Well, I was shocked – I liked Ken Dodd and met him once at the Civic Hall in Ellesmere Port.

And on the day of his funeral in 2017, as I arrived back at Lime Street station, there he was. Standing there in front of me!

Yes, the great Liverpool laughter-maker, our lord of one-liners, was grinning at me. And he was looking very bronzed, if I may say.

Funny really, I’d made a detour after a meeting with an old journalist mate of mine to join literally thousands of fans to wave off Doddy as he was taken to his final resting place.

His wife, Anne, said outside their Knotty Ash house: “The world has lost the most life-enhancing, brilliant and creative comedian with an operatically trained voice, who just wanted to make people happy.”

Her words passed like ticker-tape across the screen of my mind I looked at the statue, and I thought: “Well, I suppose it is a bit of a joke.”

The supposedly iconic statue of Sir Ken, who had died aged 90 had been removed for safe-keeping and restoration as major station upgrades began.

Martin Frobisher, Network Rail’s London North Western route managing director, said: “Sir Ken Dodd has stood inside the entrance to our station since 2009. It’s right he returns today as we remember the laughs he gave us over the years.”

So, they brought him back for his final curtain … and as I stood there looking at him I remember thinking “it looks more like Bob Monkhouse waving a kebab on stick than it does good old Ken!”

I winced at my own private insensitivity on such a day but it did cross my mind that if my mind-joke was disrespectful then surely so was this statue by renowned artist Tom Murphy.

And I’m not alone.

Eddy Rheadm a member of the Modernist Society said recently “I would argue that the statues are downright ugly and poorly executed, clumsily plonked on the station concourse. I’m more than a little creeped out by them.”

Anyway, this is my memory of the day I met Ken Dodd. And he gave me some advice that, 30 years later, I finally took.

But he also revealed himself as a good and caring funny man with a broken heart:

“When I was a ‘rooky’ reporter on the local Chester ‘rag’, The Chronicle, in the late 1970s I was dispatched to a village hall on the outskirts of Ellesmere Port to cover an afternoon comedy performance by Ken Dodd.

It’s that long ago now I can’t really remember how the show went – but it was definitely a lorra lorra laughs. I remember the predominantly blue-rinse brigade and retired bank manager-type audience roaring with mirth hour after hour.

Back then Ken was a bizarre sight to behold, wild spiky hair and goofy teeth, ill-fitting suit, dusty loafers and tickling sticks.

The Diddy Men added a surprisingly lysergic atmosphere to the wood and shingles hall at the end of a narrow country lane. Ken’s Rolls Royce – I seem to remember it as chocolate brown – waited like a patient old dog on the gravelled drive.

But it was his unbroken stream-of-consciousness jokes which marked him, not as an out-of-date has-been despite the mature middle class-ness of his audience that evening, but as a surreal comedian with an almost psychedelic madness.

Back then he had found a form of cult status on the tail end of hippydom and yet still had staunch followers among the semi-detached ‘squares’ in his audience.

When the show ended I waited by his Rolls for what seemed more hours – Ken was still entertaining the crowd, shaking hands, telling jokes, poking fun and laughing fit to bust.

Finally he was there shaking my hand and grinning like a dray horse, you could tell he was preparing for another round of jokes and mayhem, but this time just for me.

Then I lit a Benson and Hedges and as I exhaled the blue-ish smoke everything changed.

The horse-face of humour crumbled and I saw the real tragedy behind the comedy.

Everybody seemed to smoke back then but Ken Dodd was having none of it.

He berated me for smoking and asked me why I did it?

I told him it was simply that I enjoyed it – really, it was because I was addicted to doing what  everybody else did. We didn’t think about cancer back then.

But Ken Dodd did.

And there were tears in the eyes of Britain’s best-loved comedian as he told me: “Don’t smoke, it can kill you … and I’ve just lost somebody very close to me and she was too young to die.”

And so he told me about his long-term lover  Anita Boutin, who  had just died from a brain tumour.

They had been together for 24 years.

He told me she was just 45 when she died … they had been engaged for two decades and he wept as he told me he wished with all his heart that he had got round to marrying her. Anita had told a reporter previously who asked if they were getting married: “It’s up to Ken.”

