How Dare Journalists Report What Politicians Say

Amazes me how the members of the Conservative Party have moved so far to the right that they can comfortably step across to Nigel Farage's Reform Party but step across they do and then unleash their inner Oswald Moseley but some are content to stay where they are and let out things which would have the former MP for Smethwick nodding his approval.  
The Tory Party conference has been overshadowed by the Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, being accused of racism in the press after giving a speech at an off-the-record lunch complaining about visiting parts of Britain where he didn’t see a white face.
His Boss, Kemi Badenoch, tried to brush it away as you couldn't believe anything from journalists which left the only way that this would make her look even more stupid was if there was a recording of Jenrick saying the words himself, which is exactly what they did have, clear as a bell.
Journalists then confronted Oswald Jenrick himself and when he heard the recording, complained that they had cut off the final part where, after complaining about the lack of white faces he explained that he wasn’t making a point about skin colour.
In his weird little mind it was obvious that the media was in the wrong to quote the things that he said and to suggest that when he talked about the colour of people’s skin, he wasn't making a point about race.
So why then, asked one interviewer, if he wasn’t talking about race, had he talked about skin colour?
He blathered something about misrepresenting his comments, those comments he was recorded saying, and blamed the media for making it difficult for politicians and members of the public to address these very issues which made 'these problems worse'.
What issues are these? What problems the journalists probed and after giving it some thought, said  
'Integration' and went on to describe an area of Birmingham which is 25% Pakistani, 23% Indian, 16% black, 10% Bangladeshi, 10%  mixed and 9% white which suggest to most people that quite a lot of integration is going on, just not a lot the white people people like Jenrick obviously approve of.
At least at the Conservative conference, he was unlikely to be confronted with many non-white faces, actually turnout was so far down on previous years that he was lucky to find any faces at all, but undisturbed by the journalists questions about the racist things he said, he strode onto stage and waffled on about how the voice of the people was being drowned out and how he would make sure that the will of the people prevails, assuming he meant some people, certainly not the sort of people you see in 'some parts of Britain' as he called it.
Still, got to love the gullibility of the few members of the audience who bothered to turn up to applaud when he said only the Conservatives could make Britain retain it's soul, pride, and freedom and make Britain’s greatness greater still.
They want us to forget about Boris's Covid parties and Liz Truss economic ineptitude and vote Tory again, go for the full fairy tale and if they get near power ever again it will be a fairy tale, as in pretty Grimm.

Going To Need A Bigger Parasol

Some politicians deal with Climate Change by willfully denying the mounting danger or cheerfully ignoring it but the changing Climate is so big and slow that it sometimes doesn’t seem real but it doesn't mean it isn't happening.  The map at the Center For Environmental Science at the University of Maryland identifies the place with a climate that your city is estimated to have in 60 years’ time and some are facing a climate that is literally out of this world.
Already there is something called a 'Coolcation where instead of heading south for hot weather, more and more Europeans are traveling north, where it’s cooler.
Since 1991, summers across Europe have been getting warmer by about 0.5°C (1°F) per decade, with starkly different outcomes in the north and south of the continent, in North Europe, Summer  temperatures generally hover between 20 and 25°C (68-77°F) while in Southern Europe the summer months are increasingly dry and unbearably hot, with temperatures regularly surpassing 40°C (104°F).
For now, the Scandinavians are benefiting from warmer summers but unfortunately we have been dozy enough to continue polluting our atmosphere so climate change is not stopping so how hot will the summers of the future get?
The University of Maryland Center looks 60 years into the future and predicts the climate of thousands of cities and towns in the 2080s and finding their climate equivalent today.
So in Scandinavia, the Danish Capital of Copenhagen, by 2080 it will be 4.7°C (8.4°F) warmer and on a par with today’s climate in Demigny, Bourgogne-Franche-Comte, France, Stockholm in Sweden would be 5.2°C (9.3°F) warmer or just like Dubosevica in Croatia today, Oslo would be 5.4°C (9.8°F) warmer and most similar to Gerovo in Croatia and the conditions in the Capital of Finland, Helsinki, would be similar to Nagyatad in Hungary by 2080.
The South of England would be 5.2°C (9.3°F) higher with Climate conditions most similar found today in Biscarrosse, the South of France and Edinburgh would be 4.1C warmer just like Basque Country in Spain.
Paris will be 5.8°C (10.5°F) warmer and in 2080 can be found today in Montelupone, Italy, Berlin 5.7°C (10.2°F) warmer and will be like Padulle in Italy, and Ankara in Turkey will be 7.2°C (12.9°F) warmer, similar to Kalaleh in Iran.
Tokyo, Japan is expected to be 4.4°C (8°F) warmer and that climate in 2080 can be found today in Zhangwan, Fujian, China and in Calgary, Canada it is expected to be 7.3°C (13.1°F) warmer that can be found today in South Dakota, United States.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Cromwell

Being friends with Henry VIII could be a double edged sword. I was his most adept henchman and the ruthless engineer of the English king’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, his split from Rome, and the destruction of his second wife, Anne Boleyn.
But as a matchmaker, I turned out to be a dismal failure a shortcoming that would cost me my head.
Henry had married three times but after the death of his third queen, Jane Seymour, I determined a political match was in order to help shore up England’s Protestant alliances in Germany and i settled on Anne, a princess from the duchy of Cleves.
Henry agreed to the match based on the glowing reports of her beauty and grace i gave him as well as a somewhat alluring portrait of the princess i commissioned by the court painter Hans Holbein.
Having successfully set up the political alliance with Cleves, I awaited my master’s romantic response and he eagerly set to to the coast to meet his intended but upon first seeing Anne, he stormed 'I like her not!' which isn't a great start to a marraige but nothing he could do about it without imperiling the vital alliance.
Henry blamed me personally for placing his neck into the yoke and at his wedding speech he said 'if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do this day what I must do this day' but i hoped that his mood might improve after he actually bedded Anne.
Nope, the morning after the wedding night he declared: 'I liked her before not well but now I like her much worse'.
I felt bad for Anne but even worse for me because six months after this Henry had the marriage annulled on the grounds on non-consummation and but I wasn’t so lucky.
I was arrested on a false charge of heresy, and with Henry saying that he was putting to death the most faithful servant he ever had which gave me little comfort as I was then beheaded and impaled on a spike on top London Bridge.

Hegworth's 21st Century Crusade

The US Secretary of Defense, sorry the morons renamed it War so Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War is covered with numerous tattoos and most are dedicated to the Christian faith so he has the Jerusalem Cross on the right side of his body, which consists of a large Christian cross surrounded by four smaller crosses in each quadrant. It is a symbol that dates back to the 13th century, when it was used as a symbol of the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the Crusades.
He has the phrase 'Deus Vult' tattooed on his bicep, which means 'God's will be done', which again comes from the Crusades and was a battle cry for the Christians.
On on his arm is an inked cross with a sword, which symbolizes the Bible verse Matthew 10:34 which reads 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword'.
His forearm has the letters chi and ro, the name of Christ in Greek and then he goes the full mad gun nut with a US flag with a sniper at the bottom of the stars and stripes, a reference to the Second Amendment.
One of Trumps biggest supporters when he farted out the nonsense that was taking a long-term ownership position of Gaza which included handing it over to Israel and ethnically cleansing the area of Palestinians, he is saying that the US is prepared to look at all options for the aftermaths of the genocide committed by Israel but as a Christian who has reaffirmed that the United States remains 100% committed to Israel's security and emphasized the unbreakable bond that exists between the United States and Israel, you do wonder how fair handed he would be.
If he is such a fan of the Crusades where Christians sought to slaughter the Muslims in the Holy lands and expel them while claiming Israel for their God, then i assume he sees this as a 21st Century Crusade.
As someone once said, America is a nice country but could be even nicer if their parents were at home.

Sex And Drugs And Pension Pots

Money. People fight for it, die for it and put it in china pigs but you would need a massive Piggy Bank to hold the £3.1m which is how much it is being advised generation Z need to save in their pension pot to retire comfortably?
To reach this figure a 25-year-old today who wants to go on an annual holiday and the odd UK weekend break after they stop work, and if they live for another 25 years afterwards, will need to find £1,600 a month to squirrel away.
Obviously good luck with that if you’re a nurse, a teacher, policemen or mostly anything actually unless you plan to spend the next 40 years of your working life eating beans from a tin and living in a single room with a candle for warmth and light like a 21st Century Scrooge, none of that having a good time when you have your pension to think about.
The good news is that you can aim a bit lower in your dotage and the analysis found that gen Zs will need £2.2m for a moderate lifestyle and £947,700 for a minimum one and then it went into subjects such as buying an annuity or using drawdown and then i lost the will to live and began nodding off but then things like pension pots have never interested me, i find it all soooooo boring and the sort of things finance nerds go on about but i am 56 now and my pension plan is to win the lottery or find a Van Gogh painting in the back of the garage in the next 11 years.   
To be fair from 0-67 my big plan was to enjoy myself and let the later part of my life take care of itself so i say to Gen Z life is short, enjoy life while you can because you never know what tomorrow brings and if the options are scrimp and save to put £1,600 in your pension plan or blow it on sex and drugs and Rock n roll, the memories of the latter will keep you warm more than that memory of that month a few decades back when you managed to save a bit extra from buying recycled toilet paper.

