Your long read (not by me)

And not really that long, except maybe by modern-internet-induced-tiny-concentration-span standards.

It’s pretty heavy, but it – as the author explains – needs to be said.

My Personal Struggle In A Time Of Global Pain – Branko Brkic

Difficult to read in parts, and clearly deeply personal, but with many seemingly obvious, yet hugely important messages:

Such a divisive conflict was bound to offer rich pickings to horrible people everywhere.

Angry people conflated the violent actions of a small group of people with entire nations and religions, sparking hateful rhetoric and physical threats.

For all of us to have a future together, this has to stop. Anti-Semitic, anti-Palestinian and anti-Islamic attacks cannot be explained away.

The tragedy of the Palestinian and Israeli people is that they are led by “leaders” who have a “greater mission” on their minds, one that does not concern itself with civilian deaths.

Sadly, he is, of course, absolutely right.

Not now, mystery outbreak of respiratory illness in China

Lol. It only seems like 4 years ago, we were talking about a mystery outbreak of respiratory illness in China that was alarming the World Health Organisation. And now look at this:

Yep. And if you look back at November 2019, we all thought that we were living in a pretty hectic, messed up world. And we were right.

But wow. Little did we know about what was to come. Suddenly, November 2019 looks a very attractive option destination for my time machine settings. Well, at least compared with November 2023.

But now is not the time to be adding issues to our already overworked, overstressed and overtired lives. So please, China: take your mystery outbreak of respiratory illness and sort it out quickly and efficiently (no! god no! not like that!) so that we can get on with prepping for economic disaster, pre-election violence and the seemingly inevitable outbreak of World War 3.

Happy days!

787 lands at Troll

In other aircraft news, a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has become the first 787 and the largest plane ever to land at the Troll Research Station in Antarctica.

This flight came from Cape Town and was carrying supplies and scientific equipment for the Norwegian Polar Institute Base there. And as I write, the aircraft above has just left SA airspace on its way back up to Oslo.

Cape Town is the easiest airport to use for trips to Troll, it being “just” 4350km straight down across the Southern Ocean to the ice runway there, and at this time of year, there are regular flights heading out there from a plethora of different nations. Russia and Iceland being two of the more recent ones I have spotted.

There’s a really good article on FlightRadar24 about how Troll operates here.

And a reminder that you shouldn’t visit Antarctica.
And a further reminder that you can’t afford to anyway.

What the hell is going on, is it Chemtrials ?

Chemtrials? Is that what they do to see if Chemtrails are going to work?

UCT is partnering with NASA who (perhaps unsurprisingly) have some really amazing scientific equipment, in order to survey and map out the incredible biodiversity of the Western Cape.

They’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, as this July 2021 story attests:

And then, when it was closer to the six week period mentioned in the article, there was plenty in the local news about it. From NASA, from the Daily Maverick, from Times Live, from News24, and other local sites.

But that hasn’t stopped the tinfoil hat brigade from assuming that they’re here looking for gas (it’s ok, we know where the gas is already) or controlling the weather (?!?) or doing “Chemtrials”. Ugh:

“Specifically Mossel Bay”, she states, then showing all of the places that they flew, which very specifically doesn’t include Mossel Bay.

“Need to see if their planes were flying in GP [Gauteng Province] before the hail,” she adds, referencing a recent hailstorm in Johannesburg, before not doing anything about actually looking to see if their planes were flying there at any time. Which they weren’t, and which she could have looked up on any flight tracking system, since this not exactly hush-hush classified NASA mission is being shared across all of those platforms.
Of course, their planes are residing at a clandestine underground villains’ lair on the tarmac at Cape Town International Airport.

It’s like the worst top secret mission ever.

@_iduchess above describes herself as “a critical thinker” (actual lol), but despite the multitude of replies on her tweet telling her about the joint UCT/NASA collaboration, she is doubling down on the tinfoilery.
Oh, and she’s anti-vax as well.

Same whatsapp group, every time.

And then there was this dream [screenshot here] that our erstwhile “critical thinker” shared, and then declared:

“Many people have been having dreams lately but as always umlungu [white people] will say “it’s climate change” and the sheep will believe umlungu over us.”

Ah yes, the casual racism slips in. We’d been missing that, and:

“The dream clearly states that the Melikans are not here for a good cause but rather for their own depopulation agenda ..”

Of course they are, dearie. Now, here’s a nice cup of tea and your evening medication.

But there is one thing that you can see from her “is it Chemtrials ?” tweet, and that is that her “news” comes from Tiktok – see the screenshots she shares. This seems an unusual place for a critical thinker to obtain high quality knowledge and information, but as recent surveys have shown, more and more young adults are getting their news from that app, and that’s quite worrying, mainly because it’s often absolutely full of shit like we can see above.

There is a school of thought that says that the loonies have always been there; it’s just that they never had a platform before, so we never noticed. But the problem is that they have clearly found a platform now, and they’re still loonies.

What can we do about this, given that these people will also likely base their election choices on what they read there? I’ve said this sort of thing before, but it really does belittle the democratic process when someone who believes in “Chemtrials” has the same voting rights as a sensible human being.

Eish.

Trains – now on Uber

I love a bit of clever advertising. And this is clever advertising. Simple stuff, taking a brand that we all know about and informing us that the range of services it offers is expanding, but keeping it all very familiar as it does so.

You can now book train tickets on Uber in the UK, and Ad Wizards Mother have given us some lovely work to tell us about it:

More on that link above, but I think it’s just very clever the way they have extended the messages we’re used to reading about drivers and cars and simply extended them into trains. It seems both completely normal and a bit alien. And because of that, it feels both comfortable and amusing.

And it’s definitely made a splash, which is surely what they were after.