The Ignorance And Hatred Saddens Me

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

Special Guest Blogger: John Phillips

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

What History Tells Us About This Peace Deal

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

The Real Financial Fraud Is Much Higher Up

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

Special Guest Blogger: Jerry Garcia

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

British Slang

English, it is said, is a tough language to learn but what makes it even tougher is the way we use Rhyming slang but even if you master that, you still have so many slang words to wrap your melon around so in view of international relations, i'm going to throw as much of the bloody bollocks into this post as possible so let's  get cracking, shall we?
Cheers always confuses people as it can mean hello, goodbye, thank you, congratulations, have a good one or a toast at the bar with your mates getting bevvied up down the boozer so we won't bugger around with that one but you would be well chuffed if you managed to work it out.
Cheeky snog with the cracking fit bloke or the belter of a bird with the nice baps but get permission first, you don't need the aggro of landing well in it with the Old Bill and getting banged up for sexual assault or something.
When you are in the boozer though you might want to keep your gob shut, especially if it is full of chavs because some of them are real bellends who would follow you to the bog when you go se a man about a dog and not for the bog roll so you might want to clear off pretty sharpish. They will also be the sort of gormless people who do a runner and leg it after the nosh  at restaurants at the end of the evening, the daft gits!
Keir Starmer is currently the the Guv'nor here but already he is starting to look peaky and a bit knackered although he was pretty jammy that the last lot were so awful and he would be gutted to get kicked out so quick nut many people want him to knock it on the head but don't have a Scooby who would replace him, some want Nigel Farage but that would be taking the piss although i think some people just say that as a wind up
There you go then, British slang and with bit of practise, Bob’s your uncle, End of.

Hiya Enceladusians

Whenever i see the name of Saturn's moon 'Enceladus' written down my brain goes 'Enchilada' for some weird reason but  Scientists have been studying water vapour plumes from the one that you can't eat and found the presence of complex molecules that could harbour life.
As it is only 310 miles in diameter and around 4% the mass of our Earth, the gravity there is awful and it averages -198C and is covered in snow several hundred meters thick so not somewhere we could go and live but Scientists are starting to think that something may have beaten us to it anyway because carbon-based substances are being spewed out in those plumes.
The spacecraft Cassini discovered that Enceleadus is teeming with all the Biological raw ingredients needed for life but we are yet to discover if they combined in such a way to start life although it does have hydrothermal vents in its deep, saltwater oceans and that is exactly were we began our long journey billions of years ago from microbial life to me sitting here typing out a blog post about how we came from microbial life billions of years ago.
The Cassini mission ended it's 800 million mile trip in 2017 and scientists have been poring over the data it collected ever since and it may not be little green men waving probes and telling us they come in peace but if we discover that life began elsewhere, and it really is just a matter of time until we do, that would be one of the greatest discoveries of mankind, unless they arrive with massive ray guns and obliterate us in which case, not so much. 

Is Farage A Racist...Well

Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, said of Nigel Farage that he was not one to attack the man but he would rather attack the policies but then seemed to forget that seconds later when he said that Farage was a racist and once flirted with the Hitler youth. Ouch.
The racist thing is obvious, if it quacks like a racist and walks like a racist, it's a racist but the Hitler youth claim was new one and seems to come from a letter from former an English teacher at Dulwich College, the public school attended by Farage in the 1970s, that Farage was not the right person to be a prefect at the college due to a liking of singing and shouting Hitler Youth songs and that he was viewed as a fascist amongt staff members.
Another staff member said he held 'publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views' and in a 2022 interview with a former classmate of Farage, he called how Farage had a thing for the National Front and would run into classrooms and chalk NF on the board.
Another former English master recalled staff being concerned that Nigel had voiced views that were not simply right wing but views that were racist and had a particular hatred of Jews, telling one Jewish by that Hitler was right and would sing send ‘em home and sing gas ‘em all, gas ‘em all, gas them all, to the Jewish children.
To be fair to Lammy, why not play the man and the policies as both are awful and absolutely racist.

Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Reed

I came from relatively normal roots, with no formal acting training, and became one of the most highly recognized British actors of his time and for being a hellraiser.
My childhood was nothing out of the ordinary though my early years might have been mundane, at the age of nine, my life was forever altered when i was sent to boarding school, the first of 14 schools i was expelled from for being a thug so i was ideal for the Army where i met a few actors and thought that looks easy so decided to give acting a try and my break was playing Richard of Gloucester in the six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur.
It was then that i made a drunken promise to a stranger in a bar that i would buy him a house in Scotland once i became famous.
I was then was cast in the Hammer horror film The Curse of the Werewolf which lead to greater success in my acting career and with women.
Pretty soon i had a slew of celebrity lads to go drinking with like Keith Moon and Robert Newman, one time i met up with American movie star Steve McQueen and we went on on a marathon pub crawl.
I got a role in The Three Musketeers as Athos, and got stabbed accidentally in the throat and was centimeters away from dying but i was now a household name in British films and hit the big time as Bill Sykes in Oliver.
I also made good on that drunken promise and bought that bar-room stranger a property in Scotland. When i was was 42 i dated a 16 year old, she was 26 years younger than me! Back of the net, and I was now famous enough to turn down roles such as The Sting and Jaws as i didn't fancy travelling all the way to America to film them.
As my reputation for drinking and brawling grew, my film career began floundering and was getting cast less and less and I ended up spending lots of his time doing TV show appearances and TV producers soon realized that getting me tipsy was a surefire method of prime entertainment and i often arrived plastered or on some occasions, pretending to be plastered to play up to my bad boy image but it did cost me the role of James Bond and they cast Sean Connery instead because I was  too far from the Bond image at that point.
In one TV interview, i said i wanted to go by overdrinking, 'in a bar of a heart attack'  which turned out to be eerily correct.
It was no surprise that my health deteriorated as i got older, especially with my heavy drinking. In December 1987, by now overweight and dealing with gout, I became extremely sick with kidney issues as a result of my alcoholism.
At the age of 60, i landed a role as an elderly trainer named Proximo in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator but i never got on with Russel Crowe and challenged him to a fight and i took a break and ended up in a bar challenging some sailors to a drinking contest.
I fell ill during the drinking competition and collapsed on the floor and was quickly rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately it was too late, dead in a bar from a heart attack.

A Guide To Surviving Nuclear Armageddon

When i was a youngster during the Cold War in the 1980's, we all feared the bomb and then in 1989 it all ended and climate change then became everyone's favourite existential crisis but now with Russia making threats about using it's nuclear arsenal, India and Pakistan a tinderbox, North Korea handing out threats like sweeties and Israel going the full genocide, Nuclear Armageddon is back.
Of the 9 nuclear bomb owning nations, 2 (Russia and Israel) are fighting a war as you read this, 2 (India and Pakistan) have just finished one between themselves and 2 (China and North Korea) are shaking their fists at neighbours while America is currently being run by a total moron who asked an advisor why, if they had them, why can’t they use them.
World War 3 then could come from any of these and it was only as few months ago that nuclear armed Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites in pre-emptive self defence (since 2007 Israel has said that Iran were mere weeks away from their own nuclear weapons) in order to achieve peace, whilst dropping  more bombs than were dropped on London in WW2 on a captive population and starving a population to death while executing 100s of people who line up for the tiny amount of aid they let in.
So if nuclear Armageddon is back on the table, how does one survive a nuclear explosion?
Luckily, we got told this back in the day so let me dust off the parts of my memory from the 80's and see what i can recall.
First, if you see a nuclear explosion don't look at it as it will burn your eyeballs out. The good news is if you can see the explosion then you are far enough away not to be vapourised and die immediately.
Second, don't stand their congratulating yourself too long because next is the shockwave and you only have a few seconds to lay on the ground and close your eyes and open your mouth so your eardrums, lungs and other bits don't burst from the air pressure.
Congratulations, you have not been vapourised and the shockwave didn't get you so next it is to either find a fallout shelter or the next best thing, get yourself underground to avoid the nuclear fallout which will soon be raining down on you and don't be swayed by the films and comics that a generous dose of radiation was a guarantee that you’d gain superpowers. A slow, painful death is much less exciting than being able to crawl up walls or turn into the Hulk but so try and grab some warm clothes and some snacks because you may be down there for a while.
If you see some cockroaches in your hole then that's a good sign, i distinctly remember being told those critters could survive a nuclear explosion.
After about 2 months the radiation should have cleared enough to clamber back to the surface but then your next action is to get as far as possible away to find cleaner, breathable air and avoid people who didn't read this post and are by now forming mobs of radioactive mutants.
The good news is that if you follow my advice, you will survive.
The bad news is that so will the very people who started the nuclear war in the first place because they will be the safest people on the planet when the Plutonium hits the fan but at least the following nuclear winter will balance out the increasingly warming climate so silver linings and all that.