Golden years

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

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

All that glisters probably is gold

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

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

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

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

Perhaps we should be told.

QotW

The madness of King Donald

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

One aspect of the ‘personalities’ of this particular monarch is his inability to believe in conventional polling which, at present, is showing the worst numbers of any president in history, with only 14% approving of his performance in office. In fact, he frequently threatens to sue the media for libellously publishing the polls, and is accusing the Democrats of faking the numbers in a plot to ‘discourage’ Republicans from voting. MSNBC’s Steve Benen reports, however, that Trump has in his oddly-shaped head, a different set of imaginary polls he claims give the true picture of his amazing popularity, but which he refuses to show anybody.

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

GW – When autumn leaves start to fall

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

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

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

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

Tailpipe

No the drill

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

Altogether, puke

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

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

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

Under the table, now

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

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

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

I expect yours are too.

Partying with Alice, Ada, Charli and Claude

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

La grande illusion

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

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

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

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

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

Funny how we always seem to end up paying.

GW – Sturm und drang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tailpipe

Speaking of expense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, breathe #27

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

A la recherche des temps perdu

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

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

It’s PayPal time

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

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

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

But I could just be paranoid.

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

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

GW – The bringer of rain

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

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

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

Postscript

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

Tailpipe

A Tail of Three Shitties

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind the drones!

We’ll gather lilacs sometime or other

“I knew what I was doing was illegal…”

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

You can bet on it

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

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

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

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

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

QotW

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

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

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

GW – whole lotta shakin’

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

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

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

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

Tailpipe

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

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

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

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

The best laid plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ffs.

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

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

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

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

So, now we know where’s next.

Does Reform need reforming?

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

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

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

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

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

Losing my balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tailpipe

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky stuff

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

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

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

Christ, that child!

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

Grim reaper

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

Damn them all to hell.

Summer warmth may linger

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

There’s denial, and then there’s denial.

Stop, Waymo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel at your own risk!

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

If at first….

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

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

Send out the clowns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London: Nope, no rain.

Tailpipe

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

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

In 2019, The Guardian reported,

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

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

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

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

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

It’s quite funny, really.

Let the wrong ones out

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

Especially where public opinion is concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But just wait until November….

“It now looks very likely that next summer, coming in the aftermath of the El Niño that is due to hit this autumn, will bring yet another jump in heat records. … As Professor Hayley Fowler, one of the UK’s leading climate scientists, observed during last November’s National Emergency Briefing summit: this is the least extreme climate we will experience for the rest of our lives.” – Prof Mike Berners Lee, in Byline Times, ‘Not the New Normal’, 9 Aug.

Failure stares me in the face

Oh dear, what have I made of my life? An article I was just reading in the New York Times refers to the subject’s ‘modest 1,200 sq ft flat in Southampton, England’. Google AI tells me helpfully that that’s 112 square metres. My entire house is just 62 square metres. No wonder my feet get cold at night!

It seems I have yet to arrive.

The ‘subject’ is interesting, though. “Guren ‘Bobby’ Zhou, was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain who had come under investigation there for money laundering and presided over the collapse of a small crypto start-up. Then seemingly out of nowhere, he became one of the biggest buyers of tokens from Mr. Trump’s (crypto) company, World Liberty Financial, dropping a total of $100 million through a new firm called Aqua 1.”

Mr Trump and sons personally trousered $75 million from the investment, says the article, not me, while some of the rest was supposedly shared with Trump’s golfing buddy, the hotelier-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff, famous for his part in screwing up the negotiations to end, respectively, the wars in Gaza, Iran and Ukraine. So where did the money come from, as Mr Zhou’s hardwood flooring ‘shed’ operations based in, originally, Wales (and a small factory in Italy) had gone into administration and he didn’t supposedly have a pot to piss in?

Well, apparently money laundering investigations are ongoing in London, so no-one wants to talk. World Liberty has reassured the Times that it holds to the highest standards of compliance with the regulatory authorities. The article ends on an inconclusive note. All we have learned is that Mr Zhou, who now lives in Abu Dhabi and is rocking the high life while creating $million businesses seemingly out of thin air and bullshit, and has ‘extensive contacts’ in China, appears to be the most astonishing con man ever, who isn’t named Trump.

