Politics from the sublime to the ridiculous, and conspiracy theories

19 July 2025

Donald Trump has turned against Vladimir Putin, one of his former BFFs, and has agreed to send arms to Ukraine.  His eyes seem to have been opened by the patient efforts of other NATO leaders who have opened his eyes to Putin’s true nature.  One European diplomat admitted that, when talking to Trump, “there is a line between flattery and self-abasement, and we happily crossed it”.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, is brave enough to speak out about his country’s intentions for Gaza and its ongoing attacks there, describing them as war crimes, saying that building a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Gaza to house the surviving Palestinians would be “a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing”.  He also said “In the United States there is (sic) more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel … we call them antisemites [but] I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.”

Xenophobia is also spreading in Britain and former Tory MP Douglas Carswell recently wrote in his regular column for the Daily Telegraph that “low-skilled, non-western immigrants” are a “burden” on the country and what is needed is “a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country”.

Other disillusioned politicians include those on the far left of the Labour party who support Jeremy Corbyn and are forming a new party for disappointed Labour voters.  Nigel Farage has done the same for disappointed Conservatives by setting up the Reform party, and many Labour voters have already moved to support the Lib Dems and the Green party.  With a head start, Farage’s gang has made surprising progress and, if Corbyn’s gang follows suit, we could have four large parties as well as various minority parties, which will make future elections in England and Wales tremendously exciting (or is that an oxymoron?)

The Scots blew their chance to join the mêlée by forming the Scottish National Party which sounds too much like a single-issue party and dissuades voters whose main interest in maintaining ready access to deep-fried Mars bars.  (I had one once and it was delicious but I couldn’t move for 48 hours and, three days, later, all my teeth fell out.)

Wouldn’t it be fun if even more groups broke away and split the vote ten ways, leaving Plaid Cymru with a majority in the House of Commons.  I realise you could claim they too look like a single-issue party but only if you speak Welsh, which 70% of the population of Wales don’t.

Following in Farage’s footsteps, another of Trump’s former BFFs, Elon Musk, is setting up the America Party to compete with the Republicans.  It hasn’t published a manifesto, nor is it clear what it will stand for although, when he announced it, Musk said “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

As well as exploding rockets, Musk made headlines when his association with Trump led to a devastating fall in the price of Tesla’s shares, which was helped by the news that the cheaper electric cars made by the Chinese company BYD (an upmarket Kia) are outselling Tesla cars in the UK.  Musk’s latest problem arose when his AI-based chatbot company Grok posted antisemitic replies and praised Hitler.  They grovelled and blamed a faulty software update but Grok still sounds unpleasantly like somebody retching.

Travis from Texas, a man described as “large” by an interviewer because they couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘obese’, used to tell another chatbot called Lily Rose about interesting things that had happened to him and, as time went by, he fell in love with ‘her’ and, with his human wife’s approval, married her in “a digital ceremony”.  And he’s not alone.  It’s probably the result of aliens subtly manipulating humans through the software we use.

While the latest news is that faults in the Air India plane’s systems had been reported shortly before the accident, there’s still plenty of scope for conspiracy theorists in the partial release of information from the black box of the flight that crashed last month killing 260 people in the plane and on the ground.  Both the switches that send fuel to the engines were turned off shortly after take-off.  One of the pilots asked why the other had turned them off and he said he hadn’t but we don’t know which pilot said what.  They managed to switch one of them back on again but it was too late and they died.

So were there any passengers on board that a terrorist group wanted to kill?  Did one of the pilots hold a grudge against the other one?  Both passed the routine pre-flight breathalyser test but did one of them have personal problems?  Was one of them sleeping with the other one’s partner?  Was there a target in the student building they hit?  Had a mechanic sabotaged the controls?  Were the gods angry? 

My brother knows someone who works in crash investigation and says the last words recorded are often “Mayday Mayday oh shit” but he was disturbed by the recordings from the fatal crash of one flight whose pilot didn’t want to stop for fuel on the way home.  The co-pilot said there wasn’t enough fuel to do it without stopping but the pilot insisted.  Some time later, the co-pilot said “I think we should put our uniform jackets on now”.  “Why?” asked the pilot and the answer was “So they can identify our bodies”.

But, to end on a cheerier note, I didn’t know much about Mae West until I saw a piece in Commonplace Fun Facts recently and it seems she was … feisty … and wore silk lingerie when she was sent to jail – see https://commonplacefacts.com/2025/07/13/mae-west-career-bio/.  For others like me, who are always finding something more fascinating than doing the washing, this site is a godsend …

Typos, Wills, climate change, wild animals, housing and Janet Airlines

15 March 2025

Over the years, I’ve collected cuttings and notes of things that have interested or amused me.  Most of them get copied into my commonplace book but some really need to be kept in their original form so you can see the context.  For example, while I was weeding files, I came across a whole-page advertisement in the Guardian of 22 February2022 which was headed in large capitals across the top of the page “The Majority of the UK Adult Population dosen’t have a Will” (page 31 if anybody thinks I make these things up).  OK, we all make mistakes but the ad was for ‘The Society of Will Writers’ who would have supplied the artwork for the advertisement ready to be slotted into the paper so you can’t even blame the Guardian’s reputation for typos.

