Ode to Parkin' Arrogance

by Tim Veater

Oh who will move YON German car?

NOR George or Dragon can get out.

I thought they beat the Germans in the war,

But sadly as they won the peace,

We don't make British cars no more,

And German cars now rule the roost. 

(With apologies to Robert Burns and 'O were my love yon Lilac fair')

The much better original:

O were my love yon Lilac fair]

Robert Burns

1759 – 1796

O were my love yon Lilac fair,  
  Wi' purple blossoms to the Spring,
And I, a bird to shelter there,  
  When wearied on my little wing!
How I wad mourn when it was torn         
  By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!
But I wad sing on wanton wing,  
  When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd. 
O gin my love were yon red rose,  
  That grows upon the castle wa';    
And I myself a drap o' dew,  
  Into her bonie breast to fa'!
O there, beyond expression blest,  
  I'd feast on beauty a' the night;
Seal'd on her silk-saft faulds to rest,
  Till fley'd awa by Phoebus' light!

11.4.2025:  DISGUSTING ISRAEL. What is Britain having ANYTHING to do with that murderous rogue state?  It should get out of Gaza. Get out of the West Bank. Stop blocking a Palestinian state. Stop killing and abusing Palestinians and encouraging 'settlers' to do the same. Stop blocking food and water to Gaza. Stop demolishing Palestinian houses. Stop shooting Palestinian children. Stop arresting and torturing Palestinians, often on spurious grounds. Release all Palestinians in Israeli gaols. Stop dropping bombs on Palestinian civilians. Stop stealing Palestinian land and evicting them from it. Stop bombing Lebanon and Syria. Stop trying to get America to bomb Iran.  START treating non-Jews with respect and dignity then we might, just might, respect YOU!


THIS YOUNG BOY'S LIFE RUINED BY ISRAEL AND THE IDF.
Fares Abulebda 
eroSposntd113y3124PY5 i:i2e8718ual25M0m4 i650ai r00t6te00dsa  · 
Ahmed Manasra is free. 
"Child prisoner Ahmed Manasra was released today from the "cemeteries of the living" after more than ten years in Israeli occupation prisons."
Arrested in 2015 at the age of 13, Ahmed was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years—later reduced to 9.5—despite Israeli courts finding that he did not participate in the alleged stabbing attempt carried out in the illegal Pisgat Ze’ev Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem.
His case drew global attention, particularly after a widely circulated video showed his harsh interrogation by Israeli officers. In the footage, a visibly injured and sobbing 13 year old Ahmed was berated while wearing a bandage around his head. The video became emblematic of the mistreatment and abuse of Palestinian minors in Israeli custody.
Ahmed endured prolonged solitary confinement and developed severe mental health issues, including schizophrenia, depression, and vision impairment due to lack of sunlight during his imprisonment where some years were spent in solitary confinement.



SELF REVELATION.  DID YOU REALISE WHAT WE REALLY ARE?

8.4.2025:
Caitlin Johnstone
odorSsetpn3eh8d2tt 5h7sM1lg0 cy1A57afr2hYum2 emh:f9t16719fma  · 
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves. We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you. We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying. And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”
Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.
But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did. They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilization who is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives. That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.
You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in western society. But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.
It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie. What we are, first and foremost, is a civilization that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.
October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves. Hamas reached thousands of miles around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in. Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.
What has been seen cannot be unseen.


