Robots rust. AI will remove all the oxygen

“…if there is even a meaningful possibility of catastrophic harm, the rational response is to assess that risk before accelerating further. Instead, we are building systems faster, granting them more autonomy, and competing to make them more capable, all while the people building them admit we may not understand where this ends. Which leads to an urgent and quite sophisticated question: what the f**k are we doing?” – Tech writer, Kyle Taylor, in Byline Times, 13 September.

QotW

• “In short, we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the liveability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. There is something treasonous in this. Treasonous not to an abstraction like a flag or a nation, for we are not nationalists. But treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us. They are traitors to creation, to the wonders of here.”

– Naomi Klein, an extract from her new book in The Guardian, 13 Sept., on the psychopathology of the billionaire class currently prepping to survive our extinction event – an event they are busy engineering for us – in underground bunkers and on floating artificial island ‘nations’ far out to sea, pending their colonisation of imagined Earthy planets to be discovered, presumably, hundreds of years in the future.

Commenters and pundits have wondered at the huge sums of money billionaires are pouring into the Reform UK party, the private business of Farage and Tice. Apart from buying up British democracy itself, they ask themselves, what do these moguls hope to gain from donating – not a total of £72 million, that’s just in the past two days, but closer to £100 million since the party started, not to mention the personal bungs to Farage?

What they hope to gain is clearly the realisation of boyhood dreams generated by reading comic books alone in their suburban American bedrooms. Reading that strips away consciousness of the richness of the world and focuses purely on the cold mechanical. The only hope for the rest of us is to kill them and smash their machines, but that’s not going to happen.

Money is bulletproof. And we keep giving it to them. Klein has a more moderate solution that requires social re-engineering and passive resistance:

• “What keeps these men up at night is … us. It’s the possibility that a popular and vigorous movement will rise up and defend this planet and the many life-forms who call it home.”

And with the dawn comes news that ‘President’ Trump’s Environmental Destruction Agency has ‘rescinded’ – a posh word for trashed – the last remaining pollution controls on coal and gas-fired power stations, with legislation designed to ensure they can never be reimposed. Why, it’s almost as though these motherfuckers actually want to end our existence on earth.

So why shouldn’t we end theirs first?

Naomi’s new book, with social justice campaigner Astra Taylor: ‘End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World’, is out 15 September.

But China….

The New York Times is finding that the Trump administration and its lackeys in Congress aren’t responding with any alarm or alacrity to pleas from the AI industry to get a grip and impose some controls on their research, following several terrifying interventions from even the leading luminaries of the industry, who are very worried that it’s all going too fast. And for some reason they can’t stop themselves from pursuing the nebulous dream of machines that are much cleverer than they are, so would someone please help?

The general mood seems to be, we can’t let China get ahead, so we won’t be too worried if the technology does decide to kill us all within the next ten years, when it removes all the oxygen to stop the robots rusting… Al Qaeda may manage to engineer a superbug that only targets Westerners, but just keep on researching, make the genie unendingly more powerful, think of the money.

The fact that no politician appears to know any more than the scientists do, where the research is supposed be leading is really quite frightening, but in America they have a gerontocracy and it would be amazing if the wealthy octogenarians in Congress even knew how to answer the doorbell; while the president, who jokes about spending a trillion dollars here or there on sending every Republican voter a cheque, and thinks he’s won a two-weeks war he started six months ago but can’t finish, and refuses to believe the military has run out of missiles, is clearly senile.

• “…asked by a reporter about whether he had any concerns about A.I. leading to human extinction, he brushed it off. ‘No, I don’t have any,’ he said. ‘I have concerns that if we don’t win A.I., we’re going to be put in a very bad position.’ … Rather than talk about exploring a bilateral A.I. accord with the Chinese, he turned to the state dinner that he said would be a highlight of Xi’s visit at the end of the month. ‘I think it’s going to be great’, he said.” (NYT)

But what does the Great Afflatus imagine in his profound ignorance he means by ‘winning’ AI? There is no winning line, no triumphal arch at the end of this particular race. It just goes on, and on, until we arrive in some kind of mechanical Nirvana or discover Time travel and leave the solar system, or destroy ourselves in the process. Even the Chinese must know that. As for Britain, what on earth do we think we’re doing, racing to catch up, pursuing this horrible chimera because we once used to be great at everything? What kind of world will we be allowing the robots to terraform for us? One which their superior intelligence is hardly likely to make less than comfortable for themselves, I’d suggest, exterminating the inconvenient biological bugs.

Or one full of paperclips.

