The Pumpkin – Issue 143: All Leave cancelled, and other stories.

Did I show you my Benny Hill impression?

All Leave cancelled.

Dr Üre Haavinkürlaaf of the Üvebinhadt Institute of Tectonics in Stockholm has produced a paper on research showing that the seabed in the English Channel is rising at an astonishing rate owing to unimaginable tectonic forces pushing up from below, driven by the relentless westward motion of the European plate.

An article in this month’s Oldie reveals the fascinating fact. Between Britain and northern Germania – the Netherlands – lies an ancient region known to geologists as Doggerland, which until the North Sea flowed over it as ice melted eight thousand years ago, was a vast, flattish expanse of marshes populated by tribespeople adept, presumably, at fishing and building villages on stilts.

The sea level is still rising, aided of course by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and by thermal expansion of the world’s oceans. But according to the good doctor and his institute, whose names I can only cut and paste, the land beneath is rising faster.

His prediction is that, despite all the best efforts of the British voter to row Britain out into the Atlantic, as far as possible from the continent of Europe, by the turn of the century a normal six-foot person will be able to wade across from Essex to Holland, where everyone is normally over six-foot. And a thousand years from now any geographical distinction between Britain and Europe will be gone, all Leave cancelled.

It’s a good story, but obviously there’s a clue in the names. Perhaps go back and read the first line again!

Welcome to your holiday destination!

The unrecognized president of Turkish Cyprus is fighting an election and has reopened Varosha Beach to tourists, supposedly a popular move. Closed after the 1974 invasion and placed under military control, the mile-long stretch of sand with its luxury villas, heavily shelled, has remained in a ruined state ever since.

So iconic is the occupied site to the displaced Greeks that the move has been referred to the UN Security Council and Russia has weighed in to tell Turkey it’s “unacceptable”. Tensions between Russia and Turkey have been growing in recent months over a number of potential hotspots in the Eastern Mediterranean, with gas reserves and lucrative supply pipelines at stake. (Story: Guardian)

Varosha Beach may well be the only place where Covid restrictions will still allow Britons to vacation abroad this winter.

Welcome to your holiday destination!

Postscriptum: two colleagues of mine were having a passionate but covert office romance. They decided to sneak away on a pre-honeymoon vacation, but on different days so no-one would suspect. They’d been shacked up in a hotel in Cyprus barely three days when Turkish parachutists started drifting out of the sky and the sound of explosions rent the night. The red-faced couple arrived back at work three weeks later… clearly together.

The pro-Life President (his own!)

The Pumpkin has previously joked, in relation to the QAnon ‘blood libel’ conspiracy theory, which of course is not remotely funny, that President Trump must have cured himself of the Covid by drinking babies’ blood.

The Pumpkin’s Americas correspondent, Hankwayne Wangnburger had no idea how prescient he was.

The president, who has been hailed by millions of profoundly ooxymoronic Christian conservatives, recognisable by their worn-out knees, as a staunch, God-fearing champion of the pro-Life movement, having popularly nominated a rabidly anti-abortion candidate to the Supreme Court, has been taking and heavily promoting a cocktail of drugs shaken and possibly stirred by his golfing buddy, Leonard Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron Inc, whose research Trump has funded with taxpayers’ money to the tune of half a billion dollars.

Today, it emerges from relatively reliable, factchecked sources that God’s miracle drug, Regeneron is derived from the stem cells of aborted Dutch foetuses.

Ooops. No doubt the Evangelistas, who have largely been in favor of publicly berating, doxxing and even murdering the doctors and staff of pro-Choice clinics, and who campaign to have women’s welfare centers around the world defunded and closed careless of the poverty and misery their arbitrary stance may cause, are such hypocrites they will still manage to find it in their wizened hearts to forgive Trump, who has after all been sent by God to redeem the soul of America, despite his many little foibles.

They can happily put up with the pussy-grabbing and the serial adulteries and the alleged rapes and the tax-dodging and the nepotism and the bullying and the grift and the blackmail and the overt racialism, the 28 thousand lies and the love of Mammon and the overweening vanity and the 215 thousand Covid dead and the destructive rollbacks of environmental and consumer protections, the refusal to fund international relief agencies unless they show him more personal gratitude (‘Screw thy neighbor’ policy), as long as his personal absorption of large quantities of unborn babies keeps their orange avatar in power, watching lovingly over them.

They may even overlook the unproven suspicion that a $1.6 million hush-money bribe to a former Playboy model called Sheri Bechard to cover-up an abortion in his election year may have originated not with Trump’s friend Elliott Broidy, see below, but with Candidate Trump himself.

On the other hand, he could finally achieve the ultimate apotheosis of finding himself being nailed on 3 November as terminally as possible to a large cross. Two resurrections in one month is statistically unlikely.

Tsk, Elliott!

“A former leading fundraiser for president Donald Trump has been indicted on a charge that he illegally lobbied the US government to drop its probe into the Malaysia 1MDB corruption scandal and to deport an exiled Chinese billionaire.

“Elliott Broidy was charged in Washington federal court with one count of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent after allegedly agreeing to take millions of dollars to lobby the Trump administration.” (Guardian)

Not detailed is the alleged attempt by Broidy to extort $70 million from a different fugitive Chinese businessman, presumably on behalf of the Trump campaign; or that $6 million of what might be money laundered from the hundreds of millions allegedly stolen by the former Malaysian Prime Minister, Abdul Razak, from the $4.5 billion 1MDB sovereign wealth fund remains in the account of Broidy’s wife’s law firm.

In a recent twist to the case, it seems the FBI was also anxious to recover $340 million from a London law firm, in the form of letters of credit to be used in a massive laundering exercise involving the purchase by Mr Razak of a failed Venezuelan oil company and two rusty tanker ships.

Your Pumpkin has been banging on about this case for two years and now it finally looks like something has come of it. A single charge under FARA rules looks like it’s just the start, as some of the money from the fugitive Chinese billionaire known as Jho Low (real name Low Taek Jho) appears to have ended up illegally laundered in a Trump re-election fund, after Broidy tried (and failed) to arrange a helpful game of golf with the president and premier Razak.

Other senior Trump administration officials, including Governor Chris Christie, were implicated in the case, being named as legal counsel to Mr Low, according to reporting in 2017 in The Straits Times of Malaysia.

Mr Broidy and his convicted pedophile associate George Nader were further involved in complex skulduggery involving the Saudi blockade of Qatar, the Emir of Abu Dhabi and the brother of Education Secretary DeVos, Erik Prince. So complex, I no longer remember the details. I don’t suppose the FBI will want to go there while the Sword of Donocles hangs over director, Chris Wray; anymore than they will dare to ask Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, about the Sheri Bechard payoff.

This is very probably the biggest and most complicated corruption scandal in the world right now. Citing reporting in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian goes on to confirm what your Pumpkin had sort of suspected, that somehow the other fugitive Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, exiled in Manhattan, would be involved.

Mr Guo, who is badly wanted by the Beijing government on real or invented charges of rape and racketeering, cropped up in the news recently in connection with the arrest on board his 150-foot yacht, the Lady May, of former Trump whisperer, Steve Bannon. The yacht is for sale, poor Mr Guo, so one naturally expects Bannon was hoping to buy it with the proceeds of a scam he is accused of having been involved in, to get ordinary Trump supporters to send donations towards building a border wall only a few hundred yards of which was erected and has since fallen down.

Broidy, it seems, was hoping to leverage even more huge sums of money from the Chinese government for persuading his friends to dob Mr Guo in, posing as an unofficial lobbyist of the Trump administration following a presumably desperate introduction from Mr Low to a senior Chinese official with an interest in the matter.

Btw, could there conceivably be any connection with the 13.5-year sentence handed to Interpol’s former president, Meng Hongwei, arrested on a trip back to China, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to taking $2 million in bribes? Particularly as none of the reports I can find ventured to suggest who or where from, or for what purpose? As questions remain back at Interpol HQ in Lyon over Mr Low’s whereabouts.

I’d say watch this space, but I fear I may have to do it for you.

Granny’s Wet and Wonderful World of Walloping Weather Wildness

USA: Residents of Pontchartrain, Lake Charles and Port Arthur are evacuating or bracing against the arrival at the weekend of Hurricane Delta that’s ramped back up to a Cat 3 and growing in size as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico. Cars are queing for miles along evacuation routes. Heavy rain and a large swell, 7 to 11 feet in places, are already affecting coastal areas as the wind field fills virtually the entire coastline from Texas to Florida.

Delta is the fifth enormous hurricane to strike the Gulf coast this season. Some Louisiana residents had been back in their homes only days after evacuating ahead of Hurricane Laura at the end of August. There are fears piles of debris left over from Laura could become airborne, maximizing damage.

Heavy rain and flooding continued into 8 October in central parts of Vietnam. At least 5 people have died and 8 are still missing. FloodList reports that flooding had struck central provinces, as disaster authorities reported over 14,000 people have been evacuated from rising waters. AccuWeather reports the system as a tropical depression with potential for causing further flooding in Myanmar before strengthing into a cyclone over the Indian Ocean, tracking towards Andra Pradesh.

September was confirmed by Copernicus as globally the warmest month-9 on record.

This week’s BogPo intensifies slowly over the gulf of my annoyance about this bloody awful new editing program they’ve foisted on us.

QotW

“Seldom can someone have so badly misjudged the mood of an empty room.” – The Guardian‘s John Crace on Johnson’s conference speech.

Editor’s note:

Wherever I type, a box pops up over the text offering a limited range of setting options, so that I can’t see what I’m typing. I have no idea how to get rid of it or to find more options. Everything therefore is taking twice as long to typeset.

The type color palette has been reduced so my coding system no longer works. You can apparently select from millions of colors but without any indication as to how you can apply them. Nor do I appear to be able to indent margins, thus making it look like selected quotes I introduce are part of the main text, which looks like plagiarism and is not my intention.

Also, there seems to be no command to Insert Media, which means you won’t get the usual photos with satirical captions. And finally, there appears to be no way now to switch off a link in a copy-‘n-pasted quote.

I’m sorry about this, please complain not to me, but to WordPress and their heap of groaning IT baboons who’ve been at the fermented fruit for this complete clusterfuck. Clearly no-one there has ever edited a text in their short little lives.

Please, WordPress Gods, give us back the option to revert to the Classic editing program. This unexplained ‘block’ system is absolutely not working.

Thank you.

Covid positive

Repellent, dead-lizard-eyed White House psychopath, Stephen Miller – architect of the program to separate the children of migrant families and concentrate them in camps to sleep on concrete floors at the mercy of sexually abusive staff and the pandemic, has tested positive as, one by one, the plague strikes Trump’s inner coterie of enablers.

I sincerely hope that, alone of all the President’s ‘advisers’, most of whom are merely fools, this filthy, inhuman, power-hungry Nazi monster – born a Jew, for God’s sake – dies crying for its mother, if it ever had one.

The Washington Post reports on Trump’s alarming mental state, post-Covid and with experimental immune-system stimulating and suppressing drugs sumultaneously battling to control him, against medical advice:

“Initially confined to the White House’s residence complex upon his return Monday, Trump has gained access to the West Wing, where staffers have been advised to prepare. A memo warned anyone who expects to be within six feet of the president to remove their outer clothes, sanitize their hands and don protective gloves, mask, eyewear and gown — all to be provided on an ‘Isolation Cart’ kept outside Trump’s zone of contagion.“

Does this need for protection against the deadly effulgence of the president not move us a step further towards confirming – as I have noted before – his apotheosis as the reincarnation of Yahweh, the tyrannical god of the ancient Israelites, who appeared as if out of a glowing, flickering screen, demanding total obedience and constant adulation while liberally consuming burnt meat offeringss, advocating sexual assault of minors and smiting enemies with battlefield nukes?

The president has reportedly spread the disease to 18 members of his own staff but is proposing to continue with his unprotected rallies and the Biden debates, all to prove how tough he is. This morning, as predicted, he was reportedly confirming a new miracle cure that he proposes to make available to all Americans – after the election, naturally. He was, he says, saved through the blessing of God. The unproven, still unapproved drug, Regeneron, is manufactured by a golfing buddy of Trump’s. Its shares immediately rose.

The filthy, filthy beast.

March: “Good morning, gentlemen. We’re here this morning to discuss a brilliant plan I’ve come up with going forward to close our distribution center in England and build a new, more high-tech one, which we will open without first making sure it’s up and running.

October: “Ooops, oh dear, unexpectedly our shiny new center is a complete crock and we can’t seem to supply test swabs to the NHS for the next no-one knows how long, sorry about that, everyone. But then, test-and-trace wasn’t working anyway, so.”

Thus, some moronic management “team” at the supposedly reliable Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Roche, earn their Christmas bonus for 2020. As if they had no idea what would happen if they decided to relocate supply to a brand new facility involving complex and predictably unreliable computer systems that never, ever work out of the box, in the middle of a fucking pandemic; and the government gives them the contract.

Speaking of whom, the world’s billionaires increased their net worth by 27% between April and July. You may hear tell of how hard they work for their money, or how brave they’ve been to buy shares at the bottom of the market, expressing their undying faith in the world’s economy. However, it seems there’s a simpler explanation.

Stockmarkets keep rising because Donald Trump is constantly announcing new cures for the virus… no, put simply, it’s because governments have conjured such huge bailout packages from the thin air of their central banks and the bulk of the money has gone to quoted companies who’ve been busily buying back their shares and forcing up prices.

In other words, Mr and Ms Broke and Desperate in the unemployment queue, they’ve given your money away to the richest cunts on the planet – the richest 26 of whom now own more wealth than 50% of the 7.8 billion rest of us, their fortunes measured in the several trillions of dollars.

There will surely be a reckoning someday.

Britain, according to a think-tank that monitors excessive executive greed, comes very far down in the list of countries where the very rich have been donating some of their free money to Covid-charitable works.

Chief among our cheapskate billionaires is the smugly grinning cunt with a chemistry set, “Sir” Jim Ratcliffe, said to be “worth” £17 billion, although frankly he’s worth fuck-all, who has taken his money out of the bank and moved to tax-free Monaco, where I profoundly wish he dies of boredom.

Don’t tell my son, but I’ve just taken delivery of a new guitar, that has almost bankrupted me. Well, it actually did for a while as I gave the vendor too much by mistake and they’ve had to refund me, which might take a day or two. You know how it is. Anyway, it really is the most fabulous sounding, most playable instrument I have ever owned, and now all I need do is to sell everything else and just keep this.*

Which is why I fear for my friends in the real music industry.

From the Classic FM website, on the Chancellor’s conference speech, Tuesday 6 October:

“When asked whether arts workers should simply try and find another job in a different sector, Sunak said: ‘I can’t pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were doing at the beginning of this crisis. That’s why we’ve put a lot of our extra resource into trying to create new opportunities for people.’

“When pressed further about whether he was really telling creatives to simply ‘go and get a different job’ in a different sector, Sunak responded by saying: ‘That is fresh and new opportunity for people. That’s exactly what we should be doing.’”

Then, from the Guardian report of Prime Minister’s Questions, Wednesday 7 Oct:

“Chris Elmore (Lab) says the chancellor said yesterday that musicians should find another job. What better advice can the government give them?

“Johnson: ‘that is not what the chancellor said.'”

No, don’t tell me the Prime Minister lied to the House?

Yes, horny-handed concert violinists will make great bricklayers, for all that affordable housing the Government’s new planning laws will make so optional it’ll never be built; or pouring concrete for HS2 and Heathrow 3 (PS – see today’s report on Berlin opening its new airport that’s already closed).

Who needs music anyway? Surely the sound of Britain’s mighty new engine of industry, forging a world-beating path through the, er, world, is far more important and inspiring and, well, just completely delusional?

*How stupid are algorithms? Every time I visit a certain website they’re trying to sell me half a dozen guitars like the one I bought. I try telling Google but the Googlemeister still doesn’t get it. I HAVE NO MORE MONEY!

Granny’s World

By the weekend we should be seeing Tropical Storm Delta crossing the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and piling into the coast of… Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, the Florida panhandle… arriving as possibly a Cat 3 or maybe 4 hurricane, the 4th to hit the region in 7 weeks. Storm Gamma has fizzled out, but not before 6 people were killed in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

Latest on Delta: arriving Saturday plumb center between Houston and New Orleans, Force 2/3.

A possible cyclone is heading for India’s east coast after dumping big rain over Vietnam. While at the same time, Tropical Storm Chan-hom will have been traveling over Pacific waters heated to a balmy 31 degrees C and intensifying rapidly into yet another Supertyphoon, over the Ryukyu islands toward Kyushu and southern Japan, bearing up to 900 mm (35-in.) of rain.

The California fire service, CalFire is reporting that 3.4 million acres of the Sunshine State have burned this season, 26 times the area affected by fires in 2019. Over 50 fires are still burning, the August Complex alone now well over a million acres. Some 15 fire zones in Oregon to the north are under immediate evacuation orders. As late as 6 Oct. noonday temperatures in Phoenix, Az. were continuing to top 100 deg. F.

French and Italian rescue teams are continuing to search the wreckage of hundreds of houses in rugged hillside areas on the border north of Nice, where at least 9 people have died since Storm Alex delivered up to 600 mm rain at the end of last week. Oh, and they just had a tornado in Belgium – a proper one! Trees were uprooted and a house demolished.

Several islands in the Indonesian archipelago have experienced severe flooding and landslides over the past 7 days, including parts of the capital, Djakarta. At least 4 people are missing, feared drowned; hundreds of properties have been damaged by floodwaters up to 2 meters deep. There’ve been “waist-high” floods too in the Philippines, with hundreds driven from their homes. And much displacement in Malaysia.

Thanks to usual sorces: Floodlist, AccuWeather, Severe-weather.eu, press.

Tunnel…

Siberian Times is reporting on a major ecological disaster off the Kamchatka peninsula. Surfers began complaining about a strong chemical smell, streaming eyes, headaches, breathlessness and fever three weeks ago after swimming off formerly pristine local beaches, as water from a nearby river seen from a satellite turned yellow. Thousands of sea creatures from sea urchins to giant octopuses have been washing up dead. Preliminary tests have shown a strong concentration of phenols and “oil products”. Suspicion is falling on a nearby army base although discharges from tankers are being investigated.

Guardian Geen Light reports on a mystery disease that is decimating Italy’s kiwi fruit trees. As with the coronavirus there’s no obvious etiology: seemingly healthy trees are dying from a baffling range of symptoms. Scientists say, “there has been an acceleration in serious plant diseases in Italy. A mysterious sickness seemingly linked with warmer temperatures has killed many apple trees; a fungus has decimated this year’s pear harvest; the southern Puglia region is grappling with a bacterium threatening to wipe out olive trees.” Italian agriculture is heavily dependent on fruit growing.

King Covid… We should be screaming our heads off about this… Beyond Rockall… Trump: Giving ground…Granny’s World – slipslidin’ away.

STOP PRESS: Entire White House tests positively negative….

