Strait Open But Aren't They Forgetting Something?

Keir Starmer is in Paris for a meeting about the Strait of Hormuz but Iran appears to have already declared the waterway is 'completely open for the remaining period of the ceasefire' and already the price of a barrel of oil has dropped by 10% .
The blame for the steep rise in the first place falls entirely on the two antagonists America and Israel, but while the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was/is a big problem, i fail to see how the tankers flowing again is going to ease the problem when most of the oil infrastructure is damaged.
Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world's largest LNG facility, took massive damage from an Iranian missile and Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reserve.
All sides targeted each other's energy infrastructure, refineries in Saudi Arabia, Gas fields in UAE, petrochemical plants in Qatar and when one of these facilities are hit, its isn't a quick job to rebuild.
Some of these facilities took a decade to plan and five years to build and if a missile goes through one,  you're looking at a couple of years to get it running again. If the structural damage is severe, and fires tend to do that, you're looking at a complete rebuild.
I am sure that Trump and his fellow infant's will claim victory and hope the whole World has amnesia that the person who caused such global economic upheaval and almost drove it off a cliff was the same person who pointed the car at the cliff in the first place.
Still, making Americans worry about the cost of filling up their cars stops them from thinking their President is a pedophile, which he almost certainly is, so job done there Donny.

Worse Iran Deal Than JCPOA

 
It is pretty obvious to almost everyone that Warmonger and wanted War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu played Donald Trump like a fat Piano with regards to Iran and now Epstein's best pal is desperate to save his own skin by desperately looking for a way to bring and end to it with some sort of deal with Tehran but will it be as good as the one they had, and tore up?
Back in 2015, after 20 months of negotiations, six World powers signed the Iran Nuclear deal, JCPOA.
Under that deal, Iran reduced its enriched uranium stockpile by 98%, capped enrichment at 3.67%, ripped out two thirds of their centrifuges, poured concrete into the core of their plutonium reactor and opened every facility to international inspectors and it worked with The IAEA, Pentagon, US Intelligence all confirming full compliance over a dozen times.
The final compliance report said that 'Iran was transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the deal' and but one country wasn't happy about it, Israel.
Netanyahu flew to Washington and called the JCPOA an 'historic mistake' and then spent the next 3 years ranting about it and waiting for the right low IQ moron to come along, and he did, Donald Trump.
In May 2018 Netanyahu stood up at the Israeli Ministry of Defence and attempted to undermine everything that had been achieved and repeated the same line he had been saying for decades that Iran were only weeks away from a nuclear bomb and eight days later, Trump tore up the JCPOA calling it 'horrible' and 'one-sided and said he’d get something better.
In retaliation, Iran started doing everything that the JCPOA had explicitly banned and then Trump started his first war, in his words 'obliterating' Iran's Nuclear facilities but which turned out to be dropping a few heavy bombs to make some dents in a mountain for which experts said merely put back Iran's nuclear facilities weeks, so not obliterated then or else the Iranian facility builders are the world's best builders.
Then this year, during negotiations, Operation Epic Fury for a myriad of incompetent reasons including Iran was weeks away from making a nuclear bomb, a bomb that the deal which was in place was verifiably stopping from happening so now six weeks into a war only Trump and Netanyahu wanted, the Strait of Hormuz is shut down, oil prices are through the roof, shipping in chaos, fuel prices spiking in every country, thousands dead, Cities reduced to rubble and Trump desperate for a deal to bring it to an end.  
The latest proposals from Iran are a 5 year pause on enrichment, no agreement on centrifuges and Iran refusing to ship out its enriched uranium while what they previously agreed to was, without dropping a single bomb, 15 year enrichment restrictions at 3.67%. 10 year centrifuge limits, 25 years of uranium mine monitoring, 98% of Iran’s stockpile removed, full IAEA inspection access and Iran was complying as confirmed by every international body on earth.
America recently handed Iran a 15 point plan to end the war and Iran replied with a 10 point plan of their own and it is that 10 point plan which Trump said was 'a workable basis on which to negotiate' and the list include the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions on Iran, continued Iranian control over the strait of Hormuz, US military withdrawal from the Middle East, an end to attacks on Iran and its allies, full compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war, the release of frozen Iranian assets and a UN security council resolution making any deal binding.
Obviously negotiations will water some of those down, and the main sticking point seemed to be the 20 year pause on enrichment with Iran offering only 5 but you don't need to be a diplomatic expert to see that what is on offer now is something objectively worse than what went before it , one nuclear expert called it 'a dollar store JCPOA' and still the genocide master in Tel Aviv is doing his best to ruin even that, phoning the criminally inept JD Vance after the just one day of Islamabad talks to make sure the deal stays broken.
The adults in the room now are Pakistan who are offering to host another round of talks before the current ceasefire end on 21st April, a war that was started  to fix the problem Netanyahu and Trump created and the proposed solution is worse than what existed before any of it happened.
As one person said to me 'Maybe Trump asked Melania to make that speech to bring the attention back to the Epstein files and stop people talking about what an absolute shitshow he has made of Iran'.

