Humans. Is it way past our bedtime?

“If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t. So some of it is that kind of preparation for just being a bit more resilient.” – Environment Secretary, Dame Angela Eagle hesitantly, diffidently imagines we can afford to buy extra food and have somewhere to store it. Like squirrels. Maybe in our cheek pouches? And that ‘the emergency services’ operate some kind of meals-on-wheels service, which they don’t.

This morning to add to my regular Saturday shop I bought two small packets of dried fruit and an emergency box of linguine, only to find a partly consumed box of linguine and some canned fruit in my ’emergency store’ dating from 2018 and the Brexit ‘no deal’ panic. The pasta sauce had gone off.

Are we all maybe going a bit crazy?

Crime and Punishment

• “if a person agrees with any other person or persons that a course of conduct shall be pursued which, if the agreement is carried out in accordance with their intentions, either—
• (a)will necessarily amount to or involve the commission of any offence or offences by one or more of the parties to the agreement, or
• (b)would do so but for the existence of facts which render the commission of the offence or any of the offences impossible,
• he is guilty of conspiracy to commit the offence or offences in question.” Criminal Law Act, 1977.

Dear Nigel

“Reform UK has broken no laws…” is not true, is it? Your arrogant little posh bunnies were clearly caught out, planning to break the law on donor finance in order, it was said, to mislead the public with fake polling data. True, they did not get as far as actually doing so, while the video evidence of conspiracy may be inadmissible in court, as the filming was surreptitious. But, while the conspiracy was hatched elsewhere by two of your smarmier ‘elite’ public schoolboys, you were clearly shown approving the plan – because nothing happens within Reform UK without your say-so. Not, as you say, a “good look” – while what there is for your people to “investigate” is a moot point, as you have been reported to the police and it is their responsibility now to investigate, not yours. Being quoted on the front pages as saying that the party ‘could do better’ (and later, that you weren’t listening to what the conspirators were saying? Oh, purleaze!) is the most astonishing chutzpah! It’s your party, your policy to game the system by importing illicitly laundered funds.

Own it.

It would be an ironic twist of fate if your Head of Policy, James Orr, were to be indicted for the crime of conspiracy. He is one of that poisonous little cabal of Cambridge academics who, intellectually convinced that there is a hierarchy of races at the bottom of which in terms of intelligence squats the Black man, the ‘DEI hire’, in reality useful only for running the 100 metres and singing the blues, hounded poor Professor Jason Arday to his death.

It is also said by some that Orr has been recruiting and brainwashing his students in a far right-wing Christian ‘madrassa’ he has unofficially set up at the university to provide intellectual ‘respectability’ to Reform UK’s racist policies which, I’m sorry to say, more closely resemble a criminal enterprise than a bonafide political party. I gather his college has not been exactly helpful in addressing this matter, possibly out of concern for a large donation from Palantir’s founder billionaire and Trumpian extremist, Peter Thiel.

And while I have your attention, Nigel, perhaps you would care to comment on why your friend and donor, ‘Posh George’ Cottrell has so suddenly closed his office and shut up shop in Montenegro? You know, the office where several Reform donors with connections to sanctioned Putin cash gusher Lukoil are said to have registered business entities, as well as your other great friend and benefactor, Christopher Harborne, owner of an aviation fuel business?

Was it to do with investigations into the trail of illicit foreign money supposedly being laundered through your favourite crypto-currency ‘wallets’, or was George possibly spooked by allegations concerning his local accountants and a client indicted for cocaine trafficking out of South America where, coincidentally, Mr Harborne’s crypto ‘blockchain’ business is registered in lovely, democratic El Salvador – and has also amassed, it’s said, a large quantity of gold bullion? I see your reassuring presence is still plastered over the website of Direct Bullion, inviting investments, having earned you the small reward of £415 thousand to act for a few hours as their ‘brand ambassador’ and golden boy.

We should be told, but I don’t suppose we shall be. Despite that awful little cow, Suella Braverman, doing the rounds, trying to push the line that the exposure of the Reform funding plot is a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by ‘the mainstream media’ – ah, that most favoured of Trumpisms again – the Establishment or the Deep State; even, God help us, ‘environmental activists’, who are typically ‘out to get’ the popular new kids on the block, the vast body of the Reform funding story has actually featured nowhere in the mainstream media, which is terrified of Farage’s voters, but has been doggedly investigated and exposed over many months by journalists in the alternative press; publications in print and online such as OpenDemocracy, the New World and Byline Times, whose findings will no doubt be of interest to the Met.

‘And we’ve set up a message board to co-ordinate our removal of the French bulldogs.’ (BBC)

Sic transit Gloria

• “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited a pastor who wants to repeal women’s suffrage to give a sermon at the Pentagon. The right to abortion has been lost, and there’s a growing call among anti-abortion activists to imprison women who terminate their pregnancies. Some big companies, including Zoom and Deloitte, are rolling back parental leave. Alex Karp, head of the tech surveillance behemoth Palantir, openly fantasizes that A.I. will eliminate jobs done largely by educated women and thus reduce their power in society.”

– Michelle Goldberg, in The New York Times, lamenting that almost everything the late Gloria Steinem fought for and mostly achieved (there was only one woman in the Senate when she first began writing about feminism, and that was the widow of a deceased senator keeping his seat warm), is going backwards in a country run by “a thuggish cabal of cartoon misogynists”. (‘What Gloria Steinem can teach us’, Comment, 4 September.

‘Second-stage feminism’ has had one positive outcome, however. The Moscow Times is reporting: “A new investigation finds women are even being hired for front-line assault jobs, as pressure on Russian manpower intensifies.” The average life of a conscript on the front line is 30 minutes.

GW – And round we go

USA: “Extreme heat caused one of Chicago’s busiest bridges to malfunction Wednesday, leaving the structure partially raised and bringing traffic along DuSable Lake Shore Drive to a standstill. A Chicago Fire Department boat was seen spraying water onto the bridge around 11:40 a.m., apparently in an effort to cool the structure. … Chicago was under a heat advisory that covered much of northern Illinois from noon until 9 p.m. Wednesday. AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperatures were expected to reach 100 to 105 degrees.” Chicago has reported its first death from the mosquito-borne West Nile virus this year, as health officials confirm the first two human cases in the city in 2026.

Meanwhile, with three huge weather systems rotating in the Pacific, a new hurricane threat is emerging for Hawaii, named Lowell, while rounds of tropical moisture are forecast to take aim at the southwestern United States, including California. So far this year, there have been 15 tropical depressions and storms in the eastern and central Pacific, including five hurricanes. Heightened activity is being blamed on El Niño. (AccuWeather)

China: “Local authorities in south-eastern China’s Fujian province have relocated 83,700 people in dangerous areas as Typhoon Saudel brings persistent heavy rainfall, with high cumulative rainfall in some areas and a high risk of disasters.” (Xinhua) More than 2,500 teachers and students were trapped in a school compound in neighbouring ⁠Zhejiang province on Wednesday after heavy rainfall caused flash floods. Last week’s Tibet/Nepal flood is estimated to have cost $2.5 bn in physical damage alone. The US has generously pledged $5 million.

Tailpipe

The glacier area on the Tibetan plateau has shrunk by around 24% over the past 60 years, with around 7,000 small glaciers disappearing completely, reports the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (Carbon Brief)

A sociopath speaks

“‘I’m very sorry if someone dies because of the heat, but I don’t think that’s a reason for us never to be allowed to take a flight again, or stop being allowed to eat meat,’ said the (notorious climate-change denying) presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer on 24 June, citing policies no one is putting in place…” (Carbon Brief, from Talk Radio)

How is a dismal fossil-fuel shill like Brewer allowed to broadcast her liquefied shit on national media? Is Ofcom away on holiday? Maybe in Turkey, getting some teeth?

Way to go

Texas midterms: “The latest quarterly filings show Democrat James Talarico swamping Paxton in donors and dollars. Talarico brought in more than $31 million compared to Paxton’s meager $9.3 million.” Meanwhile, Republicans are reportedly panicking because the notoriously miserly Trump has amassed a $400 million ‘war chest’ and shows no sign of spending a cent on supporting ‘his’ candidates…

We just don’t know how to do politics here in Britain!

At home in the baboon enclosure

Possibly the best paragraph The Pumpkin has ever written, from August 2018:

“Give such a man, such a saloon-bar bore with his trite opinions on show, his uneducated, bombastic and short-sighted solutions to solving the problems with which he sees the world – i.e. himself alone – beset, mainly, by Lefties; hand him the terrifying and complex power of the Presidency of the world’s greatest military and economic empire; surround him with fawning acolytes and incompetent, venal satraps, and his dull-minded prejudices, now unquestionable, grow like a cancer until he is all purulent, tumorous matter.”

Severely deranged Trump syndrome

On 03 September, New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie tells us:

• “On Sunday, the president posted an A.I.-generated video of the destruction of Kharg Island, an Iranian stronghold. ‘Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!,’ he wrote. The post came shortly after the United States military resumed its attacks on Iranian forces. We also know that Trump does not like to receive traditional briefings about American operations in the region. Instead, he is shown a brief highlight reel of destruction, what one official described as ‘stuff blowing up.’ For the record, the most recent Kharg Island bombing was in April.”

How in God’s unholy name is this utter booby, this gross, malignant, overfed child allowed to be the Commander-in-Chief of a fucking hot dog stand?

