toucana

One reason is because of some extreme failings in the American education system. A particularly good example is the almost total absence of Geography as an academic discipline or curruclum subject within American schools and universities. It is usually lumped in together with History in a package called ’Social Studies’ in many US schools. The American author Ambrose Bierce who was himself a military cartographer once joked that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography”. The stunning ignorance that has ensued was epitomised by anecdotal accounts of educational surveys which found that some 40% of students questioned couldn’t accurately locate either the Canadian or Mexican borders on a map of North America. Others couldn’t even locate the USA on a world map. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/geography-survey-illiteracy Other academic disciplines that might promote critical thinking such as Philosophy fare equally badly in the American educational system. Philosophy degrees in the USA for example are not only comparatively expensive, but the salaries that students are likely to receive on graduation are about 6% below average compared to other undergraduate degrees. https://www.careerexplorer.com/degrees/philosophy-degree/tuition/ Back in November 2015 Senator Marco Rubio (who has recently been appointed Secretary of State) said during a Presidential debate on Fox News that “Welders make more money than philosophers; we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers”: https://theweek.com/speedreads/588149/marco-rubio-wants-more-welders-less-philosophers Which rather epitomises the problem.

Rep. Sarah McBride the first transgender Congresswoman made this very point after Trump announced his anti-transgender executive order on Tuesday evening. Legally speaking, Trump has just declared everyone in the USA - including himself and his own sons - to be female. Yes folks, the ‘Proud Boys’ are now all ‘Proud Girls’ ! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/sarah-mcbride-trump-executive-order-trans-b2683936.html A more charitable explanation is that this order was written with the help of AI.

If you are interested in the gender distribution of recent Congressional committee appointments then you might want to check out the stats listed here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republican-women-chosen-lead-house-committees-time-decades/story?id=116764680 According to this, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) aged 81 is the only woman to be named by House Speaker Mike Johnson to lead a House Committee in the 119th Congress, as the chairwoman of the powerful House Rules Committee. The chairs of another 17 standing committees announced so far are entirely populated by white men. https://scalise.house.gov/press-releases/Scalise-Applauds-Committee-Chairs-for-119th-Congress As Swansont pointed out, Trump isn’t directly responsible for any of these appointments, but House Speaker Mike Johnson who does make these decisions is basically a ventriloquist’s dummy who enacts Trump’s will at every turn - case in point - last week when Mike Johnson dismissed the widely respected Republican Mike Turner (R-Ohio) from his position atop the House Intelligence Committee - and did so directly on orders from Mar-a-Lago according to multiple sources. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-johnson-removes-mike-turner-house-intelligence-chairman/ Trump has a long history of demonstrating extreme hostility towards empowered and intelligent women, especially if they dare to criticise or contradict him. This was seen on the Inauguration day earlier this week when Trump had a meltdown after hearing a sermon by the female Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Cathedral Prayer service in which she called on him to have mercy on transgender children and immigrant families. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5099730-donald-trump-criticizes-bishop-transgender-migrants/ You can read Trump’s subsequent tirade against her on his Truth Social platform here: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113870397327465225 Trump is a malignant narcissist and conceited fool who cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny or contradiction from anyone - especially women - which de facto makes him a misogynist - “a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women” (NOA Dictionary)

Every new US president since Harry Truman in 1945 has faced an unforeseen crisis during their inaugural term which tested their abilities to the limit - and beyond in the cases of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Trump’s first presidency was ended by the abject failure and utter imbecility of his administration’s response to the global COVID pandemic. What will it be this time I wonder ? The San Andreas fault shifting ? Another INES Level 7 nuclear accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Or perhaps the collapse of the United States into anarchy and civil war - if Trump tries to order the US military into California or New York to carry out his mass deportation program against the will of the state Governors. As a footnote: The 14 year reign of the Roman emperor Nero came to an abrupt end when he committed suicide in 68 AD. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Nero deliberately started the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD in order to clear land for his pet ‘Golden House’ palace project (another property developer) and subsequently blamed and persecuted the Christians for the destruction that ensued. His avarice, cruelty, and high taxation policies finally provoked the aristocracy into rebellion against a man they already despised as a panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’) crowd pleaser, and malignant narcissist.

