Special Guest Blogger: J. Edgar Hoover

I directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until i bit the dust in 1972 and in those five wiretapping decades, I served under eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon, and became one of the most powerful men in Washington.
I earned a reputation of being a ruthless, lawless strongman, using illegal break-ins and hidden microphones to collect damaging info and blackmailing anyone in my path but I always held back the most seedy bits though, i intended to use them for my own personal use and i kept copious files on the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Frank Sinatra not to mention each and every sitting president, just in case someone had the idea to try and bin me.
My first job at the FBI was as a special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who was responsible for removing undesirable elements after World War I, rounding up and deporting suspected Communists and liberals, of course. We deported 556 innocent people, and Palmer resigned after his methods came to light but i got made the top banana at the FBI and organised it into one of the best law enforcement units the world has ever seen.
President Franklin Roosevelt gave me the directive to investigate both foreign espionage and perform surveillance of Communist and leftwing activists within our great country’s borders and to do that I turned a ragtag organization into a top-notch unit. I started the FBI National Academy, rebuilding from the ground up, stripping lousy officers of their jobs and any political appointees and anyone too fat to be a Special Agent and hired rookies only after extensive tests and interviews.
I was a controversial, hit-or-miss kinda guy who was always one to shoot-first and hide the bodies later although supporting Prohibition helped as it led to the largest development of organized crime in our history.
While harassing black activists and suspected Commies left, right and center, i created the G-men who were the very best became Government Men (or G-Men for the hard of spelling) handpicked, highly educated, and abstained from booze, relations with women, and other amoral behavior.
Eleanor Roosevelt called them the American Gestapo but I never liked her. In fact, she was on my Custodial Detention list, along with other Communists who might be questioned for their liberal activities.  Un-American activities, are un-American regardless of who you are like Charlie Chaplin, JFK, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe or Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King Jr was a dissenter. A left-wing activist who may well have been a Communist with his anti-American 'civil rights' and truth be told, I was a huge racist and i tried many times to bring him down, even mailing tapes of his sexual affairs to King’s wife and encouraging him to commit suicide but I had many secret files and dossiers on innocent people, many of them the Presidents i served under.
Later on evidence of my secretive abuses of power began to surface and I was found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing so I made damned sure my files were shredded the day I died, croaking at age 77, having served as the FBI’s chief for forty-eight years.

Spending Review Is The Easy Part

It's the spending review, where the government set out the budget which the Government Departments will receive over the next three years and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced that Government spending will increase by 2.3% and will go some way to undoing the  'destructive legacy of austerity' which to be fair, was a steaming pile of ideological right wing crap and actually did nothing to cut the deficit apart from hollow out most institutions.
So what can we look forward to?
The Ministry of Defence would have got sweet FA if i was dishing out the money but Reeves saw fit to shove a further £11bn to it so that's lots of shiny new missiles and tanks in service next time we have to 'defend ourselves'.   
The National Health Service will find an extra 3% or £29bn a year in their piggy bank and the Schools budget has risen by £4.6bn a year and a further £1.2bn a year for  training and upskilling young people. Government funding of social and affordable housing has been allocated £39bn over the next 10 years and Energy has been handed £30bn with half of that going to the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station.
Research and development funding will go to a record high of £22bn a year and £2bn to build 'home-grown AI' and £15bn is being set aside for for new rail, tram and bus networks.
£7bn is being invested in new prisons and £2bn is allocatd to the police in England and Wales to fill them up while asylum and border security get an increase of £280m more per year.
On the nations of the UK, the chancellor announced Scotland has been allocated £52bn, Northern Ireland £20bn and Wales £23bn.
All sounds very good but that's the easy part done, now to tell us how she will raise the additional money to pay for it all which should be interesting as she has ruled out increasing income tax.

