Hypocrisy, Books and Parliament.

Axios

Donald Trump last night insulted insulted Christians everywhere by making use, without informing the church authorities, of St Johns Church for a photo opportunity.  Not only did he not inform the church authorities his police fired tear gas at them as they provided refreshments to the peaceful demonstrators. 
For a cheap election stunt he abused the church itself, physically assaulted the clergy and then had the audacity to stand with a bible in his hand in front of the building!  What hypocrisy! 
For myself I doubt there has been a 'regeneration' within him since his many 'prayer meetings.'  I am not keen on his 'spiritual advisor's as the main woman appears to be more concerned with raising money than Jesus.  It appears Trump merely wishes the 'evangelicals in the Mid West' to come out and vote for him, he is unafraid to make use of the church building or the good book itself in and effort to obtain votes.  You have to wonder what goes through his mind sometimes, he appears to have so little understanding of the real world.    

No-one who has read the bible can ever vote for this man.
Trump has taken advantage of the natural response to an 'out of order' police force running amok not to bring order but to create a divide, a 'them and us' situation, so he can pretend to be on the  side of right, whether it is 'right' or not does not matter as long as he gets votes.  His voters sadly will understand and follow his lead.
Adolf Hitler used similar tactics.  Pointing the finger to the Jews and anyone else believed to be responsible for Germany's failure he obtained success.  This is an old rabble-rousing trick, Boris Johnson was also doing the same thing with his absurd 'Get Brexit Done' call recently, we now know he was not capable of getting anything done bar creating children for others to rear for him.
St Johns Clergy have immediately indicated their disgust at this man's cheek.  None wished Trump to make use off and abuse their building, it is clear no Christian can support such a man walking far from God yet here we see him abusing the Bible for his own ends.
What a disgrace.

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An interesting note regarding the past.
1968, LBJ, besieged in the White House by over 100,000 peaceful protestors objecting to the Vietnam War.
1969. Nixon, besieged in the White House by more than 500,000 peaceful protestors similarly.
2020.  The man claiming, "I am your President of Law and Order." Encourages the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters, threatens to bring in the Military to clear the streets, and suggests shooting protestors.
Some 'President for Law and Order,' the previous two, professional politicians of course, did not call on the guard to use tear gas on ether occasion.
  

The difficulty discovered after finishing a good book is finding one, on a differing subject, that will take a similar hold.  This is not easy.  Several books which have been opened are full of words, words that require to be read slowly.  Others are somewhat slow in themselves and picking up the book is not easy.   Some find time to waste during Lock Down to tidy up their bookcases.  The media is full of those arguing whether books ought to be in alphabetical order, subject order, authors name and such like.  The really stupid file all their books in colour order greens, blues, reds...I am left wondering if any have actually been read?  However while adjusting the space for the Great War books I did wonder if I need a new house, one with a library possibly?  
Now, how to get rich quick...?

Guardian

At first sight Rees-Moggs idea that all MPs must attend parliament in person to ensure proper voting appears somewhat foolish.  Indeed as many MPs will be unable to attend due to Lock Down keeping them in because they or a relative has the symptoms or have been advised, by this government, to remain indoors due to a disability, it certainly appears stupid.  Long queues nearly a mile long, waiting to vote, all 6 ft apart, will certainly induce ridicule from the public.
Hold on though, Rees-Mogg does not have 'ideas.'  Rees-Mogg did not come up with this, so who did?  I venture to suggest that the famous bald man who, 'for the sake of his children,' spends time driving them up and down the nation is responsible.  Not only will this ensure Boris has support at PMQs and therefore appear less foolish, but parliament itself will be made to look stupid, turning the attention off Boris and elsewhere.
Brilliant!  Now when the Leader of the Opposition tears Boris apart the sheep behind him will be able to drown out his embarrassment by whooping and cheering as if they meant it.  Boris will still look unfit for the job however, but at least he can try and hide by appealing to his sheep.  

Venus

To the untrained eye that 'blob' seen just above the ever so dark treetops is in fact Venus!  Glinting brightly in what can only be called the wrong part of the sky, I had to squash against the wall falling over things to have several attempts to capture a picture, it was impossible to resist.  How I wish I lived in a better placed house!  However, I managed several moving pictures, one or two possible abstract art works worth millions and eventually obtained this before the planet dodged behind the trees and out of sight. 

