Iran Targeting Trump?

According to Israeli intelligence, Tehran is hatching an alleged Iranian plot to kill Trump and mourners at the funeral for slain Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, did call for the assassination of Trump with a banner that said, 'We Will Kill Trump' and others held signs calling for his death.
Trump and his group of sycophants had no grounds to justify their actions when they attacked Iran and in the first move bombed a girls school which killed 185 and also assassinated the Supreme Leader Khamenei which could very well create a precedent for other countries seeking to resort to force without consideration for the rule of law.
Donald Trump has often boasted of the the assassination the 86-year-old Iranian Leader but makes no mention of the killing by his side of his daughter, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter in the attack which is illegal under International Law which prohibits the: 'Targeted assassinations of political leaders in peacetime unless during armed conflict' and as the assault has been called 'Pre-emptive', which is also illegal as there was no armed conflict until Trump and Netanyahu decided to start it by assassinating the Leader so the legal ground is non-existent.
National leaders should quite rightly be hesitant to target their counterparts in other states, in case it leads to their own targeting and if Israel is to be believed, this is what is happening.
Obviously any intelligence coming from Israel should be taken with a whole bucket of salt rather than a pinch but if Iran does manage take out Trump, it would indeed be very, very wrong and should be loudly condemned but it would be hard to not say so without triggering objections of double standards and hypocrisy.

Count Binface

Facing increasing scrutiny and tough questions over his finances, Nigel Farage has made the decision to resign and call a snap by election in Clacton, seemingly frustrated by all the unwelcome attention and bad press over that fat gift of £5m from a billionaire supporter that he failed to declare on becoming an MP.
Obviously hoping to avoid the two investigations, he has thrown his toys out of the very expensive pram (paid for by someone else) but  what he wasn't planning on was all of the main parties agreeing to not standing any candidates against him which not only makes him look a wally but leaves him facing just one opponent, a man who is named Count Binface (a name which also works for Farage without that 'o' in the name) and who could soon find himself parking his bottom on the House of Commons benches as a newly elected MP.
To make it even more hilarious, the House of Parliament have said that even if Farage is reelected, the investigations will only be paused and would restart once he is back in Parliament meaning it would all would have been for nothing and the probes and questions into the millions he received will just carry on afterwards.
As he is friendly with the almost certain pedophile in the White House, maybe he should ask him to give Keir Starmer a call to get them cancelled like he did with that red card at the World Cup although the answer would be two words and the second would be 'Off' so if things work out, we could see a man with a bin on his head sitting behind the Conservative Benches and Nigel Farage sitting in the new home which he refuses to say how he paid for and crying into his pint about how it all went wrong.   
Got to love British Politics sometimes.

Norway V England

One of the most brilliant bits of Sports commentary came in 1981 after Norway beat England 2-1 in a World Cup Qualifier and the commentator, Bjørge Lillelien, went on a fantastically and slightly unhinged rant where he named a long list of England's most well known people such as Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper and Lady Diana and ended with....Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Your boys took one hell of a beating.
The joy of beating England with players like Bryan Robson, Kevin Keegan, Trevor Francis and Glenn Hoddle is understandable because back then Norway were just not very good and hadn’t qualified for anything since the 1952 Olympics but now it is Norway V England in the World Cup Quarter Final to play either Argentina or Switzerland in the last four.
It is a real shame we are playing our North Sea neighbours because i would be cheering for them if they were playing anyone else but it is the likes of Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard who will be standing on the other side tonight so we can only hope that by midnight we can say: 'Roald Amundsen, Edvard Munch, Morten Harket, Erik the Red, Ada Hegerberg, King Harald V, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Leif Erikson, Edvard Grieg...Your boy's took one hell of a beating'. 

