David Bennett

Plot Lines

#1

A loose group of people with assets sunk into oil are firefighting to preserve their asset value because the world is turning green and they have no exit plan. Their only plan is to delay and discredit the green movement.

A team is detailed to discredit Prince Charles, heir to the throne of the United Kingdom because of his influential support for green energy and an end to pollution.

Their attack is via Harry and Meghan. They help to bring them together and they do small things to help the romance blossom.

They see Harry as the entry point for their plan because of his resentment over the treatment and death of his mother, Princess Diana and because Meghan is mixed race, which adds confusion to the mix.

None of what happens reflects well on Prince Charles or any of the Royal Family. The plan goes well until an employee sees the light and decides to expose the plot. The race is on between the employee and the rich and powerful trying to stop the employee. Friends turn out to be snakes in the grass, and supposed opponents prove their worth.

#2

Boris Johnson turns out after all to be a Russian asset.

He is exposed after a coded memo he writes promoting Christopher Pincher MP, is decoded.
The memo shows that when he promoted Mr Pincher he knew the MP was subject to an investigation over sexual assault. It also shows that he lied to Parliament when he said he was not aware of the allegations and the investigation.

The giveaway though is that the memo is shown to be written in a code used by the Russian FSB.
Boris Johnson’s downfall is brought about by his unforced error in using that code, which he does in disregard for how it might reflect back on him and which he does to show off his dexterity and for the rush of playing with fire.

Boris Johnson’s motive is political. He dreams of resurrecting the Ottoman Empire but is gullible and falls for an obvious Russian ploy in which the FSB promise him £350 million a week indefinitely to support his political dream once he has extracted Britain from the European Union.

Johnson’s exit causes him to start to spill the beans, first by leaking a video of a partygate party at CCHQ then by leaking stories that imply his relationship with former Russian agents who might still in fact be active.

The stinger in the tail is when it turns out that Michael Gove is his handler.

#3

Elon Musk turns out to be an alien on a mission on Earth, who wants to get back home to Mars. His planet was wrecked by an earlier advanced civilisation on Earth. So that the catastrophe cannot be repeated, he develops a giant rocket ship with a dual purpose.

One is to get him back home.

The other is to deploy multiple nuclear warheads to reduce Earth to cinders.

Putin and Trump are revealed as drones under his control.

Musk’s plan is brought to nothing when in his exuberance he talks wildly about his plan before a public audience with the event relayed in real time on X.

Incarcerated, he reveals that the reason Mars was destroyed previously was because of an inbuilt design in Martians whereby they cannot help but vocalise their carefully designed plans.

Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and Nagorno-Karabakh

The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is an autonomous enclave of Azerbaijan. It is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan and completely surrounded by other countries. It shared a tiny sliver of border with Turkey on the west.

It was formerly owned by what was then Persia (now Iran) and then in the early 1800s after the Russian-Persian war, by Russia.

That changed again with the 1917 Russian revolution when it was contested by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Fast forward to 1990 when it declared independence from the USSR to show solidarity with the nationalist movement in Azerbaijan, and the following year it declared itself the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic within the newly independent Republic of Azerbaijan.

That decision to ally with Azerbaijan resulted in conflicts and cross-conflicts with Armenia, Turkey, and Russia – who all had an interest in the region.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Nagorno-Karabakh is another region close by, internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but run as an independent state by the Armenian ethnic majority. Not being a country, it isn’t marked on most maps and I have coloured it fuchsia on this Google map.

The Lachin Corridor

In a statement to the United Nations on 18 September 2005, the Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan, Elmar Mammadyarov, said “It is the issue of communication of the Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan with Armenia and that of the Azerbaijanis living in the Nakhchivan region of Azerbaijan with the rest of the country. We suggest the using of the so-called Lachin corridor – which should be called “Road of Peace” – by both sides in both directions provided that security of this road will be ensured by the multinational peacekeeping forces at the initial stage”

Update 2022

On 22 Dec, Michael Carpenter of the US Government published a long thread on Twitter. One tweet was a warning about a “A military flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh if Prime Minister Pashinyan does not cater to corrupt Russian interests in Armenia.”

Update September 2023

The BBC and other news outlets are reporting today about demonstrations that have been taking place in Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional capital Stepanakert. The demonstrators are demanding the reopening of the Lachin Corridor linking the Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia

For nearly nine months the corridor has been blocked by Azerbaijani authorities, resulting in shortages of food, medication, hygiene products and fuel.

What a mess.

Vichy

In May 1940, Germany invaded France and conquered it in six weeks. Under the peace terms, only the northern half of France was occupied by the Germans. The southern half of France was governed as Vichy France by the French themselves under Marshal Petain.*

The French outside France who didn’t like the Vichy peace terms, maintained a Free French government in exile.

In Syria, the Vichy government’s forces fought and were forced to sign an armistice with the British and Free French in June 1941.

