Keeping The Restrictions For Now

With the June 21 'Freedom Day' looming, the Government is coming under pressure from all sides to either open up the country or to leave the restrictions in place as infections number rise alarmingly.
On the one side is businesses, hospitality and travel companies who are looking at things through the eyes of their profits and the viability of their businesses and jobs after 15 months of restrictions.
In the other corner are the medical professionals who are looking at the rapidly increasing infection rate, 6,238 new confirmed coronavirus cases yesterday, and arguing that it would be madness to open the nation further just when a third wave is about to come crashing down on us fueled by the spread of the more transmissible Indian variant, also known as the Delta variant.
The Prime Minister is refusing to decide who to follow, saying that he is ruling nothing out but the whispers seem to be that 'Freedom Day' will be pushed back to 5 July to allow more vaccines to be jabbed into peoples arms so more of the country is protected when the restrictions are lifted.
The Medical profession are saying that we need as much as 80% of the 65 million Britain's to have been immunised with both doses to achieve herd immunity and as present, 60% have received at least one vaccine dose and 40% both doses so still some way to go although the NHS are ramping up an
already impressive campaign.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has paused lockdown easing and in Wales Mark Drakeford has already said he is considering keeping social distancing rules for the rest of this year making it difficult for Boris Johnson to not follow suit.
For me it is a no brainer and the nations Health should come first, Covid 19 is not going away and we will have to earn to live with it at some point and get back to normal but not until we reach that 80% immunised rate so if that means pausing the reopening of the nation until July or August or even beyond, that's how it should be.
Economies bounce back, it may take a while but they do come back finally but if people catch Coronavirus because we reopened too soon as some people were more concerned with the threats to their financial situation, the only bouncing some people will be unnecessarily doing is when their coffin hits the ground and nobody cares about the profits of Ryan Air or Wetherspoons when they are 6ft in the ground.

Special Guest Blogger: Michael Crichton

Have you ever seen a real dinosaur? Of course you haven't, and you never will. Fact! That's because they never existed and science is a lie. I mean, have you actually ever seen a sperm? We've all tried and i was a Harvard trained physician and best-selling writer including a book called State of Fear where i set about dismantling the idea of climate change, claiming it is nonsense and is at best based on shoddy science, and at worst an elaborate scam concocted to line the pockets of Big Science.
There is a famous quote that states given enough time, a thousand monkeys typing at random would produce all of Shakespeare's plays. A hundred monkeys given a few weeks would turn out a sci-fi book by some of my lesser author rivals and one monkey, given 20 minutes and a bottle of extra strong Russian vodka would produce one of the Global Warming papers polluting the world of science.
State of Fear won an award from a petroleum association but that's nothing to do with it, people were being suckered into believing that the global climate was changing and as there was no voice calling out their blatant bullcrap, and as any opposition was weaker than the Russian parliament, i stepped in.
I toured Universities to poo-poo global warming and also advise students to ignore the opinion of the entirety of the medical community that secondhand smoke could hurt them and as a trained physician who chose to make things up for a living, i told them to believe me rather than all the collective physicians who actually physicianed for a living.
It was while i was at University that i wrote a novel under the pseudonym John Lange, Odds On, that was so well received they asked me to write a series of them but once i finished medical school i decided physicianing was not my thing so took up writing full time under my real name instead and my first book, The Andromeda Strain, was a smash hit and i directed a few films but it was the writing of the novel Jurassic Park which really made me.
That gave me the platform to spout off about other things but as i said, i'm very intelligent so i didn't expect the average person who read my books to understand so i tried to keep it simple.
I died of lymphoma but i would like to think that my books act as warnings against the use of science and technology and from where i am sitting the greatest threat is now computers, robotics and the nonsense people read on the internet. What the hell is the internet anyway? I mean, a lot of computers linked up so you can look at pictures of chicks in the buff. What's wrong with a good old fashioned telescope or a shoe mirror?
In truth, we have nothing to fear but fear itself so do yourself a favour and burn all books related to global warming, except for that one by me obviously.

