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The banana skins of Evil

Just a reminder, then, that: “These ideas about the Singularity, super-intelligent machines and humanity’s obsolescence did not emerge neutrally from the technology we have today. They have a long intellectual history – one entangled with transhumanism, eugenics and a small group of extraordinarily wealthy men convinced they could anticipate, and perhaps engineer, humanity’s future.”

– Byline Times’ indefatigable investigator, Nafeez Ahmed, wrote in an article ten months ago that the: “newly released Jeffrey Epstein files” were revealing that “an apocalyptic worldview – blending racial hierarchy, genetic ‘optimisation’ and even climate-driven population culling – was circulating inside the elite, founder-linked networks shaping Silicon Valley’s rise.” That inexplicably wealthy Svengali, Jeffrey Epstein: “…funded prominent transhumanist and AI thinkers, notably Nick Bostrom, Ben Goertzel, and Joscha Bach – while bankrolling organisations that brought him into the orbit of top Silicon Valley figures.”

In many more words, we learn that: the “power broker and convicted sex offender”, Epstein appears to have been seminal in promoting those evil men’s racialist and eugenicist ideas among the selfsame bunch of deluded proto-billionaires he drew into his circle of influence, who are even now warning us that the advanced self-replicating AI models they’re creating could kill us all and, bizarrely, are begging us to stop them! It appears however that that had all along been their intention, so long as they themselves would survive to perpetuate a master race.

In a preamble to this week’s timely reprise of Ahmed’s article from last December, Byline Times notes: “Long before today’s LLMs (Large Language Models) were even a theoretical concept, a future crop of Silicon Valley founders, funders, and philosophers were taking pulp science fiction novels extremely seriously – and obsessing over the inevitability of hyper-intelligent AI.”

The developmental impact of reading comics, lonely and isolated in their stinky teenage bedrooms, on today’s crop of sociopathic billionaire techbros is a point we’ve made before on the BogPo. So let’s unpack one possibility:

In his collection of short stories, published as long ago as 1959 (when computers had barely got started) as ‘Nine Tomorrows’, legendary Sci-Fi guru, Isaac Asimov postulated the rise of AI, plotting the evolution of supercomputers through various, ever-more powerful iterations, sucking in more and more data, until (spoiler alert) one becomes the Singularity, existing as the sole entity in an otherwise dead universe. At that point, in possibly one of the most powerful endings ever to a work of fiction, the all-knowing entity looks around itself and intones, in an echo of the biblical Creation: ‘Let there be light’!

Horrific, if you had to trace that profound moment back to something as creepy and evil as Epstein, his filthy money and his mad ideas!

Ad-Vance, America Fair!

In a possibly hopeful sign of progress, Fox News TV anchor Sandra Smith cut off a half-hoour speech Vice President Vance was making at a poorly attended rally in support of a Trumpy candidate in Greenboro, North Carolina after just eight minutes, sighing: “We’ll bring you right back to this rally if he starts to make news.” The clip has gone viral, attracting many approving comments from viewers.

GW – ooh, what a spin I’m in

USA: Approaching Hawaii, which has already been hit by three hurricanes/tropical storms in the past month, causing extensive flood damage, although none has made landfall, Fox Weather is reporting, Hurricane Polo “has undergone extreme rapid intensification, strengthening into a monster Category 5 storm.”

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Lost cause

“Gosport local Dave Palmer, 43, was among the protesters. ‘We don’t want them in the country at all. They get given everything. I work 70 to 80-hour weeks as an air-conditioning engineer. What does the government give me? Nothing,’ he said. (Guardian: ‘Far right activist Daniel Thomas slashes dinghy in Channel with blade while rescue worker onboard’, 23 Sept.)

