Pass The Cake

On the same day that we are told 80,000 finance jobs will be making the short hop across the channel to the Eu zone, we are told that items such as computers, coffee and chocolate will be going up.
What? Prices going up? This can't be! We were told we are a great trading nation looking outwards after freeing ourselves from the decaying eurozone and saving £350 million for the NHS.
Why isn't everything getting better?
After the 'it's all those foreign types coming over here and claiming benefits' argument, many of the 52% of Brexiter's said they voted for change because it can't get any worse.
Seems they are going to soon start discovering that things certainly can and will.
'Let them eat cake' is the phrase attributed to Marie Antoinette when France went down the pan so we may have to dig deep and break out the Victoria Sandwich (just not the chocolate type obviously).

Britain's Next PM May Be Female But Still A Tory

The votes have been counted and verified and Britain's next Prime Minister will be...female.
The final two left standing are Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom and as one will take over from David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party, by default they also become leader of Great Britain also.
Theresa May is the overwhelming favourite but they still have to go through the process over the next
few weeks of choosing a winner so we also have to pretend it's a competition and may the best women win etc etc.
So in the one corner Theresa May, the current Home Secretary, owner of a Geography degree and a career as a financial consultant behind her.
In the other corner Andrea Leadsom, the current Energy and climate change minister, has a Political Science degree hanging on her wall and came into politics with a background in Banking.
Both are saying the right things but it is worth remembering that whether it's May or Leadsom, they will still be heading up the Nasty Party and will still be following the same horrific right wing ideology that includes yet more austerity so whether it's a man or a woman, the politics won't change and the poorest in society will continue to be trod all over, it will just be done by someone with a slightly higher voice.

Not A Good Day For Blair

Chilcot has ruled that the decision to invade Iraq was taken 'before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted', that military action was 'not a last resort' and Saddam posed no 'imminent threat'.
The Iraq decision was based on 'flawed intelligence', Blair and his  colleagues 'should have challenged what they were told but did not' and the planning for post-invasion Iraq was 'wholly inadequate and the consequences 'underestimated'.
Blair had been warned that invasion would set off 'internal strife', the legality of the war was 'far from satisfactory' and Blair told Bush 'I will be with you, whatever' showing that he had decided to go to war long before the official decision, despite telling the public that no such decision had been made.
Chilcot has taken almost every line of attack that has been lodged against Blair and endorsed it, giving the rubber stamp of vindication to almost everything the critics had said about the war from the beginning.
Now it is over to the people who can, and should, drag Blair into a court for prosecution.

Chilcot, Blair and the ICC

With the publication of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war tomorrow, the International Criminal Court has shrugged it's shoulders and announced that while it will would comb through the report for evidence of war crimes committed by British troops, Blair's decision to go to war was outside of it's remit so therefore will not be able to prosecute Tony Blair for any war crimes.
Already the family of dead soldiers and those who opposed the war have spoken out to condemn the ICC decision, stating that Blair will once again escape retribution for his decisions but as shameful as that is, i don't expect to hear much from Chilcot that we don't already know.
I am sure that we will hear about 'lessons being learned' and 'mistakes being made' but it is hard to believe that we have learnt anything as since Iraq we have gone blundering into Libya and to a lesser extent Syria.
We know all that already, we put the blame firmly on George W Bush and Tony Blair for what happened, and what is continuing to happen in Iraq and Syria, the massive car bomb in Baghdad at the weekend that killed 150 is a direct result of the decisions they made back in 2003.  
The political impact of the Iraq war in Britain was serious, it not only cost Tony Blair his Prime Minister position but blasted his once promising reputation and cost Labour tens of thousands of supporters who could not bring themselves to vote for a party that would act so heinously, myself included.
So if those of us baying for Blair's blood won't get our way, and all we will hear is confirmation of common knowledge that that Blair misused and span the available intelligence, what can we take from Chilcots words? 
I will be listening with interest to hear not how we ended up in a war whose repercussions are still echoing today but why the British and American governments in their desperation to attack Saddam, went to such lengths to deceive, cheat and lie to the public to take us into the war as that question has never been fully answered.

Nervous Wait For Juno

After traveling for 5 years and 400 million miles the million pound Juno spacecraft is almost in position to be placed in orbit around Jupiter.
NASA scientists will attempt to fire rocket engines to put the brakes on the probe and then maneuver it into orbit around the giant gas planet while also turning it back so the solar panels face the sun.
The risky 35-minute operation to move Juno into position is a one shot chance, get it wrong and burn the engines for anything other than the precise 1.2 seconds required and Juno will be sent pinging off into space or sent plunging into the gas clouds and an inevitable crushing
Get it right though and the information we garner from Juno will be invaluable and will help settle the question whether Jupiter has a solid core beneath all those toxic clouds of gas and gain insights on the famous Great Red Spot. 
As the distance from Jupiter to the control center is so vast, there is a 48 minute lapse which means that there will be some very nervous technicians and scientists waiting to hear if their 1.2 second calculations were correct or if they have just sent a million pound lump of metal flying towards Alpha Centuri.