Anita was buried at their local church in Knotty Ash, the same one where Ken’s mother was laid to rest eight years earlier. Ken put flowers on both their graves every Christmas.

His relationship with former Bluebell Girl Anne Jones – whom he married just a few days before he died – began in 1980. They had known each for many years. They were in Dick Whittington at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham when they fell in love.

It was only a brief moment in my life – I was 20 years old at the time – but it is a memory that’s never gone away.

Ken Dodd had shown me the real tragedy behind his mask of comedy and had handed me my first revealing celebrity interview.

But more than anything I had met a man who genuinely cared about people and their lives.

MAIN IMAGE KEN DODD ELEMENT by DAVID A ELLIS

#kendodd #knottyash #liverpool #limestreet #ellesmereport #diddymen #funnylaughter #diddydoddy #sadness #

In my life, I have met many narcissists and, to a man and woman, they were all talented, charming, attractive, witty, intelligent and ambitious.

Narcissists even walked beside me in what should have been the fairytale of my formative years.

They gently held my hand and purported to teach me how I should act on the manufactured stage of sand and badly painted backdrops they set before me…

… All the world’s a stage, I began to believe.

Bur I became convinced that the only truth in the script of life is a mesmerising swirl of lies.

***

In my late 30s, I was devastated to discover the new narcissist in my life was, in fact, a serial love cheat. She later spent a decade abusing me on the phone over why our great affair had ended so badly.

I didn’t change my number because I felt there might be a glimmer of truth in her gaslight.

Then I had a lasting relationship with another who made me believe she was vulnerable and broken. The tough fact was she only wanted to get married and have children so she could divorce me and steal my 19^th century country cottage.

In my 50s, I went in to business with another narcissist – I thought he was my best friend.

But a narcissist can never be your best friend. He can only be his own.

***

I have to say I have always known about narcissism – at least I knew of its origin in Greek mythology … a young Narcissus fell passionately in love with his own image in a pool of water.

For him there could be no other.

What I didn’t know though, is that it narcassism means grandiose self-importance in a fantasy world of delusions. It means a desperate need for praise and admiration. It means a sense of entitlement and exploitation without guilt or shame.

It also means intimidation, bullying and the belittling of others.

In business it manifests itself in people who genuinely believe that the whole world owes them.

After watching this short video I began to see narcissism in this way … it is like a twisted marriage which never gets beyond ‘what’s yours is mine…’

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/how-to-spot-those-lying-cheating-narcissists-who-walk-amongst-us/

#narcissist #narcissism #bullying #lying #cheating #twisted #evil #uncaring

BY ANDREW JOHN TEAGUE…

What is a guardian lawyer?

Well, the guardian lawyer represents children.

The guardian is supposed to act in the best interest of the children’s well-being and safety – physically, emotionally and psychologically.

The guardian lawyer is a family court lawyer. 

He or she could be working for a parent  in one case  – and they could be working for  Cafcass in the next.

And Cafcass normally knows the lawyers it intends to use. Yet, Cafcass is meant to be impartial in family court cases.

The guardian lawyer is there to  represent the children in the family courts. But how can this happen? They are just a bunch of people who don’t actually know the child or the family, making decisions on future and life.

And then there is the courtroom itself, a place full of people who have no idea what the children really want.

Nor do they care.

It’s like the beginning of the end for many many children, children whose hearts are broken inside, children whose minds are broken inside. Their healthy relationships have been dissolved.

How can this be in the best interests of children?

All children should have the right to a family, the right to be in a happy relationship with both parents and, only if there is risk of harm, should there be any reason to doubt that relationship. Should a relationship actually be damaged on guess work?

This is something worrying we have come across over the years.

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/as-suicide-probe-set-to-be-revealed-dads-talk-about-being-bullied-over-children-and-money/

Teenagers are lost behind the secret Family Court doors.

Teens who have been unduly influenced  by the maligning parent, forced to be emotionally  and psychologically  reliant, obsessed with hurting, torturing, destroying the absent parent.

It only spells disaster for children.

