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.

Low Expectations From Putin Trump Summit

Donald Trump said he could end the Russia Ukraine war within 24 hours but here we are 150 days later and still it goes on so that obviously never happened but he could have easily ended both that one and the Israel Palestine conflict over the past few weeks.
Netanyahu and Putin are both wanted for War Crimes by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and he has met both now within the last few weeks and he could have got his goons to grab them and hand them over to the Hague for trial but instead he not only gave his backing (and provided the weapons) for the Israeli genocide to go on, but is widely expected to promise Putin a reward for stopping killing Ukrainians, a nation that Putin invaded.   
That reward is the lifting of sanctions or promising land they currently occupy but we know that like Netanyahu, Putin will play Trump like a very fat piano and make demands that the Ukrainians couldn't possibly agree to and when they say so, will be accused by Russia and America that they have no partners in peace and the killing continues.
Netanyahu has always done the exact same thing as we saw in the peace negotiations a few months ago when Hamas agreed to the terms and Israel then shifted the goalposts so dramatically that the only outcome was for the restarting of the killing.
Neither wants peace until they have reached their goals, in Putin's case it is the annexation of most of Ukraine and the removal of Zelenskyy and replaced with a more Russia friendly President and in Netanyahu's, the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank so he can claim it for Israel.
Trump may pitch himself as a great businessman and negotiator but both the War Criminals involved have run rings around him and they will continue to so i am not expecting much from the summit today in Alaska, the best is the promise that they will hold talks at some point in the future and the worst case scenario is Putin puts his terms to Trump, Trump agrees to them and tells Zelenskyy who says they are unacceptable and Putin goes back to Moscow with a big smile on his face having played Trump for a mug once again.
Hope I am wrong and something is sorted to stop the killing but we have been here too many times before to be optimistic that someone as low IQ as Trump could come out of this with anything other than Ukraine being well and truly shafted again and the ICJ cell remains disappointingly empty. 

Special Guest Blogger: Inga Arvad

Journalism is not an easy career choice and sometimes you have to talk to people who are not completely nice and trustworthy which is why it was two very powerful men who pretty much put an end to mine.    
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, i was sent to England for my education but it was when i won a Miss Denmark beauty contest that i became known but my passion was for journalism and i joined Denmark's most prestigious newspaper, Berligske Tidene, and quite soon after starting i was to hold an interview which would impact the rest of my life.
In 1935, to prove my potential, I asked for, and was granted an interview with a little known Austrian who had just been appointed Führer in Germany who was yet to come into the global consciousnesses and actually back then many found him a fascinating character and he was very amiable and charming and as i had little understanding of International Politics, our interview was not that hard hitting.
I was only one of a few selected Scandinavian journalists chosen to meet with him and i was invited to join him at the 1936 Berlin Olympics which i did but by then International tensions were rising on the approach to WWII, and other nations were starting to pay closer attention to the Führer and his pals.
I realised just how much of a situation i was in when the Getsapo tried to recruit me as a spy so i moved to America to escape being spied on and got a job at the Washington Times-Herald as a columnist and that was when i got noticed by the second life changing powerful man.
A Picture of me standing beside Hitler at the Olympics surfaced and  J Edgar Hoover was certain I was a spy for Germany and the FBI began taking an interest in my day to day activities and bugged my apartment and intercepted my mail.
What the bugging my apartment discovered was that  John F Kennedy was a regular visitor to it.
We had met when my roommate introduced us but we had tried to keep our relationship a secret, he was then an Ensign in the Navy but he had ambitions to be a politician as he came from a political family and being with a suspected German spy was not a good career move for him.
Although they had no evidence i was a spy, to protect John they moved him to Charleston but the phone calls and visits continued so the FBI told his father who forbid him from seeing me.
I thought becoming an American citizen would help me allay any fears about me so I became an American naturalized citizen but the FBI continued to distrust and keep tabs on me, even when i met and was engaged to a British politician, Robert Boothby, but pressure was put on him about my links to Hitler and JFK and the engagement was called off.
It was now the middle of WWII and I gave an interview to set the record straight and I explained that I had no positive view of the Führer who i had only met twice and categorically denounce his policies but the media refused to let it go.
I then met and married all American hero actor Tim McCoy and finally it was accepted that i was no spy but by then I had retreated from the public eye and stayed out of it until i died of colon cancer in 1960.

