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England beat Ireland 2-0 in a strange football game, it was a win on Irish soil, with a manager who used to play for Ireland and the goals were both scored by former Irish player. I guess stealing Rice makes a change from when the English stole the potatoes.

Grenfell Tower was back in the news as it seems the maintenance, eventual demolition, and memorial will have cost the government £340m - they must have money to burn! (or is that in poor taste?)

France finally got a Prime Minister in ......

This week I thought we'd check with the state of the US election, where battleground states like Ohio look set to see more drama than when they filmed the Shawshank redemption there, and just like the end of that film we're all going to have to crawl through some proverbial, to reach the end of it. This week saw 3rd party candidate RF Kennedy drop out of the race and urging his opponents to vote for Trump, and it was certainly very brave of former President Trump to invite a Kennedy to the campaign given that he's already at risk of assassination attempts.

Elsewhere, Kamala Harris was officially crowned the Democratic party's candidate. This is the party that claims to be the only one that wants to save democracy and have done so by 1) Ignoring the primary votes and forcing Biden out 2) Choosing the party candidate without asking the members to vote 3) Launching court cases to prevent RFK running as a 3rd party candidate in swing states 4) Then launching battles to keep him on the ballot now that they realise that him running will benefit them. I'd use that expression about "destroying the village to save the village" but at this point they don't even need to actually destroy anything, as long as they can get CNN to show some stock footage and warn people that Trump might bring nasty working class jobs back to the village.

But this election will largely be decided by a handful of battleground states so how are things playing out there?

- Arizona is a remarkably tight race this time around and one of the few where swapping Biden to Harris played to the Democrats' benefit. You could make some metaphor up about Biden being a cowboy riding into the Arizona sunset, although this was more like some kind of nasty gunfight where a posse of bad actors rode into town and shot the sheriff.
- Elsewhere in the sun, Nevada looks on pace to hand Trump the state by 5%, especially with a policy of eliminating tax on tips and thus telling the IRS that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
- Wisconsin is an interesting one with polling showing that Harris is up 1%, despite, Trump outperforming his 2020 standing, almost as if the polls are dubious at worst.
- Michigan is probably going to remain blue, that's the party colour too, although its also the frigid temperatures this November. On the other hand, it has a huge Muslim population and we're yet to see if Kamala will carefully handle the Israel-Palestine issue, or whether we can expect some gaffe that is undoubtedly as hilarious as it is horrendous and tragic. Possibly something where she think that the West Bank is on Wall Street or that the ruler of Jordan is Michael Jordan.
- Georgia on the other hand will flip red, Trump only lost it by 0.2% last time and every poll since has shown his support growing.
- Pennsylvania is one that might also be out of play. Kamala was expected to pick the state governor for VP but changed her mind at the last minute, a snub that didn't go down well with many. Also add in that it's a state where RFK has more votes that will now go Trump's direction and it will likely be a decision they regret, although it's also worth looking up the allegations that governor Shapiro covered up a murder several years ago and maybe they didn't shoot themselves in the foot. Although to this day Shapiro claims that Ellen Greenberg 20 stab wounds were the result of a suicide that definitely doesn't need re-examining.

There's an exciting question doing the rounds about who will survive in their job longer: Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak or Gareth Southgate. Certainly in the case of the latter two, a lot of people are wonderring if the England team will even be able to vote in the UK election or use a ballot paper, seeing as they seem unable to ever find the box and when they do they struggle to put a cross into it.

But just like the football, Thursday night saw the repeat of something that also seems to happen every 4 years: a debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is the third such time Trump has been in the debate, and like the TV show Westworld, the best season was probably the best: that was the one where he said that Hilary was lucky not to be in Jail. This year it was switched round with Biden talking about Trump being a convicted felon before losing his train of thought, pausing and appearing to glitch up worse than that Horizon computer system the Post Office bought. My favourite parts of the debate would probably be [1] when the two of them went off on a bizarre rant about which of them had the better golf handicap [2] when it cut to the CNN studio and it was like a wake as all of them realised the true horror of what had just unfolded. It reminded me of that scene in the Simpsons when Homer designs a car and his brother realises he's now bankrupt.

Even for those who have been aware of Biden's failing faculties, the performance was fairly shocking, there was no doubt that he should bow out gracefully. The New York Times and numerous major donors have called for such. But Biden and his handlers have said he's staying on, will keep campaigning, and he's going to visit South Carolina. He'll also be going to other states, like Confused State or Semi Conscious State but jacked up on a cocktail of pick-me-ups.

At this point with hundreds of millions of ballot papers only a month or two from being printed, it's actually fairly difficult from a practical perspective to replace Joe as the candidate, at least without making the new presidential candidate Kamala Harris who is probably the only person other than Hilary Clinton who would be guaranteed to lose to Trump in November. The only other option on the table is using the democratic party's 'behind the scenes' apparatus and skip the convention, disregard the primary votes and put in someone like California Governor Newsom or one of the other suggested upgrades, all of whom are white men, and all at a time when most of the party activists claim that promoting anyone to seniority other than a woman of colour is fascism. Who would I put in though? Well there is a candidate out there and he's been president before but only served one term. That would be Jimmy Carter, and strangely he's probably still just about more popular and certainly less divisive than Trump or Biden. (But maybe also stick a safe pair of hands on the ballot paper as the vice presidential candidate just in case).

This week a jury decided that Donald Trump might be the first criminal to be voted in as president if he wins in November, or at least he would be the first politician to be voted in *after* they got caught. There's lots of examples of people who got away with it but as a basic one Bill Clinton did the exact same thing as Trump when he paid Paula Jones $850,000 to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit and that is of course s the tip an exceedingly large iceberg. I say iceberg, but it's more like an island, that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein. There are also roughly 100 people who worked closely with Bill and Hilary who have since died from a suicide or an accident. I don't want to get too 'tinfoil hat' but 9 of the police officers involved in the Anthony Wiener investigation, all went on to kill themselves afterwards. If we're kicking around other names, remember when Dick Cheney shot someone, or how George Bush's wife killed someone in the 60s? Or

Let's talk about the Trump court case though and why the result will be overturned on appeal
1) The judge overseeing the trial gave money to a pro-Biden political organisation, a plain violation of NY law.
2) The crux of the case comes down to quite an obscure piece of logic, alleging that the falsification of business records was committed "with intent to commit another crime" but refused in court to specify what that crime was. That goes against numerous rules, mainly the one where you have to tell the defence what the accusations are.
3) The Jury supposedly was made up of 12 people who may or may not have voted in the previous election in 2020, yet somehow come to this with an open mind. If you look through the records, one even claimed in the jury selection process that they were a member of the social media site Trump Social, in fact that was part of the claim that the jury was a mix of both sides. I'll personally wager money that at some point in the next 10 years that person accidentally reveals that to have been a lie to get on the jury and winds up facing perjury charges. In America, unlike in the UK, it is completely legal for jury members to discuss the trial and write books about it. One of them will slip up, as sometimes happens, and overturn it as a mistrial.

But I digress, none of this matters of course and nor will it in this case. Trump's poll ratings jumped 6% on the news of the guilty verdict and he raised $39m in one day, while Joe Biden showed up in Philadelphia to a rally attended by less than 100 people, in what is a crucial swing state this November. It's a shame because Biden has a lot of achievements to his name: The standard of living for Ukrainian politicians is up 200% and more women of colour than ever before are getting the chance to pilot the drones that attack children in Yemen and Syria. There was an interesting poll in the newspaper that claimed that young American women don't want to date men who plan to vote for Trump, although unfortunately for them the men that support Biden only want to date other men. Meanwhile there was a case of a grocery store that did a President Trump sales promotion where it rolled back prices to what they were 6 years ago. Given the backdrop of the country, the court case didn't gain the democrats a single vote and in an cruel twist for progressives probably cost them hundreds of thousands of votes as black and minority voters emphasise with the narrative that the justice system was stacked and rigged from the beginning. One thing certain is that Trump will not be going to jail this year, the appeals process will drag on into next year if he isn't elected before then.

Greta Thunberg was arrested once more this week, it seems she's back to campaigning for environmental causes, rather than trying to link migration and welfare to her 'save the world' policies. To her credit though, I guess that it would do a lot to shut down the global oil industry if she encouraged the governments of Scandinavia to drain all the millions of skilled workers away from the oil fields.

I've never been quite sure what they're intended to wear when they get to sunny Oslo or Stockholm. I mean fur clothing is out, but then even fake furs and polymer clothing is bad for people, one time when I had on a winter coat I had to tell a green activist that "The dinosaurs killed to make the oil were all killed very humanely: by that huge massive meteorite" There's probably also a joke in there about Stockholm Syndrome but I'll save that for another day although I did see a story about a muslim cleric in the news this week, apparently proclaiming that women should be banned from watching or attending men's football. Although given the state of a couple of teams like Everton or Chelsea, sometimes those extremists have a bit of a point.

