Special Guest Blogger: Genghis Khan

Geneticists discovered that 16 million men in central Asia had nearly identical Y-chromosomes, meaning they had the same male ancestor about 800 years ago. And who was running all over central Asia killing off other men and having all the sex at about that time?
That would be me but I always like to relax after a hard day at work. And I liked to relax hard by laying waste to every village in my path and killing the men, grabbing the women and generally doing everything that comes filed under the rape and pillage heading and then get really, really drunk. So drunk that i couldn't always tell my sister from my wife which can make the breakfast table the next morning a bit uncomfortable but it was fun, not as much fun as killing Persians though.
In the early 1200s, i started conquering places and it turned out that i was really good at it and soon the Mongol empire stretched from Korea to Eastern Europe and the secret was even though we conquered entire civilizations with brute force and i would introduce myself by impaled people by way of saying hiya, i realized that to stay the ruler of a mighty empire, you have to keep the people happy and marching into a country and killing some and forcing those left to convert to some weird new religion isn't the best way to maintain power when your subjects outnumber you by the millions so i said they could keep the weirdo cult they believed in, they just had to surrender, pay me some tax and you and you won't have to watch your town burn to the ground, your fields salted and then be brutally murdered.
We did have a rule that no noble blood could be spilt on the ground, but we also really liked killing so to get around this, we came up with some loopholes such as bending backs until they snapped, pouring molten silver into their orifices and roll the victim up in a rug and trampling then him with a horse. Clean and no bloody stains on our tunics to clean up afterwards!
Altogether we killed over 40 million people (90,000 in India from which we made a pyramid of their skulls and very pretty it was to) but it was the Persians who copped it mostly and all because as a sign of good will when we decapitated our way through Asia like a mustachioed lawn mower and turned up on their doorstep, i sent a group of messengers to ask them if they wanted to open up a trade route with us and they replied by killing all but one Mongol merchant who they allowed to live so he could come back and say that the Persians had gratefully declined my offer.
After giving it some thought i decided that a reasonable, measured response was to kill as many of them as possible, so we reduced many Persians to mounds of skeletons, 90% of the population of Persia, that it didn’t return to pre-Mongol numbers until the 1900s, nearly 700 years later.
I died falling off my horse like a numpty but my burial plot remains a mystery as i had those i trusted divert a river over my final resting place, ensuring no one would disturb my eternal slumber so i am literally sleeping with the fishes.

Special Guest Blogger: Voltaire

Nothing makes us feel smart like repeating something an actual smart person once said, why would you bother coming up with your own witty retort, when you have an off-the peg one which you read once, something someone said way back in the day.
I, Voltaire, was one of the 18th century's most celebrated intellectuals, providing irreverent and comedic commentary on the philosophy and politics of the day but most people will be familiar with the quote: 'I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'
Is a neat thing to say and would be neater if i had actually said it but it was by someone many, many years later who said it was something which sounded like a thing i would say, but i never, but despite that it's an accurate description of my whole philosophy anyway, i was big on the freedom of speech but mainly because it meant i could say what i wanted about people and then justify it under the absolute freedom from censorship which was essential for the intellectual growth of society by being a dick about it but i was full of hypocrisies.
Rousseau and i had our differences and i made an exception for the freedom of speech for Rousseau's books and decided censorship might be justifiable after all by lobbying the government to have his book burned and Rousseau punished to the full extent of the law for having written it.
Fueled by the 60 cups of coffee i drank each day, i also called out the religious fruitcakes for their beliefs, saying that 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him' but it was that along with promoting such ideas as reason, liberty, progress, tolerance, protest and separation of church and state that saw me face an ultimatum of either being sent to prison or be exiled to England presumably because the officials figured that sending a Frenchman to live in England would be a far worse punishment than any prison sentence they could offer.
I packed up my boxes of coffee, my fortune i won from the Paris lottery (idiots made the cost of all the tickets less than the winnings so i bought every ticket possible) and landed in London which i said was far better than France and my French countrymen burnt my books in disgust.
I passed away at the ripe old age of 83 while visiting France and i was on my death bed when i managed to come up with one more witty quip.
The Catholic priests were hoping to hear me give my confession and be reconciled with the Church before my death but when they asked me to asked to renounce the Devil, i said 'Now is not the time to make enemies' and then promptly died.