Generation Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I really don't get enough sleep, there are some night when my brain just goes 'Nope, not happening' although it has gone on for decades so it is probably used to only getting 4 or 5 hours a night.
I have tried going to bed later and going to bed earlier but nothing seems to change the pattern but according to a survey, it is not a problem for the younger generation because a survey for a mattress company asked 2,000 of them and found they on average go to bed at between 9pm and 10:30 and fall asleep 42 minutes later which seems a bit...well, boring.  Generation Zzzzzzz indeed.
Research from the European Heart Journal in 2021 suggested that going to sleep between 10pm and 11pm is linked to a lower risk of heart disease but then researchers at Stanford University, published in Psychiatry Research, which analysed the sleep patterns of nearly 74,000 adults found that they recommend lights out by 1am and sleeping for nine hours and 28 minutes which sounds the perfect excuse for turning up late to work, can't argue with science Boss.

Special Guest Blogger: Robert Peel

I was a British Conservative statesman who twice was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was Chancellor of the Exchequer and also Home Secretary twice but i am most remembered as the father of modern British policing, owing to my founding of the Metropolitan Police.
I entered politics at the age of 21 and was considered one of the rising stars of the Tory party and when i was made Home Secretary i decided to have a look at the judicial system.
We still had death sentence for any of the 200 capital crimes back then such as stealing, impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, scribbling on Westminster Bridge, chopping down a young tree etc and these crimes were going unpunished because juries were refusing to convict because a guilty verdict sometimes meant a shoplifter being taken from the court to a place of execution and thence hanged by the neck until he is dead.
I reduced the number of capital offences to four: murder, treason, arson in a royal dockyard and piracy with violence but maintained leaving the bodies of executed prisoners on the gallows as a warning to others until residents complained that having the rotting corpse of a murderer swinging just outside your bedroom window could have a detrimental effect on house prices and stopped that also.
Then i had my greatest idea, taking the work that was being done by local volunteers and dodgy law and-order enthusiasts to look out for criminals and making them into a professional force and created the Metropolitan Police in 1829.
One thousand constables were introduced on to the London streets to direct tourists to Tower Bridge, tell people the time as well as catching the wrong'uns and i crucially refused to arm them but instead gave them a whistle.
They became known as Peelers and Bobbies and they spread to police forces forming all across the country which became a model for modern policing around the world but I also reintroduced the idea of an Income tax, played a key role in social reforms including reducing working hours for women and children in factories, repealed the Corn Laws and promoted free trade but I may have been a progressive in most things, but the idea of letting Catholics have the vote was clearly going too far and I stepped down from the government and resigned my seat.
I was continually courted by the Conservatives to return to front line politics but i held firm to my beliefs although  may have done better to hold onto the horses reigns because I died when i was thrown from it while out riding. The horse then stumbled on top of me, and I died three days.

Cheerio 4 Billion Humans

There was some Scientist on the radio this morning and he said that the World contained 3 trillion trees. My first thought was how the hell could he know that and assumed he must have a whizzy spreadsheet or something but it was what he said next that got me thinking which was that to balance the amount of Carbon Dioxide we so stupidly spew into the atmosphere, we would need to double that amount to 6 trillion trees.
Trees are big so that is a lot of land needed so my brain went we could plant twice as many trees or alternatively, we could always just get rid of 50% of the 8 billion humans but which nations should we wave goodbye to?
We could go the most polluting ones so that would be China (population 1.4bn), the United States (347m), India (1.4bn), the European Union (450m), Russia (143m) and Japan (123m) which totals 3.9bn so that's close enough so that's sorted but then maybe we should look at it historically, bit harsh to get rid of nations because they are the biggest polluters in 2025 when there were plenty of other poisoning the Planet before them so let's tweak the criteria slightly and see if we cant get two birds with one stone and get rid of the most hostile and violent places that blight us.
The Peace Index is where we should turn here so to get to the 4 billion humans we need, and according to my calculator, we would have to wave goodbye to every nation under position 97 in the Peace Index so once again it's bye to some large populations such as China, USA, India, Philippines, Egypt, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Russia which is a good portion who are also the Worlds largest polluters so everyone is happy, well the ones not living in those countries anyway because while the rest of us are living in a cleaner and less warmongery world, they are going to be escorted from the premises.
Just remember that the last one out, make sure you turn off the lights, we are all about saving energy and all that.  

