Hi Everyone
As I was born before WW2 started, as a small child I was oblivious to all those world events. It was not until the end of the war that I had some understanding of how the goodies had won and the baddies had been consigned to history. Two things stuck in my mind at the time were that the Junior Partner used the word "propaganda" on a regular basis, and when I watched Pathe news at our local cinema, whenever Winston Churchill appeared on the screen, some of the audience booed. This seemed odd to me as I thought that he had just won the war for us. Although I had a fairly good idea what propaganda meant, in case he was describing what the Senior Partner was saying, I decided to google it to refresh my knowledge. I quote, "Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing and persuading an audience to further a specific agenda. It often involves selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular perception or using loaded language to elicit an emotional response rather than a rational one. Propaganda can include various tactics such as misinformation, half truths , and emotional appeals to manipulate public opinion". It was at this point that I realised that someone we all know had got there before me, in fact, about seventy years before me, as he seems to have used this mantra for most of his life. The problem was that long ago, he was talking to six people in a small room, he is now talking to millions around the world. Let us hope that, like the Junior Partner, there are enough sensible people, including especially people who voted for him, to be alarmed by his unbelievable daily press conferences.
We all love planning a holiday. We decided that we needed to start thinking about our next special wedding anniversary in five years time. As we will be approaching middle age by then, we need somewhere warm and sunny with wonderful scenery, not too many hills and, of course, free bus passes. In this current unstable world, safety, pothole free roads with no litter is also a major consideration. This week, we found the perfect holiday location - Gaza. By then we will have a wide choice of luxury hotels like Hotel Trump, Days Inn Trump, Premier Inn Trump, Imperial Hotel Trump and, as a budget alternative, Travel Lodge Trump. I had second thoughts however as I decided that Donald was not getting any of our hard earned money unless of course, he manages to take over the UK as well as Canada and Greenland.
They say "What goes around comes around". Now that is very true as fashion changes, and we have gone from modern furniture to traditional and back to modern in just over six decades. Even many small things have changed and as kids, we had paper straws for drinking which worked perfectly as long as you did not have wet lips, until plastic took over the world and we evolved to plastic straws, but then sensibly, as we do our best to beat climate change paper straws are back. Now Donald has decided that "paper straws don't work" so this week he is signing one of those large pieces of paper while pouting for the cameras taking America back to plastic straws. As well as having nothing better to do I did not realise that he is also a sucker. You could say that this really is the final straw but we all know that there are many more to come.
Just a Thought :
My age doesn't bother me, it's the side effects.
Donald feels a strong connection to Scotland. He gets his skin tone from Irn-Bru.
Straw or no straw, that is the question.
Brian