Special Guest Blogger: Loretta Swit

I went from Loretta Szwed to Swit to Houlihan to Holahan and back to Szwed during my 87 years with each surname summing up my life into neat little parcels of time.
Szwed was when i was had been a high school cheerleader and captain of the girl's basketball team and then when I was employed at a variety of clerical jobs including the secretary to the ambassador from Ghana to the United Nations.
Then i Americanised my name to Swit when i began acting on Broadway before becoming the name most people know me as, Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan in MASH.
I played a strong, complicated, occasionally lipstick-wielding woman in a military hospital during the Korean War who could cry on cue, scream into a P.A. system but of course, being known primarily for screaming CAPTAIN! across a compound isn’t exactly the kind of legacy poets write sonnets about. But hey, Hot Lips! Like I was some sort of exotic cocktail garnish. I wasn’t even particularly hot in those days, my lips were chapped from the wind and my hair was permanently frizzed from humidity and trauma. But sure, call me Hot Lips. I’ll take it. I earned it.
For eleven years, from 1972 to 1983 and for all but 11 of the 256 episodes of the show, I woke up, put on an army uniform that fitted like a sausage casing, memorised dialogue that swung from hilarious to heartbreaking in the span of a commercial break and all in a fake tent in California.
Only Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, William Christopher and myself started and finished the series and every season I was nominated for an Emmy Awards and won two, in 1980 and 1982.
In 1981, I played the role of Christine Cagney in the movie pilot for the television series Cagney & Lacey, but was my contract with MASH meant i wasn't able to play the role in the television series but when MASH ended in 1983 i went from Houlihan to Holahan when i married actor Dennis Holahan, the guy who played Per Johannsen, a Swedish diplomat with an embarrassing injury who became briefly involved with Hot Lips in an episode of MASH.
I did carry on doing TV work and milked the MASH reunions for all it was worth and even wrote a couple of Books but of the main twelve members of the MASH cast, there are now only four left as I bugged out from natural causes which will make the next MASH televised reunion a much quicker show.

Back In The EU (Almost)

Keir Starmer is hinting that Britain could adopt single market rules without MPs’ vote as part of UK-EU reset and i am more than happy with that although i hold my hands up on grounds of hypocrisy as i would be spitting feathers if it was the other way round.
If Donald Trump has been good for one thing (other than protecting pedophiles in the USA), then it is for pushing us back towards our European neighbours and Labour Ministers are planning to fundamentally reshape Britain’s relationship with the European Union, with new legislation that could result in the UK signing up to EU single market rules without a normal parliamentary vote.
It is undeniable that coming out was economic madness as the trade deals around the World we were promised failed to materialise leaving our GDP 4% worse off and Ministers are arguing that the move which is expected to be launched before the Summer recess, will add billions to the UK economy, help temper the cost of the conflict and boost sluggish productivity.
The move is possible under so-called Henry VIII powers, named after the 1539 law that allowed the monarch to rule by decree, which allow ministers to approve laws without full scrutiny from parliament using secondary legislation which enforces laws without needing new Parliamentary acts although it will need to be rubber stamped in Parliament and with a stonking majority of 174, that's just a formality .
Ministers are saying the move will promote trade without breaking the government’s promise to not rejoining the customs union, single market, or returning to freedom of movement which even I find a bit of a stretch but what the hey, the Right Wing numbnuts have been doing enough damage recently so up there's as the saying goes.
'The EU is our largest trading market, almost half of our total trade was with the EU in 2024' explained one Minister, 'We’re all paying a cost of living penalty for all the barriers at the border, so it is sensible to make deals to remove those barriers and undo the damage' which all makes sense but maybe it would be better to re-run the Referendum and get the agreement of the British public but if they have to be sneaky about it, i'm surprisingly okay with that also.

