UK Should Avoid Backing Israel Aganist Iran

The Iran strike on Israel was a bit of a strange occasion. They signposted to America what they were going to do hours in advance which gave Israel plenty of time to get their defences ready, and then sent relatively slow moving drones which were thankfully sitting ducks to be shot down before they reached their destination. Hezbollah did not launch a barrage of rockets to tie up the Israeli Iron Dome as anticipated so overall it looks more likely it was an Iranian message to their own people that they hit back at Israel for what they did in bombing the Embassy compound in Syria.
What Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu, will do in response is now a topic of debate but whatever they do, Britain should not be involved and stay well away from what could spark off a major conflict with multiple players on either side and we would be forced into fighting on behalf of the nation conducting a genocide.
What the Iranian action has done is move the focus away from what Israel are continuing to do in Gaza where the death toll has topped 33,000 and the warned of famine in the North has now arrived and the UN blame Israel for delaying aid delivery and  the European Union's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, accusing Israel of intentionally using starvation as a weapon of war.
The Save the Children US president said, after American aid was refused delivery that she had: 'never seen anything like the level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance' and Amnesty International stated that children are dying from malnutrition and the result of an Israeli 'engineered famine'.
At the start of this phase of a conflict, an Israeli military occupation which has been ongoing for decades, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said 'We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly'.
Devastatingly, they have been true to their word so the ICJ should be on the case and doing whatever it can to force Israel into today's version of  the 80's pariah South Africa.

Trumps Truth Shares Tanking

It is undoubtedly true that when it comes to business, Donald Trump has a sort of opposite Midas touch where whatever he touches turns to crap but it didn't seem to put off his deluded supporters who paid for shares in his Truth Social network and then watched on as it tanked regally.
Experts warned wannabe investors that the company didn't  have the fundamentals to back up its obscenely high valuation and Trump Media had lost $58 million in 2023 and made just $4.1 million in revenue but Trump supporters are not known for their smarts and the company has lost more than 60% of its value from its peak of £61.98 on March 26 when it started trading publicly to $26.95 today.  
The Trump company has now announced a massive new influx of 21.5 million shares which will further substantially devalue existing shareholders’ stakes which must annoy Investors who put their cash into the former presidents Truth Social stock.
Analysts have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump's cash grab was nothing more than a scam and that investors should stay far away yet there were plenty of Trump supporters who believed that the shares were, and still may, go through the ceiling but even if it doesn't, some seem happy to show their support for Trump even if it costs them dearly.
See, not too smart when they are out of pocket but Trump stood to make £3bn, now down to $2bn and falling fast so you know what that Truth Social share certificate says about the person holding it?
Yes. Yes, you do. And it’s not that you are in possession of a nest egg or a badge of honor that you helped out your favourite sex offender, it says that you are unlikely to trouble any Brains Trust meetings.  