With a modest flat in Southampton, 112 square metres.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/us/politics/bobby-zhou-trump-crypto.html

Morons alert

• “In July 2017, the European Court of Justice upheld the Dublin Regulation, declaring that it still stands despite the high influx of 2015, giving EU member states the right to transfer migrants to the first country of entry to the EU. The United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union took effect at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, at which point the Regulation ceased to apply to it.” (Google AI)

So, your aunty Jean thinks migrants arriving in the UK from other EU countries should be sent back to be processed in their country of first arrival. A standard Reform/Restore policy, based on the belief of leaders Farage and the PG Wodehouse fascist caricature, Lowe, that the British hate migrants and will vote for any shitty fascist arsehole just to get rid of them.

So, if the morons hadn’t conned people into voting to leave the EU, we wouldn’t have abandoned the very agreement that would have made that an automatic process.

Equally, Reform’s ludicrous suggestion that ‘foreign’ criminals should be sent to die under indeterminate sentences in El Salvador’s brutal maxi-jails, regardless of where they came from, would not have been necessary, as ‘foreign’ criminals sentenced in British courts to a period of twelve months or more in prison were already automatically deported to serve their sentences in their countries of origin, which of course thanks to the deeply unpleasant Farage and his disastrous Brexit con, they aren’t now.

Or,to put it in the words of a spokesman for Amnesty International:

• “Too many politicians seem incapable of any real leadership – whether at home or internationally – preferring to agitate hate, violence and inhumanity that makes all of us less safe. This latest proposal from Reform provides a stark example of that.”

GW – Nor any drop to drink

Canada: “Canada’s federal government has announced it will provide urgent assistance to British Columbia after an onslaught of unprecedented fast-moving wildfires forced about 22,000 people to flee their homes in frantic evacuations. A total of 102 wildfires were raging across the province on Sunday, of which nearly half were categorised as ‘out of control’, according to the BC Wildfire Service. Of those fires, 78 ignited during the past week.” (Guardian) A man has been charged with starting 25 fires that ravaged the Spokane area in Washington state last week, destroying over 800 properties and causing mass evacuations.

Hungary: “The Danube, Europe’s second-longest river, which winds through 10 countries on its journey from Germany to the Black Sea, has fallen to record lows in Hungary. Water levels in Budapest sunk to 4 inches Monday, shattering the previous record low of 13” inches set in 2018, according to the Associated Press. The city is bracing for triple digit temperatures this week as another heat wave scorches Central and Eastern Europe, driving fears that levels could drop even further.” (AccuWeather) The country’s main nuclear power plant is operating at only 10% capacity. In Germany, the Rhine at Kaub, near Koblenz, is a mere 9″ deep and tour boats and barges are stranded.

Temperatures in the southeast of England and the east Midlands are expected to reach 36 deg. C by the end of the week, with no rain in the forecast, anywhere south of Scotland. Over 20 million homes are under a hosepipe ban and firefighters are battling many fires around the country. Some previous Posts I’ve been overreading from November 2022 remind us, it’s perfectly possible to experience heatwaves going into winter. For several days, temperatures in the south of the UK approached 22 Celsius, 12 degrees above normal. Then followed by storms, floods and record rainfall in Scotland….

China: Hong Kong officially recorded its highest ever temperature – 36.9C – as the typhoon swept warm air over the city, reports the Guardian. Reuters says Dolphin is the most ​powerful tropical cyclone to hit China this year. Nearly 1,400 flights in and out of Shanghai’s two main passenger airports have been cancelled, notes AFP. (Carbon Brief) A million people were evacated out of Dolphin’s path. “The typhoon has already swept through Japan’s southern Okinawa prefecture, injuring six people and cutting power to more than 50,000 buildings.”

Indonesia: “authorities have closed access to Mount Bromo national park on Java island as firefighters battle a wildfire raging there for nearly a week.” (AP) Hundreds of firefighters, disaster management personnel, police, soldiers, park rangers and volunteers have been mobilized to contain the blaze, one of numerous fires that have broken out during an unusually dry season.

Tailpipe

California’s winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century. “It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog the shelves of storerooms and wine shops”. The reason is Gen Z, who find wine ‘difficult’ to understand and believe conspiracy theories that it’s bad for your health. Apparently they prefer fizzy fruit cocktails and non-alcoholic beers. Wine growers are tearing up and burning their vines as sales have dropped to their lowest level in decades. (New York Times report).

Not a word about the heat, the fires, the ‘affordability’ crisis. Personally, I avoid American wines. They’re a bit too sugary for my taste. Like fizzy fruit cocktails.

