RAF Bomber Command Memorial
Do you remember the scene in the film “Memphis Belle” in which one of the crew persuades the rear gunner to let him have a go with the machine gun? He then shoots and hits an ME 109 which then flies straight into another B-17 – “Mother and Country” – which contains a rookie crew on their first mission. The bomber breaks up and starts to fall. The crew of the “Memphis Belle” have to watch and listen in horror as the screams of the crew fill their headsets as the remains of the aircraft fall to earth.
Last weekend I listened to a WW II veteran recount a similar tale. He was a wireless operator aboard a Lancaster bomber on its seventh mission over Germany. The formation of bombers was over the target when one of the adjacent bombersturned too early and collided with his aircraft. The collision ripped off part of the wing and the crew had no choice but to bail out. He was taken captive and spent the rest of the war in two prison camps until Germany’s defeat meant he and his comrades could start making their way back to Britain. Two days later he was able to telephone his parents from an airfield in Surrey and make the final stage of his journey home.
RAF Bomber Command lost 55,000 crew members during World War II. Many of them were little more than 22 years old and those that weren’t killed instantly by fighter of anti aircraft fire died in burning and crashing aircraft.
A memorial to the lost aircrew is to be built in London and should be completed by 2012.
To learn more about RAF Bomber Command and the role it played in World War II click here.
To make a donation to the memorial fund click here.
I’m giving very serious thought to eating your wifi
Bloggers a year or two ago were wondering whether social networking was all just a bit too narcissistic and time consuming. Having given it a shot for a while I’m inclined to agree, but it’s worse than just being bland and egotistical (and that’s just my postings). According to some commentators prolonged use of the Web is rearranging our neural networks and creating a generation of people with short attention spans and an inability to concentrate.
In his new book The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr describes how this happening. I haven’t read it yet but it’s high on my reading list due to the reviews it’s received.
It’s long been known that people read web pages differently from how they read books. Surfers often glance at a few lines on a page before clicking on a link a going elsewhere to repeat the process ad infinitum and so minutes can become hours and nothing of any depth is learnt. I noticed this trait in myself which is why, if I want to enjoy a story or learn about something I still buy a book about it no matter how much information there is about the subject online.
If you can’t be bothered to read the whole book then at least read Nicholas Carr’s article on this subject on Wired’s website. Thought provoking stuff.
The Taliban, the Mujahideen, al-Qaeda
As Operation Tor Shezada (Black Prince) gets under way in Afghanistan another surge is evident among the forums and feedback columns online.
The BBC’s Have Your Say section seems to be run by people have a knack for asking questions and proposing topics which they know will polarise the debate. The BBC has often been accused of a left wing, anti-war bias, but over the past few months that attitude seems to have moved back towards the centre a little. However, they continue to (rightly and properly) report on the deaths in the war, but at the same give scant attention to military successes achieved by British troops.
The responses to the question ‘Can the Taliban be defeated?‘ have been divided between predictable lines of ‘Never, so bring the troops home‘, and ‘Of course, and we’re winning‘, but it’s interesting to note how events in Afghanistan over the past thirty years have become blurred in the minds of those who feel strongly enough about the situation today to post comments.
I’d be the first to admit that my knowledge of the complexities of this region is patchy and basic at best, but even a cursory look online can help clarify who each group is and just as importantly who they are not, and I know we shouldn’t rely upon Wikipedia and that we should always question the content but it’s often a handy reference for laying out the basics.
So even using only Wikipedia as our guide we might be able to put things into perspective a little.
Mujahideen – Islamist guerilla fighters best known as the loose coalition of warlord lead groups who collectively defeated the Soviet Union’s army and drove the occupiers out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. They subsequently went on to fight among themselves during the Afghan Civil War before creating a united front made up of representatives from the seven separate groups.
Taliban – Formed in the early 1990′s by Mullah Omar they are a Sunni Islamist group whose ideology includes a the strictest interpretation of sharia law. By recruiting from madrassas in north west Pakistan they grew large enough to take on the Mujahideen and gradually gained control of Afghanistan and ruled there from 1996 to 2001.
al-Qaeda – A stateless Sunni Islamist terrorist network calling for global jihad. Responsible for many bombings and attacks most notably the September 11th 2001 suicide bombings in New York. Its goals include the creation of a global caliphate of Muslim countries. They set up training camps in Afghanistan with the cooperation of the Taliban and it’s believed that Osama Bin Laden sent the suicide bomber who killed Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001.
Why would al-Qaeda want to kill Massoud? Perhaps this open letter to the people of the USA would answer that question. Written in 1998 he says:
“The country has gradually been occupied by fanatics, extremists, terrorists, mercenaries, drug Mafias and professional murderers. One faction, the Taliban, which by no means rightly represents Islam, Afghanistan or our centuries-old cultural heritage, has with direct foreign assistance exacerbated this explosive situation. They are unyielding and unwilling to talk or reach a compromise with any other Afghan side.”
September 9 is observed as a national holiday in Afghanistan, known as “Massoud Day”.
Thirty five years ago before digital cameras, mobile phones, the Web, and camcorders, there weren’t many ways in which to capture stills and video of UFOs and it was a lot more slow and difficult to share any evidence or fresh information.
Today you can film some footage of a UFO on your phone and share it with the world within minutes. You can broadcast your own theories, cut and splice footage to make your own documentaries and carry out hours of research in archives and record libraries now available online. You can set up your own website, publish a book and make a DVD claiming that you have the real truth about UFOs.