Footloose In Chechnya

The Chechyn Culture Minister, Musa Dadayev, doesn't figure in many of my blog posts but he is a man who walks to the beat of his own drum, as long as that beat isn't less than 80 beats per minute (BPM) or more than 116 because he's gone and banned all music that is 'too slow or too fast' to conform to the Chechen mentality.
He has now given music artists until 1 June to rewrite music that doesn't meet the criteria to allow them to continue performing it in public which must be a nightmare for Chechen radio stations who will be unable to play many Rythm & Blues (average 70 bpm) Reggae songs (75 bpm),  Jazz (135 bpm), Disco (120bpm), Techno (135 bpm) or Rock (125 bpm) although Hip-hop with an average bpm of  85-115 will be perfect so Cypress Hill and Run DMC should be expecting some royalty checks paid in Rubles shortly.
The BPM of a song can be measured roughly by playing a song for 15 seconds, count how many times you tap along to it (usually the drum beat) and then after 15 seconds times it by 4 to get the beats per
minute although i would avoid  'Thousand' by Moby which holds the record of 1,015 bpm.  
It got me thinking if i, god forbid, ever ended up in Chechnya with my MP3 player, what songs would have a rather large customs officer standing over me ordering me to delete before they let me in and  
that's most of the punk stuff such as Green Day (Average 133 bpm), the Sex Pistols (average 150 bpm) and Ramones (Average 180 bpm) would have to go as would most of the decent Rock and Metal stuff such as Metallica's Whiskey In The Jar (133 bpm) and Madhouse (164 bpm) by Anthrax so of my Top 10 in the Lucy's Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians, who could i continue to listen to in my Grozny hotel room?
Sweet Child O' Mine (123 bpm) is out as is Hotel California (148), Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll (170), Teenage Kicks (135), Anarchy in the UK (134), Platters Only You (71) Johnny B. Goode (168), Manic Monday (122) and the only two that would be left are I Don't Wanna Grow Up by the Ramones (91) and Stairway to Heaven (82) which isn't great.
My first thought then was to scratch Checnya as a holiday destination next year but on reflection, a country where you can go and legally not hear Disco, reggae or jazz...hmm, lets not be hasty with binning that Chechnya brochure.

Damn You Taranis!!!

Climate change can be blamed for many things and unless you was smoking behind the bike-sheds in those science lessons you would remember the science teacher explaining that warm air holds more water vapour which will come back to us in the form of heavier and longer bouts of precipitation and as Scotland finds itself on the wrong side of the Jet Stream for most of the year, it gets more than its fair share of downpours which a certain football team in the lowlands of Scotland is claiming as an excuse why its games keep getting postponed.
Dundee FC is situated beside the North Sea and after their Scottish Premiership match against Rangers was postponed for a second time as the pitch was deemed unplayable and therefore putting the kibosh up Sky TV's scheduling and annoying the 4,500 Rangers fans who had made the 80 mile trip to Dundee s Den's Park, the club pointed to this being the fifth fixture they have had to call off and pointed their finger squarely at the increased rainfall brought about by climate change for the problems.
Fair enough you may think, if your patch of grass is situated in a place where the MET figures shows it rains on average for 125 days of the year then you should expect a warning climate to have an effect but it kind of falls down when your neighbours, Dundee United, whose ground is 200 yards, is perfectly playable and have not had any games postponed there this season.
Now it could be that being 200 yards closer to the North Sea means that Dundee FC is impacted more than its neighbour, possibly there is a geographical reason why the rain clouds get to Den's Park and then inexplicably empties themselves of rain before reaching the other Dundee's team Tannadice Park or maybe the Celtic God of storms, Taranis, is a St Johnstone fan or, and this may be a bit of a long shot, but maybe the people behind Dundee FC are guilty of not shelling out for a decent pitch and are pinning the blame on something they vaguely remember during those long ago science lessons. Just a thought.  

Labour Shouldn't Take Supporters For Mugs

The Angela Raynor Capital Gains Tax dodging accusations rumbles on and as big as a fan of her and Labour i am, if she did deliberately avoid paying her share of tax when she sold her home, then she should resign or be sacked immediately because the (hopefully) incoming Labour Party have to been seen to be squeaky clean after years of them highlighting Conservative Party corruption, sleaze and dodgy dealings.
The worst possible outcome would be for Raynor to be found guilty and then refuse to put her hands up and admit to and fall on her sword because that would leave Labour open to allegations that they are as corrupt, sleazy and dodgy as the Conservatives and the biggest Labour selling point is that they are NOT the Conservatives.
That she has not presented the 'advice' she was given that she had no Capital Gains to pay when she sold her house and killed the 'chatter' immediately is concerning and just allowed the Conservatives and their friends in the right wing media to target her and initiate a Police investigation and reminding her that when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were being investigated by police over Partygate, she suggested they should stand down.
Keir Starmer is currently supporting her although he has claimed that he hasn't seen the 'advice' personally but MP's in the Labour Party had better get used to this level of scrutiny, and how they are dealt with by the senior Politicians, because it is only going to grow.   
I hope Raynor is innocent and i sincerely hope that HMRC and the Police find her not guilty of any tax dodging but as Tony Blair discovered, us Labour supporters will ditch you if you don't play by the rules we believe you should be playing by.