Special Guest Blogger: Neil Armstrong

On 20 July 1969, an estimated 650 million people watched the live global broadcast of me stepping out of the Apollo 11 capsule onto the Moon and saying that it was a small step for man, i actually said for a man but the 'a' bit gets forgotten much like Michael Collins who tends to be the forgotten astronaut of us famous trio, a bit like that one out of Destiny’s Child who isn't Beyonce or Kelly Rowland.
It was going to be Buzz who stepped out first but the people at NASA thought that big-headed Buzz's ego would explode so they made up an excuse that i would have to be first because the exit door was on my side and opened inward so it would be impossible for Aldrin to get out first.
After two and a half hours of bouncing around like kids at a birthday party on the moon surface, we returned to a hero's welcome and three weeks in quarantine to make sure we didn’t pick up any alien diseases, i celebrated my 39th Birthday in quarantine but then we were out to a world tour that consisted of 25 countries in 38 days, and we met with important figures like the Queen of England, the Pope, and the Emperor of Japan and 17 other countries that honored me with several awards and medals.
Buzz loved the limelight but i retired from NASA and went to teach engineering at the University of Cincinnati and moved back to Ohio and purchased a 200-acre dairy farm.
Such was my aversion to the limelight, that on my death there were talks of holdImg a state funeral for me but my family said i would hate that and i was cremated and my ashes spread in the Pacific.
Some rumours i must nail is that the moon wasn't hollow or made of cheese, i never converted to Islam and the space-pen story is bull. The reason NASA didn't like using pencils in space was because pencils in space are dangerous. If the tip breaks off in a zero-gravity environment, surrounded by sensitive instruments that are the only thing protecting you from a horrible vacuum of space death, those little pencil bits suddenly become a big problem.
Shamefully they didn't go on to do anything useful with the one small step that i took like building a city on the moon or using it as a launchpad to Mars but at some point Aliens will come visiting us and they will probably pass by the moon and there they will see the now the six former large stars and stripes we planted not billowing in the lunar breeze and which are by now large white flags which will either reassure intergalactic travelers that us humans are a lovely bunch of pacifists but if they are coming armed with intergalactic lasers to take over our planet and enslave us all then it isn't really the signal we want to send out before they arrive.

You can Trust Him, He's Trump's Doctor

Such are things related to Donald Trump that even his doctors can't be trusted to to give out correct information, the Doctor treating the President admitting that he refused to admit the president had been given oxygen at the White House on Friday as he was 'trying to reflect the upbeat attitude of the team but in doing so, [it] came off like we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true' although it was necessarily true as they were trying to hide that Trump had been given oxygen.
The Saturday press conference also revealed that he was improving and already talking about returning to the White House until minutes later his chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that his vital signs had been 'very concerning'.
As the bleach injection remedy seems to have been passed over, several Health Experts are querying, if he is improving as stated, why is Trump now also receiving dexamethasone which the World Health Organisation guidelines make very clear is to be used 'only in patients with severe and critical COVID19' and underli9nes that by stating that it 'is not to be used in patients with non-severe COVID19'.
No wonder there is a great deal of skepticism about his condition but Trump himself has said in a tweet that he is 'starting to feel good' and is 'looking forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started' which as i recall was him standing on a stage and shouting into the face of a 78 year old man and making fun of him for wearing a mask.
The administration has gone down the route of authoritarian regimes with the video released of him beavering away in the ward signing bits of paper which would have looked even better if the paper he was signing wasn't blank but they probably didn't expect anyone to zoom in and see what he was actually signing.
Then there is the 72 hours into the diagnosis, oops i meant 48 hours mistake by the Doctor so all in all, anything said should be taken with quite a few pinches of salt if not the whole damn barrel.
It is exactly the same as what happened in the UK with Boris Johnson where we were told he had a mild version of the disease and was working away in hospital when actually he was on ICU ward attached to a ventilator fighting for his life.
It is hard to have sympathy with a man who has downplayed the pandemic while it ravaged his country, mocked people who wore masks and has overseen the highest Coronavirus death toll in any country and judging by the reaction from most people, he isn't getting any but we have to remember that the President Trump is in several high risk categories as he is 74 so elderly, a BMI over 30 so he is obese, his £750 tax bill shows he is a low income earner and he is a person of colour, bright orange.