GW – Life’s a beach

USA: Southern California communities are losing beaches and scrambling to protect oceanfront homes after swells from former Pacific Hurricane Marie accelerated coastal erosion last week. Laguna Beach officials declared a local emergency Thursday because of ongoing sand loss. Just as the Atlantic season has set a new record for having had not a single hurricane since 1 June, the rising El Niño has brought about massive disturbance in the Pacific this summer. Earlier last week, in the wake of Hurricane Lala, Hurricane Lowell came within about 40 miles of landfall in Hawaii, knocking out power to most of Kaua’i island.

Last week’s September heatwave over the southwestern states, that drove temperatures to 100 deg.+ in southern California and Nevada (107F in Long Beach, also in Las Vegas) has dissipated, but a new heat dome is forming over Florida and across the southeast.(AccuWeather)

India: “Flooding around the city of Malda in the Indian state of West Bengal since Thursday has had a devastating effect. So far, three deaths have been recorded and many areas are still flooded, with numerous villages affected. … the Ganges River rose about 75cm above its ‘extreme danger’ level owing to heavy rainfall.” (Guardian Weather Tracker)

Tailpipe

What’s annoying your Old Uncle this week?

Apart from the fact that it’s been raining pretty consistently here in gloomy Boglington since last Friday (‘scattered showers, sunny spells’), the problem I’m having as usual with The News is not what they’re reporting, but what they’re not reporting.

F’rinstance, amid the plethora of blather about those £36 million, perfectly ‘legal’ donations to Reform UK, no-one is pointing out that the two jokers in question have ALREADY handed Farage and Tice Ltd. £30 million in rather dodgier circumstances over the past two years to say nice things about crypto-currencies, lobby the Bank of England to scrap the pound and promise to reverse whatever controls might already exist, should they buy their way to power, making a total of, er…. You’re kidding! no?

In the soup

In a closed-door hearing, Moscow prosecutors are calling for an eight-year sentence for Pavel Syutkin, a 61 year-old food writer, for posting critically about the Ukraine war. Syutkin has upset the Kremlin by claiming that Russian borscht is really a Ukrainian recipe. (from Moscow Times)

Wot, me worry?

“We are in a period of exponential development, and there are only two ways to respond: too early or too late,” he said. “The world has missed its chance to be too early.” – Johns Hopkins associate professor, Ben Buchanan. Quoted in New York Times, ‘As Fears of A.I. Catastrophe Magnify, Washington Stirs, but Mostly Slumbers’, 13 Sept.

I’m constantly reminded amid the relentless awfulness of the news that my little granddaughter is due to enter this world sometime next month. – UB

Scratch the wind

You’d think Trump would want to scrap AI. Studies show, it’s rather good at predicting hurricanes.

It might as well rain until next April

• “Donald Trump frequently makes comments about the economy, the vast majority of which are plainly wrong. But the president also occasionally makes economic assertions that expose his economic illiteracy. At an Oval Office event on Friday afternoon, for example, the Republican argued that the United States could save money by ‘just not trading’ with other countries.” (Steve Benen, MS Now)

The Pumpkin has occasionally noticed before, that Trump appears to have a sense of humour; although his wee jests are often indefinably obscure. Are his demonstrations of economic illiteracy genuine, or are they evidence of heavy-handed, Germanic jocosity? It’s hard to tell, although when they terminate in actual economic measures, usually against other countries he’s taken a dislike to, they tend to come back to bite him. Painful consumer price inflation, for instance, especially of ‘gas’ prices, largely owing to his silly war against Iran and malignant punitive tariffs against everyone else, has then to result in expressions of nonchalance: ‘if your kid can’t afford thirty dolls, she can make do with three: I don’t care!’

“After falsely claiming the U.S. ‘loses’ $195 billion a year to Mexico, (in exchange presumably for $195 billion’s worth of goods), the president added, ‘They have nothing that we have to have. I mean, hot tamales? Tomatoes? A couple of things? Basically, they have nothing we need.'” Mexico is one of America’s most lucrative trading partners, not least because US companies manufacture a lot of stuff there, like cars, where labour is cheaper south of the border. Slapping tariffs on goods imported from Mexico merely adds to the pain of American consumers, it’s not a great electoral strategy. Threatening to halt ALL trade with other countries unless the Fed agrees to interest rates lower than anywhere else on the planet is a bizarre strategy not, argues Comment writer Steve Benen, because of economic conditions, but “because he thinks we’re awesome.”

Proclaiming yet another Trump economic boom, the severely deluded occupant of the White House is either ignoring, or has not been told, that his job numbers are 40 per cent lower than the monthly totals achieved during the whole of Joe Biden’s last year in office. So maybe it’s not a joke after all.

Why is this useless old duffer still in office?

GW –

USA: “Temperatures will surge to 10-20 degrees above historical averages, challenging daily record highs across multiple parts of California and the interior Southwest this week.” Which is a bit odd, because California is still attracting Pacific storms: “As a storm pushes inland into the northwestern United States late this week, breezes from the ocean will sweep inland, breaking the heat wave. … Highs above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for multiple days are in store for the interior valleys of California, including in Sacramento and Fresno, and may approach 110 in Palm Springs. Highs are forecast to be well into the 90s to near 100 in downtown Los Angeles.”

