanitarian workers and after refusing to comment, Israel said they would investigate which if the murder of over 100 people at a an aide convoy last month is anything to go by, means it will be filed under the carpet where it will hopefully be forgotten so over to you United Nations and International Court of Justice, how much more Genocide and how many war crimes can you take before actually doing something to stop it?

Trump Missed A Trick With His Bible

Donald Trump has been a salesman for many things although as at least five bankruptcies attest to, he isn't that great at it so his record stands as Trump beverages (abandoned before making it to market), Trump: The Game (discontinued after poor sales), Trump magazine (folded after 2 years), Trump Mortgage (defaulted), Trump Steaks (pulled after two months for poor sales), Trump’s travel site (folded after 12 months), Trump Communications Company (abandoned before launch), Trump Tower Tampa (collapsed after being sued by buyers), Trump University (shut down and facing lawsuits), Trump Vodka (abandoned after poor sales) and Trumps Cologne (discontinued after poor sales).
The ultimate business failure has to be Trump casinos which should be a licence to print money but ended in £3 billion debt and bankruptcy but everyone loves a trier, especially if he is too damn stupid to realise what a loser he is in the business man stakes so we have recently had Trump gold trainers and now the Trump Bible although it hasn't been confirmed that he has removed the usual 10 commandments to just those he hasn't broken so Moses needn't have lugged both those heavy tablets down the mountain and could have just managed with half a one instead.
Now normally i would say if you was mad enough to pay $60 for Bible when they are just laying around on the Pews of Churches waiting to be slipped into your handbag then it's your money to waste but whilst i don't want in anyway help Trump pay his multi-million pounds worth of court costs, i do think he has missed a trick by hocking the same, tired old stories and he should have gone for a sequel, 'The Holy Bible 2'.
Obviously it would have to feature Jesus because he was a successful character in the first one and main characters God and the Devil could finally make an appearance after just being as yet unseen characters but i wouldn't bother with minor characters such as Joseph, boy that guy was yawn.
The first Bible ends with Jesus returning and cleansing the earth from all evil and restoring his dad's original plan for mankind, with a new heaven and a new earth and that's perfect as he could introduce some other deities for broader appeal across the other religions Globally, i have always liked that big headed Elephant one and the Greek God of getting shit faced drunk Dionysus would be ideal as the John Belushi type Bluto from Animal House type character.
There you go then Donny, a follow up to the Bible i'm sure your followers would lap up, actually on second thoughts, as they are your supporters, better make it a colouring book. You are very welcome.

Not Super But Still A Nova

When Astronomers say something is going to happen soon, they are generally taking about eons such as when they announced that the Star named Betelgeuse was starting to shed its outer layers and will be going Supernova very, very soon by which they meant sometime within the next 100,000 years so when i heard that T Coronae Borealis was going to go kaboom, my first thought was sure, i will make sure to tell my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren to keep an eye out for it.
Turns out this time they meant within the next 6 months because 3,000 light years away T Coronae Borealis is literally on the verge of not only blowing it's top but it's bottom and sides also in an explosion we can see from our Planet without a telescope, just a working pair of eyes.
This Nova isn't going to be Super though, just a common old Nova, and scientists have said that it blows every 80 years and dims for a year before it goes bang and it has been dimming like a maniac for the past twelve months so grab your popcorn and a deckchair and look towards the constellation Corona Borealis
and see the 'new' bright star which should hang around for about a week.
In a Nova, the explosion doesn't destroy the star as it just blows off excess material it has accumulated but a Supernova destroys the star completely which is why when Betelgeuse finally goes full Kaboom, it is going to be very, very impressive and well worth marking on your 102,024 calendar.