Smithsonian

This is what it looks like in close up.  This picture is not one I could take sadly, the high powered telescope is beyond my pension money.  Such a lot of swirling poisonous gas in one place.  Space is full of such marvels, this one however somewhat hot to touch.  Japanese spacecraft are orbiting the planet, sending back this picture among others, watching the swirling mass and giving astronomers work for years to come.  What practical use the info will be I am not sure, but it is interesting, at least to those of us who knew 'Dan Dare' and that Green Mekon!
Of course the cloud hides Venus tonight in spite of sunshine for much of the day.

The difference 75 years makes to Politics...

   

Spaced Out Saturday

How the hacks must be happy tonight.  Tim Peake the 'Brit' in space has returned safe.  This means they can move on from the tale of the shot MP and talk about something different.  The caring media love a new story as yesterdays news does not sell, especially when the story has been told and you are merely filling space in both print and sound and vision rather than acting like a journalist.  A new story, and this man has been a news story since he went up six months ago, a new story is a delight to the media.
For me it means nothing.  Certainly he has had fun in space, certainly he has done decent experiments and taught children from up above live into their classroom or school hall, certainly it is a difficult thing to be weightless for six months.  However as a woman 'Brit' has already been up in the shuttle some time ago I fail to see the adventure here.   Add to this the fact that the 'Brit' had to take US citizenship before he could go means that he is now a 'US, Brit' and not a 'Brit!'  Add also the fact that a Russian and an American were also up there with him and they were almost never mentioned at any time and I see the union flag waving as a wee bit of rampant English imperialist xenophobia.  That at least is something they are good at.  I suppose it would be tedious to point out that such flights into space have gone on for years and this man is not therefore that special, so I will not point this out in case it upsets someone.
He knows a great deal, he has done his job, he has had fun but spare us the rest please.

At a few minutes before seven this morning I stopped to allow the defibrillator to be used on me at the top of the slope and cogitated at the sky above.  It may interest you to know that according to some Monday the 20th of June will be the longest day this year, that is the Summer solstice!  Today is the 18th day and the weather is not yet very Summery.  I may have burnt myself on one of the two days hot weather we have so far noted but I wish summer to be more of a length than this.
It's just no fair so it's no!

 
Sad for the relatives and especially the husband of Jo Cox the lass who was gunned down.  The man accused when asked his name in the dock did not answer "Thomas Mair" as he ought but "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain."  One suspects he will be locked up under a law which regards him as mentally insane and unfit for prison but given a kind of life sentence in a secure unit.  
This is hard for some and a friend of mine today notes a year since his wife passed on.  How hard this has been for him even allowing for the many friends praying for him.  In the end he goes home alone and still has that empty space beside him.   Jo Cox's husband is young enough to remarry, and indeed with two young children ought to, but many others are alone and no-one can comfort them.

 
One more football game tonight.  From tomorrow the games will be played at a more social time, five in the evening and eight for the last game.  How glad am I to be able to get some sleep at last!  All this action has been ruining my social life.  Social life in this context is not to be confused with actually having a social life!  My life has however been out of context, I have missed many radio programmes I would otherwise have heard, missed much sleep and trips to far off towns to buy cheap meat and other requirements.  Little has been done in the abode either, not that this makes much difference as you know.  Roll on tomorrow.

Tuesday Tattle

 

The morning was spent watching people browse the shop with little idea of what they were looking for.  The worst were men, they have to buy for her and have absolutely no idea what they want, or what she wants that is.  I suspect the clever woman, and most are, have already made it clear to him what she really wants but he has not noticed, the football might have been on or something important like that, so he is now desperately trying to remember all those few (cough) words she has used concerning the Christmas present she requires.  It is harder as she started mentioning this back in January!  At least some folks found something useful, and a few pounds fell into the till.  

There is of course a way round the problem if the gift bought does not come up to expectations, a bottle or two of her favourite tipple.  It may also keep her quiet for much of the Boxing Day football he will be watching.  The thoughtful man thinks of all things.

