Got Any Integrity Richard Tice?

When it was revealed that Labour Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Raynor, had bought a Flat which should have been registered as a second home, which meant she should have paid an added £40,000 in tax, Reform's Richard Tice said that Rayner should be sacked for her tax errors and: 'If she has any integrity, she will resign' so a bit award that he has now been revealed he owes HMRC £100,000 plus £30,000 interest for unpaid Corporation Tax.
The error stems from his property investment firm, Quidnet, which he still owns and failed to register to become a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), which meant it paid no Corporation Tax hence the big bill now.
Tax expert said it was: 'A really basic tax mistake and not some deep tax nerd point' and the Tax Policy Associates said that they would expect Richard Tice to know it and if not, his advisers certainly should which does look as if that will come under the HMRC title of 'Carelessness' which carries one of the higher rates of penalties for denying the Chancellor.
Obviously, as Tice is not one to take the blame for anything when he can try and blame someone else, said in his defence it was a all stitch up as: 'The relentless effort to tarnish my good name is the kind of behaviour that deters other successful business people from going into politics. The consequences are very real - as we can all see with the current Labour Cabinet, which is entirely devoid of business experience. The result? A flatlining economy and dire public services. All in a nation facing humiliation on the world stage' which shows that he obviously will not resign from carrying Nigel Farage's bags around and has no integrity himself for owing twice as much as Raynor, who's head he called for for owing half as much.

Undecided On No Hits Tour

The Pet Shop Boys are back on tour but this one is billed as 'No Hits' and they are just playing Album tracks and B sides.
I can't describe myself a big Pet Shop Boys fan, i didn't mind them and even had the first Album 'Actually' but then i guess this isn't aimed at people like me, which is why they are playing smaller venues and is probably just going to attract hard core fans who have the albums and the singles so they will know the songs which is fair although if I went to see a band who i liked, i would expect to hear some of the most well know songs which is why it conflicts me .
Part of me applauds them for doing it and part of me thinks it's the big hits which people want to hear when they shell out to go see a band but then this shouldn't bother me because i wont be queuing up to go see them, but it may set a precedent for other bands who i may well be standing in line for.
I'm still undecided but i'm leaning more towards good luck to them but I hope it doesn't become a thing amongst other bands.

Is the Pope Catholic?

The battle to be the absolute biggest moron in the Trump Government can feel so closely fought but in the end, it’s always Trump himself isn’t it, nobody is going to outdo him for sheer moronicness but the Vice President must have givejn the Orange (probable) Pedo a scare this week when he began questioning the Pope of all people on religion.
Now I have no time for either the Pontiff or the bunch of children in the White House but i did find myself rooting for the man in the funny hat after Trump pictured himself as God and then tried to gaslight mainly his not too bright supporters that he thought it was him dressed as a doctor.
The Pope said a few days later that he was not seeking to debate Donald Trump when he criticised 'tyrants who spend billions on wars in a speech for which the Government who have spent $80bn so far on a war they needlessly started and are despretly hoping comes to an end soon, took offence and pushed forward the man who has been a Catholic for about 10 mins, JD Vance.    
The vice-president said that: 'I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology' for which the Vatican must have asked if they can't talk about matters about theology, than who could? They literally describe themselves as being God’s vicar of Christ on Earth, it's their raison d'être so to speak.
All very concerning for the low watt Catholic Trump supporters in the US who face a choice between supporting their (probable) pedophile they have been supporting or the guy who actively calls himself Gods voice on Earth although it is hard to any sy6mpathy with them having to choose, if they are supporting Trump in the first place than their moral radar is very off centre to start with.
Trumps relationship with Christianity has been long debated, but if a Hell exists then his best bet against eternal damnation is being so radioactively unpleasant that Satan would balk at spending five minutes with him, let alone an eternity.
England has a history of breaking from the Pope when our own sociopath tipped the toys out of his pram when the Pope refused to let him divorce and remarry so maybe it is all a ploy to break with the Church and create their own but with Trump running it you just know like everything he touches, it will be even more of a shitshow and will probably reduce the age of consent down to (checks his entry in the Epstein Files), 13 or something.