Tails We Lose

If you are not one of those people who believe that us human turned up on Earth fully formed after a bit of dirt scraping and nostril blowing then you are probably a follower of evolution, the idea that all species came from a common ancestor and change and gradually change over generations.
Our evolutionary journey means we are now generally shorter, lighter and smaller than our ancestors were 100,000 years ago and our brains have got smaller, have smaller jaws and therefore own less teeth as well as shedding most of our hair which all come with some benefits but a study published in Nature, losing our tails was an evolutionary boo-boo.
We lost our tails around the same time as we began standing upright and walking on two legs but we still have the coccyx as an evolutionary hangover from this tail-bearing ancestry as well as causing back pain which is the largest contributor to disability worldwide according to the Global Burden of Disease study.
Scientists explain that the amount of time it took for humans to move from quadrupedal to bipedalism did not allow our musculoskeletal system to properly adapt and all that extra pressure that is added to the lower back without the adaptation results in pain in the lower back, legs and feet.
It did give a great line to one scientist though who said that: 'If an engineer were given the task to design the human body, he or she would never have done it the way humans have evolved' which is sound advice but millions of years too late so thank heavens our brain developed enough to invent painkillers and ergonomic chairs.

This Easter Sunday Should Be All About Jesus

A strange man came bounding up to me one day a few weeks ago and asked me if i loved Jesus, 'well, he's alright' i replied in a well rehearsed answer, 'he seems a bit injury prone so i think we need another striker' and i walked away feeling very smug because the only Jesus i care about this Easter Sunday is the one with the big number 9 on the back of his Arsenal shirt today.
I am sure that at some point the commentators will make some reference to our Brazilian striker and a carpenter making an unlikely comeback a couple of thousands of years ago but that's just lazy and you won't get anything like that from me, no siree, i am far above puerile nonsense like that in such an important game.
The team news is that Jesus is likely to come on as sub if we are losing, he has bought us back from the dead before and would be just the man we need to resurrect our title hopes and crucify his old Manchester team.
If he can get on the end of a cross then we can finally nail City's chances in the League so come on your Gunners, let's make this Sunday less about scoffing chocolate eggs and more about celebrating Jesus!

Measuring Good Or Bad Governments

 

For many people, the way to judge just how good a Government has been is the basic 'Am i better off' which is a crude, but effective measure of how good, or bad, a Government have been over their time in power but it is a difficult one to measure.
With the ongoing cost of living crisis it would be difficult to find anyone who could honestly say they are better off today which is one of the reasons why Keir Starmer and the Labour Party are measuring up for the Downing Street curtains and we can't use indicators such as Interest Rates, Inflation or GDP because they move around and change from one year to the next.
I could look at things like homelessness, food banks, waiting lists or literacy rates to get an indication of whether things have improved but across the country the most important issues for voters are the Economy, Health, Immigration, Environment, Housing and Crime.     
As the Conservatives completely tanked the economy with Brexit and Liz Truss and lavished austerity on us for the past decade and somehow still managed to make the deficit significantly larger than when they took power than the Economy is not their strongest selling point.
With the NHS sorely underfunded and waiting lists soaring while staff strike for better pay and conditions they probably shouldn't be advertising their successes with Health and they may want to keep off the subject of immigration as 1.2 million migrated to the UK last year, the highest number since records began although they probably don't want you to look at the 52,530 small boat illegal immigrants who landed on our coastline either, especially as Rishi made a pledge to stop them completely a while back.
The Environment could have been a strong card until Rishi took to fighting against low emissions areas, handing out licenses to increase oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, slipped back the date for Net Zero and the date for petrol and diesel cars to be scrapped so once again, not so much green as a dirty oily grey.
Housing could be better, they made a manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new homes annually but have not hit that target once and cutting 20,000 police officers at the start of their reign in power wasn't a smart move as the number of crime offenses in England and Wales in 2010 was 4,150,916 and today stands at 6,739,868 although they will state they have increased police numbers by 20,000 which amazingly is the same number they cut it by previously.
The Worldwide Governance Indicator is a measure of Government effectiveness and is based on 30 think tanks, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations and private firms in each nation and in 2010 the United Kingdom's Government effectiveness was 1.62 and today stands at 1.24 which means that during their 14 years in power, the Conservatives are woefully less effective than when they took over power.
I assume their could be some success they could point at but overall it is obvious why as a Government the Conservative Party are not so much at deaths door as standing in the hallway and commenting on the coat rack.