Special Guest Blogger: Victoria Woodhull

One thing you would hope for in a leader is intelligence, you would think twice about handing the reins of your economy over to a person who had L and R printed on their shoes but American kids grow up hearing that anyone can become President and 21 people have done it before i had a go at it and they had all been male and it had been that way ever since a guy who owned 600 people helped start the country by writing 'all Men are created equal'.
During my career i started a newspaper which focused on a number of controversial topics, such as women's suffrage, free love, and Spiritualism and in my spare time i was a suffrage pioneer, became one of the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and even ran my own successful brokerage all during a time period in which women weren't supposed to work and didn't even have the right to vote so with that in mind, i thought those men running the country are all awful, i can do a better job than them so with the many, many dollars made from my stockbrokers job, i threw my hat into the ring for the 1872 election for President of the United States as a third-party candidate for the Equal Rights Party and first ever bra wearing candidate against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant.
My campaign ran on the idea that women didn't need a man to make our decisions for us and women should have the right to vote but my campaign didn't get off to the best start.
The idea to give women the vote was a non-starter and claiming to be a Spiritualist who would be guided in Office by ghost advisors from the World of Spirit including Demosthenes, Napoleon and Josephine wasn't a vote winner and my running mate, Frederick Douglas, was next to useless, at one of my stump speeches he actually urged people to vote for Grant!
The campaign never really got going at all, amazingly my views on equal rights for women earned more public ire and derision than believing that a French General's wife who had been dead for 60 years was deciding economic policy and on election day i never received one vote and despite being a candidate i couldn't even do it not that i could vote anyway as i was in prison on election day for my newspaper publishing an article revealing Congregationalist Clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher's, extramarital affairs which was deemed indecent and obscene.
Giving America the finger for not voting for me, i went to live England and gave up hopes of ever being able to pass laws over America but seeing what the the male moron's they have elected have done to America since, i wouldn't pass water over it now.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Erasmus

We feel like we know the general history of Christianity, Christ was born, he spouted some stuff about free love and messed with the Roman's then bada-boom-bada-bing, his followers rule the world but back at the start things were not that straight forward for us Christians.
I was the Bishop of Formia in Italy at a time when the Roman Empire under Emporer Diocletian was doing its best to stamp us out before we got going and i was captured and imprisoned but an Angel came and freed me saying that i should leave Rome else i end up a God fearing Sheesh-Kebab so i fled to Turkey to continue my preaching and kept my head down for seven years.
I was quite happy converting Turks until another Angel came to see me and said that Diocletian was dead and i should return to Formia to pick up the conversion thing again so off i went but within days i was arrested a second time because the Angel forgot to tell me that the new Emperor, Maximian Hercules was even more of a Christian hater than his predecessor so the Emperor told me to give up the whole Christian thing or face being rolled down a hill in a barrel and i thought that doesn't sound too bad, might actually be quite fun so i took the barrel option which turned out to not be as much fun as i first thought.
They dropped me into a barrel of spikes and rolled it down a hill but the same Angel who came to me in Turkey appeared and healed my wounds so i popped my head up out the barrel and said, 'Sorry, still a Christian' so next they covered me in pitch and set it alight but the Angel kept the flames from burning me and the flames went out and i was getting a bit cocky, protected by Angels and that so i  went 'Hey, still a Christian here' so next they cut open my stomach and wound my intestines around a winch and hoisted them out of my body and i looked at the Angel to help but he just shrugged in a sort of 'on your on with this one' type way and floated off.
I am predictably the patron saint of stomach ailments but also sailors who pray to me to protect them at sea in thunderstorms and the electrical discharges at the mastheads of ships were seen as a sign of my protection and came to be called 'Saint Elmo's Fire' after me and i assume anyone who gets their guts wrapped around a winch is said to be doing an Erasmus.

Special Guest Blogger: William Dampier

The English language almost took off in America (they have a few problems with vowels) and the Australians almost have a basic grasp of it but seem to name things when they are drunk (billabong, dunny, chook) but while Shakespeare may take the plaudits for introducing many new words to the English language, i gave it over 1,000 and he wasn't raiding Spanish settlements and plundering other people's ships in South and Central America at the same time, but i was.
When it came to sacking, burning, robbing and ransoming Spanish towns, i was never really any good at all that stuff as i was busy drawing coastlines and the flora and fauna of the places we raided but while all pirates are depicted as toothless hobos who talk like idiots, my booty was the collection of over 1,000 words i introduced into the English language.
I sailed with several pirates and chopped and changed ships quite a lot because a gang of bloodthirsty salty sea dogs were not so keen to discuss the interesting plant life when there were treasure to plunder so i returned to England and joined the Royal Navy and was handed a commission to explore the Australian coastline which turned out to be quite eventful.
We never made it there as our ship sank but we did pick up a shipwrecked sailor living on a deserted island which Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe upon and while tangling with a storm, one of the crew shot an albatross which became the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I returned from that trip with a slave named Jeoly who i sold to a local inn, telling them he was a Prince but he died of smallpox within 3 months of landing in England but i had said no returns so i wrote a book instead and gave the language avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, posse, tortilla, banana, castaway, sea-breeze, subspecies, intelligence, free trade, maroon, soy sauce and kumquat.  
I was then handed a ship to go fight against the French and Spanish off the coast of Chile but was captured and thrown into prison as a pirate and released to go back to England if i promised not to attack another Spanish ship but i had my fingers crossed and ended up back in the South Pacific watching a Spanish galleon sink with its treasure stowed on our ship.
My share of the loot from that was £1351 14s 10d, which was enough to live out the remaining years of my life in luxury but i died before i received it.
I may not go into the annals of history as the greatest pirate but next time you are wondering what to call the curved yellow fruit thingy or using live fire and smoke to cook food and using grabby sticks to pick up green mushy thingies, not sounding like a complete moron is my legacy.