Special Guest Blogger: Ivan Pavlov

I never intended to be a psychologist. In my day, psychology was seen as a bunch of people sitting in velvet chairs talking about their dreams of flying sausages. I was a physiologist. I cared about the guts! The juices! The magnificent, sloshing machinery of the gastric system!
I spent years studying the digestive glands of dogs. I wanted to know how the stomach knows food is coming. I was the King of Saliva. I was the Sultan of Secretions. I had perfected the art of the gastric fistula which is a fancy way of saying I put a little window in a dog’s stomach so I could watch the soup happen in real-time or severing the dog's esophagus and created a hole in the neck, meaning food would fall out instead of reaching the stomach.
But then, the dogs started being difficult. In a perfect world, a dog should only salivate when you put a nice, juicy piece of dried meat on its tongue. That is basic biology. It’s honest. It’s predictable.
But my dogs, bless their furry, misguided hearts, started cheating. They began drooling the moment my laboratory assistants walked into the room. The assistants weren't food. (Well, maybe to a very hungry wolf, but not to my lab pups.) I realised that the dogs weren't reacting to the meat,  they were reacting to the white lab coats. I called this psychic secretion.
It sounds like something a Victorian medium would sell you for five rubles, but it was actually the birth of Classical Conditioning.
I realized these dogs had learned a association and as any obsessive compulsive Russian scientist will tell you, when you find a variable you didn't account for, you don't ignore it, you lock yourself in a cold room for thirty years and study it until everyone involved is slightly traumatized.
Everyone thinks I walked around like a frantic butler, ringing a dinner bell while shouting, 'Dinner is served, Comrade Fido!' but In reality, I used a variety of stimuli. I used metronomes. I used harmoniums. I used whistles. I even used electric shocks (look, it was the early 1900s).
The metronome was my favorite. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The dog hears the ticking, the dog gets the meat powder, the dog produces 4.5 milliliters of high-quality drool. It was beautiful. It was rhythmic. It was predictable and I was the conductor of a Glandular Orchestra.
Ironically I did win the Nobel Prize which should remind people I DIDN'T USE A BELL!
What I did in the early 20th Century has connections to you today. Look at you. You’re sitting there reading this. Maybe you’re on a bus, or at home on the sofa or pretending to work.
Suddenly, your phone goes Ding!
Your heart rate spikes. Your thumb twitches. A little squirt of dopamine hits your brain. You didn't choose to feel that way. You didn't sit down and think, 'Ah, the auditory frequency of a push notification indicates a 74% probability of social validation, therefore I shall feel excitement.'
No. You just did it.
You are conditioned. You are my greatest legacy. I did it with meat powder and metronomes but Silicon Valley does it with Ding and when your Pavlovian responses kick in every time you hear the New Email, text or notification, tip your hat to old Ivan, the man who turned drool into data.

Repairing The World Again

While the Earth roasts there are some real dingbats around trying to deny what they are seeing with their own eyes but they are in the minority and as we showed in the 1990's, we saved ourselves once and we can do it again.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) are human-made chemical compounds containing carbon, chlorine, and fluorine which were once widely used in aerosol sprays, refrigeration, and air conditioning until scientists worked out they were destroying the Earth's Ozone layer which shields us fragile humans from the Sun's harmful radiation and the Worlds Governments got together to phase them out.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  projects that the ozone layer is responding by healing and by 2066 will be restored to it full, life saving glory.  
Unfortunately the CFCs were replaced them with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) which don’t harm the ozone layer, but they are extremely powerful greenhouse gases with some trapping thousands of times more heat than CO2 but then Humanity always did have a knack for solving problems by creating even bigger ones but once again the Globe got together and decided to phase out HFC's in the same way that they did with CFC's.
By acting, humanity avoided a future of extreme UV exposure leading to widespread skin cancers despite the chemical industry who dismissed it and launched a PR campaign in defense of the compound which echoes today with the Fossil Fuel industry who try to deny that their products are responsible for the man made climate change causing us such problems today.
So if we are capable of a concerted global effort to tackle a problem no single country could ever hope to fix alone, why not now with Climate Change?
The science is clear to everyone and we are perfectly capable of repairing what we broke in the first place and as we have no second home or anywhere to escape to, we have no choice, we HAVE to fix it again.

