Social – Page 27 – Fooyah

August 5 2019August 5 2019

EM Warnings

You know how it is. You are having a short break on a motorway drive and pop into the service station for a drink and a comfort break. It is the adverts directly above the urinals which seem to show the worst of mankind. I’ve written about this before in a communication about shaming farts. This time I was at Southwaite Services just south of Carlisle. I saw this advert above the urinals:

You are very welcome to go and read the stuff from the following links if you wish:

I have some things to say about all this. Let’s start off with some science about electro-magnetic radiation. This is a form of energy that extends from long wave radio waves to gamma radiation. It is a very large spectrum and our visible light takes up part of it.

Long wavelengths can travel a long distance and through lots of stuff. We use them for communicating with submarines and ships a long way away. Radio waves we are familiar with and they carry information like TV or audio signals. Infrared we feel as heat radiated from objects. Visible light humans can see, some animals can see higher frequencies but not us. All of the wavelengths/frequencies mentioned so far are called NON-IONISING RADIATION. Each photon doesn’t have enough energy to knock an electron out of its orbit in an atom and so up to violet light can’t caused any molecular changes, they, by definition, can’t cause cancer. They might warm you up a little but that is all.

All the stuff in the ultra-violet and beyond is the nasty stuff. It can cause cancer because each photon contains enough energy to knock electrons out of their orbit and therefore could cause molecular changes. This could cause a DNA change in your cells and, if it happens right/wrong, then could cause cancer. Here’s the easy bit:

UV Rays cause cancer. UV is BAD for you.

When you get an X-Ray at the dentist or hospital the radiographer or dentist will leave the room when the photograph is taken. Why do they do that? Because being exposed to X-Rays is bad for you. Each X-Ray you have increases your chances of cancer by a little. But, the information gathered from the X-Ray can do far more good than the increase in risk of cancer and so we elect to have them done. It’s similar to going somewhere by car – you know you will get there in a short time and in comfort but we balance that with the risk of being involved in an accident, the benefits outweigh the risks.

Right. Point number One. Radio and Micro waves can’t cause cancer. The worst they might do is cause a very slight heating which is less than what you get by exercising and is easily carried away by your blood.

Next, the slightly tougher issue. EM sensitivity. This is the situation where people are convinced that their health is detrimentally affected by EM radiation enough for them to notice. I have to be quite specific in the language I use here because the illness that people feel from this is real. The cause of it is not. I do not want to be dismissive of their illness, they feel what they feel and they blame it on all the EM in their surroundings. People with EM Sensitivity do feel what they report and so the illness is real. It’s just not caused by electro-magnetic radiation.

There have been studies completed where patients who claim EMS have been put in a shrouded room and then told when a wi-fi transmitter is turned on and off. They then report their symptoms in line with when they know the transmitter is on. Here’s the thing: they report symptoms even when the wi-fi transmitter is NOT turned on but they are told it is. Their symptoms are psychosomatic. This is not to belittle their illness but to point out that the cause is not what they think it is. Read this over at Science Based Medicine.

The people who claim that 5G will ruin lives are wrong. They are scaremongering and therefore adding to a problem that doesn’t exist. They are pushing ideas out to people who are sensitive to suggestion and causing more problems than they can fix.

I am still quite convinced that the amount of EM radiation humans absorb is mostly from natural sources, the sun and radio waves from stellar sources. Being in the home means that you will absorb a certain amount but go outside and this home-based absorption is insignificant. See this page from the World Health Organisation.

If mobile phones and wi-fi caused lots of issues with human health then where is the epidemic? Mobiles phones and wi-fi is everywhere and I don’t see the epidemic anywhere. For around thirty years these technologies have existed and we aren’t getting ill.

5G will be safe.

July 28 2019July 27 2019

Poe’s Law

https://t.co/qsoINefE6L
— Ian Parish (@iparish) July 26, 2019

I keep thinking back to this news item from ITV. I mean ITV is a trusted source isn’t it? It seems ridiculous to me that a new member of the government in our current times would insist on a particular style guide for his staff.

