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.

Banning Israel From Eurovision?

I am conflicted over the rash of withdrawals from the Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is involved because on the one hand i want to keep Politics and Entertainment separate but on the other you can't treat a nation committing Genocide to be treated like everyone else as if nothing is happening.
The Irish, Spanish, Belgium, Iceland, Slovenia and now Netherlands are saying they will not take part in the contest being held Vienna in May 2026 if Israel appears.
Earlier this year, more than 70 former Eurovision contestants, including ast years winner, signed a letter calling on the organisers to ban Israel and the Eurovision Organisers did try and nudge them out last year by saying they could not sing their original song but then they just wrote another one and ended up performing amidst boos from the audience.
As Spain is one of the big 5 who qualify automatically for the Grand Final each year because their broadcasters make the largest financial contributions to the Eurovision organisation, so that could focus a few minds in the contests HQ and especially if any of the other largest contributors in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom withdrawal although the UK's Eurovision Committee has so far declined to comment on if they will participate.
The Eurovision, about to celebrate it's 70th anniversary, issued  a statement which said that: 'We understand the concerns and deeply held views around the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. We are still consulting with all EBU Members to gather views on how we manage participation and geopolitical tensions around the Eurovision Song Contest' .
If several more countries were to withdraw from Eurovision it would have serious ramifications for the format of two semi finals and a grand final as well as financial but as Russia has been asked not to bother due to the invasion of Ukraine, it is hard to see how Israel can be allowed to enter.   

US Civil War 2

There was some guy on the radio last night and he was predicting that the shooting of Charlie Kirk could very well spark a Civil War in America which sounded so hyperbolic that i dismissed it, especially as predictions of a looming civil war has been uttered a few times but i did wonder what would the 2nd American Civil War look like?
I assume they mean it would be between the ideological left and the right rather than slavery this time but then you could tell who the enemy was because it was South against North and they conveniently wore different coloured uniforms so you knew who you were shooting at but it would be tricky to see who is left and right so can't see how that would work.
I have always managed to sort the left leaning males from the right leaning males by hairstyles. In my mind right wing men have short, gelled and smart hairstyles while lefty men usually have long hair that goes in whatever direction the wind is blowing but that is my own rule of thumb but Psychologists have conducted studies which may help Americans pinpoint who in their neighbourhood is today's version of the Yankees and the Dixies.
If you look through a window and front room is messy, cluttered, colourful and contains maps or flags, then they are on the left side of the political fence but if its neat, clean, organized, brightly lit and contains paintings or pictures of buildings then they on the opposite side.
Lefts have more books are are likely to listen to classical music or jazz, enjoy abstract art, like romantic comedies and play musical instruments while the right are more likely to be religious and like country music.
Of course it would be much easier if the left just held their fist in the air occasionally and called everyone comrade or the right wore T-shirts with Swastika's on and gave Nazi Salutes but it isn't that easy  and unfortunately there have been enough Civil Wars in years gone by to know that the winner is always the one who the Army back, and we can't tell who that would be.
I guess what will happen now is some right winger will target a high profile left winger who in return will target a right winger and it will escalate from there but until the left and right come up with uniforms, can't see it happening.

How To Measure A Nation's Success

With the budget looming, we will be hearing much about tax rises and GDP and the state of the economy and using that as a measure of how well Britain is doing and although it may be a fairly useful indicator of a country’s performance, economic performance is not everything.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that economic growth was the priority of her Labour Government but why should the economy be the priority, why not measure how well Britain is doing by using other measures such as how happy we are, or how peaceful, how healthy, life expectancy, wellbeing, access to clean air or effective public services?
At the end of the 14 years of the Conservative Party, one minister said that over 14 years, Britain's GDP had risen consistently but that obviously didn't impress the voters who at the time of the elction gave the Tories the lowest favourability ratings ever and not only kicked them out but booted them to their worst performance in a national poll since 1832.
Effective GDP Growth obviously wasn't enough for UK voters while the NHS was underfunded, police numbers reduced and the price of everything in the shops shot up so how refreshing if instead of boring us with economics and public service cuts and taxes, how about if the Government said they was going to make serving the population their priority.
If strength of the economy was the be all and end all then the worlds largest economies such as the USA, China and Germany should have the happiest people but none of them feature in the top 20 of the World Happiness Index where the top 3 are Finland (46th in Global economies), Denmark (35th) and Iceland (105th) which proves strength of the economy does not result in happier citizens.
At the end, when we look back wistfully, our personal measure of our life will be if we were happy and that should be the priority of the people making the rules and laws we live by because that will be appreciated more than how much they can expanded our GDP by because that won't matter a jot.

Mandelson Gone, Again

You could argue that Keir Starmer should have seen this coming after repeatedly insisting he had full confidence in the British Ambassador to the US,  Peter Mandelson, he was forced to sack him after the publication of further emails between his lordship and Jeffrey Epstein where Mandelson had written to Epstein saying he believed him to have been wrongly convicted of multiple sex offences.
Obviously nobody was to know that after his first resignation over secret dealings with a millionaire, and then of course the time he resigned over his secret dealings with a millionaire, that his third downfall would come from his secret dealings with a millionaire.
For Keir to lose his Deputy for cheating on her taxes and then the high profile US Ambassador in less than 7 days is awkward and the cherry on the cake was that he got a proper shellacking from the lack-luster Conservatives on the opposition benches who demanded to know amidst the creepy letter to Epstein signed off by 'your best pal' and more rumours of more to come, if the Prime Minister knew about Mandelson's close association with one of the most notorious pedophiles in modern times before he gave him the job.   
I guess Starmer thought that it seemed a good idea at the time to send Peter Mandelson to Washington, nobody does sycophancy better than Pete who is yet to find a rich and powerful person by whom he hasn’t been impressed, and the childlike Donald Trump likes nothing better than people who fawn over him.
Keir now has two problems, the first being to find someone as willing as Mandelson to insert themselves in the Orange Tyrants colon, pending a check whether somewhere there is a cache of emails to a convicted criminal that might look quite awkward first.
Secondly, with Mandelson gone, Keir now has nobody to take the boring lump Trump off his hands for a while during the long 3 day visit because Donny was also a great friend of the convicted child sex offender and being a sex offender himself, now has has nobody to discuss giving a mega-wealthy convicted pedophile the benefit of the doubt with and reminisce about the good old days with their pal Jeff.

Why Wasn't Isaac Herzog Arrested?

It was said that Keir Starmer checked if the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, had one of the ICJ Arrest Warrants against him for aiding and abetting War Crimes in Gaza as his statements calling for collective punishment for the October 7 attacks which was highlighted in South Africa’s case at The Hague accusing Israel of genocide before agreeing to meet him yesterday.
Somehow he hasn't which is why the Israeli head of state never left Downing Street in handcuffs and shuttled off the a prison cell in the Netherlands.
Sixty MPs from across the parties wrote to the Prime Minister to urge him to snub Herzog who was coming over to make his case against the UK government’s expected recognition of a Palestinian state.
At Prime Ministers Question Time, The Prime Minister said that he was meeting him to make 'absolutely clear that Britain condemned Israel's actions in Palesine and in the bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar but line of the day went to the SNP's Stephen Flynn who stood up and asked if he would be inviting Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu into No 10 next.
The New Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, called for 'handcuffs not handshakes' and said that Scotland Yard's war crimes unit should be waiting inside Number 10 to take him away for questioning.
I get that sometimes as leader you have to speak to reprehensible people and with that in mind Donald Trump is on his way here next week and there must be a case that as he is providing the weapons and financing the genocide in Gaza, he should also be feeling the hand of the War Crimes Unit on his shoulder for aiding and abetting War Crimes.