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Demeter

Known as Ceres to the Romans, I taught nomadic mankind how to plow the fields and settle down, thus making civilisation possible so i was very popular with the rural folk.
As the daughter of Cronus and Rhea, and as a goddess, a bit of a looker, I was the object of many Gods affections but i fell for a mortal prince called Iasion with whom we had two children, Plutus, who went on to do well from a financial point of view, and Philomelus who invented the plough.
Zeus wasn't happy with me loving a mortal as he wanted me for himself and his solution to break us up was to fling a furious thunderbolt where Iasion happened to be standing leaving a pair of smoking boots but then the horny Poseidon leapt in.
To escape, I changed into a mare and hid in a herd horses but Poseidon changed into a stallion and the result was Arion, a little horse who could speak and had feet. Jealous Zeus could stand it no longer and managed to pin me down for a liaison and another daughter was duly born, the beautiful Persephone.
Now it was the turn of Hades to be jealous and one day while Persephone was playing, the Earth swallowed her up.
When I found my daughter missing I ran round but could not find her and it was Helios, the Sun God and right old nosy parker who notices everything, had a quick word in my ear saying Persephone was now the consort of Hades in the Underworld.
In my distraught state crops failed, wheat withered and livestock limped to a breeding halt which had the Gods gnawing their fingers and beseeched me to return but I refused to help until I could see my daughter.
The starving God's sent Hermes to the Underworld for negotiations with Hades and a was agreed, but as Persephone had eaten the mystic Underworld pomegranates, she was tied to the realm of death. But a deal was struck and she was allowed out for half the year.
I was so pleased to see her that flowers bloomed and summer was born but when Persephone is summoned back to Hades six months later, my mourning  returns and leaves fall off the trees and along comes the winter.

Avoid Tax Repayment Agents

When i was working with Students, every year i would hear of them being ripped off by Third Party Tax Agents who claim a tax refund for them but then claim as much as 40% of any repayment as well as an administration fee for doing as little as passing on your pay and tax details for the year to HMRC and asking them to pay them any refund money due.
I mentioned it to HM Revenue & Customs who said they couldn't do anything about them because the people would sign a form to say they want such a company to claim the any tax refund due on their behalf so it was legally binding.
There was even Tax Agents contacting HMRC to remove things from the tax code in the year such as Expenses or Marriage Allowance to force the client to pay too much tax in the year and generate a refund so they could then claim it on their behalf and trouser the 40% again.
I thought of this today when i heard an HMRC Advertisement on the radio stating that you do not need to use a third party and how easy it was to claim a refund for yourself and get 100% of the repayment due.
I did contact one Agent called Rift and they said that they offer a full tax service to individuals but they refused to tell me how many of their staff were taxes trained or if the company was approved by HM Revenue & Customs so i contacted the people at Tax Aid, a Tax helpline and heard some frightening stories.
They explained how they are constantly getting calls about these Repayment Agents and how they have been suckered into handing over a significant proportion of their refund, or even worse landing a tax bill.
The agents sign-up processes is such that if you email them or use their online calculator, they take that as you signing up and they send the details to HMRC and some of these agents request repayments for the past four years meaning that any refunds for those years will be paid to the repayment agent but here is the kicker.  
HMRC process the claim and make the repayment but they check it later, and if they disallow some of the claim they will write to the taxpayer and not the repayment agent and demand repayment of some or all of the refund and that includes the portion you never saw as the Agent took as payment for their 'services'.
Some Tax Agents also ask HMRC to put people into the Self Assessment system unnecessarily as it can be quicker or easier to get a refund that way, as opposed to claiming through the PAYE system which means not only are you now required to complete a Tax Return each year but the Agent can include expenses claims for significant amounts, again if HMRC later find it to be incorrect, you will be required to repay in full and any possible Penalties and interest for now sending in subsequent Tax Returns.
The TaxAid advice then is to avoid these Repayment Agents like the plague and you can go straight to HMRC to request a repayment, it's free and all you need to do is fill in some details online, send in a letter or call HMRC on 0300 200 3300.
If you see adverts from places like Rift, Taxback, Tax Rebate Services, Swift Tax Refunds, Tax Refund Company, Hidenda Tax, TaxPro or TaxScouts then unless you like handing over your money, avoid using them.  

