Don't let the bully win

Quite disgusted with the Times Radio discussion on whether the Trump state visit should be concelled and whether the UK should be responding in kind to Trump tariffs. The great minds discussing this, which include Andrew Neil, seem to think only about the economic consequences of responding, in a very coldly objective way, ignoring the aggression towards Canada and Greenland/Denmark and the despicable kidnappings that the USA has been inflicting on any suspected of being a foreigner.

I don't know how the rest of the country are feeling, but I feel very strongly that we should not be giving an inch to Trump, even if the economic consequences of responding are bad for the UK. It looks cowardly and selfish to play the "we're all right Jack" card negotiating independently on tariffs. We whould be standing with the EU, with Greenland and Canada, and hitting Trump where it hurts.

I am appalled at these people talking as though they can ignore the threats against Canada and Greenland and the EU - let alone the way that Trump has messed with Ukraine.

It is tempting to believe that Trump simply forgot in some demented way which side he was on, when he befriended Putin and attacked Zelensky, but I think it is all part of the same Putin playbook - keep the country on its toes never knowing what you are doing, until they capitulate because they can't cope with the chaos any more.

Our country needs to find its backbone, cancel the visit and apply reciprocal tariffs to the US - and begin to support Canada, Greenland and Ukraine and develop much closer reciprocal relationships with the EU.

Here's what a USA Nazi taught me....

It seems that Donald Trump's gang of thieves have taken a few leaves out of the Boris Johnson book of plausible deniability and in defiance of parliamentary rules in both our countries have adopted the habit of discussing policy on bombing other nations on Signal, which can be set to disappear quickly and leave no trace of conversations which are supposed to be held in secure places using government messaging services which do leave a record of the decisions made.

The world has been stunned by the revelations in the Signal group which exposed US plans for bombing Yemen. Leaving aside the stupidity of first, doing that, and then, adding a journalist to the chat to eavesdrop on the whole discussion, in particular, European press is all shock and awe over the hatred of Europe expressed there. Having encountered a US Nazi last year, I can give them some insight into their thoughts.

The first revelation for me was that the US right equates any left leaning tendency or policy with communism. And the second was that they think the US fought on the wrong side in World War II, and should have joined the Nazis to eradicate communism. Yes, really.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. There was definitely a touch of hurt bunny about feeling that white men are the victims of current society, unfairly criticised and blamed for everything. So in a stream of consciousness I heard that countries in the rest of the world ought to be grateful for the civilizing effect of being conquered by the western world; the wholesale murder of First Nation peoples simply didn't happen, and if a few had, that was the cost of the gift of civilization, and that the rise of the federal government in the US was just communism by a different name.

Among other opinions expressed was that the Biden administration had facilitated the ingress of Mexicans in order to gerrymander the election, that any form of social support was communism and evil to boot, and that natural selection ought to be invoked so that those born disabled or mentally handicapped should not be encouraged to live.

That they have adopted the fascist playbook quite so comprehensively was a surprise. I came to the conclusion that the far right in the States was assuming that any kind or compassionate solution to any social problem was communism, and from that stemmed a dislike of almost all European governments. We're all communists now.

Of course, excepting Russia, which they seem to associated with the strength and dedication to capitalism that many of them attribute to the Nazis. Yes, they see that as a good thing.

There have been many commentators, particularly those on the moderate right, who have cautioned against the use of fascist and Nazi terminology to categorize the Republicans currently in power. They dismiss those who liken the current cirumstances with the 1930s. They see no problem with the weakness which was demonstrated by Schumer when he caved instantly to the requests for the Democrats to assist the Republicans in getting measures through Congress. I'm sorry, but I think it is entirely appropriate to fear for our safety and our world. And it scares the hell out of me.

Robbie Burns wrote "Oh would some Power the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us!" I think I'd be asking at the moment for a different gift: for the ordinary Americans who voted for Trump the gift to see Trump and his administration as they really are. Maybe that's been granted, in part, with this leak.

Unidentified flying objects disclosure

 

I haven't posted for a long time on this blog, but I have found myself posting a LOT on twitter and Reddit, and that's a bit disatisfying, because it's difficult to draw together all I am thinking without posting enormously long threads. So I am returning to this blog instead.

I've been interested in UFOs since I was a child. I've read a lot about the subect over the last 50 years or so, and there are some cases which impress me and others that do not. In case you have been reading the mainstream media and don't know why this subject is current, the most recent interest in the subject began in 2017 with the publication of an article by the New York Times, and the release of three videos from the Pentagon, of unexplained phenomena. 