There’s a world of wholly unjustified grievance to unpack in that dismaying statement from a person one supposes is a typical follower of “Tommo’s Patriot Platform”, starting from the premise that he’s totally misinformed or even deluded about the situation of the Channel migrants, who are not ‘given everything’, or, indeed, anything much, other than a blanket, verbal or even physical abuse and free conveyance to an overcrowded minimum facilities transit camp or a redundant hotel divested of its former luxuries pending deportation or, possibly, imprisonment; after many months of forced inactivity on an allowance of £10 a week, allowed one phone call a week, a decision on whether or not they may be temporarily admitted as bona fide refugees of the sort we’ve been taking in since the 15th century; while the government ‘gives’ Mr Palmer a country in which he may have received free training and be encouraged to ply a trade on a hefty hourly rate, which migrants are not at liberty to do at all. The government ‘gives’ him a body of laws and defence forces designed to keep him and his family safe; free healthcare for the family and education for his children; free security and banking services; the freedom to roam, shop, have a (paid) holiday or go to the pub; free entertainments; the opportunity to live in a house with a garden and, if his income should fall away, a whole range of benefits ranging from Housing Benefit and Universal Credit to – if he’s feeling particularly aggrieved – a Disability Allowance, or if long-term aggrieved, a Personal Independence Payment; subsidised Maternity and Paternity leave, and a triple-locked State Pension at the end of it, none of which is ever going to be available to the poor sod who’s slogged his way across the Sahara desert to the Med, being shot at, raped or enslaved by random militias; and, exploited by a trafficking gang at eye-gouging expense compared to his or her lifetime’s income or to the cost of a ticket, forded the choppy English channel in an unsafe inflatable rubber conveyance – being the only means of entry available – desperate to get to an illusory land of milk and honey whose historic ‘Empire’ probably beggared his country in the first place and forced him into having to leave home, which he never wanted to do because his family is there; only to be greeted by a violent, smelly bunch of feral racist arseholes in balaclavas, yelling and waving rude messages, most of whom could probably work for a living but choose to ponce off the rest of us instead.

Still, thank Christ for global warming, we’re going to need those air conditioning units. I assume you get quite well paid for working 70 to 80 hours a week? Sadly, I’m a bit past all that.

And could somebody kindly explain to me, why some of the most visibly genetically damaged, intellectually challenged people on the planet believe they’re so fucking superior to everyone else? Who told them that?

Synergy, thy name is Nigel

If you want somebody to wave your placard at, Mr Palmer, Byline Times is reporting that Stack BTC, former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s bitcoin crypto firm in which Farage, the Toxic Frog has a 6% stake, is proposing to buy Direct Bullion, the gold-dealing outfit that has, according to his filings, so far paid him £685 THOUSAND to smear his gurning mug all over their website, while being paid £98,599 a year plus expenses by you, the taxpayer, to represent the people of Clacton.

We’re assuming there’s no connection to the massive gold bullion stash reportedly held in El Salvador by billionaire crypto-man and Farage-fluffer, Harborne’s Tether blockchain operation?

Somebody please explain, just what the fuck they’re all up to? Or, as Josiah Mortimer more elegantly puts it: “So what does it mean when a politician with significant financial exposure to these industries is also seeking to reshape Britain’s economic policy – including its laws regulating crypto – and where might his political and personal interests collide?”

Indeed. All vote for Nigel! (Incidentally, he’s being advised to scrap the State pension altogether when Reform gets in. Fuck that!)

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When is a feedback loop a tipping point?

“Israel has been in a state of denial now for close to three years,” said the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov, author of the recent book “Israel: What Went Wrong. … “In Israel you may be on the left, but your children go to serve in the army, and often you are proud of them being soldiers,” said Bartov. “And then you’re told they maybe were involved in a criminal war. That’s very difficult for people to accept, and they will find all kinds of ways to resist it.”

– Michelle Goldberg, NYT Opinion, 18 Sept. on the official Israeli response to the documentary film NAZA, including calls for the filmmakers to be stripped of their citizenship, murdered and their family homes demolished, for interviewing on camera ex-members of the IDF who admit that’s pretty much what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians in Gaza.

Has Israel moved on in two and a half thousand years?