Charlie Kirk And The Second Amendment

I had never heard of the name Charlie Kirk until yesterday but by all accounts he was a conservative activist who championed what he considered free speech and right-wing ideas.
As a husband and a father my first thoughts were for his wife and children but then when i began digging into his views i was not surprised to see that some of his views were as moronic and ignorant as expected for an American right winger who seem far more extreme than other nations due to the Gun and God issue there.
A quick search found that he called the Covid distancing prohibitions as a plot against Christianity, promoted claims that Trump won the 2020 election and was a victim of electoral fraud, called abortion murder that should be illegal even in cases of rape, said women should follow the biblical model in relationships and that  birth control medication screws up female brains.
He claimed that the Democratic immigration policies were aimed at decreasing white demographics, called the Civil Rights Act a huge mistake and  opposed gay marriage  but gun rights is where he shone and was the topic of conversation when he was shot and killed.
He had said that to prevent school shootings they should employ armed guards and said last year that some gun deaths every single year is worth the cost to have the Second Amendment.
I assume he meant the death of other people and not his own.

Special Guest Blogger: John Snow

Cholera is a nasty disease and it was everywhere when i was growing up and thought someone should have done something about it, so i did.
I grew up in a poor neighbourhood and was very well-acquainted with the terrible sanitary conditions but drinking foul water didnt hinder my knack for grasping maths and got taken on as a a medical apprentice where i came across many ailments but one particular disease soon emerged constantly, Cholera, which was thought to have been an airborne disease at the time.
I sat and had a think about it one weekend and the common link was polluted water and unsanitary conditions but the older doctors refused to listen, insisting it was airborne and the disease went on uninterrupted whilst we argued about it until one outbreak in Soho killed 500 people in a small area.
I began asking around in the area and worked out that most of the victims had used a shared water supply from a pump but in the same street was a brewery and none of the workers had fallen ill and found that the workers drank a company beer allowance each day instead of drinking water and the brewery’s had its own separate supply from a well out the back.
I got the polluted pump closed down and then another outbreak in Deptford killed 90 people and again it turned out that the victims had all been using the same pump for their drinking water but the authorities were asking for evidence and i had to find a way to show that the sewage which was regularly dumped into the Thames was killing a large number of people who relied on the river as a water source and some water companies drew their water from the Thames downstream of the main sewage discharge.
I found that the rate of cholera fatalities in homes supplied by companies that drew their water from the Thames was a whopping 14 times the rate of those who used other sources and these results attracted the attention of the British government, who banned the collection of drinking water from anywhere downstream of the sewage discharge.
Amazingly many of my medical colleagues were unconvinced and editorials and letters in medical journals continued to advance the airborne theory, and ripped into my ideas of it being in the water supply.
But then something curious happened, my discovery motivated London to build a massive new sewer system that would carry all the wastewater out beyond the tide-line of the Thames and feeling kinda smug, while working in my office i suffered a stroke and died six days later.

Union Flag Design Secret

At some point the British decided they needed to come up with an idea of how to let other Brits know that they were in distress but not to let on to Johnny Foreigner that they were in trouble so some bright spark came up with the idea of flying the Union Flag upside down.
Obviously their thinking was that unless you know what you are looking for, the British Flag is almost identical whichever way it is flown which was fine when you know but can cause a problem if you don't.
Fortunately for the hard of thinking, the right wing chose to hang the English Flag from lamp-posts all over towns and Cities to try and intimidate the non-English and even they with the few braincells they have rattling around in their heads couldn't get that wrong but more and more it is the British Flag we are seeing now with rain dripping off it while it wraps around the post because they may live here but England, United Kingdom and Great Britain are the same thing to them.
The problem with the England flag is that, despite it being very, very boring, it is mostly white with a red cross and as the morons have Zip Tied it to the Street furniture, they will be there for years over which time the red will become weathered and fade and what we will be left with is streets full of white 'Surrender' Flags which is probably the last thing the people who bravely anonymously abuse anyone who isn't White English intended.
Anyway, back to the Union Flag which is comprised of the Cross of St. George (England), the Saltire of St. Andrew (Scotland), and the Saltire of St. Patrick (Ireland) but doesnt have any Welsh in it although there was attempts to include the Dragon on it but everyone decided it would be far too hard to draw so never bothered but as flags go, it is a nice colourful one in a nice design but it does have a cunning design secret put in especially for the distress signal as mentioned above which almost everyone gets wrong.
If you look at the Irish part, their cross is off centre which creates a wider strip of white down the left hand side and the flag is flown with the widest section of white closest to the flag pole, the Military call it 'The Snow on Top' for some reason but if you see a British Flag flown and the thinner part is closer to the flag pole, then it is actually a sign of distress, usually along the lines of 'Help, a complete ignoramus hung this'.
It could also be a clever ruse that they know it is a distress signal and they are signalling that the country is now  swamped with non-White people coming here and doing the jobs we don't want to do and paying tax to the Treasury although that would take more braincells then they posses between the lot of them so it's very, very unlikely.

Special Guest Blogger: Michael Hutchence

Many music groups tend to meet each other while at school, make up a bands and give it a ridiculous names and INXS was no different. We all met at Davidson High School and went with the name Doctor Dolphin.
My original plan was to be a swimmer but a broken arm put paid to that so my fallback was to become a poet but that developed into songwriting for the Dolphins who by now was called The Farriss Brothers, then The Vegetables and finally INXS as suggested by another Australian Band, Midnight Oil, because we sucked at band names obviously.
Throughout the early 1980's, INXS kept chugging along and establishing themselves in Australia with me as the frontman and then in 1988 and our second album, Kick, and the 'Need You Tonight' single from it, launched us into global fame and five MTV Video Music Awards came around in 1988, INXS’s name came up several times. The music video for 'Need You Tonight allowed us to take home five awards.
In 1990, INXS released the hit single 'Suicide Blonde', inspired by my then girlfriend Kylie Minogue and the public loved us even more and we were winning BRIT Awards and I beat Bon Jovi and Prince as Best International Male Solo Artist and we were flying and then it all came crashing down because our third album sank.
The band took a rest but i never, dating Belinda Carlisle, Helena Christensen and Kym Wilson and i became labelled a wild man of rock when i became embroiled in a few brawls with journalists and one Danish taxi driver in-particular who fractured my skull on the pavement and damaged my brain and i lost my senses of taste and smell.
Then i was asked on the Big Breakfast and met Paula Yates, the wife of Bob Gedolf who was just as wild as me and it ended as obvious as you would expect, me hanging myself with my belt from the door handle in a hotel room while high and drunk.

Top Threats

Our world faces a range of difficult issues so Pew asked adults across 25 countries what they saw as the three biggest threats and top of the list was online disinformation which makes sense in a time when Politicians just outright lie.
The Internet has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories and dangerous lies and amazingly many people are unable to see through them which i will leave to psychologists to ponder on.
The second biggest threats was perceived as Climate Change which has taken a long time to reach some peoples consciousness now that after decades of warnings of what is coming, is finally arriving although sadly it is too late to stop it but we can still get together to stop it being as bad as it could be.
The third biggest threat was the Global Economy but again unfortunately, until a fairer system of Capitalism is bought in or it is replaced with something much more fairer, we are stuck with as the people who could make the change are the ones who most benefit from it so not going to change anytime soon.
Other threats included terrorism and the memory of Covid hasn't gone because the spread of infectious disease is still of concern to many. 