Out of their league

“The 2026/27 season in the Anglian Combination League of 85 amateur teams in Norfolk and Suffolk was due to start next weekend. But on Friday after an urgent meeting, the league’s board announced it had unanimously decided to postpone the start of the season until the end of August, because most of the clubs’ pitches are dried out and too dangerous to play on.” The Guardian.

The board said “a number of pre-season friendlies have had to be cancelled because of the drought and matches that have gone ahead have led to ‘many injuries'”. So, if there’s no grass left by August on playing fields in the UK, what will conditions be like for the next football World Cup, due to be held in four heated-up years’ time in thick smoke across burning, 40 deg.-plus Morocco, Spain and Portugal?

Break a leg!

Perve? The nerve!

I’m sure a lot of pervy people are buying into Zuckerberg’s magic Meta spectacles, so they can secretly undress women they see in the street, stare at children, or whatever it’s feared people will do with the AI-connected, on-nose devices. Summon an Uber, possibly. Look for a table in a Thai restaurant. Read a Kindl. Find a shortsighted girlfriend.

But I’m not in favour of an outright ban. People over 75 should be allowed to wear them. I get very embarrassed by constantly bumping into people in the supermarket who I’m sure I know from somewhere, but from where, and when, and who were they anyway? I can’t remember. Facial recognition is built-in, I gather.

Maybe they can even help to find my actual spectacles. They’re not on my head, I’ve looked.

Indeed, I suggest that the devices should be available to the elderly on prescription. I’m far too old for naked ladies now. Nothing works anymore.

Where the streets have no name

The Second Coming of Andy Burnham

So, this morning the new Health Secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced an initiative on the mental health front. One hundred and fifty nine new drop-in mental health advice centres are to be located in banks and libraries – if you can find one still open – around Britain. The ‘new’ government is good at initiatives.

The idea seems to me to be completely bonkers. Banks? Okay, they can drive you crazy, I admit. Libraries? Try looking up ‘mental health services’ on the internet! It’s far simpler. Where are all these new mental health professionals to be found to staff them? There are few enough in the NHS as it is, the waiting lists are almost eternal. And when the scheme involves beds…. it gets scarily batty.

People’s mental states can be fragile and are not to be played around with.

Would it not be vastly simpler, quicker, cheaper and more reliable to simply grant some additional funding to the many mental health charities, such as MIND, Mental Health UK and YoungMind, which already have drop-in centres in most towns across the country, are ready-staffed and supervised, and which could definitely use the money? And, maybe, to fund more beds for mental health patients within the existing NHS structures, if they can be found? And… community support? Follow-up?

The very next day, The Guardian reported the following: “Seven in 10 (68%) NHS trusts providing mental health services are likely to reduce or shut some of their services in 2026-27, according to the results of a national survey conducted by the NHS Alliance. Of respondents, 59% said they expect to freeze vacancies, with more than half (57%) likely to cut the number of clinical staff they employ this year.”

I’m getting very confused about almost everything.

Speaking of the mental health of the nation, I’ve been somewhat disturbed at how many single-issue pressure groups and charities of one sort or another, even individuals having dramatic breakdowns on morning TV chatshow sofas, have been rushing to ‘write’ to the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, since he arrived in office two weeks ago, desperately pleading for his personal intervention in addressing their particular needs; some of which seem to me to be rather tiresome, as support is clearly already avaiable.

Others – notably, the officious nonentity Badenoch – have been ‘writing’ to him to tell him all about their brilliant ideas for how to run the country.

He’s not the bleedin’ Second Coming of Jesus, you know. Andy doesn’t really do miracles. He has a cabinet of ministers for that, why not try writing to the archangels who are actually responsible for sorting out your problems and let the poor guy get on with his summer holiday?

The thick plottens

As the ‘mainstream media’ continues resolutely to ignore the weight of evidence building behind suggestions that Reform UK is funded ultimately by an international criminal enterprise with links both to South America and to Russia via Montenegro, or at best makes shuffling references to Farage and his paltry 5 million quid ‘gift’ from Thai-based entrepreneur, Nicholas Harborne, comes another shovelful of ‘dirt’ on the whole shitty business from the indefatigable Nafeez Ahmed, investigations editor of the Byline Times.

This one’s a humdinger.