QotW

DIY AI

• “Once R.S.I. takes off, humanity will not understand the A.I.s being built, because we will not be building them. Development will not move at human speed. It will not be overseen by human minds. We will have to hope that the A.I.s we have built and the A.I.s they will build and the A.I.s those A.I.s will build, and on and on, will be acting with our best interests at heart forever. If nothing else has been proved this summer, it is how naïve that proposition would be.” – Ezra Klein, NYT Comment, 21 Sept.

[Recursive Self-Improvement = ‘An AI model analyzes data or previous research, proposes improvements to its own architecture or training process, and applies them to create a more advanced model.’ – Google AI explanation.]

Will somebody please try to explain to poor old Trump that there is no ‘winning’ the ‘race’ to create superintelligent AI? He seems to think the US has to go balls-out in a race with China for national prestige – and his own glory. Hence his claim that the industry leaders’ warnings of dangers inherent in the process are, in his favourite word, a ‘hoax’ – and his belief in the necessity to cover the entire country in energy-guzzling, high CO2 output data centres.

RSI is in the real world a continuous, iterative process which developers hope to delegate to the AI agents themselves, a process to which there is no known ending or winning other than, possibly, the extinction of inconvenient biological life on Earth.

Oh, is that maybe what he means?

Here in Boglington it was 16.9 degrees C in my garden at 7 o’clock this morning.

“The current El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere in which temperatures are already rising rapidly due to human-caused global heating. This double whammy means 2027 is expected to ‘blow apart’ previous records and become the hottest year ever recorded. The most recent forecasts predict a peak sea surface temperature of 4.0C in November and December, according to the average of 14 different models assessed … as ‘Godzilla-level’.” (Guardian Climate Crisis)

[The previous average or ‘normal’ temperature increase owing to El Niño events has been 0.5 degrees C. We’re already at 3.7.]

Don’t buy stuff. Don’t burn stuff.

“The planetary life support systems relied upon by humans have deteriorated to their worst levels ever recorded amid ongoing pollution and habitat destruction, according to a key yet grim annual update by scientists. Of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that help determine whether life can flourish on Earth, seven are being breached at their highest ever levels…” (Guardian, quoting report from the Potsdam Institute on the eve of the UN plenary.)

GW – Stormy weather

Japan: “At least 4 (later 5) people have died and 22 were injured after Typhoon Dujuan brought torrential rain and destructive winds to Tokyo and surrounding prefectures, causing widespread travel disruption.” 275 flights were cancelled as the storm swept through the region. “More than 1.6 million residents in and around Tokyo were urged to evacuate, although the advice was not mandatory. Oshima, around 120km south of central Tokyo, received 832mm (32-in.) of rain over 48 hours – more than twice its average rainfall for the entire month of September.” (Guardian)

USA: A major ‘Nor’easter’ storm is threatening the US’ east coast with power outages, high waves and coastal flooding. But still no Atlantic hurricanes – a 60-year record. In the Pacific it’s a different story: “Tropical Depression 15-E has restregnthend (sic – not an actual word!) about 400 miles to the southeast of the Big Island of Hawaii” and is forecast by AccuWeather to become a hurricane, Nolo, bringing flooding rain and mudslides across portions of the islands beginning Wednesday. “Life-threatening conditions could unfold.”

Mexico: “Hurricane Polo has rapidly strengthened into a major Category 5 hurricane as it threatens portions of Mexico’s Pacific coast running up to Baja California Sur with flooding rain, damaging winds and storm surge. Polo went from a 50 mph tropical storm on Monday morning to a 160 mph Category 5 hurricane 24 hours later. As of Tuesday morning, Polo was moving east at 6 mph and was located about 220 miles south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico.” The remnant storm is likely to bring flooding rain to the southwest of the USA next week. (AccuWeather)

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Emissionary position

• “Recent models tell us that current policies give us about a 25 percent shot at exceeding four degrees by 2150. Those odds look a bit better than they used to. But we shouldn’t overstate our scientific confidence about an experiment we get to run only once, in a climate system whose intricacies remain mysterious and in which all of us and all of our descendants are going to have to live.” – David Wallace Wells, in the New York Times, 22 Sept. warns us not to follow our leaders down the rabbit hole of complacency, just because the transition to renewables is going better than expected – although not everywhere, your Old Unc hastens to add, as the demands of the rapidly proliferating data centres continue to mount.

