WITH our own election around the corner, it’s still hard to take your eyes off America these days. Trump hosted a massive Maga rally in Madison Square Gardens at the weekend to close his dark and weird presidential campaign.
A comic kicked off the rally by calling Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage’, mocked Hispanics for failing to use birth control and called Jews cheap and Palestinians ‘rock-throwers’. Another speaker compared Kamala Harris to a prostitute with ‘pimp handlers’ and another called her ‘the Antichrist.’
Meanwhile, Trump is being cosied up to by the likes of Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) boss Dana White.
It seems the half of America that is spellbound by his nativistic and racist worldview is not for changing and most people will already have their minds made up, whatever happens in the final week.
There was always the possibility of an October surprise in previous elections but Trump has bent political normality so far out of shape that there is literally nothing he could do to scupper his chances with those who already support him. In the past he has said he could shoot somebody and not lose any voters, and the sad thing is he appears to be correct.
It’s taken a lot of the heat and speculation out of our own national election which you’d imagine will suit the current establishment down to the ground. Again, it’s extremely hard to predict how things will roll on the day.
Sinn Féin have had a month of serious setbacks, it would seem, but there is still a sense that people are sick of the inflation crunch and the ridiculous cost of living and could be seeking a bit of change.
Thankfully, the choices for the Irish electorate are nowhere near as stark or, frankly, terrifying as they are in the next parish over.
Look up - it’s an eVtol
I READ with interest during the week that the Federal Aviation Administration in the USA has published regulations for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles. These are better known as air taxis in the industry but to you and me they are flying cars and this could mean that the future we were promised by Doc Brown and Marty McFly is finally coming to pass!
The new regulations should open up a brand-new, multibillion-dollar transportation industry as this is the first new airborne vehicle class to be signed off since the helicopter in 1940.
These electric aircraft take off and land vertically like helicopters, but transition to fly with fixed wings like airplanes, so they represent a brand new category.
The plan is for them to take off from ‘vertiports’ which would be similar to taxi ranks.
The prospect of affordable local air transport is certainly a titillating idea. I remember many nights spent in the rugby club in Clon when an air taxi would have been just the ticket.
The EU’s aviation agency, Easa, has been planning for a future of urban air mobility for years, and released their own set of regulations in 2022, so the prospect of this arriving to our shores in the coming years is actually very real.
The Future Mobility Campus (FMCI) in Shannon has been carrying out experiments with the support of the Department of Transport and a company in Dublin has apparently been working with the European Space Agency on a potential route between Dun Laoghaire and Howth on a trial basis.
Can you imagine a day trip across to Sheep’s Head and maybe touch down for a spot of lunch in Ahakista?
Or what these machines might mean for farmers or people who have emergencies in remote areas? Will Doc Brown’s words ring true – where we’re going, we don’t need roads?
Or will these flying cabs be like any new technology in Ireland and be used mainly to ferry rich men to tents at the Galway races?
Not Japan’s Fungi
IT’S like a story from a horror movie but it seems that a bottlenose dolphin has been terrifying the coastal Japanese town of Tsuruga. The male has been attacking and biting swimmers, and in some cases aggressively pressing his genitals against them.
Marine experts are saying he’s just trying to communicate but, if you ask me, there’s no excuse for that sort of toxic masculinity in this day and age. You wouldn’t see Wally the Walrus carrying on like that, would you? And I imagine Fungi is turning in his grave. It’ll certainly be hard to ever look at Flipper in the same way again.
