Still Wavering On Assisted Dying

 I was always wavering on the Assisted Dying  which has just passed through the House of Commons, mainly because it was open to exploitation but it has been toughened up to make it harder to access.
The assisted dying debate was last heard in the Commons in 2015, when it was defeated by 330 votes to 118 but this time it passed with 314 votes for and 291 against, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who will have to deliver the bill, voting against.
The amended bill will now allow terminally ill adults with fewer than six months to live to apply for an assisted death, subject to approval by two doctors and a panel featuring a social worker, senior legal figure and psychiatrist and exclude anyone trying to join the program on grounds of Mental Health or Anorexia and will not be started until 2029, giving more time for it to be pored over.
Campaign group Dignity in Dying hailed the result as: 'A landmark moment for choice, compassion and dignity at the end of life' and i get all that but still i am not wholeheartedly behind it although a recent poll showed 70% of people support assisted dying but the opposition has come from the Medical Profession who were challenging it up til the very last moment.  
The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Pathologists and the Royal College of Physicians raised concerns about the bill and it is one of those emotive subjects where i can see both sides but if the professionals are against it, then the 49% for and 51% against debate i have internally over it remains.

Five Things I Learnt About Cruising

1. Dress for where you are going not where you are coming from. Beautiful and Sunny in Southampton when we sailed away, cold and wet in Norway when we arrived and sandles and flimsy tops were not cutting it but at least the Norwegian Economy benefited from a Cruise Ship full of passengers woefully unprepared for a Norwegian Summer.

2. People will ask how many cruises you have been on and if you say this is your first, they will offer 'advice' on everything, and i mean everything including the fine details of every single one of their previous cruises..every...single...one.

3. Another question is where do you work but they are not asking you out of interest and you could actually say anything as they are just hoping you will say it back to them so they can then go into details of their job and try and make it sound exciting as one guy who sold Air Conditioning did until we did the watch tapping 'wow, is that the time' thing and buggered off to another part of the ship.

4. The Americans onboard were very nice and well mannered but nobody beats the Japanese, they were excruciatingly polite and smiley and would always stop for a chat as were the Indians but they are not so keen to engage in smalltalk but as for the British, unfortunately the drunk ones staggering around the pool at midnight and singing loudly were the folks from my own country.   

5. Ducks. Lots and lots of ducks and not the feathered kind, the plastic type which passengers hide all over the ship and when you find one you take a picture and rehide it again.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first cruise, so much that we are looking into doing one for our Anniversary in November but the Sea Gods were good to us this time, those virgins i sacrificed to Neptune before we set off obviously worked so that's a tip, just before you set off prepare an altar and invite a computer programmer around.

Someone's Lying

Seemed weird just watching the news rather than be involved in disseminating it but i am due for a full catch up at work tomorrow but from what i have gleaned so far:

Iran and America were in talks about the Iranian Nuclear Program
The IAEA announced that Iran were not in co-operation with them and been enriching uranium to 60% purity
Israel launched a 'pre-emptive attack' against Iran as they say it was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb although they gave no evidence
The American Director of National Intelligence said there was no evidence Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
Donald Trump said she was wrong and he didn't  care what she said and Iran could have a bomb in weeks.
Israel and Iran have been trading missile strikes with each other ever since.
Israel calls for regime change in Iran.
Donald Trump is mulling over joining Israel in attacking Iranian Nuclear Sites.

All seems very much like the build up to the Gulf War and the infamous 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', where G W Bush and his sidekick Tony Blair said they had to go to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq who were stockpiling Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons and Saddam said he wasn't. Turns out one of them were telling the truth and he didn't have an American or British Accent.
Now the Israeli and Americans are saying Iran are weeks or months away from developing a nuclear weapon, the Iranians, as well as the American Intelligence Service are saying they are not so swap out Britain for Israel and we are exactly where we were in 2003.
Meanwhile, the Israeli genocide in Palestine continues with them continuing to call people to distribution sites and then shooting them dead, 51 on Friday.
Maybe i missed something but a pre-emptive strike and calling for regime change against a Middle Eastern country who are being accused of developing weapons of mass destruction which they deny? Been there, done that, watched the bloody mess and abhorrent death toll that caused. Don't learn do we. 

Special Guest Blogger: The Sundance Kid

My name was Harry Longabaugh but I was called the Sundance Kid because i was a youngster when i first broke the law and i earned that name because i was imprisoned in Sundance, Wyoming which could have been worse, i could have been arrested in Colon, Michigan and that's a nickname nobody wants.
My life was full of gun-slinging, daring robberies and thrilling escapes and the fast living did eventually catch up to me, though not until I was in a whole other Continent.
I was the Kid because i first landed in jail at 19 when I headed up North to work on my cousins farm and made my way to Sundance, Wyoming, where I stole a gun and an horse but my first stint as an outlaw was postponed for 18 months courtesy of a magistrate and Harry Longabaugh may have gone in but it was the Sundance Kid that came out.
I got a job as  a ranch hand and a sideline in rustling cattle and horses across Montana and into Canada but the pay was lousy and i had found a new pal in someone with an equally cool name, Butch Cassidy, and his Wild Bunch and we robbed trains and banks and we became well known all across America but to law enforcement mostly.
We were involved in several thrilling gunfights but it was the one where i shot two officers which put a price on my  head, $30,000, and my face on Wanted Posters with Dead or Alive beneath it and i was very keen on it not being dead so Kid and I decided to lay low for a while.
As we were off the grid the long arm of the federal government set the Pinkerton Detective Agency onto us and those guys were not the sort to politely inform us that we were under arrest and that it would be best for everyone involved if we just came along quietly so we went where their eye's couldn't find us, Argentina.
We purchased a 15,000-acre ranch but old habits die hard and we held up a bank which alerted the Pinkerton's where we were so legged it into Chile and I adopted a new name but the name may have changed but the love of a gun fight never and after shooting an Officer, escaped to Bolivia.  
We did consider giving up the outlaw life but that lasted as long as it took to knock over a courier carrying the payroll for the local Silver Mine but we made the mistake of taking the mule to carry the money which embarrassingly had the branding of the Mine on it which led to our last stand but it wasn't the authorities that killed me, it was my pal Butch who finished me when i was fatally wounded and then took his own life, both of us riding off into the sunset.

Special Guest Blogger: Moses

1350 BC was not a great time for the Israelite's. We had been subjugated by a certain Egyptian Pharaoh to a life of bondage and misery. But along came  a Hebrew chap who also happened to be an adopted Egyptian prince, the Great Prophet of Judaism, the leading light of the Israelite's and God's right-hand man, little old me.
Close encounters with God are very rare and as email was still a few millennia away, Yahweh appeared to me in the form of a burning bush on the side of a mountain and issued a rescue plan with me as chief perpetrator. I ask God the kind of personal questions we’d all like the answers to but Yahweh was not entirely forthcoming but it was worth a try.
When God started giving me detailed religio-political instructions for confronting kings and leading an entire nation out of slavery, fair to say I was not overly enthusiastic.
Sure my Princely Egyptian status got me the ear of the Pharaoh, but when it came to 'Let My People Go', the ear was a little hard of hearing.
It was a tough gig I had been handed so i tried to show them that God was all powerful so had a contest with the best wizards but despite me turning sticks into snakes, pulling rabbits from hats and even performed my sawing a Mummy in half trick, they were not impressed.
I conjured up plagues of boils, locusts, frogs, gnats and other nasties with only the Israelite's remaining unscathed and that got the Pharaohs attention and he booted us out into the desert wilderness.
The Jews complained non-stop about the sand in their sandles and the lack of food and water so I went to consult with Yahweh, who provided two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.
Many of these rules were practical tips for keeping a society healthy under difficult circumstances but to some it just seemed like an excuse for me to boss them around. Which, to be perfectly honest, I did but i didn't have much choice.  
The Ten commandments may be a good starting point, but they're so negative. Thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do that. What about things you shalt? Thou shalt have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, for example.
Anyway, after forty years of wandering the desert, the Israelite's finally reached the Promised Land but i didn’t quite make it.
We arrived at Mount Abarim and as we gazed down upon Canaanite, i looked up the Heavens and asked God if i should lead our people into the City.
Expecting something for my lifetime of devoted service but he said nope, neither dead nor alive shalt thou go into the land and God kissing me upon the mouth (bit weird in all honestly), i dropped dead which seems a tad ungrateful but religion is like that, bears may lay down with lambs and princes mix with paupers but to the Big Guy, you are as inconsequential as a speck of dust, but nah, i'm not bitter.