Special Guest Blogger: Adam Smith

While Karl Marx is thought of as the father of Communism, his counterpart would be me and my 'Wealth of Nations' book that decreed that the motivating force of economic growth assigning each worker a specific task to maximize efficiency even if doing the same thing over and over on a production line gets snooze-a-rama but the motivating force is selfishness.
My analogy was that: 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest' which means that the Butcher is not selling you meat because he enjoys or wants to sell you meat, he is only doing it to make money and this desire to make money benefited everyone as he spent this money hiring people and buying other things from people selling items and the money went around and everyone got a slice.
While Marx's slogan was that Communism would produce enough goods and services so that everyone's needs can be satisfied, mine was that being selfish and greedy is the key to satisfying everyone but i did underestimate the pathetic self-regulating powers of mankind when it came to selfishness.
My assumption that as the butchers, brewers and bakers fortunes rested with the fortunes of others, it would act as a brake on just how selfish we would be was wildly wrong.
I also mentioned 'the invisible hand', an idea that even if corporations act like greedy dickholes, the market will always deal with them by itself without the Government butting in to regulate corporations, or tax the rich, or bother with commie bullcrap like welfare, so just sit back, and let the invisible hand sort it all out therefore proving Capitalism is just the best, you guys.
I wasn't big on taxing the rich, when you’re successful, nobody wants to be bothered especially not by the poor who never really understood that in my system we need poor people. The rich are the yin, they are the yang and it’s okay to be poor and instead of complaining about being poor, enjoy it!  Watch TV!  Don’t vote!  Eat stuff you find at the side of the road for free. Who cares?
Without doubt my Capitalism filling the bank accounts of the top end while it empties those at the bottom trumps Marx's Communism with its sharing things out fairly for everyone and as the people at the top of Government are very rich people, it's all fine and Capitalism works for everyone as long as you don't get sick, grow old, be poor or underprivileged, lose your job or expect to eat decent food.

Special Guest Blogger: Tupac Shakur

A lot of people say gangster rap is misogynistic posturing by fake-ass idiots who spend more time in drama school then they ever did pimping or hustling dope. Well I assure you, i was the real thing. So what if i did spend time in drama school, enrolling in Harlem’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble at 12 and performing in several Shakespeare plays while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts and taking poetry classes but that all just made me the awesome ghetto poet i became.
My lyrics were about my coming from the streets, y'know, gettin' hammered, singing about setting things on fire, shooting up funerals, striking poses, smoking a lid and all that but in my music i drew upon difficulties i had seen with his own eyes such poverty, drug addiction, violence, and gang culture and prison and all that was just in my own family.
I did do time for sexual assault and i beat on innocent people just for kicks, but i rhymed like an angel and i walked the walk and told a cautionary tale about the tough life on the streets, ya' hear me, playa'?
I come from a long line of radicals, both of my parents were active members of the Black Panther party during the 1960s and 1970s, my mother charged with more than 150 counts of conspiracy against the United States government, my step-father was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and my godfather was a high-ranking member of the Black Panthers who spent 27 years in prison for murder.
So i was streets man, i was gangsta, a warrior poet and i was taking rap in a whole new direction but a week in September in 1996 was when it all changed, i released a diss track 'Hit ‘Em Up' in which i rapped trash talk about Bad Boy Records, Puff Daddy, and Notorious B.I.G., claiming to have slept with his wife.
Then i got into a brawl with members of the Crips while at a Mike Tyson fight and after driving away i stopped at a traffic light when another car pulled up carrying a busta' who shot me in the chest so you can forget all those sightings of me after faking my own death , i had enough bullet holes in me to prove i was stone cold dead.
Whether it was the Crips from earlier that night or Biggie, nobody knows but it was me in the crematorium and my ashes in that lid that my crew smoked later to honour my memory. Peace and chicken grease, i'm out.

