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On the 8th March 2014 a Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner code-named MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, China. The aircraft carried twelve crew members and two hundred and twenty-seven passengers. It has not been seen since.

The aircraft apparently disappeared into thin air. The first forty minutes of the flight were routine. The Malaysian air traffic control passed the flight to the Vietnamese ATC via the aircraft’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, one of Malaysia’s most senior pilots. Zaharie never contacted the Ho Chi Min ATC and nothing more was heard from the aircraft. It literally disappeared into thin air.

Nine years later, we are no further forward in discovering what happed to that hapless plane and the 239 people on board.  There have been a multitude of theories, some viable and others downright ridiculous. Even this writer put forth one viewpoint in a story entitled, “MH370-Flight To Armageddon.“

The truth is that no-one knows where the aircraft is, though scientific analysis indicates it eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in the Indian Ocean. Some twenty pieces of aircraft wreckage have washed ashore on Réunion, Madagascar and Mozambique. It is purported to have come from the stricken aircraft.

There is hope that a new search may commence within the next year or so.  The original search team has stated they have new evidence come to light. As yet no-one, apart from the company involved, knows what that evidence might be.

Nine years on and still the relatives and loved ones of those on board have no more idea of what may have happened to them, than they did on the 9th March 2014.

It’s a sad indictment of humanity that we can allow such long and arduous suffering because governments don’t want to spend the money on continued searches.

Let’s ensure we don’t forget those unfortunates on board that doomed aircraft, and those left behind who are still grieving.

Last week the UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled that the government was right to strip a British citizen of their citizenship. This despite it not proven that she held citizenship in any other country, and despite Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that states:

“Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission is the most secretive judicial body in the UK. Nobody is allowed to know who sits on it, other than they are high court judges.

Almost all teenagers rebel in some form during those years. There are a few who were mollycoddled, given everything they wanted, could borrow daddy’s sports car to court the local debutante, and ended up as politicians or bankers. Most of us rebelled, and often it was the likes of them we were rebelling against.

I wasn’t the worst teenager, but I got in a few scrapes. I was caught drinking underage in a pub when I was sixteen. It peeved me no end as I’d been a regular there for two years and it had a full-size snooker table. A sergeant from the local force wandered in one night and caught me with a full pint glass. I did offer to buy him one but he didn’t seem very thirsty.

My mates and I loved driving cars. None of us were old enough for a licence  as we were still schoolboys. No way could we afford a car , so we used to borrow them on the occasional evening for joyrides.

It was fun till we got caught, and for a time I held the dubious honour of losing my licence before I was even old enough to hold one.

It was a simpler life then with no internet and social media to brainwash us.  We were much less likely to be lured away to fight for dubious causes in foreign lands. In 2015, one young teenager and British citizen, Shamima Begum from Lambeth,  South London, along with two other teenage girls, was lured into the murderous pseudo-religious group, Islamic State, by bad people on social media.

We all think we know what we’re doing when we’re fourteen or fifteen. Of course, we don’t. We’re simply trying to wander our way along the murky path to so-called adulthood. Some never make it. Many get stuck in the teenage years until the day they die. They end up with positions of power in government, or, “The City,” but still drink themselves silly with wild parties while the rest of us stay locked down and isolated against Covid-19. These elderly teenageers make laws which suit them rather than the rest of the country, and break laws and degrade moralities because they believe they were never anything but wise adults, even while driving daddy’s sports car, at age fifteen.

Sajid David is a fifty-four year old teenager.

He happened to be the Home Secretary in December 2019 who cancelled Shamima Begum’s British citizenship, after that young woman was found in a refugee camp in northern Syria. She was nursing a fourth child. The other three had died shortly after birth. It’s understood the fourth child has now died from pneumonia.

Shamima Begum is twenty-three now. She’s no teenager. After the life she’s been leading I would think she’d make a better Home Secretary than Sajid David ever did, which let’s be honest, would not be difficult.