Raising Something For All The Saviours And Sons Of God Crucified

Today is Good Friday, or to give it it's full name here in the UK, 'Wahoo, a day off work' but i did find out something and that that Jesus supposedly took his last breath at 3pm or as it states in Mark 15: 33:34, 37: 'At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And at three in
the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last'.
If you are reading this before 3pm today then lift a Hot Cross Bun and toast the guy who died so we can have a day off work, go shopping and drink latte's in Costa's (it is what he would have wanted afterall) but if it's after 3pm then bad luck, you missed it but don't despair because religion is chock full of  messiah like 'saviours' who were crucified before ascending to heaven and they all got into the act long before a certain long haired Carpenter.
The Sumerians can lay claim to starting up the whole nailing up the savior thing when Inanna/Ishtar was crucified in 3400 BC and if that was good enough for one iof the first religions then it was good enough for later ones such as Thulis of Egypt who was also crucified on a cross in 1700 BC, as was Krishna of India in 1200 BC and Crite of Chaldea in 1200 BC although in 1170 BC the Phrygian's of modern day Turkey didn't bother with a wooden cross and just nailed him straight onto a tree.
Thammuz of Syria found a cross with his name on it in 1160 BC, the Druids God Hesus/Eros was given a lamb and an elephant when he was crucified in 834 BC but Bali of Orissa had no such animals when he was hung up in 725 BC.
Indra of Tibet died on a cross in 725 BC, Iao of Nepal had a very close up view of a tree trunk in 622 BC and Buddha Sakia of India not only had the bad luck of being pinned to a tree by an arrow in 600 BC, but the tree then split at right angles to form a cross that hung the body.
Persian God Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace and died on a cross in 600 BC whereas Quezalcoatl of Mexico wasn't even given the comfort of a cross and was cruified on a rock in 587 BC unlike Indonesia's Wittoba of the Bilingonese in 552 BC or Greek God Prometheus who was not only crucified in 547 BC but had his liver grown back after being eaten by an Eagle everyday.
Quirinus of Rome never saw 505 BC as his crucifixion but as his life left his body, the whole earth was enveloped in darkness but the Thracian God Zalmoxis only pretended to be crucified in 500 BC and turned up years later in a 'ta-da, im still here' moment.
So in all, don't feel bad if you missed the 3pm Christian Crucifixion because there are so many 'Saviours' and 'sons of God' who have died for our sins/given human's fire/bumped off by enemies that whatever the time is, there is a good chance that one of them died about now anyway.

The Time Of Our Lives

There is a great story about Joey Ramone who suffered from a Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that whenever he walked down some stairs he had to step onto the ground off the last step onto his left foot and if he never, he would return to the top of the stairs and start again and as he lived in a 5th floor apartment, the band were always late for their appearances which must have been a nightmare for the rest of them but it could be that soon we all have the perfect excuse for turning up late somewhere because the Earths rotation is slowing and it is all thanks to Global Warming.
The accelerating melt from Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the World's seas, redistributing mass and causing the Earth to not spin quite as fast as it would otherwise which is actually gloomily impressive that we ruined our Planet so much that we have actually changed how fast the Earth rotates.
To compensate the bods in charge of these things will be subtracting seconds from our clocks to keep everything in line, the first time they have ever had to do such a thing because they usually have to add seconds to compensate for our trip around the Sun not being an exactly timed journey.  
The problem with the negative second is that all the computer systems we use are only programmed for positive seconds and will have to be rewritten to ensure they all keep with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which the standard globally used to regulate clocks and time.
Those of us old enough to remember the Y2K bug and the rewriting of computers programs to compensate for the calendar ticking over to 2000 should be prepared for the dusting off of the prophets of doom predicting planes falling out of the sky and banks resetting all our savings accounts to nil so if us affecting the Earths spin doesn't focus your mind on what we are doing to our planet, maybe a Boeing 747 landing in your kitchen or your Halifax account being wiped clean will.