They are teens who, in the very near future, will be rap-a-tap-tapping on the mental health door. That’s if they are lucky enough to make it there. 

For most of their lives these you ng people  have seen  the parents entrenched in family court  proceedings. The court arenas are the battle field for the family destroyers with judges giving the thumbs down.

And here will be the classic example of child-psychology splitting.

There are certainly a number of questions that would need to be asked about why the children have reached this point. The thing is, we do not ask these children the right questions, leading to a future of devastation, distrust, attachment disorders, low self-esteem and many more negatives.

 A big question I’d like to ask is why the likes Cafcass and the children’s lawyers is, why do they choose to shrug their shoulders and simply say ‘what can we do?’.

 Transitions…  children go through transitions  through out their lives. I cannot believe the likes of Cafcass and guardian lawyers desert the children  when they need them most. Feels like them saying f*** it, not our problem that they don’t see  the absent parent!

 Remember that what we know for a fact is that these children  have spent most of their time going through the secret Family Court doors.

Three months of a child being indoctrinated and brainwashed.  If this has happened it can take anything from three months or longer to get the child to feel comfortable  and trusting of others again.

The critical and suitable question to ask is, how do Cafcass or even guardian lawyers  make the decisions for  children in a 20-minute to half hour meeting with the child?

Maybe there is some kind of magical fairy dust they sprinkle over the children.

Secret family court doors and what LIES  beyond them …. no child chooses to lose a parent. But though these court arenas children are forced to do just that.

We are not going to whisper, we are not going to say hush.

We are going to shout about the fact that abuse of children and absent parents runs rife throughout the family courts in every corner of this land.

And beyond.

England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Republic of Ireland, Europe, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Pakistan … so many countries where children’s lives are dismantled, broken and torn.

Our children deserve much much more  than the ignorance and let-down they get.

End of story.

Children 1st every time – even teens!

#parental #alienation #family #courts #parents #guardianlawyers #judges #childrenfirsteverytim

I was about seventeen when I got into listening to Dylan, and quite apart from his effect on me as a writer, he profoundly influenced my attitude towards culture, politics and religion.

My first purchase was his Masterpieces three-LP compilation, which I think was only released in Australia and New Zealand.

My second was the album he had just released: Infidels, (1983). On it was a song, ‘Man of Peace’, which spoke to me straight away.

I had been brought up in an atheist household, and I was full of questions about Christianity. I had been brought up to see Christianity as an unreasoning, authoritarian religion that deprived people of free thought.

And there was Dylan singing, “Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace… Could be the Fuhrer, could be the local priest…” 

Here was a man who had recently identified himself with Christianity, but who was quite willing to testify that the forces of evil might sometimes work through the church, or through the entanglement between religion and politics.

I had an explosion of interest in Dylan, and saved my pennies to buy every album.

In his recordings from the early Eighties, I found a very different conception of Christianity, centring around a Jesus who made moral demands. 

Whether I believed it or not, there was something about Dylan’s uncompromising voice in those songs that drew me, and seemed to me to be totally consistent with the Dylan who sung about Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and Hattie Carroll.

It was the voice of the Sermon on the Mount; the voice of Jeremiah crying in the wilderness.

It clashed with what I saw of institutional Christianity.

Over the years, it has clashed more and more, and the words of ‘Man of Peace’ have rung truer and truer. The blight of paedophilia in the church has lent the song new force.

So has the appropriation, by the forces of racism and bigotry, of the New Testament as a political tool.

The verse about the “man of peace” exerting his sexual magnetism for evil ends (“He knows just where to touch you, honey, / and how you like to be kissed.  / He’ll put both his arms around you; / you can feel the tender touch of the Beast”) has become more and more relevant in a world in which powerful men who pay lip-service to Christianity use sex as a means of extending their power.

But one other thing brought that song into focus for me. I wanted to be a historian, and I ended up writing a doctoral thesis on Second World War cultural history. 

That was when that “Fuhrer” reference in the song really came into focus for me.  I was reminded of the song again by this image.