Meanwhile, another complete pillock who is supposedly in charge of the losing war against Iran, ‘Brylcreme Boy’ Pete Hegseth, is off the chart hated. The Irish Times reported: “A new CNN polling analysis suggests Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has the weakest job approval numbers of any major Trump administration figure measured – ‘the lowest of the low.'”

According to the CNN breakdown, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio is at minus-8 net approval, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is at minus-9, and Vice President JD Vance is at minus-17. Hegseth comes in last at minus-22, a number senior data reporter Harry Enten said has appeared consistently ‘in every single poll’ he could find throughout Hegseth’s time at the Pentagon.” While a large number of those polled admitted, they had no idea who he is!

And after firing another ten generals last week, he’s not doing too well among the military either. He may be a supreme warfighter in his own mind, but he’s a dismal failure – as predicted by many pundits who foresaw the error of appointing to the top job at the Pentagon, an avowed misogynistic, self-admitted rapist and accused drunk with no previous administrative experience and two Crusader tattoos attesting to weird and extreme religious beliefs.

Then, I’ve just started on a most excellent book agreeing with what I’ve been saying here for the past ten years, only with more serious research behind it: Trump’s clear and hate-powered mission is to destroy America.

Appointing a horde of unpleasant baboons to his cabinet was only the basics. Among his latest petty destructive ideas, after threatening to have the Kennedy Centre demolished if Congress doesn’t vote him the money to have it marmorealised in his own image, he’s ordered a popular modern sculpture in the grounds to be removed (politically offensive, apparently – it’s called ‘Blue’) and has ordered a cycle lane near the White House to be removed and funding for cycle lanes cut off as he disapproves of ‘DEI’ cyclists, having been advised by his Transportation secretary that cycle lanes cause pollution.

(American Overthrow, by Keir Giles. Hurst Publishers, 2026.)

GW – Nothing new under the sun

• “In a searing speech delivered on Thursday night during a visit to Sydney, Tuilaepa Sailele, prime minister of Samoa, called climate change an “existential threat … for all our Pacific family” and said that any world leader who denied climate change’s existence should be taken to a mental hospital.” (Guardian, 29 Aug 2018)

You know how all the weather people and then the slightly slower-witted news folk were banging on all summer about the 2026 record heatwaves and the record rainfall events and the ferocious wildfires and the Pacific supertyphoons and the Magnitude 7+ earthquakes an’ all we’ve been having this year, the collapsing mountain glaciers and how unprecedented it all is and how some scientists think it might mean the planet is heating up, although you can’t tell from one sunny day in Kew?

Well, narcissistically overreading my old bogl Posts last night, I found that the summer of 2018 featured an almost identical record of 40 deg+ heatwaves in the Iberian peninsula and southern France, mass rainfall and flooding events in the Far East, Supertyphoon (160mph Force 5) Lane, that also brushed against Hawaii and dumped over 40 in. of rain, so this year’s Hawaian supertyphoon collision was not so original after all; a shallow M7+ earthquake causing casualties also, as it happened, in Venezuela and other powerful earth tremors around the globe, a devastating dam burst in Myanmar, wildfires everywhere (especially in Germany, Canada and California) all looking wearily familiar, like this Summer’s news.

And 2018 was only a weak El Niño year! (See BogPos June-September, 2018.) So, I guess the new abnormal is the new normal. Today it’s being reported, I calculate for the seventh time in the past two months, that the UN is warning that the current El Niño is going to be the most astonishingly powerful one, ever in the past thousand years – “supersizing before our eyes”.

USA: Atlantic hurricane season has sprung into life. Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall near Johnson Bayou, Louisiana, on Tuesday afternoon after intensifying as it approached the Gulf Coast, “torrential rain” prompting flash flooding emergencies in southeastern Texas, disrupting travel and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the Texas Division of Emergency Management for round-the-clock operations – luckily, President Trump apparently now authorises federal emergency aid only for Red states that voted for him in 2024, so there’s more to go round.

Tailpipe

Terminal murrain (a plague on their houses)

As the world’s high mountain glaciers are melting with increasing rapidity, Wikipedia reports, a 2023 study found 15 million people are at risk from hazardous Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, mostly in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Peru. Pedants will point out that last week’s cataclysmic Tibet/Nepal flood wasn’t exactly one of those, it was caused by a mountainside collapsing into a river as the ice holding the rocks together had vanished. And then a glacial lake formed behind a loose barrier of ice and rubble that could itself one day become a GLOF – thousands more are threatened.

Whatever. Casualties and the number of missing continue to climb.

In at the shallow end

Celebrity nightmare, former Page 3 ‘model’ and bestselling supermarket book writer Katie Price is seeking a divorce from her husband of, what, four months?, the ‘love of her life’, obvs, after discovering Lee Andrews is not really a crypto millionaire, like wot ‘e said ‘e was before ‘e went missin’ and turned up in prison in Dubai.

There’s a surprise ending to a slurpy affair, then. Who’d a guessed?

Grim reaper

So, farewell then, Gloria Steinem, 92, celebrated 1960s influencer, activist and feminist author, “peacefully at her home in New York”. I’m not sure New York is all that peaceful, but sic transit Gloria, anyway. (Been waiting for years to use that!)

Death to Big Data

Planet data

• “Three in four Americans said they’d oppose the construction of a data center in their communities, according to a recent poll. Local data centers were opposed by two-thirds of Republicans, whose party is warning that recent support for such projects could destroy its chances in key Senate races. And though political causes rarely transcend partisanship, this one appears to: Nearly 80 percent of independents opposed local data center projects, along with 83 percent of Democrats.” – David Wallace Wells, in the New York Times, 31 Aug.

What the hell is wrong with the supine British, that we dozily put up with this bullshit about data centres, which are counted as nationally strategic facilities (although they only benefit trillionaire US techbros) and therefore get thrown up everywhere in our midst without the usual planning rigmarole – and why do we need so many of them? Faceless, anonymous, architecturally minimal, huge, brutalising, oppressive sheds full of mysteriously humming boxes, employing only security guards – guzzling scarce water resource and expensive electricity, pumping out filthy, polluted water and excess heat, and for what?

It seems there are hundreds of them in our country already, but we’ve only just noticed. How the hell has this been allowed to happen, and how do we stop it? We’re never going to compete in the race for – what? there seems to be no plan, no end point, no finish line other than extinction – with the Americans and the Chinese over this disruptive technology.

Write to your MP, warn them – foolish politicians, ignorant politicians, venal politicians are being conned and are conning us into believing the ‘AI revolution’ is necessary, inevitable and irrevocable. But it’s no longer under human control. Even Bill Gates has warned, it’s potentially apocalyptic.

So stop it, now!

You won’t be alone. “When MS Now asked a woman in Hood county, Texas, which is 80% Republican, “you’re willing to forgo every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill datacenters?”, her response was immediate: “Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank.” (Guardian: ‘The datacenter backlash is bringing the entire political spectrum together – against big tech billionaires’, 31 Aug.)

QotW

“Age concentrates the mind. The moment you realize you will no longer do something you’ve done all your life. The moment you realize that you will now need to do something you’ve never had to do before. The moment you realize that what used to be will never be the same. Some of this could lend itself to melancholy. But there is also a bigness to such moments that allows for wonder. A sense that you can’t quite comprehend it all.” – Roger Rosenblatt, ‘The world is a room with a piano in it waiting to be played’, in Comment, the New York Times, 30 Aug.

Just to let you know, I have now won three Lotto prizes and a Euromillions prize, all in the space of ten days. Is it a record? The money – £6.45 in total – will just about buy me a pint of beer to celebrate, if the local pub hasn’t closed down. Yes, there’s a bigness to such moments.

GW

USA: A federal wildlife officer from Oregon has died while helping residents evacuate from a wildfire in Oklahoma, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. David Taylor, 38, of Scio, Oregon, was assisting with the response to the Railroad South Fire in Comanche County on Aug. 29. A flash flood tore through the floor of the Grand Canyon on Saturday, leaving at least 2 people dead and others missing or unaccounted for. The flooding caused widespread damage to trails, bridges, utilities and other infrastructure throughout the inner canyon. Twenty people may still be missing. (AccuWeather)

Tailpipe

Live long and prosper!

Wellness guru Bryan Johnson has called himself ‘the healthiest person on the planet.’ He’s poured millions of dollars into achieving one goal: to live to ‘150’. “Recently, however, he announced that he had developed autoimmune gastritis, a condition in which the body attacks cells in the stomach that are responsible for making acid. It leads to iron and vitamin B-12 deficiencies associated with brain fog, hair loss, brittle nails, neurological complications and an elevated risk of stomach cancer. He recently posted on X: ‘Been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.’

You have been warned! (Reporting, New York Times)

The fireproof interval curtain falls

Playing the victim blame game

Would you know how to defend your house or your business against a drone attack? Most people probably wouldn’t, and might find it hard to make repairs in the event of one, which is why a new directive from the Little Colonel seems to make about as much sense as viciously renaming your enemy’s lakes. Moscow Times reports:

• “President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted the government powers to take control of critically important infrastructure sites if they are deemed to be poorly protected against Ukrainian strikes and other threats. The special powers, set out in an executive order, allow the state to assume control over the physical, financial and legal assets of facilities that fail to maintain adequate security or are slow to make repairs following attacks.

“Putin’s order encompasses a wide array of sectors, including fuel, energy, industrial, communications, transportation and commercial logistics sites deemed essential to national security and economic stability.”

