Author: Paul Handover

Presidential transport

An article about Air Force One.

The Boeing 747, that currently serves as the means of air transport for President Trump, has been written about on The Conversation.

Here is that fascinating article:

ooOOoo

Air Force One is more than transportation – it has defined how presidents run the country and meet the world

A man in a dark suit climbs a stairway to a large plane.
President Donald Trump boards Air Force One on July 1, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Peter Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis

Air Force One used to be a high-flying symbol of American technology, ingenuity and power. For many, it was also a source of national pride.

The current Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One are a combination transport vehicle, command center, press room, medical center and apartment, complete with bedroom and office for the nation’s chief executive.

Now, to many, Air Force One has become scandalous.

On July 8, 2026, The New York Times reported that the latest version of the presidential aircraft – presented by Qatar as a gift to President Donald Trump – lacks the sophisticated countermeasures that were a ready defense for the 747s that had been in service since 1990. Critics immediately revived earlier claims that the new 747 was a corrupt transaction from the start. Trump later said the plane would be sent to be “maxed out” with upgrades.

This article is not part of that story. Nor is it the standard story of Air Force One that appears in numerous documentaries, which tend to be gee-whiz accounts of the amazing capacities of the president’s airplane.

I am a historian writing a book about the technologies that have shaped the long history of the American presidency, in which Air Force One looms large. I believe it is important to see Air Force One as more than a cool gadget or political flash point. Von Hardesty, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, certainly understood this when he wrote that “by the end of the 20th century, Air Force One had evolved into an essential arm of the American Presidency.”

Put simply, the presidency as we know it today would have been impossible without Air Force One, which has shaped and defined that role for decades.

A man, waving, and a woman at the top of a stairway leading down from an airplane with 'UNITED STATES OF AMERICA' painted on its side.
President Richard Nixon waves to the crowds from Air Force One with his wife, Pat, as they arrive at Ireland’s Shannon Airport on Oct. 3, 1970. Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

Horse-drawn carriage to the ‘Sacred Cow’

It was only recently that Americans or their presidents could imagine things this way. When presidents left the capital throughout most of the nation’s history, it was a lengthy, at times arduous, process that severed their connection with government offices.

As a result, presidents rarely traveled while in office and were more likely to depart Washington for extended vacations than for official business. Likewise, no serving president left the United States until Teddy Roosevelt visited the construction of the Panama Canal in 1906. Woodrow Wilson became the first sitting president to cross the Atlantic when he boarded the USS George Washington in 1918 to join the negotiations in Versailles at the end of World War I.

If few presidents got away from Washington to see the country and its residents before 1900, the flip side was also true: Few Americans saw presidential candidates or incumbents in person, especially Americans who lived outside the eastern third of the United States. Instead, the connection between presidents and average citizens was mediated through political parties, the press and eventually through broadcast media.

The first designated presidential aircraft arrived in 1933, but Franklin Roosevelt never flew on it. His first flight as president came in 1943, when American Airlines loaned a flying boat called the Dixie Clipper to ferry Roosevelt to meet with other Allied leaders at the Casablanca Conference. In 1945, Roosevelt traveled to Yalta on a Douglas VC-54C called the Sacred Cow, the first plane specifically built for presidential travel.

Two men, one in a suit and the other in a military uniform, sitting next to each other and talking on an airplane.
President Franklin Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower on the president’s plane en route to the Tehran Conference in December 1943. George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Despite these flights to important international meetings, Roosevelt and successors Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made limited domestic use of aircraft, preferring instead to travel by railroad. International trips remained lengthy journeys in loud, propeller-driven aircraft that encountered the greater turbulence of lower altitudes.

All this changed in 1962, when President John Kennedy acquired a brand-new Boeing 707, the first jet-powered Air Force One.

Presidential ubiquity

Flying higher, faster and quieter than their predecessors, the jet aircraft used for Air Force One made possible one of the central facets of the modern presidency: The nation’s chief executive could be a ubiquitous player in national politics and world affairs.

Presidential travel increased dramatically, both in its frequency and in the number of stops on each trip. This was not simply the result of the growing use of air travel worldwide. Where Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower understood world leadership as their ability to coordinate American power from Washington, Kennedy and his successors sought to make themselves the center of the story.

This seemed particularly important during the Cold War. As the United States asserted its leadership in the struggle against the Soviet Union, American presidents positioned themselves as the symbols of freedom in opposition to communism.