John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi poster, ‘The Cross was not yet heavy enough’ is a satire on a hideous perversion of Christianity known as the Deutsche Christen, the mutation of Protestantism which served as the “Church” of the Nazi state.

The “German Christians” grotesquely magnified the anti-semitic tendencies which had always been a problem in Lutheranism.

They quoted Luther himself in order to legitimise the most murderous manifestation of anti-Semitism ever seen, and they purged their Bibles of Jewish elements.

They emphasised Romans 13 over the Sermon on the Mount in order to procure fanatical obedience to the Nazi State.

They adopted the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ which defrocked clergy of Jewish descent, and their symbol was a cross with a swastika at the centre.

Whilst this Frankenstein’s monster of a “Church” served the fundamentally vicious needs of Nazism, other Protestants formed the Confessing Church, which was one of the principal sources of resistance to the Nazis inside Germany.  Its leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was eventually hanged by the Nazis for being part of an assassination attempt against Hitler.  Bonhoeffer had contacted the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, asking him to act as an emissary between the conspirators and the British government. 

He wanted an assurance from the British that if Hitler was assassinated, the conspirators would be permitted to form a provisional government without the Allies invading and tearing Germany apart.  When Bell’s letter, pleading on Bonhoeffer’s behalf, crossed the desk of the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, the minister dismissed the proposal utterly.

Apparently, it was all right for thousands of bombers to pulverise civilians in German cities, but it was not all right to help Germans assassinate their dictator.

Similarly sharp dichotomies can be seen in the story of the Catholic Church under Nazism.

The Pope himself failed to publicly condemn Nazism, the official reason being that he feared that doing so would merely provoke further Nazi reprisals against the Jews.  Some Catholics became collaborators, including the monstrous anti-Semite President of Slovakia, Josef Tiso, who co-operated in the deportation unto death of Slovak Jews, but was never excommunicated.

Yet the Nazis knew that Catholics whose convictions were genuine, just like many secularists and people of other faiths, were a significant danger to the totalitarian state, and that is why there were 2,579 Catholic priests imprisoned at Dachau, and many thousands of other Catholics in concentration camps.

Heartfield’s photo-montage, in which a Nazi converts the cross of Christ into a swastika, never seems to lose its power to shock.

Nothing could be more blasphemous, to a Christian of genuine conviction, like Bonhoeffer, or the Roman Catholic priests who condemned Nazi racial ideology from their pulpits, or, I believe, Dylan, no matter how he melds his spiritual influences these days, than the naked cynicism with which Hitler mutilated the Christian faith.

The image provides a powerful object lesson which must not be forgotten: when the State seeks to gain a monopoly over belief, untold atrocities may be committed in the name of a religion that has ceased to believe in a single one of its founder’s original precepts.

“Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, 

The king snake will crawl

Trees that’ve stood for a thousand years 

Suddenly will fall”

sings Dylan, and like all good apocalyptic, it’s not just about the end of the world. It’s about how hellishness works its way into reality here and now – and especially, it’s about the way it uses falsely appropriated religion as a means of spreading hatred, bigotry and persecution.

I listen once more to this song, and look at this image, with new ears and eyes today.

#BobDylan #Zimmerman #hibbings #infidels #heritics #hitlershame #nazishame #newzealand #God #Masterpieces #manofpeace

Well, there it is everybody (above)! My real McCoy retro electricity bill from npower for a six month period totalling £15,573.99p exactly.

Oooh eck! How can I pay that then? Is it accrued interest that’s made it so high, considering it dates back to 2012 and 2013 and we only received it a few weeks ago?

It’s very strange tho’ cos we don’t really use much electricity – well at least we didn’t think so – because our house is heated by oil and we have two log burners. The only thing we use electricity for is powering doing the washing and watching a bit of telly!

But I don’t mind telling you it gave us a bit of a shock haha!

Here’s what happened when we phoned up npower to discuss it.

“Hello, you are through to npower, my name is Joan, how may help you today?”

“Hello, I’ve just received an electricity bill from you for £15,573 and 99p, I think it might be wrong.”

“I’m sorry to hear that sir, if you would give your name … etc etc etc. … and I can look into this for you.”