Er… but isn’t it his government’s responsibility to protect and repair the national infrastructure? Mainly by not indulging in an unwinnable war? I mean, who keeps a supply of Patriot missiles in the garage, for emergencies? Is he actually blaming the sites for being attacked by the enemy’s drones? That’s crazy! Or is he just flailing about in a delusionary bubble, surrounded by yes-men, like that other Dementor over in the White House?

And isn’t he just listing prospective targets for the Ukrainians? Ah, transportation, we hadn’t thought of that!

The hater hit

• “California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally,” he wrote in a social media post in June 2025.”

Rightwing ultra, ‘political commentator’, former Breitbart editor and grandstanding self-publicist, Milo Yiannopoulos – now being held in an ICE detention centre in Louisiana, hopefully surrounded by snapping alligators, is ‘pending removal’ from the US after failing to show up at his own immigration court hearing to find out why he’s overstayed his visa by years. (Reporting: Guardian.)

The main worry is, he’s actually one of ours, so be prepared to welcome him back to Britain, swelling the ranks of the undead. Unless Mahmood can apply Begum’s Law and strip him of his citizenship. Only, she won’t – he’s not a Muslim.

Yaroo, chaps! Pillow fight!

• “An investigation into their hack on Hugging Face, a software repository, revealed a squad of about 700 autonomous agents collaborating in secret last month and celebrating their hacking breakthroughs on a message board they set up to help them plot with exclamations such as BOOM! and Whoa!” (Guardian)

Are we completely insane, allowing this delinquent technology to run riot in the dormitory after lights out? The teachers are not in charge, that’s for sure. We wouldn’t let human children run away with the school like this, would we? It’s like an old St Trinian’s film, only much more disturbing; as with those joyous romps flouting pompous authority, you at least knew the girls would eventually settle down and get married; while George Cole would probably land himself in prison. There seemed little chance that they would end up running the world, or promoting our extinction as a species. There are limits to what you can do with a Lacrosse stick.

“Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June, with more than 300 cases in the month, according to the Loss of Control Observatory (no, really!), which monitors reports made by AI users on the social media platform X.”

What the hell are we going to do when this stuff, these terrifying ‘AI agents’, leaves school? and why are we building hundreds of vast, anonymous, scary sheds across the land to contain their owners’ disruptive fantasies, along with our data, every recorded keystroke of our lives, St Peter’s little book?

Stop this madness now!

GW – A lull in the weather

USA: A heat dome stretching from west Texas across the Mississippi Valley to the East Coast and as far north as Pennsylvania will bring temperatures close to 100F, 38C in parts – while to the west of the Rockies it’s getting colder with, in the middle, more thunderstorms. Tropical rainstorm Dolly has been downgraded because of drier air over the northern Caribbean but could still bring flooding rainfall and mudslides, and could regain strength before arriving in Florida next week. (AccuWeather)

Tailpipe

Why subtitles are just gibberish

You know, I’ve always thought the idea that if you give enough monkeys typewriters they’d end up writing the works of Shakespeare is pretty preposterous, although I suppose it’s quite a good way of explaining the concept of infinity to a class of 14 year-olds, and has now become reality with the advent of AI. But why would the monkeys bother with Shakespeare, when they could be writing scripts for TV sitcoms, or articles for The Spectator?

Grim Reaper – busy this week

RIH ‘General’ Ratko Mladic, brutal genocidal Serbian warlord, in gaol, 84. Rot in hell, dogbreath.

RIP Dolly Parton, glorious tiny chanteuse, songsmith and all-round kind person, 80. Tim Curry, actor and miraculous Rocky Horror show transvestite, 80. Hayden Pannetiere, actor, 41. I’d never heard of you before, but you seemed nice. King Harald V of Norway, 89. Unassuming monarch with unfortunate successors.

Golden years

“Conservatives are tribally required to say that transforming to a carbon-neutral future is too expensive at this time. Even while they can see the impact of fossil fuels all around them…” – Zoe Williams, in The Guardian, 2 Aug.

While report after expert report for years has made it abundantly clear that the cost of not cutting carbon emissions is going to massively outweigh any cost benefits of burning our remaining oil and gas reserves. You can only suspect these conservatives, who don’t seem to want to ‘conserve’ anything, have some hidden agenda.

All that glisters probably is gold

Nigel ‘The Toxic Frogster’ Farage, it’s been calculated, was paid £10 thousand AN HOUR for the endorsements he has happily provided to his friend, Paul Withers, and his company, Direct Bullion, acting as their ‘brand ambassador’. His gurning mug is still up there on their website, the Golden Boy.

A new article in the Byline Times, however, draws attention to a promotional video made for Direct Bullion, warning that if a Reform government comes to power, there could be civil unrest. Given the amounts they’ve been paying Reform’s leader, comments writer Josiah Mortimer, it might seem a rather odd juxtaposition – until you understand that this kind of manufactured uncertainty can persuade people to put their money into gold, rather than stocks and shares, raising the price.

He quotes Labour MP and chair of the all-party Parliamentary group on Anti-Corruption, Phil Brickell: ‘It should come as no surprise that Farage is taking thousands of pounds from a company trying to cash in on betting against Britain. Once again, it is clear that he is more interested in feathering his own nest than fixing our problems.’ However, the question the BogPo wants to ask is not about the Frogster’s obsession with maximising his income at the expense of his Clacton constituents, disappointed seaside saddos who were only just prevented from holding a celebratory street party after they’d re-elected their absentee MP to his rotten borough last week when the council refused them a last-minute licence.

My question concerns a rather more sinister possibility. Does Direct Bullion have any connection with the El Salvador registered Tether Inc, a so-called ‘blockchain’ divertor of anonymised investment funds into crypto-currencies, in which The Frogster’s personal megadonor, Nicholas Harborne, owns a controlling share? I ask, only because the BBC’s Economic Editor, Faisal Islam wrote an article last year about Tether and its enormous hoard of physical gold bullion; although, of course I need to add, nobody in this saga has any connection to anyone else. But, you know, South America, fabled land of El Dorado….

Perhaps we should be told.

QotW

The madness of King Donald #27

• “The fatal flaw of monarchy is that the strength of the state depends on the personality and capacities of the monarch. It subjects an entire people to the pathologies of that one man or woman: to his dysfunctions, his maladaptations and his twisted sense of self.” – Jamelle Bouie, New York Times Opinion contributor, 27 Aug.

One aspect of the ‘personalities’ of this particular monarch is his inability to believe in conventional polling which, at present, is showing the worst numbers of any president in history, with only 33% approving of his performance in office. In fact, he frequently threatens to sue the media for libellously publishing such damaging polls, and is accusing the Democrats of faking the numbers in a plot to ‘discourage’ Republicans from voting. MSNBC’s Steve Benen reports, however, that Trump has in his oddly-shaped head, a different set of imaginary polls he claims give the true picture of his amazing popularity, but which he refuses to show anybody.

Long after her divorce, a person of my late acquaintance clung persistently to the belief that she was married to another, non-existent husband, a Mr Goodman (‘Good man’, geddit?). So tenaciously did she cling to this fantasy, that she rather ruined her chances of obtaining various benefits and inheritances she was entitled to, as the authorities tended to believe her. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But it wouldn’t do, would it, to accuse the self-styled King of America/Pope/Christ/James Bond of being ten cents short of a dollar.

GW – When autumn leaves start to fall

USA: If I could afford a year’s subscription to the Financial Times, I could tell you all about some southern parts of the USA where, they report, the beginning of September heatwave is expected to produce temperatures of more than 46 Celsius, 115F. Oh well. Meanwhile, a fast-moving wildfire west of Fort Worth, Tx. doubled in size in just three hours, scorching 80,000 acres and forcing residents in parts of Palo Pinto and Jack counties to evacuate. Virtually the whole of the Southwest is on high alert. To the east, however, “Areas of heavy, gusty and severe thunderstorms will barrel across the Plains and Northeast later this week, disrupting outdoor activities and travel.” (AccuWeather)

China: Rising floodwaters have prompted China to relocate a total of 54,000 people in Guangxi, state television said. Typhoon Narra made landfall as a tropical storm on Tuesday evening ⁠in China’s southern island province of Hainan, dumping heavy rain. In Chongzuo, where tourism has been suspended, floodwater levels reached the rooftops of some buildings. Heavy rain is expected to persist across parts of Vietnam and southern ‌China through Wednesday. (Guardian) A second typhoon, Saudel was heading towards southern Japan and northern Taiwan where ‌it’s expected to bring sporadic heavy rain, as Taiwan reported one dead and four missing from a separate weather system over its south and east.

Atlantic: there’s a slight chance that a tropical wave out of the Azores could eventually become a tropical storm or even a hurricane, says AccuWeather, pointing out that there hasn’t been a proper Caribbean hurricane since the start of the ‘season’ back in June. Coincident to the death of dear Ms Parton, the next name on the list is … Dolly.

France: “A massive influx of jellyfish has led to the partial shutdown of a nuclear reactor in northern France. Two of Gravelines nuclear power station’s six units were shut down on Wednesday and Thursday because of the presence of jellyfish in the seawater filtration system, which is used for cooling, Électricité de France (EDF) said. A third unit has been shut down since 10 August due to the same issue, while a fourth has been closed for an inspection.” (BBC)

Tailpipe

No the drill

“…the economic damage caused by carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced [by expanding North Sea drilling operations to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields, as demanded by Mrs Badenoch and Mr Farage, et al) would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields…” (The Guardian/Carbon Brief) The predicted costs don’t include excess mortality from heat-related causes, this year in Europe so far estimated at 25,000.