Special Guest Blogger: Nat King Cole

Hello, darling. About time i was asked to do this but but no I had to wait behind the woman who was in MASH! Priorities, people.
Anyway. I know the profound injustice of being remembered mostly for The Christmas Song which I recorded on a 98-degree August day, while wearing a woolen jumper and mentally hallucinating chestnuts. Roasting. On an open fire. Bless my heart.
Let’s start at the beginning, being born in Alabama in 1919, son of a preacher, raised on hymns and the firm belief that dancing was probably a sin. My father thought I was going to be a minister.
I started on the organ, played in church, in the school band and later in speakeasies in the King Cole Trio, I named it after myself. Bold? Perhaps but we were a hit. Piano, guitar, bass and me, crooning like a love letter dipped in honey.
And the ladies? Oh, the ladies. If I had a shilling for every time a woman swooned after I sang Mona Lisa, I could’ve bought my own island and declared it a sovereign nation.
Being a Black man with a voice like warm cognac in mid-century America was… complicated. After being spotted by Bing Crosby and signed to Capitol Records, I broke barriers like the first Black person to host a national TV show only to have it cancelled after a year because advertisers weren’t ready because apparently America wasn’t ready for a black man singing love songs to a national audience.
After moving to a house in Los Angeles and days later finding a burning cross on my front lawn and my dog dead from eating poisoned meat and an attempted kidnapping i decided i wasn't ready for America either so I pivoted.
I went big on albums and became the velvet-voiced diplomat of integration with songs such as Unforgettable, When I fall in Love, Smile, . Some folks said I wasn’t Black enough but frankly, I was just a man who liked good suits, fine music, and the occasional martini.
And then the end. Lung cancer. Bit of a buzzkill, really but i knew smoking was bad. I mean, they put a warning on the packs these days in bold, capital letters but back then Cigarettes were practically a fashion accessory. You weren’t a proper singer if you weren’t coughing elegantly between takes.
I died in 1965. Age 45. Too young, really and just when I was getting good at golf.

Strait Open But Aren't They Forgetting Something?

Keir Starmer is in Paris for a meeting about the Strait of Hormuz but Iran appears to have already declared the waterway is 'completely open for the remaining period of the ceasefire' and already the price of a barrel of oil has dropped by 10% .
The blame for the steep rise in the first place falls entirely on the two antagonists America and Israel, but while the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was/is a big problem, i fail to see how the tankers flowing again is going to ease the problem when most of the oil infrastructure is damaged.
Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world's largest LNG facility, took massive damage from an Iranian missile and Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reserve.
All sides targeted each other's energy infrastructure, refineries in Saudi Arabia, Gas fields in UAE, petrochemical plants in Qatar and when one of these facilities are hit, its isn't a quick job to rebuild.
Some of these facilities took a decade to plan and five years to build and if a missile goes through one,  you're looking at a couple of years to get it running again. If the structural damage is severe, and fires tend to do that, you're looking at a complete rebuild.
I am sure that Trump and his fellow infant's will claim victory and hope the whole World has amnesia that the person who caused such global economic upheaval and almost drove it off a cliff was the same person who pointed the car at the cliff in the first place.
Still, making Americans worry about the cost of filling up their cars stops them from thinking their President is a pedophile, which he almost certainly is, so job done there Donny.

Worse Iran Deal Than JCPOA

 
It is pretty obvious to almost everyone that Warmonger and wanted War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu played Donald Trump like a fat Piano with regards to Iran and now Epstein's best pal is desperate to save his own skin by desperately looking for a way to bring and end to it with some sort of deal with Tehran but will it be as good as the one they had, and tore up?
Back in 2015, after 20 months of negotiations, six World powers signed the Iran Nuclear deal, JCPOA.
Under that deal, Iran reduced its enriched uranium stockpile by 98%, capped enrichment at 3.67%, ripped out two thirds of their centrifuges, poured concrete into the core of their plutonium reactor and opened every facility to international inspectors and it worked with The IAEA, Pentagon, US Intelligence all confirming full compliance over a dozen times.
The final compliance report said that 'Iran was transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the deal' and but one country wasn't happy about it, Israel.
Netanyahu flew to Washington and called the JCPOA an 'historic mistake' and then spent the next 3 years ranting about it and waiting for the right low IQ moron to come along, and he did, Donald Trump.
In May 2018 Netanyahu stood up at the Israeli Ministry of Defence and attempted to undermine everything that had been achieved and repeated the same line he had been saying for decades that Iran were only weeks away from a nuclear bomb and eight days later, Trump tore up the JCPOA calling it 'horrible' and 'one-sided and said he’d get something better.
In retaliation, Iran started doing everything that the JCPOA had explicitly banned and then Trump started his first war, in his words 'obliterating' Iran's Nuclear facilities but which turned out to be dropping a few heavy bombs to make some dents in a mountain for which experts said merely put back Iran's nuclear facilities weeks, so not obliterated then or else the Iranian facility builders are the world's best builders.
Then this year, during negotiations, Operation Epic Fury for a myriad of incompetent reasons including Iran was weeks away from making a nuclear bomb, a bomb that the deal which was in place was verifiably stopping from happening so now six weeks into a war only Trump and Netanyahu wanted, the Strait of Hormuz is shut down, oil prices are through the roof, shipping in chaos, fuel prices spiking in every country, thousands dead, Cities reduced to rubble and Trump desperate for a deal to bring it to an end.  
The latest proposals from Iran are a 5 year pause on enrichment, no agreement on centrifuges and Iran refusing to ship out its enriched uranium while what they previously agreed to was, without dropping a single bomb, 15 year enrichment restrictions at 3.67%. 10 year centrifuge limits, 25 years of uranium mine monitoring, 98% of Iran’s stockpile removed, full IAEA inspection access and Iran was complying as confirmed by every international body on earth.
America recently handed Iran a 15 point plan to end the war and Iran replied with a 10 point plan of their own and it is that 10 point plan which Trump said was 'a workable basis on which to negotiate' and the list include the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions on Iran, continued Iranian control over the strait of Hormuz, US military withdrawal from the Middle East, an end to attacks on Iran and its allies, full compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war, the release of frozen Iranian assets and a UN security council resolution making any deal binding.
Obviously negotiations will water some of those down, and the main sticking point seemed to be the 20 year pause on enrichment with Iran offering only 5 but you don't need to be a diplomatic expert to see that what is on offer now is something objectively worse than what went before it , one nuclear expert called it 'a dollar store JCPOA' and still the genocide master in Tel Aviv is doing his best to ruin even that, phoning the criminally inept JD Vance after the just one day of Islamabad talks to make sure the deal stays broken.
The adults in the room now are Pakistan who are offering to host another round of talks before the current ceasefire end on 21st April, a war that was started  to fix the problem Netanyahu and Trump created and the proposed solution is worse than what existed before any of it happened.
As one person said to me 'Maybe Trump asked Melania to make that speech to bring the attention back to the Epstein files and stop people talking about what an absolute shitshow he has made of Iran'.

Special Guest Blogger: Loretta Swit

I went from Loretta Szwed to Swit to Houlihan to Holahan and back to Szwed during my 87 years with each surname summing up my life into neat little parcels of time.
Szwed was when i was had been a high school cheerleader and captain of the girl's basketball team and then when I was employed at a variety of clerical jobs including the secretary to the ambassador from Ghana to the United Nations.
Then i Americanised my name to Swit when i began acting on Broadway before becoming the name most people know me as, Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan in MASH.
I played a strong, complicated, occasionally lipstick-wielding woman in a military hospital during the Korean War who could cry on cue, scream into a P.A. system but of course, being known primarily for screaming CAPTAIN! across a compound isn’t exactly the kind of legacy poets write sonnets about. But hey, Hot Lips! Like I was some sort of exotic cocktail garnish. I wasn’t even particularly hot in those days, my lips were chapped from the wind and my hair was permanently frizzed from humidity and trauma. But sure, call me Hot Lips. I’ll take it. I earned it.
For eleven years, from 1972 to 1983 and for all but 11 of the 256 episodes of the show, I woke up, put on an army uniform that fitted like a sausage casing, memorised dialogue that swung from hilarious to heartbreaking in the span of a commercial break and all in a fake tent in California.
Only Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, William Christopher and myself started and finished the series and every season I was nominated for an Emmy Awards and won two, in 1980 and 1982.
In 1981, I played the role of Christine Cagney in the movie pilot for the television series Cagney & Lacey, but was my contract with MASH meant i wasn't able to play the role in the television series but when MASH ended in 1983 i went from Houlihan to Holahan when i married actor Dennis Holahan, the guy who played Per Johannsen, a Swedish diplomat with an embarrassing injury who became briefly involved with Hot Lips in an episode of MASH.
I did carry on doing TV work and milked the MASH reunions for all it was worth and even wrote a couple of Books but of the main twelve members of the MASH cast, there are now only four left as I bugged out from natural causes which will make the next MASH televised reunion a much quicker show.

Back In The EU (Almost)

Keir Starmer is hinting that Britain could adopt single market rules without MPs’ vote as part of UK-EU reset and i am more than happy with that although i hold my hands up on grounds of hypocrisy as i would be spitting feathers if it was the other way round.
If Donald Trump has been good for one thing (other than protecting pedophiles in the USA), then it is for pushing us back towards our European neighbours and Labour Ministers are planning to fundamentally reshape Britain’s relationship with the European Union, with new legislation that could result in the UK signing up to EU single market rules without a normal parliamentary vote.
It is undeniable that coming out was economic madness as the trade deals around the World we were promised failed to materialise leaving our GDP 4% worse off and Ministers are arguing that the move which is expected to be launched before the Summer recess, will add billions to the UK economy, help temper the cost of the conflict and boost sluggish productivity.
The move is possible under so-called Henry VIII powers, named after the 1539 law that allowed the monarch to rule by decree, which allow ministers to approve laws without full scrutiny from parliament using secondary legislation which enforces laws without needing new Parliamentary acts although it will need to be rubber stamped in Parliament and with a stonking majority of 174, that's just a formality .
Ministers are saying the move will promote trade without breaking the government’s promise to not rejoining the customs union, single market, or returning to freedom of movement which even I find a bit of a stretch but what the hey, the Right Wing numbnuts have been doing enough damage recently so up there's as the saying goes.
'The EU is our largest trading market, almost half of our total trade was with the EU in 2024' explained one Minister, 'We’re all paying a cost of living penalty for all the barriers at the border, so it is sensible to make deals to remove those barriers and undo the damage' which all makes sense but maybe it would be better to re-run the Referendum and get the agreement of the British public but if they have to be sneaky about it, i'm surprisingly okay with that also.