Special Guest Blogger: Montezuma

In 1502 i became the ninth emperor of the Aztec Empire. Ruling the city of Tenochtitlán, i was revered as an intellectual, warrior, and chief priest who had a nasty habit of sacrificing folks on pretty much an hourly basis.
My coronation was one big party, guests were given mescaline which is a powerful psychedelic drug to make the bash seem even more spectacular but i didn't need any stimulation to master the practice of tearing a victim’s heart out and tossing the body down the pyramid steps.
These ritual killings actually became a full-time job for me and I was an equal opportunities executioner and killed the  young, old, virgins, maidens and when you have a theater made out of 135,000 skulls it might sound a bit excessive but we prayed to over 1500 Gods so had many of them to appease so occasionally i would start a war just so we could capture warriors for sacrifice.
I conquered many area tribes and was despised for my looting, taxation, and murder in the name of religious zeal and my empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific but my reign sadly came to an end with the arrival of Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés in 1519.
We mistakenly thought he was a god as Aztec legend, Quetzalcoatl, who was a bearded white deity showing up to bring on the apocalypse and he arrived the exact year the god-king is supposed to show up, and with a white beard, how was we meant to know it wasn't him?
Cortés convinced many tribes to aid in his effort to oust me, and in fairness most of them hated my guts anyway as I kept killing their warriors, and rolled into Tenochtitlán and stormed my Palace.
I was not a great leader for nothing and to make sure it was a God and not someone coming to murder us all, I sent along a look-alike dressed as me but he never came back so assumed he had either been killed or take to Aztec heaven so still thinking it was indeed Quetzalcoatl, I welcomed him with open arms and offered him gifts of gold, jeweled necklaces, and even the highest honour, flowers from my own garden.
Bad idea as the Spanish took me hostage and threatened to kill me unless i went onto the balcony of the palace and told his angry followers to back off.
The crowds became even more furious at me for appearing meek and stoned with rocks and chucking spears. Injured and no longer in charge, I was held captive until my death a few days later and with me gone, so did the Aztec empire.

How Countries Got Their Names

From Britannia to Anglia to Engla Land, our country has had a few names before settling on England, or the 'land of the Angles' which got me thinking that every country had to be named after something or someone and apparently the majority of country names fall into just four categories:  a tribe name or a person, a feature of the land or a description of the country,
France is named for the Franks, Italy for the Vitali tribe, Switzerland for the Schwyz people, Korea after the Han tribes, America is named after either Richard Ameryk or Amerigo Vespucci, Colombia takes its name from Christopher Columbus, St. Kitt’s after Saint Christopher and St. Lucia the only country to be named after a woman, Saint Lucy.
The Philippines are named after Spain’s King Philip II, Bolivia after the Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar, Mauritius after a 16th-century Netherlands magistrate, Belgium after the Belgae tribe, Hungary’s name comes from the On Ogur tribe.
Montenegro’s means 'black mountain', Iceland is self explanatory,  Costa Rica means 'the rich coast' and named by Christopher Columbus as the indigenous people wore a lot of gold,  Honduras means 'deep water' and Sierra Leone is named 'lion mountains' due to explorers hearing thunder there, Singapore means 'lion city' as hunters wrongly thought there was lion there. Ecuador is a reference to the equator running through the country and Jordan after the River Jordan.
Japan means 'land of the rising sun' as it is direction of the Sun rising and Australia is a shortened version of 'Terra Australis Incognita', or Unknown Southern Land.” Ireland means Land in the West' but some names are a bit more silly such as Tobago is named after a pipe, Brazil and Barbados are named after a type of tree, Malta means honey and Venezuela named so because European explorers thought it looked like Venice and Grenada because sailors thought it looked like Granada in Spain.
Mexico means 'in the navel of the moon' and Nauru is named after the indigenous words for 'I go to the beach'.

Special Guest Blogger: Frida Kahlo

They called me Frida Kahlo as my real name, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, took too long to say but despite suffering from polio as a child and a nasty accident on a bus which collided with a trolley car and broke my spinal column, collar bone, ribs, pelvis, and leg which took over 30 operation to fix, i became Mexico's most famous artist.
I specialised in self portraits mostly because finding myself in constant traction with corsets and broken legs and plaster casts, it was pretty much the only thing I could do was to lie there and paint although people did say my art contained a lot of pain and suffering but i would say ever been in a bus when it flips over and crushes most the bones in your body? Comprende?
I always think you should paint what you know and in my case, that was a lot of X-rays and internal organs and I used a special easel with mirrors so I could see myself and do self-portraits.
I also put  a lot of my culture and political ideas on canvas, I was a proud Communist and painted Karl Marx, Mao, Stalin, Engels and Leon Trotsky who i hobnobbed with when he was in Mexico, he lived me with for several years  and i even got arrested on suspicion for his murder.
Leon was a sweetie but not so much my husband, the muralist Diego Rivera who was an abusive bastardo, anger management issues you may say and while i was barely a cripple and he was over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, it was not a good time let me tell you.
I had an exhibition exhibition in Paris in 1938 and The Louvre bought a picture and I met fellow artists such as Picasso, Kandinksy and Duchamp, and they made me feel a part of their Surrealist group which really helped me become something in the art world although i thought their work was cuckoo but i played along because i was now popular.
I had exhibition in Mexico but i was in such bad shape my doctors told me not to attend but i wasn't going to miss that so i arrived in an ambulance, and they carried me in on a stretcher. I had my giant four-poster bed delivered to the gallery, and they put me right in the middle of the action.
Everyone said how brave i was but lots of painkillers and even more tequila helped  ease the pain of my broken body but the pain stopped when i hit 47. Some say i died from one of my many ailments, some say it was suicide from a drink and drugs overdose but as there was no autopsy, nobody knows for certain although the death certificate said: Pulmonary Embolism' so let's go with that.

Out Of Office

'It was on the good ship Venus, by Christ you should have seen us, the figure head was a....' oh hello, you caught me singing from nautical tunes because the Out of Office has been set and very soon I will be bobbing around in the North Sea on my way to the Fjords of Norway and i am equally nervous and excited by the thought of my very first cruise.
Not knowing what to expect i have been asking around more experienced cruisers and on the whole the experience of other people is a good one, we have booked a cabin in the middle of ship to reduce the feeling of movement on the ship and  i have a good supply of sea sickness tablets (it was pretty unanimous that Stugeron 15 is the best apparently)  and sea sickness bands and on advice of other travellers, a decent supply of Ginger biscuits.
I have been obsessively checking the weather on every App and website possible for the week from 14th June to 21st June since we booked the trip in January and it has varied from windy to calm and everything in between but now that we are getting closer, it is settling on warm and a gentle breeze and i have been assured that a ship which weighs 181,541 Tonnes isn't going to be blown around by a gentle breeze which is reassuring.
For the first time ever i will be completely incommunicado so the work phone is going into the drawer and even though everyone at work has my personal number, as i am not paying the extortionate price for the Ships internet if someone does ring to ask me to 'quickly glance over' something  or ask where did i put the teabags, all they will get is the mechanical voice telling them the number they called is unavailable.
I have told the Rev if he fancies posting anything then he can feel free to but otherwise it's me and hubby, the North Sea and if the Sex Pistrols are any guide, the captain of this lugger who was a dirty bugger.

Very Wary Of Netanyahu's Words In Iranian Attack

As hard as it is, we have to separate the ongoing horrific genocide Israel is committing in Gaza to their action today in Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu is taking the line that their action was a pre-emptive strike to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear missile and nobodies wants Iran to develop one, i would rather nobody had them at all, but i do have a problem with believing anything Netanyahu says on anything especially as the Israeli Prime Minister has been warning that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon for decades.
Israel said it had no choice but to attack Iran, saying that Tehran was approaching 'the point of no return in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon' but we have heard this before, in 1992 Netanyahu said Iran was  'three to five years' away from reaching nuclear weapons capability' and in 1995 he repeated the three to five years claim and in 1996 he addressed the American Congress and warned that Iran acquire nuclear weapons was 'extremely close'.
Then in 2009 where Netanyahu informed a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran was 'one or two years away from developing weapons capability' and in 2012 he said that Iran was just 'a few months away from attaining nuclear capabilities' and in 2105 he arrived at the UN with a cartoon bomb and a marker pen warning that Iran was 'weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons'.
In 2015 a deal called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran and six major world powers (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France, and Germany) where the IAEA kept constant checks on the Iranian Nuclear program which was working until Donald Trump, under pressure from Israel, withdrew the USA from it while calling it the worst deal in history.
If Iran is building a nuclear capability, and there is no proof that they are, it is copying what Israel did back in 60's when they lied that the building in Dimona was a textile factory and refused IAEA inspections, so i would be very, very, VERY wary of what Netanyahu is saying without proof. 