The problem with this news article is that it’s so ridiculous that it could be true. It might have been made up but we all know Rees-Mogg is a prick of the highest order and so this could be true. I’m just not sure. This news article could be a case of Poe’s Law in action.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

While Poe was talking about creationists being fucking stupid his views have been converted into a law stating that in some cases extreme sarcasm is indistinguishable from the real thing. This is what I think has happened here. Someone has cleverly taken the concept of Rees-Mogg being a fucking prick and gone extreme. Seriously, let’s look at the things he wants done:

All non-titled males are Esq. – fuck you, what a singular stupid fucking thing to say. Jesus Christ, this is fucking entitled bullshit in the highest.

No comma after “and” – of course you use the Oxford comma, it’s there to make sure you have clear intentions in your language. We’ve developed this wonderful thing called language to be able to communicate clearly and we can make our words mean the correct things. For an example – Rees-Mogg is an entitled prick.

Check your work – this man is really telling his staff of professionals to check their work? Really? Does he employ monkeys or something? You would think that people already know how this type of stuff works. Arrrrrgh.

Could someone please stop the planet, I want to get off.

July 26 2019July 24 2019

RIAT 2019

I went to RAF Fairford a short while ago to attend the Royal International Air Tattoo. RIAT is a huge airshow which takes place each year at RAF Fairford. I’d never been to this particular airshow before and so I was quite excited. There were also a few aircraft types I had never seen static or flying before:

F35
Su-27
P8
F18 (a friend told me I had seen some at RAF Waddington years ago)
Patrouille de France
Freece Tricolori

Nearly all the other types of aircraft I had seen static or flying before. I have to say now that the very best displays were the F16s and F18. They were both incredibly impressive given how old their design is. The Flanker was amazing, utterly brilliant.

Here is a selection of some of the photographs I had once I’d returned home. Not all the credit goes to me, the kids took quite a few of the photos and did a good job.

Spanish Harrier
Freece Tricolori
NATO Elephant Walk
Breitling Jets
Patrouille de France
Flanker Landing
A Moody Red Arrows Shot
Min Radius Turn F-16
Flanker
Freece Tricolori
Double Concorde

The weather was a little cloudy at times but we coped. Photographs look better with a mixture of blue sky and fluffy Simpsons clouds.

The noise was amazing and I just loved the sound of the afterburning jets taking off and pulling many G to show off their capabilities. I also met some old friends while at the tattoo and it was lovely to arrange to meet them. I even managed to bump into George who is a colleague from the PAC at Amport, I knew he attended and I was hoping to see him.

I’m not too happy with the media page for the photos as I think the photo is too small on that, so the images link to the actual image file, I might get around to learning how to adjust that one day.

July 18 2019July 25 2019

Cold War Jets

In around the year 1988 my friend and I travelled to the back garden of someone in the village of Mildenhall to camp for the weekend. The purpose was to spend the weekend at the Mildenhall airshow, which I had been to before but was important for a few reasons:

Aircraft
Military aircraft
Military might
Blackbird
More planes

When you are a plane nut then airshows are where you get your kicks. I can’t help what I like and planes have troubled me all my life. It’s possibly due to growing up underneath the flight path of Stansted Airport in Essex. It could be because of my dad who was involved in the industry when I was young or it could just be that an aluminium tube filled with people and fuel doesn’t really have any business being six miles up off the ground.

Somehow Alan and I had found the number of someone who lived near a walk-in entrance to RAF Mildenhall [actually a USAF base] and we had booked to camp in her garden. Then, each day of the show we walked in. My memory of the charges is not great but I seem to think we got in for something like £5 each whereas a car for the day was £40. I suspect those prices are wrong given what prices were like in the 80s but I can’t remember. I do know it was dirt cheap to walk in to the show rather than drive.

There’s only a few things I can remember from the airshow. I sort of remember the Blackbird flying, it was a privilidge to see that. I also remember both AB and I watching a helicopter display, possibly an Apache, when it did a form of a wing-over or loop. Both, AB and I were amazed and clapped. There weren’t many who joined in the clapping, only those in the know.

The Red Arrows were there, of course, I I’m not sure if this was before or after I had been to Cyprus, porbably before and so I was still excited by them. The above photograph was beautifully timed by me.

My father must have found the original negatives of these photographs as he has scanned them inot his computer. I suspect there are some more picture lurking in a box somewhere and I’ll have to keep scanning his computer to see what I can find.

