Government Spending Ideological Choices

I am as guilty as anyone for often saying that the NHS is free because it isn't, we pay 20%, 40% or 45% income tax for it but often forgotten is the 12% National Insurance Contributions which everyone who earns above £6,240 a year pays.
Out of your pay packet each month then comes 32% but the whispers are that the Government are about to announce a hike in National Insurance contributions to pay for 'Social Care'.
When the Government made the pledge in their manifesto not to raise tax, everyone took that to mean Income tax but they have the dubious wiggle room of they are not raising taxes, they are raising National Insurance which to everyone is the same thing but obviously not to a Prime Minister who is not on speaking terms with the truth at the best of times.
The result will be more of our money heading into the Government coffers anyway regardless of what name it is taken under but the Government assume that as it is 'for the NHS', people won't complain too much and obviously more money for the NHS is a great cause, but i do have a problem with being taxed for a particular cause.
Once this has been bought in 'for the NHS', what about all the other essential services that have had their budgets slashed such as housing, education and police, they could all quite rightly make an excellent case for a 1% rise in contributions also.
Each year the Government get an amount to spend on what they see fit and any cuts and shortages of funding for our services are purely an ideological choice of the Government, they decide how much the NHS, police and other departments receive from the tax intake, the way it is divided out is down to the ruling Government and the Conservative Government have made the choice to reduce the amount the NHS, police or schools receive and that will continue regardless.
My personal bugbear is the £44.6 billion they spend on defence which doesn't include the £133 billion spent on maintaining our Nuclear Weapons and to to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower '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'.
If the Government decide they can't afford to spend billions on rockets, nuclear submarines and tanks and also spend the money building schools, equipping hospitals, hiring police officers or building houses then they should be deciding which is more important. Spoiler alert: It should never be the war equipment.

A Last Blast Of Summer

Climate Change means that Mother Nature takes what is already in the offing and ramps it up so you get stronger hurricanes, heavier rain and hotter summers although the last one doesn't seem to apply in Great Britain because apart from a few days in June, our Summer was not a scorcher.
Not that i am complaining that i wasn't waking up with my pillow stuck to my face or getting third degree burns from the car seats, i am quite happy with a summer where i am not getting sunburn within 30 seconds of stepping outside the front door although i did get the annual insect bites so still spent weeks smelling of Calamine Lotion.
So off we head now into the -ber months with a stop off at Halloween and Bonfire Night before we dive headlong into Christmas but don't go putting away those shorts and strappy summer tops just yet because the MET Office has announced that Summer isn't done with us entirely as next week is going to see a 'sharp hot spell' and are advising us to 'wear a hat and some sun cream' with temperatures hitting 30C in the South of England which is where i am currently sat in my cardigan.
The next week is obviously going to be the last chance to blast out Mungo Jerry, sit outside batting away stingy things and deciding whether to wear socks with the sandals as the season of white legs and men in shorts that are far too tight comes slamming to an end for the Northern Hemisphere and it's looking up the date the Christmas Channels start on TV (I looked already and they are Great! Movies Christmas on 24 September, Hallmark Christmas October 22 and Christmas24, October 24).

Cosmos Loving My Hair Apparently

Every summer there seems to be a song that follows me around everywhere and this year it was Chic's 'Good Times' that i was hearing on a loop in Supermarkets, on the radio, on TV and just about anywhere that my ears went.
Not a bad song to have trailing me through what should be the hot months although this year the British Summer was a few warmish days in June and the rest of it slightly warmer than normal rain but whenever the same song keeps popping up in unexpected places i take it that the Universe is trying to tell me something but what is the message to me from the guitar of Niles Rogers?
The problem i have with the song is that the tune is the same as the one for 'Rapper's Delight' so when it kicks off with that distinctive bass my mind goes ' I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip hip hop-a you don't stop the rock, it to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat' (yep, i googled that) rather than the Good Times lyrics which i am delving into to see what the Cosmos is desperate to alert me to.
Quite worrying that the chorus is 'Good times, these are the good times' because that means it's saying this is as good as this is going to get which looking at what is happening in the news is a bit rubbish but there is a bit about girls in pony tails and i have been growing my hair so have actually had it in a pony tail but then it goes onto roller skates which i haven't owned since about 1987 and when i did i spent more time on the floor than actually skating so i am ignoring the Universe wants me to buy some roller skates.
The words 'Good Times' appears 32 times in the song so applying Occams Razor to the problem, there is a good chance that the Cosmos is saying that the bad times are over and it is all rainbows and lollipops from here on in or it is really loving the pony tail.
Yep, i'm going to go with the Universe really likes my hair, thanks Galaxy.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek/Roman God Apollo