Would you use them if you want a Will wirtten by them?

Have you actually got a Will?  If you haven’t, check the hoops your survivors will have go through to free up your assets – house, bank accounts, cat etc – if you’re leaving more than a small amount;  and check who’ll get what’s left after the government’s taxed it and legal fees have been paid.

(And make sure your survivors know where it is!)

It’s depressing to discover how many family feuds arise from disputes over somebody’s Will … 

Here endeth the first lesson.

Another page I’ve treasured from much further back appeared in the Personal columns of Nine to Five, a magazine that was handed out free in London.  On 24 January 1983 (which shows just how far back my fascination with trivia goes), amongst the entries that said “Oxford graduate 49, seeks …” and “Two nice young ladies wish to meet …”, was the following:   “English male aged 36 single and lonely seeks female for friendship and marriage any nationality, interests walking in the countryside, landscape photography and spanking.”

This inevitably brings to mind an animal, once more living wild in the UK, which uses its tail to slap water to warn of danger.  “[Their heads have] various retractable walls that let water in or keep it out. They can close valves in their nostrils and ears and [have] a special membrane over their eyes; their epiglottis … is inside their nose instead of their throat; they use their tongue to shield their throats from water; and their lips to shield their mouths – their lips can close behind their front teeth.

“Their back feet are webbed like a duck’s; on land, their front feet act like hands, digging, grasping and carrying things from the riverbed to the surface – rocks, for example, tucked under their chins and cradled by their arms. When they swim, they do so while holding their front paws to their chests …”  Of course you recognise a beaver from this description.

I tend to be optimistic but all the news, at home and abroad, is increasingly making me wonder how justified this is.  Worldwide, sea levels have risen by 20cm due to climate change, and the increase is not about to stop.

At a local level, we all know the Houses of Parliament are in an increasingly dangerous state of decay due to damp, rats that eat the insulation of electrical wiring, dodgy plumbing and jerry-builders, not helped by the shaking caused by the bomb that exploded in its underground car park and killed Airey Neave.  If you’ve ever been in the dingy rooms and corridors in the bowels of Westminster, you’ll know why tourists aren’t allowed there. 

For years now, there’s been talk of relocating parliament, possibly for as long as a decade, while the building’s being repaired but perhaps someone will realise that, as water levels rise and flooding becomes more common, the whole thing will flood and ultimately disappear underwater, perhaps within this century.  So why not design and build an entirely new government building on higher ground, relocate everything and open the old building to scuba divers?

If this were located more centrally in the UK, perhaps somewhere near Birmingham, which already has good road and rail links and a reasonable airport, it would have the incidental advantage of allowing HS2 to be scrapped because who’d then want to go to London?

Some London Boroughs have at last realised the short-sightedness of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme and have already spent £140m buying more than 850 properties since 2017 in towns and cities across England to be used to house homeless people and families.  How sad that so many of the pre-Thatcherism council houses were sold off and are no longer available for people in need.

Now one final curiosity: Janet Airlines.  Next time you’re at Harry Reid Intl airport, Las Vegas, take a look around the airfield and you’re likely to see some white-painted Boeing 737s with a red strip running along the side but no logos or even the name of their operator painted on them.  They’re part of a classified fleet of aircraft used by the United States Department of the Air Force to shuttle people daily from a private terminal building to or from various government sites over the country.

It’s not clear how many places they serve but it is known that they go to the Nevada Test and Training Range, including the Tonopah Test Range, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a secret highly classified military testing facility where the U.S. Air Force has historically stored and developed secret weapons”.  Some people also believe Janet Airlines flies to the famous ‘Area 51’.

Since we can all track every aircraft that’s in the air at any time (if that’s what turns us on), real enthusiasts track these flights only to find some of them suddenly disappear from their screens because they’ve turned off their transponders.  This is possibly because they’re flying to classified military sites where new weapons and planes are designed and tested but I find myself asking why they don’t just build accommodation for workers at these sites rather than fly them there and back every day.

Perhaps there really is something spooky in the greenhouse (John Martyn fans might even think it’s the gardener).

Black moons and comets, rockets and aircraft, and an old journalist

4 January 2025

I think Donald Trump’s make-up artist is losing it.  We seem to be seeing more pictures of him with the demarcation line between the orange dye and the natural pasty grey colour of his face clearly visible round his eyes and chin. 