Trump Saving The World

Is the FIFA Peace Prize winner Donald Trump going to accidentally save the World?
Not with the hilarious botched reflecting pool or his racism but with his continuing war on Iran which has done us all a favour and pushed up oil prices and nudged the World towards clean energy faster than we might have otherwise.
Yes we know all about how he has claimed victory against Iran for the 73rd time and says he will keep winning this war until someone tells Iran and they admit defeat but meanwhile all over the world, Governments are switching faster and more thoroughly to clean energy and away from dirty and polluting fossil fuels.
The war has been a fossil fuel own goal and some/all/or none of this is thanks to Donald J Trump who recently said Climate Change is a the greatest con job perpetrated on the world and was invented by and for China to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive although he did apply for planning permission to build large sea defences at his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, citing on his application that the defences were necessary: 'Because of global warming and rising sea levels'.
It turns out the unintended consequence of the confused Americans who voted for Trump and more foreign wars and making things more expensive in America (oh, that's right they didn't vote for that) is the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel industry.
We all knew that Trump was an idiot (which isn't even the almost certainly a pedophile's worse trait) and literally everything he touches goes wrong but his buddies in the coal, oil and gas industry must be a bit annoyed right about now but thanks Donny, you and your supporters being unable to reach the benchmark for being stupid enough to be moron's has really paid dividends this time.

Special Guest Blogger: Franz Beckenbauer

When I was a little boy in Munich, the only thing I could do better than kicking a leather ball around the backyard was pretend-playing the role of the referee complete with yellow cards, exaggerated whistles, and an occasional 'offside' shouted at my poor mother as she tried to serve us dinner.
Little did I know that those early theatrics would become the foundation for a career that spanned playing, coaching, chairmanship, and enough public appearances to make a Kardashian blush.
I was born a few months after the war had finally decided that enough was enough. My parents, both of whom survived the rubble of post-war Munich by playing Schach (chess) and occasionally smuggling small pieces of chocolate, gave me the name Franz.
At age six I discovered football as my father, a former amateur player for TSV 1860 München, noticed my enthusiasm and signed me up at the local club, SC 04 Schwabing. The first lesson was simple, Don’t trip over the ball. The second lesson was more philosophical: If you do trip, at least do it with style.
In 1964 I had just broken into the first team of Bayern Munich (then a modest club playing in the second division). My teammates started calling me Der Kaiser because of my elegant playing style and the way I liked to stand with my arms spread wide before a free kick, a pose that made me look like a monarch addressing his subjects.
The name stuck and it gave me a brand that even the most sophisticated marketing agencies in Berlin would have envied.
The first major trophy I lifted was the European Cup with Bayern in 1972, after beating the mighty Ajax 2-0. I remember the moment the ball hit the net and it felt like the entire continent had paused for a collective Wooo-hoo!
If you think the Kaiser sounds like a fancy nickname, you’re missing the point as I captained West Germany to their first World Cup win in 1974. It was an extraordinary tournament and we defeated the Netherlands, the team famed for Total Football, in the final, 2-1. The match turned into a tactical chess game, which I, being a chess aficionado, enjoyed immensely.
A particular moment that still makes me grin happens when I think of the famous 1974 Final photograph, where I’m running with the ball in my arms, Gerd Müller trailing behind, and the crowd cheering as if we had just handed them free Saurkraut. I later discovered that the photo was used for a promotional campaign for a brand of German mustard.
In 1976, West Germany reached the European Championship final, only to lose to Czechoslovakia on a penalty shoot-out.
Twice named European Footballer of the Year, I appeared 103 times for West Germany, playing in three FIFA World Cups and two European Championships and I ended my playign career in the North American Soccer League with the New York Cosmos, playing alongside Pelé.  with the Cosmos for four seasons up to 1980, and the team won the Soccer Bowl on three occasions (1977, 1978, 1980).
Fast forward to 2006, when Germany played host to the World Cup.
I was the team president by then and, as you might guess, I was also the official face of the “Football for All” campaign.
However, a political scandal from that time involving a political donation (a small sum of 6.7 million euros) erupted in 2016 caused the media to spin a tale that I had been bribing the German Football Association. In true German fashion, the press called it Der Skandal however, the trial was suspended due to the Covic pandemic and closed in 2020 without a verdict because the statute of limitations expired. Thank you International Pandemic!
If you read any modern football textbook, you’ll see a chapter titled The Art of the Sweeper-Libero. That’s me, in a nutshell. I reinvented the role of a defender who both defends and launches attacks, turning a simple hacking the ball clear job into a creative masterpiece.

