We Are All Luddites Now

The Industrial Revolution led to the increase in machinery and the workforce reducing which the workers never took too kindly, especially the weavers who took a page from the Ned Ludd book and smashed up their weaving machines and The Luddites were born and we could be soon seeing a 21st Century version of the Luddites as technology does what the machines did back then, make people unemployed.
John Pugliano, author of 'A Survival Guide to the Age of Automation', has looked over the employment field and come up with a list of jobs in decline due to technology and to be avoided if you want to avoid looking the Job Centre worker in the eye at some point in the near future.
Due to the ease of doing it yourself online, Pugliano points to Travel Agents, Bookkeepers, Financial advisors, Insurance and Mortgage Brokers being in decline but the silver lining there is that Lawyers are also. 
Jobs as Shop assistants, Casino cashiers, Data Entry, door to door salesman and the book binding business should be shunned as they are all on their way out as is IT support, Photo Processor and Telephone switchboard operators which is surprising mostly because i didn't know that was still a thing.    
If you are considering a career as a Disc Jockey, Florist, Postal Worker, Cobbler or Furniture Restorer then think again and even Fast Food Cooks and Newspaper Reporters are on there way out of work.
The once safe career choices no longer viable thanks to artificial intelligence are Detective, Architects and Medical Consultants which all means that a vast majority of us could soon be unemployed so don't feel bad about that time you accidentally spilt coffee over your laptop, it deserved it, the job stealing fecker.

The Real Reason Trump Cancelled Trip To Denmark

Donald Trump asking Denmark if they would sell Greenland to America and being told by the Danish to go boil his head was my highlight of the summer, mostly because it annoyed the tiny handed American President enough for him to stamp his tiny feet and call off a planned visit to the Scandinavian nation.
Utter madness indeed but there are a few theories why the President came up with yet another harebrained scheme in the first place such as being a sign that he has lost the plot but for that to be true he had to have a plot to lose in the first place. 
Other theories are that it was purely a distraction as the American economy is tanking but the one which rings with the most truth is that Barack Obama is also going to Denmark soon and the previous President is far more popular there unlike Mr Trump who was due to face demonstrations and protests.
That the man he so obviously hates would be greeted with adulation just a few weeks after he himself was greeted with signs mocking his hair/weight/skin/racism/intelligence would be too much for such a thin skinned child man, so the rejected Greenland bid handed him the prefect ready made excuse to cancel.
As Obama's trip to Denmark was announced two days before Trump belched out the buying Greenland idea, it does make sense but we can now add Denmark to the growing list of countries where Trump isn't welcome, amusingly that also increasingly includes his own, but i'm sure he can watch his predecessor being greeted with such warmness in Denmark on Fox News next month.

Special Guest Blogger: Muhammad Ali

Calling a black man racist names is frowned upon these days but it wasn't very nice back in my day either but it never stopped white people from doing it which is why i said when i refused to go fight in Vietnam that 'no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger', that abuse came just from my own countrymen.
Such was the racism in America that even blood was kept separate so you had Rednecks with three teeth and their dungarees buttoned up wrong saying things like: 'you can't go mixing up white and black folks blood because you might accidentally make us white folk less intelligent', seriously, that's like don't pee in a swimming pool because it might make it wetter. 
I began boxing after someone stole my bicycle and wanted to find and whup them but despite winning gold at the 1960 Olympics, the racism continued and i joined the Nation of Islam and changed my name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali which annoyed America because real Americans should keep their given name like American heroes such as John Wayne and Kirk Douglas.
As a black Muslim was due to fight for the World Heavyweight Title you can imagine how well that went down in 60's America, like a diet sheet at Donald Trumps house and it only got worse when i whupped Sonny Liston who i said was too ugly to be world champion, and he was, the man was one fugly mofo.
As America had got involved in Vietnam, it had to recruit it's youth to fill the tens of thousands of coffins and American flags that they had ordered but i said i wouldn't go when i was called up saying 'I ain't go no quarrel with them Viet Cong' which cost me my crown but kept me alive unlike the 60,000 young men who made the trip one way. 
I later regained my title by beating George Foreman in Zaire using the tactic of letting my opponent keep hitting me, a technique that Tyson Fury seems to have mastered.
I never did get my bike back which was the whole reason i started but i would like to think that as i held the Heavyweight Belt above my head there was someone in Louisville, Kentucky looking at the rusting old bicycle they stole from my garden and thinking 'Oh Crap'.