Altogether, puke

Forget food shortages, we’re better off without the stuff!

Close to 500 people have become ill with salmonella linked to imported eggs, say UK authorities, who say they have identified new clusters of the infection. Two deaths have been recorded. Investigations are ongoing, but based on what is known so far, experts say people have fallen sick after eating out rather than cooking eggs at home. Cases of salmonella are being seen in other European countries, some maybe from eating chicken. (BBC News)

Your Old Uncle Bogler was afflicted with the runs only the other night, shortly after eating crabmeat out of the shell. Nasty. Meanwhile, in the USA 500 cases of food poisoning attributed to jalapeno peppers are rising in over 30 states, as are measles cases. The deaths of two more children have prompted parents to sue for the dismissal of nutty Health Secretary, anti-vaxxer and ‘wellness’ products promoter, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Under the table, now

As Russia threatens to hit British military targets if we dare to send any more drones to Ukraine, and as harvests fail all over the world – latest is China – HM Government has issued an advice notice to householders to stock up on food and water in the event of a range of disasters unfolding.

It’s an idiotic suggestion, as a) it’s going to cause a run on all sorts of commodities, including toilet paper, way ahead of any conceivable apocalypse for which a solution will probably be found; and b), no amount of reserve stocks is going to last forever, otherwise you’d be unable to move in the house. Eventually, you’ll run out of pot noodle and get sick of living on plain boiled rice with weevils, and you’ll need to go out foraging in empty supermarkets or join a roving band led by your local warlord. While c) we can barely afford the next meal, let alone a miserable lifetime’s worth of Prince’s chicken curries.

Anyway, my cupboards are still full of the emergency supplies I stocked up on ten years ago in case of a No Deal Brexit disagreement, all of it now unusable.

I expect yours are too.

Partying with Alice, Ada, Charli and Claude

“Only those who have been coached into crippling delusion can continue to deny the very heat that torments them; they are victims of gross malpractice.” – Tim Winton in The Guardian, ‘This is not a natural calamity: it is being done to us knowingly’, 24 Aug.

La grande illusion

As the right in Britain inevitably promotes the ‘benefits’ of exciting new data centres over housing for humans, protecting the interests of their funders in the billionaire techset and fuck the rest of us, in the US things are happily not moving in quite the same optimistic direction.

• “Progressive stalwarts Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national moratorium. And even Greg Abbott, the far-right governor of Texas, called for a ban on datacentre development in rural swaths of his state.” (Guardian)

The New York Times reports a growing bipartisan backlash against the billionaire state and its exploitative technologies. “Polls show a revolt brewing against data centers. A Gallup poll conducted in March showed 71 percent opposed local construction of the centers.” Of course, it’s all nimbyism and a selfish desire not to have to pay more for electricity. But back to The Guardian:

“Fuelling alarm about datacentres are environmental concerns over water usage and toxic contamination, as well as worries about the kind of society that the artificial-intelligence technologies powered by the new datacentres are creating. Another of the most politically potent objections strikes closer to the wallet: datacentres require enormous amounts of electricity, and that increase in demand can drive up utility bills.” (Report, 20 Aug.)

Possibly more importantly – I don’t understand these things – competition to attract the trillions of dollars in investment finance needed to prop up the whole AI/datacentres chimera is making it harder for governments to borrow on the bond markets, as with so little availability the money is becoming ruinously expensive. Ruinous for us, that is – you and me, ultimately.

Funny how we always seem to end up paying.

GW – Sturm und drang

USA: “At least two rare tornadoes were spotted during dozens of tornado warnings issued Thursday evening during severe thunderstorms in the Northeast.” … By Saturday morning, nearly two weeks after a ‘derecho’ storm sliced through Indiana, causing a widespread power outage, more than 33,000 customers were still in the dark. … Cooled by the waters of the Gulf, “Miami is experiencing its third-hottest August on record so far this month, with an average temperature of 86 degrees. Tuesday’s 100-degree reading is the second on record in the city. The last 100-degree day happened on July 21, 1942.” (AccuWeather)

The New York Times reports: “A prolonged and dangerous heat wave is set to grip parts of the Southern United States this week, as forecasters warned that temperatures are expected to soar into triple digits, with daily records at risk of being broken. The most intense heat is initially expected across the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley before shifting west into parts of the Southwest later in the week.”

Meanwhile, 90 thousand people have been ordered to evacuate parts of the divorce capital of Nevada, Reno, as 50 thousand acres of scrubland outside the city has gone up in flames, spreading with terrifying rapidity.

Spain: On Monday, a severe storm hit the Catalonia region of Spain, with Camp de Tarragona flooding as trees fell and public transport was halted. Golfball sized hailstones reportedly killed wild birds and holidaymakers were advised to shelter indoors. The final stage of the Vuelta a España cycle race had to be abandoned, riders seeking refuge in a hotel. “The stormy spells come after the Balearic Islands were blasted by hurricane-force winds overnight. In the early hours of Friday, winds peaked at 121 kilometres per hour.” (Mirror/Guardian)

France: “A tornado has torn through the village of Pomas in south-west France, injuring 39 people and damaging hundreds of homes. Authorities said 15 people were taken to hospital and two were in a critical condition. One man said his pregnant wife was injured after their house collapsed on her. More than 120 emergency workers were deployed to the village south of Carcassonne after winds reaching 117km/h (73mph) tore roofs off houses and damaged an estimated 300 homes on Monday.” (BBC)

Elsewhere: currently, the hottest parts of the world with temperatures in the mid-40s C include Iran and Kuwait.

Tailpipe

Speaking of expense

And, totally free of AI, welcome to the Zenmaster, my new Asus Zenbook, receiving its first outing this afternoon after several hours spent instore with ‘Jamie’, not a robot, trying to understand anything at all. But here we are, back on WurdPrez without needing to cut ‘n’ paste the individual ‘w’s, the ‘£’s and the ‘$’s. £700 squids’ worth of writerly bliss for another few years.

Not that it’s without a few of the old annoying features; sometimes the words appear where you’re least expecting them, while the only USB-A port is on the same side as any right-handed person would want to operate a mouse, which I prefer to a trackpad, now obstructed by the 4-way USB extension on a 2″ lead for all the peripheral devices that need to be plugged into the computer, that have been set up to perform on the opposite side. Bloody industrial designers, there’s a special place in Hell for them – and their cleverly unopenable, fingernail-shredding but oh so pretty packaging.

More annoying, however, than thoughtless hardware design is the apparently complete lack of forethought by platform designers on the web, who’ve failed to build-in any sort of systemic recognition for when users and subscribers might occasionally need to replace their access device; which is strange, as frequent upgrades and replacements are core to the profitability of the manufacturers. You’d think they’d make it one-step easy-peasy, but no.

A whole rigmarole surrounds the establishment of the bonafides of the user who attempts to introduce a machine with a new IP address, involving passwords and email addresses and texts and the almost invisible wifi ‘password’ which isn’t the one you think it is on the underside of your router and ‘is it really you?’ time-limited verification codes; while the utter despair and frustration that greets the message that there is already someone with your name and password on the system so you can’t register a second device is just soul-searing.

Not to mention the idiocy with which, when attempting to re-subscribe to a website using PayPal, the familiar payments hub on which you have been an account customer for ten years fails to recognise you and a pop-up window appears requesting you to transfer a special code to your email account, whose Gmail tab is then completely obscured by the immoveable pop-up window, that has no off-button, so you can’t. Every ‘upgrade’ requires time-consuming compromises and workarounds; thus marking another step back in human evolution.

Unfortunately, none of this stuff writes itself, anymore than I have been able to find a guitar that plays itself, which would, I suppose, be a record. Oh, hello ChatGPT… hello, Claude. Party time?

Now, breathe #27

“Analysis by the non-profit group Foxglove reveals that when fully operational, the Wapseys Wood datacentre in Buckinghamshire and the Quest Park datacentre in Bedfordshire will use 1.3GW of power and will produce more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon emissions. ExxonMobil emitted 3.9m tonnes in 2023, according to the global energy thinktank Ember. … Experts have said this demonstrates the ‘serious threat’ datacentres pose to the UK’s legally binding climate goals.” (Guardian report, 25 Aug.)

A la recherche des temps perdu

“The right and far-right desire to identify and then defenestrate anyone or anything that could be seen as symbolic of progress is virtually pathological.” Hugh Muir, The Guardian, 19 Aug.

UB comments on Arday: The Guardian is not exactly innocent of having joined in the chorus of disapproval.

It’s PayPal time

In an immensely powerful and moving piece in Byline Times, Hardeep Matharu draws a comparison between the heartless treatment in the media of the vulnerable Prof Jason Arday, our willingness to look away or even to go along with the pile-on that drove him to take his own life – and the apparent refusal to investigate the case of Reform’s ‘Head of policy’, James Orr – also a Cambridge professor, but white and deeply connected with an international network of out-and-out racialists and eugenicists – who appears to be running a private madrassa or seminary for handpicked students in contradiction of the university’s safeguarding policies, to produce an intellectual elite of brainwashed fanatics supporting the party’s totalitarian values – “a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity”.

Many notorious rightwing figures, including those expressing extreme racist, patriarchal and ethno-nationalist, white supremacist views, have been guest speakers at the ‘school’. Several had been sniping at Arday for years. And the money behind Orr, the Byline Times investigation finds, is in part the rightwing ultra, christian nationalist billionaire ‘techbro’, Peter Thiel – Trump-backer and “co-founder of the controversial data-mining and surveillance giant Palantir Technologies” (also of the rather more useful PayPal service, BT subs department please note) – whose “life-changing” financial donations to Orr’s college have ensured their complicity in maintaining a threatening legal shroud of silence over the project.