Iran And Israel Face Off

The Israel war in Gaza has many subplots with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel nibbling at each other and the Houthi's in Yemen attacking Western shipping and the West bombing them i return but while they have been simmering just below boiling point, the latest developments between Israel and Iran are threatening to explode alarmingly.
Iran have vowed to respond to Israel killing senior Iranian commanders when it bombed the diplomatic compound in Syria and the World is waiting to see what Tehran will do next and what the response from Israel will be with many nations warning their people in Israel to be ready to leave the country at short notice.
'We will make them regret this crime and other ones like it, by God's will' warned Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which drew a response from Israel that if Iran attacks it, Israel will: 'respond and attack in Iran' and then the United States weighed in, putting Iran on notice that it will: 'help defend Israel'.
American media, quoting unnamed US sources, have spoken of an imminent Iranian assault against Israeli targets, with a wave of drones and missiles but the Ayatollah faces a choice because every action it is considering comes with a risk.
Iran's usual response, is to mainly hit back through its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houtihi's but in January it fired missiles at a Mossad Spy Agency base in Iraq but a direct attack on military targets in Israel is not expected to be on the way, rather operations against Israeli embassies and interests elsewhere in the world and increasing support for it's proxies already fighting Israel.
Another option could be that Iran bides its time, keeping Israel dangling and continually running up and down it's enemies security measures in anticipation of an attack that may, or may not, arrive at some point but military experts are saying Iran is too canny to attack Israel itself, it will bide it's time, let everyone believe that something will happen soon only for it to happen somewhere else at a later date.

Lying Men (And Women)

You can’t argue with the science…museum because they conducted a survey to ascertain facts about lying and they discovered that men lie 30% more than women and on average tell around 3 whoppers a day or 1,092 lies a year which is a lot of deceit lads.
The poll also found that the people the men play fast and loose with the truth to the most are their mothers with the top three lies being 'I’m on the way', 'I had no phone signal' and 'I’m stuck in traffic' and the poll also found that no woman has ever told a lie in the history of the World so the rest of this post will be about men spouting off a lot of porkies to all and sundry.
Actually, that's a lie right there because us women have our fair share of commonly uttered lies too. More often, according to the same study, women tend to lie about how they feel with 'I’m fine' top of the list followed by 'I didn’t drink that much', 'It wasn’t that expensive' and, on receiving a crap gift, trotting out 'It’s great, just what I’ve always wanted' which obviously means it will be appearing in a charity shop window tomorrow.
So us ladies lie less than mendacious men but where we do agree is that it is OK to lie to spare somebody’s feelings so 'Of course you’re not going bald' or 'I have no idea how your 'Best of Country & Western' CD ended up behind the Fridge' is us being nice to each other.

12 Years For A Plan B

I don't know who came up with the figure but apparently we need £43,100 a year in our retirement to live a happy and comfortable old age so with 12 years to go until i can open my Happy Retirement cards, my options are to start some serious saving or come up with a Plan B.
The state pension is currently £221 a week, or just under £11,500 per year which is the 17th in Europe where Luxembourg sit in first place, paying their pensioners £5,211 per month and to get it you must have paid Pension Insurance Contributions for at least 10 years so that's an option, i could go work in Luxembourg for the last 10 years of my working life but that would mean learning Luxembourgish so may have to rethink that.
I could do what many pensioners have to do and keep working for ever but that won't leave much time for sitting around moaning about the younger generation and endlessly telling them how everything was much better in my day so that's not ideal.
The Taxpayers Alliance  issued a report which shows that over a lifetime, an average earning employee will pay £107,045 in National Insurance Contributions (NIC) which means i would have to live until i am blowing out the candles on my 78th Birthday Cake to receive more than i paid in else it goes into  the big pot named Government Coffers to spend on whatever they want.
I therefore have another 12 years to work out my Plan B for a comfortable retirement but luckily, there is a nice government in power that cares about it's elderly people, unfortunately it’s in Luxembourg.