Special Guest Blogger: Lieutenant Tomas

Most people get their name in history books for being the first to do something but i am in there for being the last and the only game in town in Europe in 1918 was the World War.
For four, long hard years we had been fighting against the enemy because the British wanted to stop Germany building an Empire, that is the British who at the time had an Empire covering a quarter of the globe so in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed with the British, French and the Russians on one side, and us and Austro-Hungary on the other with the idea being that two vast opposing armies would act as the other's deterrent but there was a tiny flaw in the plan, it was utter shite and war ensued.
Finally, the big knobs got round the table and decided that four years of death and madness was enough and declared a cessation of hostilities on November 11 at 11am and on that morning, while the world started to celebrate and word continued to filter down to the troops that the fighting would cease at 11:00am, i was holed up in a house in Germany.
Outside the house was a group of American soldiers just standing around doing what Americans do and a day earlier we would have popped their heads like ripe melons but we realised it was just a few minutes until 11 so we kept our guns on the floor and stayed put until we heard the chimes of the local Church bell indicating that it was 11am and the war was officially over.
Relieved to get through the whole show, i was thinking of how i could now find a job at the new BMW factory, keep goal for Karlsruher FC Südstadt,marry my beautiful Klara when i stepped outside and approached the American soldiers to let them know that, since the war to end all wars was over, me and my men were vacating a house and it would be available for their use.
Unfortunately, no one had informed the Americans of the Armistice and the dumpkopf's went and shot and killed me meaning i had survived everything only to die sixty seconds after the ceasefire and making me the last soldier killed that day and therefore in the Great War.
I did later meet up with the last Frenchman killed, he was shot at 10.58am while carrying a message to the front lines that soup would be served to soldiers shortly after the 11:00 ceasefire but i would like to think that as all this is over, we learned to practice kindness and become more generous towards our fellow man, a frictionless society based on patience and willingness to tolerate each other’s strengths and weaknesses because otherwise it was all for nothing and even us humans are not that insane to have another World War.

Special Guest Blogger: Marlene Dietrich

Being German in America during World War 2 was tough enough and i could really have done without Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels announcing they were huge fans of mine and my sister Elizabeth running a Nazi canteen and cinema in Bergen-Belsen during WWII.
No matter what i did, because of my rejection of Hitler and the Nazis, i was regarded as a traitor in Germany and the Americans were suspicious of me even after i applied for American citizenship, recording a number of anti-Nazi albums and help to sell war bonds, i even sang for the American troops on the front lines and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom but they never really got over me being liked by Hitler.
I was planning to be a violinist but got called up for an audition for The Blue Angel and as i wasn't bothered and didn't think i would get it anyway, i was very nonchalant and approached it as though i was bored and simply going through the motions. As it turned out, luckily for me, that was exactly what the Producer was looking for in the character, and i was hired!
One of the coolest things about being famous is that you get access to other famous people who are just as interesting and as randy as you. You meet up at illuminati picnics planning meetings for secret cities where you'll all move after we have tanked the economy but most importantly, you make odd friendships that normal people generations later would never have expected so between films i had affairs with Ernest Hemingway, Lupe Véle, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., James Stewart, Yul Brynner, Errol Flynn, George Bernard Shaw, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra Gary Cooper and John F Kennedy but considering that JFK was using Hollywood as his own private brothel, who didn't have a fling with him?
Kidney failure killed me in the end and i was buried in Berlin at a beautiful funeral attended by every world leader of the important nations but i did find the line 'She lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier' as a bit confusing unless i am very much misled about what goes on inside the barracks.