Who Is The Antisemite Again Christian's?

 I have long wondered why Americans are so keen to help Israel, especially in this time when they are committing genocide against the Palestinians, and i got an answer in one of my comments years ago that it was because America is very religious and because the Christian vote is a very large one, the politicians back Israel to keep them on side which all makes sense, abhorrent and misguided when you see what the Israeli's are doing, but from an American political stance, i can see that.
Now I am religiously very ignorant and reject any notion that any God of any flavour exists but the Christian and Jewish love-in is a peculiar one so when i was introduced to a Rabbi, i took the chance to ask him why and the reason was quite eye-opening.
Zionism, is a political and religious ideology that espouses a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible in accordance with Biblical prophecies mentioned in the Old Testament.
The belief is that once the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the region is complete, this will herald the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and he will return to Earth after his ascension to Heaven 2,000 years ago and judge the living and the dead, something which 58% of American Evangelical Christians believe will happen hence the support for Israel as they see not an abhorrent mass killing of people and ethnic cleansing of a region but as them preparing the way for Jesus to come back again.
Now if you suspend belief and believe in a Christian God (or any God come to that) then i can see how that makes sense and why religious Christians support them but there is a kicker at the end for Jews which the Rabbi tried to sweep over, and that is that Judaism would cease to exist afterward.
The final part after Jesus does he's thing is that all Jews, as per the same Biblical prophecy, would then have to reject Judaism and adopt Christianity as the one true faith which to my mind means that the Christians are backing Israel only because it will usher in the end of the Jews.
That is worth tucking away for the next time some loopy religious types harasses me for Antisemitism because i don't want to see innocent Palestinians killed, because where as i just want to see an end to the death and destruction on all sides, you are backing Israel because you want Jews eradicated for good so who is the Antisemitic one out of us?

Very Wrong

The British government was due to hold a peace conference on the war in Sudan on 15th April, a war which has gone on for years and has Sudanese Arm on one side and the United Arab Emirates backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on the other.
The UAE, a major trading partner for Britain, said that they: 'Firmly rejects any claims of providing arms or military equipment to the RSF' although United Nations evidence very much shows that they do and continue to do so.
Britain invited 20 nations to the discussions including the UAE but on the eve of the Conference, the RSF paramilitary launched a 72 hour massacre in Zamzam refugee camp which killed 1,500 people with as many again unaccounted for and missing.
Witnesses tell of men and boys being dragged out, lined up and shot, women and girls being raped and nurses and doctors who went to aid the injured, being killed.
News of the slaughter filtered through to the British Government and human rights groups were calling for the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office into making a statement on Zamzam ahead of the conference but no statement was forthcoming, just a Tweet that said: 'Shocking reports from Darfur. All sides must commit to the protection of civilians.'
At the end of the Conference, the UAE refused to sign up to a statement that mentioned the massacre or the RSF so what was put out was a bland statement which stated: The conference participants focused on making progress on our shared goals of ending this conflict and alleviating the suffering of the Sudanese people'.
The International Criminal Court are now looking into war crimes and crimes against humanity which unfolded in Zamzam but what did the UK Government do?
What it did was weeks after the massacre, the UK declared it's desire to conclude a £1.6 trade deal with the Emirates.
Something is very, very VERY morally rotten in this world when mass killing is swept under the carpet as not to upset a nation you want to trade with.