With so much potential already to trip those pesky ‘tipping points’, our unpredictable climate can still turn around and bite us.

Cold Comfort Farm

“The Trump administration has ejected more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance marketplaces, Vice President JD Vance announced on Tuesday, claiming that many were receiving premium subsidies they did not qualify for and that some were not even real people.” (NYT) He hopes it will save $2.2 billion. Another 440 thousand more cases are under review.

Further examination shows that most of these people are already too poor to qualify for insurance under the new ACA (formerly known as ‘Obamacare’) and, in several ‘blue’ Democrat States where their existing safety net of State-sponsored Medicaid has also been removed in White House cost-cutting initiatives, have been forced to apply fraudulently for the programme or, potentially, die. But it’s true, some applicants may not exist. That’s because unscrupulous brokers get commission from the insurance companies for signing up rafts of non-existent clients.

Never mind, bonkers antivax Wellness Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr advocates a high-protein breakfast, typically 4 eggs and a steak, although most days he fasts until lunchtime. Keeps the measles at bay, no doubt.

Who are the foreigners now?

“The thing I’ve found most shocking about Donald Trump’s second presidency is not the epic grift, the ICE paramilitary violence or the assaults on free speech. These abuses, while horrifying, are predictable. What has stunned me has been the capitulation of so many American elites to Trump’s vulgar authoritarianism.” – Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times. The answer, she concludes, comes down to the imperatives of capitalism.

Going loudly bonkers

• “Trump’s actions, rhetoric and general behavior, reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the president’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so. For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.”

Requoted today, 16 Sept. from an April, 2026 report in the New York Times, in a Guest Essay by Thomas B Edsall titled: ‘Trump has untethered himself from reality’, the opinion above was delivered by no fewer than 36 medical specialists acting in concert.

Nothing at all suggests that the President is in any less of a manic state today, having in only the past week agreed to supply Israel with 40 thousand one-ton bombs he doesn’t have to spare; having abandoned his friends in Saudi Barbaria to whatever the Houthi militia can hit them with, despite the horrific inflationary pressures their attack on the kingdom’s oil exporting capability are inflicting on the world; casually dismissing the dangers of continuing to develop Artificial Superintelligence Systems despite the warnings of experts; contradicted reports that stocks of weapons for the war in Iran are dangerously low, claiming he personally boosted military spending (his Iran war has cost the US $38 billion); and petulantly shuttered the Kennedy Centre indefinitely, depriving Washington’s glitterati of the opportunity to absorb a little culture on a Saturday evening, until the courts allow him to stick his despised monicker on the building in defiance of its founding legal covenant. Their refusal to do so has profoundly shamed him; perhaps not so much as his petty, puerile vindictiveness.

Eat your broccoli, Donald. Shan’t!

Of course, he is still lying that he really won the 2020 election, gutting the intelligence services, rolling back environmental protections, threatening countries with counterproductive tariffs, rigging the midterm elections in any way he can, and trying to imprison his opponents.

The Prezudent’s delusionary state came to the fore on 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. At a ceremony honouring the first responders at Ground Zero, he recounted the story of how two burly firemen had carried him out of a building that seemed about to collapse, after he had bravely run down with his nearby building crew to where the twin towers had fallen twenty minutes earlier, to see if he could help. Nobody remembers him being there. According to CNN fact checkers, he was four miles away in Trump Tower at the time. He later falsely claimed to have witnessed Muslims ‘dancing’ in the street in New Jersey, and – with nearly 3,000 dead – joked that one of his buildings was now the tallest in New York.

He has recently taken to demanding fealty, modestly describing himself as ‘The greatest president in the history of the United States’, although his polling shows, as Edsall says, “He is one of the most toxic people in American politics right now.” NYT contributing columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote two weeks ago, before the president announced that the Iran war would end in victory ‘after the election’ and promised to send every adult American $5 thousand if he wins, improbably magicking another $1 trillion out of the ether, heedless of bond market jitters and the impending collapse of the AI dollar: “Trump exists in a world where he can do no wrong. Where he is loved by the people and feared by his enemies. His deals never fail, his wars are overwhelming victories, and his party is on the march to another majority.” Edsall concludes, however:

• “The reality is that no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity — no small comfort for a nation looking forward to 28 more months of an unstable man holding the presidency.

But at least we have the comfort of knowing that the Democrats have called formally for the impeachment of Brylcreme Boy, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, on various charges – basically, of being an unpleasant, incompetent, vain, bullying, racist, misogynistic religious nutter who has managed to deliver a victory for the intolerable Iranian regime.

Passport to Pimlico

Aping a humoresque 1950s Ealing comedy of that name, the 350 villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire have voted in an unofficial referendum to ‘leave the UK’ in protest against government plans to incarcerate 1500 migrants temporarily for processing in an old army camp about half a mile away.

Oh, ha ha! How quaint. How very British.

During World War Two, German and Italian prisoners of war were held in similar hutted encampments around the country, often in close proximity to bewildered local communities, most of whose members had never travelled further than the nearest market town and knew nothing whatever about ‘foreigners’ and their funny ways. The inmates, many of them, were drafted to local farms as useful labour. In the event, they soon got on fine with the locals, quite a few marriages ensued and their descendants still live in Britain, second and third generation migrants, without a problem.

Then we had thousands of American GIs billeted everywhere. They were a pretty criminal lot, it must be said, with their jitterbugging, bubblegum and Hershey bars.

And thus to rustic Piddington, 2026, where, riled up by the local Tory warlord, the natives have been reading too many lurid press stories about ‘brown’ migrants raping British women, stories that far outnumber the actual cases of white British men sexually assaulting Muslim women, and attacks on mosques – while everyone is terrified of marauding Somalis lurking around, being Black and generally kidnapping children. Of course, it would never occur to anyone that they could be put to useful work.

Hypocrisy too is rife – honest attempts to ‘educate’ asylum seekers in British moral standards (!) to reduce any such criminal tendencies on the part of the foreigners have met with furious abuse from the Right; moving the asylum seekers out of redundant hotel rooms at the insistence of torch-bearing mobs of masked ‘Tommo’ supporters has only led to protests at housing Them anywhere else, even in the depths of the countryside, where their presence might interfere with Reform’s plans to frack the hell out of this ‘green and pleasant land’.

So, if these precious twats want to leave the UK, let them. We don’t have to provide them with schools and health services; with housing benefit and universal credit. The county council can stop bothering to provide bus services and binbag collections. Travel in and out of the village can be controlled – we do control migration – on a visa system based on improbable levels of income. They can have their own currency. Proof of right to work should be demanded of those commuting to jobs in Oxford and London, and goods moving in and out of the village stores subjected to the same customs inspections and tariffs as might apply to third countries outside existing trade agreements.

Chocks away, and good riddance, remarks the urban BogPo, huffily. Unhelpful, attention seeking Tory nimbys. Who are the ‘foreigners’ now, eh?

(Needless to say, Trump has weighed in with a message of support, suggesting they could rename their village ‘Trumpington’. Just fuck off and run your own country, Sir.)

Home banking

I’ve been surprised to learn that ‘thousands’ of staff working for Barclays Bank are protesting an order from on high to stop working from home and get back in to the office.

Surprised, that is, at the sheer number of staff a bank employs.

You’d think at least one of them could be tasked with answering the phone?

GW – Blow the wind easterly

USA: A significant surge of moisture from Mexico will unleash numerous showers and thunderstorms across the interior West into this weekend. Meanwhile, a separate storm will trigger mainly dry thunderstorms in parts of the Northwest, increasing the risk of fires.

Meanwhile, Tropical Rainstorm Norbert could become the latest system to affect Hawaii. “As of Tuesday, Hawaii time, Norbert had lost tropical organization about 780 miles to the east of Hilo, ‘Late this week, we expect Norbert’s moisture to enhance trade wind showers over portions of the Hawaiian Islands, which could lead to localized flooding.” The storm follows on from hurricanes Lala and Lowell, that brushed past the island in recent days, creating severe flooding and wind damage.” (AccuWeather)

Japan: Tokyo could see the approach of typhoon Dujuan during a five-day holiday period starting this weekend, with the weather agency announcing Wednesday the development of the typhoon off the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. The season’s 25th typhoon is projected to move northward and become stronger, possibly approaching Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. (Japan Meteorological Agency)

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Bear necessities

“Drought, scarce natural food and human carelessness have contributed to a record surge in bear activity in Colorado, with a series of encounters stretching into Wyoming as bears intensify their search for calories before winter. Wildlife officials in Colorado responded to two reported black bear attacks just days apart earlier this month as the state reached a record 10 confirmed bear attacks on humans this year.” (AccuWeather) Could something not be safely arranged to create feeding stations for the bears, who are a valuable part of the local ecosystem?

Meanwhile, in its usual cavalier fashion when it comes to life, human or otherwise, in the past year Japan has slaughtered 14 thousand wild bears to lessen the chances of human contact. Between April 2025 and March 2026, bears attacked over 230 people, resulting in 13 fatalities. But at last, the Defence Ministry in Britain is looking at replacing the traditional bearskin hats worn by cavalry troops in dress uniform with artificial fur. Although I suppose they could always buy some in from Japan.

No smoke

514 people – including 198 minors – have been arrested in France on suspicion of starting wildfires this summer. The minimum sentence for deliberate arson, which under Napoleon was death by guillotine, is 10 years. (Guardian Down to Earth)

Beyond the Unbelievable

“In April 1932, the Nazi party became the strongest party in the state election in the region that now makes up Saxony-Anhalt, with 40.7% of the vote, and formed, with coalition partners, the first Nazi-led state government in Germany. Whatever happens next, it will be hard to say we didn’t know.” – German journalist, Carolin Würfel in The Guardian Comment, 15 Sept., on the ominous rise of the AfD as the party of disillusioned voters.

What price British democracy?

Oh fuck, oh shit! Farage Jr, ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, the minor aristocrat who helped bankroll Farage and his Reform UK ‘party’ by allegedly funnelling money from donors registered at his office in Montenegro allegedly working for sanctioned Russian oligarchs, seems to get more and more intimately entangled with organised – if pretty chaotic – crime. Namely, a Balkan drug gang smuggling cocaine from South America – where another businessman associated with Cottrell and Farage, Christopher Harborne, has his crypto ‘blockchain’ business registered for some reason in El Salvador.

It’s like the plot of a bad Netflix movie.

It seems, according to the latest chapter from Byline Times investigations editor, Nafeez Ahmed, that: “George Cottrell’s partner Andjela Vukadinović (Miss Montenegro 2023) is the younger sister of two men indicted over an alleged operation involving 5,670 kilograms of cocaine – including a man US authorities believe is a senior figure in the Kavač clan. The Kavač clan is one of the Balkans’ most powerful cocaine-trafficking organisations”, linked to a feud involving over 60 murders across Europe.

Can this get any worse? Cottrell, who was gaoled in the US for felony wire fraud, calls Farage ‘Daddy’ and formerly served as the party’s treasurer… it’s hard to see how the Reform leader can separate himself from the Montenegro back office operation, which Cottrell hastily closed down recently as Knacker of the Yard’s investigations intensified over the source of £1.5 million in unexplained funds funnelled into Reform by Cottrell’s mother Fiona, a sometime ‘girlfriend’ of Prince, now King Charles, via a company registered in Britain by Richard Tice, supposedly for the purpose of legitimising foreign donations – but there’s more, just as bad.