Brexit: How Did We Get Here?

You may have noticed that Britain is hurtling towards a no deal deal Brexit and all the problems that will bring to everyone except the same rich politicians pushing for it but how the hell did we get here?
So after taking a deep breath, David Cameron called an in-out referendum and the British voted 52-48 to leave the EU so Dave said he couldn't possibly do that so he resigned and Theresa May took over and she set the leaving date as March 2019 and negotiated a deal with the EU which she put to Parliament three times and each time it was turned down so she resigned and Boris Johnson has
now taken over as Prime Minister and he has set the date of leaving as 31 October 2019 and to limit the chances of Parliament stopping him, he has suspended Parliament for 5 weeks, or prorogued it as it is known, which has caused uproar and he now faces all sorts of scraps and protests next week when Parliament returns. Phew.
I'm sure that there will be all sorts of twists and turns before 31 October and there is talk of a vote of no confidence and Johnson's removal with a Unity Government made up of members for different parties taking over if only they can find someone to coalesce around with Ken Clarke the favourite but certainly not Jeremy Corbyn who even the Labour Party are shaking their heads at.
It's going to be interesting, an absolute disaster without doubt, but interesting.

Busy Summer For News Afterall

Another summer over and where generally August is a poor month for news, this August has seen quite a bit happening with a couple of mass shootings in America and after the obligatory mention of the victims being in their prayers and thoughts, nothing was done to prevent the next one so nothing new there. Bad luck Americans.
Jeffrey Epstein died in suspicious circumstances much to the relief of some big names including our very own Prince Andrew who has been accused of all sorts of shenanigans with under-age girls and the denial that he did anything untoward is lessened by the famous photo of him with his arm around the young girl who has accused him.
He has said that he is appalled by the alleged crimes but not that appalled that he stopped socialising with him after his previous prison time for paedophilia.
In a brilliant Trumpian move, the American President asked Denmark if Greenland was for sale and was told 'Skrid med dig!' which made him pout and stick out his lip and call off a visit to Denmark for a planned visit. Denmark dodged a bullet there.
In Britain Boris Johnson promised that he wasn't going to suspend Parliament and then went ahead and suspended it for 5 weeks anyway to try and ram through the no-deal Brexit he has been fantasising about.
So i'm back and tidying up the mess left on the sofa by 31 long dead guest bloggers and looking forward to more madness in a world which seems to have got a whole lot madder recently.

Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Cromwell

If i did nothing else i inspired Elvis Costello to write that fine song 'Olivers Army' although as it turned out we were not here to stay and it was the Royal's who would have rather been anywhere else but there today.
In the early 17th Century England the two largest factors dominating factors were the Church and the Royals and i hated the Royals as much as i loved God so one of them had to go, and i decided that King Charles was it as he keep putting up taxes so i raised an army and set about booting him out of power.  
As i was an MP it was labelled the Parliamentary Army and i gave it the cool name of The New Model Army and we faced off with the Kings Army, or Cavaliers as they called themselves which was not as cool a name as my army, and while many leaders in conflict claim they had God on their side, i really did, or so i thought.
Charles was caught, put on trial and charged with murder, treason and mischief and we chopped his head off and i modestly declared myself His Highness By the Grace of God and Republic, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.
I set about making England more religious and banned most things including bathing as being too clean is ungodly, all that smelling nice, nothing good could come of it but i had a particular hatred of all Catholics so i said to God that i was considering handing them a good hiding and to not give me a sign if he agreed and i took his silence as a massive yes so laid siege to Ireland and kill over 2,000 of them, especially the Catholic Priests. God's will and all that.
It all fell apart after i died and Charles son, the imaginatively titled Charles II came to the throne and dug up my corpse, hanging it, beheading and putting my head in Westminster Hall, way to hold a grudge, jeesh.
England had never been so holy, or miserable, but i do look at all i achieved, all the struggle, fighting and the problems i had to overcome to get ourselves a Parliament, and we end up with this Boris Johnson twat.

