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.