Kemi Who?

Party conference season and this week is the turn of the Conservatives led by...hang on let me check my notes...Kemi Badenoch.
Kemi kicked it all off with a live interview on the BBC this morning and it was...well, not great.
The BBC kept the strap-line 'Kemi Badenoch: Conservative Party Leader' up all the way through just in case someone turned on the TV and wondered who Laura Kuenssberg was talking to because the Conservatives are sinking faster than a lead balloon with half a dozen house bricks tied to it.
Up first her brilliantly ill thought out plan to deport 150,000 people a year and leaving the European convention on human rights and when asked where they would be deported to, replied that it was irrelevant and went on to asked herself another question and went on to answer that instead and the answer was it didn’t really matter where we sent them. They could go anywhere, as far as she was concerned and only the Tories under her had the credibility and competence to pull it off.
Yes, she said it in all seriousness and to show just how credible and competent she was went on to reply that America and Canada were not signatories to the European Court of Human Rights when she was asked if she really wanted to join Russia and Belarus as the only countries not to be signed up.
Geography not big on the syllabus in her school obviously.
Laura, to her credit, didn't burst out laughing but just politely pointed out that the US and Canada were not in Europe and after a long silence, moved onto other things but you could tell Kemi was deflating and tried to boost herself by exclaiming that 'We can win the next election' and it is true that Kemi has achieved the seemingly impossible, she inherited a Conservative Party straight after its worse poll ratings and lowest amount of Parliamentary seats in its history, and taken them even further backwards.
When the worst defeat ever in your history is the high point in her party’s fortunes, it’s going to be a very long week.

The Ignorance And Hatred Saddens Me

In 2022, Britain rewrote the definition of antisemitism and now defines it as: 'Language or behaviour that displays hatred towards Jews because they are Jews' and that is right, nobody should be displaying hatred towards anyone for their religion and neither for their sexuality, skin colour or gender but after the terror attacks in Manchester where two Jews were killed in Manchester at a Synagogue, it needs to be hammered home that Judaism and Israel are separate things.
I have cringed and corrected people many times when they have failed to separate the two when criticising the countries actions and Israel itself doesn't help when anyone criticising them, automatically scream 'anti-semitism' to try and shut it down which only waters down the shouts when real anti-semitism, like this, happens.
I was talking about this to some friends, two of whom happen to be visibly Muslim, and they agreed that it is right to criticise a nation like Israel for it's actions as we criticise Russia, America or Britain if they did the same and it is not the same as criticizing Jews, nobody went after Christians when George W Bush and Tony Blair were at their warmongering worst and it would have been ridiculous if they had.   
I once had a long discussion on this blog with someone who tried to choke off my criticism of Israel by calling me an anti-Semite during one of the many times when Israel was pounding Gaza and his argument was that by me having a go at Israel, I was also having a go at Jews because they are the only Jewish state.
My counter argument was if that is the criteria then any criticism of England is anti-Church of England because we are the only Church of England nation.
My friends explained that as Muslims, and when ISIS was running rampage through the Middle East, they were constantly being asked if they supported them and to condemn the group and i remember it at the time, almost every Muslim had to explain how they didn't support the terror group, they just happened to share a religion and it is the same thing now for some people, Jews=support Israeli actions, Muslim = support ISIS actions but not once was a Christian asked if they supported British actions in any of our recent wars, wars we instigated.
Please, if your mind does work this way then engage the few braincells that you possess and stop the mindless violence against an innocent population. If you feel that strongly, boycott Israeli goods or join one of the many demonstrations against Israel but don't take out your anger on innocent people who could very well be as disgusted at Israel as you are if you only bothered to ask.

Special Guest Blogger: John Phillips

All the leaves may have been brown and the sky grey but for me the 60s where mostly white, cocaine white.
I was the driving force behind the Mamas & the Papas but before i was writing sunny flower-child anthems with ear-pleasing harmonies and my first stop was focusing all my energy on my successful folk band The Journeymen. Well, not all of my energy…i made sure to save some for the groupies including 17-year-old Holly Michelle Gilliam who i married and now went by the name Michelle Phillips.
I put her into singing lessons and before long, we were making beautiful music together alongside Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty as the Mama & the Papas.
As the Mamas & the Papas produced hit after hit, life was getting messy behind the scenes. Michelle couldn’t keep her hands off our bandmate Denny Doherty and we were both having affairs but the 60s were a time of blurred lines in the name of free love, baby.
Our house was party central with mind-altering substances available on every surface, and in vases and bowls but another one was Roman Polanski's place and i pulled out of one particular to go to the beach and get high instead so missed the massacre, drugs actually saving my life that time.  
The world at large was pretty turbulent in 1969 and so was we as the Mamas & the Papas disbanded, Michelle and I divorced and I was not in a good place.
I had a go at a solo career but that stank so i just took even more drugs but mind-altering substances weren’t cheap and i owed close to a quarter of a million to the tax man so i left the US and moved to the UK and lived just down the street from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones which never helped as they got me addicted to the really hard stuff.
Not surprisingly, all of my hard living was hard on my bodies organs, and my heart and liver teamed up on me and both failed.

What History Tells Us About This Peace Deal

Hamas and Netanyahu, what a couple to be putting your trust in regrading any peace deal but Donald Trump seems to be so keen to get his Peace Award that he is declaring it 'peace in our time' although i would trust either as far as i could throw the 26 stone American President.
Already Netanyahu has said that he will not pull Israeli troops out, will continue to go after Hamas members in Gaza and will not allow a Palestinian State to exist beside Israel, both of which are essential parts of the 20 point plan which Israel have signed up to and Hamas are saying they will accept with amendments.
The word Peace must mean something very different in Hebrew because since the November 2024 ceasefire with Lebanon, Israel has not withdrawn from Southern Lebanon and have killed 123 according to the UN Human Rights Office who are calling for Israel to make more effort to keep to the agreed ceasefire.
Since Donald Trump told Israel to stop bombing Gaza 24 hours ago to give the peace talks a chance, Israel has bombed homes and businesses in Gaza and killed 61. 
Hamas are concerned that once they release all the hostages as per the first of the 20 steps, Israel will just restart the genocide and that is what they do, they have done it so many times before including the last ceasefire when they moved the goalposts and made such demands that when Hamas refused, went back to the original plan of killing as many Palestinians as possible.     
It is obviously good news that we have a ceasefire at all and we can only hope that it lasts and Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace but we have been here so many times before and each time it has fallen down and the cycle begins again but this time we have to make sure both sides stick to their promises, Hamas stop threatening the safety of Israel and Israel stop the ongoing genocide and forcing Palestinians off their own land.
Since the first UN Resolution in 1967 demanding Israel stop the military occupation of Palestine and return to the pre-1967 borders, Israel has continued to forcibly suppress, steal land and murder Palestins so there is as much chance of Israel agreeing to a peace deal as there was of anyone finding salad in Donald Trumps fridge and over time the Palestinians have been forced to progressively narrow their conception of acceptable peace, let alone a fair peace.
History shows that after every peace talks (1967, 1978, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005) Israel has made promises it hasn't kept and have never withdrawn their troops or stopped the military occupation or even considered giving Palestine its own nation, even before the 65,000 deaths in this current war, the grim death toll of Palestinians killed by Israel stood at 134,000 and have been condemned in 45 resolutions by United Nations Human Rights Council, almost more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined.
We can hope that this one holds and Palestine and Israel begin living beside each other in peace but history tells us, Israel won't allow it to happen because they never have.