Special Guest Blogger: John Lennon

It is often said that all the best musicians do their best work while high and i was off my tits for most of the 60s and 70s so how great must i have been! Bigger than Jesus as it turns out but me saying that didn't go down particularly well, even if we were, which we definitely was, even through our transition from cool dudes to drugged up hippies singing about submarines.
Drugs do affect you memory and my memories are hazy at best but i do remember George and Paul and there was some other guy who used to hang around us but i think he was just the bloke who went out and got our coffee.
Strangely enough my introduction to hard drugs came from a dentist who gave me LSD at a party and i started seeing and hearing weird things like angels and devils and we went to a club and Bob Dylan was playing and i said to Paul 'Wow, this guy has a great voice' so it shows just how off my face i must have been.   
Drugs though do affect your memory but i do remember George and Paul and some other guy who used to hang around us, he used to go and get our coffee i think.
There was always competition between Paul and I over who was the real song writing talent but my 'Woman' and 'Imagine' against his 'Mull of Kintyre' and 'The Frog Chorus' soon stopped that ridiculousness.
Fate decreed that Cliff Richard would live but i would be shot dead therefore removing any question about if there is a God but i don't recall much about that day, all those drugs i guess, some guy came up and asked for my autograph and then came back hours later and shot me which is a bit ungrateful, my handwriting wasn't that bad.
When i got to heaven i thought Jesus may be a bit miffed about my little comment about us being bigger than him but he turned out to be a big fan, even asking for my autograph but i said 'I’m not falling for that one again...'
I did a lot in my shortened life and left some great music and even made nerdy round glasses fashionable, at least until JK Rowling came along now everybody just calls then Harry Potter glasses.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Paine

If you ever go to England and mention the name Thomas Paine, they will stare blankly at you as if you had asked them to explain the LBW rule in cricket but i should be one of the most famous Englishmen ever as i was directly involved in all of the big events in the 18th Century and created some of the best fitting corsets ever designed. 
Of course i ballsed all of it up, i started out trying being a pirate with someone called Captain Death but never really had the heart for it so set up a corset making factory instead which naturally went into bankruptcy and then my wife left me.   
I met Benjamin Franklin, as you do, who told me i should go to America and as i got there the anti-English climate was reaching it's head and crates of tea were bobbing around Boston Harbour due to the tax increases and if there are three things Americans don't like it's small portions, spelling properly and paying taxes.
While all this was going on i wrote 'Common Sense' which set out why the Americans should overthrow the English King, a book that inspired George Washington to take up against the English and he even came around my house to chat about it and made me the Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
All was going well until i let slip that i supported the abolition of slavery which didn't go down well as most of the founding fathers including old wooden teeth himself kept slaves but it was when i suggested increasing taxes to pay for the military that the brown stuff hit the fan and i was sacked and thrown into a debtors prison. 
On my release i came back to England and wrote 'The Rights of Man' which supported the ongoing French Revolution and called for a revolution in England against the monarchy, oops, and i fled to France before i could be captured and executed and was made part of the National Assembly Parliament which had replaced King Louis XVI but i voted against executing the king which the assembly charged me with being a royalist and threw me in jail and sentenced me to death.
While in my cell i wrote 'The Age of Reason' which slagged off the Bible and wrote some nasty letters to George Washington saying what an awful job he was doing and he should take more baths because he stank but by a bit of luck the Assembly was overthrown by Napoleons mob and i was released.
I helped Napoleon with some inspirational speeches for his army but turned him down when he offered me a position in his military which Napoleon didn't take particularly well and fearing he would execute me, i planned my escape but i was unable to run back to England (way to hold a grudge England) so i wrote to Thomas Jefferson who said i could go to America which i did.
The subject matter of my 'Age of Reason' book had reached the ears of the American religious nutters who attacked me and i ended up sofa surfing and holding a steak to my black eyes until i died and even that went wrong as my bones which were meant to be sent back to England for burial were 'misplaced' and never arrived.
So in a name dropping competition i could mention the founding fathers and the first American President, the French Revolutionary Assembly, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson and author of some of the best known books in history but to my own countrymen, i'm as familiar as a bar of soap to George Washington.