I did what was asked and this is what was said: “Yes sir, I can confirm that your bill is correct… if you have problems paying it immediately I can offer staged payments.”

Well, I must admit I was a bit shocked and said: “What do you think I’ve been doing to get a bill this high? Running a cannabis farm?”

She replied: “Well, actually sir these are the types of consumption we see when people have.”

I was a bit taken aback by that!

“So, Joan, you think this bill is right – and if you think I’ve been running a cannabis farm in my lounge don’t you think you’d better call the police?”

Joan went silent.

“Well,if you the bill indicates something untoward and it’s correct then perhaps you should.”

Uncomfortable silence.

“Don’t you care about the law Joan?”

Squirming silence.

So, I took a chance: “Joan, if you’re not going to get the police to investigate this bill, because if it’s correct as you say – and as I have confirmed I don’t have a cannabis farm – then it sounds extortionate to me … and we all know what extortion is don’t we.”

“I do not like the way you are speaking to me sir and if you continue in this aggressive and threatening fashion then I will be forced to hang up on you.”

I finally raised my voice: “Joan, this isn’t aggression, this is frustration! You just confirmed to me that I owe you nearly £16,000 and suggested I might be running a cannabis farm … and I think you think you’ve done a good job because you offered and easy payment scheme!”

That was obviously too much for Joan who hung up on me and probably needed counselling because somebody had the temerity to argue over a bill!

Well, do you know what everybody? A few days later it was sorted out … we actually had an outstanding balance on our account of 67p.

Well, I never.

#electricshock #joancannabis #npower #bill #cannabisfarm #retrobillilikehim #consumershock #paymentmistake

Dylan revealed as only man to hit charts every decade since 60s

Ol’ Bob has made history again! He is not only the oldest rocker – or anybody else to be honest – to make it to No 1 in the Billboard Chart…

… but it is now revealed that he is the only artist to have had an album in the Top 40 in every decade since the 1960s.

Wow Bob! So the times they aren’t a-changin Bob! You are literally the top man!

With 39 studio albums under his metaphorical belt, the figures show that Bob has had top-charting albums spanning seven decades.

Rough and Rowdy Ways not only makes Bob Dylan the oldest male solo artist to secure a No. 1 on the albums charts but it also deems him the oldest artist to have a No. 1 album of new and original material.

Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute ballad dropped on streaming services with no warning and became his first No. 1 single on any Billboard chart.

The Billboard 200 charts calculate their figures by ranking the albums that are most popular each week in the U.S. on the basis of multi-metric consumption which is then measured in equivalent album sales. Units are made up by album sales, track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums.

Dylan started his musical career in 1959.

#bobdylan #hisroyalbobness #roughrowdy #billboard #heshallbereleased #sevendecades

What’s all this about? Bob can’t sing?

DYLAN, THE MAN WITH A VOICE THAT IS A-CHANGIN’ STILL…

As the man with the blues-iest rasp ever – the mad bad beautiful Jim Morrison – would have said today: “Shut up and give the ol’ singer some man…”

For 60 years now I have listened to family, friends, foes, colleagues, pundits and the plain musically bereft saying: “I like his songs but he can’t sing can he?”

And for all of those decades I have gone to war over the mastery of his vocals … and I say here and now Bob Dylan is the true minister of sound!

For one of those decades I presented a radio show called The Trip (The Trip is about to find a new home on this site soon).

In it we had a section called The World’s Worst Singer … and we played ol’ Grandpa Bob’s best vocals ever, like the beautiful high croon of Pretty Saro, the metered passion of The Man in Me and Sign on the Window, the magnificently soaring live version of I Believe in You from the 70s… the heartbreaking soul-searching of Blood on the Tracks and the old croaking riverboat captain of Tempest.

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/old-folk-and-the-21st-century-bob-goes-down-to-cyber-town-as-pablo-finds-success-in-foggy-ruins-of-time/

Then of course there are the songs on Triplicate where he crackles like a cool breeze in the night… and then some of the greatest live rock performances ever.

Bob himself said this at an award ceremony a few years ago:

“Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog.

“Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. Why don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do “I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free? … Slur my words, got no diction.

“Have you people ever listened to Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters? … “Why me, Lord?”

Well, I believe there have been three leading lights in the grand influencers of modern music … Elvis, Frank and Bob.

Here he performs Warren Zevon’s Mutineers in a beautifully nuanced live performance from 2002 …

Tell us what you think in the box below!

Can Dylan sing? I say yes – and more than that, he is unique!

#bobdylan #worldsworst #worldsbest #warrenzevon #elvis #frank #leonardcohen #tomwaits #loureed #prettysaro

It’s almost 60 years since Bob Dylan first appeared at No. 1 on the albums chart in the U.K.

And there is nothing rough or rowdy about his new chart topper … it’s sheer bluesy, beauty with powerful lyrics and a ravishing voice.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s ninth No. 1 album in the U.K., which stands as one of the most impressive sums when looking at solo acts.

They are The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning, Together Through Life, Shadows in the Night and now, yep, Rough and Rowdy Ways.

To talk the lingo of the business it’s cleared 34,000 – but the good news is that 29,000 of them are real sales.

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/mutiny-worlds-worst-singer-at-his-greatest/

In just over a decade, he’s appeared at No. 1 four times.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is his fortieth title to break into the uppermost region on the UK chart, which is one of the greatest career counts in history.

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/hear-five-tracks-inside/

#bobNo1 #No1Bob #BobtheBoss #bobbobbob #Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan #Bringing It All Back Home #John Wesley Harding #Nashville Skyline #Self Portrait #New Morning #Together Through Life #Shadows in the Night #Rough and Rowdy Ways

Story of our race with the Nicker Hacker Man…

A few days ago Andrea rang me on my mobile by accident … a bit of handbag dialling, so to speak.

I was sitting opposite her in the blustery sun at Poprad’s railway hotel, the Europa, with the sound of intercity trains rattling by.

My phone didn’t ring but I heard her say, with a quizzical look on her face: “Hi, is Leigh there please.”

And so began our race to trap the Nicker Hacker Man.

Andrea was on the ball, after years of working as chief researcher for our investigative company A.M. News Services, it was automatic – engage who ever this is in conversation.

The man she was speaking with was quick too though: “Yes, this is Leigh,” he said. “How can I help you?”

She said: “Hi Leigh, I’m just around the corner from you, can we meet up for a coffee, I’ve something to tell you.”

The line went dead.

So, she rang back while I hovered over her with my own phone on record. And this is the recording we got… he didn’t answer but a woman’s voice came on the phone: “Hi how can I help you?”

Andrea engaged her in conversation too and was asked ‘who are you?’ followed by ‘I’m sorry I can’t hear you’.

These phrases were repeated over and over but in an initially very believable way … then a series of sinister cackles of laughter permeated the ear piece.

But for what it is worth, we had our recording … take a listen again and tell us what you think.

Now, it is obvious that the woman’s voice is a recording but what about the man? They both have vaguely transcontinental accents.

So, began the long laborious boring ridiculous pitfall-ridden insulting pompous patronising battle to secure our bank accounts, change social media passwords, uninstall apps and get new phone numbers.

In fact two days later, as I write this, HSBC bank – the daftest bank in the world – is still sending codes to my old hacked phone! Well done HSBC.

3 Network, our phone provider weren’t really that much better – funnily enough as a phone network provider we found it impossible to talk to a human being on the phone. We had to communicate by the equivalent to text message and two of their operatives seemed to get bored – or had to go to lunch – and hung up on us.

Anyway, they managed cyber message to finally change the security on our accounts and advised to go to the police.

One keyboard operative did write saying that ‘hacking is all over the place now,’ and did strike me as he signed off, why don’t big phone companies try and catch the hackers themselves? It’s happening on their networks after all?

We have asked 3 Network’s new Press and Media office ItsPrettyGreen for a comment but we’ve had no response – possibly because I asked them to ring me!

We have to say that nothing appears to have been nicked by the Nicker Hacker Man and his digital doll of a girlfriend and it was a purely malicious hack.

And we think we know who it is … we are about to tell the police.

But it is worth being aware that cell phone calls can easily be intercepted with the latest technology and it is a complete invasion of your privacy.

Many interception services leave barely a trace of any sort of breach, allowing another party access to your conversations, messages, even your location, without you ever knowing.

But there are tell-tale signs, for instance a shortened battery life, your phone over-heating … is your phone lighting up when you aren’t using it?

Have you been hacked? Do you recognise the voice? Can you help us catch the hacker?

#hackers #nickerhackerman #banks #socialmedia #getoutofmyphone #HSBC #3Network #callcentres

How the killing of George has brought down the totems of slavery and raised millions for anarchy

The asphyxiation of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a policeman, has set off a new ‘war’ for racial equality. It has also created anarchy, street battles – and fund-raising worth millions.

The killing of George and the following international wave of protests has, in a matter of weeks, gone a long way to rebuilding the financial landscape of black political activism.

Money has come in so fast that some groups are said to be redirecting donors elsewhere.

And as social media has gone mad with its fake news, vicious misrepresentations of what is actually happening and the glorification Trumpian dystopia, the sale of traditional books about racism has gone mad too.

This is amazing when you remember it is all happening in a pandemic that has driven millions people from their jobs and left many on hard times.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, says protests are “an expression of solidarity with our diaspora in the US and recognition of what we went through after the slave trade, colonisation and the extraction of our resources.”

Black Lives Matter is not a registered charity but they say the new funds will go towards a number of aims including advocacy to effect changes in the law, developing and distributing educational resources, healing practices in black communities.

They will also use the money for police monitoring, strategies for the abolition of the police and supporting the United Family and Friends Campaign to help friends and loved ones of people killed by British police to access justice.

***

The British arm of the organisation, BLMUK, was created in 2016, and its cause has been given renewed attention following the US police killing of George Floyd.

And in an article for the Voice, Boris Johnson recognised the “incontrovertible, undeniable feeling of injustice, a feeling that people from black and minority ethnic groups do face discrimination: in education, in employment, in the application of the criminal law.

“And we who lead and who govern simply can’t ignore those feelings because in too many cases, I am afraid, they will be founded on a cold reality.”

There has however, been criticism that Johnson did not go far enough in addressing the grievances of the BLMUK.

Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote and chair of the Downing Street race disparity unit’s advisory group, said: “Whilst an acknowledgement of racism within our society is to be welcomed, the real deal is having a plan to effectively deal with it – and that was missing.”

In Britain, the dumping of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston into the river in Bristol has divided opinion between those who abhorred “mob justice” and those who saw it as a fitting end for a man who participated in a trade in which many Africans were deliberately drowned so that owners could collect insurance.

Oxford’s Oriel College bowed to long-standing pressure to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist accused by activists of laying the foundations of apartheid in South Africa.

In Australia, where the hashtag #aboriginallivesmatter has been trending, the focus of protests has been on the treatment of an indigenous population that has been subjected to mass killings, eviction and incarceration since the arrival of white settlers in the 18th century.

Poland has seen discussions about the use of Murzyn, a term for black people that has its roots in the same word as the English “moor”, which many Poles consider neutral but others regard as offensive.

In one Warsaw protest, a young black girl walked with a placard proclaiming: “Stop calling me Murzyn.”
But then Black Lives Matter UK put this on their GoFundMe page …
“We’re guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world. We build deep relationships across the diaspora and strategise to challenge the rise of the authoritarian right-wing across the world, from Brazil to Britain.”

Yes, we are living in a world of new anarchy and yet, here, where millions of pounds are being donated for change, nobody seems to be able to say what this change will be and when it’s gonna come.

#BLM #livesmatter #georgefloyd #USA #trump #dystopia #slavery #coston #riots #blacknwhite

The main image in this article is based on a sketch of police victim George Floyd which was sent to the preservation society by the family of Karin, aged 13, who lives in Stropkov, Slovakia.

Karin was watching TV when a news broadcast high-lighted what had happened to Floyd. “It made her very sad,” a family member said.

i”She was thinking about this guy for a few days and wanted to do something so people don’t forget about him.

“She is angry about situation in USA and about racism. She is very young, but understands so much.”