Foam, Sweet Foam

The issue that originally inspired me to take up blogging continues, with glacial speed, to play out.

To summarise for those who haven't followed the case , the Ministry of Defence have been somewhere between stupid, mad and criminally negligent in not fitting anti-explosive foam to the fuel tanks of Hercules planes. These planes fly low over warzones and if your fuel tanks are just a metal casing full of aviation fuel, there is a chance that anyone with a grudge and a gun on the ground could bring you and your plane down in fireball. This is exactly what happened in January 2005 with the loss of 10 lives.

The latest news is that today an inquest into these unnecessary deaths was kicked off by the Wiltshire Coroner.

Now, there's every chance this inquest will be somewhat muted, because the MoD has been attempting in the High Court to ban coroners from using the term "serious failings" to describe the MoD's farcical oversights. I'm pretty sure they would probably prefer that I not use the phrase "farcical oversight", however appropriate it seems to be. Or even "penny-pinching, bureaucratic bumbling" - they probably wouldn't like that either. One former squadron commander has described the situation as "criminally insane". They definitely wouldn't like that.

The Americans have had this Explosive-suppressant foam (ESF) since the Vietnam war in the 1960s. Shortly after the British crash (January 2005, remember) a military Board of Inquiry recommended that the foam be fitted. As at the start of this month (March 2008), only 7 out of 48 aircraft have actually had this work done.

Now, I'm sure there are logistical reasons connected with the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq that might delay the work, but that's hardly the point. British lives have been put in unnecessary danger over forty-odd years and rather than blame the various governments of both parties that have had held the power to do something about it over that period, I choose to blame the current government.

Why ? Because the ten casualties mean that they cannot pretend that the issue does not exist, and yet they concentrate their energy on bringing legal action to moderate the language of the coroners.

And I'm Feeling Good

The Eurofighter Typhoon is a phenomenal fighter plane. It is made of futuristic light-weight materials, and is powered by two Rolls Royce engines giving a staggering 20,000 pounds of thrust. It's controlled to an unprecedented extent by computers allowing it to make turns no unaided human could make. You may have seen its party-piece on "Top Gear", racing Richard Hammond in a Bugatti Veyron

My favourite part from this footage is the lazy weightless flick that turns it from a climbing rocket into a falling stone in half a heartbeat. You feel the pilot could throw it around the sky like ... like ... er ...

Well, the only thing that comes to mind is "Like Nina Simone singing 'Feeling Good".

I drove down to London and back today, which took around 8 hours, so I had plenty of time to listen to music in my car. I don't drive a Bugatti Veyron, unfortunately - I still have the Spanish diesel that I unfairly slagged off last year. It's still running fine, nearly 100,000 miles into its life, and it cost me little enough , so I shouldn't be so ungrateful.

The weather was pretty miserable and I was tired, but I was mentally and emotionally lifted up by Nina Simone's amazing piece of Powerful, Black, Feminine vocal acrobatics. Gravity isn't an issue as she throws her voice all over the sky, ignoring the conventions of beats and bars and putting the notes where she knows they damn well belong.

Just as well I was alone in car - I must have played it twenty consecutive times.

My other discovery was "She's My Man" by Scissor Sisters. It's a track I've heard before on the second album, but it never struck me before. Perfect music for tired drivers in the rain closing in on home after a long day on the road.

I've seen the song described as a "joyous glam-rock-disco shakedown" and I can't improve on that for a description. Wonderfully deranged lyrics too.

No "fun" in "fundamentalist", but plenty of "mental"

I watched the controversial film Fitna tonight on the Internet, and it was an interesting 16 minutes to be sure. Over-18s with strong stomach only, please.

The first section is a stunning montage of the worst excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. You've probably seem most of the pictures before, but having them all in one place in such a short space of time is overwhelming. Twin Towers, Madrid bomb, London bomb. Mad-eyed mullahs preaching death and damnation. A young girl, practically a baby, parroting the hateful description of Jews that her parents have drubbed into her.

It's an unbalanced hack-job on a whole religion, showing the lunatic fringe and all their works, and implying that that's pretty typical Muslim behaviour.

Then a middle section to the film is all tabloid headlines screaming about the Muslim Menace including an comical picture-postcard "Welcome to Holland" which had views of five different mosques dominating the skyline.

