Jim Stewart's Blog

They are making sure they cover their tracks – making sure we can’t see them. Yes, you might hear the collapse of the Arecibo telescope was called an accident, but why did it collapse so quickly? Yes – they made it collapse to stop us seeing them.

We have, of course known about them for many years, as the museums in Roswell demonstrate. I remember meeting somebody there that has been subjected to an alien implant. He had been brainwashed to prevent him remembering it, but then he did and had it removed.

And then near to Roswell there is the Very Large Array – looking to listen for the signs of life? Or is it listening for a different bunch of aliens to help us fight off the grey aliens.

They are people claiming the virus is just an excuse to let them inject us with a vaccine with a chip- or maybe a vaccine that will alter us?

Maybe these sound like crazy stories to you, and maybe you think Qanon is selling crazy conspiracy theories. But I have been surprised recently by the political posturing that would seem to indicate a lot more people have a bias towards believing ideas with no factual evidence behind them.

Is Facebook responsible? I see people leaving Facebook because it “censors” people, so maybe it isn’t just Facebook. Maybe it is us.

I caught a programme about croquet today. I spotted that one of the people on the past champions plaque was a Capt J Kirk. Obviously the stories on Star Trek about time travel were right.

But the story behind the development of the game and the introduction of the rules interested me. Apparently the early game had virtually no rules, and it was pretty much just an excuse for young ladies and gents to get together. Now there are rulers and it is highly competitive.

It reminded me of one New Year when I was young. The snow was about a foot deep and we were out visiting people after midnight (four or five young people). There was some waste ground (behind the wee shop) and we had a couple of balloons. So we played football with the balloons. There were no goals- it was just kicking balloons around. It was much more fun than any of the times I actually played football to the rules.

Now we have VAR in football to make sure the rules are followed to the nearest mm.

Do rules take a lot of the fun out of sports?

I remember listening to the problems some African countries had getting access to radiation sources for cancer therapy. Some of the stories were horrific. I find it hard to talk about them. The stories I heard about one African country and the suffering of some women with cancer still haunt me.

People were really worried about that incredibly dangerous radioactive material moving. Especially the people that were making their name by preventing terrorist attacks. So what is the risk. Well, if you were really determined you might contrive to kill a few tens of people. And what is the benefit – well every one of these trips saves 7000 lives. So even if 9 out of 10 of these shipments went wrong you would still, on balance, save more lives than you would lose.

Adding extra safety will actually result in more deaths.

Today we see the death rate in Scotland from COVID is higher than in England. But hang on – hasn’t Scotland been tougher than England – they have had much tighter restrictions and applied them earlier. Hmm.

And now Christmas. People are starting to say it is a mistake to lower out standards of restrictions at Christmas.

My take.

If the strict rules had applied over Christmas then a lot of people would have rebelled and broken the rule. Having broken that rule – stepping outside the law – they would be much more likely to break the laws again.

So the government relax the laws at Christmas even though they know it is bad news virus wise. But it means they are more likely to get people to fall in line after New Year. Don’t believe it? Remember what I said in the last lockdown – that the lockdown would only last as long as people could endure it, not the length of time to get the infections down to a low enough level. And with beach madness and BLM protests came the release from restrictions.

This is how we work in the UK – we police by consensus. This might well be why more authoritarian states have

And this might well be the cause of the Scottish deaths – the restrictions have been so severe that people have rebelled.

The problem is that you cannot apply lockdown rules for long enough to save everybody – we would all go mad, starve, freeze or worse. So you use your restrictions carefully 0ly using them when it makes most difference. And if you use them too much you end up with disobedience – and virus spread.

Strange how we create a brain for things like plants and animals. I was reading about studies in to pets recently. Pet owners commonly call themselves mum or dad. But it was interesting hearing how many had added their pets on the census returns, or suggested that their pets were more important than their partners.

I was reading about a new discovery. Only the second plant in the world that has been identified as being pollinated by a lizard. It was interesting reading about it, but I was struck by the language. The article was written in a way that made it sound like the plant had designed the lizard in order to get pollinated.

Some of the recent discussion about the possibility of the virus mutating used similar language “we haven’t put pressure on the virus yet”. Almost as though once we start attacking the virus with a vaccine it will choose to fight back by mutating.

Have you ever asked “Where are you?” when looking for an inanimate object that you have lost? I’ve heard some people say it.

I wonder if that might be why we accumulate “stuff”, because it becomes part of our family.

I was watching a quiz programme today that listed some of the richest people in the world. We need to eat to live, but there is only so much we can eat.

I started to wonder about the ability to spend money.

All of the people mentioned in the quiz were worth more than $50 billion. So I decided to look at a mere £10 billion with a low rate of return.

Spending £1,000,000 a day every day of your life this would last a hundred years. And if you let that spending increase by inflation it would still last 30 years.

So give this exercise a try – jot down a list of what you would buy for yourself on day 1 with your first million. Then try day 2, then day 3. Just do the first week.

I can’t manage it, I run out of ideas pretty soon.

So why do people need to keep earning beyond their first £10 billion? What does it give them other than a number. Most of these people have set the rewards from their business to be to their benefit over that of the office cleaner. Why do they still need that?

And what sort of society do we live in that allows that level of greed while others suffer?