Merkel, May And Clinton

If things play out the way they look like they will, Angela Merkel could very well soon be joined in the queue for the Ladies toilet at the UN by a couple of more female World Leaders in the shape of Hillary Clinton and Theresa May.
Unless the FBI bring a screeching halt to her bandwagon, Mrs Clinton should be soon measuring up the Oval Office for curtains and Mrs May is the hot favourite to be changing the wallpaper in 10 Downing Street to match her sofa.
At this point i should be making quips about what a bloody mess men have made of things and they should now step aside and let us women have a go but while Merkel may not be a warmongering lunatic, May and Clinton certainly are.
Clinton is a hawkish woman who has supported armed conflict at every single opportunity and is in favour of undertaking another Rambo exercise in Syria while May was a cheerleader for the Afghan and Iraq conflicts and has voted for the use of UK military forces whenever it has turned up, which shamefully has been quite a lot this century.
She also wants to replace Trident with a shiny new nuclear weapons system so it seems that being the owner of a bra and owning a womb are not prerequisites for being a different sort of more caring and sharing politician, it just means you are a warmonger who has boobs and can bear children.
If Angela Merkel wants to do us all a favour and promote World Peace, she should lock them both in the United Nations Lavatory at the first opportunity.

Conflating Corbyn's Anti-Semitism Speech

The knives are out for Jeremy Corbyn and they have been plunged in once again over his comment regarding anti-semitism in the Labour Party.
The shadow leader said that attacking all Jews for what Israel did was wrong as was targeting all Muslims for what Islamic State does.
I can't see anything wrong with that, i have said exactly the same here many times when Synagogues where being vandalised and Jews attacked in the street while Israeli attacks on Palestine were ongoing.
The anti-Corbyn media immediately piled on saying that he was drawing a parallel between Israel and the Islamic State. The Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev apparently had no problem with what Jeremy Corbyn said and i fail to see why he should, Corbyn didn't draw any parallels between the two except to say that to target members of a religion because of the actions of others who they have no influence or control over is wrong.
The less intelligent among us will continue to take it upon themselves to act their shoe size and attack Jews in retaliation for Israels actions as they will carry on attacking Muslims for Islamic State's actions and both is appalling but then so is the right wing media outlets with a grudge against the Labour leader conflating his words into something it obviously wasn't.

Teflon Tony Due A Fall

When he was in power Tony Blair was known as Teflon Tony because no matter what mess was going on aropund him, he came out of it clean but that all changed with the Iraq War where he went from being one of our best liked Prime Ministers to receiving more hatred than even Margaret Thatcher had thrown at her.
Next Wednesday is the culmination of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war and it has been heavily hinted at that Tony Blair is set to savaged.
A number of MPs have already looked into impeaching the former prime minister using an ancient Parliamentary law which will be set in motion if the report states that Blair misled Parliament over the Iraq War.
The MPs believe he should be prosecuted for breaching his constitutional duties and taking the country into a conflict that resulted in the deaths of over a million Iraqi's and 179 British troops.
If the impeachment attempt is approved by MPs, the Blair is put on trial and could face a prison sentence.
The key point which could launch the procedure is if Chilcot shows that Blair committed to the invasion of Iraq in private with President George Bush before 2003.
'If, as I believe Chilcot finds that there was a prior commitment from Blair to Bush at Crawford ranch in 2002, that would provide the reason for pursuing the matter further' said one MP.
Wednesday could turn out to be a very bad day for Tony Blair but a great day for those of us who want to see him punished for his appalling and abhorrent actions for which he has never been properly held to account.

Healing Ozone Layer

Researchers say they have found the first clear evidence that the thinning in the ozone layer above Antarctica is beginning to heal as the the hole was around 4 million sq km smaller than it was in the year 2000.
Credit must go to the greens in the mid-80s who campaigned to ban ozone-destroying chemicals CFC's found in everything from hairsprays and refrigerators to air conditioning units.
Since the global ban on the use of CFCs in 1987, the situation in Antarctica has been slowly improving and are now showing first signs that the ozone protective layer is actively growing again.
Even though we phased out the production of CFCs in all countries, there's still a lot of the chemicals left in the atmosphere and as it has a lifetime of 50 to 100 years it will be a slow process and to a complete recovery but it should provide an inspiration that we may have royally messed up the atmosphere but with international co-operation governments, science, industry and us everyday folks can work together to protect our natural world and come up with solutions to tackle our spiraling global environmental problems if we have the will.

Taiwan Navy Idiots

If ever you needed evidence that the World is run by idiots, Taiwan has accidentally mistakenly fired a supersonic anti-ship missile in the direction of China, the Taiwanese navy have said.
The patrol boat was undergoing an inspection inside a military base when the missile was fired by accident and landed in the sea between Taiwan and China although luckily there were no injuries.
A preliminary investigation showed that its operators may have failed to follow proper procedures.
Lets hope china does not 'accidentally' fire a missile back at them.