Anyone who is familiar with the Greek or Roman Gods knows that our family tree gets very complicated very quickly and when the Romans changed the names of the Greek Gods it got even more-so but luckily i was one of the few whose name stayed the same although my responsibility changed with the crossover.
In the original Greek Mythology i was the God of Light, and it was my job to pull the Sun across the sky in my golden chariot every day but when i wasn't creating the day (the original sun god was the titan Helios, but everyone forgot about him), i was also the God of poetry, truth, art, oracles, medicine, knowledge and plague but two of my best inventions were archery and music.
As the son of Zeus and the Titan Leto, my twin sister, Artemis, and i were Olympians and both expert archers and as immortals, we would zing each other with arrows when we annoyed each other and were both pretty quick tempered, after the god Hermes stole some of my cows, i was about to make a colander of his head when in desperation he created the lyre for me, the very first stringed instrument from which all other stringed musical instruments came from.
At the many drinking parties held on Olympus, i would perform some bodacious lyre solos but as always, there are others who think they can play better so i was forever being challenged to contests though, being a God, i could never stand to lose as King Midas found out when i gave him donkey ears for not choosing me as the winner of a contest against Pan (him of the stupid pipes fame) and also the satyr Marsyas who i flayed alive for being a bit too good and nobody likes a show-off.
Probably the Sun dragging thing was the most important of my jobs but although i have dropped out of favour i have had a big hand in the music business, you might recognise a few tunes i dashed out over the last few millennia but there are a few i regrettably have to put my hand up to also.
That 'Big Yellow Taxi' song is one, Jodi may have been a woman brainier than Kurt Cobain’s living room wall but she refused to remove the line 'they paved paradise to put up a parking lot’ despite me telling her that would actually alleviate the awful traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise where i lived and i didn't really think through The Weather Girls 'Its Raining Men' song where they sounded happy about the prospect of male forms thudding down onto the pavement filling the streets with twitching, shattered human corpses and soaking everyone with blood, brain matter and piss.
Something i absolutely will not take the blame for is boys bands, seriously, who buys that crap? Everyone knows pop music should be sung by hot little teenage girls in tight clothes foaming each other at a car wash in the video, tell me that's not entertainment at it's finest!
I may have fallen out of favour and been replaced by one God who does everything us Romans and Greeks Gods did but millennia after i blinked out it was my name on the side of the mission to the Moon, because you're goddamn right it was, it's the least you puny humans could do for me giving you the goddamned Sun everyday and persuading Oasis to call it a day. You are welcome.

Special Guest Blogger: Rudolf Diesel

I have been dead over 100 years but looking around today your world is bullcrap. Your governments don't work, there are rocks everywhere and almost nothing hovers, dammit things were supposed to be hovering by now but the worst thing of all is that Socialism is not the default Government everywhere.
I did my bit, i invented the Diesel engine with the idea that my invention would foster social equality and peace between all nations as i explained when i premiered it at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris with one of the main benefits of my engine being that it would enable small-time craftsmen and artisans to compete with the new industry behemoths that were beginning to eek them out of business.
The last thing that i had in mind was that my engine should power tanks and other war contraptions and pollute the atmosphere, i designed it to run on peanut oil and other biofuels but the Capitalists got hold of it and ruined it and the planet, nice one morons.
There was many pluses to Socialism, you get a cool song sung to the tune of a Christmas Carol and Socialism comes in any colour you want as long as it's red and Albert Einstein thought it was a good idea and if the brainiest man who has ever lived decides that Socialism is the way to go you know you have backed the right horse, or German physicist. What's not to like?
So if your child struggles to read even the most basic literature, have no concern for their fellow man, they don't like to share and appear to be intellectually backwards while refusing to recycle, question climate change or have a view that supports the fairness of the Capitalist system then don't bother trying to persuade them of the value of Socialism, they are already lost.
My death has been the subject of much conjecture and i am not sure myself what happened but the question of suicide has been raised but i was aboard a German Ship heading to a meeting with the Royal British Navy to discuss powering the British ships with my diesel engine after refusing to grant the German forces the rights to use my invention for their ships so what do you think?   
I am spinning in my grave whenever someones thinks that i would kill myself and spinning significantly more efficiently than Karl Benz and the rest of the internal combustion engine guys.