Elsewhere the Ukraine diplomacy story has taken a farcical turn, after the West asked them to stop attacking Russian fuel depots and oil refineries, and to presumably focus on killing people. This is all due to it being an election year and Russia remaining one of the largest oil exporters in the world, despite everyone lying about sanctions on oil imports. There's a fairly similar story out of the Middle East where Joe Biden really wants a ceasefire, not so that people stop being killed, but again simply so that oil prices will go down and thus lower the price of a tank of petrol in time for election day. Or at least that's what his advisers want. I can hardly see the president tracking oil futures, although I can see him maybe passing a law to ban fracking because he thought it was a curse word.

King Charles was diagnosed with Cancer this week. The doctor told him it was the big C and the king looked very despondent before asking whether he'll also be brining that big C of a wife of his. Yes, Harry made a stop back to the UK in order to visit his father, before presumably also going to visit King Charles. Anyway, the royal household hasn't given any details as to what type of cancer it is although it was discovered during a fairly routine prostate operation and so that's one option, bowel cancer is another one being speculated. It's quite remarkable that thanks to Prince Andrew, a cancerous bowel still wouldn't qualify as the worst arsehole.

In other medical news Joe Biden was in the news after a report came out, saying he was not to blame for all the classified information he illegally kept in his garage. More specifically the report concluded that he should not be prosecuted for mishandling the material as, if it went to trial, jurors would see the full extent of his mental decline and conclude he was simply a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”" That is a fairly shocking and blunt outcome to come to, and the president decided to follow it up with a hastily arranged press conference to tell everyone how innocent he was and how he's still sharp as a tack, but in the midst of it all managed to confuse Egypt with Mexico which is something you'd expect to happen if you were buying a suspiciously cheap package holiday.

This confusion all came just a few days after he discussed his recent conversations with Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, people who have actually been dead for 7 and 28 years respectively. The report also mentions various other angles on the situation such as how Biden forgets being vice president and was unaware that his son was dead. This would all be bad enough if the plan was to just let him run the clock down before stepping down in November, except he still is president and has made it abundantly clear to everyone that he's running for re-election. He's used the party apparatus to prevent anyone else from running against him. He recently talked about how Trump is the current president but that he's going to depose him in November so it's obvious he believes it's 2019 still, and at this stage the GOP are going to just let him keep digging his own political grave rather than actively forcing him from office in favour of someone who might win the election. As Napoleon said, never interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake.

As to our older politicians, Gordon Brown was asked relatively recently about David Cameron's return to the cabinet, and he was asked about similarly making a return to frontline politics. He replied back that he's too old to be a British politician, but to young to be an American one. I guess even a stopped clock is correct twice per day.

The government have announced that they are going to ban pet owners from importing Bully XL Dogs from America. If anyone's interested in getting one before the ban, I have a friend who's selling one, the advert says it loves kids, especially big juice fat ones.

Tony Blair made a statement about junk food and how it should be priced so the poor can't buy it. Making food expensive for the poor makes about as much sense as appointing someone like him a Middle East peace envoy.

This week's main news story was the slow train wreck that is Joe Biden and his son Hunter. For the last 6 years it was Donald Trump that the American left guaranteed and repeatedly failed to impeach and jail. But this week two major events happened [1] Trump's court case got pushed to 2024, possibly concluding long after next year's election [2] Biden's son will be facing a court case for illegal gun possession, illegal drug possession and a crime that the US views far more seriously, the illegal possession of lots of money he didn't pay taxes on.

Biden and cronies have spent the last 2 years prepping for him to run for a 2nd time although I know someone who was at a rally back in 2020 and Biden said on stage about he was going to be reelected to the senate, he didn't know where he was or what was going on, he clearly has significant cognitive issues and the only reason he's even in the white house is because he didn't marry Bill Clinton or Kill Epstein. There was a story a while back about him making a surprise visit to Ukraine but in all honesty a trip to the fridge would probably come as a surprise on a day to day basis. In the last month or two alone he's claimed to have spent 4 years teaching at the university of Pennsylvania which he didn't, that Russia had invaded Iraq, that there were 54 states in the union and that Nancy Pelosi had been in office during the great depression. There's a joke where Joe Biden walks into a bar and sees a young pretty lady sitting alone at a table, he walks up to her and asks "Hey there, do I come here often?"

In any normal situation he would be in a nursing home with proper medical care; this would all be deeply upsetting were it not for the fact that he and his entire family are a gang of professional grifters who all deserve to be in jail. If his supporters say that only he can save democracy then they only way that is true would be if resigned and called for an open and fair election rather than using cronies to threaten people. The Hunter Biden legal case is genuinely quite astonishing, the government set up with a plea bargain where he would be completely exonerated for not only existing, but also future prosecutions, until a judge spotted the small-print. He now faces years of actual prosecution and eye-watering legal bills, and this time he can't even pay for it all with embezzled corporate funds or money from the Chinese government, y'know the things he's on trial for doing.

Perhaps this is all just part of a grand plan though, force Joe to issue a presidential pardon for everyone and thus resign in disgrace rather than making 2024 election be one that takes place almost exclusively in court rooms. I mean in the days of the founding fathers the town court house was a centre point of the community but it's not because Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson were facing charges for something. At least not by the American legal system, I'm sure King George felt differently about the whole treason stuff. I mean Donald Trump maybe did some shady business deals in New York but he never took over the city by raising an army and calling finders keepers.

Maybe I should finish with a joke, but then I thought that in honour of president Biden, I forgot the punchline.

This week I thought we'd talk about the world of American companies dicovering that going woke makes you go broke. It was recently the 4th of July and for several decades the most popular beer in the US was Budweiser, until this year when it didn't even make the top 10. This is all due to that Dylan Mulvaney nonsense where they rebranded the blue collar beer to specifically appeal to men who are also keen to advertise their love for transvesticism. The irony really is that they could have appealed to both sets of people if they'd used an old pic of Eric Idle dressed up and stuck some Monty Python quotes on the tins. Nonetheless this stuff is all the rage right now and despite the company losing tens of billions of dollars in less than 6 months, this month also saw Unilever let the Ben & Jerry brand announce that Mount Rushmore was a disgrace and that huge swathes of the mid west should be handed over to native tribes, which I guess is easy seeing as how none of that tribal land is located in upstate Vermont (where Ben & Jerry live) or Palo Alto. It has the intellectual integrity of me deciding to boycott nicoise salad or refuse to purchase ladies shoes.

More recently Natwest decided to cash in on both The Ashes as well as diversity by putting up a billboard saying "Cricket has no boundaries" It literally has boundaries. That's how you score points! More scarily, there was the issue that Coutts bank is a subsidiary of Natwest and Nigel Farage had his bank account closed. The bank put out a press statement claiming he didn't have enough money in it although this turned out to be a complete fabrication after a dossier was leaked, revealing that they just didn't like his anti-EU politics. This is one of these stories where you really have to argue it by asking what if it was someone else, if Jeremy Corbyn for instance had his electricity cut off all winter because none of the energy companies wanted to have him listed as a customer due to his views on renationalising the grid.

Other examples in recent years have been Gillette dropping their tagline "The Best a Man Can Get" before the accountants realised that most of their customers had a y-chromosome, or perhaps the removal of the Uncle Ben's Rice branding, which I still think was over an argument with the writers of Spiderman: Uncle Ben being a major character in that story, and not actually asian the last time I checked. One of the leading causes of the recent Titanic accident was the decision by the company to get rid of former royal navy staff-members because they were all white blokes in their 50s with far too much knowledge about submarine safety and nowhere near enough knowledge of useful things like the plight of North African migrants.

And yet despite this woke smokescreen, a woke-screen, the attitude is entirely duplicitous. Disney might be putting out films with homosexual characters but they re-film and reedit scenes when the films are sold to anywhere outside of the US or Europe. The Apple CEO Tim Cook will go on record about the appalling attitude to LGBT people in China, but he'll also manufacture more than 95% of Apple products there whilst occasionally putting out some rainbow themed social media posts. At a national level the US is even worse, pushing one set of morals domestically and another overseas. A good case in point could be Joe Biden who has gone on from playing that Banjo player in Deliverance to being President. A few years ago he said that the US had to reduce its carbon footprint and went on record saying that Saudi Arabia would "pay the price" for its poor human rights record before begging them to increase oil production. Of course, in reality they sided with Russia, cut production, bumped prices and and Biden voted to "impose consequences" before China brokered a deal, involving Iran as well as numerous human rights abuses. More recently the Saudis bought out the PGA golf tour, leaving those on the left to wonder whether they preferred traditional golf tournaments organised by Donald Trump or those organised by a country where putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car is literally punishable by execution. The situation is so beyond parody at this stage that I'm genuinely waiting to see the Saudi's use of crucification being spun as an olive branch to Christians and a demonstration of the kingdom's religious tolerance and modernisation. Certainly that would be far less ridiculous than say Disney releasing Mary Poppins where the nanny is white and therefore evil, or whatever nonsense the house of mouse next has planned. Currently there is a version of Snow White being made where the character named after her skin as white as snow is played by a Colombian and the 7 Dwarves look like a pride rally in New York and are regular size, apparently because Peter Dinklage didn't understand that the dwarves in the story were the magical species from German folklore and not people afflicted by dwarfism. Who would have thought that Pinnochio telling lies would turn out to be more honest than the corporation itself.