Andrew Coyne a columnist for leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail had this to say on the eve of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration - (quoted in full because of a paywall): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/.../article-trumps.../

This was conservative writer Bethany Mandel who had just published a new book on the subject, attempting to explain what ‘woke’ means to interviewer Briahna Joy Gray on 14 March 2023. Her new book was called "Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation". https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7iWEEcPKoQ

I used to play Contract Bridge in a competitive Duplicate tournament format while at University (after learning it at school), but have hardly touched the game in almost 40 years. When the global pandemic took hold a few years ago in 2020, and many people turned to online games, I took up Riichi (Japanese Mahjong) instead. There are some interesting parallels between the two games which may help explain why attempts to promote digital forms of Contract Bridge in particular have not been very successful. - Both games became highly popular in their respective countries (Japan and USA) in the early 1930s, and again after the war in the 1950s, but both slumped dramatically in popularity towards the end of the 1970s. - By the mid-1980s, Riichi Mahjong had become something of a joke in Japan. It was seen as a game that your parents or grandparents used to play, and of no conceivable interest to younger people. - Much the same was true of Contract Bridge which was by now seen as a dowdy game played by seniors in retirement homes, or social clubs for the elderly - (my nearest Bridge group meets in a local Croquet club). What changed in the case of Riichi Mahjong in Japan was the advent of networked digital gaming and the internet from the mid-90s onwards, which was boosted by the very rapid growth of highly popular Mahjong themed Manga comic and Anime film brands such as Saki (咲) and Akagi (アカギ). The re-awakening of interest in Riichi these aroused among younger players in Japan was quite explosive. Nowadays there are said to be about ten times as many Mahjong players as there are Poker players in the world - the vast majority of them in Asia of course - but with many more beginning to play in Europe and USA too. One reason for the recent popularity of Riichi Mahjong outside of Asia was the advent of two truly excellent global online Mahjong playing platforms called Tenhou (2000) and Mahjong Soul (2018) respectively. https://osamuko.com/a-history-of-tenhou/ There aren’t really any comparable platforms for playing Contract Bridge online. Those that do exist such as Bridge Base Online charge money to play, and are quite restrictive too - (Tenhou and Mahjong Soul are free to play, and open to all). From an engineering point of view, one large problem is that Contract Bridge is a *partnership* game (Riichi Mahjong is not). There are significant practical dificulties in managing partnership play in any form of digital version of Contract Bridge. One problem is that of random network disconnection. When it happens on Tenhou or Mahjong Soul, automata can intervene to enable the game to continue. You simply can’t do this effectively in a partnership game like Contract Bridge. Then there is the social overhead of practising and timetabling partnership arrangements across timezones. It’s so much simpler and rewarding to play Riichi 😉

In the case of the recent disaster at Muan airport Korea on Sunday 29 December 2024 (involving Jeju Air Flight 2216) it would appear that the starboard engine *did* survive the initial bird strike, and was still developing some thrust as the plane made a wheels up landing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzprprlyeo Video taken from the ground on the plane’s initial approach shows a large puff of white smoke and flame from the #2 engine which was evidence of a compressor stall caused by bird ingestion. Another video taken a couple of minutes later as the plane made a belly landing shows a heat haze from the #2 engine and the thrust reverser cowl deployed as well, whereas the port #1 engine is dead. What seems to have happened is that the crew inadvertently shut down the wrong engine while responding to the initial bird-strike, which left them flying with only the damaged starboard engine still developing any thrust, and with no time or height to restart the port engine. As the crew had already retracted the landing gear and flaps to fly a go-around, shutting down the wrong engine also had the disastrous effect of taking out the hydraulic pump driven by the port engine which powers the landing gear. They couldn’t get the gear down again ! The plane type was a Boeing 737-8AS fitted with two CFM International CFM56-7B engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Air_Flight_2216 These are high-bypass turbofan engines.

One of the more delightful occupations first recorded in the English language from the early 14th century period onwards was that of a ‘Gong Farmer’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmer Cesspits normally had to be dug out by these 'Gong Farmers' every two years or so, and in the late 15th century they charged two shillings per ton of waste removed. The waste was usually carted out of town and spread as fertiliser on common land, or dumped in areas known as ‘laystalls’ such as the appropriately named ‘Dung Wharf’ on the banks of the river Thames .

The widespread use of RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete) in public buildings - especially in school buildings - became the subject of a major political scandal in the UK in May 2023, where over 100 hundred schools had to be closed following investigations after a structural beam collapse brought down a roof at a primary school in Gravesend Kent in 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/school-closures-raac-concrete-closed-b2403208.html The structural risks of using RAAC which first became popular as a cheap building material in the UK during the 1950s had begun to be flagged up from 1995 onwards by professional engineers who described RAAC as a “ticking time bomb” in British schools. The crisis deepened in May 2023 when the UK government announced that 7 hospitals in England which were largely constructed with RAAC were not safe to operate beyond 2030 and would need to be rebuilt. Large numbers of RAAC compromised buildings were subsequently identified across the country, including some on university campuses, public theatres, and even at the Palace of Westminster.