Trump A Victim Of His Own Inadequate Actions

Karma and schadenfreude are just two words i have heard often today on the news that Donald Trump and his wife have tested positive for Coronavirus.
There was also talks of chickens coming home to roost and what goes around comes around and jokes about White House doctors running around with bottles and syringes full of bleach but we have to bear in mind that this is a person who could potentially be very, very ill or worse.
I agree with all the comments that Trump is an abhorrent and awful person but on a purely human level, i have seen people with Coronavirus in hospital on respirators hooked to machines and it isn't pleasant and i wouldn't want to see anyone going through that, even repugnant imbeciles like Trump.  
It is ironic though that the three leaders who did the most to dismiss the disease, Boris Johnson, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and now Donald Trump have all gone down with the disease that has killed over a million people worldwide with 410,000 of those 1 million coming in their three countries alone.
Apart from the newsroom meetings this morning on how to mention his weight (do we call him obese, clinically obese, morbidly obese or just overweight) there has been some conspiracy theories springing up as usual.
Some include that he isn't really ill and this is just a way to silence him to stop him further wrecking his chances after the debacle in the first debate and there is the one where he has seen the polling numbers and knowing he is in for a massive fall, will use this to withdraw and stand down before the election rather than lose it heavily and i have also heard it pondered that it is to try and gain a few sympathy votes or even that it is a ruse to get the election postponed.
All very doubtful, his ego wouldn't allow him to pretend to go down from the very thing that he has spent the last six months trying to dismiss as not that important so i hope him and his wife gets better soon but he shouldn't be expecting too much sympathy from many people, especially those families of the 204,000 American's who have been victims of Trumps own woefully inadequate and harmful actions on the disease, inadequate actions which he himself and his wife are now a victim of.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Honorius III

The world is full of terrible things, things like ugly and poor people but we had it bad in the 12th Century at the time of the Inquisition, when the Catholic Church was busy beating up Jews and ripping the arms off anyone who wasn't a Catholic but in order to be a Pope you had to be a badass and i was as badass as they come.  
The Papacy you see is a rather uninteresting job and after a hard day of slobbing in the morning, followed by slobbing in the afternoon, then a bit of a snooze before the main evening's slob, i needed to fill in the long nights when i retired to my chambers between the years when something interesting happening and i was so pious that the temptations of this world were too easy for me, so i summoned demons just to challenge myself.
When the clergy no doubt thought i was busily devising new ways to bore the hell out of them, i was actually drawing pentagrams on the floor and trying to interrupt the slumber of various imps, demons and all manner of ogres, forcibly bringing them to the earthly realm and banish the demons back down to hell before they managed to break free from my flaming portal from hell and disembowel someone which must have been very frustrating for the demons but they were evil so who cares.
The problem was that such was my reputation for being a demon slayer that none actually turned up, not even Satan who i tried many times to summon but even he feared the wrath of my rosary beads.
I wrote a book about it so that any local parish priest could test himself against the denizens of the netherworld which was more successful than my attempt to recover the Holy Land from the hated Muslims.
You would have thought that by the time of the Fifth Crusade the Catholics would have got their act together but all the nations leaders i got together got halfway and had a massive fight amongst themselves and most just gave up and came home while the rest got as far as Egypt and starved to death, so altogether not a great success but as i said at the start, there's a lot of evil in this world, but there's also light and i shone a light on all the evil things just waiting to come from hell and rip your legs off, or i would have done if any had bothered to turn up, the cowards.