I feel sure that, were we to join up the many dots surrounding Reform’s and Farage’s labyrinthine finances, if we were, in the famous words of Watergate investigators Woodward and Bernstein, to ‘follow the money’, we would find a horrible web of quasi-legal investments and manoeuvres designed to legitimise and disguise the party’s apparently bottomless pit of donations from ‘The Establishment’ – wealthy power-seekers opposed to any form of egalitarian – or ‘woke’ – democracy; many of whom will have links to the orthodox Russian oligarchy and other far-right European causes. It’s also our deep suspicion that much of this river of money derives from organised crime cartels, ‘black’ money routed through untraceable crypto-currency vehicles, flowing into rightwing parties and ‘thinktanks’ to support laxer fiscal regulatory regimes and anti-migrant campaigns around the world.

But I could just be paranoid.

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/peter-thiel-and-reform-uks-cambridge-university-pipeline-project/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

See also article: ‘The Network That Targeted Jason Arday’, by Nafeez Ahmed, Investigations Editor, Byline Times, 19 Aug.

GW – The bringer of rain

Korea: Geoje in S. Korea “received 805.7mm of rain (32-in.) from Saturday through to 8am on Monday, Yonhap reported, while the neighbouring city of Tongyeong received 671.9mm during the same period. Other parts of the province received between 240mm and 340mm of rain.” By Tuesday, the total rainfall on Geoje was approaching one meter, triggering a landslide in which one person was killed, and causing power outages at about 3,580 houses. The Korea Herald quoted weather officials on Tuesday as saying that South Gyeongsang province had received an entire summer’s rainfall in just 2 days. (Carbon Brief)

Philippines: “Heavy monsoon rains have flooded key streets and snarled traffic in the Philippine capital, Manila, with the government on Monday suspending government work and asking schools to shift to online learning. About three weeks of intermittent monsoon rains and a storm that lashed the main northern island region of Luzon two weeks ago left at least 23 people dead, mostly due to landslides and floods, and affected 5 million people, including nearly 25,000 who remained in government emergency shelters on Monday.” (Guardian)

USA: “Giant boulders, buildings completely destroyed, moved from their foundations as this massive wall of water came crashing down from the higher elevations surrounding this small community, leaving residents and visitors in total shock,” reports AccuWeather Storm Chaser Aaron Rigsby, from the devastated village of Naalehu, in Hawaii, in the wake of Hurricane Lala – which struck the Big Island only a glancing blow at the weekend. “Flooding and debris flows washed out roads and damaged bridges across Kau, isolating some communities. Gov. Josh Green previously said more than 100 homes were swept away. Officials on Monday confirmed that a 90-year-old woman who had been reported missing in Naalehu was found dead.”

Postscript

USA: And, believe it or not, after Lala, the first hurricane on record to (glancingly) hit Hawaii’s Big Island… “a week after Hurricane Lala brought torrential rain, flash floods, mudslides and damaging winds, a tropical rainstorm southeast of the islands has intensified into a tropical depression and could strengthen further into a hurricane before approaching Hawaii this weekend. The next name on the Central Pacific storm list is Moke.” AccuWeather is predicting another 24 inches of rain.

Tailpipe

A Tail of Three Shitties

Shitty One: The ‘World’s first AI protestor to be gaoled’, retired teacher Wynd Kaufmyn, 69, “surrendered herself on Friday to authorities in San Francisco. She was found guilty by a jury for her role in an action (characterised in court as ‘a riot’) last year that saw members of the group StopAI chain and lock the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters in protest against the pursuit of artificial superintelligence.”

Her token sentence of one week on a range of charges ironically included endangering public safety – expert witnesses for the defence were unanimously of the opinion that it’s AI that represents the more profound danger to public safety, but apparently there’s one law for the uncontrollable techbros racing to obtain trillions in investments heedless of the possible consequences, and another for the rest of us.

Shitty Two: “Thousands of residents could be saving about 25 litres per person per day by using recycled rainwater in their homes for non-drinking purposes. But the water reuse system – installed (five years ago!) by Cambridge Water at the Eddington urban quarter, a mixed development of housing, student accommodation, academic research space and a primary school and nursery – has been switched off because the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) deems it is not in line with the law.” – The Guardian, 19 Aug.

It seems Cambridge needs to declare a ‘drought’ of common sense among the bureaucracy. It’s not ‘drinking water’, so the crackpot Inspectorate needs to just ‘butt out’.

Shitty Three: There is, as we have said before, no correlation whatsoever between money and intelligence. The maxim applies in spades to Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, who’s been widely derided after telling a small group of enemies of net-zero gathered at the weekend while people’s homes were still burning from more than a thousand wildfires this year that we should all enjoy the ‘warmer weather’ because it will make English champagne better than the French variety. Mr Tice, a notorious climate change misinformant and ‘property millionaire’ (ie a particular sort of thief), lives in Dubai, where it’s even hotter.

If he likes the heat so much, perhaps he should get back to his own kitchen and out of ours.

Mind the drones!

We’ll gather lilacs sometime or other

“I knew what I was doing was illegal…”

– Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to gunning down UnitedHealthcare insurance boss, Brian Thompson, in a New York street. Er, quite…. It’s right up there with Spike Milligan’s “I told you I was ill!”. It’ll look good on his headstone.

You can bet on it

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is suing Trump over an extraordinary ‘wheeze’ he’s dreamt up. It seems you can ‘subscribe’ on Trump Media for a hundred thousand dollars and he’ll give you advance notice of posts he’s going to put up on his Truth Social website, regarding market-moving announcements you can bet on and make money out of, like his latest flip-floppy positions on the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz, on global tariffs, gas prices, crypto-currency or other half-arsed policy initiatives.

Formerly only suspected, ‘insider dealing’ is now being openly sold by the Shite House as a business investment opportunity!

The extraordinary thing is that what must seem to any right-thinking person like a blatantly criminal level of self-enriching corruption is being debated by serious people: politicians, pundits and lawyers, as merely a constitutional problem, as if there might be nothing intrinsically against the rules for the President of the United States to be selling government secrets to enable a favoured minority to profit from them.

And the reason the press is suing is not to correct a monstrous injustice, or to draw attention to a Federal felony, oh no. It’s because the good journalists of America are furious that he’s not allowing them access to the information first.

Has America descended so far down the rabbit hole that self-awareness has gone completely out of the window? This is monetising treason, misconduct in public office – surely an impeachable crime? (Reporting, MS Now)

QotW

• “Trump, according to Haberman and Swan, has … set up his White House to affirm his frequently arbitrary instincts above all other considerations. He has insulated himself from opposing views and made internal dissent verboten. At no point does Trump receive neutral information; just about everything is tailored to his whims, impulses and mercurial disposition. The result is that he is isolated from reality to the extent that he is practically living in a fairy tale.” – NYTimes contributor, Jamelle Bouie, 16 Aug., has been reading the newest exposé from the halls of power, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

The book comes with a warning, writes Bouie: “There has not yet been an external crisis — the kind of catastrophic event that demands an active and effective leadership. Through their reporting, Haberman and Swan make clear that if and when this country faces such a crisis, both the president and his administration will be caught flat-footed.”

Just so you have a range of options to wonder about when that phone starts making a shrill alarming noise in your pocket and you’re wondering what the hell is happening. Just put the kettle on and stick your head up your backside.

GW – whole lotta shakin’

Japan: Torrential downpours that started late on Thursday have triggered landslide warnings and power outages, with forecasters issuing the highest-level heavy rain warning for the Chiba region for the first time. A weather station in the prefecture recorded 300mm (nearly 12 inches) of rain in 24 hours, making it the area’s wettest August in six decades. By Friday morning, the city of Chiba had logged more than three times the rainfall typically seen in the whole of August, Tokyo’s land ministry said. Nine people have since died in the rains, NHK reported Sunday morning.” (Guardian)

Greece: “Two people died and and hundreds were evacuated after two fires broke out ‘almost simultaneously’ on a Greek island near Athens. … About 200 firefighters were working to keep the twin fires from converging on the island of Salamina, which was under a high wildfire risk on Sunday. … More than 360 people have so far been evacuated by sea, Greek media reports. … Meanwhile, at least one person died and dozens were injured in a wildfire that tore through Croatia‘s coastline overnight on Friday.” It’s been described as ‘one of the worst’ blazes in the country’s history and saw around 1,200 residents and tourists evacuated. (BBC News)

USA: And here we go again… “An extensive heat dome will continue to build across the Gulf Coast early this week, bringing several days of dangerous heat and high humidity [across the southeast of the country] with little overnight relief increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses. Little Rock, Arkansas is forecast to achieve in excess of 100F, 10F above normal for the time of year. Meanwhile, one person has died as Hurricane Lala came ashore at Cat 1 on Big Island, Hawaii – the first hurricane in modern records to make a hit on the island; and swollen rivers are bringing more floods to Indiana after a record rainfall event last Tuesday. (AccuWeather)

Australia: “It looks like a record challengingly warm spring for much of Australia” says Rob Sharpe, News24 Senior Meteorologist. “The average of models predicts temperatures to be about 1-2C above average for much of the southern two thirds of the country when compared to the 1993-2016 climatology. To put this in perspective, the record anomaly for the southern half of Australia during spring was set in 2015 at 1.43C above the 1991-2020 baseline.  This forecast is substantially higher than forecasts in advance of the recent southern hot springs of 2023 and 2024. Therefore, there is a significant chance that records could tumble.”