There is a growing suspicion that Russian ATC controllers refused to give the Azerbaijan Airlines plane landing permissions at two nearby Russian airports, and quite deliberately sent it eastwards out over the Caspian Sea towards Kazakhstan, in the hope that the crippled plane would crash into the sea - thus destroying any physical evidence of the Russian missile strike.

I very much hope that no-one here had friends or loved ones on that flight. Reuters sources have subsequently confirmed it was a Russian Pantsir-S air defence missile that brought the plane down. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/azerbaijan-airlines-flight-was-downed-by-russian-air-defence-system-four-sources-2024-12-26/

Correction:- Baku[GYD], aka Heydar Aliyev International Airport is in Azerbaijan, not in neighbouring Georgia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heydar_Aliyev_International_Airport

The crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E-190 civilian airliner in Kazakhstan on 25 December 2024 appears to have been a shoot-down caused by a Russian Pantsir - S1 (Панцирь-С1) type air-defence missile that detonated near the tail of the plane, destroying the hydraulic fluid reservoirs of all three sub-systems onboard. Shrapnel damage can be clearly seen in the tail section of the plane in a number of video clips of the crash site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J04wUKZUCI The loss of hydraulic line inputs to all flight control surfaces left the crew with no means of controlling the plane other than by using throttle levers to vary the thrust of the two engines - which explains the phugoid oscillation seen in videos of the final moments before the plane crashed - where the plane is alternately pitching nose-up and then nose down, before banking uncontrollably into the ground. It’s very similar to the ‘Impossible Landing’ scenario that occurred in the 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 disaster at Sioux City Iowa - which was also caused by a total hydraulic failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 The plane departed from Baku in Georgia at 03.55 UTC on a scheduled flight to Grozny in Chechnya Russia. The plane apparently diverted twice from its planned landing site because of poor weather. Flightradar 24 then suggests they were attacked at around 06.08 UTC on the western Caspian sea coast. The pilots issued a 7700 squawk code to declare an in-flight emergency, and diverted due east across the Caspian sea to attempt an emergency landing in Kazakhstan. Photos from inside the passenger cabin show that the oxygen masks had dropped, so the crew were dealing with a depressurisation event as well as the loss of flight controls. The plane crashed while attempting an emergency landing at Aktau airport in Kazakhstan at 06.28 UTC. There are said to be 29 survivors from the 62 passengers and 5 flight crew onboard. Russian sources have attempted to blame the incident on a ‘bird strike’, but the Caspian Sea area where it occurred is extensively used by Russian TU-25 bombers to launch cruise missiles against Ukraine. Russian forces routinely jam the GPS in that area, and maintain heavy air-defences against Ukrainian long range drones. US airliners are not allowed to fly there

According to reports in The Hill and elsewhere President-elect Trump said on Sunday evening on social media that owning Greenland “is an absolute necessity” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5053319-trump-greenland-purchase/ Trump also gave a speech to a conservative group demanding the return of the Panama Canal to US control (some 50 years after the canal zone was ceded to Panama) citing “ridiculous shipping fees” as the reason. Trump originally proposed trading Puerto Rico for Greenland back in 2019 during his first term in office - much to the bemusement of Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen who called the idea “absurd” telling reporters at the time “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland is Greenlandic. I persistently hope that this is not something that is seriously meant.” In the case of Greenland, Trump - along with the minority of his advisers who don’t think that global warming is a Chinese hoax - are presumably attracted by the idea that the loss of Greenland’s icecap will expose a treasure trove of extractable mineral ores, oil and natural gas.They also probably imagine that no one else in the entire world has thought of this possibility either. But why is Trump so interested in the Panama Canal, well before he is even due to take office ? Part of the answer can be found in this YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sv_Wv_Ui1A Back in 2018, Trump owned management companies were accused of substantial tax fraud in respect of the partial sale of a 70 storey tower hotel called the Trump Ocean Club in Panama to a private equity firm called Ithaca. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama Ithaca subsequently ousted the Trump Organization who unsuccessfully petitioned Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela to intercede on their behalf. The Trump team were physically thrown out of the premises by Ithaca security teams, and the Trump logo was very publicly hacked off the frontage of the hotel which was later renamed the JW Marriot Panama. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JW_Marriott_Panama More recently in February 2024, Laura Loomer who is a whackadoodle 9/11 conspiracy theorist and ally of Trump began urging him to seize the Panama Canal as soon as he takes office. Happy Days !