Trumps Not Mad Or Senile, He's Just An Awful Person

After his burst of mad social media tweets recently, the talk is of just how senile or plum crazy Donald Trump is now but i just think he is, and has always been, an odious, awful human being who is so used to getting his own way that he throws a toddlers purple hissy fit if he doesn't get it.
As for the war of his choosing in Iran, it is pretty obvious now that he is having buyers remorse with Israel telling him that by taking out the leadership on Day 1, the Iranians would buckle and he would sweep in and take the oil with a USA friendly Government in place like he did in Venezuela but that didn't go to plan and now he is desperately scratching around declaring America won with nobody actually believing they won anything.  
Amusingly, Trumps own Administration are saying that  he should not be taken literally and does not mean exactly what he is saying meaning even they believe that nothing their President says can be given any credence.
He may be mentally unwell or even senile or suffering Dementia but even his own supporters turned on him recently over the Genocidal 'Wipe Out A Civilisation' and the Trump as God picture which he tried to defend as he thought it was him as a doctor and therefore treating his own supporters as a honking great throng of halfwits.
His skin may be bright Orange but it must have the thickness of single ply Tissue Paper because he takes any slight as a reason to launch a childish broadside at the opponent, which today included the Pope, but none of this is the behaviour of a normal person which means Americans have to be looking towards the 25th Amendment which allows them to remove him if he is unfit for Office.
Personally, leading an insurrection to overthrow Democracy, the criminal charges for fraud, being one of the Planets leading liars and the sex pest tag hanging around his neck was not enough and the Epstein files which has a growing body of evidence that he not only knew about Epstien's pedophile behaviour, but indulged in it also which is why he is desperate to hush it up.
Who America votes for is their own business but i was genuinely staggered by the inability to see that an obviously dreadful man will obviously do dreadful things over and over again which is exactly what we are seeing now but most annoying is that thing which politicians always do once they are safely out of office, say that they never agreed with him and he was terrible which by then is far too late.

After Artemis II, What Next?

They have flown at 17,000 miles per hour, travelled 685,000 miles and spent 10 days in space, a trip that took Nasa’s Artemis II crew the furthest humanity has ever been from the Earth but now that the astronauts are back on Earth, what's next?
For Nasa and for all of humanity in whose name the astronauts said they were travelling, the question is where will this achievement lead?
There is a space race with China to get the first feet on the Moon for 50 years and Nasa hopes to do that with Artemis IV by 2028 but the whole Artemis project has been facing delays are are 5 years behind their original timescale, Artemis III was pencilled in for 2023.
If III succeeds, then comes Artemis IV, which aims to finally put astronauts onto the moon but China is working to a similar schedule, with the hope of getting to the moon by 2030. And it is working fast and has already put landers on the moon, and is due to test the spacecraft later this year, and experts suggest that its timelines could be a little more realistic than the ones offered by Nasa.
Although i refuse to buy into the Nationalism which comes with Space Exploration, inevitably the winner to leave fresh footprints on the Lunar surface will get the glory but various political demands from inside the US and China will require that both get to the moon as quickly as it can.
There have been people who do not share my enthusiasm for Space Travel, asking what's the point of it all but that's to not notice the Earth's faces growing challenges from climate change and resource scarcity to geopolitical instability from which we may well need to escape one day.
Then there are the considerations of asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions or nuclear war, Stephen Hawking warned, 'I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space' and he was a proper brainiac.
Then there are the technological advancements it generates right here on Earth, satellite communications, GPS, weather forecasting, advanced materials, medical imaging, miniaturised electronics in smartphones and laptops.
Finally, the cost is often mentioned but consider this, the projected estimate for the whole Artemis project is $93 billion, the war in Iran costs America $2 billion dollars each day, the 40 day war therefore cost 86% of what it cost to fund the entire Artemis project which should shut up the people who are saying to me the money would be better spent here on Earth because when the money is here, we just spaff it away on missiles and bombs to kill each other with.