Seen from such a distance it does make you wonder as to why we are the only inhabited planet.  On the other hand the many stars we see, and especially the for more distant one 'Hubble' and other fancy telescopes have seen are so far away in light years it is a strong possibility that they may not exist any longer anyway.  'The stars will fall from the sky' it says somewhere and maybe this is a reference to that.  Space is so big and so vast it is fascinating to just stare at some photographs and wonder about what is out there.   

However I suspect most peoples image of space is based on 'Star Wars' or 'Star Trek' rather than actual science or astronomy.  My early days were influenced by 'Dan Dare' from the 'Eagle' comic and his exciting adventures amongst the planets. The stuff I read was full of space travel in craft that looked very different from the things that are used today, these disappoint as they do not use fancy speeds to travel great distances, are shaped completely differently from the bulbous take off and land craft drawn by so many experts and more than this they claimed that by 2000 we would travel often to the moon you and I.  Experts eh?

Advent 1955
by
John Betjeman

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out 'Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.'

And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there -
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know -
They'd sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
'The time draws near the birth of Christ'.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

Yesterday's Post (I fell asleep)

Tim Peake has reached the International Space Station!
So the media are trumpeting loudly these days.  Who he you ask?  No idea I answer.  However he is 'A Brit' who has gone into space so this, according to the press, is news.  Less clearly stated is the US policy of only using Americans to visit the space station and Tim Peake has had to take US citizenship to get his free ride into space.
So what I ask?
The space station has had limited press coverage ever since it opened years ago, only the science sections have bothered with it, so why all the fuss now?  maybe I am suspicious but what news is being hidden behind this exaggerated story?  It is always wise to look at the hidden stories behind the big headlines.
Anyway who cares he has gone into space outside of his family and those interested?  This is a small thing and years ago a British woman went into space why is this considered main news?  Good luck to him travelling around the world at high speed, good luck to his experiments that are oh so important.  Good luck to him getting back in one piece.  But spare us the large headlines on a story of limited interest. 
And remember he is now a US citizen, so charge him with treason!

Quite surprised yesterday by the US state that closed all the schools because of a terrorist threat received by email.  I was doubly surprised when New York did not close anything after receiving the same threat.  I suppose having endured thrity years of IRA terrorism and attacks on the nation for other reasons many times before that the UK is not so neurotic about threats.  However it was clear even from afar that this was just an idle threat and careful checking elsewhere would have shown this surely?  Something else behind this show I feel, possibly a real scare or a lack of judgement shown by the leadership.  
Some at a distance wonder about the neurotic fear generated by the likes of Trump and the media re Islamic terrorism in the US especially when 30,000 are shot and killed by good clean all American types each year in the US.   Maybe spending less time in 'fearthought' re Islamist and more time in 'forethought' in removing the vast number of needless guns on the streets would be a better way to save US lives? 

   

Looking Down on You

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The Sky Above

Have you noticed how the days are getting, ever so slowly, longer?  The sun is slightly higher this afternoon than it was last week, and the darkness takes minutes less to arrive.  Spring is fast approaching and once this mid winter festival is out of the way and the drunks locked up we can look forward to better days.  It never ceases to amaze me the way the world works.  If the sun was closer we would burn, if further away freeze, life would not be possible.  How lucky it manages to stay in the right place.  Orion constellation is one I have know all my life, hanging high above us in the cold, clear nights Edinburgh folks are so used to.   Out side Edinburgh it could be seen clearly from the bus stop as we made our way home at nights.  I wonder if it is still there?  Once upon a time I was foolish enough to believe that there was life out there, possibly too many episode so 'Star Trek; or a reading of 'Dan Dare' in the 'Eagle.'  I no longer believe this now.  Vast area of South American desert show no life whatsoever and I suspect out there things are the same.  Not counting the many stars, especially in the far distance that no longer exist, they dying long ago and the light only now reaching us.
I used to enjoy science fiction type books but in the end all comes down to human nature and they way we behave towards one another.  Whether at sea, on land or in deep space science fiction folk always proved to human.  There must be a reason for this.  Still it would be enjoyable to sit in a warm comfortable spacecraft and make speed through the night sky visiting far distant planets, without dying of course, and having lunch at the restaurant at the end of the universe.

Back on earth there is the Blues.....