Consider President Richard Nixon traveling to China in 1972 to normalize relations, or Ronald Reagan flying to Iceland for the 1986 Reykjavík conference with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the future of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The presence of a president at these conferences elevated both the importance of the event and the image of the president as a statesman who was able to quickly pivot back and forth from national to international leadership.
As American presidents struggled to maintain their power and their relevance after the end of the Cold War, their international travel only increased. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each made over twice the number of international trips as Ronald Reagan did.

These trips ranged from goodwill visits to maintain old alliances to attempts to build new connections after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Presidents specifically visited international hot spots, positioning themselves as global peacemakers. The sight of the American president descending the long stairs from Air Force One, smiling and waving along the way, became a symbol of American diplomacy.

A group of people seated on an airplane listening to a man speaking and gesturing with his hands.
President Jimmy Carter meets with reporters aboard Air Force One on July 1, 1979, while flying from Seoul, South Korea, to Honolulu. AP Photo/Ira Schwarz

Official business – and campaigning

If Air Force One enabled presidents to announce themselves as statesmen abroad, it also revolutionized politics at home.

During the 1970s, the two major parties moved from selecting their nominees at national conventions to a system where state primaries decided who would lead the ticket.

This change emerged from demands that political power move from party leaders to party members. But a primary system would have been unimaginable without aircraft to shuttle candidates around the country. That was particularly important for incumbents, as air travel enabled them to be both sitting presidents and active candidates.

Presidents and their handlers learned how to combine official government business, which permitted the use of Air Force One, with campaign opportunities. These moments not only changed how presidents operated; they changed how Americans understood their presidents.

This change began with Kennedy’s use of the jet-powered Air Force One for domestic travel, including the tragic decision to visit Texas in November 1963, where he was assassinated. In just his first year in office, Bill Clinton visited 37 states over the course of 73 days.

Air Force One is a symbol of presidential power, but its problems only reinforce the fact that technology shapes the presidency.

The clearest demonstration was on 9/11. President Bush was in Florida that morning. Air Force One whisked him into the air, delivering him first to the safety of an Air Force base in Louisiana and then to the fortified headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska, and still had him back at the White House by the end of the day.

It was a grim reminder of the other task for Air Force One: a safe transport for the president during a national crisis or nuclear armageddon. While the aircraft fulfilled its promise to keep the president safe in a crisis, its legendary communication systems faltered. Crucially, Bush struggled to coordinate with senior officials in Washington, leaving him momentarily out of the loop at a terrifying historical juncture.

The role that presidents have assumed at home and abroad, as well as the ways Americans interact with their presidents, have taken form through the possibilities – and the limitations – of presidential aircraft. Air Force One is not just a great way to travel or a nifty gadget, nor is it peripheral to the presidency. It is central to it.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History & American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

The last sentence of the last paragraph spells out how Air Force One is central to the presidency. The aircraft serves as a symbol of presidential power.

Picture Parade Five Hundred and Thirty-Four

Just three photos of the deer in our back garden, and then the moon.

oooo

oooo

oooo

Now to the moon, taken last Friday.

oooo

oooo

oooo

oooo

oooo

It was impossible to resist taking these photographs of the moon.

Nonsense on Stilts

The book by Massimo Pigliucci.

The subtitle of the book is “How to Tell Science from Bunk“

I am up to page 48 and I read something that is so obvious but had not occured to me before now. I have spoken to friends and they, too, had not realised this.

Namely, that the fact that “…. a variation on the old latitudinal hypothesis ….. explains a major causal factor explaining the rise of more successful civilizations in Euroasia, say, than in sub-Saharan Africa or on the American continent, is that Euroasia expands along an East-West axis.“

This East-West expansion provides greater opportunity for the invention of agriculture and the domestication of, say, the horse. Simply because feed crops are easier to grow owing to the smaller change in weather patterns. Unlike, the North-South expansion, where there is the problem of having to adjust to different weather towards the North or towards the South.

Here is the book from Amazon.

Version 1.0.0

It is a very interesting book.

Trashing the living world

The latest post from George Monbiot.

In a weird way, this post published by Geo Monbiot on the 24th July, 2026, reveals a similar vein to yesterday’s post about the Save Europe Act. I mean they are both about the unfair and unreasonable power held by those in political command.

Over to Mr Monbiot (and I have his permission to republish):

ooOOoo

Chickened-Out

Posted on 24th July 2026

Trashing the living world on behalf of corporate power: is this really all we can expect from the ministers in charge of protecting it?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd July 2026

There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the Environment Secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years.

Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests.

Standard operating procedure, by contrast, is exemplified by the final acts of the outgoing secretary, whose name, to put you out of your misery, is Emma Reynolds. To give just one example – which could be seen as an embodiment of everything that has gone wrong here – she spent her last weeks in the post trying to remove the brakes on industrial chicken farming.

In front of a parliamentary committee this month, she railed against the planning constraints holding back yet more giant chicken factories (let’s not grace them with the name of farms). If only these obstacles were demolished, she mused, “there is great investment out there waiting to be made … I want to bring down these barriers as much as you do”. She said she had spoken to other departments to ensure permission for new chicken factories was easier to obtain.

Neither she nor the MPs questioning her gave any hint of why these buildings have run into trouble with the planning system. In fact, there was no mention of any of the problems the factories cause: the MPs’ only apparent interest was in what the industry wanted. What’s the point of MPs if they simply channel corporate demands? But these factories are killing some of our most beautiful rivers. They generate far more dung than the surrounding fields can absorb. The surplus washes downhill into the nearest stream.

The only decision that counts is the planning decision. As soon as permission for a chicken unit is granted, the local tributary, and possibly the main stem of the river it drains into, is as good as dead. It’s not even as if these factories support jobs and growth: by killing the rivers, they help to destroy local economies.

I thought we’d won this argument. But argument, it seems, is no match for economic power. Reynolds’s loyalties appeared to lie not with the ecosystems she was meant to protect, but with the lobbyists threatening them. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising: before she joined Keir Starmer’s government, she worked as a lobbyist, representing the financial sector.

Disturbingly, it was the new environment secretary, Angela Eagle, while working as Reynolds’s deputy, who sought to drive through the “planning reforms” the poultry industry is demanding, telling chicken lobbyists “planning should enable ambition, not stifle it”. Will she now take Burnham’s “circuit breaker” promise seriously, and junk this appeasement of one of our most destructive industries?

At a recent farming festival, Reynolds claimed that boosting the poultry sector would enhance our food security. I don’t know how many times we need to point this out, but isn’t it bleeding obvious that it has the opposite effect? The feed sustaining chickens in these factories must be either imported or grown on land that could otherwise directly feed people. There could be more soya in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109g of soya to produce 100g of chicken breast. Yet this is just one of several components of their diet.

The chicken business in the UK is also controlled by a handful of giant companies: another security red light. If food security were the objective, the government would encourage us to eat fewer chickens and other animals, and more plants. But in parliament, Reynolds also proudly announced that she was disregarding the targets set by the government’s Climate Change Committee to reduce livestock numbers. I find myself asking, over and again: “Are they trying to harm this country?”

To advance their dismal agenda, Reynolds and Eagle set up something called the Farming and Food Partnership Board. Its aim is to encourage “closer collaboration between farming, industry and government”. How could it possibly be closer? The environment department, Defra, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the farming industry. The only members of this new board are government ministers and corporate representatives and lobbyists. Among its objectives is a “poultry sector growth plan”, to address the issue of “planning barriers”.

This chickening out is just one of many examples of how, by working for special interests, the environment department has harmed the ecosystems and the people it is supposed to protect. Another is the government’s “delivery plan” to restore nature, released by Reynolds just before she left office. It’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver: just a catalogue of vague hopes and blandishments. It could be summarised as “do nothing, for fear of offending landowners”. Far from meeting its promise to protect and restore 30% of the land in England by 2030, Reynolds’s department has presided over continued decline. That’s her legacy: less nature, less resilience, less security.

Much worse is planned: Starmer’s government proposed a “regulating for growth bill”, whose text we haven’t yet seen, but which appears to threaten even greater assaults on nature protection. It may contain one of his government’s most alarming proposals: creating a system that could be described as pop-up freeports, in which companies all over the country would be able to operate in temporary “sandboxes”, where the usual rules don’t apply. We should see this as a key test of Burnham’s promise to end neoliberalism: will he drop this nonsense?

I’ll keep asking the question, regardless of who occupies this office: do you know the name of the environment secretary? The answer is likely to depend on one factor: whether they are ready to break the grip of corporate power, and defend us and the rest of the living world. Whether, in other words, they want to do their job.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

It makes for grim reading.

Thanks to George Monbiot for revealing the truth as to what is going on with the United Kingdom Government.