Here are some more photographs from those days. They aren’t very good but them photographs weren’t back in the 80s. I wasn’t great with a camera and with only 24 or 36 shots on a reel of film you were very limited in what you could take.

Sea King @ Mildenhall
Harrier, A-10 and A7 [?] @ Mildenhall
F-5, F-16, C141 and AB @ Mildenhall
EF-111 [?] @ Mildenhall
SR-71A @ Mildenhall
Phantom @ Mildenhall

AB and I had a great time at the airshow. It was a really good experience and well worth the camping and entrance fees. I do feel it’s a bit of a shame that the number of airshows has decreased over the years, but these beasts were probably also a show of strength during the cold war. They were interesting times and maybe I should be glad we don’t currently need massive forces to prevent mutual destruction [it feels like it’s heading that was again though].

Addendum: I have had confirmation of aircraft types from a US source:

A7 is indeed an A7D and it will have been a Lynx you saw display rather than an Apache.
— Richard O (@richouss) July 25, 2019

July 8 2019July 13 2019

Rammstein – MK Stadium

Last Saturday I went to see Rammstein play their current set at the MK Stadium in Milton Keynes. It was bloody amazeballs.

I had spent the previous week at RAF Shawbury with a cadet camp which was already a brilliant week and I then topped it off with this brilliant show. I drove down from the West Midlands to Milton Keynes and met with Smith in a supermarket car park. This gig is an important one because he had brought his kids along, their first major gig. You could tell that there was a slight trepidation from the eldest [around 14] but the youngest displayed nothing but sheer excitement [around 12].

The support band were two women who played pianos on a stage just in front of our seats. It was nice but I didn’t really pay attention. I was suffering with the effects of being tired and so I read a book on the development of the pressure suit for high altitude flying published by Nasa. It wasn’t bad but I needed to rest!

Rammstein themselves were amazing. Absolutely amazing. The show they put on is remarkable and worth every penny of the 7500 for the cost of a ticket. There were the normal theatrics with lots of fire. And I mean lots of fire. There were black clouds bellowing over the stadium at certain points during the show and I wondered what it must look like to someone outside the stadium.

There were many highlights. Every song had its own act. The keyboardist being burnt in a massive cauldron, the burning to death of a giant baby, the massive riding cock for the song “Pussy”, and flames shooting from guitars.

This might seem odd but the dance track halfway through made my night. That was the moment I thought “this is the best show ever”. One of the guitarists DJd while being lifted high above the stage and the other members of the band came on with suits that lit up along the limbs. They then performed a dance routine to an electronic version of thier own song. What balls, to make 30,000 metal fans listen and dance to electronic music. This band have it all.

This was the best show I have ever seen and is the third best gig I have been to. The Prodigy last year at M’era Luna may have been an excellent show, I don’t know I can’t remember any of it. This concert would have been top of the list had I been in the pit. You have to take whatever you can from a gig and I loved this but part of me hankered to be in the mild violence of the circle. I still had a great time. My top three gigs are: Combichrist Old School, The Prodigy and Rammstien – this one.

This is the thrid time I have seen Rammstein and it was bloody brilliant.

“Did I mention? I’m seeing Rammstein in Milton Keynes this weekend.”

July 7 2019July 7 2019

CCF Camp SHY

It’s the end of a great week and tiring week at RAF Shawbury. I spent a week there with the CCF RAF cadets and I’m pretty sure everyone had a great time. I’m struggling today with being super tired [fault of seeing Rammstein last night] and so have decided to write this instead of doing some pressing work badly.

RAF Shawbury is home to the helicopter flying school for the three services and there is a mixture of uniforms walking around.

On the Sunday we had some time on a high ropes course in Telford and then went to fly some birds of prey along with seeing owls close up. I got some excellent photographs and I endeavour to show them on here at some point.

Monday was the first day of section visits and we had the RAF Police tell us about their job and demonstrate restraining an adult volunteer [me]. One of the Midlands ARVs also came along to show us what kit they have and what they do. In the afternoon we had talks about training Air Traffic Controllers and we saw the simulators they use covering RAF Cottom. We had a tour around the dry helo training area run by the Ascent military contractors.