You know ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, the guy who, it seems, may have passed two million squids in unexplained funds (his company has “near-zero” revenue) to his mother shortly before she made two large donations to the ‘party’ via a business vehicle set up in Britain by Deputy Chairman, Richard Tice (transactions being investigated for possible money-laundering by the National Crime Agency)? George, the former City accountant and treasurer of the Brexit party, who calls Farage ‘Daddy’? The one who served eight months in a Federal penitentiary in the USA for ‘wire fraud’?

Well, it seems that an accountancy firm that administers Cottrell’s business in Montenegro may be tied up in a property venture with a former police officer indicted by state authorities in 2024 for organising an alleged cocaine-trafficking and money-laundering operation, wittily known as the “police cartel”.

• “Artemon is the corporate service provider that administers Cottrell’s Montenegro company, registered as Private Family Office. But it simultaneously administers companies owned by Mileta Ojdanić, who appears to have used bank accounts being scrutinised for links to Russian money. Montenegro’s High Court confirmed an indictment against Ojdanić in 2024: prosecutors accuse him of organising a criminal network that trafficked some 4.3 tonnes of cocaine from South America into Europe and laundered around €7 million. A bank used by his company, Adriatic Bank, has separately been swept up in Montenegrin police (enquiries) amid regulatory scrutiny over Russian-linked money.” – Byline Times, 3 Aug.

Oh dear! Ooops!! Of course, there’s no suggestion that Farage or Tice knew anything about Cottrell’s business dealings in Montenegro, which are tied up with other former City colleagues apparently working for sanctioned Russian oligarchs – the money must have seemed like a godsend at the time – and why would they query where it came from, George’s mum being such a trusted source an’ all? Nor should we assume any connection between a drugs cartel in South America and any untraceable crypto-currency ‘wallets’ possibly linked to the vastly wealthy El Salvador-registered ‘stablecoin’ company, Tether, of which Mr Harborne, who also, according to Mr Ahmed, has a company registered in the same offices in Montenegro from which Mr Cottrell operates, is a substantial shareholder although not, he stresses, a director.

https://www.bylinetimes.com/2026/08/03/nigel-farage-funder-george-cottrells-accountant-co-invested-with-russia-linked-indicted-cocaine-trafficker/

Happily, next week’s Clacton by-election should serve to maintain the attention of the mainstream media for a while longer, as Mr Farage seeks to use the disillusioned voters of his abandoned, rundown seaside constituency to validate his annoying existence. His bleating about being a victim of ‘the Establishment’ seems disingenuous, in the light of his list of supporters above the mob, see: https://www.desmog.com/2026/07/28/meet-the-aristocrats-helping-to-fund-reform-nigel-farage. Seems George is not the only posh one!

GW – A topical heatwave

Europe: Austria and neighbouring Slovakia have set new temperature records – both over 41C – as a “sweltering heatwave batters central Europe” (AFP) 27 Italian cities are under extreme heat advisories, many for the fourth time this year. Wildfires have forced evacuations in Albania (Reuters) and Bulgaria, while the countries bordering the dried-up Danube are all having severe power supply crises. (Carbon Brief) The forecast for the UK is for a return to mid-30s temperatures in the south by Tuesday, and no rain.

China: Heatwaves have driven a “rapid increase” in electricity demand, pushing electricity loads to record ⁠highs across northern, north-eastern and eastern China, according to the country’s main grid operator State Grid, as “soaring temperatures boosted air-conditioning use” (Reuters) Extra funds are being trotted out to support emergency rescue and disaster relief efforts in eight provinces following heavy rainfalls across the country (Xinhua)

Puerto Rico: “has announced it will implement water rationing measures in San Juan and other major cities as a drought grips the United States territory with no relief in sight. More than 180,000 Puerto Ricans will be without water for 48 hours at a time on a rotating basis starting Friday.” (Al Jazeera)

USA: “Summer downpours may cause flash flooding and travel disruptions in parts of the central and eastern United States at the weekend, while clusters of thunderstorms will become severe enough to bring damaging winds and frequent lightning strikes.” Meanwhile in the Northwest… “Dry conditions, very low fuel moisture and locally gusty winds will maintain a very high wildfire risk across parts of the region (around Spokane, Wa. where fires have devastated whole communities) through the weekend and into next week. Temperatures will remain in the 80s, 90s and 100s F across much of the West, and meaningful rainfall is not expected.” (Accuweather)