QotW

“Shortly after Donald and Ivana Trump’s son was born, the future president had an unusual concern. …

“‘What should we name him?’ Donald asked, according to Ivana’s memoir, Raising Trump. When Ivana suggested Donald Jr., the real-estate heir responded, but: ‘What if he’s a loser?’” – From: The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: I appear to be being prevented from using the Classic WordPress editing program on this site, that I have been used to for nearly ten years. I’m struggling to work with the new version, many of whose selections are meaningless, and have no idea what I’m doing. Please bear with me for a while.

Another QotW:

“Arguably the real victims here are the president’s MAGA disciples, who are devoted to him but also don’t believe the virus even exists. Trump being officially diagnosed with it is category 5 cognitive dissonance – a logical contradiction so intense it could crash their circuitry, causing them to immediately lay down their assault rifles and open a chain of abortion clinics.” – Marina Hyde, writing in The Guardian.

King Covid latest: he has the cough. Now, back to The BogPo:

“And is there room over there for the BBC Board of Governors?”

Possible fake news alert (because it’s fucking unbelievable!)

We should be screaming our heads off about this

“Department for Education (DfE) guidance issued (last week) for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorises anti-capitalism as an ‘extreme political stance’ and equates it with opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and endorsement of illegal activity.” – Guardian.

Taken together with the possibility being floated by Downing Street’s busy team of leakers that two notoriously libertarian media figures: rabid Brexit propagandist and millionaire former Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre and posh psycho Charles Moore, editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator, friend of Johnson, are to be handed the plum jobs of chairing, respectively, the media regulator Ofcom and the BBC Board, thus placing two key independent media institutions under partisan Conservative control, does one not sense that we are being driven further down the road of authoritarian corporatism, under a government now seemingly composed of just three people, one of them a crass, bumbling nitwit and the other two, slippery and amoral ideocrats?

Equating anti-capitalism to extremism, against which there are more ugly and repressive laws coming down the pike, does rather expose the raw nature of the plot against liberal values. And is capitalism a religion? It would seem so, if arguments against it can be considered in the same breath as anti-semitism, that now has a broader definition than it would probably merit. Marx would certainly be surprised at being called an anti-semite. Government interdicting the teaching of almost any subject is in itself an attack on free speech, while to suggest that the free and open exchange of ideas in an academic setting is potentially endorsing criminal activity is way too far down the road of totalitarianism.*

No, this looks more like the death throes of a system that hasn’t really worked in favor of the Common Man, whatever they may tell you. A 60-inch TV, an SUV and a pay-nothing-now sofa are hardly elements of social progress, when they leave the consumer in record debt and theplanet simultaneously on fire and drowning. Unrestrained capitalism has brought us to the brink of several existential crises to which it no longer has any credible answers. We should be screaming our heads off about this heinous act of censorship, not confining the subject to page 14.

Because if nobody speaks up about this monstrous new anti-intellectual imposition, this absurd diktat under which we could not discuss Marxism or Marcuse, the contributions of Tom Paine to the French and American revolutions – perhaps not even the Peasants’ Revolt – or argue against monetarism, Reaganonomics and consumer excess for fear of being prosecuted for thought crimes, we are surely doomed.

In America, Trump has called for the entire education system to be refocussed on a “patriotic” syllabus, teaching only a positive – i.e. White – view of the nation’s cultural identity and history. He has expressed strong disapproval of teaching the real histories and legacies of slavery, genocide, capitalism and feminism. Anti-capitalist and anti-fascist currents of thought, he has suggested, should be legally classed as domestic terrorism. And he is openly and cynically exploiting a Confederate grievance agenda in the South.

Where there are atavistic state legislators who would like nothing better than to ban the teaching of evolution in schools. Trump’s Secretary of Education, the preposterous Betsy DeVos, owner of ten yachts and a business ruthlessly extracting payment of student debts, has called – unofficially as yet – for Creationism to be taught alongside the scientific evidence of Man’s true origins as an equally valid point of view. Which it isn’t. (It’s not a “point of view” in either case!)

And then there’s his highly contentious move to elevate the inexperienced judge, former obscure, smalltown college law perfesser Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, ensuring a 6-3 majority for extreme conservative, corporatist values to dominate legal precedent, possibly for decades to come. Fact-finders have found that, like another Trump appointment to the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Barrett overwhelmingly rules in favor of big corporate interests against individual litigants, even in personal injury cases.

Trump has openly admitted he is pushing her nomination through in haste, in the last month before the elections contrary to precedent, so that, in case he loses and challenges the result, with three conservative judges on the bench owing their positions to him he will have a better chance of overturning it in the courts. And it’s playing fabulously well with the evangelical dumbfucks, although not, curiously, with pupils she taught at her former college:

More than 1,500 alumni from supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, have signed a letter of concern. “… we believe both her record and the process that has produced her nomination are diametrically opposed to the values of truth, loyalty, and service that we learned at Rhodes.” (Guardian)

This is the shape of things to come. It’s now emerging that Barrett and her husband are members of a closed order of mainly Catholic recusants practising extreme patriarchy – living the Handmaid’s Tale! So swivel-eyed are her selective, biblical-truther beliefs that it almost suggests she is mentally unhinged. Is it really the foremost duty of a lawyer to bring about “God’s Kingdom on Earth”? What happened to the constitutional separation of religion and state?

Although she says she does not allow her personal views to cloud her judgement, Trump is gleefully assuring his base that she will immediately overturn the 1973 pro-choice law, Roe v. Wade, and further seek to erode women’s rights.

Women love it when he talks flirty.

What with Trump’s instinctive authoritarianism, his apparent enthusiasm for extreme rightwing groups, his frequently expressed admiration of brutal dictators with the enviable freedom to terraform their countries in any way they like, his total lack of any actual beliefs or moral compass and his so far fairly successful attempts to either seize and corrupt or merely to defy the commanding heights of the State and its democratic norms and institutions, placing himself and his cronies above and beyond the law, the sound of boiling frogs is nerve-shattering.

The UK tends to follow where the US leads, and the similarities between the White House and Downing Street – the “What can we get away with today?”, endlessly chaotic, disruptive, dissimulating mentality propounded by our very own mini-Bannon, Dominic Cummings, the terrifying idea of “alternative truths” should be a cause for far greater alarm. Instead, gaslighting is the order of the day. What, fascism? In good old Britain! My dear chap, don’t you think you’re taking it all a bit too seriously?

Perhaps, but why am I standing against this wall?

*Several years ao, in a response to a BTL Comment that no-one need fear government surveillance if they were innocent, Sterling Pound pointed out that no-one could be innocent of crimes that had yet to be defined as such.

The BogPo’s Chief Economics Correspondent was, as usual, prophetic.

Beyond Rockall

Speaking of evil, the Home Secretary, Baris Johnson’s Big Brexit Bus conductress, reportedly put her civil servants to work on evaluating a wheeze to send asylum claimants, supposedly protected under international laws, to a gulag on Ascension Island, a barren outcrop of rock 4,000 miles away in the South Atlantic, to await their fate.

Told it wasn’t really on, she ordered them instead then to find some cheaper remote British dependancy or shithole country where people are more normally rendered for enhanced conversations with the CIA to which they could be banished, out of sight and out of mind – and well out of reach of our dreadful human rights lawyers.

She’s not only a vicious, bullying, smirking little dumpling, she’s batshit crazy.

Immigrants, eh, Priti?

By halfway through the appalling carnival of insults and shoutovers the first of three debates between US presidential election candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden descended into, Google was reporting a massive surge of searches inquiring how Americans could apply for Canadian citizenship.

Trump: Giving ground

It’s been explained a thousand times, but why anyone is still stupid enough to believe the Orange Conman is going to make their lives one whit better remains a compelling mystery.

This patch of scrub is the little-known “Donald J Trump” – the name appears by contract – State Park, hidden off a highway in New York State.

Writing in Guardian US, Wilfred Chan explains, Trump bought the land for $2.75 million in 1999, hoping to make a golf course. Permission was refused. In 2006 on donating it free to the State, he declared its asset value to be $100 million – qualifying for a massive charity tax deduction.

“I hope that these 436 acres of property will turn into one of the most beautiful parks anywhere in the world”, Trump slimed, ever the optimist. The area is now closed to the public because of rising maintenance costs and asbestos pollution.

The president of the University of Notre Dame, Rev John Jenkins, has tested positive for coronavirus after attending a White House event last weekend. This religious hypocrite who refused to wear a mask and went around shaking hands with people commented that it’s “a reminder of how we all need to be more vigilant”. ‘Rueful’ doesn’t cut it. ‘Criminally stupid’ seems more appropriate. 

Granny’s World – slipslidin’ away

France and Italy: Flooding from record rains in the hilly border area behind the Côte d’azur has killed two people and left 24 missing, including a family of German tourists. Rescue efforts were hampered by blocked roads and tunnels. (Guardian) As much as 630mm (24.8in) of rain fell in a 24-hour period as Storm Alex swept over a huge area, as far north as the UK. BBC News reported homes in several areas flooded after 116 mm rain fell overnight – some for the second time since August.

Georgia: At least 5 people have died and rescuers are searching for 1 missing after heavy rain triggered landslides that swept a house away in a mountain region. (Floodlist)

Indonesia: At least 11 people have died after heavy rainfall triggered landslides in North Kalimantan. (Floodlist) 2 people died after heavy rainfall caused houses to collapse in Papua. Flooding was also reported in Sumatra, affecting around 10,000 people.

India: 1 more person has died as a third wave of flooding and landslides in the past 4 months has brought the death toll in Assam to almost 150. Around half a million people are affected as the Brahmaputra river again rises to danger level. (Floodlist) Rainfall totals in the state since the monsoon began in July have been 12% higher than normal.

Bangladesh: Flooding has affected tens of thousands of people after days of heavy rain in the north. Among the worst hit areas is Rangpur district, where a record 433mm (17-in.) of rain fell in just 12 hours between 26 and 27 Sept. Around 50,000 ha of crops have been submerged. (Floodlist)

In Benin, west Africa, reports Floodlist, 29 people have died and 7 thousand have been displaced as the River Niger continues to flood. 11 more have died and “many” missing in DR Congo after the Mutahyo river broke its banks, sending raging flood waters, mud and debris sweeping through the town of Sake. Houses were washed away and school and health buildings damaged. A local official said the town has been “wiped off the map.” (Floodlist)

USA: fires are continuing to rage in California. A city-wide evacuation order was issued for Calistoga as the 36k-acre Glass Fire spread rapidly through the winegrowing region of the Napa Valley. The small city is home to just over 5,300 residents. The August fire complex in Humbolt county now covers almost a million acres; the two long-burning Lightning Complex fires have been contained but have burned almost 800k acres. 4 people have died in the fast-moving Zogg fire, covering 16k acres west of Redding. (AccuWeather)

Californian wine is likely to be expensive next year as much of the grape harvest has been smokelogged. Or you could start a fad for smoked wine. The wine country’s Glass Fire was assessed at 56k acres by 2 Oct with only 5% containment.

Atlantic: has been quiet the past week thanks to strong “wind shear” but a weather system is forming in the Caribbean with 50-70% probability of becoming something stronger, if not two storms – and a “strong tropical wave” is on hurricane watch as it begins to organize near the Cape Verde islands.

Friday: Tropical Storm Gemma is intensifying in the Gulf and is expected to bring extreme rainfall to Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula over the weekend. (Extreme-weather.eu)

Pacific: an extremely powerful Cat 4 hurricane. Marie is sending heavy swells towards the coast of Mexico but is unlikely to make landfall in the eastern Pacific. The remnant hurricane however could bring welcome rains to fire-ravaged California later in the week. (Extreme-weather.eu)

Tunnel:

Amytiville horror: Environmentalists have been poring over Trump-pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s record on green issues as she moves forward to her rubber-stamping Supreme Court hearing in the Senate, and have decided there’s little cause for optimism. She was a pupil of hardline conservative, Judge Anton Scalia, who in 2007 famously dismissed a case brought by the state of Massachusetts to include CO2 under the Clean Air Act, opining that they couldn’t show they were injured by it and it wasn’t the EPA’s problem.

Tailpipe…

Your life in their hands: An NHS boss has been replaced as the testing director of the government’s beleaguered NHS test-and-trace program by a former chief executive of Sainsbury’s supermarkets. (Guardian) The program is being run by a private security services contractor, Serco.

Sand in my shoes: The coastal village of Walcott in Norfolk woke up to find it was buried under a foot of sand after a storm blew in and stripped the beach. The sand had recently been imported by the local authority at a cost of £22 million to help combat coastal erosion. (BBC News)

Sentence review: An American who complained on TripAdvisor that a resort hotel in Thailand wanted to charge him a $15 corkage fee for bringing his own bottle of gin to the restaurant was arrested and spent a weekend in jail. If convicted of criminal defamation, he faces up to two years in prison. (New York Times)

Back to work: Deprived of their regular East European migrant workforce by Covid restrictions, the “hostile environment” and the threat of Brexit, a collective of growers in Scotland were forced to take on a largely British contingent of, initially, eager recruits. By the end of the harvest, their numbers were down to less than 10 per cent. (BBC Scotland report)

Corona v. Us: An early night… Well, fuck off then Jim, have a lovely time in the world’s most boring ghetto… Burisma: The sins of the sons… A scary prospect… Granny’s Drowned World… Tunnel, Tailpipe… A letter arrives from the financial sector.

QotW

“What happens when you place the power to appoint judges who can make laws into the hands of a corrupt, autocratic and lawless Chief Executive? We believe that power is an essential pillar of fascism.

“Is America the only supposedly democratic country in the world that has absolutely no qualms about making blatantly exigent political appointments to its Supreme Court, purely to enable the re-election of a criminal president? A system that obliges the judges to bend to the electoral pressures on those to whom they owe their preferment? No, but look at the others.

“It’s grotesque. At the very least these law-makers who are appointed for life need to have a time limit put on their service and be held accountable in the people’s Congress for their decisions. The choice of an inexperienced appellate court jurist with a fanatical belief in invisible entities to a position with the power of life and death over defendants is surely not justified by the explanation that she’s young, and a lovely person.” – The Pumpkin Editorial Board.

 

…we shall fight it on the beaches… er, sorry, no, not there. We shall fight it in the pubs… but not after 10 o’clock… we shall…

 

Corona v. Us

An early night

Cases in the UK are rising faster than they did during the first wave of the pandemic, writes the BogPo‘s medical correspondent, Tintin Quarantino, although hospitalizations and deaths still remain lower.

It’s confusing when Health Secretary, Mutt Hancock tells us it’s 10 thousand a day when the official figure yesterday was a record daily 6,634, but in a sense the actual numbers are almost irrelevant, now Chancellor Sunak has committed the entire annual pre-Covid value of the British economy to relief measures he admits are still inadequate.

The Guardian last night posted an intrepid reporter off to London’s Soho district to observe grumpy crowds milling around unprotected and undistanced, when the pubs had once again been ordered by the Prime Minister to chuck-out by 10 pm. Some of the quotes she obtained, even allowing for drink taken, seem astonishingly crass and selfish.

Would you attribute the following to a student at the prestigeous London School of Economics?

“Stood next to a sign saying ‘Sunak’s specials’, advertising cheap pints of beer, Colin Chen, a first-year politics, philosophy and economics student at the LSE, asked: ‘How long are we going to wait for a cure for? Even if we wait till there’s no new cases, there’s just going to be cases again when people come in from overseas. This pointless curfew is punishing young people.’”

And:

“First-year architecture student at UCL, Phoebe Hampson, summed up the feeling among those in her halls who were out with her for the night: ‘This is freshers’ week, but it’s really depressing. Now you have to start your night way earlier.’”

Yes, with 42 thousand dead and thousands more for the long-haul Covid, it’s all about you! And there isn’t going to be a “cure”, any more than there’s a cure for the common cold. True, it’s hard to see that, logically, letting people mingle en masse in crowded pubs is going to be that much less risky if you force them to go home early. The dead hand of statisticians, a breed that drinks morosely alone at home, is all over this one.

But Mr Chen puts his finger on an important point about “herd immunity”. Paradoxically, it’s only achievable if you isolate and confine the herd.

More sobering reading is to be had in today’s Washington Post, which reports:

 “Poorer nations are floundering amid massive public debt and shortfalls in state revenue. All the while, the roughly 2 billion people who eke out a living in the world’s informal economies face varying degrees of deprivation.”

According to the UN World Food program, some 135 million people around the world faced acute food insecurity before the pandemic, and that number is expected to double this year. The program is in need of $5 billion now to prevent 30 million people dying from imminent starvation. The World Bank says improvement in the global poverty index has flatlined, incalculable millions are or soon will be out of a job, while the U.N. Children’s Fund has calculated that 872 million students in 51 countries are unable to attend school because of restrictions.

Oh dear, little girls and boys, did the miserable old groan-ups want you to have an early night?

*

A report in the Guardian overnight informs us that UK Scientists are to start a testing programme to see how long the coronavirus can hang around in the air.

They could just try Googling it. The Lancet has quite a good article on the subject: “Small droplets, from submicron to approximately 10 μm diameter, produced during speech and coughing, have been shown to contain viral particles which can remain viable and infectious in aerosols for 3 hours”, and so forth.

 

Well, fuck off then Jim, have a lovely time in the world’s most boring ghetto

“Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s richest person and high-profile Brexiter, has quit Britain for tax-free Monaco. Ratcliffe, a petrochemicals magnate with an estimated £17.5bn fortune, has this week officially changed his tax domicile from Hampshire to Monaco, the sovereign city-state that is already home to many of the UK’s richest people.

“It has been estimated that the move will save him £4bn in tax payments.” (Guardian)

Have you ever been there? It’s surely the world’s most boring ghetto, full of dull people droning on about their money, the unfair tax they don’t pay, the servant problem, should they buy a sixth house? – a theme park for yachts that never leave harbor, a tribute to fiberglass and chrome.

This cheapshot sonofabitch was an ardent Leaver in the days when the rich were still gaslighting the poorer voters. You think they don’t have the plague in Monaco, Jim? You obviously haven’t read your Edgar Allen Poe. And thanks for depriving the Treasury of the means to rescue thousands of British lives, you smug, greedy, rotten, selfish little man.

At the very least we should rescind his knighthood. He won’t need it there.

 

The BogPo wails

Purely selfishly, your Uncle B. had been waiting since April to have a choice of one of his cataracted old eyes done, all such “non-essential” surgeries having been Co-voided in the meantime. Now, however, an opportunity has arisen for the operation to be performed next week, he’s been given 12 days into which to fit 14 days of pre-operative quarantine.

He is now terrified, and in a bind. When his vision improves, which the specialist seems confident is highly likely, he will lose all or some of the extra bit of money he gets on top of the pension as compensation for blundering around, not being allowed to drive, tripping over things, missing typos and not recognizing neighbors in the street. It’s possibly a cumulative loss of £500 a month, not to be sneezed at, as it were.