Since the release of those films, there have been many efforts to debunk them, but a pilot who saw what is now known as the "tic-tac" UFO, David Fravor, appeared on a 60 minutes episode, and in many other places, to explain that he saw it with his own eyes, and it isn't something which the US or any other world government has the capability to build: an object that can fly without any visible means of propulsion, no heat signature, no wings or direction apparatus, and at speeds which would produce G forces heavy enough to kill a human.

The three films were released by the efforts of Lue Elizondo, who had worked for one of the groups organized by the Pentagon ostensibly to research the phenomenon of UFOs. They change the names of these groups every five minutes, and some people have doubted that he has ever worked for the Pentagon, because it appears that the project he was employed by was defunct by the time he claims to have worked for it. This is possibly an attempt to obfuscate the official involvement in UFO research, I have no idea.

The most recent development was that an ex-navy pilot, Ryan Graves, was astonished to find that the things he had been dealing with while he was a pilot, objects which looked like a cube in a transparent sphere, were still getting in the way of current pilots, and nothing appeared to be known about the phenomenon and there was no official way to report an interaction with objects which might be dangerous for pilots operating in the same area. Such was the fear around UFOs and being associated with them that only 5% of pilots would even bother reporting a near-miss incident.

Another government employee, David Grusch, (above) was allocated the UFO project at the Pentagon to look into UFO cases (yeah, I know they call them UAPs now, but really, I think UFO is a better term and more well-known. Also I don't like the way the Pentagon changes the names for things every two minutes - it makes me imagine that most of their meetings are held to discuss what acronyms they are going to assign to things!). 

He had top level clearance and a brief to investigate and yet was being refused by people working on a secret project of some sort. He gathered information about the project, and discovered that people involved in it had been harmed. The project was allegedly to back-engineer technology recovered from UFO crashes and also the biologic entities who were piloting them. The level of secrecy about the project meant that it wasn't under the oversight of congress, and was an illegal project for that reason.

He reported this over a year ago, and gave evidence to the Inspector General, who is responsible for intelligence services. I don't know what happened as a result of those submissions. Here we are a year later. The Inspector general has said his claims are "urgent and credible". David Grusch says that he has suffered reprisals following his submission, which was in effect a whistleblowing submission about this project. Ross Coulthart, an Australian journalist who has reported on other UFO cases, interviewed Grusch on NewsNation a few weeks ago,

On Wednesday this week, congress heard witness statements from Ryan Graves, David Grusch and David Fravor. On many occasions David Grusch said that he was unable to reveal something in open session, but would be able to in a closed session - in "a skiff " is how it sounds, but is actually a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility. I do not understand the regulations for the provision of a SCIF, but this had been denied. 

There are two parts to the information that was disclosed to congress. Firstly that UFOs are real, that the US have had crashed spacecraft and alien artefacts since the 1930s and that they have recovered aliens, or non-human bodies.

The second is that there is this secret project which is run without oversight, sucking up government money with no official status or reporting. And the implication of what Mr Grusch said about it is that it has gone rogue, has used possible threats and perhaps violence against people who have threatened the secrecy.

The revelation for people like me who have followed the subject for a long time, is not that UFOs exist. I have been convinced by many of the reports from people who have had contact with them, that this is true for a long time. I have believed since the 1970s that non-human technology has been seen and made contact with some people. But like clairvoyants and supernatural encounters, there are charlatans mixed up in the verifiable and truthful accounts, and it seems that this project has had a vested interest in keeping people thinking there is nothing to see except tinfoil-hat wearing fanatics.

The revelation which has shaken the UFO community is that it isn't official government which has been concealing and ridiculing the existence of UFOs but some secret project which is even hidden from congress. I don't think this can always have been the case, and I am assuming it must have involved the military at various points, if only to secure and transport material from crash sites etc.

The recent documentary on the Varginha incident in Brazil indicated that the US collected the remains of a pilot and the vehicle he travelled in. There was eye-witness testimony about the other-worldly nature of the alien, which was very close to many accounts of demonic creatures, along with a horrible smell, which made me begin to wonder how many of the accounts in previous centuries of demons and demonic creatures were actually aliens.

That there are accounts going back hundreds of years about strange things in the sky, is an answer to those who think that it is possible that our own secret projects might have produced things which can fly so fast and withoutvisible means of propulsion. These things have been seen way back in history - there is a famous picture of a swarm of the things in the 15th century, and many paintings featuring what appear to be flying objects. People have dismissed them in the past as fantasies, but when they resemble so closely the things which are being reported by pilots today, that assumption needs to be reassessed. And if they have been flying in our skies for six centuries or more, we have to admit that we definitely didn't have any such technology at the time.

David Fravor asserts that we don't have the technology to reproduce the actions of the tic tac that he encountered and wont have for at least 10-20 years. And being a Top Gun pilot, he should know. Many people have asked if it is possible that the government is testing new technology by sending it out to encounter fighter jets, but given the expense of these things, that doesn't make any sense at all. As he said, they have testing ranges for that.