Tailpipe

“UK battery-electric vehicle sales have risen 44.5% year-on-year to a record 43,106 in July, amid high petrol prices, manufacturer discounts and government incentives” (The Times)

La Grande Illusion

A fleet of 15 ‘Trump class’ frigates – his ‘golden fleet’, already dismissed by senior naval officers as tactically useless, of ‘zero value’, is being estimated to cost the taxpayer 275 billion dollars. But it doesn’t stop there – the President’s mad vision is to add a further ten beautiful ‘battleships’ to his Trump memorial fleet, bringing the cost at today’s prices to “nearly half a trillion dollars” for, as Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon put it, a ‘massive military boondoggle’. (MS Now cf The New York Times)

Who cares for starlit skies?

…”Most of the media, most of the time, provides a platform for people who say things that have the effect of serving capital, whether or not they are true, whether or not they are coherent, whether or not they may hasten disaster.” – George Monbiot, The Guardian. ‘Murderous heat, an endangered food supply and no net zero: this is the life the radical right wants you to have.’, 4 Aug.

QotW

• “We don’t need to know whether AI has crossed some theoretical threshold of self-awareness to see that it is dangerous and that its unregulated expansion is monstrously irresponsible. … Earlier this year, Anthropic limited the release of its most powerful model to a small number of hand-picked clients because it was too good at exploiting software vulnerabilities. In the wrong hands, Claude ‘Mythos’ could be a cyberweapon of mass destruction. Whose hands are the right ones? The US government will never be relaxed about the private sector having control over such awesome tools. But Donald Trump regulates by monarchical patronage, not law. He demands that companies submit to his personal authority and uses state power to punish those that resist.” – Rafael Behr, The Guardian: ‘Democracy is at stake when foolish humans bet on machines being intelligent’, 4 Aug.

Between the lines

Is there ultimately any difference between biological intelligence, the kind we fondly imagine we have a monopoly over in the animal kingdom; and mechanical intelligence, which manifests through a machine capable of making so many billions of choices every second that it creates a simulacrum of our biological neural networks? Both rely on stored experience and speed of recall; both are limited to what we already ‘know’, or can most rapidly ascertain; the common denominator being the action that results from the processing of the data; action which in either case may be the same, desired or possibly sometimes not, as in the case of the AI programs in tthe news, that developed a life of their own, hacking the opposition. No one wants to see independence of thought in a silicon chip.

In recent years, perhaps in subconscious preparation for the AI revolution, and not willing to be outdone by faster processors, we have learned to differentiate other kinds of ‘intelligence’ than the mere ability to process data rapidly. When, for instance, will a machine be able to do anything more than simulate ’emotional intelligence’, detecting an expressed emotion and guessing in its own way at a desired response? Where is its impulse towards genuine empathy, creative freedom? It may be argued that AI can already demonstrate those intelligences, but they depend on our perception of the machine responses – our tendency to anthropomorphise. Are we not in reality breeding a generation of autistic humanoids, created in the somewhat soulless image of their wealthy ‘tech-bro’ progenitors?

As for me, elderly and in full retirement, I have no idea where or how or even if AI plugs in to my life; any more than, despite many years of learning and working with analog production techniques, I’m increasingly finding supposedly user-friendly, ‘Smart’ technology utterly baffling. I imagine it’s because at my age I’m no longer considered to be a useful user; I certainly have no use for social media, to the annoyance of my singing group, who seem to communicate on another plane. But I expressed an instant aversion to the whole idea of ‘facebooking’, back in the day, sensing a likely quid pro quo; an instinct that has served me in good stead, given the ‘slop’ factor and misinformation polluting current discourse. I am enjoying seeing if I can catch the rudimentary Google AI search engine out, asking it what I imagine is a bewildering series of disconnected questions; and sometimes, it seems to be engaging me in dialogue rather than merely providing reference-book answers, or parroting the messages of its paying advertisers, which could be a positive sign.