But there are dangers: what if he refuses the opportunity, asks for a postponement as a lifesaving measure, will poor Uncle B. be had up for benefit fraud if he keeps on claiming when he could be “cured”?

Cases south of here have been surging, the whole of the lower third of the country including the capital, Cardiff now fully locked-down. While yesterday we had only 1 new case up here, down in the next county where the busy regional hospital is, that I shall have to travel to by risky public transport, 50 miles away, a 2-hour journey in an enclosed airspace with total strangers, there were 25. The nurse assures me I shan’t have to mingle for hours, waiting in a crowded reception area in Outpatients, as I used to while my wayward retinas were being welded back on last year. They’ve introduced a straight-through corridor system with locked doors. lots of hand-gel and strict time limits.

Even so.

And the ludicrous thing, there’s a general hospital just a mile up the road from here, walking distance, with a separate, specialist eye clinic, where they are so deprived of staff and facilities that they can’t perform the simplest cataract surgery you could get under a leaky tin roof in any village in India.

Fucking NHS. (Add orange smileyface here, with irony quotes. Just in case. Ed.)

 

Councillor Carlos Galiana from Valencia in Spain delivered a minute-long speech to the European Commission in impressively fluent English and without the slightest trace of a Spanish accent. Hidden behind a face mask, it was later revealed he’d been miming to a voice track. – Guardian

The sins of the sons

Fortunately, Trump doesn’t always have things all his own way. While although it’s the case that the Republican-controlled Senate seems to work entirely on his behalf, at least two internal inquiries this year have gone against him.

In August, a massive, 1,000-page conclusion to the Intelligence Committee’s two-year investigation into the investigation of the origins of the Mueller report found no evidence of any “Deep State” conspiracy against Trump. The five-volume judgement exonerated the FBI, and backed its findings of extensive contacts – there’s no such crime as collusion – between his campaign officials and Russian political, financial and intelligence interests; and his subsequent attempts at a cover-up, branding him a grave security risk to the nation.

You might ask why he hasn’t been arrested, but that’s where his powerful enablers step in.

Now, reports the New York Times, as ever sotto voce on about page 372: “an 87-page report summing up the findings, released jointly on Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees, contained no evidence that the elder Mr. Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed”, although they poured scorn on his son Hunter for trading on his dad’s name and position as Vice President to gain lucrative corporate positions he didn’t merit.

Of course, no Republican senators’ children ever receive undeserved preferments. Especially not the President’s.

There was also a suggestion that someone might have been trying to manufacture false evidence against the Democratic candidate. We wonder who that could be. Maybe the person impeached in the lower House, who “improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine”?

The White House immediately rushed out a statement confirming that the report had indeed concluded, the Bidens were guilty as hell of absolutely whatever.

This evening, Trump has lost yet another round in his febrile attempts to hide his tax returns. The Manhattan appeals court voted three-to-nil to voice their extreme frustration with the endless delays caused by his refusal to comply with lower court subpoenas to see the documents and his attempts to personally sue the New York District Attorney – despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that he has no reason to not comply. And they ripped his defense team to pieces, for fun.

The New York supreme court also has ruled that son Eric, the dimmest of the family, actually does have to obey a subpoena to give evidence in a case alleging financial irregularities in the Trump Organization. Eric – the “little Nazi”, as Mike Malloy engagingly calls him – responded that he would do so after the election, only to be told, sorry, you don’t make the rules. Watch this space.

 

A senior Google executive has received $90 million severance pay in a settlement involving a sexual harrassment claim.

Go, gropers!

A scary prospect

Virtually no sane political commentator in America now believes that Trump will concede to his opponent if he loses the election on 3 November.

As with his taking the Post Office hostage to delay postal votes, he’s already given every indication that he can throw many spanners into the works in the hope that the result will become entangled in legal red tape.

That could go on for a while, during which he can declare a national emergency to quell unrest and spin it out until after 21 January, at which point there could be two presidents; or that Republican administrations will just ignore the vote and send their own delegates to the Electoral College – which they have the constitutional ability to do –  until Congress or the Supreme Court will just heave a sigh and say, okay, you can have another term: a disastrous outcome as it gives him four more years in which to engineer yet a third term, ensuring that the statute of limitations runs out on all the many crimes for which he is facing indictments on stepping down.

The terrifying prospects are laid out in The Atlantic today in a piece by Barton Gellman:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200923&silverid-ref=NjYyNzM0MTYxMTE5S0

Anyone pointing to Trump’s advancing age – 74 – and generally lethal dietary habits should be reminded, the kleptocratic former Marxist, debatably senile Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe made it to 94 before he was quietly overthrown in a constitutional coup.

The Pumpkin proposes that Biden’s only option to obtain a quick resolution confirming his victory will be if he offers a full and immediate, Nixon-like pardon to Trump and his squalid little crime family, leaving him to live out his life quietly in retirement, tending his one-book library, eating chocolate cake and golfing twice a day at Mar-a-Lago.

Like, he would agree to that!

 

A Muslim hotel worker has been awarded £2,000 damages by an employment tribunal on grounds of loss of personal dignity, after the manager of the hotel in Winchester, Hampshire swapped his raffle prize of a bottle of brandy, which he doesn’t drink, for a cheaper box of chocolates without asking.

Granny’s Drowned World

• Floodlist, a service funded by the European Copernicus satellite monitoring project, is reporting:

Iran: 2 killed in flash floods in the northern province of Gilan on 20 September. Damage to homes, roads and bridges

India: at least 24 dead in an apartment-block collapse in flooded Mumbai, after 400 mm (16-in) rain fell in 48 hours to 24 Sept. Widespread flooding in Karnataka, after 450 mm (18-in) rain fell in 24 hours.

Nepal: At least 10 people have died and 6 are missing after heavy monsoon rainfall once again triggered landslides.

Pakistan: The UN’s World Food Programme says that ongoing monsoon flooding in Sindh Province has left 300,000 people in need of food assistance. Thousands of displaced families are living by the side of the road. Over 400,000 hectares of crops have been damaged.

Indonesia: flooding in Kalimantan, Java and the capital, Djakarta have displaced 1000s.

Vietnam: 2 people have died and 7 others injured following heavy rains and landslides from 26 Sept’ Hanh Cu in Phu Tho province recorded 338mm of rain in a 24 hour period to 27 September.

Cambodia: extensive flooding in 5 provinces as Storm Noul passes over from Vietnam, where there was extensive flooding two days ago.

Myanmar: Almost 3,000 people have been displaced by recent flooding in parts of Kachin State. Flooding was over 3 metres deep in some places.

Ethiopia: unprecedented flooding caused by the overflow of the Awash River has displaced more than 144,000 people in Afar state. Tens of thousands of ha. of crops have been lost, and over 20 thousand livestock feared drowned.

Nigeria: yet more extensive flooding in Kogi provice after the River Niger burst its banks.

Sudan: hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the flooding of the Blue and White Nile rivers in the past 6 weeks and water levels are still rising. The UN is warning of famine.

Mexico: Flooding and 2 deaths in Oaxaca two days ago.

• AccuWeather, the private US forecasting and weather news service, is reporting on:

USA: Summerlike 90°F-plus heat is expected to build back over the west coast increasing fire risk again as a surge of Arctic air is projected to plunge into the eastern half of the nation. Both high and low temperature records could be broken.

Texas: extensive flooding from Storm Beta in the Houston area, where water levels have risen to 3 feet. Rainfall was second only to Hurricane Harvey in 2017, that caused $125 billion damage.

Florida: “Forecasters are keeping a close eye on an area of concern near Florida that could slowly develop this week.”

Northwest: at last some significant rainfall in the Seattle area is helping to reduce the fires in Washington and Oregon states but threatening landslips on scarred and bare hillsides.

Calfornia: A study suggests as many as 1,000 people may have become “excess deaths” as a result of smoke inhalation from the wildfires. Spreading out of control, at 850 thousand acres the Creek Fire has become the largest in the state’s history, generating its own 125-mph winds.

Canada: the approach of Tropical Storm, ex-hurricane, Teddy toward Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, bearing up to 12-in of rain.

Atlantic: ex-hurricane Paulette, that made no landfall after slamming into Bermuda and fizzling out, is reorganizing as a Tropical Storm and heading on a path toward southern Portugal and Morocco.

• Severe Weather.eu, another Copernicus vehicle, is reporting:

Japan: after devastating Super Typhoons Haishen and Maysak earlier this month, now Severe Tropical Storm Dolphin is moving along the eastern Japanese seaboard threatening Tokyo with severe winds and flooding potential over the next 48 hours. “Storms associated with the low could also bring tornadoes, high tides and torrential rainfall.

Europe: Severe thunderstorms are forecast across Italy and the Balkans, up into the Alps. A wind gust of 114 mph was recorded in Norway as another storm swept the north. Severe gales are expected over N France and southern UK next week.

Smoke alarm: following a change in the prevailing wind direction over west-coast USA, the smoke cloud from fires in California, Oregon and Washington states has crossed the continent, over the Atlantic and NW Europe, and is being detected in Scandinavia.

Siberian Times reports, the northern province of Yakutia has had its longest wildfire season ever, with 21 major fires still burning all around the capital, Irkutsk and residents trapped indoors by thick smoke.

• The Washington Post recorded the arrival in Nova Scotia of ex-hurricane Teddy, 23 Sept, noting that the system has attained an impressive width of more than 1,000 miles:

Canada: Winds sustained around 60 mph with rain totals approaching 6 inches. Buoy 44150, 100 miles south of western Nova Scotia, observed individual wave heights topping 80 feet. WaPo comments that, with the dissipation of Teddy over land, peace now descends on the Atlantic – for a while.

 

So profoundly corrupt is the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that he and his wife have been accused of packing their soiled underwear to travel abroad on official trips, obliging foreign taxpayers to pick up their laundry bills. Sounds good, anyway….

Tunnel….

The small town of Leighton Buzzard, near Luton, Beds. has been the epicentre of an unusual swarm of relatively strong earthquakes – 4 in two weeks, up to magnitude M3.5 at a relatively shallow depth of 6 miles. Residents reported their homes rocking, pictures falling off the walls. The Sun reported that boxer, Frank Bruno was knocked to the floor by his own punchbag while working out. The BogPo‘s Earth Mysteries correspondent, Henry “Shakin'” Stevens, commented: “It might be something, it might not. It’s what we scientists call a ‘Why are you asking me that question?’ event.”

37 US Senators have signed a motion requesting that climate change be introduced on the agenda for the three scheduled debates between Trump and Biden. Republicans all refused to sign the letter.

Former Democratic frontrunner, Sen. Elizabeth Warren tells MSNBC: “If the President is good, Lindsey Graham is good. Man, there’s a man with a spine. A spine kept in a box …”

142 years ago, a sailing ship, the Vega famously became stuck for almost a year in pack ice while on passage through the Arctic ocean. Siberian Times reports, a modern sail training ship, the Sedov has travelled 3,600 miles around the top of Russia from Vladivostock to Kaliningrad, passing the spot where the Vega ran into trouble, without even seeing any ice.

 

Tailpipe…

Reinventing the peel: I worked as a writer in creative marketing service agencies for ten years, back when, so I can probably answer this for myself, but how stupid do marketing people think the average British consumer is? I’ve just taken a bag of McCain oven chips – raw sliced potatoes sprayed with rapeseed oil – from the freezer, and see that the bag bears a bright red corner flash proclaiming: “New recipe!“.

“Suckers and Losers”:  A billion dollars in “funds set aside under the Cares Act economic stimulus package passed by Congress in March were given to the Pentagon to ‘prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.’ But the Defense Department decided to divert most of that funding toward long-standing defense concerns such as drone technology, body armor and dress uniforms.” (Washington Post).

The military receives $738 billion a year from taxpayers, 205 thousand of whom have already died from Covid-19.  Glad to see they’re doing their duty – killing people.

Tracks of my tears: At this time of year, with another birthday requiring rewarding – 71, how time drags! – I tend to up my game, ordering many jazz CDs to add to the collection that I realize, courtesy of the younger members of my family, is a tragic waste of money compared with the price of a streaming service. (The collection is the point!)

And I never fail to be disappointed by the rashness of my selections, compared with the wonderful stuff I’ve been discovering all year. Some of these won’t even make it onto the shelf.

In 2019, according to the royal expense sheet, Prince Andrew spent £16,000 on a charter flight to the Irish Open golf championship at Portrush. The average UK pensioner’s income is £15,080 per year, after tax.

 

A letter arrives from the financial sector :

Dear…

“We wanted to let you know that from 2 December 2020, we’re reducing the interest rate on your Enhance account from 0.25% AER to 0% AER.”

“Our overdraft rates will be a standard rate of 39.9% APR Representative (variable)”

Love, your bank….

(So, say the bank lends out £100 million in a year, the money they’re borrowing from you is free, so the lending book is returning £39,990,000 sheer profit, less administrative costs. Trebles all round.)

A specially trained sniffer rat has been awarded a tiny gold medal for “lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty”. Magawa, a giant African pouched rat, has uncovered 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance, helping to clear more than 141,000 square metres of formerly wartorn Cambodia – the equivalent of 20 football pitches. (Guardian)

Grim Reaper…

RIP Juliette Greco, iconic 1950s chanteuse, the thinking existentialist’s pinup, and Miles Davis’ lover, 93.

RIP Sir Harold “Harry” Evans, 92, legendary working-class newspaper editor, enemy of Murdoch and half of New York power couple, Evans and Brown (Tina, of Vogue fame).

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pumpkin – color section: Quote of the week… Q triumphs again… Essay: The global laundromat spins on… Tailpipe.

QotW

“President Trump, meanwhile, suggested that Democrats had concocted Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish that her replacement on the Supreme Court be chosen by the next president.

“‘I don’t know that she said that, or if that was written out by Adam Schiff, and Schumer and Pelosi,’ Mr. Trump said, referring to Representative Schiff of California, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The justice’s quote had been verified by journalists.” Washington Post.

Is there no depth of moral bankruptcy to which this demented old thug won’t sink, to squeeze just one more vote out of the still-beating black heart of the dumbfuck sewer for a cheap quote, a quick buck – a sentence deferred?

Anyone who accepts preferment from Trump now surely knows, whatever other detestable hypocrisies they profess, they are approving and enabling this filthy bastard and his putrid crime family and have no right to judge others. They need to go in the field and string themselves up from the tree, their 30 pieces of worthless silver scattered in the grass around them.

Yes, I mean you, Miss Goody Two Shoes. May your seven kids rot in the abyss if you take the job now.

Dear Alexander

We’re sorry to inform you that your application to replace Mr Savile as Head Porter at this hospital has been unsuccessful. Thank you for your interest, wishing you the best of luck with your future career, etc.

Q triumphs again

Trump and Cohen were walking by the tennis court when Trump spied a pretty young thing in a short skirt. “Look at that piece of ass!” he exclaimed appreciatively, giving a low whistle. “I’d love a piece of that.”

It was Cohen’s 15-year-old daughter, Samantha. – CNN interview, citing article in Vanity Fair.

She remembers the incident vividly.

But it’s okay, because Trump is leading the Q-sade against the secret global cannibal child-abducting Satanic pedophile triads of the Clintons, the Democrats, the liberal media and the Jew, Soros and his world-dominance cabal.

Only not those of Messrs Epstein and Casablancas, partners in fun sadly gone before, equally appreciative of pert young things, with whom he hung out at Club 21 in the 1990s.

All be over in November.

Lock ’em up!

And now, despite being broadcast on tape volunteering that he deliberately did nothing, he’s back to lying to his rally crowd that he took strong action to save millions of lives, it affects practically nobody, that young people can’t get the disease and thanks to him the US has among the lowest death rates in the world. It seems like he wants everyone to get so sick of his barefaced lies that they will just pull up the blankets and not vote.

Very Long Essay

“Is there a book to be written about how we’ve got the Trump story wrong all these years?” (Spoiler alert… probably not!)

The global laundromat spins on

We have to be careful, because the man known as Semion Mogilevitch is very high on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list and said to be, literally, the ‘capo di capi’ of the Russian underworld, not a man to tangle with. But he has been frequently mentioned tangentially with Donald Trump’s business affairs and this is a side of Trump which it seems to us has been totally ignored in the runup to the election, as many another of his appalling traits is being hammered to death in the liberal media.

Pointlessly, in The Pumpkin’s view, as the more we hammer, the more we’re nailing his base to the philosophy of “say any old crap that convinces these ‘disgusting’ (I quote) people to buy the store”. Not even the following will drive a wedge between him and their forlorn hopes, it’s just more fake news.

In June 2018, the website Just Security.org ran a piece by investigative journalist, Craig Unger – author of House of Trump, House of Putin – about Trump’s apparent vendetta against an FBI agent, Bruce Ohr, eventually having him fired. It seemed a little odd to most people, because Ohr hadn’t committed any of the usual crimes, like investigating or criticizing or even making mild jokes against the president, although he was rumored to have been connected with the infamous Steele dossier, an independent Intel report which Trump believes, wrongly, was the start point for the Mueller “witch-hunt” against him.

Unger writes that Ohr seemed to be a blameless, 30-year term-served FBI man:

“But there is quite likely another reason which could trouble Trump even more: Ohr’s job in the Justice Department involved facing off against Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich, whose operatives have been using Trump branded properties to launder millions of dollars for more than three decades.”

Another FBI agent, Peter Strzok was also targeted by Trump, ostensibly over an unwise 2016 exchange of emails with his mistress in the department. He was eventually removed from his desk, and has produced yet another book of tales from Trumpland.

Strzok tells of how he had been the leader of a team tasked with tracking Russian sleeper cells in the United States (as reported by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow) and may have been instrumental in the arrest of the glamorous spy, Anna Chapman – whose later prisoner exchange links US Intel with the MI6 double-agent, Sergei Skripal, poisoned by two GRU goons with a novichok military nerve agent in Salisbury, England in 2019.

Consequently the SVR, Russia’s foreign Intel service, may well have taken an interest in Strzok’s defenestration. While, we are reminded, although we can’t remember where, there are supposedly close links in Russia between the Kremlin, the Intel services, the banks – and organized crime.

Bob Mueller, the Special Counsel set out to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ended up defining instances of Trump’s undoubtedly criminal behavior in clamping down on the Justice Department, firing FBI Director, James Comey and trying to intimidate and discredit its law enforcement agencies, in what were several instances in which he seemed to confess to the media that it was all to “make the Russia thing go away.”

Ultimately, Mueller failed (or chose not) to close the gate on Trump’s business affairs in Russia, the money trail, or his connections with organized crime. I’ve heard it said that members of his team thought some other team was taking care of that end of things. Seems not.

So there’s a history of the president conducting strange vendettas against law enforcement officers concerned with investigations into Russian crime on US soil potentially incriminating Trump and possibly others; Trump’s unexplained pursuance of policies favorable to Putin and Russian interests, and a manic effort involving his new personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to deflect interest in Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election and project it instead onto Ukraine, where Giuliani has spent months recently trying to persuade pro-Trump officials to manufacture a case against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, alleging corruption over the acquisition of a large gas company. Of which more anon.

Furthermore, Trump’s ties to Mr Mogilevich, if any, seem to have run through a former business associate of his, Felix Sater.

Sater, of Soviet Russian origin, the son of a man believed to be closely connected with Mogilevich’s operations, served time for a near-lethal attack on a random guy in a bar, and on his release went straight into business with other Russian criminals operating a $40 million “pump-and-dump” penny-share fraud. Somehow he avoided prison by spilling all to the FBI; yet he apparently leads a charmed life.

For several years, he seems to have enjoyed a business relationship as a named adviser within the Trump Organization and as a director of a dubious entity called Bayrock, involved with financing the Trump SoHo development, that extended to his occupying an office towards the upper floors of the Trump Tower in New York. And it was Sater, bragging that his influence with Putin would see Trump elected, who seemingly set up meetings in Russia colluding with Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen as a go-between over Trump’s so-far futile attempts to gain planning permission and finance for a prestige tower development in Moscow.

Curious to find out more, The Pumpkin inquired: Where is Felix Sater now? And lo, as usual Google delivered!

Apparently happily married with three daughters, Sater was subpoena’d to give evidence to the House Intelligence Committee in 2018, and after initially attempting to wriggle out, spun them a lurid tale that he’d been working undercover for US Intelligence for 20 years, pursuing al-Qaeda leads and helping to “undermine organized crime”.

However outré that might sound, In August 2019, NBC reported:

“Newly unsealed court records confirm that Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Donald Trump (which Trump vigorously denies), was an invaluable FBI source who used his ties to the criminal underworld to rat out New York’s organized crime families and gather intelligence on Al Qaeda and arms dealers in Afghanistan.”

Was it true, or was it just what he said was true under oath?

It seems, also, from the judge’s remarks, that although portions of the evidence were redacted, not “a jot or tittle” of evidence connected Sater with Trump. When questioned, Trump professed he would have trouble recognizing Sater if he saw him across the room. Yet a mountain of incidental evidence suggests that was a lie.

Was the whitewash because Trump too had been an “invaluable FBI source”, explaining his curious relationship with former crimebusting New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani? Is there a book to be written about how we’ve got the Trump story all wrong all these years?

Sater also had some involvement with Ukraine through a local Putinist politician, Andrei Artemenko, who, needtoimpeach.com reported, was hoping Sater – through Trump’s then-personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen – could gain leverage to broker a peace deal favorable to Putin. Later exiled by decree of his political enemy President Poroshenko, and frequently investigated for corruption, his (somewhat questionable and self-serving) Wikipedia entry records:

“In 2016, still in the capacity of Ukrainian MP, Andrii Artemenko was the only Ukrainian politician who openly supported then Presidential candidate Donald Trump and demanded that Ukrainian policies were adjusted to take into account of Trump’s program at the time when official Ukraine publicly supported Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.”

At stake, was a popular movement to push the pro-Moscow President Yanukovich, a kleptocrat elected thanks to a campaign of dirty tricks plotted by PR consultant and Trump’s eventual campaign manager Paul Manafort and his sidekick, Rick Gates, into the arms of NATO and the EU.

Artemenko, however, denied to a Congressional inquiry that he even knew Manafort. The link between Artemenko and Trump appears to be another Trump fixer, Erik Prince – brother of Education Secretary with no educational experience, billionaire Betsy DeVos – heavy Trump donor, and founder of the now-supposedly defunct Blackwater group of mercenary contractors. In April this year, Politico reported:

“A Ukrainian associate of Rudy Giuliani has hired a business partner of Erik Prince to lobby Washington on his behalf regarding ‘corruption,’ according to public records and interviews. … The business partner, former Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Artemenko, is registered to lobby using a different name. He’s also in the transportation and logistics business with Prince…. “

Yes, and he’s also a known arms dealer! So in comes another name, Qatar.

His brain beginning to meltdown, The Pumpkin learns also that Artemenko had set up an unlikely political organization in Ukraine, the “Inter-Parliamentary Group of Friendship with Qatar”; information that may provide yet another link, that between Trump’s favorite fundraiser, Eliott Broidy; his business partner George Nader, a convicted pedophile who served a ten-year sentence for possessing “extreme” material, and the apparent conspiracy involving the UAE (including Abu Dhabi) and Saudi Barbaria, with the support and complicity of the Trump White House to extort over $1 bn from the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, used to bail-out the sinking Kushner Companies.

I land in the sun….

In January 2017, Nader, the Washington Post reported, brokered a meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince, the powerful Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi – Prince Mohammed bin-Zayed, MBZ, who owns several properties in the Seychelles – and a Russian money-man said to be close to Putin and a specialist in sovereign wealth funds, Kirill Dmitriev.

According to an article on Vox, the purpose of the supposedly secret meeting emerged as an attempt to set up a back-channel between Trump and Putin, for perfectly innocent purposes, bypassing the snoopers at the State Department. Sadly it didn’t work out.* Exactly the same excuse that Jared Kushner was forced into when he had to explain why he’d failed on numerous occasions to declare meetings with a Russian banker, Sergei Gorkov – yet was still given the highest-level security clearance by his father-in-law.

Was that where the plot against Qatar was hatched? A plot in which Trump seemingly suborned US foreign policy, risking a new Middle East war to benefit his family?

Pumping and dumping

And then, there are the indictments against Giuliani’s “associates”, Lev Parnas and Igor Frumin, men with mafia-related convictions, in a trial process that was due to have come to court before the election but, oh look, has been pushed back to February 2021 because of Covid – which will have gone away by 3 November. Your Pumpkin merely Googled “What has happened to Parnas and Frumin, or Fruman, and magically Reuters explained:

“The Ukraine-born Parnas and Belarus-born Fruman were charged over their alleged use of a shell company to make an illegal $325,000 donation to a committee supporting Trump’s re-election.”

There’s that man again!

The money came, allegedly, from friends of a suave multi-billionaire Ukrainian businessman, said by the FBI to be a high-up in Mogilevich’s Moscow mafia. Dmytro Firtash is wanted by US authorities for his part in a $200 million bribery scandal in India, and has been fighting extradition since 2014 from exile in Vienna, where he was held on remand until being bailed on a recognizance of 125 $million; whereupon he commenced setting up a prestigious organization to promote “reform” in Ukraine, hiring a team of genuine political heavy-hitters from all over Europe. The payment to a Trump PAC, laundered through a fake energy company registered in Florida, is believed to be the entry money for a possible suspension of US inquiries into his activities.

Mr Firtash’s immense wealth derives from his manipulation, with Putin’s blessing, it’s said, of Russian gas contracts from which he benefited by skimming off the margin allowed to the Ukraine government, i.e. the taxpayer. Although much of it is now frozen, pending extradition. The Foreign Policy Research Institute website, fpri.org explains:

“The firm paid discounted prices for Russian gas imports, while passing major mark-ups onto the Ukrainian government. Firtash thus became a billionaire at the expense of Ukraine’s budget. This wealth gave him the springboard to do business not just in Ukraine, but around the globe, even after allegedly admitting ties to infamous Russian organized crime boss Semyon Mogilevich.”

Strangely, when arrested Parnas, Frumin and Ghouliani – who has not yet been indicted, despite the evidence against him – were all in possession of plane tickets to Vienna. In a “belt-and-braces” gesture, Firtash went on to hire two of Trump’s legal team to represent him.

But we’re straying far from the trail.

It was said that a disproportionate number of Russian names, many known to the FBI, were behind the deeds of properties in New York and Florida which Trump seems to have sold at suspiciously inflated prices. There are numerous other instances of Russians operating close to, but deniably far from, Trump and his properties. As one example, Needtoimpeach.com records:

“Vyacheslav Ivankov (a self-confessed killer) implemented a money laundering scheme set up by the “boss of bosses” in the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich arranged Ivankov’s release from a Siberian gulag, and soon afterward he went to New York where he presided over the Russian mob’s expansion in the States. … The FBI discovered he made regular visits to the Trump Taj Mahal (casino) in Atlantic City, and was living in a luxury condo at Trump Tower. After being convicted of extortion in 1997, he was jailed for nine years and seven months. He died in 2009 … after being shot several times leaving a restaurant in Moscow.”

And none of this even begins to look into Trump’s Roy Cohn-brokered relationship in the 1970s and 80s with the home-grown Genovese family and its ruthless boss, ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, that gave him certain “concrete” advantages in the days when he built things rather than merely getting people to pay him millions to put up a board with his name on their project. Yet, while he has had minor slaps on the wrist for infringing state licensing regulations, employing undocumented labor, tax and charity fraud, Trump has never been indicted on any more serious charges, even at the height of Mayor Giuliani’s depradations against the Big Five New York crime families. Speculation therefore grew that Trump might have been, on some level, a protected FBI informant.

Is that what the Russians have over him?

So, anyway, there we can leave the Trump connection and move on to a compound story running on BBC News today that, for instance, HSBC is in trouble with the Securities commission after a leak of “suspicious activity” files to the US Financial Crimes Investigation Network (FinCEN) alleging that the bank may have unwittingly played a part in a massive Ponzi scheme, one of whose investors was recently found weighted down with rocks in a lake on a California wine estate: “after HSBC avoided a US criminal prosecution over money laundering by Mexican drug barons.”

Who knew working in a bank could be so exciting?

Although there’s been no mention of Trump transactions among the files, we do know from a whistleblower that his accounts at Deutsche Bank especially were yellow-flagged for suspicion of money-laundering and a history of defaults; yet the private wealth management division continued to lend him funds totalling over $2 billion, a substantial chunk of which he still hasn’t paid back. Why?

With an inquiry in the Southern District of New York pending, the divisional manager responsible, Thomas Bowers was found hanged at his Malibu home in November, 2019 – the latest in a line of Deutsche executives who have been “suicided” since 2013 while working for one senior executive in particular, Michele Faissola, according to a July 2016 News.au. report, and connected with internal investigations into the bank’s exceptionally large losses on private lending.

And another leading US bank is also in hot water:

“The FinCEN Files also show how multinational bank JP Morgan may have helped a man known as the Russian mafia’s boss of bosses to move more than a $1bn through the financial system. Semion Mogilevich has been accused of crimes including gun running, drug trafficking and murder. Over one five-year period, JP Morgan is said to have sent and received wire transfers via its London office totalling $1.02bn” – on behalf of an unnamed offshore account. – BBC.

As Trump’s nemesis, the Pulitzer winning specialist tax journalist, David Cay Johnson wrote in a major article in Politico, 22 May 2016:

“No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.

He may have been thinking of the 1,300 properties Trump has sold to Russians at inflated prices over the years, as Unger reported, “all cash purchases through anonymous sources.”

One of those Russians was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the “Fertilizer King”, who in 1999 paid $95 million for a condemned Palm Beach mansion Trump had snapped up for just $40 million a few years earlier. It was said he was trying to hide his assets from his ex-wife. A Cypriot citizen, along with several other oligarchs, Rybolovlev owned 10% of the equity in Bank of Cyprus, a known conduit for the illegal transfers of Russian money to the West, whose vice-chair was Wilbur Ross, Trump’s family “consiglieri” and long-serving Commerce Secretary; and whose founder was Dr Joseph Ackermann, a former CEO of Deutsche Bank.

As I say, nothing evidential so far connects Trump to the Deutsche Bank scandals, apart from the little matter of $340 million he owes them. Then, nothing ever seems to connect him with anything or anyone. Yet investigators have followed his slime-trail everywhere until it disappears in the morass of tiny, criss-crossing details.

The story of the files is covered in a BBC Panorama documentary, the FinCEN Files (available on catch-up in UK only).

In 2016, the BBC’s bulldog reporter, John Sweeney made a valiant attempt on behalf of the Newsnight show to corner Trump on his connections with organized crime, based seemingly on the Johnson account, and did enough to raise suspicions that really ought to have informed the Republican party’s calculus as to whether they should adopt this profoundly compromised old thug as their presidential candidate, or not touch him with the proverbial ten-foot pole.

Yet here he is again. You can’t keep a good man down, they say.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54225572

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3B-tw2sB0

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/banking/questions-over-spate-of-suicides-among-deutsche-bank-executives/news-story/f03c963669d7e01e8d9cca2f64240567

http://www.fpri.org/article/2019/12/the-extradition-case-of-dmytro-firtash-a-ukrainian-oligarch-with-global-connections/

http://www.newsweek.com/2019/01/18/donald-trump-mafia-connections-decades-later-linked-mob-1285771.html

http://www.needtoimpeach.com/corruption/trumps-most-wanted-tenants/

http://www.needtoimpeach.com/corruption/felix-sater-where-is-he-now/

http://www.vox.com/2018/3/7/17088908/erik-prince-trump-russia-seychelles-mueller

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrii_Artemenko

*These ‘back-channel’ stories seem odd, justified as they are by the need to ‘improve relations’ with Russia, which could perfectly well be done through the now-gutted State Department. Trump notoriously refuses to allow his iPhones to be swept for bugs, so he might as well use the front door.

Tailpipe…

Sadface for Republican Senator Fred Girod of Oregon. Days after blocking a bill bringing in a carbon reduction program, his house burned down in the fires sweeping the state. Undaunted, he complained that environmentalists had encouraged too many trees.

A performance at Madrid’s Teatro Real opera house was halted after audience members protested they were being seated too closely together. The production? Verdi’s Un Ballo in Masquiero – A Masked Ball.

The Pumpkin – Issue 142: RIP, Notorious RBG… More madness… We don’t chat anymore… Granny’s World of unending sogginess…

Editor’s Note: more than some of this content appeared in the previous BogPo Post but has been moved here for safety. I’ve edited and added a few bits. Please don’t feel conned, you’re not being charged for any of this valuable information.

QotW

“Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday suggested that nationwide stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus were the ‘greatest intrusion on civil liberties’ in America’s history ‘other than slavery.'” – MSNBC report

The tin-eared Barr went on to launch an astonishing attack on his own Department of Justice’s prosecutorial team, some of whom have resigned over his so-far unsuccessful attempts to spring Trump’s former National Security advisor, Mike Flynn, saying he had an absolute right to do anything he wanted and they couldn’t object. He also denied less plausibly that he was subject to any political interference from the White House.

“Are you sure that was the Russian ambassador’s wife?”

RIP, Notorious RBG

AS the entire Trump family came out on message yesterday to mourn the loss of the Republicans’ pet hate figure on the Supreme Court bench, the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has died from cancer, aged 87, that same evening Trump announced to a rally of the dumbfucks in Fayetteville, North Carolina that despite her last wish that the Senate should wait to confirm her replacement until after the election, he would be announcing his pick to replace her within days. It would be a woman, he said, because “I like women better than men”.

Yes, given yet more accusations of serious sexual assaults that have emerged this past week, he really is as irredeemably crude and cynical as you’d think.

Yet again, US media and the commentariat have been hailing as “presidential”, his apparently spontaneous oration on receiving the news of Ginsburg’s death, which contrasted well with Biden’s narcoleptic response, seemingly prompting himself from notes and reaching no heights of magniloquence. You’d imagine the president would have gotten the hang of presidential by now, but even after nearly four years any seemingly rational statement from Trump that emerges from the background fog of dimly-illuminated, poisonous verbiage, often in all-caps, is still being greeted with relief, as if he has somehow morphed into a more hopeful figure than just an internet troll with gas.

Front-runner for the job, a lifetime appointment, is one Amy Coney Barrett, a 48-year-old circuit judge with seven children and little courtroom experience, but who fulfils the principal requirement of being a disturbingly religiose, pro-life Catholic prig, who will vote at the drop of a hat to overturn Roe v. Wade and send all the Blacks to the gurney. Justice Clarence Thomas may not be able to keep his hands off her.

She’s been a real judge only since her appointment to the 7th Circle of Hell as a Trump loyalist in 2017, having previously lectured in law, but she’s a blonde – his type – looks like a Stepford Wife – not his type, then – and reportedly told her students they should always remember that “a legal career is but a means to an end … and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”

Didn’t someone once say, “Judge not, that ye be not judged”? (but I expect the president-for-life likes to hear the word Kingdom…)

In case anyone really thought Trump was being generous and presidential in his remarks about “Notorious RBG”, as she was known to her many fans on the liberal center-left, in a humorous reference to New York rapper, Notorious BIG (Ginsburg stood barely five feet), let’s remind ourselves of the glee with which Trump has been contemplating replacing her since last year when her medical condition began to give cause for concern.

“‘I’m saving her for Ginsburg,’ Trump said of Barrett, according to three million sources familiar with the president’s private comments.”

(Reporting mostly: Washington Post, BBC News, Guardian)

 

Another senior prosecutor has resigned from the Department of Justice. Nora Dannehy says she is certain Barr will pre-release his own version of the John Durham “Deep State” investigation he commissioned at Trump’s insistence, into the law officers personally who were tasked with investigating the collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians – sorry, who conducted a treasonous witch-hunt against the president – despite those investigations having been investigated three times already and not been found materially wanting, in order to help Trump win. (Mike Malloy, citing former Solicitor General, Neil Katyal)

Trump has again whined that he is owed a third term because of the Mueller inquiry taking up all his time for two years. (Apart, obviously, from when he was playing golf or watching tv.) Robert Mugabe managed to cling to power until he was 94, so….

 

More madness…

A new Trump ad has appeared in the wake of revelations about his insults to the military, assuring his dumbfucks how much he loves the military. The images used, of soldiers and aircraft doing, er, military stuff appear to experts to have been taken from film of the Russian army. The ad director turns out to be a Russian. (Malcolm Nance, on Stephanie Miller.)

“If you take the Blue states out we’d be at a level I don’t think anywhere in the world would be at.” Thus, Trump slashes the world-beating coronavirus death toll in the USA at a mini-stroke, by dismissing all the dead people who voted Democrat last time. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that many Republican voters also live and die in Blue states, and vice versa. (CNN)

At the same press conference he boasted once again that 240 thousand dead Americans was a good result given that he’d been warned there might be two million. Well, as they say, it ain’t over until the fat lady complains of a cough.

It’s been alleged for months and confirmed by statements made both by Trump and members of the White House staff that Federal assistance with PPE and ventilators has been more generous towards Republican-controlled states that agreed not to lockdown or enforce masking and distancing – things which make the president “look bad”. It’s emerged also that Trump may have ordered Jared Kushner to hold off on a national testing plan when he heard that the death toll was higher in Democrat-run states. (Many sources) It isn’t now!

Former Federal prosecutor, Glenn Kirschner takes the view that these and other actions or deliberate inactions on the part of the President lay him open to multiple charges at least of manslaughter, possibly even murder in the second degree. (Justice Matters)

Trump has attacked the head of the Centers for Disease Control for telling the House Appropriations Committee a vaccine won’t be generally available until later next year and that in the meantime, masks are the safest option. At a press conference, Trump called him “confused” and claimed he had told Dr Redfield in a call that “he might have made a mistake”. When pressed moments later by a reporter, Trump replied: “I didn’t tell him anything. I just thought he might have misunderstood the question.”

You can take that as a threat.

Anyway, the two leading US pharma companies racing to produce a viable vaccine then came out and confirmed none will be ready for distribution before the new year, let alone 3 November, as the head of the CDC has been trying to tell Trump, who isn’t listening. A further delay could arise as, the Washington Post reports, the $6 billion cost of distributing a vaccine nationally is deadlocked in the relief bill that’s stuck in Congress with no sign of compromise.

A whistleblower has confirmed, the White House pressured the CDC into releasing a revised set of watered-down coronavirus advice guidelines last month, that they’d had nothing to do with drawing up, but which were said to be more in line with Trump’s “thinking”. The new guidelines were written under the aegis of new White House pandemic taskforce head, Dr Scott Atlas – a professor of neuroradiology. (MSNBC)

Trump’s Bedminster, NJ club (membership $350 thousand a year) charged the Secret Service more than $21,800 to rent a cottage and other rooms while the club was closed and otherwise off-limits to guests. The only people to visit the club in April were Jared and Ivanka and the kids. At the time, reports the Washington Post, both the District of Columbia — where the Kushners live — and New Jersey had imposed ‘stay-at-home’ orders, warning residents to avoid travel except under limited circumstances.

One law for the Trumps….

 

Nearly 11% of adults surveyed in the US said in July that their households sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat, up from 3.7% in 2019. (Guardian, citing Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University) Scaled up, that’s about 30 million, or roughly the numbers claiming unemployment. “Congress remains at a standstill over passing another coronavirus rescue package”.

We don’t chat anymore

Whether or not he has the power to do it, Trump has imposed a ban on internet app stores downloading the popular web platforms TikTok and WeChat.* Friday’s statement from the Commerce Department said the governing Chinese Communist Party “has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the US.”(BBC)

Coming from the Trump administration, that weaponizes personal data illegally harvested from social media sites to influence voting intentions, welcomes compromizing emails hacked by the Russians, blackmails foreign governments and has been declared by the Senate Intelligence Committee last month to be: “the single most grave threat to national security in the modern era”, that’s pretty rich.

Oh, and especially since the head of the Commerce department, Secretary Wilbur Ross – former vice-chair of a bank known to financial regulators as “the global laundromat” – was said by Forbes magazine in 2017 to be “possibly the greatest grifter in American history”, having cheated his business partner out of $130 million.

You wonder what use the Chinese Communist Party would make of the personal data of twenty million American teenagers, mostly, one imagines, Taylor Swift fans?

They’d run screaming!

*Waking up to the fact that banning TikTok could be an electoral no-no, Trump has linked a reprieve to a deal involving shared ownership with Oracle software and Walmart.

Joe Biden is reported to be hiring “hundreds” of lawyers in case he wins and Trump tries to overturn the result in the courts, or – Heaven forfend – finds some other way to cheat, like having the uncounted postal ballots annulled…

Stable genius

“During his press conference, the president was asked if he believes he knows better than the experts in his administration, after Trump contradicted the directors of the CDC and the FBI this week.

“‘Yeah, in many cases, I do,’ Trump replied.” (Guardian report)

Forbes reported, 28 Feb., 2019: “Trump has repeatedly claimed … that he graduated ‘first in his class’ from the Wharton School” (of Business, at Penn State U.). “In fact, he wasn’t close—Trump graduated without honors.” And did not go on to postgrad school. Many years later, according to Michael Cohen, he had letters sent to all his alma maters, threatening to sue if they ever revealed his real grades.

Tax returns be jiggered, those grades are what we need to see!

 

La,La,La land

Returning from his brief visit to the West Coast, where he once again complained that the locals should be doing more raking of the forest floor and threatened to defund the Forestry service as 4.5 million acres continued to burn, where 35 people have died and entire species are threatened, while Hurricane Sally was dumping three feet of rain on Florida, Atlantic storms breaking all records, Trump has nominated for the post of Head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one David M Legates.

The shifty looking Legates is a former state-employed climatologist of little seniority, fired in 2011 by the State of Delaware for arguing that we need more, not less CO2, and that the planet killing greenhouse gas whose dangers have been known about for more than 130 years has been given “a bad rap”.

Legates is funded by the alt-right, Steve BAnon-supporting, fanatical Christian billionaire disruptor, Robert Mercer, through his private wank-tank, the Heartland Institute; and, according to Democracynow.org, has also received money from leading climate change-denying proponents, Koch Industries. Another profoundly compromized academic? Another energy bidness shill lying for money?

Sounds just the man for the job!

 

Granny’s World of unending sogginess

USA: Slow-moving Tropical Storm Beta has brought extensive coastal flooding to Texas and Louisiana, with torrential rain, high tides and a storm surge to contend with. Wind-shear and a band of dry air finally prevented Beta from reaching hurricane strength but more days of rain, up to 30-inches, are expected from Port Arthur in the west, across the Houston area to New Orleans. Galveston bore the brunt initially of the surge, much of the city is flooded, its pier has been destroyed. (AccuWeather)

As the damage reports and $billions in costs roll in, so do the records. Hurricane Sally killed 3, with 1 still missing, and dumped almost 30 inches (762 mm) of rain in Orange Beach, Alabama, and 24.8 inches (630 mm) in Pensacola, Florida in a 72-hour period, according to the National Weather Service. The torrential rain moving inland has dangerously raised river levels in the area, which are likely to remain high for some time.

Up to 3-in of rain in the Seattle area covering much of Oregon as well this week will help with firefighting, but could cause problems mixing with hillside burn-scars to trigger landslips, according to AccuWeather.

And the heat goes on… “Las Vegas broke its record for most consecutive days without rain on Friday after tying the previous record of 150 days on Thursday.” (AccuWeather) There’s no sign of an end to the drought.

Atlantic: Hurricane Teddy has weakened from Cat 4 to Cat 3 and is passing to the east of Bermuda, where storm warnings are out, headed for Nova Scotia in the week. Canadians are hunkering down. The last designated name available on the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season list, Tropical Storm Wilfred dissipated north of the Antilles before making landfall. Subtropical Storm Alpha ran ashore in Portugal yesterday with 50 mph sustained wind, the furthest east a STS has ever formed.

All of these named storms – 23 to date – are around a month earlier in the season than the previous year’s. Tropical Storm Beta is the one to watch, intensifying towards hurricane strength in the Gulf of Mexico and on course at a leisurely 3 mph for Texas, where days of flooding rain are forecast.

There’s some concern that ex-Hurricane Paulette may be reorganizing in mid-Atlantic. Some tracking forecasts have it possibly entering the Mediterranean through the strait of Gibraltar between southern Portugal and Morocco next week.

Greece: the ‘rare’ medicane – the last one was in, oh, 2018 – took a turn and headed for Crete after battering westerly islands and causing extensive “catastrophic” floods in central Greece, north of Athens. 3 people are dead and police are still searching for a woman swept away in her car. BBC Weather reports, a search is also taking place for a boat believed to be carrying 55 migrants off the western Peloponnese that was reported to be in distress on Friday.

At least 2 people are missing after torrential rain triggered flash flooding in southern France. Violent thunderstorms lashed the foothills of the Cévennes mountains on 19 September. In one 6-hour period, 468 mm (18-in.) of rain fell in Valleraugue, including 361mm (14-in.) in just 3 hours. (Floodlist) Over 460 people were evacuated as water supplies, roads, bridges and electricity substations were cut off. Accuweather adds: “At least 6 deaths have been confirmed, including three emergency workers that died after a helicopter crash near the town of Leluc. A 7th person was reported missing after their car was found abandoned.” It’s the region’s second major flooding incident in a week.

India: Emergency teams were rescuing flood victims in the state of Karnataka after heavy rainfall drenched the city of Udupi and surrounding areas. Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre figures show that Udupi recorded just under 450 mm (17.7-in.) of rain in 24 hours to 20 Sept. (Floodlist)

Mexico: 160 mm of rain in 24 hrs has triggered landslides and river flooding and killed 2 in the province of Oaxaca. (Floodlist)

Guinea: Flooding has affected around 50,000 people in the city of Kankan. Media reports heavy rainfall began on 3 Sept. causing major damage to people and property. Local media reported 1300 displaced and 1 person missing. At least 5 people have died in recent flooding in Ghana‘s Upper East Region, with many homes and large areas of food crops destroyed. (Floodlist)

 

RIP Robert Gore, 83, inventor of the breathable waterproof material, Gore-Tex. Has saved many a life in the endless rain.

Corona v. Us v. Them… Fayling ever upwards… Birth of a Notion… Granny’s World of weary watery wisdom… Old Bugger’s Nature Notes.

QotW

“Now it appears that, despite the Spunk-Burster’s special basting, the oven-ready Brexit deal had all sorts of inedible Irish offal left in it. The hated Border giblets keep gurgling back up the waste disposal, like the new series of Ricky Gervais’s After Life, or career opportunities for Grant Shapps.” – Stewart Lee in The Observer. Sometimes stand-up comedians can prick the balloons more effectively than the sketchwriters.

“Ah, good, here’s another mobile phone I can add to my collection…”

Corona v. Us v. Them

“The Government is to publish plans to ration coronavirus tests over the coming days as millions of Britons complain of being unable to access swabs.

“This morning, 16 Sept., Justice Secretary Robert Buckland insisted capacity was “ramping up” to deal with the demand, after Health Secretary Matt Hancock acknowledged “operational challenges” with the Test and Trace programme.” (Evening Standard)

A testy and increasingly embattled looking Johnson has blamed the public for demanding too many tests, even as schools and offices have been reopening on his order – and many having to close again. A sign, he blusters, of his government’s success in tackling the virus, its failing testing program among the best in the world.

Deaths 41,684.

• A 19-year-old student who ignored a police warning to shutdown a Covid-19 restricted house party of more than 50 at a property in Nottingham, England, has been issued with a £10,000 fine (USD $12,800).
• As the law stands, the £10,000 limit also applies to the organizers of protest marches, pushing civil liberties to the forefront of the coronavirus response debate. The disease is dangerously politicized in the USA, and so inevitably here too.
• Minutes before the activation by the Conservative government of an order imposing a limit of 6 people on gatherings, with a £3,200 ($4.1 thousand) penalty for persistent non-compliance, to try to contain a huge spike in Coronavirus cases in England, grouse-shooting parties were added without discussion to the list of exempt activities. The Chancellor, millionaire Rishi Sunak represents a grouse-shooting constituency in rural Yorkshire.
• Sir Ian Vallance, the Chief Scientist, has claimed he was “told off” by senior officials for recommending a full lockdown, a week before the government moved to declare a lockdown on 23 March. It’s said thousands of lives might have been saved had the government responded earlier.
• The World Health Organization on 14 Sept. reported the highest global one-day increase in coronavirus infections since the pandemic began: more than 308,000 new cases, with India, the United States and Brazil topping the list.
• India has passed 5 million cases, adding over 90 thousand a day. According to the Worldometers count, the USA has passed 200 thousand Covid-19 deaths.
• As another Welsh district is locked down, we learn it started with a cluster around a party of idiotic racegoers who went on an extended pub crawl 200 miles from South Wales to Doncaster races and back.
• Health Secretary, Mutt Hancock has admitted it may be several weeks before testing gets back to normal. Thousands of people have been complaining that testing stations have run out of tests; many being sent hundreds of miles away and returning without one, as there’s a backlog of 185 thousand unprocessed tests at the government’s privately contracted labs.
• Oh, that’s apparently an official secret.
• Johnson clearly announced a new 20-minute testing program, Operation Moonshot, which he claimed will be up to 10 million a day in the New Year. A week later he told reporters he did not remember saying it. People love him for it, apparently.
• “And instead of this endless carping, saying it’s difficult to get them, we should actually celebrate this phenomenal success of the British nation in getting up to a quarter of a million tests of a disease that nobody knew about until earlier in the year.” – Jacob Rees-Mogg accepts that he hasn’t got a fucking clue how the other 99.99% live, how many days on average it takes to get a result back, how many tests are actually being carried out and completed (about 180,000) or how many people have been getting tested for many months past in, say, South Korea or Vietnam.
• Meanwhile, ‘Baroness’ Dido Harding, socially connected head of the UK’s test-and-trace programme, has admitted that demand for coronavirus tests across the UK is three to four times higher than capacity. Who knew that might happen? The programme has, essentially, broken down.
• Eight members of staff at Bacup Holy Trinity CE Primary School in Lancashire have contracted Covid-19 after attending a pre-school reopening party on 5 September. Another three, who did not attend, have since been infected and the whole school has now had to close. (BBC)
• Authorities in Wales have already had to close down 30 schools owing to positive
• tests and staff shortages, after only a week of opening.
• Compare that with the selfless sacrifice of Ripdorf FC, a lower-league German football team who lost 37-nil while maintaining rigid social distancing by not all taking to the pitch at once.

Fayling ever upwards

I don’t know which is more depressing, the WHO expressing alarm over the rate of increase of Covid cases in Europe, or the news that “The World’s Leading” port operator, Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Ports, has hired the hapless former UK Transport secretary, Chris Grayling, to give them the benefit of his advice for 7 hours a week, on a fee of £100 thousand a year, while he’s still sitting as an MP (public salary, £81,932 pa., plus x’es. Pension your UB lives on, mostly, £10,608. All donations gratefully received).

I feel sure those whose furlough payments are due to run out next month will be taking to heart Ivanka Trump’s advice to: “Find something new”, now they see what a bright future could await – well, almost anyone, really.

Grayling, famous for handing a £14m contract to supply extra freight capacity in the English channel to a start-up company with no experience of operating ferries – and no ferries – then having to compensate P&O Ferries to the tune of £33m for what had been an illegal tendering process, has basically fucked-up every job he had in government and cost the taxpayer close to £3 billion in failed projects (howmuchmoneyhaschrisgraylingwasted.org)

And we are supposed to believe that “Fayling” won’t be advising on any commercial activities at CK Hutchison’s major UK ports until at least two years after he left ministerial office, because that wouldn’t be allowed under the laughably lax Commons oversight rules on revolving-door consultancies.

So why are they paying three times the average wage (actually by the standards of these appointments it’s just chickenfeed) to the ex-minister who totally botched the introduction of a new national railway timetable, leaving fuming commuters stranded all over the country, saying he “wasn’t a railways man”? Is he maybe a ports man?

Apparently, the role will be limited to”advising the firm on its environmental strategy and its engagement with local enterprise bodies”. Nothing whatever to do with Brexit and wangling government contracts for new Customs infrastructure, then.

What can possibly go wrong?

Birth of a Notion

Someone calling themselves Sterling Pound posted the following as a Comment on TYT’s The Damage Report, the cheeky hound:

“I’m old enough to remember the first computer game where you batted a white dot over a white line with a short, white bat on an otherwise black CRT screen, and when you hit the ball it went ‘ping’ (or ‘pong’) and bounced back. It was endless fun.

Then games got louder, more colorful and more interactive. You could stand in front of your TV and play with yourself, tennis or whatever, waving your arms about while giggling manically. You could pretend to be a character, a lone assassin or an entire army, and play against some insomniac kid over in Korea. And you could pay real money for imaginary stuff you could use in some shoot-em-up game, with real aliens, or build little civilizations like a megalomaniac.

But they were all so 2-D! And you had lots of pointless points, but so what? So they came up with VR, but it was never quite real enough. It made you feel nauseous and you had to wear a silly head thing.

At long last, it occurred to someone called Quentin that the problem with computer games was the computer. Get rid of that, and endless fun could be had again!

So Quentin, the master manipulator, enlisted a host of Russian bots to invent a new game, in which real but not very intelligent people were coerced through FOMO into living their lives in a new reality based on a rough script involving odd urban legends, medieval science, Biblical mythology and nasty things people were saying in the 15th century about Jews…. After all, it had worked before with Catholicism, National Socialism and Scientology.

Thus, QAnon was born, and hopefully shortly afterward died from its own internal contradictions.

End of.

Postscriptum

(This was fairly typical of things Sterling was posting on YouTube at one length or another before, at the beginning of December, he tells me he received out of the blue, an “indefinite” ban for persistently infringing the rules on bullying, hate speech, ad hominem attacks, inciting violence and other crimes against Humanity. Poor Sterling, whom you will know as the BogPo‘s Business correspondent, has impeccable liberal credentials and was, he says, only taking the piss out of Trump supporters, evangelists, alt-right haters, Proud Boys, climate-change deniers, racists, misogynists and obvious trolls in St Petersburg while speaking up for the Good Guys. It was all seemingly too much for the tender sensibilities of moderators too innocent to notice the sheer nastiness and dishonesty of what the others were posting, many fine people, and now he’s banned even from signing-in to listen to jazz albums, following liberal bloggers or looking stuff up.

O Tempora, O Morons.)

Granny’s World of weary watery wisdom

India: As of early Sept. much of the monsoonal flooding that had afflicted Assam since May had subsided. State authorities reported on 10 Sept. that no districts or people were affected anywhere in the state. Since then, more heavy rainfall has brought on a fresh spate of flooding, affecting over 100 villages and over 4,000 ha of crops. 1 more person has died, adding to the 116 previous casualties. (Floodlist)

Vietnam: Tropical Storm Noul made landfall 18 Sept. and has been dumping up to 20-in of rain over mountainous areas. Airports throughout the country were shut down and 1 person is known to have died. (AccuWeather) A foot or more of rain from 15-16 Sept. caused extensive flooding in Myanmar, where 4 people have died and houses destroyed. At least 4 people have died and over 2,000 displaced after flooding in several provinces of West Kalimantan, Indonesia over the last few days. (Floodlist)

Uganda: rescuers are digging in the rubble of a collapsed building in the capital, Kampala, looking for survivors. 2 bodies were found in another part of the city after flash-flooding following a week of rain swamped the city’s roads and caused major disruption to traffic. (Floodlist)

Cape Verde islands: At least 1 person, believed to be a child, died after heavy rainfall brought flooding to the island of Santiago on 12 Sept. Flooding hit the country’s capital, Praia, as well as other parts. Several major roads were blocked, bridges, buildings, farmland and cars damaged. (Floodlist)

Guatemala: 25 thousand people have been affected by flooding and landslides after 8-in of rainfall was recorded overnight in Chimaltenango department.

Greece: An area of low pressure that moved into the Mediterranean earlier this week has strengthened into a “medicane” before turning toward Greece. The low, named Ianos,  moved off the northern coast of Libya on Tuesday and drifted to the north overnight into Wednesday. The Met office has issued an extraordinary weather warning for Greece and the southern tip of Italy, including Sicily. (AccuWeather) CNN is reporting, it could be one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the region. (Since the Odyssey, perhaps? Ed.)

USA: Over 4.6 million acres of land — a portion of the U.S. amounting to the size of Connecticut — is currently burning. The wildfires have scorched over 6 million acres in total, a little over the size of New Hampshire, since Jan.1, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. A total of 87 large fires, not including individual fires within complexes, are burning across 10 states. The death toll is currently 35. (AccuWeather) A storm has brought some relief from the fires to parts of Oregon but wind and dry conditions are forecast to return..

Atlantic: Less than a week after Bermuda was smashed by Hurricane Paula at Cat 1, the island is bracing for impact with an even more powerful Cat 4, Hurricane Teddy. AccuWeather reports: “As of 5 a.m. EDT on Friday, the storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 130 mph and located more than 900 miles southeast of Bermuda moving at a speed of 12 mph.” The forecast track could take 480-miles-wide Teddy on up into New England and Nova Scotia next weekend.

Subtropical Storm Alpha has formed just off the coast of Portugal, becoming the furthest east point a tropical cyclone has ever formed in the Atlantic basin and being only the second time that the Greek alphabet has had to be used to name storms in a hurricane season. Alpha will make landfall shortly with tropical storm sustained winds.

“While the tropical Atlantic is very busy with a monster Category 4 hurricane Teddy, the Gulf of Mexico is expected to form another Tropical Storm today – Beta. By Sunday (20 Sept.), Beta could even intensify into a hurricane. The landfall could occur in Texas early next week, with dangerous flooding, storm surge, and severe winds threat.” (Severe-weather.eu)

Tunnel…

“Thousands of migrating birds have died in south-western US in what ornithologists have described as a national tragedy that is likely to be related to the climate crisis. Flycatchers, swallows and warblers are among the species ‘falling out of the sky’ as part of a mass die-off across New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and farther north into Nebraska.” (Guardian US)

Malnutrition appears to be the probable cause, as the birds were pushed off-course over desert regions by the wildfires raging along the west coast – smoke from which has reached New York. This year’s record dryness and heatwaves are likely to have reduced the insect populations they feed on.

A recent paper from the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the Arctic has entered into a ‘new Arctic climate’ state. “This new climate is one characterized by warmer temperatures, more open water, less sea ice, more rain, and less snow. In the Arctic, weather that used to be considered extreme is becoming the norm. The summer of 2020 is clearly representative of this new Arctic.” (Arctic News)

Arctic News reports, 16 Sept., despite rapidly accelerated melting in the first week of September, the shrinking Arctic sea ice extent still hasn’t managed to beat the record 2012 mid-September low, by about 400 thousand sq km.

Latest sign of the rapidly thawing Siberian permafrost, a 200-metres wide crater filled with ‘sludge’ has opened up on the Gydan peninsula, northern Yakutia. Siberian Times.

Nature Notes, by Old Bugger

Your increasingly forgetful Uncle B. may have bogld recently that he sees no ants in his garden, or anywhere else ants used to live. What has happened to the ants? On reflection, he has seen no swallows here this year either, although there have been plenty of flying insects around for them to, er, swallow.

This morning while out avoiding joggers in the sunshine a faint industrial hum revealed many bees of different species collecting pollen from the cheerful yellow dandelion-like Hypochaeris (Cats’ Ears) growing alongside the cycle path. A slightly more hopeful sign, but a bout of cold weather at the wrong time could set them back again.

As we walked down to look at the river, under the trees in the untended wood, fat acorns were thudding to the ground, while a few leaves are starting to fall. Last month’s storm did quite a bit of damage, the footpaths blocked in places by fallen shallow-rooted trees and broken branches. Trees don’t expect 80-mph gales in August.

An eerie calm descended on the river valley as Hunzi and I were out on our walk the other evening. Sounds of distant traffic were hushed and only a distant caw from a rook broke the silence, which at that time of the evening is usually filled with birds bidding each other goodnight. The cyclists and joggers and noisy parties of youths making fires on the river beach were nowhere in sight. The darkening cloudless sky seemed veiled with a light haze, bronze-colored in the west toward the sea and the setting sun.

What was that about? Just one of those things, nothing bad happened.

Not here, anyway.

Tailpipe…

The Pumpkin -Issue 141: The historic betrayal of the natives… All white now… Policing today… More madness… Granny’s World of fire and fury.

 

QotW….

“Authoritarianism is able to take hold not because you have a strong set of leaders who are forcing their way, it’s more about the fact that we can give away our democracy …  by being complacent. Truth is a victim in this administration, I think it’s Orwellian—the ultimate goal of this president is to get you to disbelieve what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard. My goal now is to remind people of this.” – Lt Col Alexander Vindman, interviewed in The Atlantic, 15 September.

Vindman, attached to the White House security staff, had his military career destroyed after giving evidence under oath to the House impeachment trial that he had sat-in on the “perfect” call to Volodimyr Zelinskyi and distinctly heard Trump in mob-boss mode, attempting to blackmail the inexperienced Ukrainian president into making up a corruption story about his opponent, Joe Biden.

• Heavily satirical picture caption…. here

 

“Trump, the great dealmaker, has rapidly sorted out the intractable Middle East problem where neither The Black Man nor any of his equally inferior predecessors – apart from Abraham Lincoln – could.”

The historic betrayal of the natives

More Gulf states appear to be lining up to join in the betrayal of the Palestinian cause, “normalizing” relations with Israel. Netanyahu and the leaders of tiny but torturous Bahrein and the UAE are in Washington and a historic announcement is expected from the Trump campaign any minute now.

It’s being presented in Washington as a triumph of Trump’s and Kushner’s brilliant international diplomacy, the apex moment of the Art of the Deal. The Pumpkin has, however, found the eagerness of the rulers of the likes of Saudi Barbaria, the UAE and Bahrein, incidentally states with extremely poor human rights records, to make nice with the old enemy, somewhat puzzling. They were all seemingly pals already.

The son-in-law with ten government briefs, Kushner claims that: “The leadership in the region … recognize that the approach that’s been taken in the past hasn’t worked, and they realize that their people want to see a more vibrant and exciting future.”

Well, hava nagila!

It could be true, we all do want that, frankly, but knowing the habit of the Trump administration to lie their heads off about everything to cover up even their most minor delinquencies and pursue financial advantage, their tendency to spin every profitable disaster into a costly triumph, it seems somewhat glib coming from a President whose only known method of diplomatic negotiation has been to demand whatever he wants and if he doesn’t get it, he’ll send the boys round to destroy your economy.

Yes, after 70 years of conflict in the region the modernization of the traditionalist Arab regimes may take the heat out of simmering popular discontent, the Arab Spring people wanting to move on from the Middle Ages. Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine the likes of Mohammed bin-Salman and the rest of the Emirati conceding so much power to the rabble, but as the oil runs dry they’re certainly interested in joining the global gangster-capitalist nexus and improving their technological base.

Israel/America can offer them that, in exchange for an end to the saber-rattling and support for the historic betrayal of the disposable natives, whose 2,000-year tenure of the land hides the fact that they were there long before. Trump enjoys historic betrayals, especially when they benefit Russia.

While the Arab League claims it is still committed to finding the Palestinians a home of their own, one senses a certain irritation with the whole business, as if Mahmoud Abbas has become an uncomfortable reminder of the past, when there are more exciting prizes to be had. And it’s true, all negotiation over the accommodation of the native Palestinians, the so-called “two-state solution”, has broken down in the face of Netanyahu’s bogus religiosity and criminally motivated intransigence.  An end to the already tokenistic Arab support for the cause would be in his electoral interest.

Netanyahu’s part of the deal has thus far been to halt the threatened illegal expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, long recognized by the now irrelevant and sidelined United Nations as the seat of any future Palestinian state. We should remember how tiny the footprint of Israel is, about the size of Wales but with five times the population. The East Bank is such a small part of it, that it would barely span Manhattan Island as a home to two million Palestinians.

And the Jewish settlers still expect to take and develop the land for themselves. As things stand, there is no guarantee the Israeli government will keep its word, as pressure for living space is intense and the humbugs of the religious right possibly the most important factor in maintaining the balance of power, with Netanyahu and Likud party attempting to cling on against mounting opposition from the politically more moderate tough guy, Benny Gantz, in a deeply divided nation.

Covid-19 has brought on a disturbing power-sharing agreement under which Netanyahu and Gantz will alternate the premiership.

Ax a military commander, Gantz led two punitive reprisal expeditions using overwhelming force against lightly armed resistance from the Gaza ghetto and on UN calculation is responsible for the deaths of four thousand Palestinian men, women and children – an accident he has blamed on the Hamas administration.

So, if you’re a moderate Israeli you are in the happy position of being able to choose between a corrupt criminal oligarch in the pockets of the Russian mafia, and someone who appears to have learned his statecraft at the feet of Reinhard Heydrich.

Sorry about that, of course it’s not true. Just a wild exaggeration. Blame the wine.

And then there is Gaza, the walled-in Palestinian – shall we politely call it an enclave? – which inconveniently abuts a large offshore gas field, their rights over which are not fully established in law, despite the well-meaning UN recognition of the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign micro-state.

So energy policy in the region, the scramble between nations for abundant East Mediterranean gas to replace the Arab world’s diminishing oil reserves, must be a factor in a deal that cuts the Palestinians nothing.

A helpful analysis in the Washington Post this morning however suggests that what really lies behind the deal is arms sales.

“The Trump administration greenlit UAE plans to purchase significant American military hardware, including F-35 fighter jets, as a reward for the UAE’s overtures to Israel. The arms deal alarmed both the Israelis and some of the UAE’s neighbors.” The latter being a reference to still embattled Qatar.

“Normalization” with all of its Arab neighbours – Jordan and Egypt long ago sheathed their swords and stabled the camels – would help to allay Israeli concerns over the acquisition by its former enemies of more and more sophisticated – “beautiful” – US weaponry Trump is eager to sell them. I’m not sure that an offer to sell arms for $billions of petrodollars that could otherwise go on educating girls, emancipating women and developing, say, a scientific research base to combat the increasing number of 50-degree days interspersed with ruinous flooding, offers much of an advantage to the buyer, but this is the Middle East.

It’s a crude solution characteristic of Trump’s transactional style and hunger for validation of his disintegrating presidency. What the WaPo doesn’t mention is that one of General Flynn’s missions in the early days of the interim administration was to secretly negotiate the transfer of American nuclear technology to Saudi Barbaria. How much that plays into the quadratic equation of Middle Eastern diplomacy, your Pumpkin is not qualified to say, but it must give both Israel and Iran pause for thought.

Ultimately, however, he has a theory as to what really lies behind this showy pretence that Trump, the great dealmaker, has rapidly sorted out the intractable Middle East problem where neither The Black Man nor any of his equally inferior predecessors – apart, of course, from Abraham Lincoln – could, since time began. Just as he pretended he would.

A few days ago, a far-right Swedish politician, Christian Tybring-Gjedde put forward Trump’s name for the Nobel prize for his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Curiously, this was before the current deal was even announced. And the timing was unfortunate as nominations had already closed. Nevertheless once again, there was Trump, modestly accepting the nomination as if the prize were already in the bag – and this time, unlike last year, he didn’t have to forge his own letter nominating himself.

Trump’s desperate ambition to gain a Nobel lies in his pitiable fear and loathing of Barack Obama, whom the racist Trump, assiduous promoter of “birtherism” and would-be sender of elected representatives of color back to their own “shithole” countries, believes to be the least-deserving recipient ever to dishonor the true “White” White House. However, there would be a peace dividend in that Trump could be seen to be keeping his election pledge to withdraw America from its policing role in the Middle East, after abandoning Syria and Libya to the Russians and Afghanistan to the Russian-funded Taliban. Not to mention the million or so dollars that comes with the gong.

He was dynamite! Alfred Nobel.

Trump naturally believes that with the Nobel on the bureau next to the Lego model of the White House, under the limited-edition Epstein bust of Churchill*, he will have attained the pinnacle of recognition for his imaginary life’s achievement. Anyone less deserving would be hard to find in real-world history. He has no interest in making America great, other than by proving his own greatness to a world that has largely dismissed his brash, self-promoting antics and disparaged his character, holding this superannuated playboy and minor criminal representative of everything that is wrong with Humanity and its tenure of the only habitable planet within 400 light years: the naked greed, the overexploitation of resources, the shallowness and crass stupidity, the moral and cultural bankruptcy – the absolute worst of what we are capable of.

In his failing mind, the Nobel would make his re-election a slam-dunk and validate his stolen presidency; possibly as a precursor to declaring himself President for Life, his next naked ambition before Godhead. Whatever is signed between the Arabs and Israel/Palestine tomorrow only needs to hold until 4 November, then fuck it.

He could care less, fucking losers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/13/middle-east-is-changing-will-palestinians-be-left-behind/?

“It is hard to identify a single point of progress concerning Israeli-Palestinian peace that is the result of U.S. intervention.” – Middle East Institute, cited in WaPo World View.

*I believe there were 10 copies cast in bronze, of Sir Jacob Epstein’s Churchill portrait, commissioned in 1945, shortly after the Great Man lost the postwar UK general election. We had one in the living room for several years before my mother needed to sell it. The US government owns three.

 

All white now

As you know, The Pumpkin is an inverate borrower of other people’s original ideas. Here’s a rare intelligent Post I lifted from the thread beneath an MSNBC/Nicole Wallace interview, 11 September, on how the death of truth is affecting democracy. It’s from someone calling himself David J.

“Richard Spencer, the current face of US’s alt-right, believes Russia is the “sole white power in the world.” David Duke, meanwhile, (a former Grand Wizard of the KKK) believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.” And as Matthew Heimbach, former head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party said, Putin is the “leader of the free world”—one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.”

In March of 2018, Heimbach had himself a spectacular fall.  He was arrested in his trailer after — in a twist as ludicrous as any over the past few years — having an affair with his mother-in-law, and battering his father-in-law when the latter found out. It was a bizarre ending for a man ThinkProgress had dubbed the “most important white supremacist” of 2016. 😂😆

Moscow’s appeal to the American far-right is, in a sense, understandable, if no less worrying. The links between Russia and America’s white nationalists and domestic secessionists have both expanded and deepened over the past few years. Moscow has been busily cultivating relationships with radical right-wingers in Europe.

Links between Moscow and America’s white supremacy movement are far deeper than approving rhetoric. Richard Spencer, for instance, who has said that he “admires” Putin and who has called to break up NATO, also helped organize a 2014 conference in Hungary that was slated to feature, of all people, Alexander Dugin. A political philosopher, Dugin is both a Kremlin confidant and the progenitor of modern “Eurasianism,” which places Russia as the center of global anti-liberalism.

But in reality, it’s a geopolitical theory that is little more than soft cover for Russian imperialism. However Spencer remains married to one of Dugin’s English translators, Nina Kouprianova. Originally from the Soviet Union, Kouprianova — writing under the name “Nina Byzantina” — had whitewashed Putin’s regime at every turn, appearing on Russian propaganda networks as an “independent scholar.”

David Duke (an enthusiastic supporter of Trump until the Republican party asked him politely to distance himself from the campaign – Ed.) sees Russia as a country that “presents an opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. And a few years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center detailed Duke’s close personal ties with another American neo-Nazi, Preston Wiginton, who has made Moscow his adopted home..

In 2016, the Kremlin helped finance a secessionist conference in Moscow, bringing together contingents from Ireland, Spain, and Italy—as well as those from Texas, Puerto Rico, and California. The head of the main group pushing California secession, Louis Marinelli, not only lives in Russia, but opened an “Embassy of the Independent Republic of California” in Moscow. As Marinelli told a Russian interviewer, “In Russia, we have partners who are ready to support us in our aspiration.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87xHE0JNfkY

Thank you, David 6. The story of Russo-American friendships between Christian and far-right groups involves a vastly complex network of influence spanning the globe. You haven’t mentioned the religious dimension, but it involves a grand alliance to bring about the Final Battle between Good and Evil. It’s an ambition weirdly espoused by Secretary of State, “two lunches” Pompeo, who believes the righteous will shed their clothes and ascend bodily to Heaven. The Pumpkin has looked at several aspects of The Thing, btw, in previous Posts.

 

More musical hijinks now, with the wonderful Randy Rainbow, the White House’s favorite gay icon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI8RZhhoBM0&t=50s

 

Policing today

Nobody in their right mind thinks it’s okay to go around shooting police officers or anyone else sitting quietly in cars.

We can presume therefore that the person in a skirt caught on a security camera shooting two police officers in their car in a street in Los Angeles with what looks like a small handgun on 13 September is probably not in their right mind, or they had a personal interest in shooting at those particular officers. Both are out of danger.

Trump has vowed vengeance, naturally, before he has any idea of the circumstances, on the Black Lives Matter protesters and other Antifa terrorists he perceives as being personally antithetical to himself and, hence, the nation. He has never been known to establish any relevant facts before shooting off at the mouth. And in the midst of an election he’s not doing too well in, incidents like this, that are not all that common in America, are red meat for Trump and his hate-fuelled racist dumbfucks.

Forty police officers have been killed in the USA in the line of duty this year; 8 apparently with premeditation. In a vast country with a population of 328 million disturbed and fractious souls owning over 300 million registered firearms and an endemic drugs problem, that’s not so terrible a number as it might be, terrible though it is. It’s hardly indicative of the nationwide breakdown of law and order Trump claims to be happening while ignoring that, in that case, after four years in office it’s happening on his watch, not his putative successor’s.

And it of course pales by comparison with the number of civilians killed by police. Statista reports, “In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004” That the victims are disproportionately of color is not in doubt, although as a single phylum White victims do, it must be said, specifically outnumber African Americans in this regard. Because there are more Whites to begin with.

The total so far in 2020 to end August is given as 661, but the fact is, no-one really knows. Many police jurisdictions opt out of reporting the figures. The USA, according to Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), is head and shoulders above every other country for the rate of police killings of civilians, 3.3 per million per annum – Norway’s ratio by contrast is zero.

We don’t know what the situation is in every country, of course. Mexico, Brazil and the Philippines for instance enjoy semi-official government support for roving police death-squads who kill suspected drug gang members and unwanted children of the barrio ad lib. Deaths by cop in many other countries’ jurisdictions, Colombia for instance, or Chechnya may go under- or un-reported. But the bar graph speaks for itself.

Another startling representation of the sheer lawlessness among US officers is given by PPI in a second diagram showing the raw numbers. While their latest full-year figure for the US in 2019/20 is 1,009, the next-worst country is Canada, with just 36. By comparison, police in England opened fire 13 times that year, an exceptionally high number, killing just 3 people. In 2011, a year when only 2 suspects were fatally shot, the killing of suspected gang messenger Mark Duggan, a young Black man whose ‘gun’ turned out to be a cellphone, sparked days of rioting in which 5 people died.

PPI concludes: “There is no question that the number of police killings of civilians in the U.S. – who are disproportionately Black and other people of color – are the result of policies and practices that enable and even encourage police violence.”

You will hear it argued in response to this latest outrage that no killing justifies another killing. Tell that to the uniformed cowboys of conservative America.

 

More madness…

The ruthless and cynical gerrymandering of electoral constituencies without which, Trump said a while ago, the Republicans would never win another seat, continues apace.

A Florida appeals court has ruled that previously convicted felons, even those no longer on parole, who still owe money to the State for fines and costs of imprisoning them, cannot vote in the 2020 election. There are several hundred thousand in that position, many of them too poor to pay but who would otherwise qualify. The ruling is in direct violation of the 24th Amendment. As the majority of felons are Black, and as the majority of Blacks vote Democrat…. Florida is a marginal state for Trump and notoriously was where, in 2000, the Supreme Court blocked a recount, handing W Bush victory by just 537 votes – robbing Al Gore of the presidency.

Meanwhile in Georgia, where Republican Governor Kemp cheated his way to victory in 2018 by failing to register 150 thousand new voters in good time, acccording to Buzzflash: “The new Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has purged more than 310,000 additional voters, claiming they had moved away. (Investigative reporter) Greg Palast and the ACLU, however, conducted a study and found that more than 195,000 of these voters had indeed not moved away.”

Meanwhile on the notorious Infowars website, Trump crony, fixer and dirty trickster, Roger Stone, whose 7-year jail sentence Trump recently had the Justice Department commute, has told crazy Alex Jones and his millions of even crazier followers that if Trump loses, he should immediately invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress any dissent, declare martial law to put the army on the streets, shutdown leftwing media and round-up the Clintons and other political opponents, as well as a list he named of critical journalists, and put them on trial on treason charges.

Trump’s chilling response? “We have the power”.

Indeed, so powerful is Trump, that at a formal signing in the Oval Office of an apparent diplomatic accord between Serbia and Kosovo, that neither side had formally agreed to, another Nobel-winning triumph, Trump announced that Serbia would be moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, enhancing Middle East peace. The announcement came as a surprise to President Vucic. The Serbian leader later said Belgrade would not relocate its embassy to Jerusalem if Kosovo opened one there. On Twitter, Trump hailed the agreement as a great day for “Middle East peace”, possibly unaware that Serbia and Kosovo are in Europe. (Reporting: Washington Post)

….and so omniscient is Trump, so wise and all-seeing, so powerfully educated and such a stable genius that:

“US President Donald Trump has dismissed concerns over climate change on a visit to fire-ravaged California, telling an official ‘I don’t think science knows’ about global warming.

“‘It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.'” (BBC News)

And this morning people are wondering what exactly he meant when he told a ‘town hall’ meeting several times that Covid would go away by itself because of “herd mentality”. Another sign of his mental disintegration.

Well, Uncle John was an electrical engineer, so if “Uncle John” was his biological father he’s inherited a complete knowledge of science and medicine. He’ll know then that the quickest way to reverse global warming and send Covid packing will be to institute a nuclear winter.

Beyond madness

Reports are emerging of a disproportionate number of forcible hysterectomies being carried out at an ICE detention facility in Georgia, LaSalle South Corrections, remember the name, on immigrant women seeking asylum.

Trump has ordered a criminal investigation of his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, over Bolton’s criticisms of him in his recent book.

 

Granny’s World of fire and fury

STOP PRESS: “Hurricane Sally has brought ‘historic and catastrophic flooding’ to the southern US as it inches ashore. The National Hurricane Center reported flooding from Tallahassee, Florida to Mobile Bay in Alabama. It also warned of a ‘life-threatening’ storm surge and river flooding inland as far as Georgia. (BBC Weather)

Slow-moving Sally landed 200 miles further east than expected, in the Florida panhandle, with sustained windspeed of 105 mph (Cat 2). NY Times reports: as dawn broke, “videos from residents and local media outlets showed images of homes that had been ripped apart by the howling winds, boats torn from their moorings and power lines downed in many towns and cities. And everywhere, water.” NWS Mobile reports, downtown Pensacola was under 3-4 feet of water and rising. Nearing half a million people were without power.

Nepal: Over 30 people are dead or missing after landslides and flooding triggered by heavy rainfall in Sindhupalchok District, overnight 12 to 13 Sept. 141.2 mm of rain was recorded on 13 Sept. (Floodlist)

DR Congo: at least 50 gold miners have been killed in a collapse following flooding from a nearby river, brought on by heavy rain on 11 Sept. “The area produces nearly all Congo’s gold but artisanal excavation techniques are unregulated and highly dangerous”. (Floodlist)

Mauritania: Many countries in East African have seen heavy rainfall since 01 September. Flooding damaged infrastructure including bridges, river embankments and water supply. It’s estimated that around 10,000 people from 1,380 households are affected, with over 700 people homeless. 7 fatalities were reported, with 1 person still missing. (Floodlist)

Bermuda: Residents were being urged to prepare to protect life and property ahead of Cat 1 Hurricane Paulette, while Tropical Storm Sally threatened to intensify into a Cat 2 hurricane as it approached the United States’ Gulf Coast. (Al Jazeera) The biggest threats to the island were strong winds, storm surge, up to 15cm (6- in.) of rain and life-threatening surf and rip currents.

USA: Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency Saturday ahead of Hurricane Sally, due to hit Tuesday night (15th). Officials in the New Orleans area issued a mandatory evacuation order for areas outside of levee protection. Several other storm systems out of West Africa are being monitored for signs of intensification.

Update Tuesday: Cat 2 Sally has slowed to a crawl – just 2 mph – a development which threatens to bring “firehosing” rainfall to coastal communities. Overnight, some places received over 30 inches of rain, which is still falling.

The Bear Fire in Butte County, N. California has burned through 250,000 acres and forced the evacuation of a summer camp for families with kids with cancer, which has been totally destroyed.

Atlantic: Tropical Depression 20 has turned into Tropical Storm Teddy, expected to become a Cat 3 hurricane by Thursday. Its forecast path could result in another battering for Bermuda after last weekend’s Hurricane Paulette but no mainland landfall is anticipated as Teddy turns northeastward into the mid-Atlantic over colder waters. The next depression, 21, is already forming and forecast to become Tropical Storm Vicky. Hurricane season does not officially end until the end of November. The Hurricane Center expects to have run through the alphabet of names in the next couple of weeks, by the end of the week, whereafter they resort to Greek letters. (AccuWeather)

Pacific: We read a lot about Typhoon Maysak plowing up the Korean peninsula last month. Siberian Times is reporting on its arrival in Vladivostock, where a unique beach covered in colourful glass pebbles was wrecked by the power of the storm.

“One of the most popular attractions among residents and visitors of Vladivostok barely survived the force of typhoon Maysak which recently ploughed through the Far East of Russia. More than 140,000 people were left without electricity, 3 were killed in accidents caused by the strongest wind Primorye saw since 1969.

“Roofs on dozens of buildings in Vladivostok were ripped away, bridges had to be shut, multiple summer campsites were destroyed, households on the outskirts of both cities flooded.”

Siberian Times. The ‘glass pebbles are in fact just sand-and-tide polished refuse’. This is Russia, after all.

 

The folly of appeasement… The white stuff… Why you can trust BBC News… Once upon a time in America (medley)… Granny’s World.

QotW

“Why would I desire to be all powerful? Being all powerful is not an interesting goal. I don’t care whether I am or not, I don’t get a motivating factor to try to be. Furthermore, it is quite tiring. Believe me, being omnipotent doesn’t get me anywhere.”

• GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, has written a guest op-ed for The Guardian. Its thesis, basically, is that AI doesn’t need to destroy Mankind because we’re making such good job of it ourselves. Do I detect a hint of XR about it?

 

All right, who’s stolen the fucking bins?

 

“When no-one is required to do any actual dying, the revolution stalls.”

The folly of appeasement

The new Director-General of the BBC, Tim Davie, has launched his period in office with a clarion call to push what many believe to be the leftwing bias, and what many others perceive to be the rightwing bias, of the Corporation back to some mythical centre ground, or perhaps floating above it, in order to please a hostile Cabinet that feels hard done-by because they won an election and it must be somebody’s fault.

There in No Man’s Land, nobody need have any thoughts about it at all, other than to continue whingeing about the extremely modest licence fee of £3 a week for all that news, children’s programmes, dance-offs, Icelandic murder-mysteries, riveting 10-day snooker tournaments, TV, radio, a catch-up service and a free website, when they seem perfectly happy to pay £20 a week more to Sky or BT just to add football in real time and a camera shot pointed for hours at some woman’s jiggling buttocks while her mates shout telephone numbers at you.

Rightwing TV, in other words.

Arses or no, Mr Davie’s campaign started badly, however. His suggestion that his comedy-show commissioners should drag in more right-wing, pro-Brexit, send-back-the-drowning-migrants performers who can elevate Dom Cummings to the status of a national comedy idol attracted a certain amount of ridicule. Professional comedians pointed out that bungling fascists, post-constructivist Randians with country mansions and taxi-drivers from Ilford are not intrinsically funny, other than as subjects for cruel jibes.

The idea that you could fill half-an-hour with material from the Nigel Farage jokebook seems to die gasping, once you have uttered the hilarious words, “That Michel Barnier, eh? What’s that about?”

But there is some merit in pointing out that by pushing forward larky, kneejerk comedians milking lazy stereotypes on the right, limp nod-and-a-wink gags starring Michael Gove, on tiresome quiz-lite, smartarse panel shows whose ossified formats rest on cherished assumptions of audience complicity, the left is doing itself no favours. When no-one is required to do any actual dying, the revolution stalls.

The sad truth is, nothing is going to save the BBC from dismemberment and selloff. You can never please the John Bullingham fanatics on the Tory right until you accept that playing Land of Hope and Glory on an endless loop while a horde of retired bank managers from the golf club ecstatically wave the Union flag is a ratings winner. As one of the bedrock institutions of 20th-century British culture it’s ripe for destruction, along with British culture.

Mr Davie might consider bringing back some less woke TV comedies – ‘Til Death Us Do Part, f’rinstance; On The Buses; that one where the young Don Warrington had to put up with endless, gloomy racist bantz from Leonard Rossiter. They’d certainly attract more Brexiting viewers than Have I Got News For You, that monument to the power of somnambulism. Behind those shows was an obviously naive hope that the British public would eventually take these scary, dark-skinned interlopers with their barbarous accents and smelly food to the nation’s heart.

Whatever entertainment he puts on for the licence-holders’ benefit, however much he tries to suppress any hint of partisanship leaking onto the Twitter accounts of his very well-paid broadcasters, Davie’s going to get it in the neck from someone. Once he realizes that he can’t win just by keeping Fiona Bruce on Question Time, we can all settle down with a can of lager and a packet of Hobnobs, dreaming of Empire.

 

The white stuff

Speaking of woke, we’ve heard a lot from that David Olusoga recently. The eminent TV historian and Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester is a person of colour; not so much African-looking, if you’ll pardon me observing politely his physical appearance, but born in Nigeria and hence ethnic enough to qualify as a spokesperson for the black community on the racial bias that afflicts the broadcasting business.

Now, to pass the time while on lock-in, I’ve been binge-watching many TV series, and being an out and out racist, casually observing the employment of Black, Asian and Middle Eastern actors, and I should say it’s East Europeans who have most cause for complaint. A variety of dreadful accents proliferates among the cultural misappropriations of heavily-armed Albanian drug-dealers and murderous Chechen people-traffickers by otherwise okay British actors who have never worked east of Clacton pier.

While not making notes, nevertheless I should like to mention that I have spent many hours cringing at the hideous level of detail as wonderfully gruesome prostheses have been splayed and flayed on mortuary slabs: burnt corpses, gaping chest and thoracic cavities, dismembered victims retrieved from suitcases in canals, bodies with no signs of a struggle but terrible toxicology reports. I’ve become an expert on blowfly larvae….

Yes, okay, I have a socio-pathological predilection for crime-scene investigations. Preferably ones in which one or other of the pathologists has been accused of professional negligence by Deep State political actors and/or bereaved relatives’ hearse-chasing lawyers and must fight to prove her or his competence against growing suspicion, despite missing blunderbuss clues until almost at the end, and am thus glued almost nightly to a show called Silent Witness, that I’ve bogled about before, as it clearly haunts me.

Aside from the preposterous premise that forensic scientists and pathologists with almost as many skeletons in the family closet as there are in the fridge are allowed to go about grilling witnesses in a state of heightened emotion and chasing suspects in police enquiries, and the possibly less preposterous premise that all coppers are bent and incompetent malcontents, impatient to get their cases wrapped up and promotion in the bag, I’ve noticed something else that’s significant. and I don’t mean how tiny Emilia Fox (Dr Nikki Alexander – feckless father issues, pretty but sex-starved (Silent Wetness?) – would be if she weren’t wearing eight-inch heels to work:

With one major change of cast, the show has been running since 1996, mostly six double-episodes per annual series, 23 series in all – 208 episodes, supposedly. I’ve seen all of them, the i-Player algorithm reminds me. You soon begin to recognize the same actors being recycled or regenerated into new characters, as even in showbiz-career-obsessed Britain there’s a limit to the depth of the pool. I’m relying on the Wiki for numbers, but it’s a lot of corpses on slabs. And one thing I can assure Professor Olusoga of, I promise you.

Every single episode I have watched, without exception, even ones involving headless East European drug mules washing up in droves on the foreshore at Rotherhithe, has contained far more than one Black, Asian or Middle Eastern actor, sometimes whole families living on estates together; often playing varied, interesting characters: teachers, diplomats, wicked doctors, witch doctors, business leaders, business losers, mechanics, senior and junior police officers, children – many in mixed-race lesbian relationships, or in mute supporting roles, and no-one on-screen has yet uttered a single race-related remark.

Some of them even end up on a slab!

Too many and too often to count as accidental, the use of so many ethnic minority actors in the show was clearly policy from the beginning, over 20 years ago. Fair do’s, a good reflection of the real multicultural Britain, and most of them bloody good.  Plus, of course, we have the profoundly disabled Liz Carr in a leading role, that of the forensic analyst Clarissa Mullery; and occasionally other disab. characters – even a frustrated copper in a wheelchair, whose boss has fired his carer ro save money. It’s worth remarking, this was not the only BBC series running at the time that paid full attention to complaints that black actors weren’t getting a fair crack of the whip.

It may be Olusoga’s contention that racial bias lies more in the technical production and administrative areas of the industry. Fewer names one might associate with ethnic minorities appear in the production credits, it’s true. And it’s obvious that they are underrepresented, if at all, at the top tables of management. So I can’t answer to that. It may simply be that, perhaps for historical and cultural reasons, those people are not entering the system in numbers in the first place and so are not available for promotion, or they are still working their way up the greasy pole. You don’t need an Oxbridge degree to become an actor, but programme accountants need their articles.

Are Black and Asian writers’ voices not being heard on TV, is that it? Are they even there? Perhaps they’re writing for other media; chasing the Booker dream. Because when you look, say, at the writers’ credits for online media, Guardian Opinion being an outstanding case in point, Black and Asian and Middle Eastern writers’ credits are now well in the majority.

Speaking from a position of white privilege, I can say I’ve had most if not all of my submissions and applications turned down, along with the best of them. Which is why I’ve grown an antenna for special pleaders. If Professor Olusoga can make it big, it’s possibly a little disingenuous to suggest others can’t, if they too have the right stuff. I really don’t think the BBC is deliberately keeping them down, do you?

 

Why you can trust BBC News…

Once again, the BBC News website has mysteriously carried a lengthy obit. announcing the death of Hollywood funny man, Gene Wilder.

I first bogld about this odd happenstance back in September 2018, when BBC “News”, that it explains at the end of every article why you can trust it, ran the exact same piece again that they had run the day Wilder died, sadly with Alzheimer’s, two years before that, on 29 Aug., 2016.

This man has died and been resurrected more times than Jesus. Only when you get to the bottom of the page do you find a modest acknowledgment of the pertinent fact that “This article is more than four years old”. News you can trust, in other words.

Why? Is it some sort of engineering test? A gap-filler? A coded message for Russian spies?

Is it because it’s close to the anniversary and they can’t be bothered to rewrite it and obtain new tribute quotes from his fellow celebs? Some kind of training exercise for new page subs? Clickbait? Do they want us to let them know we’re still awake and paying attention?

Or is it that you can’t trust BBC News not to fuck it up sometimes?

We ought to be told.

 

Once upon a time in America

Kids’ lives don’t matter

Police in Salt Lake City, Utah, shot an unarmed 13-year-old boy multiple times in the back as he tried to run away, and then restrained him in handcuffs. He’s in a critical condition. Autistic Linden Cameron suffered a meltdown when his mother was forced to go back to work after months on furlough, and she requested back-up. (New York Times) People with autism are disproportionately likely to be harmed in encounters with American police. Even white boys.

Doc’s bill

“When Dr. Zachary Sussman went to Physicians Premier ER in Austin for a COVID-19 antibody test, he assumed he would get a freebie because he was a doctor for the chain. Instead, the free-standing emergency room charged his insurance company an astonishing $10,984 for the visit — and got paid every penny, with no pushback.” ( ABC News/Texas Tribune)

Pour encourager les Autrichiens

Many elderly people in Austria and some other countries are reportedly grateful to have received $1,200 Treasury checks, or cheques, paid out in error under the US government’s Covid stimulus scheme, through the post. It seems they’re people with prior work experience in the USA but who haven’t lived there for years and are not eligible for benefits. Red-faced officials are threatening that if they dare to cash the cheques they won’t be allowed into the country ever again. (Washington Post)

Running for their lives

If as he says Trump ignored the pandemic in the beginning because he didn’t want to put the Dem in panic, why did he run for president, we wonder? Watergate reporter, Carl Bernstein has declared Trump’s refusal to act to control the virus as the “greatest presidential felony in history”, after a tape of a last-February interview with his former colleague, Bob Woodward came out, on which Trump admitted deliberately allowing tens of thousands of Americans to die unnecessarily. (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) Former DoJ prosecutor, Glenn Kirschner has made a case for indicting Trump for murder in the 2nd degree, and he’s not kidding. (“Justice Matters”, on YouTube)

Hot pants

Responding to reports of the tape, White House press spokesmouth and woman who looks like she was dropped on her head as a baby, Kayleigh McEnany flatly denied Trump had been misleading about the danger of the coronavirus. “The president never downplayed the virus,” she asserted with great authority. Happily for the truth, the Washington Post has recorded all 108 occasions on which Trump did actually downplay the threat from the virus, which he admits on the tape he did deliberately.

“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” – Donald J Trump.

Revving it up

Researchers in Germany have concluded that a 10-day motorcycle rally endorsed by Trump in the small town of Sturgis, S Dakota in early August that attracted half a million visitors is linked to a ‘superspreader’ event, with over 250 thousand ensuing Covid-positive cases having been tracked and traced to date, resulting in a bill in healthcare and other public costs likely exceeding $12 billion. (Mother Jones)

Who ya gonna call?

A Quinnipiac poll finds that 64% of Americans believe Trump committed crimes before he was President. His former “fixer”, jailed for tax fraud and campaign finance violations, at 50% Michael Cohen gets a 15% higher believability rating than the president. But despite being impeached for extorting favors from a foreign power by illegally witholding Congressionally approved funding, fined $2 million for robbing his own charity foundation, countless emoluments and Hatch Act violations, lying to the FBI, blatant witness intimidation and being accused by Mueller on ten sample counts of obstructing justice, only 45% of Americans seem to understand that he’s committed crimes while in office.  (MSNBC)

Racist, moi?

Trump has issued a written “cease and desist” order, prohibiting diversity and racial sensitivity training from all federal government agencies. He had his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, draft and release a letter, claiming that diversity training is “divisive, anti-American propaganda”. (Glenn Kirschner) Trump-appointee, Vought is a virulent Islamophobe. He’s a former Vice President of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the mothership conservative wank-tank funded by the Koch brothers that lobbied heavily to defund Obamacare.

On the move

The Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University has “conservatively” estimated that at least 37 million people have been displaced by wars linked to the U.S. response after 9/11. (Washington Post)

 

“Black Lives Matter is a subject that’s important to me, because I was actually brought up by a couple of anti-racists. My auntie Margaret and my auntie Jean.” – Frankie Boyle. (Better if you hear it in a Glaswegian accent.)

 

Granny’s World

Sandy Huffaker / AFP / Getty

California: If you’re not watching the cruxifixion of the American west, you’re not watching. It is quite literally Armaggeddon.

“Wildfires have burned more than 2m acres (809,000 hectares) in the state this year, setting a new record as crews battled dozens of growing blazes in sweltering temperatures Monday that strained the electrical grid and threatened power outages for millions.” The Creek Fire alone has destroyed more than 114 square miles (295 square kilometers) of timber after breaking out Friday. (Reporting: Guardian US) Dry, hot winds are predicted to raise fire danger to critical levels in the coming days.

The New York Times reports, 8 Sept:

“Utilities in Oregon and Washington State reported that tens of thousands of their customers were without power on Tuesday.” 170 thousand homes had been cut off to prevent power lines starting new fires. Some customers could remain in the dark for as long as two days.” The PG&E utility has just accepted responsibility for the manslaughter of 85 people who died in 2018, trapped by a fast-moving fire in the town of Paradise.

“The Bobcat fire in Angeles national forest, which erupted shortly after noon Sunday, is consuming 1,000 acres every 30 minutes.” (Guardian, 10 Sept.) Driven by dry Santa Ana winds off the Rockies, more than 90 large fires are burning from southern California and Arizona through the Pacific states up to Alaska. 7 more have died, including two children trapped in cars; many more are missing, while property losses are mounting and several small rural townships have been entirely burned to the ground.

Half a million residents in Oregon – 10% of the state’s population – have fled or been ordered to stand by to evacuate their homes ahead of uncontained fires that have burned nearly a million acres. (Guardian)

USA: Everyone is commenting on the unusually vertiginous 24-hour plunge in several states from 90-degree summer heat to winter-like conditions and temperatures in the 30s. Rapid City, S Dakota was hit by a ferocious blizzard overnight, although it’s not been cold enough yet for snow to settle. In Denver, Colorado, it’s been down to 35 °F, 3 deg. above freezing, and rain has turned to snow. Emergency crews were out rescuing residents of Cleveland, Ohio, 7 Sept. from flash floods. This isn’t really normal for early September.

Washington DC got a taste of flooding on the 10th, with nearly 3 inches of rain falling in one two-hour period.

Update: 40 mph Tropical Storm Sally is passing over southern Florida and is expected to intensify on 14 Sept. to a 100 mph Cat 2 hurricane by the time it whacks New Orleans. Evacuation notices have been issued. The Keys have been experiencing between 8-12 inches of rain from this system.

India: monsoonal rains are stalled out in two areas, one over the east coast and the other up in the Ganges delta, threatening the megacities of Mumbai and Kolkata with between 2-4 and 8 inches of rain possibly causing flooding and transport disruption towards the end of the week.

Heart of wetness

Many parts of Africa have experienced exceptionally heavy and prolonged seasonal rains in 2020, causing widespread flood damage to food crops and homes.

In Sudan, a national state of emergency has been declared for the next three months as both the White and Blue Nile rivers continue to rise to historic levels, inundating miles of countryside and ruining food crops. Heritage authorities are battling to protect the country’s ancient pyramids from flooding. “The site at al-Bajrawiya is home to a host of ruins more than 2,300 years old” – older and pointier than Egypt’s more famous structures. Countrywide, floods have killed nearly 100 people and made thousands homeless.” (BBC Weather, et al.)

Parts of Senegal recorded more than 200mm of rain in 24 hours on 05 Sept. The capital. Dakar, recorded more than 100mm. A state of emergency has been declared as at least 6 people have died as a result of flooding in several parts of the country. (Floodlist) At least 9 people have lost their lives and 330 thousand are displaced after flooding in parts of Burkina Faso, Niger and northern Ghana, West Africa, from late August. Heavy rain and flooding continue in Ethiopia, with over 500,000 people affected and around 300,000 displaced since July.

Around 20 people have died in floods in northern Nigeria. Thousands of acres of crops and 10s of thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed. (Floodlist) In North Africa, a child died and hundreds of homes were damaged after flash flooding followed torrential rain in northern Algeria.

Atlantic: As of 10 Sept there were no fewer than 7 hurricanes or Tropical Storms active in the region – yes, another record and all of them a fortnight earlier than past storms starting with the same initial. P-for “Paulette” is threatening landfall in Bermuda. “Sally” is shaping up to be the next big one aimed at the US mainland by next weekend. (Washington Post/AccuWeather)

Europe: Severe-weather.eu is offering us an “Indian summer” high-pressure heatwave 6 to 10 °C above normal for the time of year, spreading across the continent from Africa at the weekend and pushing on up into Scandinavia, northern Russia and the UK by Monday, with temperatures staying up in the mid-30s C across central Europe for most of the week.

Tunnel….

The Bear Creek fire, 9 Sept. (Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty)

And now it’s snowing!

This doesn’t happen very often either…. (AccuWeather chart)

Grim Reaper

RIP Formidable and statuesque Avengers actress, Dame Diana Rigg, 82. Avenged at last!

RIP Toots Hibbert, 77, one time rival to Bob Marley and leader of top reggae band Toots and the Maytals.

RIP Sir Terence Conran, 88, designer of modern Britain.

 

Tailpipe…

The next time anyone tells you that capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, you should point out that the UN’s baseline definition of poverty is an income of less than $3.20 a day. (Guardian)

The Pumpkin – Issue 140: The madness of King Donald (Did they Novi-choke? etc.)… How to rig an election… Mister grifter… Granny’s World of flood and, er, flood…

 

Incidentally, this is my 900th Post since The BogPo began as a few experimental scribbles in February, 2011. Beat that, Mr Tolstoy!

 

“Are you sure this is what the science says we’re meant to do instead of shaking hands? Only I have to see Her Majesty the Queen shortly…”

Tweet of the Week

“The Dow Jones Industrial just closed above 29,000! You are so lucky to have me as your President…”

Trump takes credit for pushing the national debt to $30 trillion by subsidizing record-debt-laden US corporations with his socialist welfare program for the rich: to print money ad lib, so they can buy back their stock, grossly overenrich their undeserving CEOs, order the yacht and further inflate the historic bubble that is the market – a slap in the face for ordinary Americans facing rising prices and mass unemployment.

3 Sept. the Dow closed off by 3.3% as markets tumbled on bad economic news and a slump in tech stocks. Apple lost more money in a day than Unilever is worth in total. Yes, so lucky.

The madness of King Donald…

Did they Novi-choke?

The German government is persuaded beyond doubt that they have scientific proof that Putin’s political nemesis, Alexei Navalny, in a coma in a Berlin hospital, was poisoned with a military-grade Novichok nerve agent while on a flight from Omsk to Moscow.

It’s believed their chemical warfare experts consulted with colleagues at Porton Down who were involved in investigating the poisonings of defector, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2019, using a similar agent. The two GRU colonels who carried out the poisoning have been charged in absentio.

Trump however has portentously announced that he has “seen no proof” that Navalny was poisoned on the order of the Kremlin – not that he would be capable of evaluating the evidence, as he neither reads briefs nor trusts his own security advisors to produce a convincing cartoon version, and has no background in chemistry or international relations.

He suggests instead that while the incident of which he has seen no proof was a terrible thing, we should focus instead on China.

Ooh look, a squirrel.

Is he seriously saying he believes China tried to murder a leading Russian political dissident? Is he protecting his master, Vladimir Putin, who can do no wrong, again? Or is he just winding-up Angela Merkel, as he hates powerful and popular female leaders?

Denying any involvement, the Kremlin has suggested Mr Navalny had collapsed from “a simple lack of breakfast”.

How to rig an election

Trump has been urging his supporters in North Carolina to vote for him twice, once by mail and once in person, to see if they get away with it. “It” being voter fraud. It’s a Federal crime punishable by up to 5 years in jail to vote twice.

Obviously he’s still trying to convince everyone that even if he wins, the election will have been rigged against him because people were allowed to vote by mail, a perfectly legal and valid method which he is doing his damnedest to stop, as it favors Democratic voters unwilling to head for the polls in person while fear stalks the land. Nonetheless, it’s still incitement under US Code §20511; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/52/20511

Asked what he thought about that, United States Attorney-General William Barr responded disingenuously that he didn’t know precisely what the law says in every state about voting twice. This miserable fraud is taking the piss, frankly, and has blatantly set about re-engineering the Justice Department and the courts to protect the president and his criminal associates.

Barr has been given 14 days to come up with a list of Democrat-run cities where Trump can claim their administrators are dangerous anarchists. In a memo, he has called for defunding so-called Sanctuary cities where minimal efforts are made to find and deport the immigrants who make up the vital workforce that does all the dirty jobs; and cities where there have been BLM protests if any have led to violence.

Burying Russia

A report from the NSA that intelligence officers had discovered that – among other tricks – Russian troll farms had been putting out false stories on social media about Democratic candidates including Sen. Biden having mental and physical health issues, was diverted to the office of the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, unqualified Trump appointee Chad Wolf.

Two months ago.

Substitute voter

During his visit to Kenosha, Winn. in the wake of protests following the police shooting of an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, and the killing of two protestors by Trump supporter, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, Trump had himself photo-opped in the smoldering ruins of a burned-out store with the poor owner, who expressed his deep gratitude and appreciation for the President’s visit. Only it turns out, the man wasn’t the real store owner, who’d declined to be used as a political pawn, but just some random guy.

The Biggest Loser

A story by senior editor Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, 3 Sept., quotes four people who were present on the day in 2018 when Trump canceled a visit to honor America’s First World War war dead in France because it was raining.

Trump claimed at the time that his military helicopter could not fly because of the weather – they lose many wars – but witnesses say he told them it was because he didn’t like to get his elaborate hairdo wet. Worse still:

“In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’ In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives (charging machine-gun nests in open formation across a wheat field at Belleau Wood – an emblematic battle for the corps) – as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies. “Who were the good guys in this war?”, he asked, presumably recalling his German roots.

“Mr” Trump is of course famous for the five medical exemptions his father bought him from doing military service in Vietnam. Do not be surprised to hear, however, that it gets even worse…

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers

Trump has since claimed he would never have said those things. Look, he says, I phoned Melania at the White House to tell her how sad I was not to be able to go to the cemetery because of the bigly rain and the soggy ‘copter.

Melania – his wife, remember – was with him in France that day. (Story: Buzzflash)

Has he finally crossed the line between compulsive, expedient lying and delusionary psychosis? A protracted  rant to a tightly packed, unmasked crowd of his dumbfucks about plastic straws would suggest so.

 

Mister grifter

I’m sick of the servile respect Mark Thompson’s New York Times continues to pay to Orange Adolf, continually referring to the would-be first US monarch since Mad King George by the honorific “Mr.”

If plain “Trump”, as one might refer to the common criminal he is, is good enough for the Senate Intelligence Committee, it’s good enough for Times readers. It’s a bit like MSNBC bleeping out the perfectly innocent word “bullshit” in case old ladies fall to the floor with shock. American double-standards are bizarre. You could put serial killer Ted Bundy in the White House and they’d still grovel to the office.

The committee, under the chairmanship of Republican Senator Richard Burr, described “Trump and his associates” in a thousand-page report at the conclusion last month of their five-volume investigation into Trump’s Russian collusion, as “the single most grave counterintelligence threat to national security in the modern era.”

That would presumably include the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, who went to the electric chair in 1953 for allegedly spying for the USSR. The evidence against them was flimsy, especially Ethel, but unlike Trump they were Jewish, so it counted double.

Mister? President? I don’t think so. His prisoner number in Guantanamo will do.

 

Granny’s World of flood and, er, flood

Stormy weather: Rescuers were searching for two children swept away in a car by floodwaters in North Carolina as torrential rain and big waves from Tropical Storm Omar approaching hurricane force off the east coast swept coastal areas of the state. It’s not expected to make landfall. More systems are emerging from West Africa and may begin to organise over the Cape Verde islands. Yet another round of violent thunderstorms in the southern Great Plains is producing “relentless” rain, with flash floods forecast. (AccuWeather)

In the southern Caribbean, Tropical Storm Nana is strengthening to Cat 1 hurricane force, heading directly westward toward Belize. In the eastern Pacific, Cat 3 supertyphoon Maysak is grinding its way up the east side of the Korean peninsula, bearing 8 inches of rain and 110-mph winds; North Korean TV  broadcast pictures of a flooded Pyongyang; while behind Maysak, the even bigger Tropical Storm Haishen is following precisely along the same track and rapidly intensifying toward supertyphoon Cat 5 status.

Die Welle reports:”Japan’s coastguard has rescued one person* as it searched for a vessel with nearly 6,000 livestock and 43 crew members on board. The survivor said the ship hit a big wave, turned over and sank as Typhoon Maysak wreaked havoc in the region.”

*Later reported to have died.

Update Friday 4th: Monster storm Haishen reaching top-end Cat 4 (155 mph sustained ws) with a central pressure of just 915 mb is bearing down on the Ryukyu islands, southern Japan/Kyushu and heading for South Korean city of Wusan as the third major typhoon in less than a month. Evacuations and other emergency procedures are in progress.

Monday 7th – Aftermath: Colder water churned up by typhoon Maysak and a weather front took some of the power out of Haishen by the time it reached the Korean peninsula as a Cat-2 equivalent but several people were killed on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The storm knocked out two turbines at a nuclear power station.

Pakistan: More days of 100mm-plus rains falling over Khyber and Swat provinces have brought more floods, with a further 30 casualties occurring between 28 Aug and 3 Sept. to add to the previous death toll of 19 and many injuries, mostly caused by collapsing structures. Disaster authorities in Nepal report that at least 12 people have died and 41 are missing after flooding and landslides washed away houses. (Floodlist)

USA: 5 Sept. Rescuers were airlifting people to safety, some with severe burns, after more than 220 became trapped by a rapidly evolving wildfire near Fresno, Cal. Campers were advised to jump into Mammoth Lake to escape the flames. At least 2,000 structures were threatened by the Creek fire, covering over 36 thousand acres near the San Joaquin River. (The Mercury News) Searing heat has led to emergency regulations ordering rolling power blackouts as air conditioners overload the grid.

Another firefighter has died in the wildfires that have burned 1.5 million acres of central and northern California, bringing total casualties to 8. More than 15 thousand firefighters are making progress at last against 19 major outbreaks, with the help of cooler, wetter conditions, and many people have been able to return to their homes – leaving “only” 27 thousand displaced in temporary shelters. (CalFire)

The weekend however sees the return of the long-running heatwave in the west, especially across southern California. “Temperatures are likely to exceed 100 °F (38 °C) in downtown Los Angeles both days this weekend. Even at the coast, 90s are expected.” (AccuWeather) “The magnitude of the heat is quite significant and can lead to record temperatures, potentially for several days in some areas.” e.g. Sunday 6th: Sacramento 111 °F, LA 109 °F, Las Vegas 114 °F, Phoenix 112 °F…. (42 to 45 °C)

A temperature of 121 °F, 48.4 °C was recorded in Los Angeles county, 6 Sept.

Heatwave temperatures in the high °90s Monday in the Denver area are forecast to vanish overnight, falling into the °30s on Tuesday, with maybe accumulations of snow later on. (Washington Post)

Honduras: Hurricane Nana blew ashore in Belize as a low-end Cat 1, eventually dissipating over the Guatemala/Mexico border, but not before dumping 300 mm of rain in places. About 4 thousand people were evacuated to shelters.

Sudan: as rivers including the Blue and White Niles rise to levels not seen in 100 years, a state of emergency has been declared across the whole country, where the death toll in extensive floods is put at 99, with others injured, 500 thousand affected and more than 100 thousand homes damaged. There’s no sign of an end to the rain. (Guardian) At least 30 people are reported to have been killed as “thousands” of homes collapsed in floods in Nigeria. Up to half a million acres of farmland have been indundated. (Floodlist)

Supertyphoon Haishen heads for the Korean peninsula, the third in 15 days. Only 14 typhoons have previously ever made landfall in S Korea. The eye is 25 km in diameter. Hurricane-force winds up to 155 mph cover an area 150 miles wide. The cloud tops extend into the stratosphere where the temperature is minus 90 C. Sea temperatures are up to 2.1 C above normal, hottest ever recorded, etc. (Severe-weather.eu)

Tunnel…

Who’d a thunk it?: “Several locations across the United States recorded their warmest meteorological summer yet (1 June -31 Aug.). Quote: ‘This is largely due to the duration of heat over the summer,’ AccuWeather Meteorologist Brett Rossio said.”

Web disaster: Something seems very wrong with Copernicus’ Severe-weather.eu website. Although the sidebars are up to date, almost, the main story center-page hasn’t changed since 18 August, covering a storm that blew itself out harmlessly in the east Pacific. Aufwachen sie, bitte?

While, with the 4th and most powerful storm in the west Pacific this year, Supertyphoon Maysak approaching the already storm-drenched Korean peninsula, the lead story on The Weather Channel concerns a small glass-bolide meteorite villagers in India are gawping at, that made a crater two feet wide when it fell from the sky. Who cares about the weather? Miracles are occurring!

Here in Wales, a minor storm has arisen over the choice by the UK Meteorological Office, of a Welsh girls’ name, “Heulwen” for our next “H”-named Atlantic storm. The word actually means “Sunshine”, ha-ha! Silly Met Office not knowing Welsh! In the view of this immigrant, the word could also mean “Hostage to Fortune” – the locals are particularly touchy about their culture and never pass up a chance to grab the moral high ground from the English.

In the wake of Maysak, North Korea’s bouncy Kim Jong-un has come up with a novel way of dealing with hurricanes. He has “punished” city and regional officials for failing to prevent “dozens” of casualties. The exact toll isn’t known.