Special Guest Blogger: Hillel Slovak

My parents came to America from Israel in the 60's when i was 4 and when they gave me a guitar as a bar mitzvah present, it set in train the rest of my very short life.
I had a knack for it and people said i was like Hendrix, unfortunately not in just the guitar playing as i will explain later.
I met Antony Kiedis and Michael 'Flea' Balzary, named because he was always bouncy around, at school and we talked a lot about music and experimented together in the drug scene.
We attempted to put together a band but Flea had no interest in playing the bass so we had to convince Flea to change his mind, and then make him into a decent player because he had never played bass before.
Me, Flea, and Kiedis worked on our own music and formed a new band that we called Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, then The Red Hot Chili Peppers but we had to stand out from the other bands so we played naked, except for socks or rather one sock which wasn't worn on our feet.
During the early years of Red Hot Chili Peppers, we made a pact not to do any heavy drug's while touring, so instead we drank oursleves into stupors instead and we put out some albums but by now Kiedis could barely function due to his heavy drug use so and whilst everyone worried about him, my own drug use when unmentioned.
Obviously our drug use was starting to affect the success of the band but our album,  The Uplift Mofo Party Pla, was a hit and took us to a new level of fame and mayhem so we deiced to quit but my withdrawal symptoms made me unable to fucntion so iwas replaced by DeWayne McKnight and Keidas threatened to sack me unless i got help.
When the tour ended the band tried to contact me but after weeks of no reply, they finally sent officers to my home to check on me but they were days too late because i wasn't okay, I was hunched dead over my front room table.

Welcome Back Youngsters

The Coronvirus lock downs changed many things but one of the largest fundamental changes was the Working From Home and we often hear of a push to get people back in the Office but it seems that home as the office is here for a while yet.
I occasionally worked from home in 2020 but being classed as a keyworker it was very infrequent and i really didn't like it but i get how it saves travel costs and not having to go halfway up the country for a meeting when you could log into Teams and although my industry never really took it up, i know many that have and i do feel that the youngsters are missing out on Office life.
In a new Bupa survey of 8,000 under 25's, 45% said they were considering looking for jobs with more social interaction and looking for jobs with a physical office where they had supportive colleagues, can socialise at lunchtimes and meet friends in the evenings as their work made them feel lonely.
So come back to the office youngsters where you can be provided with social interaction, support and intergenerational friendships but more importantly, you will never have to pay for stationery and toilet roll ever again.

Raynor Had To Go

I always liked Angela Raynor and always hoped that at some point she would take over from Keir Starmer and become the Prime Minster but that ship has well and truly sailed now that she has been caught out cheating on her taxes.
Now i don't even understand my own taxed let alone somebody elses but i never swallowed that 'I Took Advice' alibi as to why she had underpaid £40,000 of Tax on her second home and when the people she allegedly took the advice from came out and said they never, it was obvious she had been caught out and had to resign.
At least she fell on her sword but when you are one of the rule makers, to then get caught not following your own rules and breaching the ministerial code stinks so as much as i like her, it is right that she has been removed from Government and hard to see how she could ever be anything than a back-bencher now.
To make it even more of a farce, Rachel Reeves is thought to be considering higher property taxes in November’s budget in part at the prompting of Rayner herself who suggested to the chancellor raising stamp duty on commercial properties, warning that the existing 5% rate was encouraging individuals to buy properties through shell companies.
The worst thing is that after the Conservative such as Rishi Sunak's wife, Nadhim Zahawi and now Angela Raynor, it gives the impression that all politicians are as bad as each other and hot on the heels of the latest case, it is revealed that Nigel Farage diverts his earnings through his own private company so he pays less tax as a result so it gives the impression they are all at it.
The truth is Raynor attempted to dodge tax, then lied about it so she had to go as does anyone no matter who they are.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek Goddess Artemis

I was the result of a wild fling between Zeus with a lovely lady called Leto. He was married to Hera at the time, and not wanting his wanton ways to reach her jealous ears, changed himself and Leto into quails. Gods can do that sort of thing. Especially randy Zeus, who must have experienced sex in the guise of almost every animal at some time or another.
So Zeus laid Leto, and Leto laid me and it must have been a double yolker as my brother Apollo was born at the same time.
Having a sex-mad quail for a dad can put a girl off men so when i grew up, i ran off into the wild and took to hunting with a band of women’s liberation Nymphs (particularly the Dryads) such as Callisto, who joined me in the vows of chastity.
Despite the hunting, I did care deeply for animals but i had little respect for human males. When a prowling peeper called Acteon caught sight of me bathing naked in a pool, i hounded him to death with his own hounds. Then the Great Hunter Orion got belted into oblivion with the aid of a large scorpion when he was doing the same pervy thing.
There are many ‘hunting accidents’ when the name Artemis crops up but nobody was willing to point their finger at me, probably because I would just chop it off, but i wasn’t a complete man-hater, as my efforts on behalf of Hippolytus show, bringing him back to life after Aphrodite had him killed.
My temple at Ephesus contained a statue of a female who, it seems, had undergone breast implants on a multiple scale. She was festooned with them and the busty statue was actually Cybele, a Goddess known for having lashings of lust (and bloodlust).
In due course the Romans came and changed my name to Diana and my public relations were much improved. Now I am the top Goddess of the feminist movement and an inspiration to animal rights activists, as long as quails aren’t involved.

Special Guest Blogger: Shannon Hoont

If you were a teenager or a young adult in the early 1990s, you knew the music of Blind Melon, our hit single 'No Rain', that one with the tap dancing bee girl, was everywhere.
I was a normal teenager, with a girlfriend, the occasionally run-in with the law, and enjoyed a bit of weed every now and again and thought i could be a musician.
I made a band called Styff Kytten and in 1990 LA was where the music scene was and it was at a Party that i found my bandmates and taking the name from a 1920's Blues Musician, Blind Melon was born.  
We began playing around LA and writing music and Capitol Records came around and offered a record contract and I got in touch with an old friend of my sister’s who had also moved to LA, Axl Rose, who asked me to sing backing vocals on the band’s 'Use Your Illusion' albums so next time you listen to 'The Garden', 'Live and Let Die', and 'November Rain', that's me singing in the background.
Hard Rock was not where i wanted Blind Melon to go though, we were not a rock or grunge band so we moved to North Carolina away from the influence of the hard rock scene in California and went down a more pseudo-psychedelic sound.
Rick Parashar, famous for producing Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, worked with us on our debut album and the single No Rain with the young girl dressed as a bee with was big on MTV and people were paying attention to Blind Melon and we opening for major acts like Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, and Soundgarden then the rock and roll lifestyle opened its enticing and dangerous doors to me.
During the next two years of touring i was fully into the rock star lifestyle, alcohol and substance misuse became a problem for me and ended up doing multiple stints in rehab and then went to record the second album and although grunge music was one of the most successful styles to emerge in decades, we were determined that Blind Melon was brave enough to be different regardless of whether or not that was what the world wanted which it turned out it didn't.
Our later singles and albums tanked but we went ahead with the tour anyway and the record company employed a drug counselor to help me through any difficult times but the counselor was fired after only one week, I decided that an all-night binge was the answer to my problems  and if my problem was being alive it did because i crept back to the tour bus and promptly died from a drug overdose.