Casino Royal-adjacent

Unfortunately, the dodgy connections also take in the Cyprus branch of a ‘corporate services’ firm, founded by a Russian oil guy linked to Putin, of City accountant mates of Cottrell’s (although he called himself something different then) with businesses registered at the Montenegro office, specialising in money laundering and crypto investing and offshore wizardry and private jets and online betting and casinos and…. oh, it’s just brain-bustingly complicated, it goes on and on, it involves money, lots of it, so I can’t honestly be bothered to try to explain it unless they want to send me some. Read it for yourself. Amazing work, Nafeez.

Everyone denies everything, of course, it’s all in the best possible taste, but the rotten smell around Reform’s finances has hardly been wafted away by the fragrant nosegay of those massive new donations from Harborne and Delo, on top of the crypto-millions they have already devoted to buying up British democracy, presumably to ensure a favourable climate for their businesses (Harborne’s crypto holdings alone are said to earn him a billion pounds a year.) Money that will, hopefully, prove useful one day in meeting the party’s defence costs.

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/09/14/nigel-farage-funder-george-cottrells-inner-circle-hosted-indicted-cocaine-trafficker/?utm_source=bylinetimes.beehive.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=george-cottrell-s-organised-crime-links&_bhlid=a3b757e7031b68898343b4f786e27e538d9a5785

What price, the American dream?

ProPublica is reporting (15 Sept.) that Donald Trump Junior’s ‘dream’ wedding back in May was extensively financed by a Russian oligarch close to Putin.

Umar Kremlev, boss of a dodgy international boxing promotions business, “footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses”, including hire of “one of the private islands” (in the Bahamas), where a reception was held and where the 50 guests slept for two nights, and enjoyed a spectacular fireworks display. Kremlev and his burly associates also helped to plan the entire event, apparently – despite the shaven-headed oligarch speaking almost no English.

Guests wondered what they were doing there, a ‘tight-knit group’ – but Moron Jr apparently concluded: “it was just awesome”. Asked why Umar was allowed to bankroll the event, and what he wanted in return, “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” said a spokesman for the oldest son of the President, who could easily have afforded his own wedding as he has a personal net worth of about $300 million.

The two men are said to have met only recently, adding to the mystery of why. Security experts are alarmed. (This story has also been verified by The Wall Street Journal)

GW – One way to give up smoking

Brazil: “A nine-story building that was condemned due to irregularities collapsed on top of a house during heavy rains in Sao Paulo on Saturday, killing two women and leaving several missing or injured. Officials in Brazil’s largest city said one of the dead women was pregnant. First responders rescued a man and a boy from the wreckage.” Other properties around the city have collapsed – it has been pouring down since Friday. (AccuWeather)

Indonesia: “Wildfires are ripping across parts of Indonesia, destroying precious peatland and smothering the country in a toxic smoke so thick, people are struggling to breathe. With months of wildfire season still remaining, experts warn this could end up as one of the country’s worst. Flights have been delayed, parks shut and thousands of schools closed as reports of asthma cases and respiratory infections soar.” (AccuWeather)

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Icy waste

Austria’s glaciers, great and small, have lost about a third of their extent in the last 15 years. Of 894 glaciers listed in the previous inventory, says a report for the European Geosciences Union, 95 have disappeared completely or were no longer mappable. Smaller glaciers are disappearing at the rate of about 7% a year. (Carbon Brief)

Out you go

Since last year, “judges have ruled that the Trump administration has deported more than 170 people in violation of court orders, in defiance of legally mandated due process protections, or to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution.” (Politico, from Maddow Monday) Meanwhile, however, 80 prospective Afrikaner ‘refugees’ fleeing what Musk and Trump claim is white genocide in South Africa have received letters telling them they’re not welcome in the US after all. (Guardian)

Fill up more sandbags

• “As this year’s super-El Niño looms large, the UK government advises us to stock up on food while it prepares to greenlight the extraction of more fossil fuels from the North Sea. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t even begin to describe the idiocy of such thinking. You couldn’t make it up.” – Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, in The Guardian, 15 Sept. This autumn’s El Niño is ramping up to be the most expensive in history. The previous strongest event, in 1877-8, is estimated to have caused a famine that killed 50 million people. (Copernicus Climate Change Service)
  

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)