Special Guest Blogger: J. Edgar Hoover

I directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until i bit the dust in 1972 and in those five wiretapping decades, I served under eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon, and became one of the most powerful men in Washington.
I earned a reputation of being a ruthless, lawless strongman, using illegal break-ins and hidden microphones to collect damaging info and blackmailing anyone in my path but I always held back the most seedy bits though, i intended to use them for my own personal use and i kept copious files on the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Frank Sinatra not to mention each and every sitting president, just in case someone had the idea to try and bin me.
My first job at the FBI was as a special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who was responsible for removing undesirable elements after World War I, rounding up and deporting suspected Communists and liberals, of course. We deported 556 innocent people, and Palmer resigned after his methods came to light but i got made the top banana at the FBI and organised it into one of the best law enforcement units the world has ever seen.
President Franklin Roosevelt gave me the directive to investigate both foreign espionage and perform surveillance of Communist and leftwing activists within our great country’s borders and to do that I turned a ragtag organization into a top-notch unit. I started the FBI National Academy, rebuilding from the ground up, stripping lousy officers of their jobs and any political appointees and anyone too fat to be a Special Agent and hired rookies only after extensive tests and interviews.
I was a controversial, hit-or-miss kinda guy who was always one to shoot-first and hide the bodies later although supporting Prohibition helped as it led to the largest development of organized crime in our history.
While harassing black activists and suspected Commies left, right and center, i created the G-men who were the very best became Government Men (or G-Men for the hard of spelling) handpicked, highly educated, and abstained from booze, relations with women, and other amoral behavior.
Eleanor Roosevelt called them the American Gestapo but I never liked her. In fact, she was on my Custodial Detention list, along with other Communists who might be questioned for their liberal activities.  Un-American activities, are un-American regardless of who you are like Charlie Chaplin, JFK, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe or Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King Jr was a dissenter. A left-wing activist who may well have been a Communist with his anti-American 'civil rights' and truth be told, I was a huge racist and i tried many times to bring him down, even mailing tapes of his sexual affairs to King’s wife and encouraging him to commit suicide but I had many secret files and dossiers on innocent people, many of them the Presidents i served under.
Later on evidence of my secretive abuses of power began to surface and I was found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing so I made damned sure my files were shredded the day I died, croaking at age 77, having served as the FBI’s chief for forty-eight years.

Spending Review Is The Easy Part

It's the spending review, where the government set out the budget which the Government Departments will receive over the next three years and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced that Government spending will increase by 2.3% and will go some way to undoing the  'destructive legacy of austerity' which to be fair, was a steaming pile of ideological right wing crap and actually did nothing to cut the deficit apart from hollow out most institutions.
So what can we look forward to?
The Ministry of Defence would have got sweet FA if i was dishing out the money but Reeves saw fit to shove a further £11bn to it so that's lots of shiny new missiles and tanks in service next time we have to 'defend ourselves'.   
The National Health Service will find an extra 3% or £29bn a year in their piggy bank and the Schools budget has risen by £4.6bn a year and a further £1.2bn a year for  training and upskilling young people. Government funding of social and affordable housing has been allocated £39bn over the next 10 years and Energy has been handed £30bn with half of that going to the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station.
Research and development funding will go to a record high of £22bn a year and £2bn to build 'home-grown AI' and £15bn is being set aside for for new rail, tram and bus networks.
£7bn is being invested in new prisons and £2bn is allocatd to the police in England and Wales to fill them up while asylum and border security get an increase of £280m more per year.
On the nations of the UK, the chancellor announced Scotland has been allocated £52bn, Northern Ireland £20bn and Wales £23bn.
All sounds very good but that's the easy part done, now to tell us how she will raise the additional money to pay for it all which should be interesting as she has ruled out increasing income tax.

Special Guest Blogger: Claude Rouget de Lisle

The French National anthem, La Marseillaise, was not written in Marseilles but in Strasbourg which is half German and far from being inspired by the Revolution, the words were written by a Royalist who dedicated it to a German and lifted the music from an Italian.
It was originally called ‘Battle Hymn for the Army of the Rhine’ which is the longest river in Germany and La Marseillaise was commissioned as a marching song to inspire the French army.
I was an amateur composer and artillery officer and at a lavish banquet thrown to mark France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg asked me to write a song that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland.
After drinking a little too much champagne, I returned to my quarters, where i fell asleep at my harpsichord, to wake with both the words and music of La Marseillaise fully formed.
To be honest the music was at least certainly fully formed as the tune had been written eight years earlier by the Italian Giovanni Battista Viotti who worked as court musician to Marie Antoinette.
I dedicated the song to the Bavarian-born Count Nikolaus Graf von Luckner, the commander of the French Army on the Rhine. My reward was to be  arrested shortly afterwards during the Terror where i only escaped being guillotined because i was the revered author of La Marseillaise.
On Bastille Day, 1795, 'The Marseilles Song' was adopted as the Republic’s national anthem although Napoleon always disliked it and had it banned. In fact, it was banned and unbanned several times in my lifetime.
I later published my  memoirs which no one bought and died penniless in 1836 but i live on through the song and thanks goes to Tchaikovsky used it as a theme in his 1812 Overture who used the first bit, not so much the bit about the French coming to tear the throats of your sons and your wives.

Call Me Nobel Prize Committee

The problem with nuclear technology has always been its waste,  the low level less dangerous stuff, remains deadly to humans for thousands of years while the high level waste is hazardous for a million years so it has to be stored somewhere safe away from humans.
There are over 500 operational nuclear stations dotted around the globe and in the UK we store our nuclear waste in secure containers at sites across Britain but successive governments have been desperate to find somewhere to dump the lot and they have tried bribing local councils to take it and dig a big hole and forget about it but unsurprisingly the local population have refused and the Government return to square one and the problem of what to do with all this growing mountain of toxic waste.  
So here we are stuck with tonnes and tonnes of the glowing stuff but nowhere to store it and I thought i had come up with with a great idea, dump it all into a volcano. Problem solved now the only problem is where to hang all the Environmental awards that will be winging  there way to me or so i thought because those spoilsport volcano geophysicists came along and ruined it all.
Apparently the problem is that in order to melt the uranium waste a required heat of  5,189˚F is needed and the hottest volcano we have is only a piddly 2,400˚F and also, if the volcano ever erupted, ash, gas and radioactive fuel rods would be spewed for miles around along with radioactive lava which is apparently not a good thing.
Not to be put off (and because i had ordered a gold frame for my Nobel Certificate), i have been pondering on this thorny issue and the required 5,189˚F limit and the obvious solution is fire it into the 10,000˚F Sun but the very real danger of the rocket exploding and the subsequent raining of nuclear waste over a large area made that a no go so if we cant go up, why not go down.
The Earth's core is 9,392° Fahrenheit, well above the heat we need and the hole would need to be 3,000 miles or 4,828,032 metres deep and we currently have a hole in China which is 7.6 miles or 12,231 metres into the crust.
Ok, we are 2,992.4 miles short and how you would manage a 3,000 mile drill bit and what it would have to be made of to not just melt is a head scratcher but that's for the boffins to work out, i'm just the person with the idea's and the currently empty gold frame.  

Brits Love Einstein, Canada and NATO

I do love a popularity contest and the YouGov website has a broad array of polls measures the popularity and fame of anything and everything, based on millions of responses from the British public and is the go-to place for British media outlets due to the accuracy and large sample size.
I could make a post a day for a year with this information but it was the three popularity contests that caught my eye which were most popular person, most popular country and the most popular International Orgainisation.
As the contributors are British it gives a real insight into what us Brits think and we think that the all time person who we have a positive opinion of is Albert Einstien with 85%.
National Institution that is David Attenborough pushed him hard as did Steven Spielberg, Rowan Atkinson and Robin Williams who made up the top five.
Dame Judi Dench at 6th is the highest placed female, Freddie Mercury at 9th the highest ranked musician and Usain Bolt 54th the highest ranked sports star.
The most popular countries for 81% of Brits is Canada and then a tie in second for Australia and the Netherlands and then it is Italy and New Zealand.
Surprisingly considering it was a poll of Brits, the United Kingdom is the 7th most popular with ourselves which says something about us and i expected Ukraine to be higher than 23rd, USA at 32rd is kind of expected considering what is going on there.    
The most popular International organization is NATO with 58% and close behind is the World Health Organization, United Nations, European Union and UNESCO. 

Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Franklin

Founding Father, inventor, scientist, philosopher, printer, diplomat and author, I had more roles than Tom Hanks which isn't bad for someone who quit school at age ten and then apprenticed at my brother’s print shop before setting out on my own.
I bought the Pennsylvania Gazette and turned it into the most popular rag in the colonies between writing political essays, Almanacks and even had a pop at writing my own alphabet for the shiny new America.
I always thought that a common global language would be great and by dropping almost 25% of it by wiping out the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y but the idea obviously never caught on among the masses but we did later drop the U, which is a vowel, but whatever.
I lived in England on and off for eighteen years and mediated conflicts on behalf of the thirteen colonies, i have one of those blue plaques the Brits like to throw up above the door of my house and even attended George III’s coronation and really thought we could do well as part of the British Empire, before hitting France to gain support for the Revolutionary War and spent nine years, munching baguettes and getting crucial aid to back our bid for independence from the British.
They loved me there, you couldn't walk around Paris without seeing my bald mug on posters and snuffboxes and busts and they even made a Franklin doll.
I helped craft both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and suggested things such as not having  a President but there should be an executive council that does the top job but if there really was gonna be a president, he should be there for one term only but those youngsters refused my ideas, not a single one of ’em!
We did raise a few eyebrows from the slaves when we read out that the line that all men are created and that the thirteen states are no longer under British Rule and have declared themselves an independent nation, as I was pretty hefty by then it was fair to say my girth was equal to three men.
I also invented bifocal glasses, was a pioneer of electro-convulsive shock therapy and an odometer which we strapped to wagon wheels because it was a few centuries too early for cars and the glass harmonica but most people know me for not getting electrocuted by lightning whilst outside flying a kite during an electrical storm.
I said that nothing is inevitable but death and taxes and a respiratory disease meant the first bit came true but i can still be seen  on the $100 bill, or i could be if i could find my damned bifocals.

Special Guest Blogger: Isadora Duncan

And a-one, and a-two, and a one-two-three-four, one-two! Gorgeous, wasn’t it, the breath work and the power from the solar plexus with haunted gestures.
If you don't know me I was a dancer but not just any old dancer, rejecting classic ballet and dancing in my own way but prudish America wasn't ready for me and my style failed to impress so my family and I took the show on the road, well, a  boat actually, and and went abroad to  Europe where they were more appreciative of my style.
I was a smash hit, they were fascinated by my unconventional style and performed in London, Berlin, Salzburg and Vienna and gained such a level of fame for my expressive dance that artists and authors were inspired by my vision, creating sculptures, poetry, and paintings in my likeness.
I did have a fan in the writer George Bernard Shaw who i wrote to saying we should have a child together as with my body and his brains it would be a wonder baby, he brilliantly replied 'What if it had my body and your brains!'
I opened a dancing school in Moscow and in 1921 Russia was brand new. The communal school seemed right up my alley, revolutionary activists and students could attend for free. And of course, I met the poet, Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, there.
I married him, and we started schools in the newly formed Soviet Union but as well as being rigid on their views on dancing in America, it was the time of the Red Scare and my timing kinda sucked because it was then that I chose to return for a tour in the United States, I was labeled a Bolshevik and raved against by the press who called me a traitor.
With hindsight I probably should have stuck with the dancing and not made speeches in favour of the new Soviet Union but i was so livid that my own country was hating on me and when the tour finished, i left and swore i would never return, and I didn't but i didn't have much choice in the matter.
While motoring around France, i stopped in to see my friend Mary Desti who gave me a beautiful, long scarf as a present and when she said i should wear a cape as the car was open topped, i said i had the scarf to keep me warm which i did right up until it got tangled in the spokes of the front wheel and broke my neck.
As i always said, my life was an odd dance, it had it up's and down's but it was never a walk in the park which would have been a lot less painful if that was what i had done that day.

Musk, Trump And Epstein

No surprise that when you get two men with planet sized egos and skin as thin as paper, there was always going to be a falling out but the question was always how long before Musk and Trump end up knocking lumps out of each other and yesterday we go the answer, 137 days.
Musk said Trumps Big Beautiful Bill was a big ugly spending bill, Trump got his teeny, tiny hands on his phone to retort that Elon ELon was 'wearing thin' and  how he had gone crazy after he took away his EV mandate and then Elon dropped what he called ' The Really Big Bomb', that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files and that they have not yet been released because they implicated the President.
The files are a collection of evidence gathered by investigators working on the multiple criminal cases brought against Epstein and his associates and some have been released by there remains a treasure trove yet to come out although Elon gave no evidence for the claim.
The accusation will puts the President’s old relationship with the paedophile under renewed scrutiny, they were good friends for almost two decades and were photographed together at parties and Trumps Mar-a-Lago Estate during the 1990s and early 2000s and documents released as part of the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell showed that Trump flew on Epstein's private jet a number of times in the 1990s.
One damning quote from Trump in a New York magazine was that he'd 'known Jeff for 15 years' and described the financier as a 'terrific guy' who was 'a lot of fun to be with' and he liked 'beautiful women and many of them are on the younger side.'
Elon's 'Really Big Bomb' could be just that as Trump is facing accusations of sex abuse by over 30 women and was found Trump liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll and defaming her by calling her a liar, as well as his infamous line that he 'grabbed women by the pussy' as well as being convicted of paying hush money to a porn star, Musk's words will bring focus on to how Trump, a renown sex pest ,was such good pals with Epstein, a convicted sex offender.

US Backs Israel Again With Veto

As of 4 June 2025,  the United States had used their Veto at the United Nations 87 times, 49 of those to protect Israel and yesterday was number was nudged up to 88 and 50 for Israel because it blocked a Resolution backed by all the other 14 members calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
America, objected to the draft which demanded: 'An immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza to be respected by all parties and the immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups'.
Somehow America deemed a ceasefire and the return of the hostages: 'Unacceptable for what it does say, it is unacceptable for what it does not say, and it is unacceptable for the manner in which it has been advanced' and that is 'undermine U.S.-led efforts to broker a ceasefire'.
Already complicit by politically backing and supplying the arms for Israel's Genocide which has seen over 54,000 people killed in Gaza, this comes on the back of starving Palestinians being killed as they line up for the meagre scraps of food that Israel has reluctantly allowed into the area.
Other nations should move forward on sanctioning Israel and bringing Netanyahu and his cronies to the ICC for War Crimes as well as recognising a Palestinian State but already i have heard the usual pathetic bleating that the United Nations is bias against Israel and it is Anti-Semitism which is drives the agenda against them.
It is true that Israel has been on the end of an amazing number of UN resolutions, almost more than on the rest of the world combined but before you think poor old Israel, what has it done to be on the end of the UN's ire in its short lifetime?
Take your pick from scuppering peace talks at every turn, mopping up occupied Palestinian land with illegal settlements, killing innocent Palestinians, committing war crimes, holding over 9000 Palestinians in its prisons, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses, using Palestinian children as human shields, inciting genocide and building a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice, oppression of its neighbours and turning Gaza into an outdoor prison and killing fields .
If their isn't a UN bias, there certainly should be.

Increased Defence Spending Madness

'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed': D Eisenhower

Russia has always been a bogeyman, China, North Korea and Iran have been recently added because the West need a bogeyman or two to keep us safe from and Russia invading Ukraine was manna from Heaven for people who have an interest in military spending and the media has been full of those these last few days as the Defence Spending Review offer up how we must be spending much more on defence and the Orange Taco's NATO ambassador is trying to talk us up to spending at least 5% of national income.
There was some Defence Minister loon on TV last night saying we will be at war with Russia within 10 years and we need to spend big NOW but he never went on to say what areas should be cut to pay for it.
More money on bombs and less for people who already can't afford to heat their homes or feed their families isn't a very good slogan nor is why give the unemployed and disabled money to feed themselves when we can buy lots of ammunition but that is what they are saying because if your country is standing there cross legged and looking for a pot, spending more in one area means spending less in another.
Spending money on weapons to bring death and destruction somewhere or use the money saved for something helpful to mankind instead, we already spend £44.6 billion on defence which doesn't include the £133 billion spent on maintaining our Nuclear Weapons which is less money for schools, health, police, housing, infrastructure, the elderly and disabled.
If the Government decide they can afford to spend billions more on rockets, nuclear submarines and tanks and spend less on building schools, equipping hospitals, hiring police officers or building houses then they should be deciding which is more important. Spoiler alert: It should never, ever be the war equipment.