In December 1941 the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour, and immediately afterwards Germany and Italy joined with Japan in declaring war on the United States.

Here is the strange thing, Vichy France maintained diplomatic relations with the United States until the Allies invaded French North Africa in November 1942. At that point the United States shut its consulate in Marseille.

So in that eleven month period from December 1941 to November 1942, a citizen of the U.S. could travel more or less freely around southern France. Not only that, the United States had a consulate in Vichy France.

I wonder what happened when German and U.S. citizens in Vichy met during that period. Did they politely nod to one another?

Come to think of it, ‘Casablanca’ – the Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman film could be just that – an American in Vichy controlled Morocco during that period. Though to be sure it could be set in the period before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. I guess there may be clues or statements in the film about when it was set. And now reading about the film at filmsite.org I find:

The Hollywood fairy-tale was actually filmed during a time of US ties with Vichy France when President Roosevelt equivocated and vacillated between pro-Vichy or pro-Gaullist support. And it was rushed into general release almost three weeks after the Allied landing at the Axis-occupied, North African city of Casablanca, when Eisenhower’s forces marched into the African city. Due to the military action, Warner Bros. Studios was able to capitalize on the free publicity and the nation’s familiarity with the city’s name when the film opened.

Varian Fry

Varian Fry was an American journalist who was in Germany in 1935 and didn’t like what he saw. When Germany invaded France in 1940, he asked permission of the U.S. State Department to rescue Jews from Vichy France.

In August 1940 he set up a fake business in Marseille, the declared mission of which was to alleviate the plight of refugees by donating food and clothing. Behind this front Fry helped thousands of Jews and a score of ‘undesirable’ artists make the journey overland to Spain and from there to neutral and friendly Portugal.

As time wore on, the U.S. State Department pressured him to get out but he stayed until he was kicked out by the Vichy French Authorities in August 1941, after two years of operations.

It came out after the war that the State Department was actively trying to prevent any Jews reaching the USA and frustrating the efforts of other Departments to help them.

Fry grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey and there is a permanent exhibition in his honour at the public library, and a street named after him.

Afterward: Marshal Petain

Marshal Petain commanded the French Army in WWI, and at the end of the war he was a hero of France and would have continued on to Berlin to prevent another war, but was overruled.

He changed in the inter-war years and led the establishment of his Government after Germany conquered France in June 1940.

After WWII the war, history decided that the French arrangement with the Germans was too cozy a collaboration to be called a victor-vanquished relationship. Petain was tried for war crimes and sentenced to death, but because of his age his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in confinement in 1951. Not least among his crimes were ordinances he signed at the request of the Germans that eased the transport of Jews to the camps, and the establishment of collaborationist armed militia that hunted members of the French Resistance.

Polar Bears and Rare Earth Deposits

I wrote this article in 2011 under the title ‘Polar Bears Poisoned And New Rare Earth Deposits Found’ – but the article was lost when I rebuilt this site. So I am re-publishing it here.

The fifteen lanthanide elements from lanthanum to lutetium – together with scandium and yttrium – are generally known as the rare earth elements.

They are essential in the production of TVs, phones, computers, and batteries.

Until now there has been a shortage of rare earths, exacerbated by China saying last December [ that would be December 2010 ] that it wanted to keep what is has – and it has almost all of the ore deposits.

That all changed last week when Japanese scientists announced that they had found huge deposits in international waters off Hawaii – deposits that are easy to get at and low in the associated radioactive materials usually found with them.

So that is good news for everyone who wants a phone, or a TV, or a computer.

And it is bad news for polar bears – and then for us.

The UK TV channel Channel 4 showed a program about polar bears in Svalbard in the north of Norway.

The programme was one in the series Inside Nature’s Giants that followed a team of veterinarians who carry out autopsies on elephants, giraffes, and other big animals.

The aim is to educate veterinary students (and the TV audience) about the special characteristics that enables each species to live as it does.

The autopsy on the polar bear was different in that it was ‘in the field’ in Svalbard and the polar bears were ones that the local Inuit hunters had hunted for food.

The programme was also different in that there were interviews with other teams of scientists who are in Svalbard investigating how polar bears are suffering from biological changes brought on by what they eat.

Specifically, they are losing sexuality, developing tumours, becoming weaker, and losing offspring.

What emerged was that because polar bears are at the top of the food chain, they are being poisoned by eating concentrated amounts of flame retardants.

Flame retardants are used in the plastics in TVs, phones, computers, etc. They are organohalogen and organophosphate compounds and they are released into the atmosphere when the products are recycled.

The products are recycled in countries like India – broken down by burning to get at the expensive rare earth metals within – and the flame retardant chemicals escape into the atmosphere and are carried thousands of miles around the world and up the food chain to polar bears (and I guess to the Inuit who eat the bears).

So just at the time that the scientific community is able to demonstrate the danger from these chemical flame retardants, a new source of rare earths is found – with the result that more and more TVs and phones can be made.