The Real Financial Fraud Is Much Higher Up

Two men sitting on either side of a table. One has a plate with one cookie on it, and the other has none. In the middle is a man with a mound of cookies leaning towards the man with one and saying:  ‘Careful mate, that foreigner wants your cookie’.
It is a simple drawing and was used at the time of Brexit to show how the right wing were trying to divide us by the rich telling the poor that the problem was the even poorer but it sums up nicely how the very rich are the actual problem.
Benefit cheats and immigrants getting £49 a week are being held up as the problem for the economic woes of the nation but the problem is much higher up which segue's us nicely to bra baroness Michelle Mone who was found guilty this week of providing faulty PPE equipment and having to repay the £122 million she received in contracts through the VIP Lane introduced by the Conservatives during the pandemic.
As thousands of companies bid for contracts to fill the UK’s depleted PPE stockpile, the VIP lane gave high priority to people with political connections and in June 2020 the government were approached by PPE Medpro, a newly formed company, and awards two contracts to supply PPE.
Mone, pictured on her luxury yacht Michelle during the pandemic, emphatically denied that they were involved with the company and said anyone saying they were was 'inaccurate, misleading and defamatory' and 'PPE Medpro was not awarded the contract because of company or personal connections to the UK government or the Conservative party.'
Undeterred, journalists continued to dig and found that it was Mone who introduced PPE Medpro to her fellow Tory peers although she continued to deny it and was based on 'speculation and not based on accuracy”.
The National Crime Agency then became involved and said it was investigating into 'suspected criminal offences committed in the procurement of PPE contracts by PPE Medpro'.
The government sued PPE Medpro for the full £122m it paid for the rejected PPE and after three years of denials, Mone first acknowledged that they were actually involved with the company and after the ruling, Mone admitted that she lied to the press when she repeatedly denied involvement in the company and did so to protect her family from press attention.
The victim card is now being employed full time, saying that the Government has a vendetta against her rather than admitting that she jostled her way into a grotesque cash bonanza and then boasted about helping the nation while profiteering with shoddy, unusable protective Equipment but she isn't the only one, many, many of the Conservative Party friends and family fleeced the country from the rush to get PPE equiment during the pandemic, £10bn spent on wasted unusable PPE, most to companies of donors and firms with financial ties to the Tory Party.
For context that is 204,081,633 immigrants on £49 per day or almost double the total disability benefit fraud in a year which you should remember next time the Government scapegoat immigrants or those on benefits, the real financial fraud comes much higher up the chain and it is them with more cookies than you could ever own.

Special Guest Blogger: Jerry Garcia

I may have looked like Santa Claus but my beatific smile concealed a dark side that not even music, adoration, or an endless supply of acid could erase.
My story begins with two Summer vacations, the first when i was four and helping my older brother chop wood for the fire pit with him swinging the ax and me clearing away the logs, you can guess the rest but i ended the vacation with only 9 fingers.
The following year's vacation i watched my dad get washed away when he slipped whilst fishing and i was sent away to be raised by my grandparents in California and that was where i discovered weed, a little old chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide  and the electric guitar.
I started playing small gigs with a couple of pals with a band we called Grateful Dead at a coffeehouse at the back of a bookstore and it was the the era of free love, and when it came to romantic partners, people were pretty generous.
As the saying goes, if you remember the iconic Woodstock ’69 music festival, then you probably weren’t there. However, if you were there, you’d remember our  disastrous performance.
Heavy rains flooded the stage, causing dangerous electrical issues and outages, which caused huge delays while the band’s sound technician desperately tried to rewire everything as the band members were getting shocked by the wet equipment.
As the 60s ended, so did the vibe of freedom and fun, at least for our keyboardist who drank himself to death one night.
Instead of using it as a wake up call i hit the drugs even harder and got into refined opium which would have me drooling on the microphone and forget where i was during songs to the point where i had to resort to humming but as shambolic as we were, the fans loved us because they were just as whacked out as us, especially the biker gang, the Hell's Angels who came to our shows.
Having a  $700-a-day drug habit ain't cheap and i had to keep gigging as a solo artist to fund it but at some point i decided to go into rehab unfortunately, a funny thing happened on the way to the clinic…
I took a detour along the way and stopped to have a smoke and was stopped the law with an an insane amount of substances in my car.
My housekeeper, of all people, was the one to help me taper off substances, but to say that I was out-of-shape was an understatement and after i  fell into a diabetic coma for five days, i shocked everyone by still being alive.
Back on tour, I made a valiant effort to stay clean, moved to Hawaii, took up scuba diving, became a vegetarian, and even cut back on the cigs and gave rehab another try and it there that I suffered a fatal heart attack in my sleep.

British Slang

English, it is said, is a tough language to learn but what makes it even tougher is the way we use Rhyming slang but even if you master that, you still have so many slang words to wrap your melon around so in view of international relations, i'm going to throw as much of the bloody bollocks into this post as possible so let's  get cracking, shall we?
Cheers always confuses people as it can mean hello, goodbye, thank you, congratulations, have a good one or a toast at the bar with your mates getting bevvied up down the boozer so we won't bugger around with that one but you would be well chuffed if you managed to work it out.
Cheeky snog with the cracking fit bloke or the belter of a bird with the nice baps but get permission first, you don't need the aggro of landing well in it with the Old Bill and getting banged up for sexual assault or something.
When you are in the boozer though you might want to keep your gob shut, especially if it is full of chavs because some of them are real bellends who would follow you to the bog when you go se a man about a dog and not for the bog roll so you might want to clear off pretty sharpish. They will also be the sort of gormless people who do a runner and leg it after the nosh  at restaurants at the end of the evening, the daft gits!
Keir Starmer is currently the the Guv'nor here but already he is starting to look peaky and a bit knackered although he was pretty jammy that the last lot were so awful and he would be gutted to get kicked out so quick nut many people want him to knock it on the head but don't have a Scooby who would replace him, some want Nigel Farage but that would be taking the piss although i think some people just say that as a wind up
There you go then, British slang and with bit of practise, Bob’s your uncle, End of.

Hiya Enceladusians

Whenever i see the name of Saturn's moon 'Enceladus' written down my brain goes 'Enchilada' for some weird reason but  Scientists have been studying water vapour plumes from the one that you can't eat and found the presence of complex molecules that could harbour life.
As it is only 310 miles in diameter and around 4% the mass of our Earth, the gravity there is awful and it averages -198C and is covered in snow several hundred meters thick so not somewhere we could go and live but Scientists are starting to think that something may have beaten us to it anyway because carbon-based substances are being spewed out in those plumes.
The spacecraft Cassini discovered that Enceleadus is teeming with all the Biological raw ingredients needed for life but we are yet to discover if they combined in such a way to start life although it does have hydrothermal vents in its deep, saltwater oceans and that is exactly were we began our long journey billions of years ago from microbial life to me sitting here typing out a blog post about how we came from microbial life billions of years ago.
The Cassini mission ended it's 800 million mile trip in 2017 and scientists have been poring over the data it collected ever since and it may not be little green men waving probes and telling us they come in peace but if we discover that life began elsewhere, and it really is just a matter of time until we do, that would be one of the greatest discoveries of mankind, unless they arrive with massive ray guns and obliterate us in which case, not so much. 

Is Farage A Racist...Well

Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, said of Nigel Farage that he was not one to attack the man but he would rather attack the policies but then seemed to forget that seconds later when he said that Farage was a racist and once flirted with the Hitler youth. Ouch.
The racist thing is obvious, if it quacks like a racist and walks like a racist, it's a racist but the Hitler youth claim was new one and seems to come from a letter from former an English teacher at Dulwich College, the public school attended by Farage in the 1970s, that Farage was not the right person to be a prefect at the college due to a liking of singing and shouting Hitler Youth songs and that he was viewed as a fascist amongt staff members.
Another staff member said he held 'publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views' and in a 2022 interview with a former classmate of Farage, he called how Farage had a thing for the National Front and would run into classrooms and chalk NF on the board.
Another former English master recalled staff being concerned that Nigel had voiced views that were not simply right wing but views that were racist and had a particular hatred of Jews, telling one Jewish by that Hitler was right and would sing send ‘em home and sing gas ‘em all, gas ‘em all, gas them all, to the Jewish children.
To be fair to Lammy, why not play the man and the policies as both are awful and absolutely racist.

Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Reed

I came from relatively normal roots, with no formal acting training, and became one of the most highly recognized British actors of his time and for being a hellraiser.
My childhood was nothing out of the ordinary though my early years might have been mundane, at the age of nine, my life was forever altered when i was sent to boarding school, the first of 14 schools i was expelled from for being a thug so i was ideal for the Army where i met a few actors and thought that looks easy so decided to give acting a try and my break was playing Richard of Gloucester in the six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur.
It was then that i made a drunken promise to a stranger in a bar that i would buy him a house in Scotland once i became famous.
I was then was cast in the Hammer horror film The Curse of the Werewolf which lead to greater success in my acting career and with women.
Pretty soon i had a slew of celebrity lads to go drinking with like Keith Moon and Robert Newman, one time i met up with American movie star Steve McQueen and we went on on a marathon pub crawl.
I got a role in The Three Musketeers as Athos, and got stabbed accidentally in the throat and was centimeters away from dying but i was now a household name in British films and hit the big time as Bill Sykes in Oliver.
I also made good on that drunken promise and bought that bar-room stranger a property in Scotland. When i was was 42 i dated a 16 year old, she was 26 years younger than me! Back of the net, and I was now famous enough to turn down roles such as The Sting and Jaws as i didn't fancy travelling all the way to America to film them.
As my reputation for drinking and brawling grew, my film career began floundering and was getting cast less and less and I ended up spending lots of his time doing TV show appearances and TV producers soon realized that getting me tipsy was a surefire method of prime entertainment and i often arrived plastered or on some occasions, pretending to be plastered to play up to my bad boy image but it did cost me the role of James Bond and they cast Sean Connery instead because I was  too far from the Bond image at that point.
In one TV interview, i said i wanted to go by overdrinking, 'in a bar of a heart attack'  which turned out to be eerily correct.
It was no surprise that my health deteriorated as i got older, especially with my heavy drinking. In December 1987, by now overweight and dealing with gout, I became extremely sick with kidney issues as a result of my alcoholism.
At the age of 60, i landed a role as an elderly trainer named Proximo in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator but i never got on with Russel Crowe and challenged him to a fight and i took a break and ended up in a bar challenging some sailors to a drinking contest.
I fell ill during the drinking competition and collapsed on the floor and was quickly rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately it was too late, dead in a bar from a heart attack.

A Guide To Surviving Nuclear Armageddon

When i was a youngster during the Cold War in the 1980's, we all feared the bomb and then in 1989 it all ended and climate change then became everyone's favourite existential crisis but now with Russia making threats about using it's nuclear arsenal, India and Pakistan a tinderbox, North Korea handing out threats like sweeties and Israel going the full genocide, Nuclear Armageddon is back.
Of the 9 nuclear bomb owning nations, 2 (Russia and Israel) are fighting a war as you read this, 2 (India and Pakistan) have just finished one between themselves and 2 (China and North Korea) are shaking their fists at neighbours while America is currently being run by a total moron who asked an advisor why, if they had them, why can’t they use them.
World War 3 then could come from any of these and it was only as few months ago that nuclear armed Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites in pre-emptive self defence (since 2007 Israel has said that Iran were mere weeks away from their own nuclear weapons) in order to achieve peace, whilst dropping  more bombs than were dropped on London in WW2 on a captive population and starving a population to death while executing 100s of people who line up for the tiny amount of aid they let in.
So if nuclear Armageddon is back on the table, how does one survive a nuclear explosion?
Luckily, we got told this back in the day so let me dust off the parts of my memory from the 80's and see what i can recall.
First, if you see a nuclear explosion don't look at it as it will burn your eyeballs out. The good news is if you can see the explosion then you are far enough away not to be vapourised and die immediately.
Second, don't stand their congratulating yourself too long because next is the shockwave and you only have a few seconds to lay on the ground and close your eyes and open your mouth so your eardrums, lungs and other bits don't burst from the air pressure.
Congratulations, you have not been vapourised and the shockwave didn't get you so next it is to either find a fallout shelter or the next best thing, get yourself underground to avoid the nuclear fallout which will soon be raining down on you and don't be swayed by the films and comics that a generous dose of radiation was a guarantee that you’d gain superpowers. A slow, painful death is much less exciting than being able to crawl up walls or turn into the Hulk but so try and grab some warm clothes and some snacks because you may be down there for a while.
If you see some cockroaches in your hole then that's a good sign, i distinctly remember being told those critters could survive a nuclear explosion.
After about 2 months the radiation should have cleared enough to clamber back to the surface but then your next action is to get as far as possible away to find cleaner, breathable air and avoid people who didn't read this post and are by now forming mobs of radioactive mutants.
The good news is that if you follow my advice, you will survive.
The bad news is that so will the very people who started the nuclear war in the first place because they will be the safest people on the planet when the Plutonium hits the fan but at least the following nuclear winter will balance out the increasingly warming climate so silver linings and all that.

The Gaza Peace Plan

So we have a 20 point Peace Plan which Israel and most of the Middle East nations have agreed to and Hamas are studying but we have been here so many times before and it all sadly ends up the same way.
On the one side you have a terrorist group who massacred over 1500 people in 2023 and on the other a Government wanted for war crimes and committing a genocide so there are no good guys here and i would trust both as far as i could throw a piano which is why i am pessimistic unless the 20 point plan comes with some hard rules because we don't want to be back here again in a year.
The plan supposedly ends with a total withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and a Palestinian state but Benjamin Netanyahu has already stated he will oppose both of these and Israeli troops will stay occupying Gaza and no Palestinians State so that's not a great start.
The usual Israeli tactics when a peace plan is reached is to suddenly move the goalposts, make demands that it knows cannot be kept and then return to the slaughter and occupation, it is a well trod road and exactly what they did only a few months ago when just before the second phase of the agreement when the hostages would be released in small groups, Israel demanding that Hamas release all the remaining hostages first which allowed Netanyahu to say that Hamas were in violation and started dropping the bombs again.   
I fully expect Israel to do it again and it has already started with Netanyahu's statements which is why the Palestinians need tougher back up so they can't.
I am no fan of Tony Blair but his Palestinians Panel may make sure that both sides keep to the deal they agreed to and make it tougher for Israel to renege on as well as pursue a legitimate Government for the Palestinians but what may be needed is a UN Peace Keeping force to stand between the two.
This would stop Hamas from rearming and firing rockets and also stop Israel from making military incursions into Palestine because that is where it always go wrong.
Israel has militarily occupied Palestine for over 75 years, murdering the civilians and stealing their land to build settlements upon and that is why we cannot return to that because that is the awful status quo but we have to go past that and make sure their is a viable Palestinian nation at the end of it.
The full details of the 20 points have not yet been released and there may be some sticking points but i think that the way Netanyahu agreed to it almost immediately means one of two things, either he hopes Hamas reject it so to give him cover to continue the genocide or, and Israel have a long history of form in this, he has absolutely no plan to stick to it and will be busy thinking of ways to sabotage it and blame the Palestinians for it.

Special Guest Blogger: John Candy

Someone said Life is life a box of chocolates and that is very true, neither last long if you are morbidly obese and i struggled with the weight of my success as well as my literal weight.
My father was a large man and died of a heart attack aged only 35 so i tried to keep fit and was a pretty decent football player but a knee injury wrecked any chance of a career so I got into acting while attending university in the Toronto chapter of an improvisational comedy troupe and we started up the hit sketch television series, Second City Television (SCTV).
People seemed to like that in the land of maple syrup and bacon and got me noticed in Hollywood and i got a small role in The Blues Brothers  but my big break came with 1981’s Stripes. this introduction to real Hollywood filmmaking, however, was almost more than my already overloaded heart could handle.
Most comedians in my position became obsessed with women, substances, and the hard partying lifestyle but i was happily married and had no interest in the hard stuff at that time and starred in some of the most successful comedies of the 80s and 90s although i missed out on Ghostbusters, i did get to star in the music video for Ray Parker Jr's hit single 'Ghostbusters' to help promote the soundtrack for the film.
Unfortunately, i then discovered an interest for the hard stuff and took to drink and drugs and my weight was ballooning and was living life in the fast lane but the death of my friend  John Belushi from an overdose slowed me down but the damage, sadly, was already done as i just couldn't get the weight off due to a pastry addiction and tipped the scales at 300 lbs.
To be fair, discipline was never in my genes but heart disease was and my heart finally gave out.