Save Europe Act

This is very important to all people, not just Europeans. This is vital for every citizen across the world.

Dan originally sent me the link to this video. I thank him enormously.

Here is the video:

I repeat, all persons who care about freedom, should sign this Act.

I forgot today’s post

Sorry!

I was distracted by something yesterday and completely forgot to prepare today’s Picture Parade. Hopefully, I will remember to post it on August 2nd. It will be the second set of Ethyn’s wonderful photos.

The wildfire smoke

A useful article from The Conversation.

When I first read this article, I thought everyone will be aware, such is the awareness of wildfire smoke in so many places, and media.

Then I realised that this was wrong, and if only one or two people benefit from the advice then it should be republished. The original was on The Conversation.

ooOOoo

Yes, breathing wildfire smoke can harm your health – here’s what you can do to protect yourself

A woman rides a bike through city air tinted orange by wildfire smoke. Neither she nor a woman walking in the background is wearing a protective mask.
Heavy wildfire smoke from Canada’s forests turn skies orange in Toronto and across parts of the U.S. in July 2026. Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Colleen E. Reid, University of Colorado Boulder

Wildfire smoke from fires burning in Canada and northern Minnesota has been pouring across the Great Lakes and northeastern U.S. states, turning skies an eerie shade of orange. In the West, smoke has also been spreading into communities in Colorado and neighboring states as more wildfires burn in hot, dry conditions in July 2026.

University of Colorado environmental health researcher Colleen Reid explains what’s in that smoke and why breathing it is a health concern everyone should be aware of.

What is in wildfire smoke?

Wildfire smoke is a complex mixture that includes nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and particulate matter. When homes or buildings also burn, they can release an even more toxic stew of chemicals from burning electronics, furniture, plastics, paints and much more.

What you see when you see a smoke plume or when the air is hazy with wildfire smoke are the tiny particles that are too small to fall to the ground right away with gravity.

These particles, which scientists call particulate matter, are very small – we measure them in microns. When you breathe them in, they can harm your health. The smaller the particles, the deeper they can get into your lungs and body.

Map shows heavy smoke and low air quality across the Great Lakes Region and into the Northeast
EPA air quality monitors show high risks from smoke in many parts of the Great Lakes and northeastern U.S. on July 15, 2026. Reds are considered very unhealthy levels. Purples are either extremely unhealthy for light purple or hazardous for areas in maroon. AirNow Fire and Smoke Map

You may have heard the term PM2.5. It means particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter, many times smaller than the width of a human hair. High concentrations of these particles in the air during wildfire smoke episodes are what trigger air quality alerts.

Has wildfire smoke been increasing recently, and why?

Yes, wildfires have become more frequent and more intense just in the past couple of decades, and when wildfires become more frequent and intense, so does the smoke.

Scientists have found that wildfires are becoming more frequent due to a variety of factors that include increases in fire weather – hot, dry, windy conditions that fuel the spread of fires due to climate change – as well as other natural and human factors. The reasons for the increases in wildfires vary in different parts of the world.

Other studies have found that wildfire smoke makes up an increasing portion of the PM2.5 in the air in the U.S., and in many areas it is offsetting the decreases in air pollution that the U.S. has gained through regulations of industrial and vehicle emissions under the Clean Air Act.

How could wildfire smoke affect my health?

Some effects of breathing wildfire smoke include shortness of breath, coughing, itchy or watery eyes, headaches, rashes and itchiness. But smoke can cause more serious harm. Numerous epidemiological studies have shown that hospitalizations and emergency department visits for asthma and other respiratory diseases increase during wildfire smoke events.

After you breathe in the particles, they cause inflammation and oxidative stress, and they can move into the blood and spread throughout the body, affecting other organ systems.

People stand in a field as a smoke plume turns the sky orange and then dark.
The height of a smoke plume, like this one from Colorado’s Aspen Acres fire near Pueblo on July 1, 2026, affects the amount of particles and chemicals people on the ground are exposed to. But generally, if you can smell smoke, you’re breathing it in. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Breathing wildfire smoke has been associated with higher risk of preterm births and other issues during pregnancy, and potentially cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes, although the evidence for these effects are more mixed.

The longer-term health effects of wildfire smoke are less clear, but it is a growing area of research.

Where can I learn more about wildfire smoke risks where I live?

The first thing to do to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is to know how bad the smoke is and how long it is going to last.

