toucana

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)-:

What point ?

The views expressed were those of the author Aldous Huxley, rather than my own - (You asked me what I thought the final line of BNW meant). You may be curious to learn that Aldous Huxley later wrote another book called The Island (1962) in the final year of his life, which was about a Utopian island state called Pala located in the Indian ocean. This later novel expresses a rather more positive and aspirational vision of a future society which you might find more congenial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel) In 1946 Huxley wrote a new foreword to Brave New World which anticipated some of the themes in The Island Huxley incidentally died on 22 November 1963, the same day JFK was assassinated in Dallas Texas, so his death went largely unnoticed by the press.

Well it’s not exactly a happy ending is it ? I think it symbolizes the pointless and random nature of human existence, and the futility of seeking perfection in human society.

Have you ever read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ? It was one of two novels I first read aged 16 as a pair of set texts for my English Literature examinations - the other was 1984 by George Orwell - at a time when that date still lay some 15 years in the future ! Suffice to say that Aldous Huxley wrote BNW in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, and did so as a direct satire and parody of novels like A Modern Utopia (1905) by H.G. Wells, or its sequel Men Like Gods (1923) which is a scientific fantasy set in a Utopia located in a parallel universe. BNW is completely dystopian in every respect Do you remember what happens at the end of Brave New World ? John, the deracinated ‘savage’ rescued from the reservation winds up exiling himself from the ‘World State’ and living in a remote lighthouse following the death of his mother Linda. After a final disastrous encounter with Lenina Crowne, the foetus technician whom he was attracted to, John hangs himself in his lighthouse retreat.

A second factor was the disclosure by a 17 y/o girl that she had a second sexual encounter with Matt Gaetz the same night at a 2017 party involving a threesome - as reported today by CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/21/politics/matt-gaetz-second-sexual-encounter-minor/index.html

Yes - and SAC is nowadays part of Air Force Global Strike Command AFSTRAT-AIR https://www.afgsc.af.mil All part and parcel of the Pentagon military command structure that Trump now wants to put under the control of a clueless FOX TV presenter. I do seem to recall that in periods of international tension that SAC used to keep a certain number of their B-52 bombers constantly airborne in holding patterns within US airspace, ready for instant deployment - so I'll assume that they had some units orbiting in the Florida Keys area !

I'm just wondering if you understand where the island of Cuba lies in relation to mainland continental USA ? From the southernmost point in Key West in the state of Florida USA , it's about 90 miles to Cuba. https://www.afar.com/places/southernmost-point-key-west For reference, the standard operational range of an unrefueled US B2 Stealth bomber is about 6000 nautical miles (9,600Km), and that of a B52 Stratofortress bomber is about 8,800 miles(14,000Km) https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104482/b-2-spirit/ https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104465/b-52h-stratofortress/ If the US military ever felt a compelling need to respond to a threat, or an actual attack from Cuba, they wouldn't bother launching highly expensive missiles at a target in such close proximity to their own territory. They would simply order SAC to scramble some bombers. At 650 m.p.h (mach 0.84) it would take a B52 around 8.5 minutes to reach Cuba.

Nope - The nuclear missile sites on Cuba were wholly under the control of Soviet technicians and military commanders. Cuban officers had no command authority or launch codes for the IRBMs, only the Kremlin could have authorised their use against the USA. The American invasion plan was rejected for a number of different reasons. The writer David Spanier explains one of them in his book Total Poker (1977) citing David Halberstam’s account of how General David Shoup, Commandant of the US Marine Corps at the time addressed this topic in briefings :

So - which hypothetical scenario is involved here ? i. If Cuba were to launch *non* nuclear Russian supplied cruise missiles at the US mainland ? ii. If Cuba were to launch Russian made missiles armed *with* nuclear warheads at the US mainland? Two very different scenarios - neither of them remotely plausible, or worth any serious discussion. It is worth noting, even at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, that the USA never once considered launching any form of missile strikes on Cuba, even though American U2 surveillance flights had detected 9 launch sites for Soviet missiles with thermonuclear warheads being prepared on Cuban soil. The American military options were confined to conventional airforce and naval bombardement, followed by an amphibious invasion: or a naval quarantine blockade of Cuba. It later emerged that in addition to the IRBM missiles, the Soviets also had up to a dozen 9K52 Luna-M (Russian Луна, - ‘Moon’ ) short range artillery rockets armed with 2 Kiloton tactical nuclear warheads. The presence of these weapons code named Frog 7 by NATO was wholly unknown to American intelligence, or to US secretary of defense Robert Mcnamara. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K52_Luna-M These tactical nukes were under the control of Soviet forces on Cuba whose commanders were tasked with defending the Cuban missile sites, and they had command authority to launch them on their own initiative, without consulting the Kremlin in an emergency. If America had proceeded with the large scale amphibious invasion of Cuba recommended by JFK’s generals, then their invasion force could have been devastated with multiple tactical nukes, and WW3 would have ensued.

A walk in falling snow this morning across a 23 acre green space just a few yards from our home. The 'Tree of Life' is a sculpture by Andrew O'Neill created from the trunk and branches of a Cedar of Lebanon tree that had to be culled because of fungal disease. The arboretum was formally designated a Village Green last year.

Trump world always feels to me rather like the nested reality simulations in this film:

Erstwhile Trump fanboi and accomplice Roger Stone on X just a week ago - some hope 😕