Tuesday brought a trip to nearly RAF Cosford and involvement in training the Midlands police how to cope with public demonstrations and protests. The cadets also learnt how to use riot shields correctly.

Wednesday for me was time spent at the DCCT block and then on the range in the afternoon. It was a little disconcerting that we had to stop often as there was a helicopter taxi way just behind bullet catcher. The last thing we needed was a stray round to kiss a Juno flying ten feet above the ground.

Thursday meant a visit to Air Traffic Control and a drive across the airfield. Then we nearly all had a helicopter flight in the afternoon piloted by an Army major. In the evening we had a camp meal out at The Red Lion in Shrewsbury.

On Friday I had a very short visit to the RAF Museum at RAF Cosford and then another afternoon on the range. It was very hot and there was a lot of aircraft activity including a visit from an Apache and two Pumas. We managed to get a tour around the Pumas. In the evening an ex-SAS member gave us a talk on motivation. This was followed by the traditional ceremony of the plates.

The final day meant tidying rooms, packing and then a journey home. Mind you, I had to stop at Milton Keynes to see Rammstein burn gallons of fuel during their concert. The review should follow shortly.

June 11 2019December 5 2019

Old Television

There’s a big news story around at the moment that the over 75s in this country are going to have to pay for a TV licence. I’ve got some thoughts on this matter which I will communicate here.

In the UK the TV Licence pays for some of the BBC along with some of Channel 4 and, I think, channel 5. It used to be more of a licence to operate receiving equipment which just happened to be used to pay for public broadcasting. I think nowadays it is considered to be a tax by people which goes directly to the BBC.

The reason the BBC are going to charge the over 75s is because the GOVERNMENT has chosen to withdraw that part of the funding for the BBC. It seems amazing to me that the majority of the anger is placed at the BBC where it should be placed directly at the government. The media which isn’t funded by the government has a massive issue with the BBC funding and targets it a lot about everything.

Much like the anger placed at immigrants or the NHS or housing or local councils the real anger should be directed at the GOVERNMENT because they set the fucking rules. Annoyed with people dodging tax? Then moan at the government, they set the rules, they produce the law. It’s the government’s fault. The fact that the anger is deliberately directed away from the government is astonishing.

Local councils get their funding from two main sources, the national government and the taxes, council tax, placed on those who live in the area. The national government has spent years reducing the amount it sends to the local councils and so the only way to make up the shortfall is to charge more to locals. Where does the anger go? To the local council, not to the national government.

I don’t see that just because you are old you shouldn’t have to pay for a service that you use. It should probably be means tested. There are plenty of old folk out there who can afford this and they should pay slightly more to allow those who struggle to have access to services. It’s how society should work. Some parts of society struggle and the rest of us should help, it’s the morally correct thing to do.

There seems to be a perception that poor people or people who struggle through life deserve it. Their failure must be because they haven’t worked hard enough, that they have made poor choices. This is incorrect. The poor work hard, those who struggle work hard. It’s the way our current society works that produces parts of the population who struggle and always will. We must change society to make it work for all people.

June 9 2019June 9 2019

Dakota Overlord

This last week saw a fleet of Dakotas fly from Duxford to Caen in Normandy to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings. If I spend too much time on this matter I will descend into a melancholy beyond which we’ve seen in these communications. I shall leave it here and show some photographs I took.

The above baby flew over my house the weekend before the anniversary and it was extremely pleasant to watch. These really are gorgeous aircraft.

It was wonderful to see so many aircraft flying towards us while we waited on the school field. It’s a shame they were about half a mile west of us but still a great sight.

Finally, here’s a photo taken of my cadet contingent to commemorate the anniversary.

June 2 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

I went to the cinema at Rochester to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters. There are customary parts to get through here I guess. The tide, I noticed, was neither high nor low and when I came out of this film it was lower so I guess it was waning.

I have rated films I have watched at the cinema for a long time now and I rated this one, although I had to check this communication covering the rules I apply to the rating system.

I rated Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/nxiWZhJARN

— Ian Parish (@iparish) June 1, 2019

This film was shit, what a waste of about $200 million.

I don’t want to go into all the details of why I thought it was shit. But I hated it all and considered leaving three times, especially once I realised there was another round of battles to go. MV-22Bs do not a good movie make.