Trump Not Dead Yet

I have seen plenty of stories this weekend where i have read that Donald Trump is not so much at Deaths Door but is standing in the hallway commenting on the carpet but although he looks awful in the recent photo's (which only added to the conspiracy theory as it was from a week ago and not this weekend as the White House said), he never looked  a picture of health and anyway i am not convinced that the people making the comments are suitably medically qualified to say when someone is about to croak.
The evidence presented is that he has those strange bruises on his hands, his ankles are swollen, he seems to be even more incoherent than usual and he seemed to be unable to walk in a straight line so put altogether he is on his last (rather swollen) legs so i asked a medical expert for their opinion and as expected they were non committal but did say his lifestyle was not healthy, he was grossly overweight and there was something 'going on' but they could not say what.
So 'Something going on' was the expert medical opinion which isn't very clear but to muddy the water some more, he has recently began making references to his death,  saying that  he hoped helping end the war between Ukraine and Russia would help boost his chances of getting into heaven and so if the Medical Experts won't say if I should start writing a Famous Dead Bloggers entry for him ASAP, handily I know a Reverend very well so what is his thoughts on Trump either being handed a harp and sat on an Angelic cloud or having a pitchfork jabbed up his jacksy in the pits of hell?
To paraphrase him, if a lying sex pest who has defrauded millions and had several adulterous relationships like Trump can get in then Hell would be empty so that's a no then but those of us who have read Dante's Inferno know, Hell is a big place so which circle can the Orange one find himself in? In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, adulterers are punished in the Second Circle of Hell where they are buffeted back and forth by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without rest but don't reserve a Trump shaped space just there yet because the sin of gluttony, which can manifest as overeating and obesity, is punished in the Third Circle where an incessant, cold and heavy rain of hail, sleet, and snow creates a disgusting, foul-smelling mire and the three-headed hell-hound, Cerberus, regularly mauls the wretched souls which sounds more like it but wait, what about sex pests?
Dante's Inferno doesn't have a specific circle for 'sex pests' but sins related to sexual exploitation are punished in the eighth circle of hell which is also where  fraudsters and liars go so pretty certain that's where he will find himself being whipped by demons and probably where Jeffrey Epstein is so would nice for him to catch up with his good friend.   
So Trump is, as far as we can tell, still with us and as much i don't wish anyone dead, it is a truth that the World would be a better place without certain people in it.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian God Osiris

Mr Big of the Egyptian Underworld, that's me, in charge of the Dead End scenario and married to the beautiful Isis which is kinda cool considering i was a green-skinned deity with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped legs and wore a crown and carried around a crook and flail.
I was quite content to rule Vegetation and Fertility until I was knocked off by my evil brother Set, who chopped my body up in many pieces, locked my body in a chest and chucked it into the Nile.
Luckily, nothing is ever that simple when it comes to the Gods, and the chest was washed up on the shore, stuck in a giant tree, turned into a pillar and relocated to the palace of King Byblos where Isis, having searched high and low, eventually found it.
Poor Isis had to collecting bits and pieces of her dead husband until she had every last scrap and then got  Thoth and Anubis to help put the jigsaw puzzle of me back together.
Luckily there were no pieces missing. Except one pretty important bit, my penis .
Summoning all her Godly Reconstruction powers, which were pretty formidable, she managed to fashion another one made out of gold and thankfully fully functional so she breathed new life into me and she became pregnant with Horus hours later.
Thanks to my Underworld connections, I was promoted to Judge of the Dead where you could be thrown to the fiery pits and the soul-eating demon Ammit to be annihilated or reborn.
I know that religion has moved on since my time and now there is a real pick n mix available but i would like to think that at least some of them picked up the idea of a resurrection and being thrown into a fiery pit if you are a sinner.

Paying For The United Nations

The United Nations always seems to be in the News and will be again soon as it celebrates its 80th year in business but i always thought it was one of those things which is a great idea, but the way they run it is awful with the UK, US, Russia, China and France holding a veto which can put the kibosh up anything the other 188 decide which has seen some truly evil regimes 'protected' by their veto holding friends.   
How the United Nations is funded is worked out by some complicated formula which takes into account gross national income, population size and external debt, conversion rates based on market exchange rates and a debt-burden assessment to work out who pays what which obviously doesn't work very weel because it is saying that it is facing a major budget shortfall.
As the world’s largest economy, the biggest bill which comes with the United Nations titled paper is handed to the U.S. who are expected to pay £607 million and then China who pay the next-largest share with £502 million then Japan third £173 million.
Germany's £142 million and the United Kingdom's £99 million make up the top five contributors but this is adjusted every 2 years to take account how much of a mess or a success each nation is making of their economy so for example China's contribution has been increasing since 2000 while Britain's has gone down since 2016 because for some reason (coughcoughBREXITcough) our economy has struggled since then.  
Before Americans start shooting guns in the air in frustration at paying the most for the United Nations, you may be exected to pay the most but you are actually the largest defaulter and owe £1.5 billion, then China £587 million, Russia £123 million, Saudi Arabia £42 million, Mexico £38 million and Venezuela £38 million have the largest outstanding budget balances.
So Happy Birthday United Nations, a great idea but oh so poorly executed.

Not A Pooping Robot

Not that i am regular reader of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology but they had a great piece about Ai where it did an experiment in some sort of reverse Turing Test to discover which Words would convince other Humans that you are not a Robot.
In the first round they discovered that the the 1,089 study participants narrowed it down to10 categories with words associated to emotions, foods and bodily functions which makes sense as robots are emotionless machines, don't eat and struggle with bodily functions due to having no body.   
These were then narrowed down further to those top two words from each of the categories most likely to convince other humans of your humanity and asked a new group of 2,405 participants to say which one of the words, if uttered, would most make you think the respondent was human, and the top choice was 'Poop'.
This could, the researchers said, be because the word has the highest average relative strength, referring to bodily function and evoking an emotional response which satisfies the human mind that this must be another human.
All very educational and good to know if you ever find yourself in a scenario where you are trying to convince someone you are the real human and the other is a robot, just shout 'Poop' and the robot will be the one Shut Down or so you would think because the Scientists had a brilliant twist at the end of the piece.
'The Study does provide some fascinating insight into our self-perception and what we feel it means to be human' they said, 'although now that this information is on the internet where any old AI with WiFi could get access to it, the study may not now really help us tell person from machine'.
Brilliant, so they found a safe word for us to prove that we are not Robots and then told the Robots it so they can now make us believe they are human and not Robots therefore defeating the purpose of the whole study.
Poop indeed.

Special Guest Blogger: Rick Danko

The Band may sound like an unremarkable name for a legendary rock group but I wasn’t exactly the flashy headline-grabbing frontman although i did mange to pack in more tragedy, addiction, drama, and danger than most rock stars could ever dream of in my 56 short years on the planet.
Regarded as one of the pioneers of the Americana genre, the twist was we were actually Canadian but i started out in The Starlights but was sacked for being anti-social so joined The Levon and it turned out the girl I had been dating already had a boyfriend who tipped off border officers that I was  smuggling a trunkful of pot. The result?
Chaos, suspicion but not a trunkful of pot, just a small amount in our pockets but they were still going to bust us for that anyway.
Our drummer came up with a plan to get his girlfriend to seduce one of the key officers in a seedy Toronto motel and then afterwards, telling him she was underage and it worked because he fled and the case fell apart.  
Bob Dylan hired us as his backing band but it was just as he was turning to electric guitars and the atmosphere was awful but we still had fun on tour, or we did until one night when i was a little too drunk and a little too high and challenged a bandmate to a car race through the twisting mountain roads and I plowed right into a tree.
I almost died, breaking my neck and back and facing months in traction and a giant scar on my face and a shaved head with a metal brace bolted to it but credit to the band, they never sought a replacement and with the help of strong pain medication and some unprescribed medication to hold back the pain from the injuries, we went on a world tour.
The demand for tickets was reaching hysteria level but with sold-out shows and venues were bigger than anything we had ever played and I began indulging in some destructive habits with our new pals Eric Clapton and John Belushi.  
After our pianist, Richard Manual, was feeling a bit down and took a desperate step inside the bathroom of a hotel, hanging himself with his belt it was the wake-up call i needed to ditch the drink and drugs and start living clean but my attempt to lead a healthier life only brought new struggles and i ballooned to 350 pounds and during one concert i had to stop the show to catch my breath.
On December 10, 1999, just one day after celebrating my 56th birthday, my wife found my lifeless in bed at our home as the years of hard living finally caught up with me, and i passed in a not very rock n roll way, going peacefully in my sleep.