Special Guest Blogger: Oswald Mosley

In a recent poll I was included in the top 10 of the Worst British Villains which is ridiculous. In the 1930' s Britain was facing huge problems with unemployment and as part of the incoming Labour Government i made some radical proposals for tackling it which included a major programme of public works not dissimilar to the New Deal that followed in Roosevelt’s United States. Do I get any credit for this? No, I do not.
The Government were too timid to push for anything so radical as my major programme of works so the they built a public lido in Hyde Park, made a few concessions to the miners and authorised an extension of pensions and unemployment benefit so that's when i decided i had enough, threw a hissy fit and resigned and that's where the story changes.
Now going off in a sulk and forming just one fascist movement, allying yourself with Hitler and Mussolini, organising anti-Semitic marches through the Jewish East End and employing thugs to beat up your opponents amazingly suddenly made me the bad guy.
The problem with trying to introduce fascism to Britain was that the British are just piss takers, when i did the NAZI Salute in Parliament one MP shouted out 'Yes, you may go to the lavatory' but i was going to show them and my party with the new catchy slogan of ‘A Party of Vitality and Manhood’, held a huge rally and we did have support, the Daily Mail even ran the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ although they were a little less enthusiastic after we were filmed beating up anyone who disagreed, and many did. After one meeting around seven thousand of my supporters were prevented from marching through a Jewish section of the East End by hundred thousand antifascist demonstrators and we abandoned the March.
To be fair the 1935 General Election was probably a bit too soon after launching the Party and i urged my supporters to abstain under the slogan ‘Fascism Next Time’.
As it turned out, next time would be in 1945, after the Fascists had caused the deaths of over a hundred million people, laid waste most of Europe and I had been locked up as a Nazi sympathizer, so next time would have been a bit of a long shot as well to be honest.

Special Guest Blogger: Arthur Machen

The First World War was a time when having seen thousands of British soldiers wiped out by machine guns, a million young men thought, that’s the life for me, and volunteered to replace them and the miltary eggheads sent over to France to see what happened this time when they were told to run towards German machine guns.
I was writing supernatural and fantasy fiction publish for literary magazines and had my first major success with 'The Great God Pan' and at the start of the war, as the first battle took place a short distance from Agincourt 500 years earlier, I had an idea for a short story based on the blending of that battle with the one happening today and it was published in the London Evening News and was called 'The Bowmen'.
My story was that under the fields of this corner of Europe lay British soldiers from the campaigns of Edward III and at this key moment in English history, the ghosts of Agincourt rose up from the ground and intervened on the English side but i had written it as a news report which was my style of writing which may have led to the later confusion.
What happened was Bowman work of fiction turned into real life as there were reports that medieval English bowmen had been seen by the soldiers and a St George Cross had appeared in the sky to inspire the English as the so-called ‘Angels of Mons’ conclusively proved that God was on the side of the English against the Germans.
These stories of apparitions and heavenly bodies were widely believed and many soldiers became convinced that they too had seen the angels, and the patriotic value of this divine intervention was so good for morale that it was encouraged by the clergy and the politicians although i did receive requests to provide evidence for the story from readers who thought it was true, to which I responded that it was completely imaginary and a story i had created.
Parish magazine's began asking me for permission to reprint the story and i said they could but to make it perfectly clear it was a made up story and not true but they missed that bit out obviously as it was a boon for the religious business and all this killing of Germans in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who, unless I’m grossly mistaken, was actually rather keen on tolerance and not murdering each other, but the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, grew bigger and bigger.
By now the story had been embellished to soldiers finding the corpses of German soldiers that had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds and then the British Spiritualist magazine ran with it as 'proof' with visions of a supernatural force that miraculously intervened to help the British at the decisive moment of the battle.
I tried to put and end to it by republishing the story in book form, with a long preface stating the rumours were false and originated in my story but even with the Society for Psychical Research announcing the stories of Angelic Soldiers was false, the rumours continued  with now even British officers saying they had seen things with one very high ranking Officer, General Charteris , saying he watched as an Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance.
The tales only began to subside once the war was over but forever after i became associated with it and if i had known that i would have written it better because it was something i dashed off quickly because i was only going to get a pittance for it from the Newspaper. 

