All kinds of disinformation are taking place in the Iranian theatre of war as details emerge of the rescue of the second downed airman from a few days ago. What we are being told officially is that the badly injured airman crawled up a 7,000′ mountain in order to find a secure hiding place and a huge military operation was put in place to find him. The Americans did not want their airman to be captured and to be paraded on TV (quite contrary to the rules of war) and their military operation to rescue him involved dozens of aircraft. Two of the huge C130 transport planes and two helicopters were lost in mysterious circumstances – of course, the Iranians have claimed to have shot them down. But the USA military is claiming that it destroyed the two C130 transport planes themselves, presumably because they feared that they would fall into Iranian hands. We know that many C-130 Hercules variants\u2014particularly specialised versions like the EC-130 Compass Call and MC-130 Combat Spear\u2014are heavily equipped with extensive communications, intelligence, and electronic warfare suites. While the base C-130 is a transport aircraft, its modular design allows it to be filled with advanced communication equipment for specialised missions. If this equipment had fallen into the hands of he Iranians, they could presumably have shared all of this with the Russians and even the Chinese and so the USA was quite contented to destroy its own aircraft completely for this not to happen. I am reminded of the saying associated with the veteran Labour party politician, Denis Healy that ‘In war, the first casualty is truth’ and possibly the full account of this daring rescue mission will never actually see the light of day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has posed a blood curdling threat to the Iranians that he about to bomb their civilian facilities ‘back to the Stone Age’ if the Gulf of Hormuz is not re-opened within a day. But what is remarkable about the post is that it contains foul-mouthed obscenities which have never before been publicly attributed to a world leader, let alone an American one. So by releasing this foul-mouthed torrent, Trump is almost publicly admitting his own dementia. But whether Donald Trump’s increasingly foul-mouthed language indicates dementia is a subject of intense debate among critics, commentators, and some mental health experts, rather than a confirmed medical diagnosis. But calls are growing that the 25th amendment to the US constitution be put into effect. The 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1967, provides the legal framework for handling cases of presidential incapacity, death, resignation, or removal. It ensures a clear line of succession and provides mechanisms for a Vice President to assume the powers of the presidency, either temporarily or permanently, if the President cannot fulfil their duties. Meanwhile, I shall re-entering a ‘Bank Holiday’ routine where I hope that unlike yesterday, I can actually obtain a copy of my daily newspaper. The night before, I had successfully completed not one but two ‘super fiendish’ Sudoku so I must be getting better at these and I am anticipating that our domestic help calls around a day earlier than usual as jury service is calling her imminently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now it comes to confession time but one to which I am willing to own up. Since I went on the trip to Jodrell Bank some twelve days ago, my Manchester University scarf has gone missing. This I purchased some 61 years ago and is, literally, and practically, irreplaceable as Manchester University have redesigned, and thus changed, their official colours. On the day after I had missed my scarf, I counted up that had been in eight different locations including coffee bars, coaches and dark exhibition halls. Meg when she was alive used to say to me that it was important that ‘we should possess our possessions and not let them possess us’ and so I tried not to get too upset by the loss of a precious heirloom. I did go on the web and purchased from the Manchester University shop a replacement scarf but not, evidently, in the original colours. There are one or two very specialist outlets from which it is possible to purchase replacement scarves but their selection is very limited and arbitrary. I did manage to track down a UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) which is very similar to the Victoria University of Manchester scarf but is distinguished from it by an additional orange stripe within it so I ordered this as well because Meg and I used to visit ‘J’ floor which was the Students Union every Sunday evening for a folk singing evening. When my domestic help called around today, I was looking for my every day rucksack which had been pushed into a corner of the kitchen floor and when she emptied it of various bits of clutter, there was my scarf – in other words, not lost at all! It is hard to convey my emotions at being reunited with my supposedly long lost scarf and, needless to say, it put me in a tremendously good mood for the rest of the day. I walked down into town in my very comfortable newly acquired trainers and collected my newspaper and sat down to drink my coffee. Then I observed one of the rarest of sights. A young man purchased seven plastic containers of sushi which I know would have cost him \u00a319.00. Then he proceeded to eat one after the other until he had consumed all seven and then he left. I mentioned this to one of the staff I know quite well and they admitted that it was a bizarre behaviour pattern but as the had observed it many times before they had given him the nickname of ‘Sushi Man’ I know some people might have some idiosyncratic behaviour traits but I had never seen anything quite like that before. When I got home, I lunched on a sort of salad which was chicken breasts, avocado and beetroot slices on a slice of seeded brown bread – all designed to keep my protein count high these days. Incidentally.my speculations about the American C130 transport planes, packed with communications equipment, proved to be entirely correct as the Americans had indeed blown up their own aircraft as they could not take off from a ‘soft’ landing strip in which the wheels of the C130 had become embedded and hence they were destroyed lest they fall not enemy hands. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All kinds of disinformation are taking place in the Iranian theatre of war as details emerge of the rescue of the second downed airman from a few days ago. What we are being told officially is that the badly injured airman crawled up a 7,000′ mountain in order to find a secure hiding place and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8179,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178\/revisions\/8179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}