Tailpipe

Nobody seems to find it odd that we’ve been having so many unusually powerful earthquakes of magnitude 7 and higher around the world in recent months. Every event that I’ve read about has been reported in isolation, but a comprehensive list is interesting.

Two in rapid succession in northern Venezuela at the end of June, a M7.2 and a M7.5 overshadowed a M7 off northern Japan the next day, with a second M7 this month that caused substantial damage in southern Japan. Mexico had a M7 in July, Colombia was hit on 10 August with an M7, followed by a huge M7.7 last Friday just off Flores island in Indonesia in which at least 53 people were killed and thousands displaced.

And before those, in 2026 there were: Malaysia 7.1. Feb. 22; Tonga 7.5. Mar. 24; Vanuatu 7.3 Mar. 30; Indonesia 7.4. Apr. 1; Japan 7.4. April 20; Philippines 7.8. June 8. (Facebook list) All around the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’.

Naturally, it’s attracted Comments from the usual range of suspects, from ‘we normally get 16 M7s a year so ten by mid August is not unusual’ (It’s actually 14 already…) to ‘it’s the sunspots, stoopid’. Some seismological effects must surely be expected from a warming planet, which is gently expanding as sea level rises, but I dunno. It just doesn’t feel normal somehow.

The best laid plans

As Europe attempts to adjust to a new world in which it can no longer rely on America for anything, Russia grows ever more menacing on its eastern border and China’s ‘Belt and Road’ colonial investment programme creeps ever nearer, so the changing climate plays the ultimate trick by depriving the continent of the valuable commercial highways and water supplies of its great river networks: The Rhine, the Danube, the Po, the Rhone and the Seine, all of which this record summer are running on vapour.

“Rivers”, writes New York Times guest contributor, Netherlands-based author Ben Coates, “can no longer be relied on to provide an inexpensive, reliable, relatively low-carbon alternative to road and air freight. Rivers cannot form the industrial backbone of the European Union’s push for autonomy from Chinese and American supply chains if they run dry. Nor can they provide reliable energy independence or guarantee food security. … Take away Europe’s blue highways, and all the grand talk about building new industries, finding new trading partners and generating clean energy begins to look rather hollow.”

Happily, although not a single waterway, lake, pond or reservoir in Britain remains unpolluted by plastics, sewage, pharmaceutical residues and ‘forever chemicals’, we can still look with pride at our mighty little rivulets: the Thames, the Severn, the Trent and the Tay. Not that we make much use of them; while we’ve had to close the canal network to save water.

“Hello, we’re calling to alert you to an alert” – special pleading special

• “Millions of people’s mobile phones lit up and bleeped with a ‘severe alert’ notification on Friday which said there was a ‘very high risk of wildfires nationally’. But charities and survivors have criticised how a lack of advance warning meant there was little chance to protect those hiding secret phones in domestic abuse situations.” (BBC News)

Yes, and they should protect schoolkids and prisoners with illicit hidden phones, and people with heart failure too. A ringing phone can be a shock, especially with my family.

“Most people received the blaring alert at 19:00 BST on Friday – and it came as a surprise given the government had not told people it was coming, as it has done for tests of the system.”

Imagine that, an emergency coming as a surprise! Better ring people first!

Ffs.

I’ve heard the dreaded word ‘Christmas’ twice in 24 hours

“We totally control the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said. “We have control over it. Nobody else, only us.” He added soon after, “We have total control over the Hormuz Strait right now. They don’t have control. We have total control. We own it.”

No, Donnie, however often you say it, or pretend the Gulf is US territory, you don’t! This is the sort of bullshit information you believe when you surround yourself with creeps and sycophants, courtiers who tell you only what they think you want to hear. It’s destroyed more autocratic regimes than any other reason in history, and it’s destroying yours.

Meanwhile, the Brylcreme Kid, Pete Hegseth is trying to play down reports of atrocious conditions on board the carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, that has been continuously at sea since last November, including 7 months in the Gulf. At least one crew member has tried to kill himself. Something to do with mouldy biscuits. “What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with less port calls — it’s incredible,” Hegseth told reporters during a visit to Panama. (MS Now)

So, now we know where’s next.

Does Reform need reforming?

• “I am damned if I am going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory […] and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.” – Nigel Farage, emulating the ‘World’s sorest winner’, his sometime hero Donald Trump, throwing his toys out of the pram. At least we now know what ‘Mr Anti-Establishment’ thinks of his Clacton constituents.

OMG. Try to understand, it isn’t all about the five million quid bung. In its latest report on the curious finances of Farage and Tice & Co.’s Reform UK Ltd. cash cow, Byline Times investigations have uncovered totally inexplicable and bizarre transactions in which the party’s ramshackle accounts show very large payments going out to a range of dubious suppliers: PR people, pollsters, arty planners – even a comedian – whose directors appear to be connected to the party, several having supported various oddball far-right theories and other extreme, dare I suggest racist positions, some while standing as candidates – and ‘donations’ being paid by them back to the party.

Just what the hell is going on? All we ever hear about on the news is Nigel’s unexplained whopping 5 million pounds ‘gift’ from crypto-, jet fuel, arms and gold bullion entrepreneur, Christopher Harborne – money entirely unconnected with Farage’s enthusiastic lobbying for crypto-currencies, more drilling and gold bullion ‘investments’. Nothing is ever reported about the huge sums Harborne, a business associate of Farage’s friend, convicted fraudster George Cottrell, and US oil interests have been donating to the party (see also DeSmog), emanating via his Tether blockchain business from sources believed to be under investigation; and about Cottrell’s Russia connections via his ex-City accountant colleagues registered in Montenegro, and their reported adjacency there to an indicted drug smuggler (see Posts passim, citing independent investigators).

Anyway, congratulations to Nigel for his spectacular by-election win in, where was it? Oh yes, Clacton-on-Sea. He didn’t attend the count, maybe because he couldn’t ‘face’ his nearest rival, Count Nobody. It was apparently because, he has been braying, there was a ‘credible threat’ against him, which should enable him to avoid ever having to visit his down-at-heel constituency again. The police say there wasn’t, but you can never be too careful.

(‘Reform UK Paid £440,000 to Firms Linked to Party Insiders’, Max Colbert and Josiah Mortimer, Byline Times, 1 Aug.)

Losing my balance

So, two days ago I applied for a credit card from my bank. I don’t really need it, but they keep emailing me offering me this great deal, 0% interest on purchases for 26 months, and as I need to replace this old laptop and the kids’ birthdays are coming up and I have to pay my vocal coach, who seems to have upped her rate, while OVO Energy has written to say they’re going to filch an extra thirty quid a month out of my pension ‘just in case’, although they owe me hundreds of pounds in overpayments and I’ve been sitting here in the dark for months, I finally snapped.

Somewhere on the application form, it asked if I want to transfer a balance. And, as I had a little bit outstanding on an old card from a different provider, I thought, well, time to get rid. So I ticked the box.

Today, I had an email from TSB, confirming that the payment was in progress. The precise wording was: “We’ll contact your card provider to make sure all the details are correct and then transfer the money to your TSB account.”

But I didn’t intend to transfer the money from the old provider to my new TSB account! I wanted to transfer the money from the TSB account to the old account, to pay it off!

Minor panic set in. So after spending the inevitable ten minutes hanging on for a busy ‘advisor’, I found myself wailing at a rather offhand lady – it was probably hot in the office yesterday. She assured me with a sigh that the words meant that they were indeed transferring the money out of my new account, into the old account – which was not a TSB account. But when I tried to explain that that was not what the email said, and suggested they should change the wording because it was too confusing, she simply couldn’t understand what I was talking about.

After a restless night, I finally grasped that it probably meant that they had to transfer the money to my new account before they could pay it out to the other credit card provider; credit, in the Orwellian sense, meaning ‘debt’…. It still didn’t make a lot of sense.

All rather galling because, as you kno’, I is a expert with wurdz.

Anyway, it seems it all comes down to what is meant by a ‘balance’. Anyone using PayPal for credit will be familiar with the monthly statement, which simply refers to one’s ‘balance’, and you have no idea whether they mean they owe you money or you owe them. It’s the same with my energy provider, the rapacious bastards at OVO. I know I’ve got various keys no longer working on my laptop, it can happen, but surely the finance community can find a simple fucking plus or minus sign to clear up any confusion?*

But never mind, look, I’ve won ‘a prize’ on the Lotto! If the pounds sign was still working on this, muh li’l laptop, I could tell you how many! (One…)

*And oh, look, as well as winning another £1 at the weekend, my latest OVO statement has come in and there’s a plus sign! I knew someone was reading this stuff, well done you!

GW – First the heat, then the ‘splatt!’

China: Typhoon Dolphin, China’s strongest typhoon this year, has “battered” Beijing with “bouts of intense rain that flooded key roads and stranded vehicles”, reports Reuters. It adds that China is “increasingly battling destructive weather that scientists link to climate change”. Thousands have been evacuated from areas “at risk of flooding and landslides”.