MMR Vaccine Nonsense

While making his ridiculous and unsubstantiated statement on pregnant women taking Paracetomal during pregnancy, he also claimed that there was a link between the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
I remember speaking about this way back when it was a thing over here and i have dug out the details from back then and since then (2000ish), it has become even more clear that it is nonsense.
The link between childhood vaccines and autism first gained mainstream attention after a paper by British doctor Andrew Wakefield was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1998 but it was discovered that Wakefield was found to have financial conflicts of interest including that some of his test patients connected with a lawsuit against vaccine companies and the UK's General Medical Council (GMC) found that he falsified his results. The research paper was retracted and Wakefield was struck off the medical register in 2010.
Multiple studies since have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, a study from Denmark in 2019 looked at 1.4 million children and concluded that their was no link between childhood vaccines and autism.
One ingredient in vaccines, Aluminium, was targeted by weird anti-vaxxers as the cause of autism but the childhood vaccines contained 4.4mg which is less than breast milk (7mg), Formula milk (38mg), and even a slice of cheese (50mg) so that idea quickly fell flat.
Studies show that the genetic and environmental factors such as air pollution and exposure to pesticides are the largest driver of autism along with older parents, injury during birth and viral infection whilst pregnant.
The British Medical Journal explain that autism tends to emerge around the same time children receive the vaccines, around age 2-3 and the UK Government have dismissed any link between vaccines and autism, saying there is 'no evidence' and the CDC in America has said: 'President Trump produced no evidence that the current immunisation schedule in the States was harmful and no evidence that giving the combined MMR vaccine was unsafe' and then showed a graph that shows MMR vaccines in USA have dropped from the 95% threshold needed to prevent transmission of measles virus to between 89% and 92% and blamed that for the US seeing the highest cases for measles in more than three decades, resulting in three deaths.
The GMC added that: The authors of the withdrawn (Andrew Wakefield) paper clearly stated that they had not proven a link but suggested more research should be done. That research has been done, and no evidence of a link has been found'.
As conclusive as it could be from professionals and you would have to be window shakily stupid to dismiss their advice that the overwhelming scientific evidence is that the MMR vaccination is a massive plus for health and is safe for our children and listen to someone who said of a possible cure for during Covid: 'I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?'
Yeah, he's the one to listen to obviously.

Dont Bother Reading If You're Over 28

I don't want to come across as Cheugy so i was amped ASL when i was asked to write a post on Gen Z speak so i asked a bunch of Gen Z's to make a post which wasn't basic.
At first they thought i was Cray Cray to even attempt it, hard to make a Beige flag post about their slang Bussin' but IYKYK, and they certainly did.
Obviously being youngsters, we had to do it in the afternoon due to bed rot and they promised to Keep it 100 although NGL, they could cap all the way through and i wouldn't know any different, it's what i would do at their age.
We met up at the cafe in the local park which suited them because it gave them a reason to touch grass for a change me because it meant we could take in flavoured air as we spoke and i'm a bit of a Granola anyway so when i arrived i knew who to look for as most were highlighter kids so i got the coffees in because being students, none were Hella Skrilla.
So now we were all finna to spill the tea on this new language and it was all bussin' and i was filling up my notepad with Gen Z speak and as most of them were G's, it was a very friendly and rewarding meeting and after around 30 mins they began saying they had to dip but by then i had plenty to got through while i ate my girls dinner on the way back to work.
Gen Z does have a bit of a reputation for being a bit Salty but i found this group to be totes on fleck, a few were there with their boos and some i had known for a while and some of the boys i knew a while ago and were Big Backs then, are now Looksmaxxing and good for them.
After making sure nobody needed a swoop, i bought my scribble back to my desk and texted it to one guy who i thought was showing small dick energy at the time and i deliberately picked out to be my contact as a bit of a confidence boost and at first i thought he was going to leave me on read but finally he got back and said he made a few changes but otherwise it was dub.
So i am stoked to say here it is, a smol post courtesy of my new sick friends in the park and i am not Delulu enough to think they haven't inserted a few Fan Service words, as i said earlier it is exactly what i would have done at their age so i won't have a Menty b if they have, no ick from me for that.
Now that this is done i am off to ask my friend if she wants to go out and find a snack with me, that waiter at the cafe was totes above Mid, Periodt!!!

Thank you guys and if you ever need some 80's words translated, i'm your bird.

Unconvinced About ID Cards

ID Cards are back and i was initially against them when Tony Blair first mentioned introducing them in a fight against terrorism, this time they are being repackaged as a necessary part of the fight against illegal immigrants.
Despite being told by various members of Keir Starmer's Government how they will actually stop immigrants working, i still don't really understand how because if you are here illegally, you are hardly going to be filling out application forms for 'proper' jobs and will surly be heading towards cash in hand work where no details are required to earn your wage.
We already have information that proves who we are, every British National is issued with a National Insurance number when we hit 16 and if you come to the country, you are given a National Insurance number which begins with the letter 'S' so that's you pointed out that you are not British when it is asked for.
The issue is that a National Insurance number is only checked by employers to make sure you are who you say you are and i could easily give someone else's Number and their name, i would still get paid and why would I worry about National Insurance contributions, i'm not going to retire here anyway.   
That makes sense and currently if we have to prove who we are we need lots of forms of identification such as passport, driving license and utility bills so having one card which verifies all that is quite smart but i forsee many problems, hacking is one of them because if someone gets all that information in one go...basically your knackered.
My other concern is the good old slippery slope and what that could be used for by future more nefarious governments and suddenly we have a scheme with the most basic of information held to absolutely everything held such as medical records, affiliations, political memberships and all sorts of data that once all put together, could be a minefield.  
I therefore file the idea of ID cards under the file marked 'Unconvinced' but then it doesn't matter because as Blair found out, it has absolutely as much chance of getting through the Commons and the House of Lords as i have of ever saying anything nice about Nigel Farage's weird lopsided face. 

Israel Further Isolated

Finally and shamefully much too late, the World is turning against Israel as the Eurovision Song Contest look as though they will be asking Israel not to bother turning up this year and UEFA are taking a vote on whether to kick the National side out of the World Cup and ban their team representatives from the European Cups.
Generally i am not in favour of mixing Sport and Politics but that ship sailed when Russia and Belarus where removed from sporting and Entertainment events so if Russia are out then so should be Israel for their ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The news i am hearing is that with 20 nations voting on the UEFA Committee, and it only needing a simple majority and the 11 required will be easily surpassed so finally some consequences for the evil they are doing.
This follows many nations walking out of the United Nations chamber when Benjamin Netanyahu rolled up to the podium amidst boos where he is only protected by the lickspillte American Government who bizarrely seem okay with his actions which has resulted in at least 65,000 deaths, amazing how much support spending billions on American weapons to drop on schools and hospitals will get you.
The plane taking the mass murderer to New York even had to divert around Europe in fear that it would be forced down and Netanyahu arrested by a European nation, what with his Arrest Warrant against his blackened name for war crimes.
Israel is becoming more and more isolated as Greta Thunberg's Relief Flotilla of 50 vessels bears down on Israel and have already come under Israeli drone attack as ridiculously the Israeli Minister said it was  supporting Hamas but at least they didn't reach for that cliched trope that it was antisemitic.
Oh Hang on,  they did with Zionist Media outlet, Arutz Shultz, saying Greta's flotilla was antisemitic and working to delegitimise the State of Israel for which the brilliant Greta replied that: 'It is not antisemitic to say that we should not be bombing people, that one should not be living in occupation'. Go Girl!!!
Israel is fast becoming the South Africa of the modern age and like the Apartheid regime, are facing international boycotts in sports, culture, and education and Worldwide protests and amazingly, South Africa's biggest supporter at the time was, guess who, America who vetoed UN sanctions and continued to sell them arms to tyrant PW Botha and even provided the information that led to Nelson's Mandela's arrest.
The America leadership it seems, is on the wrong side of history...again.

Brilliant English Ladies

I don't know the first thing about rugby but i was there at Twickenham today with 81,000 others, cheering the Red Roses against the Canadians and taking my cue from people who know more than me and cheering when everyone else cheered and thoroughly enjoying it.
First our ladies won the European Football Championship and now the Rugby ladies have picked up the (Rugby) ball and dropped it behind the line to bring home the World Cup and next week starts the Women's Cricket World Cup so we could yet make it a hat trick.
Much has been made about the morons hanging England flags from lampposts to show their patriotism (in truth it is to intimidate anyone not white English whatever they grunt monosyllabically about it) but it is moments like this which should be held up as what makes us proud and not just the team but the crowd.
I do notice when i go to watch Ladies sports, the atmosphere is just nicer and more sporting, no booing of the Canadian national anthem, no crude hand gestures or screams whenever a player comes to the side and is within earshot of the baying crowd.  
Just another reason to my logic that men should be sidelined and women should run everything, just think how much nicer everything would be but anyway, brilliant stuff ladies, it is people like you who make us proud to be English.