Special Guest Blogger: Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us!
I may be one of America's greatest poets but I barely published a word in my own lifetime and hardly ventured out of my own front door but somehow people seem to know a lot about me, including my sex life.
I was a recluse, I would spend days hiding away in our family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts and the only time i did go out was to go to school but my love was poetry, and not the usual stuff but i did it differently, breaking the rules of the usual grammar and rhymes, daring concepts and changing the meter on a whim which was a bit of a problem for most editors and why not very much was published at the time.
I had over 1,700 poems in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and only seven were published but after I died of Kidney Disease, my sister in law, Mabel, edited my poetry to fit a more traditional style although we had an agreement that she would burn them all when i died.
I was definitely the stay-at-home type, for the last twenty years of my life I never left the house and because i would always wore white, i became known as the Nun of Amherst but it was one of my favorite colours. If you must know, it looked rather fetching with my fair complexion and chestnut hair.
I did also suffer from problems with my eyes, an  intolerance to direct sunlight, so it was hard to go outside but i had a regular visitor in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who knew about publishing but he was always trying to 'improve' my poetry by straightening out the punctuation, taking out the half rhymes and adding Capital letters but i  said if you can't print them as i intended, stuff you and refused to let him alter them.
One regular thing was the romantic letters i wrote to my friend, Susan Gilbert,  who married my brother Austin and that did break my heart but if I couldn’t have her, I suppose it’s best to keep her in the family.
I did write about death quite a bit and because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me when but i never heard a Fly buzz, all i heard was: 'Shouldn't that sentence start with a Capital Letter'?

Churchy Types And Abortions

Groucho Marx said that: 'Those are my principles, and if you don't like them…well, I have others' and that comes to mind with Nigel Farage who has been spouting forth on the subject of abortions.
When it was revealed that he has been working with the whack-a-doodle right-wing US-based Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), it was only a matter of time before the massive donation they made to his Party meant he would begin echoing their views and that day has come and the Reform UK leader this week said: 'It is ludicrous we allow abortion up to 24 weeks and that the law is totally out of date' and Parliament should debate rolling out stricter limits on abortion for women.
Now i take no side in the Abortion discussion, it is only between the man and woman directly involved but what i am for is having the choice left on the table so i hate it when religious types, or people speaking on behalf of them, stick their noses in and try and force their view onto people in what is already a difficult decision.  
The ADF that Farage is working with has called for abortion to be banned as well as strip away protections for LGBTQ+ people, in the name of Christianity and that may be successful in America where Religion is taken much more seriously, but not so much in Britain where it plays almost no part in the decision making process.
There was a discussion a few years ago about cutting the legal limit to have an abortion from the current deadline of 24 weeks to 22 weeks but it was dismissed after Health Chiefs warned this could inflict cruelty on vulnerable women and 90% of abortions happen in this country are performed before 10 weeks and only 1% are after 20 weeks and they are due to fatal conditions that mean the child would not survive birth or is a danger to the mother if the pregnancy continued.
If Farage thinks he can stir up ideological feelings in a culture war using abortion then he should note that in a British Attitudes Survey, 90% of Brits supported abortion in some circumstances and over the last decade the UK has seen a string of victories for abortion rights such as decriminalisation in Northern Ireland, the permanent adoption of abortion pills by phone after the pandemic and the introduction of buffer zones around clinics.
It is far too important a decision to have someone else try to intimidate a woman into what they can and can't do with their own bodies because of their own beliefs and we cant allow them to chip away at the right to an abortion, however we feel about it.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Eros

The Greeks have given us many great things such as thick yoghurt, sodomy, and triangles but they also gave me to the World and I was the irresistibly handsome God of Love, Sex and Desire.
I was born of Chaos and helped Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth) get it together and their offspring helped to populate the Universe and fill the pages of mythology and silly blogs like this and my role was to stir the passions and create desire, no matter how many hearts get broken in the process. To help in this mission, I carried a lethal love weapon, a magical bow with two string which nobody could withstand when my Arrows hit you.
Primarily known for the gold arrows from the string which denotes love, my other sting fired lead arrows and led the receiver to indifference so it’s best to get on my good side if you’re feeling lucky.
I went from being the most eligible bachelor in the Universe to a married man when i fell for the lovely mortal Psyche after accidentally pricking myself with one of my own arrows which was a match made not in Heaven, but in the Underworld.
My Mum, Aphrodite, was jealous of the beauty of my mortal girlfriend as people were leaving her altars barren to worship a mere mortal woman instead so she stole her away from me and imposed four difficult tasks on her which she did so as a reward Zeus turned Psyche into an immortal to live amongst the Gods with me.
My love life was complicated but my family life wasn't straight forward,  my mum complained to Themis that I did not grow and remained a perpetual child so Themis advised her to give me a brother and when she gave birth to Anteros, whenever I was near him, I grew into an adult but if Anteros was away, I shrank back to my previous, smaller size.
When the Romans took over the Greek they changed my name to Cupid and turned me from a handsome stallion of a God into a cute and cuddly baby angel which is a bit embarrassing but not as much as the Brits who thought they had stuck a statue of me in Piccadilly Circus only to find out it was actually a statue of my brother  Anteros.
The Sculptor thought I was too frivolous to immortalise so did the statue of goody two shoes Anteros instead who was the punisher of those who scorn love and the advances of others but the Londoners just shrugged and called it Eros anyway so it's not me but everyone thinks it is anyway so I'll take that, spin on that Anteros.

Boris Redux

The saying is that you cant keep a good man down but it seems the awful ones are pretty keen to come back also because Boris Johnson is apparently eyeing up a return to politics when the current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, falls from grace.
Since being removed by his own Party in 2022 after swearing he never attended any of the lock-down breaking parties only to then be hung to dry by his own photographer showing he was not only there but pissing it up with the rest of them, Boris has been knocking out yet more babies (his 9th? 10th?) whilst plotting a miraculous return to politics like a bloated Orpheus muttering about his destiny and the betrayal he suffered at the hands of his Cabinet, who if memory served, refused to work with him.
Johnson’s premiership actually began in triumph if you are of a right wing bent, he had an enormous majority and the opposition Labour Party was in disarray until his self-inflicted scandals, corruption, lies and incompetence saw him squander it all away.
 Kemi, for her part, has been irrelevant and has on a few occasions ended the day rejecting the position she had appeared to be taking at the start of it and as she moves her party so far to the right that many have taken the short step to Nigel Farage's Reform Party, the relaunched UKIP which were once dismissed as Fruitcakes and racists but now are in the same political space as each other.    
As the Conservatives leak electorate, the Party’s best and brightest are manoeuvring into position to replace her and vying for the honour of being knifed by colleagues before the next election but if Boris, who was one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers at the time of his removal, thinks he can come back and be welcomed by the British public means he is even more deluded than that time he asked us to trust him that all the rules had been followed in Downing Street during lock-down.

Capitalism's Crap

The problem with Capitalism is that it falls over time and time again and it is the little guy who gets hit but as the people who run these things rely on Capitalism to maintain their large houses and even bigger bank accounts, it isn't going anywhere soon so keep that envelope for 'Sell Your Gold' handy because nothing is going to change.
The thing came crashing down in 2008 and from that we had the right wing ideology of austerity where everything was slashed in an ideological zeal which they said HAD to introduced to bring it down but which achieved nothing, the debt actually somehow went up from £1.0 bn to £1.5bn when austerity was officially ended in 2019 and achieved nothing except hollowing out all the essential services and here we are in 2025 still struggling with the results of the Conservative Parties response to 2008.
When the Labour Party took over a year ago the National Debt was £2.2 trillion and our taxes were at the highest rate since 1945 and dont get me started on the whole idea of Privatisation, what a bright idea that was.
The whole system is designed to make profit for large companies who don't care how people pay their extortionate prices because the Capitalists who now run the UK's public utilities do not seem to be serving the public very well, taking the customers left, right and centre, as the water, gas and electric suppliers know that whatever they put their prices to, we HAVE to have them.
Nobody can argue that since they went private the rail, utility, mail or water industries have been more efficient, generated investment, lowered costs or saved jobs because what actually happened is large scale redundancies, prices sky-rocketed and the previous British companies are largely in the hands of a small group of international investors who pay themselves billions in dividend payouts and as we found out recently, tax free.
The whole system should be shook up because Capitalism. Crap 'innit. 