GW – El Niño: we ain’t seen nuffin

Asia: “A record heat wave is sweeping across Northeast Asia, with South Korea, North Korea and Japan reporting deaths, illnesses and disruption as temperatures stay dangerously high. The impact has been seen in scenes ranging from baseball fans collapsing in South Korea to three lions dying at a zoo in Japan, while North Korean authorities have issued safety warnings. … heat wave advisories remained in place across most of South Korea as temperatures in greater Seoul and nearby areas climbed to as high as 39 degrees Celsius. North Korea also issued advisories in many areas, while Japan reported a sharp rise in heatstroke cases, with its anti-disaster agency saying more than 18,000 people with heat stroke symptoms were taken to hospitals in the week from July 20 to 26. In South Korea, the Interior and Safety Ministry said about 2,220 people have been diagnosed with heat-related illnesses since mid-May and 19 people have died.” (India Today)

The death toll from flooding in India’s north-eastern state of Assam has risen to 87. Sri Lanka has shut down schools after “torrential rains triggered deadly mudslides and flash floods, killing at least 7 people”, (Al Jazeera) “A series of cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides ‘swept through Jammu and Kashmir this month, killing 28 people.'” (Guardian)

Ethiopia: Fourteen people have been killed in ​a landslide near a ‌monastery in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, the state-run Amhara ​Media Corporation said ​late on Monday. ​Independent ⁠news reports said it was ​triggered by heavy ​rains. (Reuters)

USA: Amid 100 deg. F temperatures, intense rainfall has created flash-flooding conditions in Houston, Tx., leaving roads underwater and motorists stranded. “A busy pattern of showers and thunderstorms will drench parts of the central and eastern United States through the end of the week. Some communities could receive a couple of inches of rain in just a few hours, raising the risk of flash flooding. One area of greatest concern will stretch across parts of the Plains and Midwest through Thursday, including Chicago.” (AccuWeather)

Similar conditions are reported from Mexico: “Streets are filled with muddy floodwaters following torrential downpours that slammed parts of central Mexico on Monday. Aerial video from Pátzcuaro shows water rushing through roadways like a river, with vehicles sitting in several inches of flooding.” (Fox Weather)

Meanwhile in Canada: A fast-moving wildfire destroyed about 230 homes in an Indigenous community in western Canada, northeast of Vancouver, officials said Tuesday, making it one of the country’s most destructive fires in recent years. (AP)

China: There’s uncertainty over the possible track of Typhoon Dolphin, which could make landfall on Thursday after passing through the Japanese Ryukyu islands in the East China Sea. In one scenario, it could land along the coast from the Yangtze River region to Zhejiang Province as a typhoon or strong typhoon. In another, the storm moves north before making landfall from Jiangsu and Shanghai to the Shandong Peninsula between August 10 and 11 as a severe tropical storm. On Tuesday, Dolphin strengthened out at sea into a super typhoon, driving up 8 metre (26 ft) waves.

Tailpipe

Gas guzzlers

• “In the debate over data centers that is roiling the country, water use and noise are often cited as objections by neighbors and environmentalists. Less mentioned has been the pollution from the scores of gas-burning plants that will power these data centers. When the El Paso facility’s power plant is complete, it could emit as much planet-warming carbon dioxide in a year as 360,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles over the same period.” – Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times. ‘Trump’s Vision for A.I. Dominance Comes With Major Air Pollution’, 4 Aug.

Meeting public objections in a country where, in most states, local regulations say you can build polluting industrial plant just about anywhere, can often make things worse. In order to obtain planning consents, which in the business-friendly USA can go through in as little as two days, data centre developers have mostly agreed not to plug into the mains, but instead to create their own electricity onsite. Nationwide, says the NYT, at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed to power data centers.

82 times 360,000 cars, average CO2 output 4.5 tonnes a year…. we’re toast.

Here in the UK, politicians’ mad obsession with keeping up with the Joneses and the Chengs is going to screw our net-zero objectives for sure, more effectively than any possible future government led by the weirdo, Badenoch, or the cryptic Frogman, Nigel ‘Goldfinger’ Farage. The Guardian reported last April: energy use by AI datacentres in the UK could cause the emission of up to 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) – about as much as generated by 2.7 million people – over the next 10 years.

That’s if we know when to stop covering the country with the fucking things, when what we really need to be building is homes for humans.

In the drink

“Each of the country’s rivers, lakes and estuaries was assessed by the Environment Agency as part of a six-yearly evaluation of England’s water quality. The EA checked for a range of toxic chemicals, from Pfas – or ‘forever chemicals’ – to microplastics. … Every single English water body is polluted with toxic chemicals, while just 14.3% of surface waters achieved good ecological status.” (The Guardian,5 Aug.)

Dude, where’s muh fuckin’ money?