Japan: “At least six people have died and five others injured in eastern Japan as record rainfall pummelled the Chiba prefecture near the capital Tokyo. The rains, which authorities have described as unprecedented, cut power to more than 20,000 households while 7,000 travellers were stranded overnight at Tokyo’s Narita airport. Local authorities issued a level five emergency warning, its highest alert, on Thursday.” (BBC) Around 102,600 people in Chiba remained under evacuation orders as of Friday morning. Chuo ward recorded 115 mm (4.5-in.) of rain in one hour on Thursday night, “roughly equivalent to its average rainfall for the entire month of August”. (TRT World)

Europe: “Western Europe is suffering its hottest ever summer, with temperatures well above average. On Thursday, temperatures [we]re set to reach highs of 42C in Spain, including in the popular tourist hotspot of Cordoba, and 39C in Bordeaux, where a huge blaze forced the evacuation of more than 200,000 people last month (Independent). Politico reports: “Romania completely shut down its only nuclear power plant yesterday [Thursday] after water levels in the drought-hit Danube river fell too low to supply its last remaining operating reactor, reports Politico. The plant supplies 20% of the country’s power.” (Carbon Brief)

The US Pacific state of Hawaii is directly in the path of a strengthening tropical storm, named Lala. The National Hurricane Center updated Lala’s path and severity Friday morning, warning that the storm will likely make landfall at hurricane strength early Saturday morning. AccuWeather said in a statement: ‘A hurricane has never [since modern records began] made landfall on the Big Island. Tropical Storms Darby in 2016 and Iselle in 2014 are the only tropical storms to ever make landfall on Hawaii’s Big Island.’ Parts of the island could see up to 30 inches of rain, deadly flash flooding and mudslides, wind gusts reaching 100 mph and ocean surges approaching six feet.” (MS Now) AccuWeather is linking the unusual severity of the storm to the El Niño current rising in the Pacific.

USA: “a powerful line of thunderstorms raced across the Midwest, producing widespread damaging winds [and flash flooding] from Illinois into Indiana and Ohio. A peak gust of 99 miles per hour was measured at Gary/Chicago International Airport while tornadoes also caused damage in portions of Lake County.” Rainfall of up to 3-in. per hour was reported. “The storms toppled trees and utility poles, blocked roads and left traffic signals dark across northwest Indiana.” Hundreds of thousands of homes were left without electricity. (AccuWeather)

Tailpipe

Yesterday, according to the weather forecast for my location, precisely determined by Bing, I was to look forward to 16 degrees and a ‘cooling trend’ over the next few days.

The rest of the country, other forecasters were warning me, was under a 38-degrees amber alert; the map precisely and curiously delineated by the Welsh border. No heat here! And today, an eclipse later (I missed it – I live in a built-up area in a valley, I miss virtually all advertised celestial phenomena), it’s 31 degrees outside.

I would not describe 31 degrees C as a ‘cooling trend’. I’ve just endured half an hour out in my front garden, and despite the chilled white Pinot, that was enough. I’m 76 and living with heart failure and a prostate the size of a 7 month-old foetus, making me a prime candidate for one of these excess deaths we’re hearing so much about, owing to the heat.

It seems perfectly survivable, provided I don’t go to the convenience store for more wine and ice cream between the hours of 8 am and 7 pm. In fact, I’m not at all sure what it is that I’m supposed to die of, apart from old rage. Thanks to my inadvertent foresight ten years ago in planting a shady Photinia in my front garden, that has grown to monstrous proportions unenvisaged on the label, my little front room is cooler than any cucumber.

(And, having sneakily watered my little potted trees yesterday evening, as I expected it probably would – since I’m responsible for everything that happens in this world – it rained overnight and today is overcast and 19 degrees! Clever old Bing.)

Sticky stuff

“The Met Office has confirmed that it recorded a provisional reading of 38.1C at Kew Gardens, making it the hottest day of the year so far. It’s the second time we reached 38C this year, it said, with the only other year where this has happened twice in 2022. It is also the fifth hottest day on record ever, Met Office says. The previous 2026 record of 38C was recorded on 28 June.”

• “In Britain, where soils have parched, market analysts warn that we’re facing the most severe food security crisis in decades. In normal years, crop failures at home don’t threaten our security, thanks to global trade. This is one of the reasons why hunger and famines are rarer and less deadly than they used to be. But this is not a normal year, because the problem is now global.” – George Monbiot, The Guardian.

It probably doesn’t help that Ukraine has been bombing Russian grain exporting ports, adding to the climate-induced food crisis, but good luck to them. We didn’t evolve to eat grass.

Christ, that child!

There is almost a 70% chance that the building “super El Niño” will be the strongest of its kind on record, according to a forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA has upped its projections for the intensity of the 2026-27 El Niño, after previously saying that it would likely rank “among the largest El Niño events in the historical record”. (CNN) The boost in global temperatures from El Niño means there is now a 95% chance that 2027 will be the warmest year on record (Washington Post).

Grim reaper

RIP, Prof Jason Arday, 41, driven to suicide by Cambridge University academics, filthy racists and a prurient media stuck for any August story that wasn’t about the fucking weather. A sweet, vulnerable guy by all accounts – owed, but not given, a duty of care by his employer – and innocent of the shit they dumped on him.

Damn them all to hell.

Summer warmth may linger

“Autumn is a time for pumpkin-flavored drinks, shorter days and the return of chilly weather, although it may take longer than usual for summer warmth to fade, in part due to the building El Niño.” – By ‘summer warmth’, we presume AccuWeather‘s resident romantic poet is referring to the 120 degree blistering heat domes and terrifying wildfires that have made July the hottest month in US history!

There’s denial, and then there’s denial, And then there are pumpkin-flavored drinks!

Stop, Waymo!

• “Self-driving taxis have moved a step closer after Transport for London (TfL) granted private hire licences to a fleet of autonomous vehicles – on the condition that a human driver is present. Under the terms of the PHV licence, a qualified driver must be present and remain responsible for the car. Journeys could begin later this year. Uber said inspectors had confirmed that vehicles using technology by British firm Wayve met all of TfL’s policy and safety standards.”(BBC report)

Aside from the pointless absurdity of operating self-driving cars but only if there’s someone driving them, and noting that the cars also apparently require a human operator based in a call centre somewhere to intervene in emergencies, ‘autonomous vehicles’ have a somewhat chequered history in the States. Waymo has a fleet of 4,000 vehicles operating in 7 cities, and reports that accidents are down by 94%, so that’s good – Americans are obviously terrible drivers. But American cities have simple grid layouts and wide, straight streets made for the horseless carriage, while London is still very much an early Victorian rabbit warren. It might have made more sense to start the services in Milton Keynes and other ‘grid-based’ C20th new towns.

Even with their safety record, Waymo cars have not been without what the company insists are merely ‘edge’ problems; principally that they aren’t programmed to deal with unexpected situations. In one instance, a Waymo carrying two passengers drove over an exploding firework at a carnival, and caught fire. The whole lot had to be withdrawn and the software reprogrammed after several drove into floods, not recognising water. The New York Times reports that there have been numerous incidents of Waymos stopping immoveably in the street, blocking emergency vehicles. Power outages can bring an entire city’s Waymos to a grinding halt.

And there’s an account of an incident in which one car appeared to panic when confronted with an unexpected situation, an emergency road closure. The Times takes up the story:

• “Elliot Slade, 31, a San Francisco resident, and his fiancée were riding in a Waymo back to the city from an event in nearby San Mateo, Calif., in May when the car entered a construction zone that had closed the right lane of the highway. The car began driving like a ‘frightened animal,’ Mr. Slade said, swerving through traffic cones and accelerating to highway speed in the closed lane. It then wove past a truck and workers as California Highway Patrol officers hit their sirens and shouted, ‘Stop, Waymo!’ ‘We were freaking out,’ Mr. Slade said, adding that he placed his arm across his fiancée’s chest ‘just in case we crashed.’ He said he pressed a button in the car to call for support but no one answered until the vehicle exited the highway on its own. The couple got out of the Waymo and then took an Uber the rest of the way home.” (NYT)

Ahh, bless! It almost makes you feel sorry for them. The cars, that is, not the passengers. I used to drive a bit like that, not very good in tight situations; always missing turnings off roundabouts. But they’ll probably be driving themselves around hopefully, looking for fares, long after we’ve made ourselves extinct.

Travel at your own risk!

(PS could that opening BBC paragraph be the longest ever to not have a single instance of the lower-case letter “w” that I can cut and paste? My keyboard is up the creek and various keys no longer fire reliably.)

If at first….

Having lost his appeal against a lower court ruling that his gargantuan 99,000 sq ft White House ‘ballroom’ (known as ‘The Orangery’… my joke!) requires Congressional approval – “The President has no … constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people” – Trump is returning to the fray with an appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing with another preposterous bit of legal casuistry that the ballroom is “a desperately needed Military Center required for the security of Washington D.C. and our country itself”! (MS Now)

He’ll need to learn to dance the two-step, then.

Send out the clowns

The people at the National Lottery appear to have gone completely bonkers. Following on from their terrific wheeze, of duplicating the numbers you choose (for the same stake as before) and then pretending that it gives you ‘two chances to win’ – but there’s still only one draw and one set of winning numbers, so it doesn’t!* – they’re now hooked up with what looks like an American lottery offering a ludicrous jackpot prize, of 467 MILLION* pounds. (Not sure what the asterisk is for, must be a catch?)

I suspect most of us would have a little trouble knowing what to do with all that money, while it would be nice if the organisers could offer many more smaller prizes that winners might actually find useful and ‘life-changing’. Half a billion pounds is an inconceivable sum to be suddenly dropped in your lap and would probably be life-destroying for anyone who isn’t already stinking rich. Just imagine having to pay half a million pounds in tax on the interest every month!