Special Guest Blogger: Jeremy Thorpe

In the mid-1970s British politics was rocked by a scandal which tell us much about 1970's Britain.
It involved the Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party (me) who asked a friend to organise the assassination of his gay lover. The friend asked a carpet salesman, who asked a fruit machine salesman, whose friend hired an airline pilot – who ended up murdering the lover’s dog instead. As i said, it was the 70's.
I entered Parliament in 1959 and homosexuality was still stigmatised and only a few years earlier another peer had been imprisoned for ‘consensual homosexual offences’ but nobody suspected me as i had been maried twice and i made sure my 'secret' same-sex encounters happened out of view in public lavatories.
I met Norman Josiffe and after a brief and sweaty fling, dropped him soon afterwards but Norman wouldn’t let go and kept badgering me for money and threatening to expose our affair with some letters he had of mine so I began to wonder about bumping him off.
I mentioned this to David Holmes who was the assistant Treasurer of the Liberal Party although he wasn't keen on my idea of breaking Normans neck, or poisoning his drink in a pub and throwing his body down a mineshaft but as i was on the verge of becoming the leader of the Liberal Party, we put it on the backburner.
The newspapers loved me and described me as a breath of fresh air and in the 1974 election my Liberals won 20% of the vote and fourteen seats but Norman was still there and making threats so we returned to pressing on with the murder plan.
As David Holmes didn’t have anyone in his Filofax under A for Assassin, he asked John le Mesurier who was a carpet salesman from South Wales, who knew a man called George Deakin, who supplied slot machines who had a friend, Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton, who was willing to give it a go.
Gino was an airline pilot and the plan was to meet Norman and tell him his life was in danger and to come with him to a place of safety so they climbed into the car along with Normans dog and when they got to a quiet country lane, Gino got out the car, shot the dog and then went to shoot Norman but the gun jammed and Gino panicked and run off, leaving Norman convinced that I had just tried to have him assassinated.
Luckily, few people believed him and the blame was put on the South African intelligence services until 1976 when the Sunday Times printed some of my letters to Norman and i was arrested.
At my trial the judge acquitted me and called me 'a public servant of many years standing’, while Norman was 'a scrounger, parasite and hypocrite’ because what saved me was that Norman had struck many newspaper deals to receive more money if i went down.
My reputation never recovered and in the 1979 election all the voters that had come to us previously flocked back to the Conservatives and Margaret Thatcher and i resigned and made several attempts at a comeback but it wasn't to be and i passed away from Parkinson's with a perfectly clean criminal record and leaving the Liberal Party in the safe hands of Paddy 'PantsDown' Ashdown who carried on the fine Liberal tradition of being a bit pervy.

Searching VPN

It may just be a magnificent coincidence that the recent interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is due to a sudden fear of online security in the UK and users worried their browsing history will lead to targeted advertising but more than likely it has coincided with the Online Safety Act kicking in and porn sites now requesting proof of age for UK users.
You can draw your own conclusions that four of the top five free apps on the Apple download store in the UK are VPN apps and Google Trends data show that searches for 'VPN' have gone through the roof since Friday and these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.
Preventing children from seeing hardcore pornography is a noble aim but it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act and i'm not here to judge the millions of Brits who do not wish to identify themselves but i am not hearing too many protests from the individuals involved.
Judging by the numbers, there are enough viewers of adult content to swing an election and punish this Government for the introduction if they mobilised into a group but it is hard to think of a bunch less likely to stand up and be counted.
Could mean a silent majority who will be angry enough to vote for anybody saying they will back track on this but they will not say so much on the doorstep when the local MP's come knocking on the door when we get closer to the next general election so beware that smile, the promise to vote for you and the warm handshake Labour MP's, that hand may be warm for a reason and i would keep plenty of hand sanitiser in your bag. 

Problems? What Problems?

Watching the images of Donald Trump envoy Steve Witkoff arriving at a peaceful, well-organised aid site in Gaza to see for himself what is going on there, reminded me of an incident in 2007 when American Senator and Iraq War cheerleader, John McCain, showed up at a Baghdad Market to show that Iraq was returning to normal thanks to the Iraq War he so vocally supported.
There he was confidently strolling down the middle of a Baghdad Street and then at the press conference afterwards he claimed: 'Things are getting better, there are encouraging signs' which was excellent news as long as the Iraqi's took the few minor precautions McCain undertook before his little jaunt.
All they needed to do to be as safe as McCain in their own nation whilst out shopping was to first send in soldiers to search for explosives, set up a perimeter and secure the neighbourhood, deploy snipers on rooftops, wear a flak jacket at all times, travel by a Humvee to the market and surround yourself with 100 armed soldiers while three Black Hawk helicopters and two Apache gunships patrol the skies above.
It really was that simple if the locals wanted to get back from the market-place in one piece and should be noted by the Palestinians who have been dying whilst being starved and forced to aid stations run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) where they are being shot at, over 1,000 killed so far by Israeli troops while waiting to collect food.
Witkoff, surrounded by Israeli troops, said it was an important gesture to show America cared about the humanitarian situation and 'to learn the truth' but as Mike Huckerbee who travelled with him later wrote that: 'GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!' it doesn't suggest much confidence that what they report back to the White House will be entirely truthful.
You really do not need to go to a Gaza aid station to realise that driving a population to starvation and then offering them a morsel of food and then shooting at them in large numbers when they arrive for it is wrong in every way, then you have no business being involved in peace talks.
That said, as America has supplied the weapons, the funding and the political backing for the Netanyahu genocide, and that is exactly what it is, then nobody actually expected anything better from them anyway and the slaughter will go on until every Palestinians is dead or ethnically cleansed out of the place they call home, a process which will now be turbo charged as more nations including the UK say they will recognise a Palestinians State.

Your Party

Even though I understand that they have had to fix the economic mess the Conservative Party left them, to say i am disappointed in the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is an understatement which is why i have been glad to hear of the new Left Wing Party that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are cobbling together.
They have not yet announced any policies but the Mission Statement on the new Parties website gives us a glimpse of what we can expect with it's denouncement of 4.5 million children living in poverty in the sixth richest country in the world and where the government says there is no money for the poor, but billions for war.
It goes on to call for a mass redistribution of wealth and power, taxing the very richest in our society and bringing energy, water, rail and mail into public ownership and standing up to fossil fuel giants and ends with attacking the government’s shameful complicity in the Israeli genocide.
While reading it my first thought was, wow, reads like something I had written because that pretty much hits every subject i have been raging against for decades so the Party ticks every box for me but then i was Team Jeremy back in the day anyway, i just thought he was a little to the left for most people, and by that i mean the people who vote because while his ideals were widely popular with the the younger voters, they do not vote in the numbers the older voters do and the grey vote is right wing so he just wouldn't get the numbers required.        
In the first week of it being announced, the party has received over 600,000 sign-ups at it's website and is in the process of forming a steering committee for the new party ready for the founding conference later this year and been asking members, disillusioned Labour politicians and left wing journalists for ideas on how to proceed and my own suggestion to them?
Join forces with the Greens and the left wing independents but most importantly, for crying out loud come up with a better name than 'Your Party'.

Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Vili

How you like the Earth? Not bad considering it was made by me and my brothers from the left over bits of a giant is it.
In the beginning and before you humans, there was nothing but a great wasteland of ice and snow, stretching between the Cloud Land of the north and the Land of Fire in the south. Sparks from the Land of Fire melted some of the ice and its drops formed into Ymir, father of the giants.
As he lay sleeping he gave birth to giants from his armpit (yep, his armpit). He was nourished by Audumla, a cow which appeared out of the melting ice, and as Ymir drank the milk from her udders she licked at the ice until it revealed a being named Buri. He had a son named Bor, who married Ymir's daughter Bestla and fathered me and my brothers.
We wanted to create a new World but our father liked things as they were so we killed him as a necessary act for creation built the Cosmos out of his body, using his flesh for the earth and his salty blood for the sea.
We changed his hair into trees and his bones into mountains, and when this work was done we raised his skull on four pillars so that its curved interior might become the sky.
Sparks drifted over the earth from the Land of Fire and we caught some and placed them within the skull of Ymir to  become the Sun, the Moon and the stars and planets.
Happy with our work we looked to craete you humans and when we saw two dead trees, we changed them into the first man and the first woman, Ask and Embla.
As I was the Norse God of intelligence,  touch and sense i passed them on to the first humans and Odin gave them a soul and life life and then we finally handed them to Vé who finished up with the speech, hearing, and sight.
Of the three of us it was Odin who went on to become the most prominent and inspire the whole Santa Clause thing along the way but Vé abd I would stay at home with his wife, Frigg, and ruled in his stead and we was happy with that.