I particularly like this footage. Watch the way it disappears. Nanjiing, China 2010
At the very least ufology is a harmless hobby, but it’s tarnished with the reputation that it’s a field that’s populated by nerds, anoraks, and gullible New Agers who are waiting for some benevolent extraterrestrial angel-like beings to descend and transform our bodies and souls into models of perfection. Not that there’s anything wrong with hoping, dreaming, and wishing for a better world and the advancement of human concisousness, but it has to be real, definite, and measurable.
“If your philosophy doesn’t grow corn, then I don’t want to hear it.”
- Sun Bear, an Ojibway Indian medicine man
Then there’s the publicity seekers, conspiracy theorists, and ego-maniacs who use the subject as a vehicle for their own self aggrandisement, and often what begin as rational discussions can turn into back-biting arguments.
So what anyone who’s even mildly interested wants to to know is, “Is it all chaff or is there one grain of truth and reality in all this?”
UFOs have been sighted in so many ways and by so many people over the past six decades that there’s no shortage of testimony. Many sightings have been made by reliable witnesses like airline pilots who are trained professionals with expert knowledge of weather phenomena, astronomical bodies, and aircraft types. Then, over the years there have been periods in which sightings seemed to have diminished in number and the subject has ceased to be newsworthy.
UFO sightings, like crop circles, remain commonplace but unexplained so people grow bored with the subject and simply lose interest. “So you’ve filmed another UFO? Let me see – oh yes, not bad, but still very unclear. Any idea what it is? No, I didn’t think so.“
Every now and again the sightings and the interest they generate increase in frequency and quality, and ufologists suggest that we’re on the threshold of some new and profound revelation. At the crest of this latest wave is Dr Steven M. Greer and the Disclosure Project. If his website is to be believed the world is soon to learn that the USA government has known about the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence for years but has covered it all up because of the anticipated panic such a disclosure might cause among the world’s population. They have also hidden knowledge about free energy technology in order to protect vested interests in the oil industry, the global financial markets and economies based upon oil.
Before you condemn those in the know who may have withheld such knowledge, consider that it’s not just the bank balance of an elite that depend on oil. Economies are fragile and the slightest change can have a very real and painful effect on ordinary people whose lives rely upon the status quo.
A series of stills taken in July 2010 in Zhejiang’s provincial capital Hangzhou, China
This theory has been around for at least two decades so it’s not exactly new. I remember reading (when the X-Files was first on TV, so in the 1990s) of a suggestion that the US and other governments were drip feeding information about extraterrestrial intelligences into the public consciousness in preparation for the day when the full truth would be revealed. The idea being that they could prevent any mass panic by getting people so used to the idea that extraterrestrial exist that they just accepted it as fact anyway.
The suggestion was that this project started around the time of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and has been going on ever since. Thirty years have passed and it could take a generation or two before the time was judged to be right for all those revelations to be made public, for the X Files to be opened.
Perhaps part of the shift in popular consciousness that both the governments and the extraterrestrials are waiting for is a move beyond an understanding basic Newtonian physics and grasping the fundamentals of General Relativity or the concept of parallel worlds as introduced in books by the likes of Michio Kaku. If half of what he writes about is true then truth is definitely stranger than fiction and it wouldn’t be at all far-fetched for things in the sky to appear and disappear seemingly into thin air.
Perhaps the time of the tipping point, of critical mass, or paradigm shift is soon, perhaps it won’t come for another thirty years, or never at all. If you look around the world today you can see ample evidence of the barbarity of the human race so why would any advanced civilization want to associate with us anyway? Besides, all the above is based on the assumption that the ETs are benevolent or at least beings open to negotiation. What if they they’re not?
Life is very probably out there in the depths of the universe or in parallel worlds and I’m inclined to think that if they had designs on conquering, destroying, or harvesting us they would have done so by now. With such advanced technology they have much to offer us that could solve many of world’s crises. On the other hand, perhaps they’ve got better things to do and more interesting species with whom to do them.
ET may be in contact already, but perhaps we won’t know until enough of us calm down and do some thinking, or meditating., and if they don’t appear in your life time then at least we’ll have read some interesting books and enjoyed some moments of peace and relaxation while contemplating life in parallel worlds.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde
Online Dating Scam – Woman conned out of £60,000
Today’s Daily Mail carries a story describing how a woman was persuaded to hand over £60,000 to a man she had met on Match.com.
The story has all the hallmarks of a typical online dating scam, similar to the Nigerian 419 fraud. The woman in question is described as an a emotionally vulnerable divorcee and the conman convinced her that he had a sick daughter who needed urgent medical treatment.
Once again the natural human instinct to help others has been exploited and another compassionate person has been conned by a criminal. Intelligent and otherwise sensible people have fallen victim to this type of online dating scam before and will probably continue to do so simply because people like to believe the best about others and they have an inbuilt urge to help.
The victim in this case, Brenda Parke of Sussex, has bravely admitted her gullibility and has divulged the details of her story to the newspaper in the hope that others will take note and avoid being similarly conned. She goes on to say that she hopes dating sites will take more responsibility for the people who join their sites. This point is backed up by comments made at the foot of the online article.
However, there is a limit to what dating site administrators can do and the ultimate responsibility lies with those who use the sites. For example, many of these cons come about because the victim agrees to communicate with the criminal outside of the site using direct emails and phone calls.
Dating sites can have hundreds, thousands or millions of members. It would be totally impractical to monitor every message that passes back and forth between members, not to mention an invasion of privacy. Online daters need to be alert to the warning signs that someone might be planning to con them.
The clues have been described in detail many times and the information is readily available online. Check out this article about the 419 Advanced Fee Fraud which explains how to keep your wallet (and your heart) out of harm’s way while still enjoying all the online dating has to offer.
P.S. If you’re looking for some recommended sites, check out these reviews of professionally run dating sites.
