Quote of the Week
Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you. … If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you.
– Stanislaw Aronson, 93, veteran of the Warsaw uprising (Guardian)
“If he would betray his marriage and his four kids, who would he not betray?
Fucking Boris, Again
“Key allies of Boris Johnson rallied behind the former foreign secretary on Saturday night, insisting that news of his divorce and stories about his personal life would do nothing to damage his chances of succeeding Theresa May as Conservative leader after Brexit.”
– “Divorce News Won’t Mar Any Johnson Leadership Bid, Say Tories” – Guardian 08 Sept.
Dear Tories
It would be ironic, would it not, if a fat, middle-aged, serial shagger with the self-publicizing morals of an alley-cat, thrashing around in the midst of yet another hormonal crisis, were to succeed the lifelong married vicar’s daughter as the leader of the party.
Why, it would be just like old Tory times!
Ousting a paragon whose worst ever sin was to run laughing gaily through the farmer’s field of wheat; golden in the mercy of His means. (Worst, that is, before allowing herself to be filmed dancing with Africans, like an injured stork.)
Especially if he were a notoriously lazy and incompetent minister who treats the electorate and everyone else as fools – which in his case, they are. A careless, thoughtless racist who describes black people as ‘piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and Muslim women as “letterboxes”. Today, deploying another Islamophobic meme, he deliberately likens the PM’s Brexit policy to a “suicide vest”. Trump will like that.
(Like Trump, he does it deliberately to fire up his dumbfuck base. And just as with Trump, nobody puts him in prison for it; although God help anyone else who says those hateful things.)
“Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;—and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.” – Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. (From Wikipedia)
For “legislation on the subject”, read “Alexander “Boris” dePfeffel Johnson; arse at large”.
You are, are you not, you Tories, now all utterly without shame, humility or moral scruple. Your entire existence is reduced to a zero-sum game: do we get back in, or not? With or without a second referendum, a deal, no deal – and the hell with the consequences? The hell, too, with good governance: the poor are crying out for an end to your oppression, the fragile threads holding our society together are breaking apart, and you aren’t hearing or seeing them in your solipsism.
The calculus is that Johnson will come out of this, his latest marital fuck-up, smelling – if not of roses, then at least of Nina Ricci – or he will be doomed to Churchillian temporary oblivion, and round we go again.
What he needs is a good war.
What he’s going to get is another global economic crisis; this one potentially terminal. Is he up to it?
The point surely is not that Johnson’s wife is divorcing him, probably not before time. He has said, rather pathetically, that he is looking for somewhere to live. I imagine him ironing his yellowing underpants in a bedsit in Pimlico, smelling of unwashed socks, Jeremy Kyle on the telly. Visiting day with the kids!
It’s not even necessarily the point, that he has had yet another extramarital affair – Marina, the mother of his four children (apart from at least one by-blow we know of), knew perfectly well what she was getting into.
It’s just that, hashtag Metoo, the other attractive blonde bit of totty concerned is, or was at the time, an EMPLOYEE. And we just don’t go there any more, do we.
Suzanne Moore wrote in The Guardian last Friday:
“Apparently allies of Johnson know that his infidelity is written into his “price” and his supporters won’t mind. They certainly haven’t minded about his attitudes to women in the past. His writing about “hot totty” at Labour conference, his ludicrous remarks about breast size, his general ogling is part of his brand. He is Trumpian in his appetites and in his disregard for the morality of little people.”
That’s you and me, by the way. Going to vote for him? Think he’d make a good Prime Minister?
His dumbfuck supporters, who think they’re voting for a refreshing change rather than for a narcissistic middle-aged Lothario who can’t keep it in his pants, normally a signal to MI5 that a politician is not to be trusted around State secrets, won’t mind because they don’t ask. They don’t know. But they would care, surely?
“Mr Johnson’s long-suffering wife Marina Wheeler (QC) announced the divorce yesterday after tiring of the 54-year-old womaniser’s antics”, wrote the Daily Mail. “He is said to have been juggling Brexit with secret trysts with a blonde Tory party aide.”
No cover-up… The hurricane of publicity trumps the winds of history: Boris, the no-hoper.
Okay, take a deep breath. You’re a Johnson supporter. Good old Boris, such a refreshing change (forget the £27 million debacle of the garden bridge. Forget the betrayal of Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe (he has). And you voted Leave, didn’t you, because you trusted him and his promise to refund the crumbling NHS, where you can’t get an appointment with a GP inside three weeks although they work only 3.5 days a week and you’ve never seen the waiting room even half-full. We feel your pain.
It’s all going to be great, a rollercoaster ride to global prosperity with red, white and blue lollipops for all, after the pain wears off.
He has a plan, surely? He must have a plan – other than telling the other 27 countries of the EU to “go whistle”?
And while he was courageously battling Monsieur Barnier and the faceless sausage-munchers of Brussels on your behalf, you now know that all the time he was holed up in some posh hotel in London, grunting like a pig with his trousers round his ankles, his patriotic little winkle balls deep in some ambitious blonde intern*.
Probably in front of a mirror.
Not only that, but he is said to have hit on the employee, whatever the silly girl is, while he was in the middle of an affair with a different Tory party worker. Go, Boris! It sounds like they’re queuing three deep to get a shot of those Johnson genes. True, after Brexit we shall need all the home-grown semen we can get, but this guy’s spending like a good ‘un. And (incidentally) seems to have been abusing his position as the Foreign Secretary all the while.
Was this why he resigned? Nothing to do with Brexit, then? Opposition to the Chequers plan that he’d approved only days earlier? Nothing to do with his contempt for the oik, David Davis? Just to avoid bringing possible opprobrium on the sacred Office of State, if the Daily Mail had got wind of the affair while he might have been jiggling some ingenue on his lap, or going at it over the desk at the FO after lights out?
Given the global furore there has been over rich slobs like Harvey Weinstein and the Trumps, père et fils, abusing their positions of power to launch their damaged egos at anything that moves, probably even at the rats overrunning their offices, you would imagine Johnson might have noticed the climate of opinion re knocking-off the secretaries and just held back for a while, but no.
He’s incontinent. A massive security risk. A total fatberg. If he would betray his marriage and his four kids, who would he not betray? If he imagines he is immune to public opinion, why would he not also think himself immune to more serious charges, of bonking for Vladimir for example?
He doesn’t give a damn about the women he uses, about loyalty, about the party, anything. He’s driven only by his fears of waning masculinity, his broadening arse, his overprivileged ego; the ease with which he can manipulate the media, and the desperate ambition that is eating what used to be his considerable brain. The famous disarming charm is wearing thin.
But you’re going to vote for him, you dumbfucks.
Because he’s such a refreshing change.
*It seems I may have been a little precipitous here. The Daily Mail, who employ a team of 376 reliable celebrity gossip specialists and one writer, are today betting on:
“Revealed, the party-loving blonde linked to Johnson’s marriage breakdown”
“Carrie Symonds, the party’s former director of communications, was linked to the former Foreign Secretary after it was claimed that he had developed a ‘strong friendship’ with the blonde in the months leading up to his separation from wife Marina. Ms Symonds, 30, has been a high-profile figure in Westminster for nearly a decade, holding senior positions at Tory HQ and as an adviser to Cabinet Ministers. She regularly posts glamorous pictures of herself on social media, including one photograph of herself striking a pose while standing on the bonnet of a car in the grounds of Parliament.”
As advisors to Cabinet Ministers are wont to do.
And one can indeed see how one compulsive exhibitionist like Johnson would be attracted to another, over his boring old family, his sensible wife. Did the Tory party-lovin’ spin-doctor make his shaggy head “spin”? For details, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/index.html
Phwoarh, what a Carrie-on! (photo: en.mogazn…/Google Images)
You read it here first #197
We have previously bogld on the question of why did Boris and Govey and the neoliberals’ neoliberal, li’l Steve Baker and old tortoise-head, Cunting Smith and the other filthy Brexit plotters simply melt away when St Theresa was dragged forward reluctantly by the 1922 Praetorian Guard to become the party leaderene in the wake of Cameron’s cowardly ratting on the job?
Those uber-bastards, fifty of whom were reported last night to be holding a coven together, openly planning a mutiny against the PM and her dead-in-the-water Chequers agreement to leave the EU without, er, leaving it….
We speculated satirically that after six years as Home Secretary overseeing MI5, the homeland security boys a’ snoopin’ and a’ snitchin’, she would certainly have known where all the bodies were buried. Surprise, surprise: “War Over Dirty Dossier“, headlines the Sunday Times today, 9 Sept. “Documents on his sex life drawn up by May’s aides…”
You read it here first, about two years ago!
x
Ready when you are, Mr Trump
Response and Recovery
“The Response and Recovery program coordinates the core federal response capabilities used to save lives, and protect critical infrastructure in communities throughout the Nation (sic) that have been overwhelmed by the impact of a major disaster or an emergency. The program also takes the lead among federal agencies, state and local governments, and representatives of non-governmental organizations to support individuals and communities with the goal of reducing losses, improving recovery operations, and promoting resilience.”
In May, shortly before the start of the 2018 hurricane season, the Trump Administration privately transferred $9.8 million out of FEMA’s emergency response funds to help shore up the budget for ICE, the immigration control agency, to cover the extra costs of seizing and locking up the children of refugee asylum seekers in detention camps; some as young as 18 months.
The item was buried in an appropriations bill that just happened to have been scrutinized by Democrat senator, Jeff Merkley.
As 160 mph Cat 4 Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the Carolinas and their complement of panicking humans, rickety shoreline houses and nuclear power plants (at least 6 are in its path), Trump trumpeted that the nation had never been better prepared for an event which, forecast the master meteorologist, would be “tremendously big, and tremendously… wet”.
Meanwhile the death toll from last year’s Hurricane Maria, that devastated Puerto Rico, has been officially raised to a number oddly coincident with that of 9/11, 2,975 – in both cases the numbers killed in the initial event have been swollen in their aftermath by official neglect and ignorance.
Several news channels have reminded us today of Trump’s astonishing, self-congratulatory encomia about how his administration’s response to Puerto Rico a year ago had been probably the greatest ever to any disaster; an unsung triumph. We were treated once more to archival images of him, throwing kitchen paper rolls at the survivors.
All other accounts however refer to its complete inadequacy – any failings, says the President, were down to the extreme difficulty of getting to Puerto Rico, an island dependancy of the USA, across ‘a lot of water, ocean water’; the poverty of its prior infrastructure, its ‘bankruptcy’ – compounded by FEMA’s total incompetence in the matter of assigning large-scale reconstruction contracts to mainland-based companies they found on Linked-In, with as few as one employee.
(Among his other irrational morbid dreads, the President clearly is suffering from hydrophobia.)
Responding by tweet to Monday’s anniversary of 9/11, Trump launched yet another whining, self-justifying denial of ‘collusion’ with Russia and claimed there was an increasing amount of documentary evidence connecting Hillary Clinton to the Kremlin – although none has been produced. Of the events of 9 September, 2001, his admiration for the responders and his commiserations with he relatives, the President of the United States said nothing. He later attended a gathering of survivors and relatives, and was caught on camera giving a victory salute to himself.
TYT’s Cenk Uygur reminded us yesterday of what Trump had said on a radio phone-in on the evening of the 9/11 attack: boasting that, with the demolition of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, with nearly 3,000 office workers and responders burned or crushed to death beneath them, people still dying in the rubble, the area still on fire, his own building, Trump Tower, was now “the tallest in New York”.
This sociopathic monster needs to be confined to a secure facility and deprived permanently of his cellphones. Not the White House, a real one.
STOP PRESS: Federal authorities have said they will not be evacuating 1,000 prisoners from the Ridgeland Correctional Institute on the coast of South Carolina, as 160 mph super hurricane Florence bears down on them. Fears are also being expressed for pollution from vast agricultural waste storage facilities as many giant industrial pig and chicken farms, sewage treatment works and ‘toxic coal-ash dumps’ also lie in the path of the storm. (Democracy Now!)
“North Carolina has roughly 2,100 industrial-scale pork farms containing more than 9 million hogs typically housed in long metal sheds with grated floors designed to allow the animals’ urine and feces to fall through and flow into nearby open-air pits containing millions of gallons of untreated sewage.” (The Guardian)
Okay, carry on…
Storm over Miami, Fla (Cater’s News Agency)
GW: Ooh, what a spin I’m in…
Fast-moving events this week make maintaining an account valid for Thursday somewhat problematic, but here goes.
Hurricane Florence, still heading for the eastern seaboard of the USA, is moving slowly towards (now past) Bermuda and possibly could become the highest Category 5 over warmer waters and one of the most destructive hurricanes to hit the east coast in decades.
The forecast is for an incredible event: Florence is expected to stall over the coast for up to THREE DAYS… potentially dropping more than 35 inches of rain. Fortunately the Outer Banks area of N Carolina is thinly populated, even so up to 10-in is possible inland to Virginia and up into New York as the rotation widens. (The target now appears to be the more populous city of Wilmington.)
“As well as Florence, likely to become a Superstorm by Thursday several hundred miles across, “The Atlantic and Pacific are ginning up at least four other systems that are already—or soon predicted to be—at hurricane strength. Each of these is likely to affect land, with an unusual cluster of simultaneous U.S.-affiliated targets.” (Wunderground)
Weather wars, no doubt.
STOP PRESS: Monday 10 Sept. Wunderground confirms, “With rapid intensification forecast, Florence is predicted by the National Hurricane Center to reach the North Carolina coast on Thursday as a weakening Cat 3, one of the strongest landfalls so far north in U.S. history. Massive rains could occur for days afterward.” A tidal surge is predicted over the shallow coastline of 10 to 12 feet. 1.5 million residents have been advised to flee, and the US Atlantic fleet has put to sea. Even Mr Trump has noticed, tweeting people to stay safe. Right…
Olivia is encountering problems and may not make it to Cat 1 before it passes over Maui and fizzles out as a Tropical Storm, even so a rare visitor to Hawaii offering up to 15-in rain over Maui island. New, Tropical Storm Paul isn’t expected to make landfall anywhere.
Helene has become a mid-size Cat 1 hurricane, 145 miles south of the Cape Verde islands. It seems to be taking a sharp northwards turn into the mid-Atlantic, from where it MIGHT make landfall next week in the British Isles, hopes the Daily Express.
“Gales and torrential downpours threaten to hammer swathes of the country early next week if Helene makes a direct hit on the UK. However the tropical storm could narrowly swerve the country and instead supercharge a sweltering blast of heat already poised to send thermometers rocketing towards 30C (86F). Helene’s path and impact will depend on whether she collides with the jet stream over the coming days and the atmospheric conditions over Britain after the weekend, experts say.” (Express)
“Compact Tropical Storm Isaac (only 45 miles wide) was on the verge of hurricane status at 5 pm EDT Sunday, with top sustained winds of 70 mph.” Heading for the Windward Islands and the Lesser Antilles, on the edge of the Caribbean, thinks Bob Henson; who is also watching a Tropical Disturbance forming south of the Gulf that could intensify over 30 deg. C. warm waters and bring yet more flooding to Texas and Louisiana.
Pacific Typhoon Mangkhut is “on track to pass through the U.S. commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands early Monday EDT as a Category 3-strength typhoon”, on its way to Guam and the Anderson Airforce Base. Unnamed Tropical Depression 27 is just passing over Luzon, Philippines. A rough week ahead in peak hurricane season.
UPDATE, Wednesday 12th: “Millions are at risk from a strong typhoon set to smash into the northern Philippines this weekend which could bring floods, landslides and huge waves to the disaster-prone nation. Emergency workers have been deployed in the northern tip of the main Philippine island of Luzon, where Cat 4 Supertyphoon Mangkhut is expected to make landfall on Saturday, with gusts of 270km per hour. ‘We’re worried for the 10 million people living in the path of this destructive storm,’ said Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross.” (http://www.channelnewsasia.com)
Next stop, Hong Kong….
USA: “Heavy rain, enhanced by the remnants of Tropical Storm Gordon, caused severe flooding in parts of Kentucky and Missouri between 07 to 09 Sept. At least 2 people have died. Parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania also saw heavy rainfall. … Slow-moving storms over the weekend caused flooding in parts of Texas. Local media report that 2 people died when their vehicle was dragged away by flood water in Fort Worth. (Floodlist)
Checking on some residual September heatwave numbers, I see Phoenix, Az. is still running at around 106F, 41C every day this week, with temperatures not falling below the mid-80s F overnight. Palm Springs, Ca. posted a high of 111F, 43C just today. The fierce Delta fire in Shasta County, northern California was raging uncontrolled over 22 thousand acres Saturday, tripling in size overnight. (50 thousand acres by Monday night.) A 45-mile section of highway i-5 had to be closed. But overall temperatures seem to be cooling, with rainy New York hitting a maximum of 72F, 22C. In Mexico, three schoolboys were electrocuted when widespread flooding affected the city of Apodaca.
Japan: Some new footage has emerged of Typhoon Jebi and a most extraordinary event that we never saw on mainstream news, a huge pile of wrecked cars blown or washed atop one another from a coastal carpark, caught alight and blazing fiercely. (Climate Change & Extreme Weather News #135) The same source gives us video of recent heavy flooding in Guangdong Province, China (single-storey dwellings up to the the eaves, fish swimming around unwisely on the floor of a restaurant!)
Wednesday 12th: 160 mph supertyphoon Mangkhut is expected to clip the Philippines and make landfall on the Chinese coast around Hong Kong on Sunday, possibly as a slightly weaker Cat 3.
North Korea: The geopolitics, nuclear ambitions and parades are rarely out of the news, but we seldom hear anything about how climate change is affecting the secretive state, that has recently suffered a long heatwave and severe drought. That came to an end briefly on 28 August when 76 people are thought to have drowned and another 75 are missing after heavy flooding and landslides hit the southern part of the country. 800 buildings were destroyed. “Thousands have lost their homes and are in urgent need of food and shelter” (Red Cross spokesman) (CEWN #135 citing AFP in Pyongyang)
Italy: Flash flooding affected the city of Verona and outskirts on 01 Sept after extreme rainfall. Similarly, Barcelona in Spain was hit by a violent thunderstorm that caused widespread flooding in the city. Another flash-flood raced through the streets of Cebolla, near Toledo, where the river overflowed, carrying away dozens of cars. “Local observers said that around 30 mm of rain fell in just 15 minutes and between 50 and 60 mm in one hour.” (Floodlist) On 06 Sept a major flood hit Erbaa, in northern Turkey, during a powerful ‘whiteout’ hailstorm that turned streets to rivers of ice, etc. (CEWN #135.) Satellite imagery (Meteo) shows a large weather system moving eastwards through the Mediterranean.
Adios, amigos!
Yellowstone News: Friday 7th, the Steamboat (biggest geyser in the park) erupted again, for the 17th time this year, with considerable force, hurling rocks and ‘dirty’ boiling liquid water into the air accompanied by a ‘deep, percussive booming sound’ (USGS field reports). The Blessed Mary Greeley reports, the eruption lasted for 48 minutes; almost twice as long as ever recorded before. The most times it has gone off in a single year before is 3, in the whole of 2003. Many years it doesn’t erupt at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9ay1PBQlBM&t=22s
Plaguewatch: There’s been a single case of potentially fatal MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a ‘flu-like coronavirus carried by camels – in South Korea, brought back apparently from Kuwait by a 61-year-old business traveler. It’s the first known case for three years, following an outbreak in Korea that killed 38 people. Authorities have quarantined the flight crew and several passengers, but they’re still looking for another 50 passengers who may not know they’ve been exposed. (ChannelNews Asia/Straits Times)
In unconnected news, dozens of passengers arriving in the USA, Australia and New Zealand on flights from the Middle East have been reporting feeling ill. Several different airlines were involved and a number of passengers were taken to hospital as a precaution. The passengers are all thought to have been making their annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where tens of thousands of worshippers mingle from all over the world – a perfect incubator – and may just be suffering from mild ‘flu, according to health specialists.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 