Jonathan Cook, journalist
podetsSnor77 cM4h80fag:u2 l1 l425gac052 414ttaiih40P5uAhlrfp  · 
Our politicians have consented to everything Israel has done, and not just in Gaza over the past 18 months. This genocide has been decades in the making.
Three-quarters of a century ago, the West authorised the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine to create a self-declared Jewish state there. The West consented, too, to the violent occupation of the last sections of Palestine in 1967, and to Israel’s gradual colonisation of those newly seized territories by armed Jewish extremists.
The West nodded through waves of house demolitions carried out against Palestinian communities by Israel to “Judaise” the land. It backed the Israeli army creating extensive “firing zones” on Palestinian farmland to starve traditional agricultural communities of any means of subsistence.
The West ignored Jewish settlers and soldiers destroying Palestinian olive groves, beating up shepherds, torching homes, and murdering families. Even being an Oscar winner offers no immunity from the rampant settler violence.
The West agreed to Israel creating an apartheid road system and a network of checkpoints that kept Palestinians confined to ever-shrinking ghettoes, and building walls around Palestinian areas to permanently isolate them from the rest of the world. It allowed Israel to stop Palestinians from reaching one of their holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, on land that was supposed to be central to their future state.
The West kept quiet as Israel besieged the two million people of Gaza for 17 years, putting them on a tightly rationed diet so their children would grow ever-more malnourished. It did nothing – except supply more weapons – when the people of Gaza launched a series of non-violent protests at their prison walls around the enclave, and were greeted with Israeli sniper fire that left thousands dead or crippled.
The West only found a collective voice of protest on 7 October 2023, when Hamas managed to find a way to break out of Gaza’s choking isolation to wreak havoc in Israel for 24 hours. It has been raising its voice in horror at the events of that single day ever since, drowning out 18 months of screams from the children being starved and exterminated in Gaza.
The murder of 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers is a tiny drop in an ocean of Israeli criminality – a barbarism rewarded by western capitals decade after decade.
This genocide was made in the West. Israel is our progeny, our ugly reflection in the mirror – which is why western leaders and establishment media are so desperate to make us look the other way. That reflection is too much for anyone with a soul to bear.
Read more from my latest article here: 
https://www.middleeasteye.net/.../graver-israels...

12.4.2025:  Re. https://www.facebook.com/trtworld Palestinian defenders are being attacked and defamed. 'Anti-semitism' groups are thinly disguised Israeli propagandists, unapologenic at twisting the truth to promote their deadly policies. Often funded by alien states and interests, they are desperate to prevent the public being reminded that just in the most recent Gaza offensive, Israel has knowingly, intentionally, deliberately targeted women and children, killing or maiming tens of thousands of them whilst the world - AKA America - not only allowed but supported it! Paradoxically, these groups are themselves rascist and 'anti-semitic' as most Palestinians are 'semitic' by definition and Jewish settlers arn't. They falsely equate opposition to genocide with support for terrorism; of protecting Palestinian civilians with defending Hammas; whilst blind to the fact in the 'terrorism' stakes, Israel wins hands down.  They operate like a Mafia protection gang and morally are no better, trying by any means to close down free speech or any accurate reporting of the atrocities perpetrated by the rogue state of Israel. Unfortunately, the American political establishment, underpinned by a vast industrial/military/intelligence complex, provides a biased listening ear to these travesty accusations. It is a rot that eats at the root of all Western institutions and will bring them down unless someone stands up for their independance and honesty, unmolested by this blatant attempt at censorship.

We are living in a Christian moral vacuum. Where have the churches been in condemning the wars in Ukraine and Gaza? If anything they have been seen to support them! Conversely the state treats the Christian faith with contempt, arresting preachers and even recklessly invading the Westminster Quaker Meeting house with armed officers, in some 'fishing expedition', looking for possible protest organisers. Meanwhile, whilst pursuing this ridiculous obeisance to Mohammid and his festivals, the government refuses to condemn the slaughter of mainly Muslims by Jews in the Middle East. What blatant hypocrisy. Clearly this all just performance art with no ethical, moral or religious substance. It is just typical of socialists, socialism, the Labour Party and Starmer in particular, a hollow unprincipled man if ever I saw one. https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=Islamaphobia

14.4.2025:  Ref. your mention of the RSPB it reminds me of my Uncle Reg who lived in Whitchurch at the Gilda which was then on the very southern edge of built-up Bristol. He was married to my mum's sister Alice and they had no children. He had worked as a gardener in the big house the other side of the Wells Road but then became a miner, which was better remunerated I suppose. He paid for it later on with obstructive lung disease (Pneumoconiosis') as so many did. But probably not unconnected, he was a great bird fancier and bred Budgerigars in a large cage in the back garden. I was fascinated by all their differently coloured plumage. When in about 1962 they moved into our old house in Pensford, he build new cages and the birds came with him. What happened to them all when he got ill I do not know. My last memory of him was sitting on the sofa with a breathing mask, looking very ill. Strange how details get clouded with time. I didn't attend his funeral and I'm now not sure when or where it took place. Was it in Pensford or elsewhere? I remember him as a jovial collier who always squeezed my knee if I sat next to him, so of course I avoided it if I could. He is now just a memory - but a good one, part of the panoply of characters that affected one's early years and leaving their mark.