Climate change activists threaten to glue themselves to the Grand National racetrack in order to disrupt or prevent the horse race. It does make you wonder if they know where glue comes from.

Oscar Pistorious looks set to get released early on parole, apparently he's unlikely to jump bail. And physically unable. Roses are red, violets are glorious, never creep up on Oscar Pistorious

There was another high school shooting in the US. Apparently the leading cause of death there in under 16 year olds is guns, although in China it's protesting, so it could be worse

A lot of the protesting being threatened though has been over the upcoming indictment of Donald J Trump, or as he may soon be know, Donal Jail Trump. This is the latest of multiple attempts to charge him with something, anything, no matter how trivial, in order to prevent him running and likely winning an election next year, going by the latest polling and the increasing incompetence of a Biden administration which has been shown to have been up to far worse than Trump was, albeit without police action ever being countenanced. A few years ago, they were going to prove that he was a paid employee of the Russian government and that didn't turn out to be true, although we know how that the Bidden family was, and possibly still is, being paid by the Chinese government. Trump was impeached over allegations of corruption with Ukraine, although there's an actual recording of Biden making identical comments to the Ukrainian government during the Obama era, so they dropped it. Then they wanted to arrest him over holding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and they were *this* close but then it emerged that Biden had been keeping boxes of classified documents at his house in Delaware and had been doing so for over a decade, there's even a family photograph of him in front of his garage with everything clearly stacked up behind him, the way that you or I would keep the Christmas decorations. A lot of his supporters, struggling to defend him, say "at least he's not Trump" but that line is increasingly dubious now, and at least the economy wasn't collapsing on Trump's watch and Eurasia was under control

It remains to be seen whether Trump will comply with any of it of course. The Florida governor actually stated that the state will refuse to cooperate with any federal arrest, one which supposedly doesn't have strong enough evidence to find him guilty. The idea is get him in court, stretch it out and keep him off the campaign trail for as long as possible and with the US legal system and lengthy appeals process, that could be years. On the other hand, there would be zero risk of him being put put in handcuffs if he and Stormy Daniels hadn't been using handcuffs several years ago

Why did the Just Stop Oil protestor cross the road? Because the angry motorist was dragging her by her stupid purple hair. And talking about protests, someone threw an egg at the King, presumably as part of a “Just Stop Royals” protest. Charles later said he wouldn’t have minded if they’d at least been free range or organic.

Also inflation remains in the news, and I think the biggest giveaway is that the economists and newsreaders are talking about the price of an average “basket of goods” whereas anyone my age remembers the good old days when you could go to the shop and afford to buy an entire trolley’s worth of goods

Perhaps the more interesting story though was from the US this week after a mid-term election was far less exciting than expected. The democrats had expected a terrible outcome that would best be illustrated by means of some photographs of Ukraine or a meteor hitting the dinosaurs although there was no mass revolution at the ballot box. In all honesty that was not a terribly surprising outcome, given that both Roe v Wade was the only argument being made in many races and that doesn’t leave a lot of space for swing voters that may have cared more about the economy. Most US elections are almost entirely decided from the get go with only a tiny percentage of voters actually changing their position on things such as abortion, or whether they are pro or anti Trump. It’s reminiscent of the Scottish elections where the simple presence of the SNP means that most of the votes are already decided long before Alex Salmond has had a chance to be arrested for something. For President Joe Biden, the result is of course considered a huge win although it’s potentially apocalyptic for his party heading into 2024. Biden is an elderly man who at a recent press conference was unaware that his son died from cancer several years ago, who became lost in the white house garden and who is generally seen by most in his own party as a electoral liability akin to the time that Charlie Kennedy was put up in a hotel next to a branch of Majestic Wine. Many democrats had secretly hoped for bad losses that would finally force Biden to agree to stand down in 2 years in favour of someone younger or more eloquent or at least someone who could remember people’s names. Yet now he seems determined to run for a 2nd term, mostly likely going up against Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida who straddles a coalition of both Trump voters, as well as minority voters. As Hilary Clinton would call them, a basket of deplorables, but a basket nonetheless makes up at least 50% of the electorate.

One of Princess Diana’s cars was up for sale this week. The 1985 Escort sold for £650k, as compared to Prince Andrew’s 1983 Escort who settled for £12m
Liz Truss is going to be challenging the status quo. Hopefully she’ll be challenging them to learn some new chords or release a new track.
Mikhail Gorbachev passed away. He was the first soviet leader to have been born in the USSR, and it says a lot that about soviet manufacturing that the first time they tried a soviet made leader it destroyed the country within 5 years

But talking about incompetence and people actively working to undermine the country, this week I thought we’d shine a light on how the migrant situation is playing out in America, specifically the issue of how the media and the Democrats think things are going now that they can’t blame Donald Trump for what’s going on. President Trump was of course vilified for separating families on the border and putting children in cages, although that policy started in the early days of the Obama administration when Joe Biden of all people oversaw much of the operational parts of that policy. Then Biden later became president and to his credit he’s old enough that he probably has first hand experience of the Mexican war of the 1840s. Anyway, he has continued to build pieces of border wall although the unofficial policy has been to let migrants do what they want, safe in the knowledge that it’s thousands of miles away and only affecting places like Texas where he’s never going to get any votes anyway. It’s all very very progressive and virtue signally, sitting in ivory towers in Martha’s Vineyard calling anyone who complains a racist, the same wealthy white people who call themselves progressive yet call the police when someone ethnic is seen trying to play a round of golf at their course. These are the same open-minded people who repeatedly make the profoundly racist claim that migrants are needed to do menial jobs like clean toilets or work as bellhops as if we were all still living in the deep south circa 1920.

In recent months though a fairly interesting policy change happened, when Texas and a number of other places started handing out bus tickets so that migrants could escape the supposed hell-holes of Trump country and travel to the “sanctuary cities” in the North. In the past few months, tens of thousands of people have traveled to the likes of Chicago or New York where their diversity can be celebrated and that has gone down about as well as you can imagine amongst the folks who never thought they’d actually have to back up their words with deeds.

In Washington the politicians have called for the national guard to be sent in to help, whilst in New York the policy has been to put everyone up in hotels. The cost of that was recently forecast at $300m, all while the city faces a budget crisis worse than Nicolas Cage, Dennis Rodman and Johnny Depp rolled into one. The Mayor of Chicago probably won the award for hypocrisy after calling governor Abbott racist because he sent migrants to city that has openly demanded for an open border policy. There’s so many brass necks on display that it’s a real shame they can’t sell the brass, and then use the money to fix all the problems caused by their shamelessly and equally useless covid rules from the last couple of years. As they say, it couldn’t happen to more deserving people…

Singer R Kelly got sentenced to 30 years in jail and Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years in jail. Yet another example of a woman being given less for doing the same work as a man.

Ukraine has urged the world to respond after a Russian ship left Berdyansk with 7,000 tons of stolen grain. Putin said, they ‘corn’ have it back.

After the railway workers, apparently Barristers are going to go on strike. That presumably means that it’s going to be more dangerous to go up and down the stairs this summer

This week it’s the 4th of July so I thought we’d look a bit more at the current insanity that has swept over America. There’s a set of important elections coming up later in the year and the democrats are expected to lose so badly that some of them have actually welcomed the recent Roe vs Wade decision because it finally gave them something a platform to actually campaign on that might get them some votes. The ongoing fallout from that continues to of course demonstrate hypocrisy at the highest order with examples of “my body my choice” townhall meetings where to take part you have to show a proof of vaccination. The corporate response has been also largely cynical: a number of corporations been very public about how they will stump up the cost for women in, for instance, Texas or Utah to travel out of state, although then I read an article about how this is largely because paying for an out of state abortion is cheaper than the company having to pay for maternity leave.

Presiding over all of this is sleepy uncle Joe Biden who looks set to add the house and the senate to the list of things he’s lost which currently includes authority and his marbles. A recent photo showed him with a cheat sheet explaining how to sit in his chair and reminding him to say hello to people, it’s the sort of thing you’d give a 6 year old. I personally know people who saw him at a rally 2 years ago and responded by not voting, for anyone, because even then it was clear he had serious mental decline. You’d almost feel sorry were it not for the fact that he and his family have spent half a century grifting and lining their pockets from the public purse in a way that even the Clintons must think is a bit corrupt and unseemly.