Foiled By Uzbekistan

This year’s Global Mind Project reveals that Britain is the second-most unhappy country in the entire world which is an outrageous slur, we are easily the most miserable so who beat us? Only bloody Uzbekistan!
So i guess we don't moan quite as much as the Uzbek's about the weather there as well as the trains, strikes, the NHS, the government, repeats on the telly, awful Wi-Fi reception in shops, traffic, parking, supermarket self-service tills, cost of living and the scratchiness of our socks so we have to up our game fellow Brit's because moaning and whinging about everything is our bag, not some damn Central Asian nation nobody could find in an Atlas unless it was coloured in and had a massive HERE sticker pointing at it!
To our credit we did beat Yemen who do actually have something to moan about what with it being in the midst of a war and a humanitarian crisis but the Project did find that there been a global decline in happiness since 2019 and the average global score was 65 which makes our 49 quite a feat we should be proud of.
With the current Conservative Government and Piers Morgan still working, us Brits are all united in being incredibly miserable and nothing makes us happier than a good old moan so swivel on that Uzbekistan, the only reason you beat us is because moaning is what makes us Brit's happy which is why you took our well deserved first place.

Stoicism

Stoicism was a philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Rome and of all the philosophy books, it was the one which has stuck with me and probably the most famous advocate was Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who wrote the book 'Meditations'.
It isn't an easy read, written in flowery prose full of thou's and dost but the overarching philosophy of Stoicism is don't waste your time and energy concerning yourself with things you have no influence over or as Aurelius put it 'Focus on what you can do, and not what you can't. There is nothing you can do about the past or future, you can only influence the present' which is great advice and basically what he took 256 pages to say.
It has certainly helped me in my career where we see and hear some awful things, much worse than the highly diluted versions which make it on to the TV News and newspapers which is sanitised for reasons of decency and to avoid giving the viewers and readers PTSD afterwards but it is hard not to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of daunting news on climate catastrophes, conflicts, humanitarian crises, murders and wars and anyone in all walks of life can suddenly feel inundated and buried in a deluge of unsettling news stories.
For a period dating from 300BC to third-century AD, stoicism was a popular philosophy that helped many in the ancient world deal with plagues, political instability, wars, high infant mortality, famine and exile but it does seem to be enjoying a resurgence in dealing with modern day problems.
Stoicism says that our realm of control consists of our own actions and reactions and we need not bother with things out of our control such as wars, travel delays, the weather, natural disasters, murders, politics, riots, the past, the future, pandemics, aging and dying so as they are all out of our control, are they worth worrying about?
It isn't always easy, strong human emotions are always in play but Aurelius hit the nail right on the head with his wise words to focus on what you can affect, and not what you can't because if nothing else it will make you calmer and make you realise that you shouldn't let events you cannot influence ruin your day.

Deporting Prince Harry

As Donald Trump's re-election campaign swings into gear, the issue of migration has bubbled to the top of the list of things his basket of deplorable's want him to concentrate his mind on and he hasn't disappointed with unhinged rants about withholding benefits from the children of migrants born in the United States, threatening to activate the National Guard to assist in mass deportations and went on a mad speech about migrants 'poisoning the blood of our country' but this week he said something which must have filled every Brit with dread..Prince Harry should be deported.
Now hang on there tubby, if you deport him, he will be coming back here so what's he ever done to you?
It appears that in his book, Spare, the ginger haired Prince admitted to sniffing cocaine and those who apply for U.S. visas must disclose whether they’ve ever used illegal drugs, and he put a big fat 'Nah, not me guv' on his application.
Trump told Britain's most hated wingnut, Nigel Farage, that Harry would not be the beneficiary of any special privileges, and if he lied, the Department of Homeland Security would kick his annoying arse back across the Atlantic.
Yes we know his greatest skill is to whine about his family and how he was forced to be raised in Castle's and Palace's and have access to all the finest things in life but while he is doing it over there, he isn't doing it over here so let's forgive Harry for his juvenile indiscretions and charitably overlook that he 'forgot' to mention his drug use on his visa and allow him to continue his please give us privacy nation tour of American TV Studios and in return we won't blow up that fat Orange Baby balloon next time you are here. Deal? 

