Bringing “stuff” to you …

From its inception this organ has always ranked alongside Facebook, WhatsApp, Tik-Tok, Twitter and Instagram in terms of its impact upon the lives of the estimated 7.7 billion members of the human race that currently inhabit the Earth.

It has managed this in part by organising its now legendary round-the-clock 24/7 watch of the leading social media outlets in order to identify the very latest news items and developments that may be of interest, importance or use to Rusters – many of whom, being beyond the first flush of innocent youth, may no longer themselves retain the concentration power or indeed brain cells to discover or appreciate such things for themselves.

It so happened that, three weeks ago, I received the short straw of a stint covering the night of 27th to 28th May 2021 monitoring the world media outlets.

Here are two items qualifying for the above description that I spotted during my shift which I considered might be of interest to our visitors/adherents – both of them, as it happens, currently appearing on the website of the UK’s Daily Mail:

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, ALFIE?

It’s either a truism, or as near as dammit to one as makes no difference, that at each of the Seven Ages Of Man – (c) William Shakespeare [expired] – every human being who has ever lived has spent time pondering upon the nature of the universe – its properties, how it all began (and its maker or makers, if it had any) … and … er … just about everything to do with “How and why did I come into being, what was I doing in the billions of years before I was born … and indeed what will I be doing in (presumably) the billion of years yet to come after I die?“

From a personal point of view I think I was about eight when I gave up worrying about these things – figuring that few other species other than my own ever seemed to concern themselves with such existential issues, instead they just got on with the everyday task of finding enough food to survive and procreate … so why didn’t I?

That registered, hopefully in common with most other people, all my life I have indulged my fascination with what the hell “everything” was/is all about and reading about the research that scientists and others with greater intelligence than me were conducting into everything “under the Sun” – and indeed beyond.

In which regard, I offer today a link to a report by Ryan Morrison upon the latest scientific discoveries by astronomers and the like about what is called “Dark Matter” and apparently makes up an estimated 80% of the known universe.

I commend it because – for me – it provides a brilliantly straightforward and succinct account of things that (to the average man in the street like myself) would otherwise be unfathomable.

It reminded me of the occasion that, as a student newspaper editor, I attended a conference in Manchester at which a professor from the Cardiff School of Journalism delighted in shocking his supposedly-right-on-activist student audience by first asking its members to suggest which British national newspaper contained the best journalism and then – after getting a uniformly consistent response of one of the broadsheets (The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian) – delighted in proclaiming that none of these was the correct answer … adding for good measure that in his opinion The Guardian contained the worst journalism of the lot.

How so?

Well, in his view The Guardian‘s reporting wasn’t journalism at all, rather it effectively consisted of self-indulgent essays.

In his view, the best journalism at that time (the early 1970s) was to be found in the Daily Mirror – it had fewer column inches available to its reporters than any other newspaper and therefore – in the cause of getting across both the key facts and full details of any story they were covering – they had to be more succinct and direct in what they wrote than anyone employed by any other newspaper.

He cited John Pilger – then the Mirror‘s foreign correspondent – as a paragon of virtue in this respect.

Anyway, see here – NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT DARK MATTER

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS

For my second recommendation today I go to the subject of UFOs.

Even by their title description, these phenomena reek of mysteries of the universe, the possibility of alien life from “other worlds” visiting us on Earth – or, alternatively perhaps, a fantasy world of “wished for” ditto in which things observed by human beings that seem to defy the normal scientific rules of physics, gravity and matter are then conveniently ascribed to “visitors from outer space” further to a general conspiracy theory that “our various lords and masters around the world” know far more than about the universe than they let on and – in their wisdom – have decided that they cannot tell us what they actually know because the details would be so shocking as to cause widespread panic, disorder and eventually the inevitable destruction of the norms of human society in all cultures around the globe.

A few weeks the United State of America effectively announced that it was going to make public some of its military and other records of UFO incidents over the past fifty years.

See here for a link to a piece by Ariel Zilber and Adam Schrader – US NAVY REPORT ON UFOs