Special Guest Blogger: Dimebag Darrell

I never started out as Dimebag Darrell, i was Diamond Darrell at the beginning which wasn't such a fitting name for the lead guitar of hard rock band Pantera.
It all began for me on my 12th birthday when i got given a Les Paul-style Hondo guitar along with a Pignose amplifier which sparked a lifelong love affair with the guitar, marking the beginning of my journey to becoming one of metal's most revered guitarists or it did once i learnt how to play the thing.
I got given a guitar but i really wanted to be a drummer like my brother but he wouldn't share them with me so in true rock style, i taught myself and got so good that i began entering competitions  and at just 14 i won a guitar contest and my mum was so proud, especially as she had to come with me because i was too young to enter the club alone and she had to accompany me.
In 1981, my brother asked me to join a rock band he was making up called Pantera with his high school buddies but they were not convinced, considering me a little skinny, scrawny kid who was not heavy enough to rock with them but onced they heard me play, they were happy to have me.
Megadeth did come and ask me if i wanted to join them but i turned them down as Pantera was on the verge of good things.
Our first Album was pretty ok, it was in the style of Kiss or one of those other 80s hair groups so i said we need to go heavier which we did and we got a new singer and the second album was better but i thought we could go even heavier which we did in our next release which critics said pushed the boundaries of Heavy Metal and this newfound fame required a newfound name to go with the heavier sound so i went with Dimebag.
So we made another album and critics hailed it as the heaviest album ever to top the charts, solidifying our place in metal history but now the downfall and the amazing death sequence.
Our lead singer, Phil Anselmo,  took to heavy drinking, pills, and eventually smack, at one point he overdosed and was clinically dead for 4 minutes and the band began to break up so we split and my brother and i made up a new band, Damageplan, although some Pantera fans, and one in particular, were not impressed.
At a concert one fan stormed the stage and caused $1,800 worth of damage but we were rockers and took it in our stride but a few months later in Columbus, Ohio, the same fan ran onto the stage, shouted 'This is for breaking up Pantera' and shot me four times which beats dying in a plane crash or overdosing in a dingy hotel room although the absolute worst thing was at my funeral when it was divulged that i was a huge fan of Nickelback.

A Post By A Climate Change Denier

I do bang on about climate change a lot so in the interests of fairness, i am handing over this blog post to Donald, a 79 year old retired businessman and climate change denier who thinks the whole thing is a load of nonsense.

hello freedom fans, donald here.

the hate media is claiming that we brave climate deniers are no longer talking about climate change because there is so called 'clear and irrefutable evidence' that the climate is changing but i'm proud to say that I tend not to focus on those things.


the sad reality is that people believe lies and are not ready to hear the truth about how climate change is caused by solar storms and volcanoes. also magnets, trans people and immigrants. we all know climate change is a HOAX but sadly people refuse to pay attention, they are even distracted by the weather so we need to stop them focusing on huge storms, floods, fires and droughts that inexplicably keep happening when they should be worried about the global climate SCAM.

the climate change HOAXERS have been so successful in bringing their claims to the worlds attention that i have had to change my own courageous crusade of climate change skepticism which started off as Climate Change is not real through even if Climate Change is real its a natural phenonomum phumnomenum thing and we can't solve it anyway.

our real enemy people are renewables. we have windmills that kill birds and whales and everyone loves birds and whales and Solar Power which doesn't even work at night so that's you stuffed if you want to watch TV in the evening in britain when it gets dark at 3pm but while there are people like me willing to ignore all the scientific evidence, fortunately there is still hope that we can still save the Earth from the people trying to save it.

science doesn’t know everything you know. i mean, what is science anyway? only a rigorously tested, peer-reviewed, continually evolving system of knowledge about the way our world works, built up over centuries,that’s all. it’s not a patch on mindless conspiracy theories and ignorance which has been around far, far longer.

i leave you with this to ponder on, What if it's all a big hoax, and we go through all this bother to just create a better World for nothing? Think on that while you are shovelling dead birds away from your windmill.

all the best and thank you for your attention to this matter

donald

Special Guest Blogger: Adrian Carton de Wiart

People called me the 'the unkillable soldier' but as we know, no soldier is unkillable but i was certainly hard to kill as my record includes being shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear and a couple of plane crashes, an escape from a POW camp and a self-inflicted amputation but i will give you the short version.
Born in Belgium, I was sent to England to learn a proper British education and was preparing for a career in law but that was interrupted by the Second Boer Conflict and the British Army needed boots on the ground so i volunteered and got the first of my bullet holes, one in the stomach and one in the groin.
These injuries didn’t slow me down though and luckily for me the start of the century was a great time for the British Army and then 1914 happened and a return to duty and another bullet wound, this time, during an attack on an enemy fort in Somaliland, i got shot in the ear and face and lost my left eye.
It did get me a natty eyepatch and moved out of Africa and into Europe though and that's where the real action was and at Ypres my hand got shattered by a German shell and in the medical tent the doctor refused to amputate my fingers so i tore them off myself although my self amputation skills were not up to snuff and i got sent back to England to have my whole hand amputated properly.
After recovering from my latest round of injuries, I managed to convince a medical board that, even without a left eye and left hand, I was fit for service and went on to lead the charge at the Battle of the Somme where i got shot in the back of the head.
Once again sent home to recover, I survived to get shot again, this time in the hip, one in leg and another through my ear at Arras so i was getting quite a metal collection back home.
I was sent to Poland in a diplomatic role but still managed to crash a plane and get captured by Lithuanian forces and on release by them i spent the next 15 years living on an Estate in relative peace until Soviet forces invaded and by then WW2 was kicking off.
Despite now being 60, I came out of retirement and returned to service as the head of the British-Yugoslavian Mission and traveled to Cairo to begin negotiations. As per usual, however, I had to add some drama to this adventures and en route, my plane crashed into the sea off the coast of Italian-controlled Libya and I managed to swim ashore only to wind up in the hands of the enemy Italian authorities.
Held as a POW, I tried to escape numerous times and i thought my goose was cooked when they took me to Rome but it was to return to England with a message of a proposed peace treaty.
I ended my time living in China but not before yet yet another plane that fell out of the sky from which i walked away from but in the end i had tempted fate one too many times and bullets and plane crashed couldn't kill me but a flight of stairs almost did, slipping on coconut mat and breaking several vertebrae so i took to living in Ireland until my last days which rather boringly, was a plain old heart attack.

Trump's Day

Now Donald Trump is a large man, he is the third fattest President in the history of the United States of America, and the rotund sex pest began yesterday pin-ponting the blame for autism on women taking Paracetamol when pregnant although experts can't agree what causes it, Trump and his cohorts of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists seem to know more than the people with qualifications and experience in it, so who are we to argue.
It could be pointed out that during his first term and the Covid Pandemic, Trump's Medical advice was to suggest people drink disinfectant and led America to the top of the grimmest of league tables with 1.6m deaths or 17% of all 6m deaths around the entire World so he may not be far enough up the Medical chain to know what he is talking about.
After that he turned up the United Nations and broke the escalator and the teleprompter stopped working. Now i'm no Escaltor technician but we can see on the video that it was working perfectly find until he stepped on it, then it stopped. I do know that escalators have a maximum weight capacity and it is a safety feature that they stop when that maximum is exceeded and as i said at the start, Trump is a very, very fat man and 25 stone of President suddenly balancing on a escalator step is enough to make it scream 'EMERGENCY, TOO MUCH WEIGHT ' and turn itself off.
When he finally managed to drag himself to the podium, he went on an unhinged rant for 60 minutes about everything from Climate Change to Immigrants to Palestine which was met with a stony silence from the gathered diplomats and the deafening sound of millions of MAGA hats hitting the bin with a 'He's nothing to do with me' shrug from his rapidly dwindling bag of deplorable supporters.   
He even had a pop at the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, for wanting to introduce Sharia Law and repeating how he didn't invite Khan to the Banquet at Windsor Castle last week for which Sadiq Khan said he asked not to be invited which is fair enough, imagine if you got in the way of the buffet table when Trump had smelt the sausage rolls, you would be lucky not to be trampled and spend 6 months in traction.  
He ended the day by signing an order which banned Antifa which now means that you cannot call out fascism in America which might come in very handy for the bunch of fascists running the country.
All in all a busy day for the Tangerine coloured Tyrant  and he must have slept well last night in the hope that one of these things had to gain traction and take the spotlight off his own sexual assaults and close friendship with a notorious pedophile who's files, which apparently contains Trump's name multiple times, he is refusing to release.  