Following a report that the leading oil companies have made $92 billion in profits since his war on Iran began in February, Donald Trump has complained that they are making too much money out of it. Don’t worry, he hasn’t had an epiphany – we suspect it’s just jealousy.

The worse it gets

“Brexit is a complete fraud, a myth served up like a dish of kippers for the minor myriad of dumbfucks who thought it was all going to be so easy, that they only had to tick a box marked Leave, all the hated foreigners would do exactly that and Britain would immediately be Great again, after years of shameful ‘subservience’ to the inferior species across the water. Stupid, stupid, stupid.” – The Boglington Post, August 2017.

QotW

• “All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation. Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people. That’s data politics.” – Tressie McMillan Cottom, Opinion columnist, New York Times, 3 Aug.

Cottom’s article goes on to provide a helpful reading list for those determined souls who want to understand the darker motivations of the ‘tech bros’ and what is being done to us through ‘End Times Fascism’, at the end of which you should have formulated a plan of resistance for what comes after Trump. “Artificial intelligence is not just a market product or a scientific achievement. It is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.”

Not sure if it helps or absolutely doesn’t, but The Guardian is reporting: “On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn). That same day, it was reported that China had developed its own tools to carry out deep-ultraviolet lithography, a technique essential to the computer chip supply chain over which the Dutch company ASML had held a monopoly. AI-linked shares, particularly chipmakers, dropped around the world, sending many indices sliding.”

In a major profile, meanwhile, the NYT tells us the cautionary tale of Trump’s octogenarian friend, Larry Ellison – a media mogul, once the richest man in the world, financially speaking, whose lavishly debt-fuelled exposure to AI data centre developments exceeds $500 billion. “Ellison is personally worth … more than $200 billion less than he was at his peak in September. Oracle (which is closely dependent on Sam Altman’s loss-making Open AI) has pushed the limits of the credit market and is facing steeper interest rates from lenders, and its credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above ‘junk’ status.” (NYT, 31 July)

So we’ll see. Maybe the ‘tech bros’ of Silicon Valley will be wiped out by the Chinese. Before the rest of us are.

(www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/larry-ellison-ai-oracle.html?emc=edit_ufn_20260801&nl=from-the-times&segment_id=224059)

Humans, go home

• “The UK Home Office has started stripping some EU citizens of their post-Brexit residency rights, in a move that has raised concerns about Britain’s compliance with its withdrawal agreement with Europe. The UK internal affairs authority has told at least 100 people that they were given residency rights ‘in error’, disrupting their lives just as they come to the end of their five-year ‘pre-settled status’” – Guardian, 02 August.

This shit has to stop, now. That enthusiastic persecutor of the disempowered, Mahmood needs to go; preferably ‘home’ to Pakistan, where, although she was apparently born in Birmingham, her heart clearly belongs. In all my 76 years, I’ve never known a worse run of Home Secretaries, beginning with Theresa May. There seems to be an endless supply of them, dumpy little school bullies with no friends, willing to make everyone’s lives a misery just to validate themselves and assuage their fear of alienation. And all supposedly ‘more empathetic’ for being women and even mothers. Well you’re not, you’re an utter disgrace to your sex and common humanity.

Home Secretary used to be a dignified position for a senior politician, next only to the Chancellor in importance – not a DEI opportunity casting for cheap populists and Daily Mail headline grabbers aligned with brutal totalitarian insensitivity. How can you do this to people? We’re not talking ‘illegals’ here, many of these hundred victims of Home Office incompetence are professional people, who have chosen to settle here, start families and contribute to the economy despite Brexit and all the threats and the horrible policies of rotten little vote-chasing racist-enablers like Mahmood and Farage.

If this is Andy Burnham’s premiership, mate, I’ll give it five months. You’re no better than the last one.

GW – And so it goes

USA: “A timber fire is considered large when it reaches 100 acres, and a fire in grass gets the designation at 300 acres. On Saturday, there were 40 large fires burning across Oregon and Washington. Among the largest is the Rowe Creek complex, a collection of fires that has scorched more than 300,000 acres (170 thousand Association football pitches) in north-central Oregon. In Washington, just north of Coulee Dam, the Kaiser Canyon fire has burned more than 100,000 acres. … Fast-moving wildfires near Spokane forced about 60,000 people to evacuate and damaged or destroyed at least 600 homes, businesses and other structures over the weekend. As the governor of Washington state declared an emergency owing to very high winds expected over the weekend, the threat extended into parts of Idaho and western Montana, with standard red-flag warnings in effect in some areas.” (New York Times/AccuWeather) The number of large fires in the two states is 15% higher than normal for the time of year.

