The first car I ever drove was my parents’ red and white EH Holden station wagon in which I started to learn to drive, with my father partly terrified in the front passenger’s seat. It had a radio which, when I could, was mostly tuned to whichever AM radio station played the music I liked (Beatles, Rolling Stones, and suchlike). My first car was a white second hand Mazda 1300 with whitewall tyres and rust in the bottom of all the doors.
In my palaeontological peregrinations, I occasionally refer to papers that may be everything from months to nearly two centuries old. For instance, one of the seminal papers in the early study of trilobites was a paper by Ignaz Hawle & August Corda entitled ‘Prodrom einer Monographie der böhmischen Trilobiten’ (Prodrome of a monograph on Bohemian trilobites)1.
Back in late 2017, less than a year after I started this blog, I wrote an item about how climate change deniers lied about sea level rise1. Later, in October 2023, I wrote an item about how the rate of sea level rise was itself increasing. The average rate of increase in sea level between 1993 and 2015 was 3.3 millimetres (mm) per annum, while the average sea level rise between 2013 and 2022 was 4.62 mm per annum2.
I wrote a rant a while ago about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has developed into a very different war with drones of various types forming a huge part of the Ukrainian arsenal. This was by way of introduction to a story about the development of unmanned underwater vehicles, one of which will be entering service with the Royal Australian Navy in early 20261.
Everyone knows that politicians and their supporters lie. Not long after I began this blog in early 2017, I wrote a piece about how politicians lie and I gave some examples of the different types of lying. They include such types as barefaced lies, butler lies, coverups, lying by omission, false advertising and several others1.
In March 2018, David Roberts wrote a piece in Vox bemoaning the state of the op-ed page of the New York Times; the main thrust being that these pages do not have enough diversity of opinion, but particularly, he stated that while it carries some conservatives, these authors do not reflect the madness of US conservative politics; they are “alienated from the animating force of US conservatism, which is Trumpism”1. One of the paragraphs that struck a chord with me was the following:
Before and during the First World War, members of the German armed forces had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Kaiser. This changed after Germany’s defeat, and the establishment of a democratic Weimar Republic. Not only did the political leaders of the new Weimar Republic seek to democratise the military by changing its social makeup but also by changing the oath of allegiance.