Special Guest Blogger: Claude Rouget de Lisle

The French National anthem, La Marseillaise, was not written in Marseilles but in Strasbourg which is half German and far from being inspired by the Revolution, the words were written by a Royalist who dedicated it to a German and lifted the music from an Italian.
It was originally called ‘Battle Hymn for the Army of the Rhine’ which is the longest river in Germany and La Marseillaise was commissioned as a marching song to inspire the French army.
I was an amateur composer and artillery officer and at a lavish banquet thrown to mark France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg asked me to write a song that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland.
After drinking a little too much champagne, I returned to my quarters, where i fell asleep at my harpsichord, to wake with both the words and music of La Marseillaise fully formed.
To be honest the music was at least certainly fully formed as the tune had been written eight years earlier by the Italian Giovanni Battista Viotti who worked as court musician to Marie Antoinette.
I dedicated the song to the Bavarian-born Count Nikolaus Graf von Luckner, the commander of the French Army on the Rhine. My reward was to be  arrested shortly afterwards during the Terror where i only escaped being guillotined because i was the revered author of La Marseillaise.
On Bastille Day, 1795, 'The Marseilles Song' was adopted as the Republic’s national anthem although Napoleon always disliked it and had it banned. In fact, it was banned and unbanned several times in my lifetime.
I later published my  memoirs which no one bought and died penniless in 1836 but i live on through the song and thanks goes to Tchaikovsky used it as a theme in his 1812 Overture who used the first bit, not so much the bit about the French coming to tear the throats of your sons and your wives.

Call Me Nobel Prize Committee

The problem with nuclear technology has always been its waste,  the low level less dangerous stuff, remains deadly to humans for thousands of years while the high level waste is hazardous for a million years so it has to be stored somewhere safe away from humans.
There are over 500 operational nuclear stations dotted around the globe and in the UK we store our nuclear waste in secure containers at sites across Britain but successive governments have been desperate to find somewhere to dump the lot and they have tried bribing local councils to take it and dig a big hole and forget about it but unsurprisingly the local population have refused and the Government return to square one and the problem of what to do with all this growing mountain of toxic waste.  
So here we are stuck with tonnes and tonnes of the glowing stuff but nowhere to store it and I thought i had come up with with a great idea, dump it all into a volcano. Problem solved now the only problem is where to hang all the Environmental awards that will be winging  there way to me or so i thought because those spoilsport volcano geophysicists came along and ruined it all.
Apparently the problem is that in order to melt the uranium waste a required heat of  5,189˚F is needed and the hottest volcano we have is only a piddly 2,400˚F and also, if the volcano ever erupted, ash, gas and radioactive fuel rods would be spewed for miles around along with radioactive lava which is apparently not a good thing.
Not to be put off (and because i had ordered a gold frame for my Nobel Certificate), i have been pondering on this thorny issue and the required 5,189˚F limit and the obvious solution is fire it into the 10,000˚F Sun but the very real danger of the rocket exploding and the subsequent raining of nuclear waste over a large area made that a no go so if we cant go up, why not go down.
The Earth's core is 9,392° Fahrenheit, well above the heat we need and the hole would need to be 3,000 miles or 4,828,032 metres deep and we currently have a hole in China which is 7.6 miles or 12,231 metres into the crust.
Ok, we are 2,992.4 miles short and how you would manage a 3,000 mile drill bit and what it would have to be made of to not just melt is a head scratcher but that's for the boffins to work out, i'm just the person with the idea's and the currently empty gold frame.  

Brits Love Einstein, Canada and NATO

I do love a popularity contest and the YouGov website has a broad array of polls measures the popularity and fame of anything and everything, based on millions of responses from the British public and is the go-to place for British media outlets due to the accuracy and large sample size.
I could make a post a day for a year with this information but it was the three popularity contests that caught my eye which were most popular person, most popular country and the most popular International Orgainisation.
As the contributors are British it gives a real insight into what us Brits think and we think that the all time person who we have a positive opinion of is Albert Einstien with 85%.
National Institution that is David Attenborough pushed him hard as did Steven Spielberg, Rowan Atkinson and Robin Williams who made up the top five.
Dame Judi Dench at 6th is the highest placed female, Freddie Mercury at 9th the highest ranked musician and Usain Bolt 54th the highest ranked sports star.
The most popular countries for 81% of Brits is Canada and then a tie in second for Australia and the Netherlands and then it is Italy and New Zealand.
Surprisingly considering it was a poll of Brits, the United Kingdom is the 7th most popular with ourselves which says something about us and i expected Ukraine to be higher than 23rd, USA at 32rd is kind of expected considering what is going on there.    
The most popular International organization is NATO with 58% and close behind is the World Health Organization, United Nations, European Union and UNESCO. 

Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Franklin

Founding Father, inventor, scientist, philosopher, printer, diplomat and author, I had more roles than Tom Hanks which isn't bad for someone who quit school at age ten and then apprenticed at my brother’s print shop before setting out on my own.
I bought the Pennsylvania Gazette and turned it into the most popular rag in the colonies between writing political essays, Almanacks and even had a pop at writing my own alphabet for the shiny new America.
I always thought that a common global language would be great and by dropping almost 25% of it by wiping out the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y but the idea obviously never caught on among the masses but we did later drop the U, which is a vowel, but whatever.
I lived in England on and off for eighteen years and mediated conflicts on behalf of the thirteen colonies, i have one of those blue plaques the Brits like to throw up above the door of my house and even attended George III’s coronation and really thought we could do well as part of the British Empire, before hitting France to gain support for the Revolutionary War and spent nine years, munching baguettes and getting crucial aid to back our bid for independence from the British.
They loved me there, you couldn't walk around Paris without seeing my bald mug on posters and snuffboxes and busts and they even made a Franklin doll.
I helped craft both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and suggested things such as not having  a President but there should be an executive council that does the top job but if there really was gonna be a president, he should be there for one term only but those youngsters refused my ideas, not a single one of ’em!
We did raise a few eyebrows from the slaves when we read out that the line that all men are created and that the thirteen states are no longer under British Rule and have declared themselves an independent nation, as I was pretty hefty by then it was fair to say my girth was equal to three men.
I also invented bifocal glasses, was a pioneer of electro-convulsive shock therapy and an odometer which we strapped to wagon wheels because it was a few centuries too early for cars and the glass harmonica but most people know me for not getting electrocuted by lightning whilst outside flying a kite during an electrical storm.
I said that nothing is inevitable but death and taxes and a respiratory disease meant the first bit came true but i can still be seen  on the $100 bill, or i could be if i could find my damned bifocals.

Special Guest Blogger: Isadora Duncan

And a-one, and a-two, and a one-two-three-four, one-two! Gorgeous, wasn’t it, the breath work and the power from the solar plexus with haunted gestures.
If you don't know me I was a dancer but not just any old dancer, rejecting classic ballet and dancing in my own way but prudish America wasn't ready for me and my style failed to impress so my family and I took the show on the road, well, a  boat actually, and and went abroad to  Europe where they were more appreciative of my style.
I was a smash hit, they were fascinated by my unconventional style and performed in London, Berlin, Salzburg and Vienna and gained such a level of fame for my expressive dance that artists and authors were inspired by my vision, creating sculptures, poetry, and paintings in my likeness.
I did have a fan in the writer George Bernard Shaw who i wrote to saying we should have a child together as with my body and his brains it would be a wonder baby, he brilliantly replied 'What if it had my body and your brains!'
I opened a dancing school in Moscow and in 1921 Russia was brand new. The communal school seemed right up my alley, revolutionary activists and students could attend for free. And of course, I met the poet, Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, there.
I married him, and we started schools in the newly formed Soviet Union but as well as being rigid on their views on dancing in America, it was the time of the Red Scare and my timing kinda sucked because it was then that I chose to return for a tour in the United States, I was labeled a Bolshevik and raved against by the press who called me a traitor.
With hindsight I probably should have stuck with the dancing and not made speeches in favour of the new Soviet Union but i was so livid that my own country was hating on me and when the tour finished, i left and swore i would never return, and I didn't but i didn't have much choice in the matter.
While motoring around France, i stopped in to see my friend Mary Desti who gave me a beautiful, long scarf as a present and when she said i should wear a cape as the car was open topped, i said i had the scarf to keep me warm which i did right up until it got tangled in the spokes of the front wheel and broke my neck.
As i always said, my life was an odd dance, it had it up's and down's but it was never a walk in the park which would have been a lot less painful if that was what i had done that day.