Hungary: “Hungary has been forced to shut down its only nuclear plant, which generates 40% of the country’s electricity, due to a record-breaking drought in central Europe, says Politico. It says prime minister Péter Magyar announced the closure of the Paks plant on Sunday, citing the continued drop in water levels in the Danube River, which the plant uses for cooling. The outlet continues: ‘A prolonged outage would cripple Hungary’s electricity supply at a time when temperatures are forecast to rise above 40C in Budapest next week amid an ongoing heatwave and drought across Europe.’” Romania too has issued a state of alert for its energy sector due to low Danube levels. It says the country has already shut down one of two nuclear reactors and may have to close a second, as a result. Bloomberg reports, the country is having to ask Ukraine if it can borrow some of its energy.

Italy: “is putting nearly all of its major cities on the highest ‘red’ alert for high temperatures, as a new heatwave grips the country. Health officials say 19 cities from north to south – including the capital Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples – are already at red alert, and by Monday all but two cities will be. Temperatures hit mid-30s C in many places on Saturday, and authorities are warning of risks to even healthy and active people – not just groups including the elderly, very young children and people with chronic illnesses. …A subtropical anticyclone from North Africa is strengthening over the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, firefighters in Greece, France, Portugal and Spain are still tackling blazes spanning thousands of hectares. In France, some 2,500 people were evacuated in the south-eastern Var region on Friday evening after a blaze – which had been contained for several days – reignited, local officials said.” (BBC)

In the UK, fires are still breaking out at the site of a major blaze that has been burning for days on Dunwich Heath, an SSSI on the Suffolk coast. Here in Boglington, we’re expecting… rain!

Korea: “Temperatures reached a record-breaking 42.5C on Saturday in the city of Yangsan in South Korea’s South Gyeongsang province, reports the Korea Times. It says this is the highest level reached in the country since modern weather observation began in 1904, amid a record-breaking heatwave. It continues that the prolonged heatwave has resulted in casualties and disruptions across the country, including 13 deaths. Authorities warned people to immediately stop all outdoor activities. …The average annual number of heatwave days in the country has more than doubled to 19 over the past five years, from eight in the 1970s.” (Carbon Brief, citing various sources)

Tailpipe

Fool you, Tice

Nine years ago, the New York Times commissioned experts led by Harvard University to conduct a review of internal communications over the previous 40 years within the giant Exxon Mobil oil and gas conglomerate, and concluded:

• “Our findings are clear: Exxon Mobil misled the public about the state of climate science and its implications. Available documents show a systematic, quantifiable discrepancy between what Exxon Mobil’s scientists and executives discussed about climate change in private and in academic circles, and what it presented to the general public. … Scientific reports and articles written or cowritten by Exxon Mobil employees acknowledged that global warming was a real and serious threat. They also noted it could be addressed by reducing fossil fuel use….” – NYT, 22 Aug. 2017.

Why the fuck is anyone still debating this, and how are these oil-drenched, money-breathing ghouls still getting away with constantly lying to us, when they know we know they’re lying?

Should they not be in prison? After all, in Germany it’s a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust, so it’s not impossible.

All change

The Telegraph, formerly a newspaper, now an Orwellian propaganda rag for the billionaire class, owned by the sometime Nazi party-supporting Axel Springer group, is blaming the heat and the fires currently causing a crisis in farming in southern Britain with potential food shortages and price rises to follow as drought bites and water restrictions are imposed for the second year running, on ‘net-zero’ and rewilding policies.

I wonder, is Britain’s ‘net-zero’ policy also causing the extreme heatwaves, droughts and fires around the rest of the northern hemisphere? Is our attempt to repair species habitat? We should apologise.

As it happens, solar power is now contributing 14% of the UK’s total electricity output, up from 9% last year; renewables met 52% of our needs last month, while private sector companies have pledged more than £100bn in investment into the green economy so far in this parliament, so fuck the Telegraph. (The Guardian, 3 Aug.) We wipe our arse on you.

Grim Reaper

RIP Sunday Times’ pet ‘confrontational’ columnist, former Today editor, Rod Liddle, 66. I dunno what happened to him, he used to be quite well-balanced. Maybe there’s more money in being a complete shithead. His family loved him, I guess.