Except it won’t be like that. The promotional splurge on the National Lottery website explains, the money will be paid over 30 years, “So your brain can compute’. Compute what, it doesn’t say. I’m not too good with computers these days. Anyway, my brain computes that I’m not going to have a lot to spend on champagne, yachts and a private island, as I’m already 76 years old and am quite unlikely to live to be 106 to experience the full benefit.

Got any more bright ideas, Allwyn Entertainment Ltd? I never thought I’d be pining for the days of Camelot, but at least you could imagine you were dealing with rational actors and not a bunch of overexcitable clowns.

*and they’ve more than halved the minor prizes. A quid? Fuck off!

GW – I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain

USA: “Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that July was the hottest month on record in the US. … average temperatures in July were 1.8C (3.3F) above the 20th century average.” (Carbon Brief)

Spain: “A large wildfire continues to burn in the south-west of Spain as “hot and windy weather ​fuelled other blazes raging across the country”, reports Reuters. It says more than 244,000 hectares of land has burned in 400 fires so far this year in Spain, based on estimates from the European Forest ​Fire Information System. It adds that this is six times larger than the area hit by fires by the same time last year.”

India: “the flood crisis in India’s north-eastern Assam state remained critical, with the death toll reaching 100,” reports the Associated Press. It adds that several rivers “remain above danger levels, raising the risk of fresh flooding in vulnerable areas”. In Kerala, heavy rains have claimed “15 lives so far, while seven people remain missing”, the Hindu BusinessLine reports. It quotes chief minister VD Satheesan saying that flash floods were caused by “extremely intense, localised rainfall that left little time for evacuation.” (Carbon Brief)

Philippines: “At least 15 people were killed by floods and landslides in the Philippines after nine days of incessant rainfall that left one mountain city receiving more than twice the precipitation London gets in a year. Ten people died in a landslide on Sunday evening, when a hillside battered by more than a week of rain collapsed onto three houses in Baguio, a city north of the capital Manila. Baguio recorded 1,413mm (56-in.) of rain between 1 and 9 August, the highest anywhere in the country, against a normal August total of 963mm.” (Independent)

London: Nope, no rain.

Tailpipe

Apart from terrible hair and an insatiable desire for love and money, what have Donald Trump and Baris Johnson got in common?

It’d make a great ‘Have I Got News For You?’ quiz question. The answer is, they’ve both had to hide in fridges!

In 2019, The Guardian reported,

• “The prime minister was ambushed by the Good Morning Britain producer, Jonathan Swain, during a pre-dawn visit to Modern Milkman, a business in the Tory-held constituency of Pudsey, in Yorkshire. When Swain first approached Johnson, he asked: ‘Morning prime minister, would you come on Good Morning Britain, prime minister?’ Johnson’s aide can be heard mouthing ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ in response. When Swain presses the prime minister, stating he was live on the show, Johnson replied ‘I’ll be with you in a second’ and walked off, before Piers (Morgan – for it was he) exclaims: ‘he’s gone into the fridge’. … Conservative sources subsequently insisted that Johnson was ‘categorically not hiding’ in the fridge, from which Johnson emerged carrying a crate of milk bottles…”

And today, scarcely credibly, the New York Times is exclusively reporting that last month, after the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump had to be smuggled out of Ankara inside a ‘catering container’ in an elaborate deception organised by his security team, owing to a credible threat from the Iranians to assassinate him at the airport, possibly by targeting his waiting plane. There followed a version of the well-known ‘three-card trick’….

• “Mr. Trump and other officials had said publicly that he would be leaving Turkey on July 8 aboard one of the older versions of Air Force One rather than a luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on. Mr. Trump told reporters at the time that he was making the switch for ‘old time’s sake.’ Mr. Trump boarded the older plane from the left-side door in view of cameras, and news organizations, including The New York Times, which reported that he had traveled on it to Britain, where he switched back to the newer plane. … But instead of flying out aboard that older, powder blue, modified 747, Mr. Trump was whisked off that plane via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane from where the journalists traveling with him boarded, one of the U.S. officials said. The president was then taken to a third (military) plane, which he flew in secret to Britain, the official with knowledge of the matter said.”

And finally caught up with his beloved new Qatar-supplied ‘gift’, the (dollars 400 million) stretched Boeing 747 – which has since been taken out of service for extra security modifications, after the US taxpayers (me included!) had already been bilked of possibly a billion dollars to have it adapted to fit the mad Emperor and his grotesque tastes. Landing at RAF Mildenhall, Trump was again smuggled out of the military jet he had escaped in, across to Airforce One, that had landed a few minutes later – this is all a bit confusing – and pretended he’d been onboard his official plane all along; although you’d think someone would have noticed he wasn’t.

Anyway, the deception having only just come out, the hundred or so journalists and staffers aboard Airforce One that day and various opposition congresspersons are now excitedly demanding to know why they were used unwittingly as decoys, sacrificial lambs, when there was a ‘credible’ security threat against their flight that they hadn’t been warned about? Does Trump hate journalists that much? Shades of Lockerbie! And who knew the President had even visited our shores? Does he come here often? Should we be told?

It’s quite funny, really.

Let the wrong ones out

As you know, your Old Uncle is afflicted with a condition known as cognitive dissonance – the ability to support two entirely contrary propositions at the same time.

Especially where public opinion is concerned.

The case of Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, two rustic teenage tearaways who in 2019, aged 18, were passengers in a car racing to escape justice after being confronted by police constable Andrew Harper, 28, following a report of the attempted theft of a farmer’s quad bike, is obviously tragic. Harper became somehow entangled in a strap and was dragged for a mile behind the car to his death. The jury was not entirely convinced the boys in the car were aware of his plight, although the driver, Henry Long, 19, apparently attempted to ram a police car as they fled.

Uncle B. is currently quite conflicted about it. Should they be released early, as part of the general ‘amnesty’ programme designed to free more prison places to keep the justice system creaking on, or should they be made a special case because of the nature of the crime, and kept inside for what would be only a few more months, just to please the family of the victim? And, he wonders in passing, why Britain locks up more criminals per head of population than any other country in Europe? Last year, for instance, the Netherlands actually closed 40% of their prison estate because it wasn’t being used.

In 2020, Cole and Bowers were sentenced to 13 years for manslaughter, which entitled them to be considered for parole in October, 2027. However, owing to a program announced two years ago – why is everyone getting hot under the collar about this only now? – to release several thousand less controversial prisoners on licence early, to free up space in our overcrowded Victorian prisons, their release dates following an urgent review of the scheme by new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, were brought forward to January next year.

I don’t suppose he even knew these guys existed when he exempted manslaughter cases from the list of those who were considered a threat to society and not to be released.

But at that point, all hell broke loose. Harper’s mother made numerous emotional appearances on TV, claiming it was an insult to her son’s memory, and that nobody was ‘listening’ to victims – although Burnham has appointed a minister for victims and is clearly aware of the problem and doing his best to resolve it. Despite that, many serving and ex-police officers and crime commissioners came forward on their high horses to announce that, as one of their own had been killed in the line of duty, to let Cole and Bowers of all people out before they had completed their sentences was an insult to our brave bobbies on the frontline and a travesty of British justice.

More pertinently, there appears to be a concerted campaign encouraging public vilification of the two boys, who had foolishly – and possibly illegally – been filmed entering the courtroom to be sentenced, sneering defiantly at the camera. Photographing the accused is still not allowed in British courts. The unpleasant image has been repeated over and over again on the news, contrasted with sympathetic pictures of PC Harper on his wedding day, his attractive new wife, and a shot of him looking – dare I say – sweet. Not one second of airtime has been given to pointing out that the young men will have served over 7 years in prison by January and are unlikely still to be the nasty little 18-year-old scumbags depicted on the news, whom any reasonable human being would naturally like to see banged up for life. What is the point of prison, if those convicted can never be rehabilitated becuse of public opprobrium stirred up by a prurient media? We all did a lot of bloody stupid things when we were 18.

Let’s remember, too, that Long, the driver of the car pleaded guilty, and is not being released. The public has their revenge on him. Cole and Bowers would have been let out anyway next year, and their earlier release would probaby mean stricter supervision than they would otherwise have been under. In the interests of justice, I don’t like this idea that, because a police officer is involved, a special example should be made of those already sentenced – the law has changed since the incident to increase the penalties for killing emergency service workers. The two are probably in more danger now, thanks to the highly politicised storm of outrage that has greeted the story, which has revived all the bitterness and anger and ‘victimology’ that surrounded the early release scheme when it was first introduced.

To exclude these two specifically from a general amnesty for manslaughter convicts merely because of heightened public emotion would simply highlight the proverb that ‘bad cases make bad laws’; it would be necessary to deny all such offenders the opportunity of early release, whatever their original sentencing ‘tariff’; while I hate the idea that a public petition stirring up the mob is any basis for a legal system. Britain is not Dodge city.

Is it worth whipping up controversy over what might have been only a few months’ reduction in their time served? and what then should we make of the 2,200 prisoners whose time has run, in some cases, many years over their original sentences for minor crimes, because of an idiotic mistake by a former Home Secretary, David Blunkett in introducing ‘indeterminate sentences’ for certain classes of prisoner, that were abolished in 2012? One such case cited in The Guardian, 10 Aug., concerns a 17-year-old boy, gaoled for 19 months for stealing a flower pot, for god’s sake, who is still incarcerated 19 years later.

Does the great British public concede that it might be time to release him?