Economies Bounce Back, Grandparents Not So Much

 If Capitalism has taught us anything, it is that at least once a decade everything will come crashing down around our ears and the finances of nations will plummet, businesses will fail and people will lose their jobs but as the people who run things profit so happily from the awful system, they keep with it and over time it builds and things return to normal before it all comes crashing down again but the point is that economies always come back.
The current Coronavirus has hit almost every Global economy to varying degrees, the Office for Budget Responsibility puts the UK's current Covid-19 tab at £300 billion which is huge but dwarfed by the £7 trillion the 2008 credit crisis cost the UK according to the Bank of England and after over a decade of austerity and cut backs and all manner of Conservative Party nonsense, we finally managed to drag ourselves back into the black and then the global pandemic hit and it's back into the red we went.
I am hearing more and more the reasoning that the lock-down that most Governments undertook has destroyed their economies and another lock-down shouldbe avoided at all costs but the flipside to that which never seems to get mentioned is that staying 'open' and saving the economy would result in the widely dismissed 'herd immunity' where more people contract, and either gain immunity or die, from the disease currently rampaging around the Globe.
I always found it strange when Boris Johnson would say that the most important aspect of this pandemic is not overwhelming the NHS because i always thought the most important aspect was people not dying needlessly but i decided to take it that he meant an overwhelmed NHS would mean less people able to be treated and therefore dying so it's the same same objective, just that the Government took two steps to get to where i was with my one.   
Now with a Resurgence of Coronavirus and the UK numbers rapidly heading the wrong way, local lock-downs are being enforced in a growing number of regions and the straw blowing in the wind seems to indicate that whether we get there in a series of local steps or by the Government making a UK wide ruling, another lock-down is coming and the call to avoid a devastating all encompassing lock-down is growing.
It is true that lock-downs will not rid us of Coronavirus but it was never designed to do that, it is to buy us time and save lives until we develop the vaccine that gains us all the immunity we need and the smart money is on that arriving sometime in mid 2021.
Economies bounce back, it may take a while but they do come back finally as the spate of booms and busts under the undependable Capitalist system has shown but if they catch Coronavirus because some people were more concerned with keeping the economy going because of threats to their financial situation, the only bouncing Grandpa Joe and Grandma will be doing is when their coffin hits the ground.

Special Guest Blogger: Billy The Kid

My story begins in a Chinese laundry, i stole some clothes and got reported to the authorities but i escaped arrest by fleeing town to Bonita where i got into a disagreement with a man and he went for his gun, i went for mine but i was quicker and blasted his head into skull-and-brains confetti so with my first killing under my belt, i was back on the run from the law.
I was always happy for a free exchange of bullets even if the guns we used were hopeless, those quick-draws at high noon that seemed to happen every other day was more two dudes just stood across from one another with their guns out, aiming and firing until someone got lucky on the fifth or sixth shot and someone else was dead.
There was some real rootin-tootin tough varmints around at that time of the Wild West. There was one guy i got into a gun fight with and i shot him in the groin but he kept shooting until his rifle ran out of bullets and then he charged me and took his empty rifle and clubbed the blazing pigshit out of me and i decided it was way too early in the day for any more of this crap and left him to bleed to death from his dick wound.
The name 'The Kid' came about when i joined the outlaw gang 'The Lincoln County Regulators' as i was the youngest of that bunch of the shit kickinest gang the Wild West ever saw although i was more about the horse rustling and killing than doing what most outlaws did and make their fortunes from robbing trains or banks that had slightly less security than one of your modern day newspaper stands.
All was sweet until i killed the Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and was arrested and put on trial for murder which led to me being sentenced to hang because shooting me in broad daylight on a main street was a bit too obvious but that was their mistake because i escaped due to the morons using manacles which were too big so i slipped them off, shot the deputy and stole a horse and fled to New Mexico but in an ironic twist my horse got nicked by Apaches and i had to walk most of the way.
Somehow Sheriff Pat Garrett heard that i was staying at a friends house in Fort Sumner and waited for me to come home and Garrett shot me in the heart but i lived and died like a proper outlaw, i worked hard, killed lots of men, didn't shower and died in my boots.