Tales Of Ye Olde Christmas

I was having  a bit of a clear out of my computer and i found some things which i thought i had long deleted or just plain forgot about such as some half written blog posts, pictures and a folder within a folder within a folder of part written Christmas stories.
Back in 2020, during the lock-down i was asked if i wanted to contribute to a Christmas Short Story Anthology and i said why not and began scribbling down some ideas and even began writing a few but then time kind of got away from me so i missed the deadline and then they lay forgotten in that Folder, until today.
I threw down a lot of ideas and narrowed my final submission ideas down to either:

1) A story about a time traveller who goes back to witness the first Christmas and accidentally makes a few changes to it
2) Santa’s elves going on strike and forcing him to recruit famous Christmas icons to help
3) A Hedgehog who tries to stay awake during hibernation to see Christmas
4) Survivors of a future post-apocalyptic world trying to recreate Christmas
5) Christmas decorations comes to life to cheer up a recently widowed wife
6) A Snowman who comes back each winter but who wants to experience the rest of the year as well
7) A toy in a second hand shop which looks for a new child to love it
8) Aliens experiencing and observing Christmas on Earth,
9) The visits of the ghosts to Scrooge as witnessed by his neighbours
10) A single snowflake with the power to change even the hardest heart
11) A mildly horror one based loosely on the song Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

Most are just skeletons of stories waiting to be fleshed out and some are just a few lines waiting to be completely written but i would like to have a go at completing them if i get around to it and putting them on here in December and if someone who is a far better story writer than me (i tend to write too much and lose the flow of the story in the editing stage) who wants to pick them up and improve them, then feel free.

P&O Wish Boss Fair Winds And Following Seas

A spokesperson for P&O Ferries said today that Chief Executive, Peter Hebblethwaite, was stepping down from his role and they extend their gratitude to him for his contributions over the past four years.
It was not known what Hebblethwaite said but we know what he said to his workers back in 2022 which was 'Your sacked' because it was he who was responsible for sacked almost 800 staff at P&O Ferries and replaced them with workers paid considerably less than the UK minimum wage.
Described as 'Britain’s most hated boss', Hebblethwaite always said his actions were the only way of saving the ferry group from going bust although during questioning at a parliamentary hearing, he was asked 'Are you just a shameless criminal?' for which he probably didn't hear because he was too busy imagining what he would spend the £183,000 bonus he was paid in addition to his £500,000 salary after making the controversial dismissals to..ahem... 'save money'.
To be fair to him, he did say at the time he reflected on that payment before deciding to accept it which makes everything alright, at least he reflected on making 800 people unemployed first before trousering what it would take a worker on the new rate of £4.47 an amazing 37,577 hours, 755 weeks or 13 years to earn.
Hebblethwaite has used that standard excuse of wanting to step down 'to spend more time with my family' which hopefully means taking a cruise on a P&O ship where he will be served his steaming hot tea by someone who is so knackered from working a 12 hour shift for £58.44 that they drop it in his lap through exhaustion.

A Pretty Good, Conclusive Ending Coming Soon

Although he stated 53 times in the run up to unfathomably plonking his wide load behind the Oval Office table again that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine on day one, it still rages on during Day 222 of the latest Trump Presidency.
Another war he seems less keen to end is the one in Gaza although he recently declared that: 'I think within the next two, three weeks, you’re going to have a pretty good, conclusive ending' although he is light on details and doesn't explain what a 'pretty good conclusive ending' entails although at this point in time Israel just not horribly starving to death or having a couple of missiles dropped on you while you visit a hospital would be an improvement for the Palestinians.
The US president’s previous version for Gaza went from grotesquely horrifying genocide and ethnic cleansing to upscale Beach resort but as Israel's only friend and the supplier of their weapons they are gratefully blowing up women and children with, unfortunately a pretty good ending relies on him, Netanyahu, Hamas and now Tony Blair who in any other realm of life would all be in prison if they were not in office.
That foursome are some of the worst people in the world but the path to peace in Gaza seems to through these politicians, one who is a convicted sex fiend, criminal and self described fascist dictator, another who has war criminal stamped through him like a stick of rock and currently sits 35th in the Table of leaders who have killed the most people in History, just two places below Vlad the Impaler, whoever is left in charge of the terrorist group Hamas and Tony Blair who even lied about the lies he told to start a war in Iraq.    
While Labour Keir Starmer and the Conservatives Kemi Badenoch get their Sunday best dry cleaned, the Liberal Democrat Leader, Ed Davey, had made a bit of a stand by announcing that he would not be attending the king’s banquet for Trump during his forthcoming state visit although it would be assumed Trump wouldn’t have the first clue who he is but maybe Davey believes boycotting the Royal dinner for Epstein's best buddy could inspire more to follow suit and it will just be Trump and an embarrassed looking King sat down to the Swan Quiche and Salmon sandwiches.
That said, my Social Media feeds seem to be full of people with no medical knowledge predicting the bruises on Trump's teeny tiny hands are a sure sign he will be dropping dead soon anyway so Charles may not have to get the best China out just yet.

Blair's Back

Just when the Palestinians thought it couldn't get any worse........Tony Blair turns up.
Donald Trump, head cheerleader and financial backer of the Israeli genocide, was visited by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to listen to his advice on the future of Gaza which is as ridiculous as..well.. asking Tony Blair for his thoughts on the future of Gaza.
Interesting that he has chosen America to poke his head above the parapet, the last time he did that in the UK someone tried to take it off with a shoe outside a bookshop where he was supposed to be signing copies of his book but that didn't go well and he had to be bundled away by security under a hail of eggs and insults.
Unfortunately the pound signs spinning in the eyes of Blair's dry cleaner never materialised because he went to meet the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's best friend in Washington DC although everyone is being tight lipped on what the discussions were actually about, but if Trump and Blair were involved it isn't going to be good news despite Blair doing so well as a 'Middle East Envoy' all those years ago, mere months after he had lied his way to jointly razing a section of it to the ground alongside a barely educated American President who must be thanking his lucky stars that a thicko like Donald Trump came along after him.
Any chances Blair had of being taken seriously once he leaves power went up the chute the first time he rolled over to have his belly tickled by the most globally unpopular American President ever (up until that date anyway) and we all assumed that once he moved out he took his poodle with him but just like Smallpox and flared trousers, he refused to go away.
For anyone who wasn't around in 2001, the main charge against Blair (anti-war protesters had the good fortune to have someone to rage against whose name changed from Blair to Bliar with such little effort) was that he lied to take us to war with some of his justifications unravelling almost immediately such as Saddam developing nuclear weapons and having links with Al-Queada in his dodgy dossier of so called 'intelligence' before dropping any pretense and just throwing his lot in with Dubya to invade Iraq.
That he has the Orange coloured ear of someone who should be so far removed from having control over anything more important than his bladder shows that the lunatics really are running the asylum.