In the mean time, the news media continue to place the blame elsewhere, whether it’s Russia or Covid or billionaires not paying enough taxes. Certainly not the current President though, who displays a level of surreal incompetence that makes you half wonder he’s really a character being played by Rowan Atkinson. In the real world nobody cares what his defenders like CNN or NBC say because fewer people watch the news these days, after it spent years liquidating its authority with a witch-hunt about how Donald Trump was a secret KGB agent. Or how green energy was going to be cheap and reliable if people would just lie down and let the politicians get on with running things. Energy could be cheap and reliable again if Biden agreed to let oil companies replace those Russian imports by drilling at home, or building a pipeline or at the very least not continuing to regulate what’s left of existing infrastructure into closure. Five US refineries have closed in the last 2 years, despite claims that they’re licenses to print money. The US was a net energy exporter until recently, but the people that benefit from cheap energy are the sort of people that Biden’s friends call a basket of deplorables and when it comes to the environment, ideological obstructionism is all that counts. All their friends think the same so therefore it must be true and the ends justify the means. A terrifying prospect is therefore if the Ukraine war were to come to an end and prices never came down again and people realised what was going on, and started paying attention to how the myriad of problems at home are one of the few things that still come with a label stating ‘Made in America’

Paul McCartney played at Glastonbury. I wonder if the body double who conspiracists say replaced him in 1966 thought he’d have to keep the act going for this long.

Garry Lineker gave an interview in which he claimed to have sufferer racist abuse due to having slightly tanned skin. Or maybe they were just annoyed about him constantly going around nicking peoples’ crisps. Of course identifying as an ethnic minority thus opens the door to suing the BBC if they ever try to cut his pay. Or maybe he’s also planning to start wearing women's clothes and apply for the job of Doctor Who or perhaps presenting Newsnight.

There are also rumours that the pope might resign so if anyone’s going down the bookies, they might want to go online first and research a list of Ukrainian cardinals

But the big story of the week was of course the Supreme Court decision in America although it’s been so badly reported on that I thought I’d clear up a couple of points here

1. The Supreme court didn’t ban abortions. What it did do was allow states to pass laws doing so. Any bans or rules you see will be there because some politicians passed a law, not because a court banned something.
2. Joe Biden and the house and the senate could pass a law guaranteeing abortion rights. America is one of the few countries to not have laws on the subject. They actually tried last month but the law failed to pass because, contrary to what you see on the news, this is not a subject where the majority of politicians want to pass a law
3. Joe Biden is one of those. For decades he was a senator for Delaware and he’s a practicing catholic who spent years trying to pass a law banning abortion nationwide, just in case the Roe v Wade decision was ever overturned. If Biden enthusiastically backed a new law, it would be like watching Prince Charles campaigning on behalf of McDonalds or putting Katie Price in charge of the MCC. Actually, that wouldn’t be a bad idea, at least she’d struggle when it came to inventing new bastardised versions of cricket
4. One of the world leaders to condemn the vote was Emmanuel Macron saying that the US should be more like France. Which is funny because until last week, France had stricter rules than Mississippi. Indeed, with a 14 week limit, France has some of the strictest abortion laws in the western world
5. In contrast, a lot of US States have no time limit and allow abortions in the 9th month of of pregnancy with no reason needing to b given. We’re not talking about cases involving disability or the mother’s life, we’re talking about a lifestyle abortions of, days before the baby’s due date. No other country does that. Going further still, California and Maryland currently have proposed laws working their way through their state legislatures, that would allow abortion up to 7 days after birth. That is euthanasia, not abortion, and the reason that abortion is in the news is largely because the pro-choice side of the debate has become so ludicrously extreme and polarising that many normal people see banning it entirely as the preferred option if you have to pick a side. If that makes life like the Handmaid’s Tale then so be it, it’s probably better than living in something like Soylent Green
6. There is a huge irony here that the two subjects being discussed here are women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Justin Trudeau took to twitter to emphasise to women that it’s your body so your decision and the government should have no say in the matter, having just spent the last 2 years trying to jail people who said that exact same thing when it came to covid. Similarly, people have had careers destroyed for saying that women's rights are a thing or that only women can become pregnant. Now men are supposed to stay out of things though, and not get involved in issues that don’t affect them? According to the more vocal people online, anyone can give birth to a child, regardless of gender. Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton could get pregnant if they wanted to and if they convinced enough woke people to believe them, so so they should have just as much a say on the subject as any of the teenage girls who were also trafficked to that island.
7. Talking of rich people with dubious ethics, someone who stayed out of things as wasn’t involved in this was President Trump. Banning abortion was one of a litany of things the left screamed was guaranteed to happen under Trump and of course it never did, at least until Biden came into power. Same with the economy imploding, trying to ban freedom of movement, journalists being blacklisted for their beliefs, or Russia being emboldened into starting a war without fear of US reprisals. You could argue that Trump appointed 3 court justices, but then you could also throw blame at President Obama who was famously tricked into not filling a court vacancy because it was an election year. An election that Hilary Clinton then lost. And also have the case of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She was urged to retire years ago, so she could be replaced with someone younger and even more left-leaning. Instead she stayed on before passing aged 87 and being replaced during the Trump administration. It’s interesting how she’s now gone from being a progressive folk hero, to being vilified for her selfish desire to stay on that ultimately tipped the court the other way. Although she herself said for years that the best and only way to settle things would be for Washington to actually pass an abortion law on the subject. But that would involve politicians doing something productive and reaching out across the aisle. It's a real shame there's not a way to settle the matter with a law that also includes a 10year military funding program or a kickback to the energy industry, then we'd have the whole thing sorted in time for the 4th of July

Joe Biden fell off a bike. You can tell it’s a slow news week when that makes the news headlines every few years, you might remember when George W Bush fell off a bike, although it at least made a change from the time he fell off the wagon. Either way the stumbling mess is a perfect metaphor for an administration that seemingly decided to use the 50th anniversary of Watergate to remind Americans how great Nixon and Jimmy Carter were compared to who they get to vote for these days

In Britain it looks like there will be a summer dominated by strike action on the railways after 13 different companies voted to stay at home enjoying the weather and the BBQ. Maybe something about salaries too, who knows. For everyone else, it’s simply a case of waiting until a government minister or union leader makes a joke about there being light at the end of the tunnel. I remember one time I thought I saw a light at the end of the tunnel but it was just someone with a torch coming to bring me more work.

The WHO want to rename Monkeypox on the basis that the name is racist, supposedly towards people from Africa. It’s quite astonishing because that itself is remarkably ignorant, the last time I checked, monkeys were more commonly found in Asia. Other things found in Asia include badly bioweapons labs and members of the Chinese government handing out suitcases of money if you work for the WHO.

Prince William turns 40 in a few days and the tabloids are filled to the brim with stories about him and whether 40 is the new 30 and how him and Harry don’t get on. One story I saw decided to show this relationship metaphorically with a photograph of Harry playing polo and falling off a horse. I don’t blame him though, it must be pretty difficult to ride a horse and stay balanced when you have that massive chip on your shoulder.

In other royal news, Prince Charles is going to be off on a trip to visit Rwanda. This was originally going to be to discuss climate change but will of course be overshadowed by the issue of migrant deportations although the two are of course interlinked and migrants from Africa give them their credit do tend to favour the zero-carbon transport option of making a boat out a tarpaulin and some empty water drums. The ECHR recently told Boris that they could overrule him on things despite him being an elected Prime Minister and them being some bureaucrats from a foreign country. That’s pretty much the same way that Nicola Sturgeon views things mind. The whole court decision might be a good thing mind, and give the impetus to finally remove the UK from that nonsense. Given the recent Julian Assange decision it’s clear that human rights or justice have no impact when it comes to decision making anyway.

In the news this week:
- The rock singer Meatloaf died, allegedly of covid, and if true then it would fitting that he was killed by a bat out of hell. I told that joke to a friend who responded by sining "you took the words right out of my mouth"
- There was also a terrorist siege at a synagogue in Texas. This was reported by the BBC as "A man from Leicester has been shot by police in Texas" and I thought that's from nearly 5000 miles away, he must be a heck of a good shot.
- Another article on the Beeb speculated about what would happen if the whole world went vegan. My answer is that I suspect we'd never hear the end of it.

To be honest most of the news this week has just been the ongoing fallout from last week's Party-gate story. Things are now in the secrecy stage where Conservative MPs may or may not be writing to Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee which ultimately has the power to force a leadership election if 15% of MPs vote for one. Boris has managed to largely distance himself from the details of what went on which is remarkable, especially as even Fred West eventually admitted to having had people in his garden. Do MPs think that they stand to lose their seat at the next election though. That wouldn't be for another 2 years by which point many expect that things will be forgotten, the economy will be doing well again and they don't want to potentially gamble everything on Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak when Boris, love him or hate him has a knack for winning elections. He’s very much like Manchester City in that respect, including wearing the colour blue as well as having very murky finances that none of us are allowed to know about.

Talking about replacing leaders though, the US has also seen a scramble at the top and DCs worst kept secret is that senior people are trying to decide how best to replace Joe Biden, either at the next election or possibly beforehand if need be. The president gave one of the first to-camera pieces for weeks recently in which he seemed confused, suffering from serious cognitive decline and one point accidentally it would be ok if Russia made a minor incursion into Ukraine, before later retracting that and saying he meant something completely different but at this point it's a like a small child covered in chocolate claiming to not know where the chocolate cake went. I probably shouldn’t joke though because it’s a tragic situation, he should be a care home living out his last years in peace and quiet, not being dragged out in front of a rabid press once every 6 weeks and expected to make nuanced statements. President Trump said crazy stuff but he did it to troll his opponents, no rational person thought jokes on Twitter were anything other than that jokes and he knew there was a line in the sand when it came to green lighting a land war in Europe.