Special Guest Blogger: African God Dubiaku

Burdened with eleven sons, my overworked mother couldn’t cope and asked the Gods for assistance. To solve the problem they helpfully sent Death.
When my mother said: “Dearest son, I’m going out tonight, but nice Mrs Death is coming to babysit”, no-one could blame him for being slightly suspicious. That evening, Mrs Death turned up with eleven of her own children, making it a kind of double babysit.
I was on my worst behavior. staying up way past bedtime, chewing tobacco, taking snuff and demanding snacks until Mrs Death didn’t know if she was coming or going. She decided to go outside and bang her head against a tree. Meanwhile I got busy...
Ten minutes later Mrs Death returned to the nursery with a sore head and a renewed sense of purpose. She ate the eleven children as she had been asked, and went to kiss her own children goodnight.
Too late she discovered that I had tinkered with the sleeping arrangements and sneaked his brothers out the back where they were hiding in a tree. Mrs Death had just eaten her own children. Cue bad attack of indigestion.
Screeching with rage, she dashed outside to find the missing kiddies. As she stood under a tree scratching her head, I peed on her head which she didn't take very well, and how did i know she knew a Falling Down Dead Spell.
All the boys fell out of the tree, except for me who had already jumped to escape the spell. Mrs Death climbed the tree to make sure she hadn’t missed anyone, and I turned the tables by repeating the Falling Down Dead Spell and Mrs Death fell dead.
By one of those quirks of fate with which mythology abounds, the tree happened to be on the banks of the Water-of-Life river. So I splashed my siblings with handfuls of water to restore them to life but accidentally allowed a drop or two to splash onto Mrs Death, who sprang up and chased us all. But the boys leapt into the river and swam to safety, all except little old me who couldn’t swim.
In a terrible rage, Mrs Death began throwing stones at the escapees. She picked up a particularly large one and hurled it towards the opposite bank. But it wasn’t really a stone, it was a cunningly disguised me so we all escaped and Mrs Death trudged home in a foul mood.

Recognising A Palestinian State

Finally, the UK, Portugal, Canada and Australia recognised the state of Palestine today ahead of a conference of the UN general assembly in New York where other nations are expected to join the recognition, including France, making over 150 countries, to have recognised Palestine by the end of next week,
In his announcement, Keir Starmer said that the announcement shows government’s hopes for a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestine although predictably, the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own party rejects there ever being a Palestinian State, says recognition is a prize for terrorism although for most decent people it is a response to over 70 years of military occupation and genocide against the Palestinians as the abhorrent death toll from the war on Gaza continues to rise and conditions for the people trapped there become even more desperate.
The move comes after the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948 and the formation of the state of Israel which as any history buff will explain, came about as reward for their own terrorism.
The Irgun was a body of Zionist Jews who actively sought to establish a Jewish state and through assassinations, bombing British hotels, markets, police stations and Embassy's, posting letter bombs and kidnappings as well as massacring entire Palestinian villages, forced Britain to withdraw from Palestine and give up its mandate to pass the problem to the United Nations who partitioned Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.
So if Israel is condemning the formation of a Palestinians state as a 'reward for Hamas' and their terrorist acts, they must know that Israel therefore came about as a 'reward' for their own terrorism or maybe, just like the genocide they are committing, it is different if they are the ones doing it.
What the UN can do about, especially as it is the United States complicit in facilitating and dismissing the war crimes, is another thing but as one Labour MP said, we have placed ourselves on the right side of history and although this recognition alone won’t change the lives of Palestinians, it is a timely and necessary riposte to an authoritarian Israeli government that has increasingly made Israel a pariah state.

Special Guest Blogger: Xerxes I

I am probably most well known for fighting the Greeks, they made quite a decent film about me.
Back then, life was hard, even for a prince and my name in Iranian meant 'ruling over heroes' so that's a title to live up to.
Raised by eunuchs and powerful Zoroastrian religious figures, my upbringing was intense and at the age of seven I was learning to ride horses and hunt game to make me battle-ready because when i was 16, all Princes has to serve 25 long years of national service learning archery and spear throwing but handily my sudden ascension to the throne aged 20 cut this short.
My fathers favourite past-time was declaring war on Greece for which he taxed his citizens heavilly but it was marching to a scrap with Egypt that he died leaving me in charge but the king needed a queen and i had a sweet Cousin and we was wed and we were ready to rule our vast empire.
The issue with our empire was it was too vast and encompassed many different religious groups who would get a bit uppity sometimes but going in and destroying all their religious temples and statues soon put out their fire.
Being a ruthless leader and sending in troops all over soon depleted my army so the next fight with the Greeks was postponed for 4 years while i built up my army and charted a course and literally moved heaven and earth to smooth the journey to Greecewell, the earth part, at least as i oversaw the digging of the Xerxes Canal through the Mount Athos peninsula, had provisions brought ahead and stored along the route, and built two bridges across the Hellespont Strait in preparation. Two because the first one collapsed so i had the Strait whipped 300 times and the strait learnt its lesson as the second attempt at the bridge was successful.
The stage was set so I personally led his army across the Hellespont into Europe and won a battle at Artemisium and many Greeks offering support to side with us and when i arrived at Thermopylae to face the Spartans we numbered 1 million men.
Laughably we faced 300 men led by King Leonidas and obviously we slaughtered them and capture Athens which we promptly burnt to the ground.
It was now that i perhaps got a bit cocky because with most of the land conquered, i went after the Greek fleet and should have waited until the storm passed by told them to attack anyway and the Greek fleet, with something of a home advantage in the poor conditions, trounced us so i ran away with what was left of my army and went home and built magnificent structures instead and having affairs.
By August of 465 BC, I was no more, betrayed by one of my own bodyguards.

News From The Weather Channel

I'm not sure what to make of it but in a YouGov survey of American Adults who were asked who they most trusted to get their news from, the top choice was The Weather Channel. Our very own BBC was second amongst Americans and then PBS made the top three.
As important as it is to know if you need an umbrella, not sure how a Channel that gives you Weather Information can be the most trusted for giving out News unless they have a Current Affairs program between the Weather reports but all the plaudits go to them and i will accept them on behalf of the BBC, whose turn is it to get the cakes in?  
I guess we could tell our BBC Weather people to up their game but the YouGov Poll does have a lot more to unpack so leaving my Blueberry Muffin on the side for a minute, let's delve into it.   
The poll shows 56% of Americans go actively seeking news and that most Americans get it from Social Media (Facebook and Youtube mostly), Television (BBC, PBS) and friends and Families (Uncle George and Cousin Bob).  
In the UK, YouGov found that the most trusted Broadcast Journalists were at the BBC and then ITV and Channel 4 News with the least trusted at GB News and Channel 5 with the most trusted Press Journalists could be found at The Financial Times, The Guardian and then The Times.
Sadly, for the Journalists at the Daily Star and The Sun, the British public believe what you write about as much as they trust you to find your own arse with both your hands and a mirror.
Now, where did i put that Muffin.

Special Guest Blogger: Jack Wild

Like many child actors, I developing unhealthy habits early on in life, i was smoking 20 a day by aged 12.
My mum was a theatrical agent and she got me and my brother into the Barbara Speake Stage School where we got put into a production based on Oliver Twist and when the role came up in the film production, I auditioned for the role of Oliver but got offered the Artful Dodger instead.
Following the release of Oliver!, i got offered TV roles  but due to my youthful face and short stature, i kept getting offered to play young boys so i packed in the acting and tried a career as a singer and had some success at that and at 20 i was a millionaire, wore hand-made suits, ate at best restaurants and hired  a Chauffeur to drive me around and then the worst possible thing happened, i started to look older.
No more child star or teen heartthrob the TV industry passed me over and spent more and more time unemployed which gave me more time for my new hobby, drinking.
Being so rich at a young age hadn’t prepared me very well and the money soon went and i registered for unemployment benefits and spent that on booze also which earned me acute pancreatitis and a warning i would die if i carried on drinking i'd be dead by 30.
Three heart attacks and a diagnose of diabetes didn't help my mental state and i became paranoid people were trying to kill me and was committed to a hospital under the Mental Health Act.
I did make a bit of a comeback, acting alongside Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and i got a few roles in the Theatre and just as things looked on the up, fate smashed me around the head with mouth cancer so surgery took my tongue and my voice box so now i could only do non-speaking parts.
I know i messed up and one of the last things i did was write to Daniel Radcliffe, who had just got the role of Harry Potter and congratulated the young star and emphatically warned Radcliffe of making the same mistakes as me which was to get older.

