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 …

Magic v science

10 May 2025

Back onto one of my continuing interests this week:  the gulf between what we can explain and ‘prove’ and what we can’t explain.  The former is based on our latest understanding of scientific laws and hypotheses, which some people think must therefore be true, the latter can’t be explained by these laws and hypotheses and is therefore trashed by people who have shut the door on the possible realities of things beyond our current understanding.

The range of the inexplicable is huge and extends from fortune-telling to telepathy to crop circles to UAPs to ghosts to the existence of an afterlife to dowsing to healing to the location of our minds to after-death experiences and ley lines, to mention a few.  People have put forward theories about how some of these things work while others just accept their personal experience of one or more of these things without worrying about why they happened.

The boundaries between the explicable and the inexplicable are defined by the extent of our current understanding of things scientific.  Without repeating my worries about black matter / energy, think about psychotherapy.

A hundred years ago, people putting forward psychological solutions to human problems thought they were pretty cool but many of their ideas have since been developed and updated.  Remember that Sigmund Freud, who is remembered primarily for his obsession with sex, was preceded by a 19th century therapist who invented a device that gave ‘hysterical’ women orgasms and discovered this tended to relax them.  This seems hard to believe at a time when a visit to Ann Summers can now achieve similar results at minimum cost.

One of Freud’s more acceptable thoughts defined the three basic contributors to human activity as the ego, the superego and the id.  If one ignores these dated and often misunderstood terms, they can be used to parallel the development of humans from birth.  For their first couple of years, babies’ own comfort is their prime motivation but this develops into an awareness of their connections to family and friends and the interdependence of the people around them.  Most children then develop further and accept their connection with society at large and become fully-functioning humans, understanding the benefits of showing kindness to strangers.

How has this affected psychotherapy?  Fashions come and go but a study some years ago showed that success rates in curing depression hardly varied between talking therapies, medication and doing nothing.

In the last 150 years, we’ve discovered more about stuff that’s billions of miles away in space than about how the insides of our head work.

Take dowsing for example.  I’ve used two Bic biro tubes and two bent bits of coat hanger to find where the main drain ran under a neighbour’s garden.  I knew roughly where it ran so I knew where to look and, when the two wires swung inwards, then back out again as I walked on, we marked the spot.  The neighbour was naturally (?) very dubious about this so he had a go, slightly further over the garden and he jumped visibly when the wires also moved in as he walked forward.  We marked that spot, laid a rake handle between the two and that was the line of the drain, running at an angle across his garden, not parallel with the back of his house.

When he built an extension onto his house, he didn’t hit the drain and the digging showed that the line of the drain we’d marked was spot-on.

Detectorists use machines sensitive to electronic echoes to locate buried Roman coins and ring pulls.  Perhaps our brains could do the same if we let them?  What we do know is that nobody can explain how dowsing works.

Or ghosts.  A relative of mine once woke in the night in an old house and saw a ghost, a young woman in a long white shift comforting a baby by walking up and down at the foot of her bed.  “Oh,” thought Auntie Gertie, “poor thing”, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never seen a ghost but I nearly saw one once and, while I find it hard to believe in wronged lovers and dead dogs roaming the earth, I’m perfectly willing to believe that something in the multiverse allows them to appear to some people.

Sadly, I’m better at receiving telepathic messages than I am at sending them, so I can’t transmit messages saying I’m going to be late but I have received what seem to be telepathic messages.  Doubters explain it as a coincidence and even believers point out it might be due to precognition, looping back from future to the exact point in spacetime I experienced it.

We hear stories of clocks stopping at a time when somebody close to them died half a world away, and stories of children talking to invisible people before they’re told that such things don’t exist.

Some places also have atmospheres.  I’ve always felt a sense of great calm in Durham Cathedral and I once found myself feeling extremely uncomfortable in a 1930s Crittall-windowed semi-detached house in Hounslow that had, as far as I know, no history of murders or persistent indigestion and whose owners were charming.  I’ve had comparable feelings of calm in some woodlands and while watching waves break over rocks in Shetland.

It’s known that biofeedback can help people to consciously change some bodily functions.  To see if this worked for me, I once strapped on a gadget that told me my pulse-rate and lay down and, by monitoring my progress, slowed my heart from its usual 65 bpm to 39 bpm.  So why shouldn’t we believe in the power of healing using ‘magic’, whether it’s reiki, reflexology, meditation or prayer?                                 

I find it much harder to believe that any or all of these things might be a subjective response to yesterday’s crab sandwich than that they’re simply due to something – sometimes called paranormal – that our present level of ‘scientific’ understanding hasn’t yet discovered or explained.

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).

IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries

31 August 2024

Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level.  Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.

Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from.  Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.

While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported.  An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south.  It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.

It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.

The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.

There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent. 

In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded.  The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved.  RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible.  It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.

Why don’t these people speak English?  What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.

To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.

For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.

The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays. 

Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars.  ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day.  This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’:  ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.

The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary.  I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.

Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.

In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U. 

Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’. 

Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all.  Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.