Meanwhile, “Hurricane Lowell came within about 40 miles of landfall in Hawaii Monday, knocking out power to most of Kaua’i and bringing the second hurricane threat within weeks. Lowell was a Category 2 hurricane Tuesday, moving north about 110 miles northwest of Lihue, Hawaii. Winds have topped 90 mph across parts of Kaua’i, including a gust over 90 mph in Puu Lua. Earlier last week, the storm briefly reached Category 5 strength with maximum sustained winds of 160 mph.” So despite a brush with Lala two weeks ago, the Big Island has still never received a direct hit from a hurricane.

Tailpipe

Last night while I was working, this, muh new laptop went into meltdown and started outputting the number 4, row upon row. I couldn’t stop it, so I hit the power switch. The computer turned off, then it turned itself on again. I turned it off again, and it turned on again, still outputting 4s. I ran a scan for malware, and nothing showed up. This went on until in panic, I just hit all the keys in the F row and thankfully it stopped and I was able to delete the 4s. Needless to say, it had also lost control of the mouse, or rather, the mouse had lost power and was out of control of the computer. Without it, I can’t get to the bit where you can select the text size. I’ve just tried posting this story to an article about AI running out of control and it’s refusing to let me upload the Comment.

It’s like being in a horror movie. Why 4? What’s it been trying to tell me? Did an AI agent just take control of my computer?

The tech guy in the store, Jamie, laughs. No, he says. you just need to turn it off occasionally – I mean, properly off, not just sleep mode.

And thus, harmony is restored. Kind of.

The party of extremely rich people

“I always picture Reform’s internal affairs department as a toy phone ringing out in an abandoned Wendy house.” – Marina Hyde, The Guardian, 04 Sept.

QotW

• “While I wouldn’t be shocked if we are living in the end times, what I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now,” the vice-president said during a podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a young Christian evangelist. Vance added: “And if that leads to the end times, OK.” (Guardian – Arwa Mahdawi)

Amid a week of scary things happening, this is possibly the scariest. Trump’s most likely successor is barking mad; more so than Trump, as he appears to have no other agenda than to be the guy God told to end it all.

“And it’s only getting worse”

• “Unending wars, expanding humanitarian crises, rising authoritarianism, dysfunctional democracies, rampant racial and religious extremism, and unchecked lawlessness cast a dark cloud as the west’s new political year begins. Set all that against a backdrop of staggering global economic inequality, corporate and individual greed, irresponsible government indebtedness, dangerous AI gambles, climate breakdown and proliferating nuclear weapons, and a truly apocalyptic global outlook begins to take shape.”

But The Guardian‘s veteran international affairs correspondent, Simon Tisdall, encourages us not to lose heart. It’s all going to be okay! (‘The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future’, 06 Sept.)

I suppose if you spent a month watching BBC TV’s The One Show (7pm BBC1 weekdays) and no other news or current affairs programming, you’d emerge in a slightly strange frame of mind, but definitely encouraged by the sheer niceness of everyone, the gleaming dentistry and the nightly tributes paid to the enormous amount of charity work and communitarianism displayed by ordinary people in every corner of these islands. No obscure medical condition is allowed to run its dread course while there are still sufferers of all ages prepared to scale at least three peaks before breakfast, to “raise awareness” and not a little money. In 2023, ordinary Britons donated over £400 million to the joint charities appeal for victims of the Turkish earthquake, and we don’t even like the Turks, what with their strange foreign barber shops and invasive migratory habits. A couple of weeks later, we donated millions more to the annual Children in Need appeal.

We’re not bad people.

And then, to bring us all down again, there’s Reform UK. The central tenet of Nigel ‘The toxic Frog’ Farage’s private party is the old saw, ‘divide and rule’. Nigel and his elitist rich pals like to remind us daily of how much we all hate and envy one another, especially foreigners, who are to be sent packing when the party gains power, courtesy of millions of gullible white, middle-aged voters who can’t or won’t see what Nigel is, a ranting, autocratic demagogue and a total phony; but who seem happy to inflict violence on his opponents to remind themselves of how great Britain used to be. It’s all so fucking crude. Nigel’s children are actually registered German citizens, thanks to their mother’s nationality, as he didn’t want to disadvantage them by forcing them to remain British, second-class victims of the historic rift he spent the earlier part of his career cynically creating in the European Union.

They’ll have to go, for a start.