Special Guest Blogger: Crown Prince Sado

What makes a person fit to be a king? In some cultures mythology, it's as easy as pulling a sword out of a stone while in others, you have to go through the awkward process of killing your father and marrying your mom but in 18th Century Korea it was just a simple matter of falling out of the right mother, in my case the wife of the King.
I became the Prince Regent when my older brother died but being rich and famous and a divine gift from the heavens affords you a lot of perks, one of these is being able to do whatever the hell you want because being a god-king in the waiting, nobody could discipline me as that was considered a mortal sin so aside from some light tutting, i was untouchable.
I was having a wonderful time with the jam-packed social calendar, the binge-drinking, the ready-made excuses for slacking off and the obsession with clothes, the murdering of a concubine, sleeping with a nun, seducing my younger sister and holding no holds drunken bared orgies with the virgins from the village which sounds great then you get in there and remember there are inexperienced virgins and you're kind of like, no, don't put that there..., anyway, you get my point.
It was the daily emptying of the palace of dead bodies and walking around with their severed heads which proved a step too far for my father but as i said, if you can’t murder the staff and carry around their heads when you are the son of a God, when can you but i knew that no one was allowed to interfere with my divine body so i was expecting some more tutting but my father threw a sword at my feet and demanding my suicide.
I obviously refused and reminded the king that 'You can't touch this' therefore pre-dating MC Hammer by a couple of centuries so he had to go think outside of the box with his next idea of how to get rid of me without touching me, by telling me to get into a damn box.
With hindsight, stepping ito the empty rice box was a bit of an error but i thought an hour inside tops then i will be let out, i will mumble something about learning from my mistakes and apologising before going back to hacking up the kitchen staff but once i was in, my father sat on the box to stop me getting out and then ordered it to be sealed and never opened again.
Seven days of suffering from heat torture and food deprivation, i finally stopped making sounds and was declared dead with the official cause of death from starvation but my fathers half-arsed under-parenting was much easier to put up with than his half-arsed over-parenting but in the end he used his whole arse.

Special Guest Blogger: Khutulun

Once upon a time, in a land called Mongolia, there lived a Princess named Khutulun. She was not your average Princess, mind you. She was the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan who you may have heard of but Khutulan may have been a girl but she was a just as hardcore a fierce and formidable warrior as he was, maybe even more so.
I grew up with 14 brothers and learnt to fight and wrestle and i loved running into battle and shooting my bow as unsuspecting bystanders,  had a knack for riding up to the enemy and basically kidnapping one of them to bring back and generally torture them but this all paled in comparison to my talent for wrestling.
I could wrestle with the best of them and would often take part in the wrestling matches against men and that skill kept me single and more horses than i knew what to do with.
My father had been attempting to find me a suitor for a long time, but i wasn't enthralled by the idea of marriage and wanted to just ride, fight and wrestling rather than partake in any wifely duties in the home so we made a deal that if a man were able to beat me in combat, i would marry him but if they lost, they would have to give me 100 horses. As i ended up with a herd of 10,000 horses and no husband proves just how good at being a badass i was.
The Khan family were split between riding, shooting and fighting like my father wanted and becoming a proper government and other things that bored the average Mongol to tears like my Uncle Kublai's idea and we fought many battles over the ideals.
When my father grew ill from dysentery due to some bad medication he'd been given, he chose me as his successor to be the next Great Khan which didn't go down well with my brothers who declined but instead offered me the role of military leader if i stepped aside, which i did.
I carried on warring and wrestling until i died aged 46, undefeated and leaving behind not only a string of broken hearts but also a lot of horses.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Mary Magdalene De’Pazzi

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be my name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in....oh, hello, you caught me in the middle of my evening prayer. I will finish it later because, to be honest, i don't know the rest of it but i know bread comes into it somewhere but i really should learn the rest of it, particularly as i am a fully canonized Saint now.
I set my sights on becoming a Saint early on but by the 16th Century the Church had more Saints then you could swing a cat at so i had to come up with something really extreme to show my devotion and humility to the cause and all the easy things had gone.
A life of abstinence was a given and some of the most extreme examples, such as St. Lucy who removed her eyes for a man who wanted to marry her saying something to the effect of 'You take these, then, and I'll keep my virginity. Now go away' so i had to really up the grossness, and i think i can safely say that i achieved that.
As a nun i became known for mortifying my body as a punishment for the sins of the flesh so i would whip myself, drip hot wax on my naked body, wore a barbed metal cilice and a home-made crown of thorns and jumping naked into thorn bushes but i felt that i still needed something more so told people that i could heal their leprosy and skin diseases and i did this by licking their open sores and suck any maggots out of their infected wounds with my mouth.
While it is true that my body was covered with putrefying sores and my gums became infected and all my teeth fell out before i took to my bed until i died four years later from any number of diseases i picked up, it proved my devotion to God although it took the Church 68 years to recognise me as a fully fledged Saint.
For a moment there it looked as though all those evening borrowing tweezers to pluck thorns out of my tender areas and picking maggots out of the few teeth that i had left had been all for nothing but i finally made it onto the wall of the Vatican and got handed the patronage of bodily ills and against sexual temptation and to be fair, if you are covered in weeping sores and are as gummy as a newborn and have maggoty breath, the sexual temptation bit really isn't that difficult.