What astonishes me is how little interest most people have in the evidence that was given. "Show me the pictures! Give me the evidence!" they cry. It isn't something they would say about drug trafficking or human trafficking or all the many different subjects that congress and other parliaments deal with every day. David Grusch says that he has followed all the protocols of his high-level clearance and has provided that evidence to those who are cleared to receive it. The whole point of his testimony is that a secret project which has imposed security restrictions and NDAs on the people within it, has managed to subvert government to the point where people are unable to come forward with their evidence without incurring severe penalties - which appear to include brutal reprisals or death.

If that isn't newsworthy enough for the British press, one has to ask why. If aliens are proven to exist, would that not be headline news? If US government is unable to control a secret project which operates without any oversight, isn't that news too? The congress hearing to take evidence from the witnesses into the congressional record was held on Wednesday. It was briefly covered by most of the newspapers, and then vanished from the front pages, and the twitter
what's happening sidebar only included it for a couple of hours.

I find it astonishing that people aren't more interested and curious about it. There has been evidence in plain sight about the reality of UFOs for decades, and they do not seem to be interested or informed about that. I worry about those who don't show an interest, firstly because it indicates an almost incredible lack of curiosity, but also because I think the revelations to come may indeed be an ontological shock - basically a challenge to your world view and what you recognize as possible.

Home for Christmas (Netflix) and other things

I realised today that one of the reasons I haven't been writing so much, is that I have been using twitter and facebook and exhausting my opinions and frustrations in those places. I have about 1700 followers on twitter, which seems like a lot of people, but is just a handful compared with others and of course a grain of sand compared with celebrities with millions of followers.

I've been watching Home for Christmas on Netflix, which I assumed from the still on the selection page might be one of those horrific Hallmark card made-for-television films with corny plotlines and terrible music. I have an infallible internal detector for those sorts of films, and know within five minutes if it is going to be worth watching or not. But it isn't like that at all.

It turns out to be a Norwegian television series with subtitles. Yes, that does put me off, mainly because I tend to enjoy doing other things while I watch television, and you just can't do that with a programme in a foreign language unless you are one of those clever knitters who can knit without looking at the needles. Trying to do any craft, or write Christmas cards or tidy up while watching a subtitled programme is impossible.

The main character is a nurse in her early thirties who is being pressured by her family to settle down with a nice boy. She has the air of a young Helen Baxendale, while her mother has the air of a younger Wanda Ventham. I wasted some time musing upon the possibility of a script drawing together Ida Elise Broch discovering she has a birth mother in England in the form of Helen Baxendale, and then her adoptive mother discovering she is the daughter of Wanda Ventham. But that suffered from the problem which all my fictional creations suffer from - a surfeit of characters. 

I've noticed that successful television programmes keep the cast of characters to a mere handful. You can have people who are in the background, or partnered with some main character, but a successful and sensible author keeps the cast list tightly knit around no more than about eight characters. My attempts at fiction start with a small cast which rapidly expands until I have trouble keeping track of who is who, let alone some poor benighted reader.

It's good though. I am enjoying it. Even though I can't decorate baubles or write my Christmas cards while I watch.

Twitter is dying

One of the reasons I haven't blogged for a while, is that I had increased the amount of time and effort I put into twitter. I've found from experience that the worth of twitter is all about who you follow. I haven't ever automatically followed everyone who was following me - that is to let go of the control over what appears in your feed.

To be honest, I've always preferred the short-lived subjot to twitter, simply because it allowed one to follow only those subjects in which you were interested. The problem with twitter has always been that you follow someone and then get all their tweets without being able to distinguish between their political tweets which may be interesting to you, and their tweets about their new boots, their food or their tedious train journeys.

I've now joined Mastodon online, although I have only the automated followers there, and have only a handful of people and bots I am following. I've also hedged my bets and joined tribel. I've signed up for BlueSky in case that turns out to the the heir apparent. But while I wait for the successor to twitter to be crowned, I'm possibly reverting to blogging for a bit.

Weekend Rage

I didn't expect to spend the pleasant bank holiday weekend raging on twitter, but I did. On Saturday twitter told me that Dominic Cummings, special government advisor, had not self-isolated when his wife was ill, but had instead first, gone to work, and second, driven 250+ miles with his wife and son to Durham to stay with his parents.  And had potentially gone on other trips too.

His explanation for this trip was that with his wife ill and potentially with the illness too he might become unable to look after his son.  Although there are systems in place to help with this, he had friends he had known for decades living close to him, and other friends who were willing to do this.  It's bullshit, he knows it, and thinks we're buying it.