UN Calls It Israeli Genocide In Palestine

A United Nations commission of inquiry announcing that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza is like saying that they found that rain is wet because you would need to be ignorant on an industrial scale to not see what they are doing is genocidal.
The 72 page report found that Israel has committed, and continue to commit, four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law: Killing members of a group, Causing them serious bodily and mental harm, Deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group and Preventing births, which was a law which ironically was written by Jews after the Holocaust to prosecute the Nazi's.
It cites statements by Israeli leaders, and the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces, as evidence and the 64,964 people which is widely seen as an under-count, have been killed in Israeli attacks which have seen residential and UN buildings, hospitals, schools, safe zones and civilians targeted as well as the deliberate famine and murder of starving civilians collecting food and water which was imposed by the Israeli Government.
Israel's foreign ministry, as expected, said it categorically rejected the report, denouncing it as: 'distorted and antisemitic' although that much used and now watered down phrase is negated when the report also found Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups guilty of war crimes in Gaza.
The Israeli have always insisted that Israeli forces operate in accordance with international law and take all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians so maybe they are just really, really bad at it but more than likely the Qatar Emir hit the nail on the head when he said that Israel wants to make Gaza uninhabitable in order to displace its population and  ethnically cleanse that piece of land.
The Report includes  a line warning all other countries that they have have an immediate obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent and punish the crime of genocide and if they do not, they could be complicit which means America mostly as they continue to not only supply the weapons to continue the genocide but fund it also.
A number of international and even Israeli human rights organisations, independent UN experts, and scholars have previously accused Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders accused of genocide.
That the victim of genocide is now the perpetrator of one is a shame that an ever more isolated Israel will now have to contend with forever.

Welcome Back Trump

If you woke up and thought the United Kingdom looked a little bit more Orange this morning then you would be right because Donald Trump landed here and was greeted as he flew over Windsor Castle with the sight of a massive picture of him and his Pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein projected onto the side of the Castle.
If he was not happy with the huge baby Balloon that was flown in his honour last time he was here then he is sure to have been a grumpy bugger once he saw that although the protests against the sex pest coming here are being kept away, or rather he is being kept away from them as the tour doesn't take in any of the Pageantry and Coach rides through London Town which usual Royal Visitors enjoy, including France's President Macron a few short weeks ago, Trump will have to make do with a trip around the grounds of Windsor Castle instead.
As the third fattest American President has no public-facing engagements to shield him from all sorts of protest banners (Impeach The Orange was a personal highlight last time), there is a grand state banquet being hosted but there will be a few extra spaces as some MP's are refusing to turn up in protest although it has not been announced if Prince Andrew is going, would be nice if he did because now Peter Mandleson isn't in post anymore, it would give Trump a familiar face to talk with about their mutual friend and trips on his Lolita Express plane.
Speaking to reporters mid-flight on his way over yesterday, Trump said: 'My relationship is very good with the UK' so he might be surprised to hear that although he won't be there, tens of thousands of people are still expected to take part in a major protest against his stay in central London today which should give us an opportunity to see some witty banners regarding his orange skin/pedophile friends/weight/silly hair/sex pest conviction or being a fascist which is a wide choice of options indeed.
They may be able to shield him from the baying mob but not the media and tomorrow sees a joint Press Conference with the British Prime Minister and one thing he will find out is that he may be able to silence the fawning and submissive American media but he won't get that luxury here and will face questions on the Epstein scandal engulfing him. 
He may be hoping that being this side of the Water the name Epstein slip away, especially as when it is mentioned it rattles the Tangerine Tyrant like nothing else, so it will prod, prod prod to try and make him explode and say ridiculous things, which he obviously will because he's Donald Trump.

Special Guest Blogger: Tom Petty

I may have come from the land of sunshine, trailers, and gators, but I was not the laid back cool guy that everyone assumed, i may have nailed the too cool to care vibe, but beneath it all i was a bubbling cauldron of psychological chaos long before the superstardom, the Traveling Wilburys, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and selling over 80 million albums.
I was a  quiet, artsy kid who would see Elvis and the Beatles on TV and thought 'I could do that' and i took some guitar lessons with a local resident who knew his way around the fretboard,  Don Felder, and played in a couple of local bands but soon we was cruising from Florida to Los Angeles in a VW camper van with band, my girlfriend, the open road, good vibes, a demo tape and of course, a little weed and once there we got a few nibbles from record executives.
I sensed bigger things on the horizon but the interest fizzled out and i drifted around LA, got married and my now wife gave birth to my daughter and we reformed the group, called them Heartbreakers and took a harder, sharper kick at the pop star can.
Strangely i was bigger in the UK at the start, the Brits really took to me before America but our album, 'Damn the Torpedoes' launched us there too although Britain seemed to just forget about me and i never had a top 25 single there afterwards but as my stardom took off, my marriage  was free falling and my wife's mental health was declining.
Sadly, her grip was loosening fast and we split although she did come back, once  at the end of the driveway in a limo, screaming and trying to get the driver to ram the gate.
By now i was a big star and my tours were anything but small-time and for the Heartbreakers’ 40th-anniversary tour in 2016, disaster struck before the tour even began.
During rehearsals, I slipped and fractured my hip. The sensible thing would have been to postpone the 53 date tour and recover but i did the furthest thing from that and carried on resulting in the fractured hip becoming a broken one.
In pain i drastically upped the pain killers which wasn't a wise move because my wife found me collapsed on the floor of our home and rushed me to the hospital but a full cardiac arrest, Heartbreakers to Heartbroken you could say, and that finished the job.

Special Guest Blogger: King Arthur

And lo, at the hour of England’s greatest need, a King will step forth to lead them and sweep the English to a legendary victory. Could a mere man turn out to be one of the greatest war leaders this land had ever known, famously expelling the invaders and becoming a national folk hero who would inspire poets and storytellers down through the ages?
Well, no, frankly because first things first, i didn't exist. You may have heard talk of Arthur the King of the Britons who was famous for owning a table which was not rectangular and mixed it with Magicians but i agree, the back story is very compelling.
I was supposedly around at a time when Swords where what matters. Swords, that’s what it had all been about. Swords and cutting off heads. That was how you got land in other nations in the old days, and then the rules were changed so that you didn’t need a sword to own land anymore, you just needed the right piece of paper. But some people still hung on to their swords, just in case people thought that the whole thing with the bits of paper was unfair, it being a fact that you can’t please everybody.
I was the son of a strange liaison between King Uther Pendragon and Ygerna, Duchess of Cornwall and raised by noble knight Sir Ector and knighted as King after pulling a sword out of a great anvil and later when the sword broke, having it replaced by The Lady of the lake whose hand rose out of the lake and handed me the magical sword called Exalibur which guaranteed victory.
Yeah, I can see how that would be hard to disbelieve but hate to pee on your campfire but it's all made up.
I didn't marry Guinevere, the most beautiful woman in Britain or chum around with Sir Lancelot in Camelot and the Holy Grail search was made up and Modred didn't kill me but worst of all, I am not laying dead on the Isle of Avalon, waiting to rise up once the people of Britain have need of me again. You are on your own people!

Guess Who's Back Keir

Oh dear, Keir Starmer may end up regretting sacking Lucy Powell from the role of Leader of The House of Commons last week because she is in the final two of the contest for the recently vacant role of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.
I'm a Labour supporter and even i say the last 12 months of Labour Government have been awful, not Conservative Party awful, but really not good and the calls for the stubbornly boring Keir to be replaced by someone more 'Labour' is growing which takes some doing after such a short time at the helm but after a year of Labour shouting at him to do something different, he only has himself to blame.
I would usually be championing Angela Raynor but that boat sailed when she evaded, and then lied about, her tax affairs so i would have to have a look around to see who is left standing before committing but the role of Deputy seems to be between Powell who has been critical of the way Labour has Governed and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson who is Number 10's choice.
Unfortunately for Number 10 though, the decision is down to the Labour Party members and Lucy Powell is believed to be the most popular candidate amongst ordinary members which could be awkward for Starmer, especially as her closest friend is Andy Burnham who is widely tipped to be the one to take over if something happens to Starmer, such as he is removed from power by his own Party.
Things could get interesting in the Labour Party which is something nobody has ever said under Keir Starmer.

Special Guest Blogger: Krampus

You’d better watch out because i may be a Christmas spirit but i am more like Satan than Santa. One is a jolly rotund fellow with a fluffy white beard. The other is a menacing shaggy-haired Eastern-European monstrosity with hideous curling horns and huge red tongue. We both do carry a sack though. Not for the same reason.
I see myself as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to children’s behavior. Good kids are rewarded with lovely gifts from Father Christmas’s magic sack. Naughty kids get a visit from Krampus who stuffs them into my sack and carted off back to Krampus HQ to be punished and by that i mean eaten.
But I don't want you to think that i'm all bad, in some regions and traditions I do actually bring gifts. Okay, so they are evil gifts for horrible people, but it’s the thought that counts isn’t it? If you are an adult who despises children, I will sometimes supply such practical gifts as whips, chains and big stickswith which to punish and bludgeon the little’uns.
In many European countries, December 5th is Krampusnacht (The Night of Krampus), a sort of Halloween do-over featuring groups of often inebriated Krampuses (Krampi?) roaming the streets and frightening people.
As its name suggests, it's a gloriously extreme costume parade complete with shockingly ugly make-up and all dedicated to me.