If Biden were to resign then that would leave Kamala Harris in charge, but for the past 12 months she’s done little other than exude incompetency and it’s hard to stress just how unfavourably she’s amongst the general public. as far as potential female presidents go, she's less popular than any other possible choice out there like Hilary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, and that’s true even when you allow for fictional people like Medusa from Greek mythology. Crazy as it sounds, Hilary Clinton is right now actually considering a 4th run for the white house and there is a genuine chance the next election will be a literal rerun of Clinton vs Trump. Which at least makes forecasting the outcome easy because we already know how people will vote if given those two options.

In the news:

- Sports news as cricketer Azeem Rafiq apologised for antisemitic posts on Twitter, days after he accused others of racism. It seems like he was caught out, very much like when he played for Yorkshire.
- Pret-a-Manger are apparently going on a hiring spree ahead of Christmas and are looking for people to fill lots of rolls
- Environmental news as Kerry Katona announced that her bank balance had achieved net zero

But the larger story this week was out of America, specifically Kenosha Wisconsin, after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges, and it seems that the only people who are likely to go to jail are the those who immediately started rioting, setting fire to things and showing their discontent by going down to the Apple store to protest the verdict by stealing a Macbook Pro and maybe some Nike shoes while they’re in town. For those who didn’t follow the story he’s a brief rundown

- Last summer there was a large Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha Wisconsin following the shooting by police of an african-american man called Jacob Blake
- The protest very quickly turned violent
- Kyle Rittenhouse meanwhile was visiting his father and took a rifle with him when he went to defend a car dealership.
- A number of protestors attacked him and tried to beat and then shoot him to death. Shots were fired on both sides and in the end Kyle was alive but 2 of his attackers weren’t because apparently Kyle was a good shot whilst they had more troubleshooting than Windows 95
- Kyle was subsequently arrested and the court case was over whether he acted in self-defence or not. The jury decided that yes, he was within his rights to shoot back at people who were firing guns at him. The case seemed pretty black and white but therein lies the racial lens stories like this are reported through these days

The actual verdict in this case came as no surprise to anyone if they’d actually followed the facts. There was video footage of what happened and the star witness even admitted that he raised his weapon first. The case had largely become a real-life version of the Star Wars argument about whether Han shot first, except this being America it’s unclear which side is more vocal: Star Wars fans, or left wing political activists. To many, a court a case like this shouldn’t be about the facts, it should be about what they feel and be based on emotions and rather than determine the legal status of an individual incident, it should be solely based on settling a broader political question. The news media spent the last year portraying Rittenhouse as a domestic terrorist and to them it was so morally important to convict him that an MSNBC was given a restraining order preventing him going near the court-house after he started researching the names and addresses of the jurors so that if they acquitted him then he could publish everything online and let the mob enact their own form of vengeance-justice. Joe Biden, then still running for president, used an image of Rittenhouse as part of a campaign video denouncing white supremacy and there’s now talk that he could be sued for defamation. I guess because it’s not a proper court case in the States unless someone is being sued for millions of dollars, although Biden may have the last laugh if he settles and hands over the cash only to point out that thanks to his hyperinflation, 20 million dollars isn’t enough to buy a beer. For me the most American part of the story is the horrific corruption and nepotism in small-town America. The mayor John Antaramianlet the town burn for his own political ends. His cousin Ed Antaramian is the City Attorney. His nephew Michael Easton is the Kenosha City Judge. His other nephew is Tip McGuire who’s the State Representative and His other cousin is Laura Belsky the County Board Supervisor. That is insane, it’s like something crazy out of a tv show or movie. Maybe they’ll make a movie out of the Kyle Rittenhouse story, but just be careful telling someone you’re looking for shooting locations. Especially if you intend to hire Alec Baldwin.

This past week was a curious one for Joe Biden, eventually culminating in an infrastructure bill being passed. Fantastic news if you’re one of the many politicians whose family and friends are in the construction business. It's seemingly easy to waste obscene amounts of money when you call it "investing in the future" rather than, "being ripped off left right and centre" And let's not kid ouselves, the waste is on the right as well as the political left. Anyway, after all the other the events of the prior week this spending bill seemed like the political equivalent of someone having a bad week and then spending all weekend in the pub burning through their wages. For several weeks, Biden has been torn apart by most sections of the media, with approval ratings falling faster than a drunk on a unicycle.

Some of this anger showed itself in the form of elections in New Jersey and Virginia, states where Mr Biden won by 10 points last election, yet this time lost. In one instance a New Jersey Senator who had been in the job for decades, lost to a former trucker who apparently only spent $153 on the campaign which given the shortage of truckers means it was an hour’s wages or something. He was in New Jersey though, so working in politics or “transportation” are essentially the same thing, you do what Tony Soprano tells you to. $153 is still a remarkably small amount of money though, especially given the sky-rocketing cost of living. Petrol prices have doubled in the last 18 months, maybe that explains why so many more New York rats are taking public transit, or maybe it’s just more left-wing mis-management with the city this week laying of thousands of unvaccinated sanitation workers and key jobs like the police, firemen and health workers before blaming everyone from Donald Trump to Dick Dastardly but definitely not themselves. The largest swing factor in these elections was undoubtedly education, the incumbent Virginia governor made it an election pledge to guarantee that no parent would ever be given a say in the school curriculum. I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggest that teachers accusing 5 year olds of being systemically racist and telling parents that they they be arrested if they disagreed, was ever going to be a vote winner. That literally happened, a parent in Virginia was arrested for transphobia after his daughter was assaulted in a school toilet by a boy in a dress who later admitted that he wasn’t transgender after all. This is the ultra-woke school philosophy where people think, for instance, that the historian Guy Chapman should have changed his name to Person PersonPerson. It’s quite a crazy world we live in where there are politicians literally trying to re-introduce segregation and the idea of “seperate but equal” and yet the people that *oppose* that are are the ones being accused of being crazy racists. It’s all upside down, next thing you know, Abu Hamza will be opening up a Weatherspoons franchise, or perhaps Yoko Ono will do a recruitment advert for the army

So where was the President while all this was going on? In Scotland attending the climate conference where he proceeded to fall asleep on camera. You do have to wonder how the BBC would have covered that story if Donald Trump had done it. The internet would have caught fire and everyone would call for his resignation but it’s Joe Biden so he gets a free pass whether it’s or when he thought he was a senator still, or forgetting people’s names, probably including his own, give it another year. The summit itself was of course a complete waste of time for everyone apart perhaps from the bloke that has the deal to sell jet fuel to Glasgow Airport, there’s stories about how the catering ran out and was bad enough anyway that leaders from the third world complained, Emmanuel Macron actually left several days early, although it’s not clear whether that was due to gastronomic taste, or because he was fed up of the UK and Australia laughing at him over the submarine deal. My favourite story from the whole fiasco was the one about protestors demanding the cancelling of a new coal mine in Cumbria, insisting that the government build wind farms instead, all completely oblivious to the fact that the project was going to be producing coking coal which isn’t used in energy production any more tofu is used in my kitchen. Wind turbine manufacturing includes steel and you therefore literally can’t build wind turbines without coking coal. Did any journalists question it or ask if any of the protestors actually understood mining or manufacturing? Well that was always going to be about as likely as the Chinese showing up. In the mean time I’m going to use the conference as inspiration to lose 3 stone, but I’m giving myself an arbitrary far away deadline of 2050, and the changes to my diet don’t include Chinese or Indian.

This week, tennis player Emma Raducanu won the US open, showing that unlike Prince Andrew, she’s not scared of an American Court. Actually talking of which, Prince Andrew has a shooting weekend scheduled 2 days before the first court hearing in the US, be careful Andy, accidents will happen after all.

However, the larger story out of the US this week was an order from the White House that all federal employees have to be vaccinated, they have around 2 months in which to do so but this raises a couple very important questions, the largest of which is what happens to the country if people decline the offer and the federal government ends up having to get rid of hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of workers. I say workers although many of them don't do a lot work, except actually when you look at the fine print it turns out that the rules don’t apply to members of congress or their staff. But that’s to be expected I suppose, even normal rules: Everything that goes up must come down? Take a look at the national debt.

