Going To Need A Bigger Parasol

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

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Cromwell

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

Hegworth's 21st Century Crusade

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

Sex And Drugs And Pension Pots

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

Kemi Who?

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

The Ignorance And Hatred Saddens Me

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

Special Guest Blogger: John Phillips

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

What History Tells Us About This Peace Deal

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

The Real Financial Fraud Is Much Higher Up

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

Special Guest Blogger: Jerry Garcia

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