And So Ends The War On Terror

There are many words to describe what has happened in Afghanistan, fiasco, failure, disaster, defeat, screw-up, cock-up, pig's ear, balls-up but one which it definitely isn't is 'success' and as the last act was blowing up and killing a car full of civilians, that pretty much sums up the West's efforts over the past two decades.
A couple of trillion dollars later, America had decided they have had enough war over there and left Afghanistan in exactly the same state that they found it, only with fuller cemeteries from the 50,000 dead civilians courtesy of Uncle Sam, John Bull and the rest of the deluded Western Governments who arrogantly decided what the Afghan's needed was some good old Western style democracy and they would bring it at the end of a drone missile.  
What Biden stayed awake long enough to say was that the airlift of 120,000 people out of the mess they made was a success as much as you can call the desperate scramble to get the hell out of there under fire with your foe showing off the captured military equipment left behind is a success, i guess any straws will be grasped at if their is enough desperation.
The Afghan's have now been left not only in the less than safe hands of the Taliban, but an even more extreme religious terror group in ISIS but the US has said that it will support those still in Afghanistan with what it is calling an 'over the horizon' counter-terrorism effort, tackling any threats in Afghanistan from afar with drones and as the family in the car found out as well as countless Wedding Parties which suddenly turned into funerals, that's not a great option.
I'm sure that there will be films made in the future which will feature American's going to Afghanistan and killing their citizens but describing how killing them made the American soldiers feel sad.
So the Afghan war is over and just like with Iraq and Libya, we have run off after leaving behind the civilians to face terrorists in their shattered nation and the final act of the 'War on terror' has been brought to a screeching halt.
For those twenty years, millions of troops and bombs, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, the trashing of humanitarian values, rendition, torture, entrapment, extra judicial killings and jihadist recruitment figures up, we don't have much to show for it.
Will the West learn from it's many, many mistakes over the last 20 years since George W Bush and Tony Blair launched their democracy crusade? I’m not holding my breath.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Symeon the Stylite

It takes some doing to be deemed too fanatic a Christian that your own religion shun you but that's exactly what happened to me and how i ended up perched high up on pillars for the last 37 years of my life.
As a child in Syria, i heard some quotes attributed to Jesus and i liked the sound of them so as soon as i turned 16 i arrived on the doorstep of a local monastery and demanded they admit me which they did but i had a real hate-on for the pussified way they lived their lives and i considered their fasting and praying a bit too extravagant so i took too fasting for days on end and standing as long as i possibly could until i passed out and as that made them look bad they told me to leave the monastery.
Out on my own i decided to shun the luxuries of the early 5th century life by shutting myself in a little ramshackle hut for three years but the hut proved too expansive and extravagant for me so i packed up my loincloth and moved to a crevice in a rock in the desert.
Soon pilgrims arrived to bring me goat’s milk and flat bread and seeking my counsel and to say prayers while emptying my waste bucket which cut heavily into my own praying time so i clambered up onto a stone pillar with a little platform on top and sat there instead.
Still they came and asked me questions so i kept clambering onto higher and higher pillars until i found one 50ft high with a 3m platform but the pilgrims still came, and this time with ladders.
The goats milk and bread was gratefully received but despite me saying just leave the milk and sod off, they wanted to know things and occasionally a woman would appear on the top rung and women...ergh..cooties, so i let it known no women are allowed near my rock erection.
To keep from falling, i tied a rope around my leg, which gradually sank into my flesh and the sore got worse but i refused to remove the rope and refused to come down for treatment when i got an ulcer which became infected and led to my death but i inspired many other worshipers to follow my example and, for a while, seeing Christians living a top a pillar was a common sight in Syria although some forgot to bring a bucket and you really wouldn't want to be standing under those pillars when nature called and a bare backside appeared over the edge of the platform, from 50ft up the solids land with a very wet splat.