G7 Economic Madness

The G7 are the seven largest IMF-described advanced economies in the world, and describes its primary aim as  'acting as a forum to coordinate economic and financial policies free of any specific protocol'.
As the seven economic powerhouses of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and USA are making decisions for the rest of us then you would be imagining that they are all successful and rich nations although you would be imagining wrong because between them they have racked up a national debt of £36 trillion: 

Canada - £570 billion (Can$ 1113.18)
France - £2.04 trillion (€2.23)
Germany - £4.37 trillion (€4.77)
Italy - £1.96 trillion (€2.1 trillion)
Japan - £8.52 trillion (¥1102.67 trillion)
United Kingdom - £2 trillion
United States - £17.92 trillion ($21.97 trillion)

Now you are probably imagining if the seven are so awful at running their own economies, what the bloody hell are they doing making the economic decisions and you would have a fair point, three of the seven (Italy, Japan, USA) are in the top 10 countries with the worst national debt-to-GDP ratios so it's a bit like asking Donald Trump to run a diet club.  
Experts are saying that another recession is coming but bear in mind that these are the same experts who missed the 2008 one so spectacularly which caused so much damage and continues to reverberate today so a whole salt field should be taken with those forecasts.
You wouldn't take spiritual advice from an atheist or go to an arsonist for information on fire prevention but we allow our economies to be dictated by people with combined debts of £36 trillion.

Special Guest Blogger: Mother Teresa

Einstein means smart, Rockerfella means rich but Mother Teresa means kind and caring so blessings be upon you for i am here to spread the good word about, well me actually because as i may have came across as meek and kind, i was a bitch really.
My parents said to me Teresa, whatever you do when you grow up be the best at it so when i got into the nunnery game, i aimed for the top and my picture on the wall of the Vatican.
That meant doing charity work with people who nobody wanted to touch, literally, people like lepers and the Prince of Edinburgh but it also meant a lifetime of celibacy which was fine all the time i was surrounded by men with body parts falling off but those nights in Calcutta can get very, very lonely.
Being so sexually frustrated all the time probably gave me the edge so when faced with a dying person looking for me to give them assurance that they would be going to heaven or to ease their suffering with medicine, i would just say softly 'You are sick and must suffer like Christ did on the cross' although whether Christ underwent heart surgery like i did when i was sick i am unsure, he probably did, guess i was lucky i wasn't the one caring for me.  
So now i'm on the wall so i can lay it all out now and be myself, to be the holiest you need to beat the holiest and i out-holied everyone.
Princess Diana tried to muscle in to my racket but there was no way on God's green earth that she was celibate and although i wasn't much of a fan, i didn't want to see her dying in a Paris tunnel, i specifically said in an alleyway.
Of course i died only five days after her but my work here was done and i was on the wall and now i have been canonised so i am officially Saint Mother Teresa and all it took was a lifetime of watching people die of painful diseases while not helping them very much. Sweet.