My Summer Playlist

First Day of Summer so i thought i would change my playlist in my car to my Summer Playlist, and discovered it is only 15 songs and several of those are by the Beach Boys.
Black Velvet (Allanah Myles), Boys of Summer (Don Henley), Echo Beach (Martha and the Muffins), Under the Boardwalk (Drifters), Summer In the City (Lovin' Spoonful), Summer Breeze (Seals & Croft), Here Comes The Summer (Undertones), Summer Time (Sam Cooke) Summer Means Fun (Bruce & Terry), In The Summertime (Mungo Jerry) and Summer Madness (Kool & The Gang) as well as the 3 or 4 by the Beach Boys and that's it which is pretty poor for a season which most people seem to like the most out of the four.
In contrast, my Christmas playlist is 262 songs long and i would need to start listening to them in September to fit them all in which obviously says a lot about me, mainly that i am not much of a fan of the Season of bitey insects, sunburn, hot car interiors and waking up with the pillow stuck to my face with sweat.
If i had my way Summer would be a fortnight long with it never getting above 25C and a few of those days rainy because i do love a Summer shower and even better if it comes with an explosive electrical storm lighting up the sky, actually i am adding no Thunderstorms before 9pm because a Thunderstorm during the hours of daylight is just a waste of Mother Nature's electricity because it's like being a racist tit on Twitter, nobody notices because of all the other racist tits there so keep the storms until its dark when they are so much more spectacular.
I am sure there are many more songs i could add to my playlist but i assume i look every year and don't find any so looks as though it will be me and my 15 songs Summer on rotation until September and then my car interior will be filled with tunes about Snowmen and Santa.

TACO Bellend

There are many names for Donald Trump, most are based around his weird orange skin colour, his rotund figure or his small hands and that's even before we get into him being a criminal and sex pest or low IQ but the one which seems to have rattled him is TACO.
Until today i wouldn't have known what a TACO was if it landed in front of me, i had to Google it to find out that it's a traditional Mexican dish consisting of a small hand-sized wheat-based tortilla topped with a filling which still doesn't enlighten me much but  it now also stands for 'Trump Always Chickens Out' with regards to his imposing tariffs, and then when the economy tanks..well, chickening out and backing down again.
When asked by a reporter in the White House how he felt about the term TACO that has come into popular use? he replied: 'That is the nastiest question I have been ever asked. So nasty.'
Now that he has reacted, it will be uttered everywhere to  get under the man-toddler's tangerine coloured skin which is hilarious and especially as it is Mexican which Trump always rants about and promised to build a great big wall but never, chickened out of that also i suppose.
So we can now add TACO to the long list of insults for the Satsuma coloured sex pest but as we have a Taco Bell here, can i be the first to suggest TACO Bellend? Nope, seems that everyone else has beaten me to that one. Damn.

Another War Crime By Israel

More than 31 Palestinians were killed and 150 injured by Israeli fire on Sunday as they went to receive food at an aid distribution point set up by an Israeli-backed foundation in Gaza Witnesses said that Israeli soldiers opened fire as they headed toward the aid distribution site in Rafah.
The foundation claimed in a statement that it delivered aid 'without incident' and denied accounts of chaos and gunfire around its sites but the Israel Defense Forces said its initial findings show its forces 'did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the aid centre' and 'the reports are false and fabricated'.
The Red Cross confirming it was treating many wounded and had recovered the bodies of 23 Palestinians and mobile phone footage shows people running and ducking, with gunfire audible in the background.
Doctors at the Nasser hospital reported chaotic scenes, with dozens of bodies being brought in with most injuries were shot in the upper parts of the body, the head, chest, and abdomen.
Australian doctor Ahmed Abu Sweid says there was a “mass casualty event” today and describes the hospital as overwhelmed, with medical supplies running out.
'These are all civilian casualties that were asked to go to an aid centre to collect food, and ended up presenting with gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds' he says. 'Most of them are critical. Some of them arrived dead on arrival'.
The United Nations has called the distribution in Gaza 'a death trap' but as yet, nothing from the continued backers of Israels abhorrent genocide funnily enough.
The end to the regime in Palestine and Israel came not come soon enough, hopefully ending with Netanyahu and his cronies in the dock of the Hague.

Politicians And Big Business Bad For Our Health

The Ed Vasey story only enshrines in my mind that you really shouldn't trust politicians (of any flavour) and big business because both will screw you over given the opportunity.
Conservative Peer Vasey, tabled a proposal to delay the UK’s tobacco and vapes act which would gradually raise the age at which consumers can buy cigarettes and other tobacco products, just after  the cigarette company whose IQOS product is the world-leading heated tobacco brand, paid for his visit and accommodation to its research facility in Switzerland.
Vasey put forward the amendment saying that more research should be done into the potential harms that such products such as heated tobacco can cause relative to cigarettes which is exactly the legal challenge brought by Philip Morris in 2023 against the proposed tobacco and vapes bill but was withdrawn after the previous Government challenged it.
Tobacco companies market heated tobacco products, which warm pre-rolled tobacco sticks to a lower temperature than traditional cigarettes, as a less harmful alternative to smoking because their studies have shown that the devices emit fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes but doctors and researchers have said that most of the research into heated tobacco has been paid for by the industry, and that the long-term health are unknown but inhaling any tobacco is known to be a danger to health.
Cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris once tried to spin a report into smoking in the Czech Republic as having 'positive effects' on the nation’s economy.
There was the revenue from excise and other taxes on cigarettes before smokers met their demise, and the 'health-care cost savings due to early mortality' savings were weighed against the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses, and the lost taxes no longer paid by dead smokers, the Czech Republic actually came out ahead.
When asked if they were seriously basing it on their products were so lethal that people actually dying prematurely was a selling point, they replied that they were not suggesting that there is a benefit to society from the diseases related to smoking.
No, of course they weren't, that would be absurd, they are basically national heroes.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Anne

One of the most important acts of a Royal is to have a child to carry on the Royal lineage and I did try, I had 17 children in total but lost all of them as babies except one, William, who reached the age of 11 before realising that he was a bit odd, living so long so he popped his clogs and that changed the course of the royal family and the end of the Stuart dynasty and allowed the German Hanover dynasty to begin.
I was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland from  1702 and the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1707 when the Kingdoms of Scotland and England merged with one Parliament.
I was married to the Prince of Denmark, George, but even I found him very boring.
He suffered from asthma and when he had an attack he breathed very heavily which wasn't great for him but showed that at least he was still alive. If he didn’t pant loudly he might be carried off and buried by mistake.
As he didn’t have much work to do ruling the country, he spent his time making model ships so when I came to the throne I made him Lord High Admiral.
I was plagued by poor health throughout my life, primarily gout which not only meant I was unable to move much but my sedentary lifestyle meant I also piled on the pounds and had to be carried to my Coronation for which i was actually 51st in the throne for.
After the whole Catholic's are evil thing and shouldnt be trusted with sharp kitchen implements or seats of Royalty at the time, I leapfrogged over 50 Catholics who had stronger claims but were excluded from the line of succession.  
I fell ill at Christmas in 1713 and as i was so feverish and kept losing consciousness, my death was seen as imminent but I wasn't known as the most stubborn woman in Great Britain for nothing and held on for months until a stroke did for me in July 1714 and ushered in the Germans.

Lower Electricity Bills..But Not Until 2030

According to the regulator OfGem, UK Wind farms are becoming cheaper to build with turbines more efficient and generating more electricty causing the Government to reconsider building new nuclear power plants so with a 6% increase in bills, the obvious question has to be why are our electricity bills still going up rather than down?
Seems an easy enough question and the Economist Intelligence Unit may say that: 'The trajectory of cheaper renewable technologies is irreversible' but  it appears that our bills won't come down until 2030 because of what was agreed in 2015.
For some reason the price for wholesale electricity is set in 15 year cycles, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity for the next decade and a half and they base their price on Gas which they use to generate the electricity.
So it is the price of Gas which sets the electricity price  which is agreed for the next 15 years into the future so we are paying up to 2030 for what Gas cost in 2015 (123p in 2015 compared to 83p this year).
OfGem say that as more renewables are connected there will be a time when gas is not setting the wholesale price but that brings us to another reason why electricity bills are not coming down, the infrastructure is old and unable to handle more electricity.
UK Energy say that the UK has an ageing electricity grid, which needs upgrading, partly to accommodate new renewable power sources and there are actually times when wind power is actually paid not to generate, because the grid cannot handle all the additional electricity that it could produce.
The government are now saying that they are reviewing the structure of the electricity market, alongside its push for clean power through renewables and state in the long term, with less  dependence on gas, renewables will be bringing down overall energy bills, and specifically electricity bills, for the UK.
Can't say i understand why anyone would agree to pay 15 years in advance for something when the price could go down (and also up), but it does me wish that we had started the rush to renewables much earlier and also that the Privatisation which Margaret Thatcher promised would lower bill, had been pushed back against much firmer.