Musk, Trump And Epstein

No surprise that when you get two men with planet sized egos and skin as thin as paper, there was always going to be a falling out but the question was always how long before Musk and Trump end up knocking lumps out of each other and yesterday we go the answer, 137 days.
Musk said Trumps Big Beautiful Bill was a big ugly spending bill, Trump got his teeny, tiny hands on his phone to retort that Elon ELon was 'wearing thin' and  how he had gone crazy after he took away his EV mandate and then Elon dropped what he called ' The Really Big Bomb', that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files and that they have not yet been released because they implicated the President.
The files are a collection of evidence gathered by investigators working on the multiple criminal cases brought against Epstein and his associates and some have been released by there remains a treasure trove yet to come out although Elon gave no evidence for the claim.
The accusation will puts the President’s old relationship with the paedophile under renewed scrutiny, they were good friends for almost two decades and were photographed together at parties and Trumps Mar-a-Lago Estate during the 1990s and early 2000s and documents released as part of the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell showed that Trump flew on Epstein's private jet a number of times in the 1990s.
One damning quote from Trump in a New York magazine was that he'd 'known Jeff for 15 years' and described the financier as a 'terrific guy' who was 'a lot of fun to be with' and he liked 'beautiful women and many of them are on the younger side.'
Elon's 'Really Big Bomb' could be just that as Trump is facing accusations of sex abuse by over 30 women and was found Trump liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll and defaming her by calling her a liar, as well as his infamous line that he 'grabbed women by the pussy' as well as being convicted of paying hush money to a porn star, Musk's words will bring focus on to how Trump, a renown sex pest ,was such good pals with Epstein, a convicted sex offender.

US Backs Israel Again With Veto

As of 4 June 2025,  the United States had used their Veto at the United Nations 87 times, 49 of those to protect Israel and yesterday was number was nudged up to 88 and 50 for Israel because it blocked a Resolution backed by all the other 14 members calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
America, objected to the draft which demanded: 'An immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza to be respected by all parties and the immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups'.
Somehow America deemed a ceasefire and the return of the hostages: 'Unacceptable for what it does say, it is unacceptable for what it does not say, and it is unacceptable for the manner in which it has been advanced' and that is 'undermine U.S.-led efforts to broker a ceasefire'.
Already complicit by politically backing and supplying the arms for Israel's Genocide which has seen over 54,000 people killed in Gaza, this comes on the back of starving Palestinians being killed as they line up for the meagre scraps of food that Israel has reluctantly allowed into the area.
Other nations should move forward on sanctioning Israel and bringing Netanyahu and his cronies to the ICC for War Crimes as well as recognising a Palestinian State but already i have heard the usual pathetic bleating that the United Nations is bias against Israel and it is Anti-Semitism which is drives the agenda against them.
It is true that Israel has been on the end of an amazing number of UN resolutions, almost more than on the rest of the world combined but before you think poor old Israel, what has it done to be on the end of the UN's ire in its short lifetime?
Take your pick from scuppering peace talks at every turn, mopping up occupied Palestinian land with illegal settlements, killing innocent Palestinians, committing war crimes, holding over 9000 Palestinians in its prisons, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses, using Palestinian children as human shields, inciting genocide and building a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice, oppression of its neighbours and turning Gaza into an outdoor prison and killing fields .
If their isn't a UN bias, there certainly should be.

Increased Defence Spending Madness

'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed': D Eisenhower

Russia has always been a bogeyman, China, North Korea and Iran have been recently added because the West need a bogeyman or two to keep us safe from and Russia invading Ukraine was manna from Heaven for people who have an interest in military spending and the media has been full of those these last few days as the Defence Spending Review offer up how we must be spending much more on defence and the Orange Taco's NATO ambassador is trying to talk us up to spending at least 5% of national income.
There was some Defence Minister loon on TV last night saying we will be at war with Russia within 10 years and we need to spend big NOW but he never went on to say what areas should be cut to pay for it.
More money on bombs and less for people who already can't afford to heat their homes or feed their families isn't a very good slogan nor is why give the unemployed and disabled money to feed themselves when we can buy lots of ammunition but that is what they are saying because if your country is standing there cross legged and looking for a pot, spending more in one area means spending less in another.
Spending money on weapons to bring death and destruction somewhere or use the money saved for something helpful to mankind instead, we already spend £44.6 billion on defence which doesn't include the £133 billion spent on maintaining our Nuclear Weapons which is less money for schools, health, police, housing, infrastructure, the elderly and disabled.
If the Government decide they can afford to spend billions more on rockets, nuclear submarines and tanks and spend less on building schools, equipping hospitals, hiring police officers or building houses then they should be deciding which is more important. Spoiler alert: It should never, ever be the war equipment.