She doesn’t have Bangladeshi citizenship, despite the UK government affirming that she does. The Bangladeshi government has denied the assertion and says if she returns there she will be executed as a terrorist. That, at least, makes her a refugee seeking asylum.

The British Establishment, from the government and Parliament up to the highest courts in the land are staffed by teenagers aged between thirty and ninety. They were all born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They all courted debutantes and borrowed daddy’s sports car.

Shamima Begum was a child when she and two friends were brainwashed into believing a load of pseudo-religious and highly dangerous rubbish, by a woman in Glasgow at the time, by the name of Aqsa Mahmood. One of her friends paid with her life in a Russian air strike while planning to escape from Syria. The whereabouts of the other is unknown, possibly also dead.

There’s a lot of people in the West, particularly in the UK, who will say, “Let Begum rot in Syria. She deserves no better.”

I got away lightly when I was sixteen. A £2 fine for the drinking, and about thirty quid and a six month licence suspension for “taking and driving away a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent.” Maybe in another country I would have fared worse. After all, you can get fifteen years jail in Russia today just for mentioning the word, “war.” I think my crimes were far worse than that!

We don’t know what Shemima Begum did while she was with ISIS. There’s a lot of rumour and third-rate media speculation, often offered up as fact. It’s not hard to imagine what she saw. One thing is certain, you don’t see the things that ISIS did at first-hand and stay a teenager very long.

It’s time she was allowed to go home. It’s time the British people remembered their humanity, and perhaps also their own teenage years.

I find myself growing more angry as I get older. Maybe it’s because I’ve been retired a while. I have more time to observe the world around me and those who inhabit it. In particular, the human race to which I belong.

Abuse of power is, above all, what makes me most angry. There have been abuses of power since Homo sapiens came down from the trees, and maybe even before that. Originally, it was survival of the fittest, the natural evolutionary process that guaranteed only the best, strongest, fittest, passed on their genes to their next generation.

It wasn’t until so-called civilisation took hold and mankind found he could rise above and control those around him, that true abuse began. The era of powerful dictatorial monarchs and emperors was upon us. It was here that the natural evolutionary process we call survival of the fittest, became warped in the brain of Homo sapiens and evolved into something we simply call, “greed.”

Millions were massacred by armies led by these power-hungry early dictators, greedy to enlarge their lands or to subdue their enemies and force them into new, fashionable, religions, from which they took hefty tithes.

Today, nothing has changed except the climate. Dictators are on the rise everywhere. They have charge of nations, governments, corporations. Their slaves are not just the workers. Whole governments now bow to the will of the corporate dictators and leave the lowly workers to suffer further deprivation.

In early history the weapons were sword and crossbow. Now, it is more sophisticated. While missiles and tanks destroy whole nations and kill millions, the internet and other media have become possibly even more powerful with their ability to propagandize and brainwash whole populations.  In Russia, a population initially opposed to Vladimir Putin’s tyranny in Ukraine, has now been effectively brainwashed via government media, to accept and even support the hideous crimes committed by their armed forces.

Survival of the fittest is no longer necessary. We go to great lengths to keep alive the more physically and mentally unfit of our offspring. Greed has become the acceptable face of Homo sapiens, greed for money, possessions, and power. So great is this factor in human life that we are now prepared to risk the very planet we inhabit in order to maintain our greed obsession.

Despite the warnings of climate scientists; despite the obvious and often deadly evidence of a planet in distress, we still continue as we’ve always done to rob and pillage our home for no other purpose than to satisfy our greed.

Throughout four billion years of evolutionary history, creatures have come and gone. Millions of lifeforms that never made it to a permanent place on Earth. For one reason or another they just weren’t suited to survive here. A number have made it, but only one has evolved an insatiable  greed that will determine its own demise.

Evolution is a natural process. When a part becomes un-natural it is discarded as unsuitable and becomes extinct. Unless, we radically change our ways very quickly, we will be the next to be discarded.

I grow more angry as I get older because the future becomes much clearer, and for Homo sapiens, much shorter.