Trumps Not Mad Or Senile, He's Just An Awful Person

After his burst of mad social media tweets recently, the talk is of just how senile or plum crazy Donald Trump is now but i just think he is, and has always been, an odious, awful human being who is so used to getting his own way that he throws a toddlers purple hissy fit if he doesn't get it.
As for the war of his choosing in Iran, it is pretty obvious now that he is having buyers remorse with Israel telling him that by taking out the leadership on Day 1, the Iranians would buckle and he would sweep in and take the oil with a USA friendly Government in place like he did in Venezuela but that didn't go to plan and now he is desperately scratching around declaring America won with nobody actually believing they won anything.  
Amusingly, Trumps own Administration are saying that  he should not be taken literally and does not mean exactly what he is saying meaning even they believe that nothing their President says can be given any credence.
He may be mentally unwell or even senile or suffering Dementia but even his own supporters turned on him recently over the Genocidal 'Wipe Out A Civilisation' and the Trump as God picture which he tried to defend as he thought it was him as a doctor and therefore treating his own supporters as a honking great throng of halfwits.
His skin may be bright Orange but it must have the thickness of single ply Tissue Paper because he takes any slight as a reason to launch a childish broadside at the opponent, which today included the Pope, but none of this is the behaviour of a normal person which means Americans have to be looking towards the 25th Amendment which allows them to remove him if he is unfit for Office.
Personally, leading an insurrection to overthrow Democracy, the criminal charges for fraud, being one of the Planets leading liars and the sex pest tag hanging around his neck was not enough and the Epstein files which has a growing body of evidence that he not only knew about Epstien's pedophile behaviour, but indulged in it also which is why he is desperate to hush it up.
Who America votes for is their own business but i was genuinely staggered by the inability to see that an obviously dreadful man will obviously do dreadful things over and over again which is exactly what we are seeing now but most annoying is that thing which politicians always do once they are safely out of office, say that they never agreed with him and he was terrible which by then is far too late.

After Artemis II, What Next?

They have flown at 17,000 miles per hour, travelled 685,000 miles and spent 10 days in space, a trip that took Nasa’s Artemis II crew the furthest humanity has ever been from the Earth but now that the astronauts are back on Earth, what's next?
For Nasa and for all of humanity in whose name the astronauts said they were travelling, the question is where will this achievement lead?
There is a space race with China to get the first feet on the Moon for 50 years and Nasa hopes to do that with Artemis IV by 2028 but the whole Artemis project has been facing delays are are 5 years behind their original timescale, Artemis III was pencilled in for 2023.
If III succeeds, then comes Artemis IV, which aims to finally put astronauts onto the moon but China is working to a similar schedule, with the hope of getting to the moon by 2030. And it is working fast and has already put landers on the moon, and is due to test the spacecraft later this year, and experts suggest that its timelines could be a little more realistic than the ones offered by Nasa.
Although i refuse to buy into the Nationalism which comes with Space Exploration, inevitably the winner to leave fresh footprints on the Lunar surface will get the glory but various political demands from inside the US and China will require that both get to the moon as quickly as it can.
There have been people who do not share my enthusiasm for Space Travel, asking what's the point of it all but that's to not notice the Earth's faces growing challenges from climate change and resource scarcity to geopolitical instability from which we may well need to escape one day.
Then there are the considerations of asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions or nuclear war, Stephen Hawking warned, 'I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space' and he was a proper brainiac.
Then there are the technological advancements it generates right here on Earth, satellite communications, GPS, weather forecasting, advanced materials, medical imaging, miniaturised electronics in smartphones and laptops.
Finally, the cost is often mentioned but consider this, the projected estimate for the whole Artemis project is $93 billion, the war in Iran costs America $2 billion dollars each day, the 40 day war therefore cost 86% of what it cost to fund the entire Artemis project which should shut up the people who are saying to me the money would be better spent here on Earth because when the money is here, we just spaff it away on missiles and bombs to kill each other with.

Special Guest Blogger: Irving Berlin

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have the honor of your attention as I regale you with the tale of my illustrious career, my untimely demise and why I’m still not over the time I accidentally invented Christmas.
I was born Israel Beilin which is a name as cumbersome as a Brussel sprout soufflé. My parents, humble German-Jewish immigrants, arrived in the United States with precisely two things, a trunk full of secondhand coats and a deep, abiding distrust of sausages made by anyone else.
We settled in New York, where I quickly learned that if you want to make it in America, you must first shed your accent, your last name, and any hope of pronouncing your own surname without a yawn. Thus, Israel became Irving and Beilin became Berlin. Classy.
The golden days of Tin Pan Alley! A time when composing a hit song was as simple as scribbling a melody on a napkin, tripping over a piano bench, and accidentally creating the next standard.
My early years were a whirlwind of renting a room in Yonkers for $2.50 a week and scribbling lyrics by gaslight. Or kerosene. Or whatever passed for light before electricity decided to show up.
Then came Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and suddenly I wasn’t just a man with a questionable moustache, I was a man with a musical career. And let me tell you, nothing solidifies your place in society like a song that makes every person in America tap their feet while pretending they’ve never heard it.
White Christmas. Yes, that one. The song that has made me eternally wealthy, I was making money off a song about snow for the rest of my life.
The truth? I wrote it on a dare. I was in Hollywood, visiting my son, and the weather was so disgustingly sunny it hurt my soul. I muttered something about missing the snow and the cold, and lo! Bing Crosby turned to me and said, 'Write a song about it.' And so I did. But here’s the kicker: I had never seen a white Christmas in my life. I was winging it.
By the time I shuffled off this mortal coil at 101, I’d written over 900 songs and outlived Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and about five of my own nieces.
My death? Quiet, dignified, and mercifully free of dramatic last words. I was napping, as one does when you’re 101 and your joints and other body parts have given up the fight.