US Still Pointing Covid Finger At China

I have always found it a bit of a coincidence that the Coronavirus virus began in Wuhan which just happended to be home of a scientific laboratory which was performing scientific experiments on Coronavirus's but i am willing to go with the science and the science is saying the outbreak was exposure to an infected animal.
Despite probes by China and the World Health Organisation, US President Joe Biden gave the US intelligence community 90 days to figure out the source of the coronavirus which has infected over 215 million and killed more than 4.4 million people around the globe.
The report was made public on Friday and it came to the decision that it didn't know how it started although it is right to question just how scientifically credible a report from a nation currently desperate for a scapegoat for its own awful response and involved in a battle for global supremacy would be as it is right to question how credible China's report is considering it is under the spotlight as the source of the outbreak.
What the US report did confirm was that the virus was not 'a biological weapon', was not 'genetically engineered' and the China’s officials 'did not have foreknowledge of the virus'.
China has repeatedly dismissed the lab leak theory as an attempt to politicise the pandemic and are now demanding a similar probe to investigate American laboratories for the origins of the virus based on several studies that found traces of Covid-19 in the US before Wuhan.
The earlier WHO probe described the likelihood of the coronavirus escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan as 'extremely unlikely' but for some they never accepted that and have long made their own mind up that China is to blame as we saw under Donald Trump who first floated the idea and named it the 'China Virus' while doing very little to protect his own citizens from it, hence the lofty position at the top of the deaths league.
I expect the game of trying to pin the blame on China will continue as it is convenient for America to do so as a distraction but it seems to be on it's own as the rest of the World seem to be happy to follow the findings from the WHO, the only independent and medically experienced author, that the origins were from an infected animal.

A Covid Autumn

As the summer ends and the autumn approaches, it all sounds very familiar as cases of COVID-19 are rising and we all know what happened last winter when cases, hospitalisations and deaths rose through the roof and cases are at an even higher level than they were at this time last year so we are setting out into Autumn and Winter with the bar raised much higher so is it time to panic?   
Scientists are saying that the vaccination program is doing precisely as they hoped but cases and deaths will certainly get even higher but the crucial difference is the relationship between cases and deaths which are very different from last year.
Public Health England put the daily total of new infections at 38,281 but the majority of these newly infected are under 25 and as they are in the best position to withstand the virus, the deaths are not coming at the same rate, approx 100 per day, as when the new infections were in the over 50s and deaths was running at over 500 a day and that is due to vaccinations.
The potential fly in the ointment is the length of time the protection lasts, scientists are stating a decline after 3 months and boosters will be required but as we shift in the more cooler Autumn months, the numbers are going to be scary.

Special Guest Blogger: St Moses the Black

I assume that in the 1700 years since i was alive black people are now treated the same as whites but back in my day blacks were treated as sub human and a lower order than the whites so not unexpectedly we went off the rails sometimes and i was considered a bad apple on account of all the murdering and robbing i did but i started off as slave of a government official in Egypt who dismissed me for theft and suspected murder of another slave.
I say suspected because there was no such thing as reasonable doubt or burden of proof then and anyone could be found guilty of any number of crimes and the victim could not speak up prove my innocence mostly due to him being dead from having my knife in his neck at the time, but still.
In order to make ends meet i became the leader of a gang of bandits and we would roam the Nile Valley, spreading terror and violence and as i was a large, imposing figure, not many people resisted when i waved my knife in their face and demanded their money.
On one occasion a man caught me making my getaway which annoyed me immensely so i ran back but seeing a huge black man waving a knife screaming that he was going to kill him gave him a clue of what was about to happen and he had the sense to make a run for it to fetch the authorities so instead i killed four of his sheep and ran off to escape.
Obviously, a big black man ugly enough to make an onion cry covered in sheep's blood wasn't going to be that hard to find so i hid out amongst some monks in a colony in the desert and i was impressed that they fed me and accepted me so i asked to join them, became a Christian, was baptized and joined the monastic community.
One time the Abbot ordered the brothers to fast but some brothers came to me saying they were hungry so i prepared a meal for them but some neighboring monks reported to the Abbot that i was breaking the fast and when he arrived he took one look at me and backed out babbling that he just realised that the divine commandment of hospitality out-ruled his orders to fast. Damn straight it did.
Some years later a group of thieves wanted to rob the monastery where we were living but i caught them off guard and singlehandedly beat them all to a pulp and dragged their bloodied bodies to the chief monk to ask what to do because after-all it wasn’t a monkly thing to kill them and the head of the monastery said to forgive them and send them away, which surprised the robbers so much that they all apologised, converted and became monks too.
My death at 75 was a noble act, another group of bandits attacked the monastery and the brothers wanted to defend themselves, but i told them to retreat rather than take up weapons and i would stay behind to fight off the warriors so i stood there alone and prayed for Gods arse kicking help.
Now God might be good but he isn't that good because a 75 year old man screaming 'come on then, you want a piece of me' to a horde of tooled up warriors ended about as well as you imagine.