But to the point raised, what happens if out of the 2m or so members of the US armed forces, the military is forced to discharge half a million people. If you think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a confused shambles, it will be interesting to see what happens when the army’s forced to remove troops from Germany and the border with North Korea. Honestly, I really think this is a far bigger story than anyone has realised. Air traffic controllers are federal employees, it wouldn’t take too many people walking away to shut down air travel, including cargo aircraft. Or maybe I’m wrong and all of these people will choose to change their mind and all the stories about federal workers thinking of changing jobs will all disappear. They might all disappear, just like the clips from last year where both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were on film saying they wouldn’t take a vaccine because Donald Trump was recommending it. That’s the problem when you take an issue and make it part of a culture war. The same state of affairs is true in France were Emanuel Macron made the Astra-Zeneca vaccine a political discussion, thus splitting the country down the middle and re-framing the vaccine debate as being as much about covid as it is on unemployment and immigration. Talking about France by the way, does anyone else think that Chewbacca in Star Wars is French? He seems to understand English perfectly well but he just refuses to speak it. Anyway, to the UK, Sajid Javid this weekend said that the government opposes a vaccine passport system, I suspect the government quite astutely knows that the rollout and participation in such a system would be seen by a good section of the public as a tacit acceptance of other tory policies and that Boris would like to keep tribalism over Brexit or social care as far away from the public health discussion as possible. Or maybe he’s waiting to roll it out on the sly when the US is forced to remove all its remaining soldiers from Eastern Europe.

Whilst I was away on holiday, the US decided to pull out of Afghanistan and the country collapsed faster than Diane Abbott getting into a deck chair. The Taliban are back in charge and they have lots of ideas for what to do with the place, like a much bigger and more violent version of one of those tv home makeover shows. Maybe they'll convert the spare bedroom into an arms depot and in the garden how about a water feature except instead of water it’s the blood of the innocent and the kids tree-house will double up as a gallows because contrary to the media’s suggestion, the place is far from a lawless wild west. Quite the opposite really, say what you want about Taliban the tend to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", an expression first used by Tony Blair around the time he got the UK involved in the country. It’s just a shame that in that list of ‘causes of crime’ they also tend to include things or “owning a smartphone” or “being a woman” When it comes to the new government's policies I actually misread things and mistakenly thought they were being quite progressive when they said that, like many western countries, that they didn’t want drivers licenses to just have 2 gender options, albeit rather than adding options they want to restrict ownership back to men only.

Anyway, the regime change was quite swift owing to the former Afghan president fleeing the country “to avoid bloodshed.” Presumably his own. He’s currently living it up in the UAE having smuggled $160m out of the country’s treasury. I guess that’s something a lot of people aspire to doing though when they’re fired from a job. As for everybody else trying to flee the country, there were ghastly scenes broadcast on television with images of babies being thrown over barbed wire fences and people dying in the struggle to board what few planes there were. In many respects it reminded me of the last time I flew with Ryanair, albeit there’s not a Wetherspoons in Kabul. On viewing the scenes Harry and Meghan were “left speechless” which made for a pleasant change from their usual torrent of inane touchy feely rubbish.

But thus ends America’s decades long involvement in the country and we can instead welcome in a war-mongering caliphate on side with the Russians and Chinese. Brought not to the world by President Trump but by sleepy Uncle Joe Biden who is senile enough the he probably thinks that Soviet Union is still trying to invade the place. There was an astonishing story about him this week when it was revealed that Osama Bin Laden personally intervened to prevent an attempted assassination attempt on him 10 years ago when he was still Vice President under Obama. This was on the logic that he was so profoundly incompetent that he would be an Al Qaeda asset if he got in the Oval Office. This last week he even gave an interview where he claimed his son had fought in Afghanistan (which he didn’t) and that he was in the Navy (which he wasn’t). That wouldn’t even make sense, the place is a landlocked country. I feel sorry for him really, he’s an elderly man who’s suffered two aneurisms, has a heart condition, clearly has dementia and is being abused by his handlers and the rest of the Democratic part. But we are where we are. Afghanistan will revert to being theocratic hellscape and tens of thousands of people will literally be put to the sword, but at least the cabinet that allowed it all to transpire was diverse. In a couple of months when ghastly footage comes out of girls being whipped to death for the crime of not covering their face. it might look painful but at least nobody’s feelings will be being hurt on Twitter

​​Exciting times in the world of sport this week after 3 days saw the rise and sudden collapse of a proposed European football super-league. If only Roman Abramovich had been in charge of the Brexit negations then we could have been out 48 hours after the referendum result. The week started with the announcement that 12 elite football clubs were going be starting up a new league which would play games midweek, as a compliment to the existing Saturday games. Depending who you spoke to this included 5 top ranked Premiere League clubs plus Tottenham. Or 5 top clubs, plus Arsenal. You get the idea. There were also some Spanish and Italian teams but nobody from France and apparently Bayern Munich were apparently all for it until they discovered that it said European Super League and not Super-race, so no German teams either. Anyway, fans didn’t like the idea, stating that Tottenham should spending money rebuilding a new squad, not constructing a 2nd trophy cabinet to collect dust and I’d certainly not seen a gunner that angry since the bloke up in that Las Vegas hotel a few years back. Anyway, by Wednesday the teams were dropping faster than political dissidents in Russia and the project swiftly collapsed, queue yet more sporting metaphors. The public are now being dangled the prospect that it could be revived with the Premiere league being reimagined as a UK-wide event with Rangers and Celtic being invited along. That’s a project that for the past 30 years plus has been primarily reserved for being discussed in the pub by the bloke at the end of the bar. The only real upside to that plan really would be that the English fans could finally benefit from the free weekly education on Irish history, King William, and the Pope. Liverpool still sting that song by Gerry & The Pacemakers but Celtic’s discography goes back 3 centuries.
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​​Elsewhere in America there was news as Joe Biden announced that the US is going to cut carbon emissions by a half by 2030, describing it as a ‘Once in a century opportunity’ in so much as the taxpayers will be on the hook on it for the next hundred years. Cutting emissions in half is a bit like you or I saying we’re going to drop 2 stone by the end of the year. Very easily to say but utterly ludicrous without a major change in policy, none of which has been given in any proper scrutiny. Going back to the football story, it’s like a bottom-rung club hiring a new manger who claims that he’ll win the Champions League next season without explaining how, all whilst the fans sit around nodding. If we give President Biden the benefit of the doubt and somehow pretend that the money isn’t going to be an issue, where are the cuts actually going to come from? Banning air conditioning in the south? Perhaps banning the sale of new heating systems in Michigan where the winters are 20° below? These are all actually ideas being seriously proposed, generally by the same people that claim that mathematics should be banned from schools - that’s a real thing, look it up. In context, the city of Houston alone has a GDP larger than the UAE and it’s similarly reliant on oil for that money, which the President is wanting to turn off in the way that you or I would turn off if we saw that Ant & Dec were coming on after the break. Forget about healthcare or guns, the environmental movement is far more likely to cause the US to break up, because why on earth would midwestern states commit economic suicide when they can just say no happily go on trading with Asia. In the meantime. Part of the proposals being discussed see China promising peak carbon by 2030 which by definition means that it is actively promising to increase its carbon emissions every single year until the end of the decade. Or worse, perhaps their plan is to continue beyond that but offset it by eliminating those from Tibet and Taiwan. Perhaps Joe’s plan is to half the US emissions by encouraging all the Trump-voting states to leave the country. That would be 25 states, 50% exactly.

The aftermath of the US election has been a sordid mess and one in which the media’s analysis has been about as neutral as a listening to Jimmy Hill commentate on an England game against Germany. Except of course these day’s its former crisp salesman turned football pundit Garry Lineker offering insight on twitter. And just like Jimmy Hill, like many of the people who voted for Joe Biden died several years ago.

At time of recording Mr Biden has been announced as the winner although there are still a number number of very real and deeply concerning anomalies with the voting counts (which I’ll come to in a bit) but from day one the BBC, CNN and their comrades are very actively pursuing the route that it’s all done, nothing to see here, everybody move along so we can get Donald Trump out of the White House and they can claim editorial neutrality for all they want but I’ve seen Tony the Tiger be more neutral about the taste of frosted flakes. The removal of President Trump is a religion for many people, most of whom are unable to actually provide examples of actions or policies that have actually affected them personally. In Britain it’s normally the sort of people that used to protest outside the US Embassy in part because until recently it was located just around the corner from Selfridges so they could make a day of it, then jump on the tube at Bond Street and head back to their 6 bedroom town house.

At the heart of this debacle though has been a number of highly dubious counts in key counties, many of which were Trump strongholds which switched to Biden by a landslide, at least on the ballots that were asking about the white house, remember that there were senate races and congressional districts up for grabs too and indeed one of the main pieces of evidence in favour of the alleged vote-rigging is that the democrats did so poorly in congressional and senate races. Typically the vote counts are the same because voters cast a vote for the same party on each of the ballot slips yet in many cases there are counties that voted overwhelmingly for Mr Biden yet also returned republican congressmen and Trump supporting senators by the same margin as in previous years.

To accompany this though have been electronic counting machines that have been shown after a handful of recounts to have overcalled Mr Biden’s votes by thousands although we have been reassured that these are one-off glitches, yet that same software is being used nationally in 30 states and court cases are being brought to prevent any further recounts. That counting software by the way is made by a company called Dominion Voting Systems and that company previously donated $2m donation to the Clinton Foundation. All things considered, I have as much faith in those numbers being true and accurate as I do of Mr Biden being able to remember what his own name is without a teleprompter or a slip of paper. And the press coverage of the maths reminds me of when when a kid once asked me if I could help them find the number 10 on a calculator.