Arming Israel Makes Us Complicit In Genocide

If a country is committing genocide, as defined by International Organisations such as the United Nations and the highest court in the World as well as countless human rights groups, then if you knowingly continue to supply that country with the weapons to continue it then you are complicit in committing that genocide so when the British Foreign Minister states that Britain will not stop selling arms to Israel, then we become implicated in what they do with the weapons we give them.
After over 33,000 deaths in Gaza including over 200 aid workers and 100 journalists, pressure is mounting on Israel’s allies to halt arms supplies with Joe Biden's America by far the major supplier, providing an estimated 68% of Israel’s foreign weapons with Germany, providing around 30% while Britain and Italy send an estimated 1.5%.
As well as weapons, America has provided $158 bn of financial support since the second world war and immediately after the Hamas attacks in October,
passed a bill that would provide $14.1bn in Israel-related supplemental spending, $3.5bn in foreign military financing, and $801.4m for ammunition procurement although it is currently tied up in the Senate.
Human Rights Lawyers in America are pointing to Section 502 (B) of the US Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits aid to governments engaged in gross human rights abuses and the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which forbids the state department or the Pentagon from providing funding to foreign units that have committed, according to 'credible information', human rights violations which is just , one of the many accusations Israel are accused of performing in Palestine. In February 2023, the Biden administration issued a Conventional Arms Transfer (Cat) policy stating that the US would not transfer weapons where they were deemed likely to be used to commit 'grave 'breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such' but unlike Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain and Belgium who have all announced they would stop shipping weapons to Israel, the arms flow continues.
One reason put forward is that punishing Israel risks alienating pro-Israel Jewish voters in an election year although that is coming at the expense of pro-Palestinian voters who are threatening to desert Biden over his stance on the war.
It is abhorrent that there are some nations who are decrying what Israel are doing in Gaza while providing them with the weapons to continue doing it and shamefully my own country is amongst them
and the murderous slaughtering of innocent Gazan's will continue long after any ceasefire, as has been happening for the past 60 years because this never started on October 7th, Israel has been killing and bombing Gaza for 60 years with weapons provided by it's allies and unless the Palestinian state is recognised and given security at the UN, it will continue long after any ceasefire.

Who Doesn't Love A Goat?

Christmas has gone and so has my husband's birthday which is a shame because one thing he has always wanted is a goat and there is an Italian island who are literally giving them away.
To be honest, whether he did want a goat or not i'm not sure but if one was under the Christmas tree he would have no choice but my motto is you should never look a gift Goat in the mouth and the Italian island of Alicudi has too many and is giving them away free to anyone who can arrange to pick one up.
Goats outnumber the Island population by 6 to 1 and the Mayor has come up with the idea of giving the goats away to anyone willing to take one as he explained: 'We absolutely do not want to even consider culling the animals, so we are encouraging the idea of giving them away'.
Nice man but goats can be a good source of milk and cheese and apparently their leavings are particularly good for fertiliser but the main benefit is they eat anything so you can feed them your food scraps, stuff you find at the back of the cupboard, your husbands gawdy Hawaiian Shirt or that assignment which is late but has been carelessly left on the table, bad goat (good goat).
As we don't have a garden it is a moot point anyway and i'm the only one who used to empty the cats litter tray so i'll be damned if i would cleaning up after a goat so it might be a nice thought but for me it's back to 'accidentally' losing my husbands colourful shirts behind the wardrobe and pretending to look in my bag and swearing i picked up that report this morning.