Canadians At Eurovision

Countries from across the globe meet each year to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest and next year we are likely to see a new country take to the stage.
With the almost certain Pedophile in the nation below them being a dick, the Canadians have been fluttering their eyelashes at Europe for a while and after they became a full member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), they are now eligible to participate in the singing competition.
Canada does have some history in the Eurovision with Celine Dion competing for Switzerland back in 1988 and winning it but Canada is not the first non-European country to take part in Eurovision, Israel have been showing up since 1973 although hopefully not much longer and Australia has been competing in the contest since 2015 when they were initially handed a glittery invite as a one-off guest to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the contest but have returned ever since due to popularity.
The truth is that it may be called 'Eurovision' but it has nothing to do with politics or geography, it is down to being a member of the the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and if they desire there are some East Asian and North African nations who could join the party although most decline the invite although they don't know what they are missing because it is brilliant fun, as Canada will find out next May.

Farage Resigns

I guess after announcing his resignation as a Member of Parliament this morning and triggering a by-election, Nigel Farage is thinking he has dodged the two investigations into him over undeclared 'gifts' from backers, but boy has he not read the rules if he does.
There are currently two parliament standards investigation into him first failing to declare benefits-in-kind from convicted criminal George Cottrell and another into failing to declare a £5m gift he received from the Thailand-based crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne which Farage declares: 'Was nothing wrong'.
It is expected the Parliament Committee will find it plenty wrong and suspend him and if the suspension is over 10 days, then a by-election is triggered but if the Poundland Trump thinks him stepping down will make the probes irrelevant, he has judges it wrong.
The Parliamentary guidance states: 'If parliament is dissolved or the member otherwise ceases to be a member while an investigation is in progress, the commissioner will suspend their investigation until the member is re-elected' which means that the investigations would be suspended during the period of any by-election, but would be re-started if he was re-elected.
If the commissioner decides Farage did break the rules, he could recommend a penalty and Farage could face a recall petition in his constituency meaning he could face a second by-election shortly afterwards.
Hopefully he will realise this and walk away completely to avoid scrutiny of his dodgy dealings and Britain will be relieved of one of the biggest stains of recent years in our Politics.

USA Out And World Cheers

After the Balogun red card reversal madness, I assume the only places that wanted the USA to win last nights game against Belgium were in America itself and in the living room of FIFA President Giovanni Infantino but as it turned out the Europeans put them over their knee and gave them a good spanking 4-1 so it all worked out in the end.
I did chuckle at the Belgium FA social media post which featured celebrating Belgians and the words 'Overturn This'  but everyone and his dog is taking aim at the Footballing top banana for bowing to the pressure of the Americans who now join the ranks of 'Who?' along with the other co-hosts Canada and Mexico who England knocked out in one of the best games of the World Cup so far.
With 5 UEFA nations (France, Norway, England, Spain, Belgium) already in the Quarter Finals along with 1 CAF (Morocco), the two SAFC nations (Argentina and Colombia) play this evening against Egypt and Switzerland to try and make up the last eight with France quite rightly the bookies favourites to be lifting the trophy and it is hard to see anyone beating them and have been head and shoulders above everyone else over the past few weeks.
England play Norway on Saturday and we can only hope that Erling Haaland has an off day and if we do get past the Norwegians, we are in line to face Argentina and if Messi gets a red card in their Quarter Final, Javier Milei doesn't get on the blower to Infantino.