To say I was angry about this is an understatement.  The government has done some pretty abhorrent things in the past 10 years - sanctions on benefits, bedroom tax, starving the NHS of funds, selling off public property like section houses and fire stations (mainly to their own friends), cheating by lying on buses, telling lies, using funds they ought not to have done, using robots and twitter farms, masquerading as individuals or independent groups... the list goes on and on.

But for the last couple of months they have peddled the lie that we are all in this together, and have imposed strict guidelines on the populace which meant that even if we were not infected with the virus, we were not allowed to leave the house or make unnecessary journeys, even if our nearest and dearest were at death's door, or we were.  And in general, the vast majority of people have respected those rules.

There was a lot of weaselly word manipulation on Saturday among those who defended Cummings, it wasn't illegal because they hadn't made journeys illegal.  Tell that to people who have been fined by the police if they haven't explained a second journey to the shops or whatever, and the people who have desperately wanted to visit mothers and grandmothers and haven't.  Tell it to people who haven't been able to go to hospital with their children.

Twitter was furious and so was I.  I read the Guardian articles on the furore, and was profoundly upset.  This man is employed by government to advise on just these guidelines, and he sat on the SAGE committee too.  The MPs were characterizing the episode as "just a father protecting his son" because the excuse given was that Cummings "might" be infected and therefore "might" become too ill to look after him.

This completely overlooks the fact that thousands of people have been in a similar situation and have avoided going anywhere else, even if a single parent.  Faced with the same situation, they have stayed at home and if necessary asked someone else to look after their children.  They have not gone on a long car ride north.

Government issued a short statement claiming that misleading stories were appearing in the paper. They have failed to point out any single example.

On Sunday I was still furious.  And more details had emerged... that he had taken his family to his parents house and it had been his mother's birthday.  That he had not, in fact, needed help with the child, just shopping delivered to his door.  That he had possibly been seen out of the house on April 12, which just happened to be his wife's birthday.

It was announced that Cummings would be holding a press conference the following day to make a statement and take questions.  This is unprecendented for an unelected government advisor.  In fact it breaks the code for government advisors.  The fact that he was allowed to use the garden at 10 Downing Street, gave no real explanation for his actions and seems to have thought that saying he took his wife and child on a 30 mile drive "to test his eyesight" was a reasonable thing to say, seems to mean he is considered special and thinks us all more stupid than he is.

He also claimed to have warned about coronavirus last year, although when people rushed to check his blog, the wayback machine indicated that his premonition had come to him on his return to London after having the virus.

He said that he was being hounded by inaccurate press, but the most inaccurate press of all seems to have been the fictional account by his wife, Mary Wakefield.  Who also had the audacity to retweet government advice not to go out even if the weather was nice...on her birthday and the day they went out to "test her husband's eyesight" in Barnard Castle.

It seems extraordinary that Cummings and his political cronies believe the country is swallowing this rubbish.  I don't hate the man, but I abhor what he did when so many of us were sticking strictly to the letter of the guidelines and the spirit.  Many people have suffered extreme hardship and heartache due to the guidelines that he was instrumental on inflicting on the public and he seems not to see what he did wrong. 

Although his friends are now saying that they probably didn't have coronavirus, despite the fact of his close working relationship with Boris Johnson and others in the cabinet who clearly did have coronavirus.  They need to decide which story they're sticking with, really.  Because if he didn't, there was no justification at all for any of the journeys.

I don't think he can survive this, but if he does, I predict Boris Johnson can't.

Curriculum Vitae

I am actively looking for work I can do from home, like the rest of the UK population.  So I thought I would put a CV on my blog, just in case.

I have long experience as a writer, blogger and editor.  I worked for ten years for Lloyd's Register of Shipping (LR), the classification society, not the insurance market, working on both in-house and external publications.  I wrote articles on shipping and industry for LR, and edited their in-house magazine and was assistant editor for their technical quarterly magazine and annual report.

Since leaving LR, I have written articles, newsletters and provided administrative support for a large number of companies on a freelance basis.

I have a strong interest in home education and unschooling, having home educated my (now adult) three children, and have written for TES and Young Minds magazine.  I also wrote a speech for my then MP, John Randall, which was delivered in Parliament at Westminster Hall.

I have been fascinated by virtual worlds since I joined Second Life (SL) in 2004.  I have been working as a creator in Second Life for 15 years.  I worked for Linden Lab as a freelance creator for five years, and have blogged professionally about the virtual world.

I have been researching my family history for decades, and have helped hundreds of people with their research.  I have blogged and written about genealogy and researching your family. I produce powerpoints for anniversaries and funerals, and I am setting up a website to help other people do this for themselves.

I enjoy crafts such as papier mache, jewellery making, decorating boxes and bottles.  I love composing music, and have recently taken up gardening.

I live in Lincolnshire with my two adult children and their partners, and my dog Tizzy.