I think this is the big flaw in the “They are a great business person – so they would make a great leader for our country” argument. A great business person has spent their life building up their personal wealth at the expense of those below them in the pecking order and by taking from the organisations they run. How is that evidence of suitability for the job?

Qantas have announced that they will not carry passengers unless they have had a vaccination. Interesting concept. I got to thinking how this could become the norm in so many places, particularly entertainment venues.

Then I started to think about the vaccination priorities. We will start with the oldest in society – the most vulnerable – the ones that have had to lock themselves away for the last 9 months.

So mix these two together and you will end up with flights and entertainment being blocked for the young and healthy but open to the old and vulnerable.

Fantastic – who is up for a pensioners party?

As we head toward the end of the Trump presidency people are starting to worry about the damage he will do as he leaves. There were reports regarding leaving the Open Skies agreement, not ordering replacement aircraft and scrapping the existing aircraft. People have questioned the speed this was carried out recently.

Now reports are coming in that Israel is concerned that they might be attacked by Iran in response to a US attack on a nuclear facility in Iran. There are reports that Trump has been advised by Pompeo and others that he should not carry out the attack. You start to wonder about some of the staff clear outs that have been going on in the defence area.

Apparently the plan is to attach a nuclear facility in Iran that has a store of Uranium around 12 times more than was allowed under the Obama agreed deal. Remember the deal that Trump withdrew from. Everything started with a bully type stance – it was just about an agreement – just paper. But here is the possible cost – war involving nuclear facilities.

And just to be clear have a look at the Geneva convention related to Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1), Article 56. Or maybe Article 8 2. (b) (iv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This says you should not attack a facility that would cause major harm to the environment by releasing dangerous materials. It is likely that an attack on an Iranian Nuclear facility would be challenged as a war crime.

There are other costs – the BBC report from a Trump supporting coal town that elected him to save their work. Trump made a lot of noise about restoring coal – but in his presidency the closure of coal mines accelerated over the last four years of the Obama period. That town will now face paying a price – maybe even the end of the town.

Sadly the words and posturing did little at the time, but the delay is almost over and it is time to pay the price.

A lot of people have been worried about paying the price for a Christmas relaxation of the COVID rules. We are about to see what that will be like because of the Trump posturing and the Thanksgiving family get togethers. In two to three weeks we will get an indication of the price the USA will need to pay for getting families together – and the price we might need to pay for Christmas.

Sometimes it s worth just looking away from the headlines to see what is going on but not being noticed. I spotted that the revised BBC news pages had narrowed down the amount of smaller reports, the sort of thing I liked to see.

So have you seen the news about the US withdrawing from Open Skies – and selling of the equipment quickly making it hard for Biden to rejoin?

Have you spotted the new security requirements being proposed for our telecom network?

Have you seen that the EU is about to allow class action lawsuits?

Did you spot the Russian plan to open a nuclear ship capable port in Africa?

What was the decision the UK made on future nuclear power last week?

It gets harder and harder to dig out the small news that might just be more interesting to some of us. We have news organisations working together and serving us up the same information.

Take a news story, copy some text from the middle. Search for it BUT make sure you put quote marks around it. How many outlets have used those exact words?

And if you have a group you are a member of that digs in to issues, don’t think that helps – they only publish the things you want to hear.

It’s almost like it is time to create a web site for news that isn’t in the news.

So where do you get news that isn’t mainstream news?

I remember the times when there was a lot of discussion about religious symbols in the workplace – an airline employee got in to trouble for wearing a religious symbol on a neclace.

In our open plan office there were some people that wanted to make a statement and display their religious symbols on their desk. It was discouraged. However we had some really nice artistic pictures in the conference room. They were of Egyptian images – in fact they were Egyptian gods. They were never commented on as far as I can tell.

In 2015 ISIS or ISIL or whatever the name was at the time destroyed a number of parts of Palmyra. To them the ancient gods, like Baal, were offensive. I remember the outrage.

This year several statues have been removed because they were offensive. For example the Edward Colston statue in Bristol that made all the news.

I started to wonder about the Egyptian gods that were acceptable in my office – did age make them acceptable? What about slavery in Egypt? What about other historical slavery? Should we be looking at bulldozing the pyramids? Did ISIL get it right or does history produce a “get out of removal free” card?

I was struck today by the thought that so many churches need to have “a confession” as part of their services. Some churches even have special little boxes where you can confess.

At the same time I see people in the limelight that seem to find it impossible to admit to anything less than perfection.

A recent post by Franklin Graham said:

Without repentance, our country will continue to spiral downwards with more division, more hate, more violence.

The responses were by people pointing out who they thought should repent – them over there.

Tesco have reminded us that there is no naughty list this year.

I have never really liked the Santa naughty and nice concept.

My interest is in the breadth of the spectrum from “I am perfect” to “Miserable me” and where we should sit on it. I think I never get it quite right myself.

One of the antiques shows this week showed a Papal Indulgence – a “get out of hell free” card. It was interesting because it had 50 “write in” spaces for friends names.

Martin Luther is well known for his opposition to this idea. It is worth reading his 95 Theses, there are some interesting parts:

Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God

In other words – it is more important to support the poor than support the church.

But his view was still that people needed to be penitent before they were absolved, so he still wanted people to know their guilt.

Personally I think it is healthy to accept our imperfections, but is it healthy to live with permanent guilt? I can’t accept that.