Time Up For Tik Tok

ARGHHH!!!!! Chinese owned Tik Tok is destroying the minds of a generation and America's youth are being brainwashed in order to bring about the collapse of Apple Pie, Chewing Gum and fat men in Hawaiain shirts and cowboy hats.
Joe Biden was awake long enough to announce he would ban Tik Tok if a bill passes because it is a security risk but strangely no mention of the risk posed by Facebook which has been accused of interfering in American elections and of being actively involved in the death of 10,000 people in
Myanmar by amplifying hate speech and failing to take down specific posts or close accounts inciting violence against the Rohingya people.
Then you have Twitter (now X) which recently reinstated a slew of extreme right wing accounts but the problem seems to be that Xi Jinping knows you spend all day watching videos of cats falling off kitchen worktops.
Excuse me if i fail to swallow the Tik Tok ban is less about security and more about who is allowed to use your data with the choices being the Chinese Government or making money for some extremely weird right wing billionaires with some highly dubious data privacy practices.
America may be saying no to the Chinese running a social media site but have no problem with the Chinese making their toys, clothes, cars, computers, mobile phones and shoes and sell them to Americans over other social media companies.
Another choice is always opting out of all of them altogether and that way you know where your data goes, nowhere.

COVID Lockdown: 4 Years On

It was four years ago today in 2020 that Boris Johnson announced the UK's first COVID lock-down and ordered people to 'stay at home' which we did but as we later found out, it was party time in Downing Street which became the most fined address in the land, racking up over 100 fixed penalties for breaking the lock-down laws they had themselves imposed on the rest of us.
I was fortunate to be designated a key worker which meant that Journalists were put in the same frame as NHS Workers in the front line which didn't seem right, but it did mean that i could enjoy driving on deserted roads and walking down empty streets so didn't suffer as much as the tens of millions locked up in their homes although it did mean i had to show my credentials several times to some very indignant police officers who wanted to know why i was out and about.
I did see some very haunting images of people dying alone in hospitals and buried with only a handful of close relatives, some of awful the 233,791 COVID Deaths in the UK and 6 million globally which made the impact of Boris Johnson's lying about the Downing Street even more galling.
It is hard to pick a highlight, but it would have to be the public NHS applause on Thursday evenings, the outpouring of gratitude for the people actually putting their own lives on the line to look after others was truly an emotional lump in the throat moment, especially as we later found out that their Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was sorely lacking and acquiring it became an opportunity for friends and families of the politicians to substantially swell their bank accounts.
Infectious Disease experts are saying that it is inevitable that a virus will once again make the jump from animals to humans and cause another pandemic although they cant say if it will be as deadly as the Covid-19 outbreak, the third most lethal outbreak of the last 100 years, but through global warming and deforestation bringing animals and insects closer to people's homes, we are making it increasingly likely it will happen again.
Lessons will need to be learnt and there are plenty of lessons to be learnt, earlier lock-downs and keep them in place until the threat has subsided, the Governments own Medical team called the Governments 'Eat Out To Help Out' scheme the 'Eat Out To Spread the Virus' scheme and advised against it and an inquiry heard Government scientists say that it was 'highly likely' to have increased Covid infections and deaths.
Despite constantly being told the Government were 'following the science', they obviously were not but we were unfortunate that we had probably the worst possible person in Boris Johnson at the helm at the time which should focus the minds of voters of who they pout their cross next to in an election year.
The worst possible outcome is if, or when, another situation occurs and we are told to stay at home for our own safety, after the partying at Downing Street, would the public agree and comply or say why should we because you never last time and it is the lack of trust in Government which could be the first victim next time. 

I Blame The Parents

A study of nine previous studies conducted by the Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania have arrived at the five signs that a person identifies as conservative or rightwing but i could have saved them time because i have my own five which are they struggle to read even the most basic literature, have no concern for their fellow man, they don't like to share, question climate change and believe in the fairness of our Capitalist system.
Unfortunately the Pennsylvanian boffins insisted they carry on with their own which they believe are a belief in hierarchy (basing everything on their importance, quality or value), sense that the universe has purpose (feel there is a deeper reason or purpose behind the Universe), accept the status quo (don't see the world as something that always needs fixing or changing), are resistant to new experiences (some things are just not worth trying or doing at least once) and believe in a just world (people get what they deserve).
Personally i think mine are better but next up is why people become right wing and again my own theory is dropped on their head as a child, not that bright or they got bullied at school but apparently 40% of peoples political beliefs are down to their genes which impact aspects of personality and a large portion is a result of parental upbringing with strict, authoritarian parents.
The final section was societies perception of right wingers, my choice is to laugh at them and feel pity for them and i find patronisingly patting them on the head occasionally and saying reassuring things like, 'That was a good try, soon you will be able to colour inside the lines' or 'The lights are not flickering out, it's you blinking' but apparently even that isn't the right way to treat them.
We shouldn't put it down to poor psychological health, or assume they are unhappy, have low self-esteem or lower life satisfaction or even dismiss them as immoral, they just have a different moral foundations, emphasising respect for authority, purity and loyalty.
Killjoys but they do end on people on the right tend to have worse thinking skills and have a lesser ability to hold information in mind, plan and adapt to changing situations and of course we should treat people with respect and patience if they hold a different viewpoint to us which is true, we should.
Obviously they shouldn't be left alone with sharp objects or given any position of power because that would just be crazy but yes, treat them with respect and patience and blame the parents.

Oi, Where's The Money Gone Rishi?

At the turn of the century, the UK debt stood at £534bn and undertook a huge jump to £1061bn in 2008 which was the year of the Global Economic Crash and when Gordon Brown's Labour Government was replaced by David Cameron's Conservatives in 2010, the National Debt was £1519bn.
One of the first things the newly elected Conservatives did was launch a mighty austerity drive to reduce the National Debt so they initiated severe reductions in public spending and put up our taxes but in 2019, when Boris Johnson gained the keys to Downing Street and declared the age of Austerity over, the UK National debt stood at £1835bn.
Today in 2024 the debt is £2296bn and looking at the Governments own figures, the debt has risen every year since 2000 and is projected to hit £2637bn in 2029 which leads me to this simple question.
As we are currently suffering the highest tax burden since the 1940's and public spending has been so horribly slashed that the Government is finding it a struggle to find where they can cut back even further, what have they done with all our money they saved not spending on public services and how economically
incompetent do you have to be to spend less but still manage to almost double our national debt in 14 years?

Down To 東京, With All Me Family

With Spring threatening to bring some decent weather, thoughts are inevitably turning towards our holidays and where we will be spending a few weeks away from work and there are plenty of websites and bloggers who will be offering helpful advice and According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s rankings, the top 5 visited countries are France (79.4m visitors in 2022), Spain (71.1m), USA (50.9m), Turkey (50.5) and Italy (49.8) so all those millions can't be wrong.
Or can they because according to a long running poll from Readers’ Choice Awards of people who have been to these places, France just about squeaks into the top 20 so where do the travellers suggest we go instead?
10th is Turkey then the mountains and valleys of Switzerland at 9th and Norway is 8th, Portugal 7th and it's neighbour Spain at 6 but it is a long haul flight to New Zealand for the 5th best country to visit.
Ireland is just outside the top three at 4th with Greece in the bronze medal position, Italy silver and the top destination according to people who actually travel is Japan which is a place very firmly on my bucket list.
The United Kingdom is 15th behind Australia at 11th which hurts a little but they have better weather than  us even if all the wildlife down there is designed to kill you but there does seem to be a disconnect between where the masses flock and where the masses who have flocked wishes they had flocked to. 