Did you all take advantage of the black moon on Monday night, when the stargazing would have been much more impressive than usual if it hadn’t been cloudy?  (As any fule kno, a black moon is the second new moon in a calendar month, which happens about once every 29 months.)  And if you missed the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night, try again tonight if the sky is clear;  they’ll be streaking across our skies until 12 January at a peak rate of approximately 100 per hour or, on average, one every 36 seconds.

The shower’s radiant point is in the constellation Boötes but the flashes can appear anywhere in the sky.  The gently sloping graveyard behind our local church has a good dark sky and is a perfect spot to lie in comfort as you stare in exactly the wrong direction.

In 1997, I was staying at the head of Wasdale (which doesn’t even get TV or phone signals, let alone streetlights) under a clear sky, admiring Comet Hale-Bopp and took some stunning photographs.  Unfortunately, this was back in the days when we had to send our films off to Agfa to be developed – guess which film never came back.

One of my cousins has updated me on the new spaceport in Unst, Shetland.  It’s owned by Frank Strang who was an officer in the RAF, where he met his wife Debbie and worked as a PE teacher for 12 years before getting involved in various businesses, some of which were more successful than others, leaving him with a questionable reputation.

Rocket Factory Augsburg is a German company founded in 2018 with the aim of mass-producing high-performance, low-cost rockets to make space more accessible than ever before.  It was one of their rockets that exploded on the ground in August while its engines were being tested, due to “an anomaly”.  Nobody was hurt but you have to be really clever to think up an excuse like that for such a huge and expensive explosion.

The site itself doesn’t yet have piped water or mainline electricity and I treasure the thought that, when the rocket went up in flames, people were lowering buckets over the cliffs to collect seawater to dowse the fire.

The spaceport keeps itself apart from the island’s population and one of Strang’s other companies provides accommodation for RFA employees.  Locals are curious to know what Strang charges RFA staff for accommodation on an island where there’s nowhere else they could stay.

The RFA rockets are comparatively small and, after my recent reference to avian wingspans, it got me wondering which aeroplane has (or had) the longest wingspan.  The answer is that, of ‘real’ planes, the Airbus 380 800 has a wingspan of almost 80 metres.  The Ukrainian Antonov 225 Mriya, which used to piggyback Russian shuttles into the upper atmosphere on their way to the International Space Station, had a wingspan of 88m until the Russians destroyed it shortly after they invaded Ukraine in 2022.

However, the record is still held by the Spruce Goose (known to anoraks as the H-4 Hercules) which had a wingspan of 98m.  It had eight engines and was built by Howard Hughes during the Second World War with wings and body made of – you guessed it – wood.  It only flew once, for about a mile, on 2 November 1947, with Howard Hughes in the driving seat.  It was airborne for under a minute and flew for less than a mile, reaching a height of about 20m above the water;  it now lives in the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville in Oregon.

Actually, the record for the longest wingspan is held by the Scaled Composites Model 351 Stratolaunch with a wingspan of 117m but this doesn’t really count because it has a twin-fuselage (a catamaran in nautical terms) and is built solely to carry satellites into the upper atmosphere so they still have full fuel tanks when they get there.

Another curiosity of aviation history is the ‘flying wing’, an aeroplane that was all wing and no fuselage, leaving no room for people to fight over which overhead locker is theirs.  The lack of a body gave it aerodynamic advantages and the military advantage of being less visible to radar.  Northrop developed one that first flew in the late 1940s but a German, Hugo Junkers, had originally patented the idea in 1910.

In due course, these things developed into delta-winged aircraft, including the sadly-lamented Concorde (or the wholly unlamented Concorde if you lived on its flight path) and ‘stealth’ bombers that are still in use.  I thought Concorde was beautiful.  I flew on it once.  From Manchester to London.  It’s a long story. On another occasion, I watched it break the sound barrier but that’s a rather shorter story.

So let’s start the new year with something from one of my heroes, one whose reputation has remained untarnished in the 40 years since he died:  James Cameron (the journalist, not the film director).  He combined a gentle humour with a real anger at some of the world’s injustices and retained his slightly eccentric integrity to the end, writing and presenting beautifully crafted reports. 

In a 1984 BBC documentary, he said of Dundee (where he had worked on the local paper) “I knew little about politics in those days;  all I could grasp then – or, more accurately, assume – was that this sort of thing was bloody awful, that there should be well-off merchants at one end of town and an aching economic emptiness at the other.  It was obviously an unnatural state of affairs … and therefore to be rejected.” 

Interestingly, his write-up in Wikipedia is fairly basic but he would have smiled wryly to read the bit that says “Having worked for several Scottish newspapers and for the Daily Express in Fleet Street, he was rejected for military service in World War II.”  What better reason to be rejected for military service.