Goodbye, Farewell And Amen Hotlips

As MASH ended 42 years ago in 1983, the stars of the show are all way into old age by now and it is sad that it has been announced that Loretta Swift who played Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan has died aged 87.
Every now and then we do hear of the death of another of the stars fro the show which is still shown on TV now and i do still catch the occasional episode and wonder just how many of the actors are still alive and found five from the show and to use their more familiar show names, the cook Igor (78), Hawkeye Pierce (89), Radar O'Reilly (82), BJ Hunnicut (86) and Maxwell Kilinger (90).
Bugged out are Lt. Colonel Henry Blake who died in 1996,  Frank Burns who died in 2000, Capt Flagg died in 2001, Col. Sherman T. Potter    died 2011, Mayor Sidney Freedman died 2013, 'Trapper' John McIntyre died 2015, Father Francis Mulcahy died 2016,  Major Charles Emerson Winchester III died 2018, Nurse Kellye died 2020 and now joined by Margaret Houlihan died 2025.    
I always thought that it was strange how i didn't see hardly any of them in anything other than MASH but maybe they were in American shows and i just didn't catch them over here.

Wary Of Trump Bearing Peace Deals

I'm not a negotiator but if i was to give some advice to someone i would say if the other side agrees to the conditions immediately, you can bet it is because it is weighted in their favour.
Donald Trump's team tried to bounce Ukraine into an agreement which heavilly favoured Putin who said he was all for it but Zelenskyy was too street wise for that and dug his heels in and refused to sign up to it.
The Americans then put forward a peace deal to end the war in Gaza which Israel agreed to immediately but Hamas are at this moment, continuing to mull over and the mood music is that it is very much a reward to Israel for their genocide and Hamas will make a counter-offer to balance things up.
It could be that Donald Trump is genuinely keen to end wars whenever they flare up but Hamas and the Ukrainians do no appear to trust him and with good reason, everything so far has been to bring an end to the wars by making the victims lose more than the perpetrators, less so in the case of Hamas, but certainly the Palestinians will stand to lose out with Israel continuing the genocide and controlling Gaza while snatching away their land, a return to the status quo which has seen Israel eroding the Palestinians over the last 70 years.
One view is that Trump will do anything to secure himself a Nobel Peace Prize, including stitching up the Ukrainians and Palestinians with Ukraine losing as much as a quarter of its land and the Palestinians returning to the position of being murdered and their land stolen which saw them turn to Hamas in the first place.
We can only hope that Trump is authentic in wanting to end these wars and if he can bring a lasting peace then he fully deserves the Noble Prize but he has proved to be nothing more than a  narcissist who has a strange crush on despots and blatantly backs Israel and Russia, i would be very wary of signing up to anything he proposes because it may bring a temporary belief from the slaughter, but without deeper and more thoughtful resolutions, they will flare up again.

Bye Bye Elon

Elon Musk went into the US (non) Government Department called DOGE (Demented Orange Geriatric's Experiment) with most people thinking him an utter douchebag but is leaving it with people KNOWING he is and he kindly let the World know that he is returning to his day job with a Tweet which thanked Donald Trump for: 'The opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending' which he did by reducing it by $140 million which means he just missed by a whisker his promise of slashing it by $2trn by $1.86trn.
Maybe there just wasn't as much Government waste to slash as him and the Orange Oaf although what he did slash was his own and his businesses reputation with the smell of burning Tesla's in the air and investors saying what the hell happened as their shares go so low that you would need a submarine to find them.
Space X had problems this week as once again Musk can't even get his rocket up (ooer missus) but now the sad little nerd is back from his job with the senile Marmalade faced moron and will be attempting to put things right again but that horse may have already bolted but he does have plans to colonise Mars so that could be how he saves his reputation, bugger off to Mars for a few years until everyone forgets who he was.

Special Guest Blogger: Crazy Horse

How Kemo Sabe. The Lakota tribe have custom of changing name as one gains in years. I am named Curly Hair at birth, then Horse Stands in Sight after I become good at catching untamed horses and then when I fight with great bravery at battle with the Arapahos, my father pass his name Crazy Horse on to me.
One of the great Indian warriors, a guy named Hump, took me under his wing and I save Hump’s hide in battle against Gros Ventres when I am sixteen years of age and when we return to camp, Hump pronounce me next great warrior.
Not long after i had first run-in with the white man and the U.S. Army. Lakota tribe members capture abandoned cow, and officer tell us to return beast. Push come to shove, and we kill thirty soldiers. Army return one year later, kill many Lakota women and children.  
I often refrain from killing when possible and instead of striking with weapon, I strike with switch, showing enemy I do not fear them and nor do I wish to make my hatchet bloody by smashing it into their thick skull.
I was chief of the Oglala Sioux tribe and the fiercest warrior the white man ever met but our main problem was never the army or other tribes, but the rapid disappearance of the buffalo from overhunting by new settlers so realising we would soon starve or freeze, I and several thousand braves surrendered to troops and though we agreed to give up our guns, hunts, and horses, the government never lived up to their part of the bargain, and life on the reservation sucked.
Black Buffalo Woman moved in with me but she was already the wife of No Water but Lakota custom allow woman to divorce husband at any time and woman signals divorce one of three ways, she moves in with relatives, move in with new man or toss husband’s belongings outside teepee and the Husband that is dumped expected to accept wife’s decision for good of tribe but No Water was not accepting and tracked me down and shoot me in shoulder. He had to give me three horses as compensation for that.
After many years on the reservation and the chiefs say that we no live happily ever after and white invader building forts and fences to take our land and we agree time to defend rights and land by force and we attack fort of White man.  
White man not like that much but i refuse to sign treaties and got stitched up by an idiot translator who take my words of how we did not ask you white men to come here and how Great Spirit gave us this country as a home and gave us plenty of land but you have come here, take land from us as 'We fight until not a white man is left'  so thinking we were to kill all pale faces so I go to Fort to meet commander and ask to sit down with me and explain the mistake but Guards try to arrest me and they have the nerve to stab great warrior with bayonet.

Special Guest Blogger: Tsar Alexander II of Russia

By 1881 I had been the target of more assassination attempts than probably any other leader. And I was one of the better Russian emperors.
When I took the throne, Russia still had 30 million serfs or peasants who could be bought or sold and were little more than slaves. I gave them their freedom, and still the revolutionaries weren’t content. They wanted me dead.
They shot at me in the royal palace, in the royal train and in the royal carriage, and missed though they did kill a horse that got in the way. They even tried to bomb me in my dining room  but only succeeded in killing soldiers and servants.
Finally the revolutionaries came up with a double-bomb plot that reached the parts other bombers failed to reach.
I had just signed the document that would let my people vote for the Council of the Empire when the commander of the guards sidled over to me and whispered in my ear 'Don’t go to the army parade tomorrow. It’s too dangerous'.
I ignored the advice and set off in my carriage and inspected the troops and drove off to lunch with my cousin. I remember thinking it was all very pleasant as we drove along the street, nobody had tried to kill me for a change and the crowds had come out to cheer me,  one woman waved a handkerchief so enthusiastically, i cheerfully waved back at her.
As i found out later she wasn't waving at me but waving a signal to her Revolutionary friends and a man ran from the crowd and threw a bundle, wrapped in a newspaper, under the horses’ feet where it exploded in a cloud of smoke and snow.
When the snow settled it was stained with the blood of two horses, two guards and an innocent butcher’s boy who’d been watching the procession but most importantly I wasn’t hurt.
I wanted to speak to the injured and as i stepped down from my broken carriage and that’s when the second bomber stepped from the crowd and flung a second bomb and this one did hurt and i died a few hours later.
The irony is that I was a reformer and when my son took over all my reformist pans were scrapped so the revolutionaries got themselves a worse life which was still more than i had as I no longer had any life at all.