Even Erdogan Thinks You Suck Benji

Shortly after the United States and Iran agreed to a ceasefire earlier this week, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan Erdogan, warned Donald Trump in a telephone conversation of possible Israel provocations and sabotage to undermine the agreement to which the Warmongering Israeli Prime Minister responded that: 'Israel under my leadership will continue to fight Iran’s terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdogan who accommodates them and massacred his own Kurdish citizens'.  
Not one to take criticism, Erdogan took off his gloves, told his Government to hold his beer and called Netanyahu the 'Hitler of our time' and pointed out the proceedings at international courts and an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for genocide and how he faces being tried in his own country and is likely to be sentenced to imprisonment.
The rest of the Turkish Government joined in and said they stood by innocent civilians and would make added efforts to see Netanyahu held accountable for the war crimes he has committed and called Netanyahu the ringleader terrorist of the 21st century's massacre and terror network.
'The brazen remarks by Netanyahu directed at our esteemed President, are a clear manifestation of a guilt complex' wrote the Turkish Foreign Minister on X. 'The audacity of someone whose hands are stained with children's blood, someone pursued by international law, to presume to lecture Turkey on morality is merely an indicator of his efforts to cover up his own crimes against humanity, and it holds no validity whatsoever' and then went on to threaten to invade Israel: 'Just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we will do the same to them. There is nothing to prevent us from doing it'.
Not a nation to take too kindly for having their war crimes and ongoing genocide repeatedly mentioned, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Erdogan doesn't impress anyone with this circus and described the Turkish president as a megalomaniacal dictator who sees himself as an Ottoman Sultan while being no more than a pathetic tyrant of a country with a collapsing economy and a dead democracy and Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, posted: 'Erdogan, do you understand English? F*ck you.'
When you are being accused of being a tosspot by Erdogan of all people, you know you are on the wrong side of history.

EU's Problem Child Could Be Problem Solved

When your closest political allies are Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, then you really should be worried when the elections come around and quite rightly Viktor Orban is facing a very real threat to his 16-year leadership of Hungary.
Polling leading up to today's election has seen Orban far behind Peter Magyar's centre-right Tisza party leading 57%/43% and the arrival of American Vice President JD Vance recently in support of Orban probably didn't help in a nation which has faced protests for a change and against his support for Israel committing War Crimes in Gaza.
Orban has been described as the leader of a mafia state and running an autocracy and according to Transparency International, Hungary is the most corrupt country in the European Union and have dropped 69 places in the Press Freedom Index, between Benin and Malaysia and the European Parliament stated that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy and that the country has become an electoral autocracy.
When asked by a BBC reporter if he was worried he could lose, he replied that: 'We always win. We always win' but if the polls are correct, Orban is on his way out and the EU's  problem child may soon be a problem solved.

No Peace Deal Yet

After 21 hours of negotiations, the Americans and the Iranians swept back home with nothing to show for it and each blaming each other for the failure.
Iran said that they never heard anything to make them think that America would stick to any deal made and the Americans said that Iran refused to budge on accepting the American terms on the Nuclear issue so now we wait to see what happens next, hopefully more negotiations and not a return to war but already the Mango Moron in the White House has escalated things by saying that the US Navy will blockade the Strait of Hormuz immediately with the help of NATO who he stated are willing to help although nobody in NATO has said this and were against joining in the Trump folly and which the British Prime Minister wasted no time to announce that they will be doing it on their own as the UK will not be involved in it.
Obviously, as is usually the case with the man known for saying something and then chickening out and who was saying he would destroy a civilisation only a few weeks ago, he is already watering down his proposal saying that any blockade might take some time to implement rather than immediately and which Iran said the only way to open the Strait would be through negotiations and if America escalate, they will respond.
It may be worth remembering that before Trump launched the war, negotiations were ongoing and when America and Israel started the war, Iran were offering to blend down their stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, allow full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and repeated that they had no desire to build a nuclear weapon and the facilitator at the talks, Oman's Foreign Minister said that the agreement could be reached within days, and then Trump and Netanyahu blundered in amidst a war cry of eliminating Iran's nuclear threat.
The talk is that War Criminal Netanyahu, who has been trying to persuade American Presidents to go to war with Iran for 40 odd years, finally found one simple enough to go along with it although now he is desperate to end it as his poll numbers sink and even his own side are questioning the wisdom of what he has done.
The Peace Agreement was for 10 days so we still have time to bring the negotiators back and try again because the alternative is a return to war and if America and Israel could not reach their war aims, whatever they were, in the past 40 days, it is highly unlikely another 40 days will but the already tragic death toll will certainly increase.