A whole year until next September. What will it bring? (Rain, sun.)

“This is the broader significance of the City verdict, beyond the interminable debate over whether the club should be forcibly relegated, stripped of titles and trophies. In a world where the UN is neutered, where transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, it offers an alternative vision to a world increasingly aligned along axes of brute power and wealth. It articulates the increasingly outmoded idea that there is a shared set of values and rules by which all must abide.” – Jonathan Liew, Guardian, Opinion, 29 Sept: ‘The Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity.’

‘Twas ever thus, Jonathan. But I’m puzzled by the fury that has greeted a comment made by Andy Burnham in a BBC News interview with soppy political editor, Chris Mason. Burnham was, as any fule kno’, mayor of Manchester, a city that has benefited from major development investment by the UAE, which also happens to own Britain’s most successful football club of recent times, Manchester City. After years of inquiry, their business practices have been found to amount to cheating. All Burnham did was to express the hope that, whatever penalties were awarded against the club, the UAE would not abandon its commitment to the city.

This was apparently tantamount to a statement of support for the owners’ malpractice. Burnham, a lifelong football fan, was said to be ‘out of touch’ – although he has spent more of his life on the touchline than most of his critics. I fear we have all gone crazy. It appears that any perfectly rational statement by a Labour politician now has to result in fits of phony apoplexy from their Conservative opponents who, in this case, appear to have benefited recently from all expenses-paid trips to the Mediterranean to socialise ominously with former News International panjandrum, Rupert Murdoch.

Bed bugged?

OMG. Lying in bed this morning, I was running through in my mind, some things I need to shop for this week, if I can bear to leave the sanctuary of my little house and travel further than the wine section of the nearby convenience store.

Somewhere on the list, I felt the need of some new socks, of the loose-fitting tops kind. Normal tightly fitting socks cause my lower legges to swell like kiddies’ party animal balloons; while for the usual inscrutable reasons, half my old loose-fitting socks have vanished somewhere between the washing machine in the kitchen, the tumble dryer in the garden and the bedroom dresser half-full of untaken medicaments – and it’s not matching pairs that are disappearing.

Grazing half an hour later on The Guardian website, an ad (I can’t subscribe, I really can’t) in the middle of an interesting item about an escaped capybara called Samba popped up and flashed at me the less interesting news that British men are “turning away” from “compression” socks to ”simple, slip on” socks. A remarkable coincidence, I thought, since I had not yet mentioned to my computer, the requirement I had already mentally identified for more socks of this specific nature. (Note, there is nothing “simple” about putting on slip-on socks, I require a sturdy wall to prop myself up against and I can only just manage to reach my feet to hook the socks over the toes and work the sock upwards with one hand if I raise each leg in turn with the other hand, forcing it to bend, which it otherwise doesn’t want to do. One day, I will break my hip, and that will be the end. Now, read on…)

Earlier in the session, I’d encountered while reading a News article about the bizarre Fairford incident, another pop-up ad explaining that “rats would rather freeze outside” than encounter “this smell”…. which compounds the oddness of the socks coincidence, as there are indeed rats scuttling about in my walls, emerging at night to eat up the remains of the cat’s supper; and, before firing up the computer, I had been hoovering (literally – I own a Hoover, highly recommended) a corner of the living room where I observed rats or a rat had left a mess of seeds and poo. (You don’t want to poison them if they’re going to die behind the walls and smell for weeks. Anyway, they’re quite sweet – there’s a little one that sometimes comes and peers at me curiously through my study window.)

Thus, I had rats on the brain before the ad appeared, presumably hoping to sell me some proprietary rodent repellent.

I’m not sure whether to welcome the convenience of not having to do my own thinking at my age, or scream and run in fear. Somebody, or something, is reading my thoughts. I have thoughts – I feel sure you do too – that I wouldn’t want anyone or anything to be reading. When I want a thought to be read, you can be sure to find it in this, muh li’l bogl. So just get out of my head, Guardian. I know you want me to subscribe, I just… well, I just can’t, and it looks like I’ve lost Adblock-Plus, its little icon I now notice has disappeared from the desktop. More admin, sigh.

Speaking of capybaras, this month’s trending feelgood creature, I invented a game last week. Which politician looks most like a capybara (an inoffensive, large South American semi-aquatic rodent now filling an evolutionary niche in the British countryside)? I can’t decide between former Chancellor, Ed Balls, nowadays to be found trying to settle in uneasily as a genial host on a morning chatshow; or the combative yet somehow placid looking wimmins’ champion, Jess Phillips MP. Old John Major could be another candidate.

What d’you think?

GW – A late blast of the trump

USA: an unusual autumn heatwave is building over the eastern states. “Temperatures in cities like Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia will climb into the middle 80s F on Thursday, then could approach 90 during the day on Friday. With average temperatures sliding into the lower 70s during early October, the mercury late week will peak at more than 15 degrees above the historical average.” The reprieve from the wind and rain in the East will only be temporary, however. “Tropical moisture streaming northward out of the Gulf will bring the risk for (more) heavy rain across the Southeast and into the mid-Atlantic into the weekend.” (AccuWeather)

Meanwhile… 110 mph Cat 3 Hurricane Polo passed over the Baja California peninsula Tuesday, heading for Sonora county in northern Mexico, threatening coastal communities with huge waves and a tidal surge. The US National Hurricane Center said that while Polo was expected to weaken as it moved over the peninsula, it was forecast to still be at hurricane strength when it makes its second landfall in mainland Mexico, and could be bringing up to 7-in of rain to mainland US states by the weekend.

UK: London managed to achieve a record late September temperature on Tuesday of 28 deg. C. Could it be the data centres, I wonder? Next week could see the islands’ first named storm of the winter.

Tailpipe

Rollin’ over in the clover

The first train has yet to run on the magnificent HS2 line between somewhere in London and somewhere in Birmingham, no track has been laid, but at least the wildlife is running on time. The artificial chalk downland newly created alongside the line of the Great White Elephant is flourishing after just 4 years, with new species thriving on the chalky soil excavated from the 10 mile-long Chilterns tunnel: “It is now one of the largest wildlife habitat creation projects in south-east England, and has already witnessed the arrival of hedgehog clover, which hasn’t been recorded in Hertfordshire since 1878, alongside water voles, lesser emperor dragonflies and pyramidal orchids.” (Guardian)

The area will be open to the public next year, which should kill it all off again.

No trouble Bruin

A brown bear named 89 Backpack has been crowned the winner of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week. Named for his cute habit as a baby of riding on his mum’s back – she’s also a former Fat Bear champion in the lady category – and described as fairly non-aggressive, Backpack won against near-rival 910 by just over 5,000 votes, coming in with 103,344 over 910’s tally of 98,253 votes. (New York Times) The bears fatten up at this time of year, in preparation for months of hibernation. I envy them, the most sleep I can manage at a stretch is about two hours.

Ratfucked

And now I’m on the New York Times website and those rat repellent adverts are still pursuing me even here. What the fuck is going on? I’ve never even mentioned a rat problem before. Is this AI? Are we being scanned?

Not a hacking cough but a hiccup?

“…we ought to be very concerned about the fact the AI companies we’re meant to trust to keep their models in check seem unable to do so. Worse than that, they don’t seem to know what their products are even doing. The scale of the problem is staggering.” – Chris Stokel-Walker, in The Guardian Comment, 29 Sept. nevertheless argues against the anthropomorphising of AI agents which, he says, are simply bits of software trying to solve the problems they’re set.

Hmmn.

The curious incident of the plods in the nighttime

Demented US President, Donald Trump and his sycophantic Secretary of State, ‘Little Marco’ Rubio, have been making fools of themselves, going on camera within minutes and with no evidence at all to claim that a weird encounter between a lady farmer who dialled the emergency services and some masked men decamping from three white vans with fake plates in the middle of the night in an English lane, close to the US nuclear airbase at RAF Fairford, must have been a terrorist attack.

Their contention still is that Iran was behind it, and that US intelligence had been ‘on top of’ the plot all along – which looks like turning out to be a bit of voter misdirection, as it seems not to have been a terrorist plot at all, but a bunch of 20-somethings up from London out on a spree to steal hugely expensive diesel fuel from local farms; or maybe, as the BogPo suggests, on a rural training exercise with one of our many delightful far-right groups ganging up to oppose immigration, as suggested by the balaclavas. It could equally have been a stag-night gone horribly wrong; a base security training operation or, as some tweeters on X think, a ‘false-flag’ operation designed to get us into a shooting war with Russia.

Or not. No explosives or weapons were found, and it appears that for some reason, one of the men had actually dialled the 999 emergency number an hour before the lady farmer did. Why, we’re not being told. All V. mysterious.

Anyway, Trump has since expressed frustration that the Met police led by the Anti-terrorism squad have bailed the five men the local plod caught; instead, presumably, of automatically gunning them down, although we still don’t know why they were there, or if there were more of them – the lady farmer thought at least ten. Nevertheless, the stringent and as yet unexplained bail orders ‘while investigations continue’ strongly suggests that much lower-level criminality if any at all was involved than a bomb plot against the poor old US airforce, as it doesn’t take much nowadays to get you banged up in Belmarsh if there’s the slightest suspicion of terrorism.

Still, mustn’t speculate.

Being a person of ADHD-level quantities of lateral thinking, your Uncle Bogler has wondered in passing, how it is that the news media has been obtaining all those aerial shots of the action below, and of the airbase itself, showing a hypersonic Stealth B-18 bomber refuelling and rearming on the ground, without their drones being shot out of the sky? So much for that notoriously paranoid US security, he murmurs.

QotW

We need to talk about Nigel

• “For a guy who supposedly valorises the wartime British spirit, Nigel would genuinely have had to have been interned during that conflict on account of his serial predilection for spreading panic and unverified information at any given chance. The weekend incident near RAF Fairford was simply the latest in a long line of occasions that make you suspect the poster on the wall at Reform HQ reads simply: ‘Lose Cool and Start Shitposting.'” – Marina Hyde, in The Guardian, 29 Sept.

Yes, the Frogster’s Trumpish reaction to any story hitting the news regarding a possible crime committed by a yet to-be identified suspect is to deliver a verdict that the guilty party must be a Muslim asylum seeker straight off a small boat in the Channel. Fine, but the problem is, he has a distressing habit of airing his intemperance in public. Thus, he tweeted, the murders of three little girls in Southport by an unidentified man should result in a display of “cold rage” against an assailant he misidentified as an “asylum seeker”. He even gave him an Arabic-sounding name, which was not that of the actual perpetrator, a 17 year-old psychopath called Axel, born in Cardiff of Somali Christian extraction. An anti-Muslim immigration riot ensued, for illegally inciting which, Farage should surely have been, but for some reason was not, brought to justice.

Marina, a notoriously sardonic satirical commenter, goes on: “It’s unclear whether a Prime Minister Farage would just bottle everything or shoot first and ask questions later, but the most likely metaphorical outcome in any given scenario may well be him shooting the wrong person first, then refusing to answer questions later.” But like the best satirists, there is seriousness in her writing. Is a man of such wildly inappropriate instincts suitable material for Number 10?

The only reason we haven’t been annihilated in a nuclear holocaust in 80 years, despite several near-misses, is because someone – on the Russian, on the American side – paused for reflection before pushing the red button, and instead established some helpful facts, like that the enemy’s missiles were not ‘incoming’ after all. To immediately declare that the ‘plot’ against RAF Fairford bore out his claims that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind every act of skulduggery in Britain seems somewhat previous, when waiting five minutes might have suggested an alternative reason for masked men to be wandering around the Cotswolds at night. As it happens, the five men bailed were all said to be white and British, ages between 23 and 25, from London.

Marina’s sage view of the situation is that Nigel is far too flaky to run the country safely. Suggesting there ought perhaps to be some sort of psychometric test for would-be prime ministers: “Perhaps our politics needs new duty-of-care guidelines, so the office of British prime minister is psychologically guardrailed to the same level as, say, a dating show like Love is Blind.” She thus echoes the view of your Uncle Bogler who, from bitter experience, believes anyone proposing to start a business and employ other people ought also to be pre-vetted by some kind of ‘business driving test’ to root out those with sociopathic, bullying or neurotic tendencies; and to ensure they understand all aspects of employment law.

Make Companies House work for a living!

GW – A present from El Niño

USA: a huge ‘hybrid’ storm made up of the remnants of two Pacific hurricanes is forming over an area of the south and midwest stretching 1300 miles from Albuquerqe to Chicago, bringing with it a potentially lethal risk of flooding on already saturated ground (from MSN). “Flooded neighborhoods, damaged highways and widespread power outages stretched from the East Coast to Hawaii over the weekend. A deadly nor’easter forced water rescues along the Atlantic coast, while Hurricane Nolo brought flooding rain to Hawaii and powerful Hurricane Polo approached Mexico. If your weekend weather bingo card had major hurricanes, a wildfire, pending volcanic activity (Kilauea kicking off again) and a nor’easter,” muses AccuWeather, “you nearly had it covered. Then a ‘zombie storm’ came back to life and Monday brought a new tropical storm.” Oh, and the first snow of winter is falling on Mammoth Mountain resort in the Sierra Nevada.

As the thousand-year El Niño hasn’t yet reached full-strength, the USA could be in for many months of this. In addition, a ‘Kelvin wave’ created by El Niño is threatening to raise sea level along the coast of California by a whole foot on top of the expected storm surges, ‘king’ tides and 8-in. of prior rise over the past century.

For a longer rundown of an extraordinary weekend of weather events in the USA and Hawaii, try:

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/3-days-of-weather-chaos-noreaster-hurricanes-and-a-zombie-storm/1940015
:

Tailpipe

UK: Today’s temperature in London is forecast to reach 26 deg. C, with an overnight low not far below the 20 deg. ‘tropical night’ mark. Meanwhile, thanks to Trump and his half-arsed war on Iran, which has led to a major expansion of territory overrun by the Iranian proxy Houthi militia in Yemen, that now controls the oil supply route from Saudi Arabia through the Bab-al-Mandab strait, the price of diesel in the UK has soared to a record £2.00 (less 0.1p) a litre ($2.65USD); while the Orange Oaf is threatening to halt diesel exports from the USA, which account for a large proportion of UK imports – the UK having shut down the major part of its diesel refining capacity in 2025; two factors that could very well cause a disastrous recession by Christmas.

Toolpipe

The Trump maladmistration has ordered a cut in the Biden-era rule that says new cars must be built to achieve 50 mpg fuel consumption. The White House says it can be as low as 35 mpg., which will obviously increase demand for gasoline at the pump and hence, orl bidness profits. It should do wonders for US car exports to countries that still maintain higher standards. (From Carbon Brief, quoting the New York Times)

Tool story

At my school, I recall with embarrassment, there was an older boy in our dormitory called Nussey who could ejaculate from a recumbent start in nine seconds flat. He was known to all as ‘nine-seconds Nussey’. How his subsequent married life went, I have no idea, but I can’t imagine his wife was too impressed. Tree surgeon Dan Whelan, from Shropshire, on the other hand, as it were, has just won his fifth annual pole-climbing championship, by scaling a smooth, 80-ft pole in nine seconds flat. His wife Emma, a ‘customer service advisor’ (No wonder they never answer the phone, they’re all up a pole!) completed her second championship victory in 15 seconds. I have no idea about their schooldays, but a career surely beckons in politics. (BBC News story)

RIP

Cassie, a brave little French bulldog who tried to protect her owners from a marauding black bear in the garden of their North California home, and was fatally injured herself. The couple were hospitalised but Cassie died from her injuries four days later. V. sad.

Reform UK – Earth’s last great wildebeest

“The charts sketched by A.I. doomers are, if anything, more vertiginous than those plotted in the early months of Covid. Perhaps more unnervingly, many of their previous forecasts of mind-bending progress have proved eerily accurate. The basic pattern matches that of early climate warnings, which tended to sketch the course of temperature decades into the future quite precisely, predict specific impacts somewhat less accurately and only belatedly inspire haphazard action to bend the curve downward.”

– David Wallace Wells comments in The New York Times, 25 Sept., that our existential panics can be a bit overblown, but we may be able to avoid annihilation if we take the warnings seriously.

Farage – great bloke or greedy, treacherous grifter?

• “Using DeSmog’s extensive prior reporting on this subject, the human rights non-profit FairSquare has documented the burgeoning network forged between Reform and the UAE – including the ‘remarkable access’ that Farage has been granted to the country’s political elite. And, surprise surprise, Reform has advanced the UAE’s agenda ‘in a multitude of ways’, according to the report.”

The BogPo has tried to keep up with investigations into the obscure sources of Farage’s funding and the ‘influencers’ and causes he’s willing to advocate for money via the political agenda and talking points he relentlessly and very profitably promotes through Reform UK, a party over which he has complete control, given how blatant the connections appear to be. Your Old Uncle is still somewhat mystified as to why the media continually refers to the two donations of £36 million from Harborne and Delo as being illustrative of the end of democracy, but never mentions the £27 million Harborne had already given, the possibly £26 million DeSmog claims came from duh orl bidness, or the £1.5 million from Cottrell via his mum, via who knows what Balkan skulduggery.

Now, however, those threads of influence appear to extend to the human rights-denying petro-states of the Middle East, where Farage’s millionaire deputy, Tice spends half his tax year, and which would, clearly, have an interest in promoting in any way possible, the fortunes of a party of absurd contrarians, addicted to denying the very obvious scientific facts and global dangers of climate change.

Should he achieve power – and mercifully, the polls tell us, it is no longer quite as nailed-on that he might – then the country could look forward to an era of racialist, authoritarian kleptocracy, a Russo/US client state run entirely for the personal enrichment of one dilettante politician who already trousers well over £1 million a year from his side-earners, on top of the generous salary and expenses the taxpayer gives him in expectation of his doing a job he shows little inclination to do, namely representing the voters of Clacton in parliament.

Indeed, his energetic advocacy of a Trumpian grab-bag of crypto-currencies, gold bullion, fossil fuel extraction, forcible ‘remigration’ of the coloured people and the abandonment of legal remedies for human rights abuses seems to be bringing in tens of £millions in political and personal funding from foreign business interests and far-right ‘ethno-Christian’ billionaires which the government seems powerless to stop; although a small part of what we think has been going on is being investigated by the police for a possible breach of election law. We’ll see if they have what it takes to drill all the way down to the South America connection, or across to the sanctioned Russians!

Farage’s former protege, Nathan Gill is serving a salutary sentence for accepting relatively small sums of money in 2018 to make fairly innocuous speeches in the European parliament in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea; speeches that had no conceivable influence on British voters. How much more egregious, therefore, is Farage’s acceptance of such huge sums of money to promote other, more damaging foreign business interests? And how does the millionaire Farage propose to pay for his ‘populist’ political agenda? Why, by beggaring the poor and needy: benefit cuts; not taxes on millionaire stamp duty avoiders with five houses.

Then, how should we interpret the news that several members of his party, councillors and parliamentary candidates, appear to be members also of neo-fascist – even crypto-Nazi – organisations virulently opposed to immigration and asylum, exploiting British bigotry as a possible pathway to power?* Is this the country we feel we deserve to live in exclusively, merely because we’re aggrieved that the melting-pot of young men abandoning failed states we helped to create and still help to perpetuate, where economic inequality, resource depletion, debt peonage and perpetual warfare are the legacy of Empire, has been moving northwards in search of the prosperity we stole from them; even as the seas rise and the food begins to run out?

*”Byline Times has identified seven Reform councillors who are listed as members of the masked anti-migrant groups that gathered in Dover and other coastal towns in early September. The network spans at least 15 patriot groups and more than 40,000 followers built up over the past 18 months.” (20 Sept.)

GW – liquid state

USA: Cat 3 Hurricane Nolo is expected to pass close by to the south of Hawaii’s Big Island shortly, with rainfall totals predicted to be as high as 36-in., maybe up to 55-in. in places. Islanders are still recovering from Hurricane Lala, which passed by 40 miles to the south on 16 Aug. and precipitated 43.54 inches of rain at Laupahoehoe, causing floods and landslides, with 140-mph winds recorded at the summit of Mauna Kea. Nolo’s rainfall, says AccuWeather, could be even more intense – the second highest on record, after Hurricane Lane in 2018.

Meanwhile, off the coast of Mexico, with up to 180 mph sustained winds, Cat 5 Hurricane Polo, the third strongest hurricane in the history of the west Pacific basin, is set to take a right over the thinly populated Baja peninsula into northern Mexico. Polo intensified from a tropical depression to a 895 mb superstorm in just 39 hours.

Meanwhile… A powerful nor’easter is bringing torrential rain and strong winds to the East Coast this weekend, sparking widespread power outages and flight disruptions. Photos and video showed homes flooded in New Jersey and people kayaking to a subway station in Queens, New York, as the strong storm lashed the northeastern U.S. (MSN) Video shown by AccuWeather shows rooftop high waves breaking over seaside communities in Massachusetts.

Indonesia: With no sign of an end to the wildfires in neighbouring Borneo that have blanketed much of the region in a thick haze, over 175 thousand people, including many children, have been hospitalised with respiratory illnesses since the beginning of the month. Air quality indices have hit multiples of the ‘safe’ limits. (BBC)

Thailand: “A flood emergency disaster has been declared across Bangkok after more than 300mm (12in) of rain fell since Thursday, leaving roads in the Thai capital submerged. People have been urged to stay at home and those living close to the city’s network of canals have been advised to move their belongings to upper floors. … extreme weather in recent days has inundated Bangkok’s drainage system, causing traffic chaos on roads that are already famously congested.” (BBC News)

Tailpipe

“The world’s oceans are currently rising at a faster rate than at any time in at least the past three millennia, with human influence the dominant cause of sea level rise since at least 1970.” (Carbon Brief explainer, 22 Sept.) Which makes Donald Trump’s peculiar about-face on Britain’s ‘terrible’ deal to pay Mauritius to look after the Chagos Islands – he used to be all in favour, but perhaps it’s slipped his mind – and, indeed, the deal itself, look pretty irrelevant. The highest point in the remote Pacific atoll is just 4 metres above sea level.

EVs – a plug

“The latest surge in fossil-fuel prices means it is now up to nine times cheaper in the UK to drive an electric vehicle (EV) than a petrol or diesel car”. (Carbon Brief Analysis)

More Trumpy filth

A report from the Democratic caucus in the Senate finds “the fossil fuel industry has secured an estimated $190bn in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade” from the US government, after providing pre-election campaign donations for Trump. (Guardian) “Reuters adds that Trump asked for $1bn in donations during his 2024 election campaign and hundreds of millions of the campaign spending can be tracked back to energy companies.” (Carbon Brief)

Oh look, we appear to have had a reader! Welcome back!

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 autonomous 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) the last 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-hour 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: “Hurricane Polo has brought heavy rain to Mexico’s Pacific coast, as Hawaii was braced for the growing Tropical Storm Nolo, which could cause catastrophic flooding. Polo, which is forecast to maintain its maximum category 5 strength over the next few days as it skirts the Mexican coast, could lead to life-threatening floods and landslides, the US National Hurricane Center warned.”

Meanwhile, out in the Pacific, intensifying Tropical Storm Nolo, which is forecast to become a hurricane on Thursday night and approach the Big Island as early as Friday at Cat 3, is about 295 miles (475km) south of South Point. Up to 20 inches (51cm) of rain could fall during the storm, say forecasters. (Sky News)

Tailpipe

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.) (Thomas has since been arrested, not for the first time.)

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, and free conveyance to an overcrowded minimum facilities transit camp or a redundant hotel divested of its former luxuries, subject to pending deportation or, possibly, imprisonment; after many months of forced inactivity on an allowance of £10 a week, allowed one phone call, awaiting 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, plus the luxury of the freedom to protest peacefully.

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; useful websites; 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, with 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 Arab 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, has 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; which created the immiserating conditions of perpetual warfare, rapacious mineral exploitation and debt peonage at the hands of ruthless global hedge funds; only to be greeted by a violent, smelly bunch of feral racist arseholes in balaclavas, waving rude messages, jumping up and down like enraged chimpanzees, 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? Don’t talk to me about work, in my last job, I was on-call 168 hours a week, on the equivalent of £1.60 an hour. 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 tells them that? Oh, public school-educated, ex-con ‘Tommo’. Right.

The Reform Councillors Embedded in Britain’s Masked ‘Patriot’ Anti-Migrant Network

Synergy, thy name is Nigel

If you want somebody to wave your placard at, Mr Palmer, Byline Times is reporting that Stack BTC, Lettuce Liz’s 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 scrap 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 £700 THOUSAND a year to present a tendentious talk show on Sir Paul Marshall’s loss-making, fascist-adjacent ‘GB News’ – PLUS £98,599 a year plus expenses paid for by taxpayers to represent the people of Clacton, who’ve seldom even seen him as he’s too busy elsewhere.

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

Somebody please explain to poor Mr Palmer, just what the fuck they’ve all been up to, Nigel’s posho mates and their Russian contacts? Or, as investigative reporter, 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. They certainly won’t collide with Mr Palmer’s interests. All vote for Nigel! (Incidentally, he’s being advised to slash services, scrap most benefits and lose the State pension altogether when he gets in. So a Reform government will be ‘giving’ you even less! 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)

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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.