Whinging White men

Is there anything more pitiful than an older white man  whinging about how he is apparently terrified of doing the wrong thing at work.
'Millions of men are walking around on eggshells at work too scared to speak freely, while knowing that being male can now be a disaster for your career' according to the YouTube show called 'White Men Can’t Work' which launches this week.
According to the poor dears, female colleague's are out to obliterate the white, privileged and male who are apparently suddenly realising what a disaster it is to be wearing the trousers with a poll showing 41% of men anxious that as a white man they can be sacked over doing or saying the wrong thing while 24% felt their mental health had suffered as a result of diversity.
Poor lambs, white men are the official victims now anxiously glancing over their shoulders, constantly wondering if they’re about to be replaced by someone without testicles and feeling 'very despondent about their sons futures in a female world' which is interesting that the poll did not ask them what they felt about their daughters’ prospects.
A third of white men are convinced they would be passed over for promotion because of their maleness and undoubtedly it is a worry to constantly having to second-guess yourself or worry about getting things right as women and minorities know only too well and have had to for decades in order to fit in to male-dominated offices.
So if white men genuinely don’t think work is working for them, welcome to the club, boys, a club that 50% of the population have been in a lot longer than you.

Nice Sculptures We Got At The Museum

If you ever take a trip to the British Museum, you might notice that a lot of the stuff on display that hasn’t got much to do with Britain but over the years, Britain has managed to acquire a lot of items and although the proper home of the treasures ask for them back, they are still here so what have we got here that should really be there?
Probably the most famous are the Elgin Marbles which from around the 5th Century BC adorned The Parthenon as a tribute to the gods and goddesses of Greece but since 1805 they have been displayed more as a tribute to Lord Elgin nicking them off the Greeks.
The Rosetta Stone made its way from Egypt to Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DG via Napoleon who took a break from trying to take over the World to pilfer them only for them to be pilfered off him in return by the Brits when they defeated him at Waterloo and rather than hand them back to the Egyptians.
The Amaravati Stupa Marbles stood proudly in India as a shrine to Buddha but in 1840 British colonisers dismantled it and took it back to Blighty as a shrine to our light fingers but at least we only took one of them, the poor people of Benin woke up in 1897 to discover a gap where 200 bronze sculptures had been standing since 1200 but now stand in the British Museum but as we are a much kinder and less kleptomaniac nation now, we do occasionally lend them back to the Nigerian Museum with a stern: 'Oi, don't get any ideas, we want them back' note attached.
When the Brits landed in New Zealand in the late 1700s, they saw the preserved Maori Heads which were an important cultural symbol of the indigenous people of New Zealand and so shipped them back to the British Museum for that important cultural symbol of £'s and although Britain has its fair share of people with swollen heads but not so many on Easter Island because in 1868 members of the British Royal Navy took two of the heads back home where they have remained to this day.
The Taino were the first people to inhabit Jamaica and they did create some lovely wooden figures which were so lovely that in 1799 the Brits decided rather be displayed in the original country, they would look much better on a Museum shelf in rainswept England alongside the artwork, vases and sculptures pinched from the Chinese Summer Palace when it was looted by the British in 1860 who then went on to burn the Palace to the ground for good measure. 
In 1896 the Sudanese were not particularly keen to become a British colony so the Brits said fair enough and walked away...sorry, they brutally massacred them and took the armor, weapons, skulls, and even the military banners as trophies and displayed them in the British Museum.
All the above items remain on display at the British Museum but if you haven't visited them yet then no rush because they are not going anywhere.

Special Guest Blogger: Julius Caesar

My lineage may go all the way back to the goddess Venus, but i wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth but what I did have was the drive to rule the world which will get you far especially if you’ve got an army to back you up.
I started as a prosecutor, accusing sleazy governors of corruption and I sponsored bills to pay soldiers and veterans and punish misconduct by governors, I gave Roman citizenship to new groups (ergo more taxes), planned a mega building program of Aqueducts, and adopted a spanking new calendar and if the Senate didn’t go along with my whims, I just rewrote the constitution and with the Triumvirate which included Rome’s richest man (Marcus Crassus) and a brutal general (Pompey) backing me, not many argued.
I never set out to be a leader and was actually going to study oratory at Rhodes but on the way I was captured by Cilician pirates which was a grave mistake on their part. Once I arranged for my ransom to be paid, I had them increase it first from twenty talents to fifty, I gathered some men, went back and overpowered them and had them crucified.
Against the Senate’s orders, I marched on Rome in 49 B.C. and instigated a civil war that lasted four years which as I was later appointed dictator for life and they named a month after me, went pretty well.   
A good way to keep the public on side was to organise all kinds of sporting events, I was in charge of the Roman games in the Circus Maximus in 65 B.C., of course it almost bankrupted us but you fudge some numbers and get back on top.
Vini Vidi Veci, or I came, I saw, I conquered and in my time I left an estimated three million dead on the battlefield, conquered eight hundred cities, three hundred tribes, and sold another million into slavery but my biggest fault was that I was too damned nice. Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Rutus, both former enemies, were forgiven for trying to plot against me and wound up literally stabbing me in the back. Of course, if it hadn’t been them, it would have been one of the other sixty conspirators that were in on my murder.
 I was a military genius and one thing I liked to do was sneak up on the enemy and attack from the rear, I really loved the rear assault and not just in war because this was 45bc and men and women could love whoever the hell they wanted and I did as often as possible and when you have someone like the 18 year old Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra waiting for you and smelling of ass's milk, ..let's just leave that there shall we but it was one of history’s great love affairs.
Bringing her to Rome in 46 B.C. was politically a risky move, my wife Calpurnia wasn't best pleased and the Roma public were not amused and that was when it all started to go wrong and ended with the whole 'Et Tu Brute' thing.  
I can't say I wasn't warned as a soothsayer told me to beware the middle of the month but I shrugged it off and went ahead with the Senate meeting where some my Senators, fed up with my behaviour, decided to do something about me.
They grabbed me and dragged me to the floor but if that never got the point across that they were not best pleased with me, the fact that the follow up action was for forty of them to stick knives into my naked body definitely did.

Chemical Castration

When the words Chemical Castration is uttered, the vision in my head is of a man having his bits dipped into Bleach or Acid, presumably held tightly and with lots of screaming so when Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor, said she was is considering mandatory chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders i did decide to find out exactly what it involved so looked it up on Wikipedia.
No pictures of men being held over a bucket and being dipped whatsover but it did explain that drugs are injected to lower the bodies Testosterone and reduce sex drive and the capacity for sexual arousal which sounds much more humane but isn't really castration so that name seems  a bit misleading.
The Government are now planning a pilot scheme and if successful, a national roll -out with chemical castration mandatory rather than voluntary, for the most serious offenders in what they said was part of a look into Penal reform which sounds more like what i had in my minds eye.
I did know that computer scientist Alan Turing was charged with gross indecency for engaging in homosexual acts and accepted chemical castration as a term of his probation, thus avoiding imprisonment because in the 1950's (and with some religio's today) being gay was considered 'gross' although 60 years after his death, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology for the appalling treatment of Turing and was given a posthumous Royal Pardon because that obviously made everything okay.
Obviously we will need to see how the trials go before it is decided if Chemical Castration will become a thing although most people would prefer it was proper castration of sex offenders using two bricks or a rusty, blunt knife but this is the 2020's and we are more tolerant and considerate so maybe give the knife a wipe with wire wool first.

Women and Girls, Men and Boys

Not sure how i do it because i don't have a system for when i call someone a girl or a woman or a boy or a man, it is something that just happens but apparently it can be a minefield to some people who deem it patronising but a YouGov poll found that most Britons see it as acceptable language, whether to describe a male or female.
A majority of Britons (58%) think it is always or usually acceptable for men to refer to women as 'girls' with the biggest  difference between generations with 70% of people aged 60 and over think it is unacceptable language and 48% among those aged under 24.
Referring to men as 'boys' is fine with 70% of Britons who think it is generally OK to refer to men as boys but something i had seen creep in, and doesn't bother me in the slightest, is a group of women being referred to as 'guys'.
I don't bat an eyelid when the waitress or someone asks 'Do you guys want another drink?' or 'Are you guys all okay?' but apparently some people, women especially, don't seem to like it with 38% not finding it acceptable to be referred to as 'guys'.
Again, seems to be an age thing with  72% of under 29 year olds think it is acceptable to refer to a group of women as 'guys' but this figure falls to just 46% among those aged over 60.
I don't really do the guy's thing, not aware it is a phrase i have ever used, but I do refer to men and boys and women and girls and i don't know what causes me to make the definition between them but as most of us think its okay, i don't have to worry about it thankfully.

Brilliant

Hmmm....not much happening today, well not much unless you are a Arsenal fan because ARSENAL LADIES JUST WON THE EUROPEAN CUP!!!!