Congress did at least partially reinstate the $190m of stopgap funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First paediatric cancer research program which was cut completely in the Musk/ Trump perversion of the original bipartisan CR https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219839534 Apparently even the most die-hard moral imbeciles in the Republican caucus belatedly realised that cutting a major research program into childhood cancers, and cancelling the federal spending debt limits in order to fund trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts for Trump-friendly billionaires didn’t provide the best optics for the GOP going forward into the new year. https://commonfund.nih.gov/KidsFirst

Here is a relevant section from the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) online safety advice on cold water shock: https://rnli.org/safety/know-the-risks/cold-water-shock The body responds to an abrupt loss of heat from a sudden immersion in cold water by shutting down the peripheral blood circulation. This muscular vasoconstriction effect can cause an upward spike in systolic blood pressure. If someone happens to have a latent aneurysm (weak spot) in a blood vessel in their brain, then this spike can cause a rupture and haemorrhage.

Just over a week ago there were press reports in the UK of a freak accident in which music producer Julian Spear 74 died after jumping into an unheated pool at a West London health club. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14183051/accident-David-Lloyd-gym-killed-Coronation-Street-star-Carol-Royles-husband-brain-haemorrhage.html It attracted much media attention, partly because he was the husband of Carol Royle - an actress in a popular TV soap opera called Coronation Street - but also because he had seen steam rising from the pool and assumed it was heated to its usual temperature before plunging head-first into it. He survived the initial shock and drove home, but subsequently collapsed, and later died in hospital from the effects of a massive brain haemorrhage that was apparently precipitated by the cold water shock. According to his distraught wife - “He was the healthiest person you could meet, he ate organic wholefood. He was a keen jogger, he would run every day. He used to cycle to the shops rather than drive and he'd go for a walk after every meal.” A blog discussion that mentions the medical issues said: So I suspect that partial pre-immersion of the face or lower body can perhaps mitigate the effects of cold water shock.

Apparently there is an app for this. Flightradar24 is one of several that allow you to point your phone at the sky, and get a read-out of any aircraft known to be flying in the area. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/14/tech/aircraft-drone-identifier-apps/index.html

Dystopian and Utopian works of fiction typically rely on both satire *and* parody to achieve their aims. Aldous Huxley quite clearly explained in the interview that Brave New World began as a parody of Men as Gods by H.G. Wells. He didn’t specifically say that it was satirical as well, for the simple reason that he didn’t feel the need to explain something so blindingly obvious to two experienced literary critics. As you seem to be struggling with this topic, here are some notes: - Dystopia is from the Greek δυς Τόπος meaning a “bad place”. It’s an antonym of Utopia which was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, and came from the Greek ού Τόπος meaning “not a (real) place", because More’s novel described an imaginary island society in the New World with near perfect qualities . - Thomas More’s Utopia (which was written in Latin not English) is cast in the form of an epistolary exchange between More and other scholars who discuss reports about the customs and lifestyle of this strange island nation somewhere in the new world - customs which incidentally include institutionalised slavery. The entire content of Utopia is perceived as being intrinsically satirical in intent by most literary critics e.g: - This satirical fictional tradition continues in works like Gullivers Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift set in the fictional land of Lilliput, and Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler which was written as a satire on Victorian society - and one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence. (Do I need to explain that Erewhon is an anagram of ’Nowhere’ spelled backwards ?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon - Modern dystopian fiction is said to start with:The Time Machine (1895) a novella by H.G Wells, a short story called The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster which predicts a type of internet, and continued with a trilogy of classic dystopian novels - Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, 1984 (1949) by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury. Other dystopian novels such as A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Antony Burgess, and Blade Runner (1968 aka ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’) by Philip K. Dick have of course continued to be written to this very day. You haven't made any valid points that I could address. You don't seem to be familiar with this book or the genre.

Yes he did - in a manner of speaking. Aldous Huxley himself gave that exact attribution in the course of an interview with Raymond Fraser and George Wickes which was published in a journal called the Paris Review in the spring of 1960 under the title ‘Aldous Huxley, The Art of Fiction’. https://web.archive.org/web/20100922002704/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4698/the-art-of-fiction-no-24-aldous-huxley Its quite an interesting Q/A style interview that quotes Huxley’s replies without any paraphrasing. Here is the section of interest (although the entire interview is well worth your time reading)-: