There are no rights and wrongs as Rodney and Leigh stand up and be counted on the political, funny, informative, outrageous cable TV show with the world’s strangest theme tune – Postcard!
#leighgbanks #rodneyhearth #airtvinternational #politicals #chat #laughter #Left #Right #portugal #spain #slovakia #europe #facebook #socialmedia # realmedia
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.
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
Opinion across Europe – Leigh and Rodney talk politics, freedom and the right to be human.
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#radio #presenters #Marbella #Marbs #Slovakia #Poprad #covid19 #freespeech
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
Listen here as Leigh and Rodney whip up a storm over life and life only…
Self-service machines in shops on the high street have been condemned by nine out of ten shoppers.
Research shows 93 per cent of customers are frustrated by the self-service check-outs.
However, despite feeling irritated by the machines, shoppers are still open to the idea of using them rather than waiting in queues with 79 per cent of adults using them at least some of the time.
Women are the most likely to opt for self-service with 82 per cent using machines when available compared to 77 per cent of men, according to the research by cash management experts Glory Global Solutions.
Women are also more likely to be annoyed by the machines with 96 per cent admitting they frustrate them compared to 89 per cent of men.
Over-55s prefer a human interaction and are more likely to steer clear of the automated service with a third admitting they never use them.
Only one in ten young people revealed they avoid using the machines.
The survey shows more than a third of customers avoid self-service altogether because they prefer human interaction and customer service. A quarter of shoppers said they avoid self-service because it is too slow and 17 per cent are worried that the technology won’t work.
Self-service is avoided in a bank by a third of customers, who say they never use the machines and would be more inclined to use self-service if there was a member of staff to help with complex transactions.
Young shoppers are the exception with nearly half saying they rarely feel frustrated by the machines.
#radio #broadcast #airtvinternational #leighgbanks #rodneyhearth #supermarket #checkout #jobs #loss #dole #unemployment
What’s all this about? Bob can’t sing?
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.
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.
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.
#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
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