One great place to get information for where you live on current wildfire smoke is fire.airnow.gov. You can zoom in on the map to where you live and find color-coded circles reflecting data from both U.S. EPA air-quality monitors and PurpleAir sensors that people have put in their homes.

The colors show the level of PM2.5 at that location and suggest the associated health risk.

To find out how wildfire smoke is expected to change over time in North America, you can look at maps from FireSmoke Canada and the U.S. Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program.

What can I do to protect myself and my family from wildfire smoke?

First of all, depending on the level of the air quality index where you are, there are different recommendations. When wildfire smoke reaches unhealthy levels, stay indoors as much as possible, with doors and windows shut to keep the wildfire smoke out.

If you have an air cleaner, use it, but check the filter, as filters can fill up quickly. Similarly, check the filter on your home HVAC system and replace it if needed.

If you have to go outside, consider wearing a well-fitting N95, KN95 or KF94 mask. These masks can protect you from inhaling particles in the air around you. Looser masks, such as surgical masks, mostly protect others from what you breathe out instead. They do not have a tight seal around your mouth, and when you breathe in, the air with all of the particles can find its way around the sides of the mask.

Having a tight fit of the mask to your face is important so that when you breathe, the air is going through the mask and capturing the smoke particles rather than letting them into your body where they cause harm.

If your home is leaky and you can see haze inside, consider going to a public space, such as a library or mall, with a good HVAC system. Some municipalities have designated clean air spaces where anyone can go.

Colleen E. Reid, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

Thank you, Colleen, and thank you The Conversation. Lots of good advice.

Just an awe-inspiring photo of the Milky Way

A stunning photograph, courtesy of EarthSky.

I hope that I can republish this photograph. I shall provide all the details.

ooOOoo

Milky Way over Isola delle Correnti

On 07/17/2026 11:00 pm by Enrico Modica | Website | Portopalo di Capopassero, Sicily, Italy 

The photograph was captured at approximately 11:00 PM (23:00 CEST) on July 17, 2026, near Isola delle Correnti, the southernmost point of Sicily, Italy, where the Ionian Sea meets the Mediterranean Sea.

The image depicts the Galactic Centre of the Milky Way rising above the island, with the lighthouse beam reflecting across the sea and naturally guiding the viewer’s eye toward the star-filled sky. The bright central bulge of our Galaxy lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, approximately 27,000 light-years from Earth. Also visible are several prominent summer constellations, including Scorpius (with the bright red star Antares), Ophiuchus and Aquila (with Altair).

Camera: Nikon D750 (full-frame DSLR)
Lens: Samyang 14 mm f/2.8
Mount: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i Pro (star tracker)

Sky
Camera: Nikon D750
Lens: Samyang 14 mm
Star tracker used
30 stacked exposures
ISO 800
Aperture: f/3.2
Exposure time: 45 seconds per frame

Foreground
4 untracked exposures
ISO 400
Aperture: f/4
Exposure time: 30 seconds per frame
Processing

The sky images were calibrated, aligned, and stacked using DeepSkyStacker to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The RAW files were then developed in Adobe Lightroom Classic, while the final image was completed in Adobe Photoshop, where the tracked sky and the static foreground were blended and refined to achieve a natural representation of the scene while preserving the finest details of the Galactic Centre.

ooOOoo

It is a stunning image.

It takes me back many years to when I was living on Songbird of Kent, a sloop, in Cyprus, and using the summers to cruise. I will never forget the night skies at sea, far from lights from the land.

Beautiful!

Ella Fitzgerald

What a fabulous person!

We came across this tribute to Ella the other day and I wanted to include a YouTube link (above).

She was born in 1917 and died in June, 1996.

Here is a summary of her life, courtesy of a Google search.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, composer, and songwriter who is often called the “First Lady of Song”. Known for her rhythmic sense, intonation, and scat singing, Fitzgerald was the first African-American woman to win a Grammy and the first woman to win multiple Grammys. She won 13 Grammys in total and sold more than 40 million albums. Fitzgerald’s career was marked by her determination to break down societal barriers.

Picture Parade Five Hundred and Thirty-Three

Just some beautiful pictures.

oooo

oooo

oooo

oooo

oooo

oooo

These photographs were taken by Ethyn.

More will be shown in a week’s time.

And I heard more about where they were taken: “They were taken June 6th 2025 at the Rocky Mountain national park The statue was taken in Estes Park, outside the Stanley hotel.”