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Ruminating

The Blogosphere has been choc-a-block with comments on the late Neil Armstrong.  No point in repeating what has gone before but it was indeed a moment to remember that first step onto the Moon!  In fact while ruminating on this I drifted off into many memories of the time, including the trip before Armstrong's.  On that occasion the capsule went close to the moon, and watching on our B & W TV It appeared to me that they were just skipping the surface of Earth's satellite.  It was a fascinating close up of the surface of the moon, almost like being there, we were so close.  The memory stays with me and by the time the actual Moon landing was to begin I, like the rest of the world, was agog!  

In many ways it is difficult to comprehend the emotions of the time.  Here was man, American or Soviet it mattered not, about to leap into space and stand on the Moon!  This was indeed as important as those famous explorers of times past, and on this occasion almost the whole world would be able to see it happen.  To place a man on that globe hanging above us, sometimes a thin crescent, sometimes huge and bright, all to often hidden behind cloud, was an amazing experience.  Having been brought up during the 50's, fed on a diet of 'Dan Dare,' and guesswork regarding space exploration, reading about rockets that would soon speed through space taking us to the far corners of the galaxy was eye opening, and here we were actually doing it! Fantastic!

The night before they launched the BBC broadcast a special programme from the launch site.  This ended with the camera slowly passing in front off the waiting rocket, this was lit by searchlights in the dark night, as the theme from '2001 Space Odyssey' (Zarathustra) played.  It was an emotional moment.  I was, as they say, 'thrilled,' indeed excited.  Later my mother and I sat up late into the night watching the actual landing.  Here was a historic moment indeed.  One of the few real historic events in mankind's existence, and I (along with billions elsewhere) was there.   

I had just turned 18, that year my father had died from cancer, and Jesus decided to inform me of his existence.  Altogether a funny old year looking back.  My dad was born in 1908, five years after man had conquered flight.  In his time he saw the development of wireless, television, a depression and a major war.  He also saw the new world in 1945, better housing and an NHS without which his illness would have been unbearable.  He died when we stood on the Moon, how far had we come?   Human nature has never changed and 

while we conquer space we still cannot conquer famine, crime, ourselves.

By 1972 when the last man (who was he?) walked on the moon it had become old hat.  Space travel rarely excited any more.  The Voyager craft and their kind sailing to the edge of the Galaxy excite some interest but rarely does space mean much to us today.  The recent Mars landing and the pictures returned have been worth while but far short of the adventure of reaching the moon.

A local scare has seen the police, sharpshooters and all, Zoo keepers, and helicopters aplenty scouring parts of Essex for a Lion!  There are thought to be several large black cats, possibly Puma's that have once been kept illegally as pets and now released into the wild, roaming in various places.  How true these stories are is debatable.  However a large 'yellow' creature was seen, captured on film, and one man heard a 'roar,' and so a police chase was set off.

Nothing was found, and the chase called off as it was 'just a large domestic animal.' says the coppers.  Hmmm I hope they are right, or a few dogs will get one big fright the next time they chase a cat.

  

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Saturn

Now here's a thing, an item in the 'Daily Mail' worth reading! Yes indeed here is a novelty! However the fact that this paper is not objecting to some misdemeanour of the Labour government must not detract from the fact that these pictures are worth looking at. Instead of whining about some nasty politically correct behaviour they have decided to show us something interesting. Here we have pictures of Saturn that far distant planet with the rings around it. Brilliant! The pictures come from Nasa's 'Cassini' spacecraft which has been flying around the planet for a couple of years now. The spacecraft took five years to reach Saturn, photographing the planets it passed on the way like some demented tourist, and will go around the planet another sixty times. Lucky spacecraft!

There is something compelling about space. We all wish to believe that there are little green men wandering around desperate to meet us, and some claim to have met these creatures. I confess to a cynical approach to these accounts, especially from women who go into far to much detail as to what the wee green men were interested in. However there are billions of stars and planets out there, some say they are as far as 13 billion light years away even! Now that is far! However as the light has only just reached us it may be these galaxies are in fact no longer in existence? It may well be one day they may appear to fall from the sky? I believe there is life of a sort out there Jim, but "Not as we know it."

Click the link and see more great pictures of Saturn, it is worth a look!