Special Guest Blogger: Christian Archangel Azrael

Nope, I'm not the mischievous cat who gets up to all sorts of smurfy shenanigans, i'm the Angel of Death which is quite a crappy cartoon name for a cat I grant you.
I was an Archangel which are a high-ranking class of angels and depending on which religious text you read there was either three, four or seven of us but whatever, we are powerful spiritual beings who serve as messengers, protectors, and agents of God's will.  
However many of us there was, i was particularly close to Lucifer and we had a great time in heaven together but then Lucifer rebelled and was banished to Hell and that sort of thing strains a relationship and anyway, by then i was far too busy fulfilling my role as the Angel of Death.
There is some confusion between myself and the Grim Reaper but apart from him having terrible fashion sense, my job is to transport the souls of the deceased after their death, that's the bit the Grim Reaper does.
I have a scroll with all the details of you mortals and record your names at your birth and erase them on your death but i began out as an Islamic deity called Ezra’ël then the Christians thought we need one of those and pinched me for their new religion which is fine by me although they lazily just called me Azreal instead.
My main boast is that it was I who took the dust from Earth to hand over to God to make man with and i kinda assumed as a reward he would make them in my image but considering my real image is a body with numerous eyes and tongues, 4,000 wings, that would have been a lot of dust so he went with you lot looking like him instead.
For this success he made me the angel of death and taking the souls of the deceased away from the body as well as all the admin that goes with it but i don;lt get to decide when your allotted time is up, that's down to the big guy who, 40 days before the death of a person approaches, he drops a leaf from a tree below the heavenly throne, on which I read the name of the person who's soul i must take.
I can't give away trade secrets but if you have lived a righteous life then i take on a beautiful form and use my sword to extract the soul from the body with care and compassion but if you haven't then the separation is a bit more rough and painful and i arrive in my real form with all my eyes in the right place so if at the time of your demise you hear the sound of 4,000 wings flapping, it may be too late to regret that you skipped Church on all those Sunday morning's.

Christianity In Decline

Christianity may be the Johnny come lately of religions but up until 2010 it was going great guns but a Pew Research poll found that the religion is in decline due to millions of Christians around the world leaving the religion.
Christianity numbers stood at 2.4 billion in 2010 and is still the Worlds largest religion with 2.2 billion followers in 2025 but the flock are not dumping their rosary beads for another religion, they are just giving up on the whole concept altogether, or becoming 'religiously unaffiliated' to use the correct term.
Globally there are 1.9 billion religiously unaffiliated which range from atheist, agnostic and nothing in particular against 5.8 billion who say they believe in something but what the the reasons that people give for being like REM and losing their religion?
The list includes an increase in access to information and education, the rise of individualism, personal freedom, a decline in trust towards religious institutions due to scandals and hypocrisy, dissatisfaction with social stances on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality, and a questioning of rigid religious explanations for life's suffering and evil.
As someone who believes that if you sit down and think about the whole idea of religion and conclude that you still believe in a God (or Gods) then you really didn't think about it long enough then i am happy to see people walking away from whatever faith they had because something which should be predominantly about caring and loving your fellows has been responsible for so many wars, conflicts and hatred throughout history that it is hard to make a case for what the World gains by having religion in it.

International Tourists Poo-Pooing America

If you look at a map of North America, between Canada and Mexico is somewhere called the United States of America which has things such as the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore and Route 66 which all look lovely in photos which is great because that is all anyone outside of the place will see now because nobody is flying in to visit them.    
According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the U.S Economy is set to lose $12.5 Billion in International traveler spend this year, a fall of 22% and the only country among 184 economies analysed by WTTC forecast to see international visitor spending decline in 2025.
The U.S. Department of Commerce pinpointed that visitors from key markets since January 2025 are down UK down 14%, Germany 28%, South Korea 15%, Spain 24%, Colombia 28%, Ireland 29%, Ecuador 30%  and the Dominican Republic 33%.
Even within North America, Visitors from Canada are down 20% and now 90% of all tourism spending came from domestic travel and the main reason why some of the
20 million jobs the tourism industry generates are at risk.
While the rests of the World poo-poo's America, it would be easy to blame the Orange sex pest in charge...so let's do that because you don't need to be a genius to work out what happened in early 2025 to make non-Americans want to go elsewhere.

Special Guest Blogger: Simo Häyhä

I was somebody you really wouldn’t want to see out on the battlefield. Luckily for you, you never would, as your head would have a gaping great hole in it before you even knew I was there.
I am often credited with having fought during WWII but confusingly i fought during the Winter War which started 3 months after the start of WWII and was between Finland and the Soviet Union after Stalin invaded when we refused to hand over land to him.
Before 1939, I was nothing more than a farmer in Karelia, who enjoyed shooting as a hobby and I had quite a reputation as a marksman and won several shooting competitions in Finland so i was pretty good when we got our compulsory sniper training which came in very handy when the Soviet Union initiated the Winter War.
The Soviet weapons were using far more advanced then the rifles we had to work with, they had telescopic scopes and we only had iron sights.
I dressed all in white and would lay in snow pits for hours, packed in mounds of snow and even keeping snow in my mouth to prevent my breath from giving my position away and plopping a pair of gloves under the barrel of my weapon to steady it, i'd wait for a series of Soviet soldiers to choose an extremely unlucky walking path, where they’d be taken out like ducks at a carnival.
I was nicknamed 'The White Death' by the Finnish newspapers which as far as nicknames go isn't a bad one, and in the 100 days that the war lasted, i was averaging 5 kills a day and was credited with 259 kills until my injury a week before peace broke out.
I was spotted by a Soviet soldier who shot me in the jaw and my injuries were so bad that when i was found, it was assumed i was dead and  was thrown onto a pile with others who had lost their lives in battle. It was only by chance that someone noticed my foot moving and sent me to the hospital so not an ideal end to a career in war and i was horribly disfigured but it was far better than the alternative.
Weirdly the initial report of my death reached the newspapers and i was reading reports of my death in the newspaper so i sent a letter to correct the misinformation.
Once recovered, I went to live and work on a farm and became a bit of a recluse eventually died at the age of 96 in 2002 so literally you could say that he I gave life my best shot.

Killing Journalists and Blowing Up Hospitals Acceptable Now?

Israel said they don't target Journalists which comes on the back of killing 6 journalists to take the toll to at least 192 killed in just under two years.
The Journalist they didn't target was Al Jazeera reporter, Anas al-Sharif, who the IDF say: 'Served as the head of a terrorist cell in Hamas' although that is a claim they have made against plenty of other journalists and not once have they produced any evidence for it, and none was forthcoming this time either so i guess they want us to just believe them on that.
Amazingly, apart from targeting journalists reporting on their ongoing genocide in Palestine, they blew up part of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to get him and killed at least another 14 people in the Israeli tactic of 'double tapping'.
That is when Israel drop a bomb on a target and then drop another in the same place so in this case, after the first they then killed the other 5 journalists and anyone else who had come to report on the initial murders.
As an IDF intelligence said the other day: 'People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death' and by people they obviously include journalists killed for doing their job and blowing up hospitals. That is acceptable now to the ignorant morons still supporting Israel?

Proud Of England Inventing Stuff Apparently

I was lucky enough to interview someone this morning who was putting up Union Flags on a lamppost and when i asked why, the reply was: 'Because we are proud to be English'.
I obviously kept my power dry until later that it was the British Union Flag he had and the English Flag of St George is very different things but it was interesting when i asked him exactly what made him proud about England and the reply was 'Well..we are English ain't we' and filled the following silence with '...and we live in England' which was very observant of him and served as a reminder to me just in case i thought I had woken up in Argentina this morning.   
When pressed on specifically what made him proud to be English his pal came to his rescue with: 'All the things we invented and winning the wars and stuff' although when asked what invention in particular he replied. 'All of 'em'.
Just before we finished i asked them if they realised the British Union Flag includes the Irish Flag and Scotland Flag in it as well as the English one and all i got was a shrug so they didn't seem overly bothered that as well as proud to be English, they were also showing pride for the other home countries also and as for it being upside down, i left that as not many people know it anyway although an upside down Union Flag is a sign of distress.   
Obviously the people putting up flags (St George or the Union one whichever way up) in our streets are not doing it out of patriotism or some sort of civic pride, they are doing it because it is the latest crazy right wing idea, to make people who are not White English intimidated, to remind them they are in England and England is for the English...and also we won wars and invented stuff obviously.
Flags don't really bother me, seems  a bit weird how some nations such as America go overboard about them and have them everywhere including on TV being set on fire in Middle Eastern countries but during a World Cup or Euro's or even during the Royal Jubilee I don't mind a flag fluttering in the breeze but just randomly turning up on signs or painted on roundabouts just seems a bit bonkers.
I am sure some people are flying them due to the ongoing Rugby World Cup and to support the Red Roses Rugby team but it does seem most are Nigel Farage supporting racists who you just know one of which will be in hospital after being knocked down whilst spraying a red cross on a white roundabout and when they are, i really hope it is a foreign doctor who is in charge of administering their pain relief. 

Special Guest Blogger: Chinese Goddess Lady Q

Few people outside of China know that China had toilet paper and flushing loos while the rest of you were still wiping yourselves with leaves. Of course, only the Emperor could afford such luxury. Ordinary peasants had to make do with holes in the ground. Little has changed in that respect in some regions, but the government are working on it.
I was the Goddess of toilets but i also dabbled in Outhouses, WC's, Lavatories, Restrooms, Closets and Washrooms and most Chinese toilets are haunted by a Toilet Goddess who were generally mortal ladies who have suffered some terrible toilet-related misfortune and been defined as a result and go on to make strange spooky noises which has even the most stout-hearted visitor crossing their legs and waiting till they got home.
My story of becoming a toilet ghost goes that I was the mistress of Emperor Gaozu who was the first Emperor of the Han Dynasty. It was one big unhappy family as the Emperor’s official wife Lü Zhi, was insanely jealous and did not like me one bit and when the Emperor died, she stripped away my official title and several of my external body parts but it gets worse.
She grabbed what was left of me and hauled me off and threw her into the dirtiest, smelliest, ugliest, foulest latrine in the whole of China and invited my son as well as the new Emperor and all his ministers of state to come and see me .
The sight of his dead mother traumatised him so much that he totally lost the will to live and spent the rest of his life eating cake and getting fat but I was made a Goddess and now spend eternity watching people in the toilet and reminding them to wash their hands.

And So It Goes On

Israel’s former intelligence chief Aharon Haliva, in charge when the Hamas atrocities of 2023 took place, was recently recorded saying that “For every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children” and Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024, said mass killing in Gaza was 'necessary as a message to future generations of Palestinians', in recordings broadcast on Israeli TV this month.
Now with the start of the occupation of Gaza City, the death toll is likely to soar again as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced into the remaining 20% of South Gaza with a view to forcibly resettle Gazan's in third countries, ethnically cleaning the whole region.
The day before the attack on Gaza City, Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal which was almost identical to an earlier plan presented by the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, which Israel accepted but now reject as they demand the release of all hostages in one go, not 50% now and 50% once the ceasefire is agreed, another case of Netanyahu moving the goalposts to make impossible demands to make sure his war keeps going and therefore delaying his corruption trial.
Internationally, Netanyahu and Isarel have only a few friends left, mainly America who supply and fund the IDF but even there 59% of Americans see Israeli actions in Gaza as excessive and Donald Trump was handed a letter signed by 600 Israeli security and intelligence officials who wrote that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel, and calling for an end to the war.
Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate 83% of Palestinians of the 62,000 killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians and the Israeli's own figures state they have killed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that includes a bit of sleight of hand as one Israeli Officer said: 'People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death'.
The Genocide and ethnic cleansing continues and today the UN announced that the famine in Gaza was: 'A man-made disaster, a moral indictment – and the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival. It is a famine within a few hundred metres of food' and the UN human rights agency said that this is a direct result of Israel’s actions, and should be considered a war crime.
Yet another War Crime by Israel to add to the growing list so when the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, ended his speech with how this must spur the world to more urgent action and shame the world to do better i think exactly, Israel and it's blindly ignorant supporters have no morals, so what are YOU going to do about a genocide that is actually happening as we watch on in horror?

Special Guest Blogger: Randy Rhoads

Rock stars dying young is not uncommon considering the toxic mix of drugs and booze but I wasn’t anything like that but still ended up dead because of them.
My parents were both music teachers so i had a head start and at age seven I was  pretty good at the electric guitar and in my teens i went to see Alice Cooper in concert and it changed my life and i formed  a band with some friends, called ourselves Quiet Riot and  started playing gigs around LA and it didn’t take long for us to make a splash on the LA rock scene and record company execs took notice.
We may have been called Quiet riot but it wasn't very quiet within the band, our Bass player Garni told me he was going to kill our singer Dubrow and got drunk and fired a gun at him and then tried to punch me so it was then we i knew he was out of control so we sacked him.
It was at that same time Ozzy Osboune sounded me out for his new band, Black Sabbath had just fired Osbourne for his bizarre behavior from his misuse of substances, and we made  a few albums but i wasn't about to exchange one drugged up lunatic for another and anyway things got awkward after i slept with his wife Sharon but i was obligated to finish the tour we were on.
On the way to Orlando, the air conditioner broke on the tour bus and where we stopped to fix it,it had a private airstrip and the guys thought they’d look around.
The bus driver, Andrew Aycock, was a pilot and thought it would be fun to take one of the planes for a little excursion but i hated flying and he was a regular user of whatever Ozzy left hanging around but he convinced me that he would take out makeup artist with us and because she had a bad heart, he wouldn't do anything stupid up there.
Once in the air Aycock started flying over the bus again in an effort to wake up the occupants, i panicked and  grabbed the steering column, the plane dropped and the wing of the plane made contact with the tour bus and  the impact sent my head through the glass of the windshield and the plane exploded.
So just say no kids, to drugs and morons flying planes.

What's Alpha Centurian For Hello?

Scientists have discovered that a mysterious object hurtling through space from beyond the solar system is emitting its own light – and it’s headed right for us.
Obviously it is an alien spacecraft coming to obliterate us but officially is is known as 3I/ATLAS and while there is a strong consensus among many other astronomers that it is a comet, a lot of people think it is something a bit more other Worldly.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows that it is glowing which they put down to a hazy cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet’s nucleus but the puzzling thing is that the 'tail' is facing the wrong way and should be facing away from us.
They then went away and had a bit of a think and came back it is made up of rare fragments from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material and is emitting radiation, or that it is actually a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel'.
The majority of the eggheads are going with the former and describe the latter as 'unlikely' and would need stronger evidence but i say we should get a move on with deciding who we are going to take them to when they demand we 'take them to our leader'.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian God Thoth

Not only was I the Ibis headed Egyptian God of Art, Science, Astronomy and Literature, but i am also a best selling author. You may not hear much of me these days but you will know my bestselling work, the Book Of The Dead.
You will never be able to hitch-hike to Heaven on the Nile on Manifestation Day without it as it tells you all the need to know and where to go, who to see, which incantations and passwords will be needed.
You will not get through the portals of the Gods without it either but as i wrote it over 2,000 years ago, you may need to take a short course in hieroglyphics. You don’t want to end up lost in the Land of the Reeds after all.
The book contains entries on over five hundred Egyptian Gods  but the rest of my resume may seem too impressive to be true but i was indeed the master of time, mathematics, astronomy, reading, writing, arithmetic and practically almost anything else you can point a pair of dividers at.
It was me who encouraged Ra to call himself Top God and i settled for Moon God as it left me free to run just about everything without any fuss or hassle and I was able to devise the calendar and days so 365 days in a year? Thanks Thoth. 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night? and circles having 360 degrees? You are very welcome.
Just don' t forget when travelling the Duat, go straight ahead at the Hall of Judgment and turn right at the Abyss and if you see a sign for the Land of Demons you have gone too far.

Special Guest Blogger: Kay Francis

As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer fans of old black and white movies and it is only the ones lucky enough to have acted in films that stand the test of time but i was one of those who wanted to be forgotten but unfortunately i lived an unforgettable life full of decadence, mayhem, and tragedy.
My life began on a sour note, my father had a drinking problem so at aged four my parents divorced and we moved away but money was tight but i did find that lying your face off does has its advantages and when i joined my new classmates at the Katharine Gibbs School, I told them my mother was Katharine Gibbs, the founder of the very school which worked out very well with my brown nosed teachers.
I got married at 17 but only three years after saying I do, I didn't anymore and moved to Paris where i really let loose and found myself back at the wedding altar with another groom but both of us turned up completely hammered so that didn't last long and i was soon back in New York and set out on a career on the stage.
I lied about my acting experience and found my way into a small part in Hamlet on Broadway  but i wasn't making much money and at that time it was the silent film era where we used caption cards to prompt the girls into various actions that would steadily become more and more suggestive in sepia tones with a jaunty piano accompaniment but then the talkies came along and everyone was moving to Hollywood so i followed and charmed Paramount Picture’s rising star Walter Huston into getting me a screen-test for Paramount Picture's latest film, Gentlemen of the Press, which launched me into the big time.
The problem with talkies is you have to talk and i suffered from a speech impediment and would pronounce my  r's as w's but this didn't stop me from climbing Hollywood's golden ladder and developing a very heavy drinking habit.
By the end of 1931 I was a certified star at the Paramount Pictures lot but an offer from Warner Brothers to double my money saw me jumping ship and become the Queen of Warner Brothers studios which marked the peak of my career.
Being a famous actress there was no shortage of men and women available and my boundless energy wasn't just for work but it all changed one afternoon when my wrist got slashed, the studio said it was from a broken window to cover my growing depression and suicide attempt.
My drinking inspired depression got worse and i was becoming a liability for the studio and the work dried up and my star faded and Warner Brothers wiped their hands clean of me and in my forlorn state i wrote that 'When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can't wait to be forgotten'.
I went back to working on the stage but the downward spiral was continuing and in 1948 I took far too many pills, lost consciousness in a hotel room and collapsed onto a hot radiator and burnt my legs.
After a career and a personal life full of passion and heartbreak I finally got my wish and died of breast cancer and left a note saying I didn't want a funeral or a gravestone and they could do with my ashes what the hell they wanted so once you have read this, forget it.

Rational World Behaving Irrationally

When one person comes out of a vital summit smiling and the other looks like he had been sucking  a lemon,. it is easy to tell who is the happier and unfortunately it was the War Criminal who was beaming.
When Donald Trump greeted the Russian President with a red carpet and a smile and friendly hand shake it was obvious how the summit was going to go and that was exactly how it went with Putin going back to Moscow having conceded nothing and the victim, Ukraine, being the one to try and be manipulated into accepting the terms of a peace deal which is a reward for Russia's invasion.
Putin was always going to run rings around Trump, I will let you decide if it is regarding a certain Kompromat video clip or the Agent Krasnov thing but an interview with a Ukrainian summed it up nicely when she said: 'The rational world is behaving irrationally by giving him this welcome'.  
The news leaking out is that is that Putin demands the 20% of Ukraine that his troops currently occupy and Trump is to pressure Zelenskyy into agreeing to that demand to gain the peace but there is no chance of the Ukrainian President and his European partners accepting that as it would make the last 3 years of fighting worthless and set a precedent that the weak American President is happy to reward Russian aggression.
An interesting moment came at the end of the conference when Trump mentioned a further meeting and Putin suggested it be held in Moscow to which Trump looked very nervous about, especially if he was to be staying at the Ritz Carlton Hotel again although i am sure Putin will order them put plastic sheets on the mattress and make sure the prostitutes drink plenty of water before he arrived.
All in all then a waste of everyone's time and Russia will go on killing Ukrainians and Trump will toe the Putin line and blame Zelenskyy but his bizarre claim to be a deal maker is on the line, as one wag said on my feed this morning, he may have to mention the Epstein files just to deflect from just how terrible he is at negotiating anything.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian God Set

You can call me Setekh, Setesh, Seth, Seti, Sutekh or just the God of Chaos but i was also in charge of  War, storms and deserts so i was a pretty busy boy creating mayhem back in the day.
I was a bit of a mix and match, with my donkey ears, scorpion tail and the head of an Aardvark but i sometimes appeared as a hippo with the jaws and tail of a crocodile just to mix things up a bit.
I did like to toy with my googy goody brother Osiris, messing up his peaceful farms but i did lose it one day after he kicked me so i killed him, chopped his body up into 42 pieces and scattered the remains far and wide because his wife Isis would not be best pleased i killed her husband and when she did find out she put his bits and pieces back together because that's a thing she could do.
She never found his penis though, that had got eaten by fish in the river,  and had to make him a new one and with his new dong they created a son called Horus and he came looking for me seeking vengeance and the ensuing battle lasted eighty years.
Not one to fight fair, I tore out one of Horus’s eyes and aimed for the testicles and hilariously at one point Isis attempts to harpoon me but hit Horus instead, who then cuts off his head in a fit of rage. Weirdly when he got put back together he went with a cows head.
The other Gods were cheering for Horus and the big God Ra demanded we make peace and if you are having lettuce in your sandwich you may want to put it down before we get to the next part.
Not one to defy the all powerful, i agreed but my plan was to invite Horus to stay for the weekend, but on the first night I crept out of bed and attempted to sexually assault him but he awoke just in time and managed to catch my discharge in his hand, whereupon he fled home to his mother who obviously chopped off his hand and made him a new one and then got Horus to masturbate into a jar and sprinkled the contents over my Lettuce Patch.
She knew i started each day with a breakfast of frsh lettuce leaves and i swallowed all the 'dew fresh' ones...we don't need to go into the details of the resulting pregnancy but one word of advice is wash lettuces very carefully before eating.

Nice Kit, Shame About the Away Results

The Premier League kicks off tonight and this is the time when the hopes and dreams of fans are still alive, before they realise that they will be looking more at the relegation battle than the title one but it could be that useless striker you bought or that defender that looks as though he is running in syrup but it could be down to the choice of kit colour as Science explains.  
One of the most studied colour effects in sport is that of red kits leading to greater success and since the Premier League began in 1992, over half of all champions have worn red home kits, and a study looking at the 2004 Olympic Games found that in combat sports, where the colours of red and blue are randomly assigned, athletes wearing red were more likely to win.
These effects have also been shown as true in Rugby but why red over any other colour?
Apparently red is associated with dominance and aggression and wearing red has been shown to boost players feelings of dominance and is perceived by others as more threatening but if red is the colour to wear, what colours should avoided?
Not a single Premier League club has chosen red for an away kit this season but Brentford have gone for Brown which is the biggest no-no then Black which Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City and Aston Villa have all selected for their away shirts and then green which the Newcastle boys will be donning so at the end of the season when the 19 Away games have been played, might be interesting to see the away record of these teams and whether a red team wins the League, which as an Arsenal fan, it obviously will.