Nonetheless for me the big takeaway is that in amidst the talk of the white house the main story has been lost which is that the Democrats did not take over the legislature with big majorities in the congress nor senate. Joe Biden and his supporters can talk all they want about raising taxes or banning fracking or re-balancing the supreme court but they can’t do any of. If joe Biden decides to make sign the Paris accord the republican senate can turn around and reassure the public that they will be doing nothing to enforce it and if Democrat run cities were expecting a blank cheque to bail them and their friends out, they might find that the bailout gets calculated by those dubious ballot counting machines. There’s a real sense that places like Chicago and New York have been purposely run into the ground in recent months so that Biden can preside over a democrat-led bail-out and revival to conclusively prove that the country does better when Democrats are in charge. As it the one thing you can say is that Democrat politicians must be in incredible physical shape because that’s a lot of stretching the truth and jumping to conclusions. For now, President Trump remains in office for another 70 days or thereabouts so lets see what he spends the time doing, or what surprises he has in store for his successor to have to inherit.

Couple of big stories this week. First there was yet another terrorist attack in France, and after the terrorist tried to buy C4 explosives and accidentally ordered a Citroen C4, this one involved a knife instead and a beheading. I have to give credit to the French police who kept their calm whilst many others were losing their head. President Macron was already about to start a lockdown for Coronavirus so let's see if whether lockdown curfew prevents Tunisian migrants as effectively as it does Corona, I suspect it will be exactly just as effective, by which I mean "not very" Either way, the roads leading out of Paris are so jammed that you'd assume someone had spotted a German reconnaissance plane.

Talking of analogies to the 1930s, this week in Britain saw a bombshell report condemning the Labour Party of anti-semitism, claims that many of the party faithful ironically blame on a zionist conspiracy to smear Jeremy Corbyn. As if he needed help in that or had ever risked winning an election. These of course are the sort of left wing activists that have hammers and sickles on their Facebook page, but probably don't know how to spell the word sickle, the types of people who become geography teachers in order to have a platform to discuss the geography of the Middle East with impressionable children. A good portion of these people probably read that Corbyn had been suspended, and feared that he'd been suspended by a rope from Blackfriars Bridge just like in that conspiracy involving the Vatican in the early 80s. You have to give some credit to Kier Starmer I guess for at least having a go at turning the party into a centrist party, albeit one the doesn't have any sort of policy or clue what it's purpose is. There's a joke I heard that a man goes into a garage and explains that his car labours in first gear and pulls to the left and the mechanic asks, "what kind of car is it?" to which the owner replies "A Kia starmer"

Lastly to America where the poling day is next Tuesday and if some newspapers are talking about a civil war in the Labour Party then as they say they do things far bigger though not necessarily better in the US. Let's run through the possibilities because all of them are awful

1) A Biden win: this could go 2 ways. If he wins and takes the senate then be prepared for regressive tax and environmental laws at a federal level. Those laws will likely be declared unconstitutional, so the court will be topped up with more judges until they get things passed. Honestly, if this happens I could see a number of states openly ignore the law, and then as they say "we're not in Kansas anymore." Except we are because Kansas and most of the oil-rich south are key contenders for that secession.
2) A Trump win: this will result in years screaming by left about conspiracies and asking why the vermin and dumb hicks in their Obama-voting districts didn't do as they were told this time around. Every celebrity will claim they're leaving, but none will unless you mean moving from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz or, well somewhere within a few hours drive of Los Angeles
3) Perhaps Biden will win but not have the senate this means gridlock: nothing happens for 4 years with the senate repeatedly voting down Biden's laws and refusing to appoint his court appointees. Eventually he retires and 2024 sees a rerun of this election but with younger and far more extremist candidates on the ballot.
4) The vote is contested with accusations of fraud (probably fact-based accusations) from both sides, and with some counties in key states having turnouts at over 100% which is to be expected I guess when both sides are adding ballots to the count. This scenario will of course go all the way to the top where Mr Trump's newly refreshed US Supreme court will almost certainly rule in favour of him. This is where we get to find out whether California really wants to go it alone or not like they keep threatening. And whether the silicon valley types and their money really do want to live under an independent high tax utopia like they've been so keen to promote in the Trump era when it was as likely to happen as their companies being open and transparent.

I realised it's now the middle of October so I have to ask, how is everyone enjoying their 6 month free trial to the new world order? On the Corona front there's a new 3 tiers system and the whole thing is about as made up and opaque as the 33 tiers of freemasonry. I wonder how that's going these days? Presumably less handshaking thanks to Covid. And none of those weird midnight ceremonies, what with a 10pm curfew.

The big story this past week was in France where a history teacher was decapitated by a terrorist, which I guess only goes to show the dangers of using a classroom practical to teach kids about the French Revolution. The situation actually occurred after the teacher taught a lesson about free speech that involved cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Cartoons which I chose not to replicate this week, partly out of fear of reprisals but also partly because being Scottish there's a slim chance that I am indeed one of those immortal people out of the movie Highlander and Sean Connery laid it down pretty firm about the rules of that game and not losing your head. As to the news story itself I'm not sure exactly how it went down or if the teacher put up much of a fight, though it is the french we're talking about here. The teaching association has since reiterated that it's important to discuss tough subjects though. To which I would respond that they're already teaching all of the lessons in french and that must make them pretty tough already. It is worth noting that this week's incident is but the tip of an iceberg of underlying tensions that seem to be covered up remarkably well, asides from when it spills into international news by way of the internet. The fire earlier this year at Nantes Cathedral for instance was portrayed by many outlets as a tragic accident which it absolutely wasn't. There is a level of denial and complicity at play here akin to when the titanic hit the iceberg and many peoples' reaction was to add some of the ice to their gin and tonic.

The other big story this week was out of America with only a few weeks to go until voting day. A few weeks back Joe Biden was odds on to win. Now Trump is even money and Biden is just odd. This was all compounded off the back of a major story about how Biden's son was up to his eyeballs in corruption with links to Ukraine, China and Joe himself was even offered shares in a multi-million dollar business venture as part of a negotiation that pretty much involved him being in the room and occasionally namedropping President Obama. I didn't think any candidate could out-Clinton the Clintons but the Democrats really went hardball this year it seems. None of this of course will change any supporters' minds. To paraphrase Mr Trump from a few years ago, Joe Biden could stand sneezing and coughing in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose one voter. However, the story will be a decisive blow for the argument that "all politicians are the same." While Trump and Biden represent two vehemently polarised political parties, both candidates are remarkably similar in their personal life whether it be murky business dealings, age, health or accusations of racism in a world where nobody even knows the definition of what that is on a day to day basis. What is known is that a reduced turnout is known to benefit the president, albeit at the polling station and not at his currently closed casinos where he's probably losing money faster than any of his punters ever did.

The other night I was watching a show on the BBC about recycling and landfill and just like a lot of other BBC programming, it was rubbish. So what has been going on?

There's a series of new lockdowns going on around the world as politicians struggle to prevent new Covid cases or in many cases use the news for self promotion. Looking at my home country of Scotland, the government announced that bars would close for 2 weeks although given that people were warned in advance and may have overdone it, I doubt many people would want to go near a bar for a few days after the ban anyway. And at the end of the day it may all just be to help the SNP avoid any new stories involving Alex Salmond meeting new friends on a night out.

Guitar Virtuoso Eddie Van Halen also died of cancer and as someone with a vast collection of vinyl I guess I was tinged with both sadness as well as the thought to put some albums up on eBay at triple the price. His wife said her "heart and soul have been shattered" before a spiritualist asked her to stop stealing Eddie's lyrics

However, the big story was that it's just a month to go until the US election and there's been new stories coming out left right and centre or as the press would rather express it, far left and far right, no centre. This week saw the vice-Presidential debate which compared to the Trump-Biden fracas was somewhat more civilised. Certainly it was refreshing to see a discussion without interruptions like the classic "stop i can't breath you're standing on my neck" which is all to often the case with arguments recorded. Pence came across a bit more professional but it doesn't really matter because the big news is that the President is alive, covid free and back on the campaign trail. Subsequent debates have been canceled because the President suspects they'll be rigged against him and he's probably right but it's probably irrelevant because he comes from the world of television and we have at least 2 major unknown plottwists between now and election day. It could go either way this time, it really could, and I'm yet to wager money on the result but I will say this much: Donald Trump is so far behind in the polls that it reminds me of the night he won the Presidency.

cartoon: trump doesn't start wars. Result, "get rid of him"

They say that a week is a long time in politics but this last one seems to have been longer than the hold time when you try to contact the council. This week we’re talking about President Trump and one of the biggest October Surprises in election history. Maybe not the biggest, that would go to the Russians in October 1917 when Lenin decided to cancel the idea of an election and just kill people instead, a classic Russian election technique still employed to this day.