The New Red And Blue England Flag

Selling at £124.99 for adults and £119.99 for kids, there is much to be offended by when it comes to the new England football shirt but i can't get worked up about the tiny flag of St. George on the collar that is blue and red rather than the traditional red and white.
Obviously there is a section of society who care more about it than the fact that a cheap polyester shirt which costs £10 to make is being flogged at such an extortionate price and at the head of the pearl grabbing outragers is Lee Anderson, the same guy who is such a patriotic Englishman that he once said he
wouldn't go to watch England while they continued to do the anti-racism kneeling thing but he is now a out and proud right winger so can rant with authority about: 'This virtue signalling, namby-pamby, woke nonsense' and then encouragingly added that if there was any more of this then he would 'be on the first flight to Rwanda' which is the only time i have regretted the Government not getting their Rwanda policy through. I guess we could all chip into cover the expense though.
Also outraged at a tiny fabric rectangle is the Prime Minister who said 'Obviously I prefer the original, and my general view is that when it comes to our national flags, we shouldn’t mess with them' calling them a source of pride and 'perfect as they are' but the FA has hit back saying it was part of a tribute to the team that won the World Cup in 1966 before undercutting their own argument by saying the colours are based on the training gear worn by England’s 1966 heroes which stinks of the FA desperately trying to find some tenuous link to justify the tinkering.
Obviously once the action starts at the Euro's in June it will all be forgotten and we will stand as one when England take the field, stand as one and shout 'DON'T LET KANE TAKE THAT PENALTY!!!'

Thank Heaven's Its Almost Over

In 2017, the The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) summoned the UK Government to Geneva to discuss how it did not consider how the minimum standards for rights of people with disabilities was being met by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May's Government and concluded that it was committing 'a human catastrophe for disabled people' and 'grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s human rights'.
This week the Government, now under Rishi Sunak's leadership, was asked back to Switzerland to explain what it had done since 2017 to maintain human rights for chronically ill and disabled people in the UK.
That obviously didn't go as well as they expected as after 90 minutes of evidence to say all was well, the verdict was that the UK government were guilty of numerous violations and were actually causing causing the deaths of disabled people via the benefits system and had actually regressed their rights.
The UN Branch didn't really believe thr evidence from The Deputy Director of the Cabinet Office’s Disability Unit, Alexandra Gowlland, along with representatives from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Department of Health and Social Care that they were providing 'ongoing commitment to support disabled people' by transforming the benefits system and putting adult social care 'at the heart of government reform plans'.
After giving the UK Governments words some consideration, it decided that 'Since 2017, we find evidence of regression in the standards and principles of the CRPD' and described their commitment to support disabled people was not supported by their narrative that 'demonises disabled people including proposals to cut disability benefits, tells disabled people that they are undeserving citizens and includes an 'onerous and complex social benefits system that is the basis for trauma and preventable mental distress'.
Plenty of shifting uncomfortably for the Ministers when the judge pointed to increasing rates of institutionalisation of disabled people due to inadequate government support, unsafe, inaccessible housing, the use of inexperienced and unqualified assessors and a Government that undermines disabled people, devalues them and that paint them as undeserving, skivers defrauding the system which has all resulted in hate crime and ended with a damning 'significant and shameful gap between the CRPD requirements and the lived experience of disabled people in the UK'.
With a weak response of how the UK Government are: 'fully committed to the UNCPRD', the Government representatives scuttled away back to Britain where thankfully the Conservative Government are in the fag end days their abominable and appalling stay in power.