Again, well within the normal range of right-wing paranoia. I've seen worse in any given copy of the "Daily Telegraph".

But then in the last minute, just as I was thinking "What's all the fuss about?", he puts the boot in.

A brief image of an old-style round cartoon bomb with fuse and what you just hoped wasn't a picture of the prophet Mohammed on it (but probably was).

Then a picture of someone about to tear a page out of the Koran, then darkness and the sound of a page being torn. The caption claims that the sound was in fact that of a page out of a telephone directory being torn, but invited Muslims themselves to tear out the offensive passages from the Koran that gave the killers their motivation.

There is a case to be made against extreme Islamic terrorists, but this film wasn't it. And as the film went on he increasingly couldn't resist the temptation to tar hundreds of millions of people with the same brush and then finally to grievously insult them all.

In short, it became a Party Political Broadcast for the Fascist Party.

I'm somewhat reminded of the film "Doctor Strangelove" where the not-so-ex ex-Nazi scientist tries so hard to physically stop himself from doing the Nazi salute, but after some time he just can't resist.

UPDATE 28th March 2008 - As pointed out by Her Maggis in the comments, the people at LiveLeak have pulled the film from their servers after receiving entirely predictable threats. Google have a copy if you still care. Personally I wouldn't bother. The way I look at it, I, as a service to my readers, wasted 16 minutes of my life watching it so that you wouldn't have to.

Many Happy Reincarnations.

I got the usual round-robin email about how beastly the Chinese government are in Tibet from an old Uni friend of mine. I deleted it without hardly a thought.

The problem is, it's too big, too far away and too divorced from my own experience to really get me. I know the Chinese dominate that area in a way Stalin would have approved of, but are they really any worse than Mugabe or one of the less publicised Arab dictators ? There's so much inhumanity in the world, that people with good intention keep getting side-tracked, find it hard to focus. Why pick on the Chinese and leave other baddies in peace ?

Watching the brave demonstrators in Greece, I was inspired to find out some more, and I think I've cracked it. Basically you need to make it small and personal, otherwise it's just noise.

Tsering Woeser is a Tibetan writer whose poetry was banned by the Chinese authorities, so she turned to blogging to get her message across. She blogged on many things that were probably upsetting to the Chinese authorities (HIV/AIDS in Tibet, the controversial Tibet railway, and the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution) but it was probably the posting that included a photo of the Dalai Lama and a poem wishing him a happy birthday that caused the trouble.

The police in the city of Mingyang, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, ordered a Tibetan website on 7 December to eliminate any reference to her writings. She and her husband have been under house-arrest since March 10th for I-know-not-what.

Read that again, and shudder - her opinions are first stopped, then her liberty is removed for no good reason and then an attempt to made to make it as though she never existed.

I think she would have been tickled by the recent pronouncement that Tibetan lamas (religious leaders, not goats) may not reincarnate without official permission. You wonder what kind of paperwork would be appropriate.

Anyway, here's a photo of the Dalai Lama.

























Happy Birthday, mate. Many happy reincarnations.

Can you nominate in order now the degrees of the lie?

OK, so you're stuck on the Guardian's Easter prize crossword - Araucaria is kicking your flabby mind like it was Bolton Wanderers and Araucaria was any other team in the Premiership. So you've come to the internet to find help.

There's still time to change your mind - you don't have to read the next bit - just go have a lie down with a damp flannel over your brow, make a cup of tea and try again.

Still give up ?

OK - the title of the crossword is "The Shakespearean Criterion's Springtime Crossword"

Anyone's who has done a few thousand crosswords knows that another word for a Criterion is a Touchstone - and this is particularly Shakespearean, because Touchstone is the fool in "As You Like It".

Touchstone has a marvellous riff on the nature of lying during the play that runs as follows :-

"O, sir, we quarrel in print by the book, as you have books for good manners: I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort courteous; the second, the Quip modest; the third, the Reply churlish; the fourth, the Reproof valiant; the fifth, the Countercheck quarrelsome; the sixth, the Lie with circumstance; the seventh, the Lie direct. All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that too with an 'If'. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel; but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an 'If', as: 'If you said so, then I said so;' and they shook hands, and swore brothers. Your 'If' is the only peace-maker;—much virtue in 'If.'"

Now fill in the blanks, remove the damp cloth, make some really hot tea and concentrate - I'm not going to do it all for you - I am on holiday after all.