Let’s stick to America though, this last week started with an election debate that was described as a dumpster fire in which President Trump and Candidate Biden yelled at each other and over the moderator. To people watching in the UK it made for very strange viewing in so much as the braying and childishness was never interrupted by the speaker of the house shouting “order order!” Nicola Sturgeon also thought it was a disgrace because the SNP weren’t allowed a say in the debate owing to English politicians in the late 1700s, notably George III.

Skip forward a few days and on Friday the President announced that he had contracted Covid19, not to be mistaken for Maria19, which is the twitter handle of a striptease artiste living in a trailer park down the road from Mara Lago. Allegedly, hastag grab her by the cat. Anyway, at this news many on the left instantly jumped to the conclusion that he was actually fine and the whole thing was part of yet another conspiracy theory, presumably one that can be easily answered by investigating whether Robert Mueller spent the weekend putting down a deposit on another beach-house. Nonetheless, the situation did appear to be fairly serious and president apparently spent the weekend surrounded by doctors and on a cocktail of drugs, just like Joe Biden did before the first debate.

I guess we won’t know anything for sure for another week although this has been yet another news story where the supposedly compassionate socially caring types have spent 2 days wishing death and pain for the entire family and friends of someone who disagrees with their political views. The irony being of course that were the President to die then he would become a martyr and a rallying point for the next half a century, a conservative president set for a landslide re-election who was cut down in his prime as a last resort throw of the dice by the deep state conspiracy. As compared of course to if Mr Biden caught Covid, in which case the election should be delayed because it's unfair if the left don't have all the advantages they need in order to lose spectacularly.

As the US election draws closer the country appears more divided than the flat pack desk I didn't get around to doing this weekend. It's made a number of commentators ask: what would Abraham Lincoln or George Washington would be doing if they were alive today? To which the obvious answer is scratching at the inside of the coffin as shouting so that someone can let them out. And Lincoln might be looking up that play on Wikipedia to see how it ended seeing as he missed the last 20 minutes.

But yes it's 2 months until election day as we move into autumn or as they call it in America, the "fall" which brings to mind other falls like the fall of Saigon, the fall of the Roman Empire, or that time that Neil Kinnock fell over on a beach because just like Kinnock the US left wing politicians have been trying incredibly hard make themselves seem as unelectable as possible over the past couple weeks. As an analogy, try to imagine the fictional kingdom run by Babar the Elephant and now try to imagine the hunter running for political office in it, possibly with a zookeeper as running mate. That is roughly what you have as left wing mayors champion the abolition of the police and urge you to vote for Joe Biden to speed that process up. Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles and New York are now deserted downtown and regularly witness to scenes reminiscent of the 3rd world and yet for many that is portrayed as a good thing with references being made to South Africa and the end of minority white rule as they actively fan the flames of a race war that frankly matters very little to anyone who doesn't have a financial stake in it. When Democrats say that the country needs immigrants to do the things ordinary Americans won’t it makes you wonder "like what, voting Democrat?"

All the while Joe Biden has been silent on the topic of the riots and so uninspiring that you half wonder whether making him the front-runner was part of a "make a wish event" like when they let a terminally ill patient have lunch with their favourite sporting hero. It's worth remembering that Joe only got the position because the party stooges wouldn't allow the role to go to Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton wouldn't let Elizabeth Warren beat her in the first female president competition. The somewhat confusing (yet inevitable way) the vote was rigged meant that the party activists voted for competence and charisma, yet were left with Jo Biden and for many it's like if you ordered a double bed and the company delivered you a double bass. Except that basses are associated with jazz and cool whereas Joe seems like the guy who'd go to a concert and then complain afterwards that the orchestra was a cover band. Who knows, maybe he's been around long enough to have seen Mozart playing a live gig back in the day. Either way, we currently have 9 weeks to go until we can see which of the two ld white men, both with accusations of impropriety, both running of a campaign on identity politics, gets to live in the White house next year. And possibly a 3 further subsequent years depending on how things go!

This week I thought we'd talk the upcoming American election although I thought in passing I'd point out how good it is with Corona to see the British 'Dunkirk Spirit' coming out by which of course I mean thousands of trapped Britons trying their damnedest to cross the channel and escape France.

But anyway, the US election is entering the last couple of months of what has been the quietest and most lacklustre presidential election since the era when King George III was in charge and the election consisted of a sketch comedy routine performed by courtiers. The usual feverish wall-to-wall campaigning has been a trudge this year as both candidates stumble forward like drunks at closing time, both assured in their own self-confidence and popularity though one of them will of course have a rude and painful awakening come that morning in November.

Up against Mr Trump is Jo Biden who many have accused of being cognitively impaired following a litany of gaffes, mistakes and an ability to mess up numbers that makes you assume he used to have a private sector job at Enron. There's hours of clips on YouTube if you go browsing, including one where he introduces his sister as his wife, although I don't know the context and perhaps he was trying to play to a crowd in Alabama. The Coronavirus has largely saved his campaign by allowing him to remain silent, out of the public eye and hide behind a facemask when he is on display. Gordon Brown presumably wishes he could have shielded his "smile" behind one back in the day.

In order to combat the stale old white man image in an era of BLM, Biden decided to finally appoint his running mate this week, by which I mean the results of the focus group finally came back and they went with Kamala Harris who ticks a number of boxes including the one where she can talk coherently but more importantly the ethnicity one given that we now live in an era where it's likely a matter of time until someone demands that the piano is redesigned to have an equal number of black keys and white keys. This is a week in fact in which Nasa decided to rename some star systems such as the Eskimo Nebula in case it was offensive to the Inuit, though strangely no mention yet of renaming the planets, the roman god Jupiter has a pretty offensive backstory after all and the whole Roman empire itself was based on slavery. Until the Visigoths held a peaceful protest in the year 410 and accidentally burned it to the ground.

Despite this I find it somewhat bemusing when you look at the facts. Joe Biden carved himself a career in the 80s and 90s by passing legislation now seen as disproportionately harsh on minority groups. But it's ok because Kamala Harris is only half-white although she and grew up in a white neighbourhood and married a white man and was one of the first to be kicked out of the primary race by the public earlier in the year. This is a PR effort somehow worse than the usual election effort, in which a multimillionaire candidate decides to remove their tie and slowly drink half a bottle of Coors Light while chatting to a voter in the Midwest. Sometimes I wonder if US politicians brought in Prohibition simply in order to get out of having to to do that part of the campaign.

Either way, the lack of anything to get excited about in this election is why there's so little action or enthusiasm on the ground, there's no grassroots groundswell and nobody's leafletting or knocking on doors and Covid is nowhere near as responsible for that as the Biden camp would make out. Morale and is always a strange one to tie down though, after all if the people who make motivational posters are so motivated, why are they still working in a poster factory?

This weekend in America it's the next round of the Democratic selection process and at the time of recording, I can't tell who's going to win because predicting the future is not a superpower that I possess. And if I could have any superpower? That would probably be the Roman Empire in the 2rd century. Let's take a quick look at the 5 main candidates though

1) Joe Biden - He's the candidate that the establishment are hoping gets the nomination. He's Obama's old VP, has decades of experience, he's saltier than tourist swimming in the dead sea and he's polling miles behind because clearly nobody learnt anything from 2016. But on the other hand he is an old white man with numerous accusations of lewd impropriety which makes him an excellent match for President Trump.

2) Bernie Sanders - He's the frontrunner, very left-wing, a US version of Jeremy Corbyn. He plays well to his base but then so does Piers Morgan or Ed Sheeran, it doesn't mean he's popular with the general public and even a lot of unions have refused to endorse him. More worrying is his age, he's 5 years older than George Bush who ran for office 20 years ago and so keep a fire extinguisher handy because if he mysteriously dies in his sleep, the internet will probably catch fire.

3) Michael Bloomberg - The billionaire has so far done dreadfully but he has spent $400m of his own money on this and he has the support of Hilary Clinton so he could very well buy the nomination. He has an emerging litany of offensive quotes and has faced attacks on the grounds of racism and sexism, but as I said he does have a lot of money and he is really good friends with the Clintons. If you've ever seen a seamstress stitching something up, you probably have good idea where the race is heading

4) Pete Buttigieg - a small-town mayor from Indiana who's only real claim to the crown is being less awful than the past 3. He's comically out of his depth but will likely be be the vice presidential nomination, partly because he can lend his endorsement, and partly because strangely he's yet another candidate with a letter 'B' initial in his name and in the superficial branding-based world we live in, that alliteration is worth far more than it should.

5) Elizabeth Warren - The female candidate would could maybe have won last time around but is probably a bit late now. She's also the only ethnic minority candidate in the race now, being 1/10 of 1% native American, after a DNA test spectacularly backfired and destroyed her backstory in a way that few people had seen since the days of the Star Wars prequels.

So those are the 5, one of whom may become president, or may lose in hilariously embarrassing fashion. Personally speaking, for me the greatest US President was William Henry Harrison, because after taking office he got sick, died almost immediately and therefore introduced no new laws whatsoever.