Then there’s his anomalous millionaire mouthpiece, DEI hire and ex-Goldman Sachs Master of the Universe, Zia Yusuf. There’s clearly money to be made from fluffing billionaires: Wikipedia reports, “In 2014, Yusuf and (his business partner) founded a luxury concierge company, Velocity Black, of which Yusuf was the CEO. In 2023, Yusuf … sold Velocity Black to Capital One for £233 million, and made an estimated £31 million.” He also gained a reputation for being thoroughly nasty: “In June 2025 a BBC report detailed allegations against Yusuf focusing on his conduct at Velocity Black. The report cited ‘unpredictable’ behaviour, employee fear, and frequent dismissals.” (Believe me, I’ve worked for psychotic arseholes like that. It’s a familiar type.)

Another claim in the report said that Yusuf approved false financial figures that inflated Velocity Black’s growth. Which, of course, he has denied – he wouldn’t want to go the way of another British entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, who ended up in all sorts after flogging his tech company to Hewlett Packard at a grossly inflated price and ended up drowned when his posh yacht sank. Promoting overvalued assets for pecuniary gain is, of course, the Trump family business.

Yusuf is, however, in a spot of bother after making extraordinarily racist and faintly disgusting remarks about Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee from Somalia and the leader of Camden council, possibly favoured to stand for Parliament in Keir Starmer’s Camden seat. It’s a case of the pot calling the kettle brown, as the son of Sri Lankan immigrant health workers appeared to object to her Somali origin, posting (on X, naturally – it’s where all the shittiest people go): “The frontrunner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former prime minister Keir Starmer in our parliament was born in Somalia. Do you understand what’s happening?”

Yes, Zia, as I understand it we have a multi-ethnic Parliament happening, reflecting the changing makeup of our society. We have had since Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as the first Indian-origin Member of Parliament in 1892 – a time when a large part of Somalia was a British protectorate. It’s a makeup of which, unfortunately, you are a part – although you remind me more of something I saw floating in the river recently, thanks to the unsavoury practices of our water industry. Try showing a little humility, mate. Manners, not money, maketh Man.

GW

Europe: “Orange extreme heat warnings are (were) in force through Saturday in Spain, southern France, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Serbia. The hottest spots in Spain will continue to exceed 40C this weekend and early next week. On Thursday, El Granado in south-west Spain reached 45.7C (114F), the country’s highest temperature recorded this year.” (BBC)

Australia: “…potentially record early September temperatures are predicted for Brisbane and Sydney, while snow was expected in southern New South Wales. Maximum temperatures in Sydney during the first days of September were on track to match the city’s midsummer average of 26.4C, warmer than any other start to spring since the city’s Observatory Hill station opened in 1858. (A temperature of 33C has been logged over the weekend.) A total fire ban was in place for the greater Sydney region, where extreme fire danger was forecast.” (Guardian) Mountain resorts starved of snow are having to close early.

USA: “More than 530,000 utility customers were without power Friday morning after severe storms swept across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic Thursday night.A line of intense thunderstorms charged east, producing widespread wind damage from Michigan to Washington, D.C., and spawning the first tornado in Detroit city limits since 1997. … In California, tropical downpours could disrupt travel and outdoor activities and cause dangerous flash flooding from near the southern coast to the Nevada deserts during part of the extended Labor Day weekend. … Meanwhile, Hawaii could face its second hurricane impact in a matter of weeks, as Cat 3 Hurricane Lowell threatens communities still recovering from Hurricane Lala.” (All, AccuWeather)

Tailpipe

Cake knife

It must be a first. A California woman who completed a prison sentence in 2013 for the ‘involuntary manslaughter’ of her (male) husband James Joseph, whom she stabbed to death in 2000 has been jailed again – for killing her (female) wife in an argument. “Olejniczak Marodi, 54, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Aug. 5 in San Diego County Superior Court in the stabbing death of her wife, Rebecca Marodi, who was found dead in February 2025.”

This time, she got 36 years. (New York Times) Good though, she believes in marriage.

Googled

“We changed some of your settings because we couldn’t confirm you’re an adult. Check if your settings are right for you.” Yes, they’ve imposed a parental lock on me. I’m 77 next month!

Must be my second childhood. Worse, I can’t get into my email inbox as they’re demanding I register a new account uptaking their new ‘Gemini’ AI-powered email service, that writes your emails for you.

Who the hell are these fucking Americans, to impose their slopocratic garbage by blackmail on unwitting users who don’t give a toss for ‘technology’ as long as it works? I’ve been a @google.com customer for over a decade, and now they don’t know who I am?

I want my email back.

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 minx, 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 in Ukraine 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 finest 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 on behalf of the Russians.

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: 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. But nothing yet has qualified as an actual hurricane. 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, but 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! Call for a reset.

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.

*07 Sept., And three more since!!! Total winnings since July, £9.45! Also, 5 free goes at my local NHS health board lottery! What is going on? (Libra: your stars are well aspected….) I suspect Russian interference, actually.

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’ – if not forever. “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!