Fascism Today… The ‘Blood of Jesus’ Insurance Co. … Practical considerations… The madness… Grim Reaper… Granny’s World: Major disaster looming in the Bay of Bengal..

“I’m taking it for about a week and a half now and I’m still here, I’m still here.”

– Trump, on his new Hydroxychloroquine habit.

Yes Donald. I’ve been drinking above a bottle and a half of wine a night since being locked down and look, I’m still here, I’m still here…

 

Fascism Today

In a front-page lead, beneath a splash headline, at a time of national crisis exacerbated by the incompetence and self-serving lies of a Conservative government, the Conservative-leaning Mail on Sunday ‘newspaper’ has lashed out at the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, a barrister, former human rights lawyer and former Director of Public Prosecutions, accusing him of hypocrisy in pretending to be a ‘man of the people’ (code for dirty Socialist) when in fact he owns a ‘£10 million’ property.

Which he doesn’t.

It happens that his mother was a nurse, and his father a toolmaker. From this less than gilded background, he was educated at a state-supported grammar school and, having joined the Young Socialists as a teenager, studied his law not at Oxford or Cambridge, but at the humbler University of Leeds. Unlike the Eton and bread-roll throwing, waitress-abusing, Bullingdon-club-educated Prime Minister, ‘Vanishing’ Johnson.

Twenty-four years ago, in 1996, Starmer, whose professional status was hardly likely to qualify him as a member of the underclass, bought a field behind his parents’ house to keep a couple of donkeys they’d adopted. Unlike the millionaire Farage, he has never pretended or claimed to be a ‘man of the people’. The field has no planning permission, is unlikely to obtain planning permission, none has ever been applied for; has only a notional value as a potential housing estate, and is perhaps worth 20 thousand pounds for the agricultural land value today.

There can be no possible connection between this fictitious non-story and the news over the past few days that Sir Keir’s national poll ratings have crept up above those of the incoherent, bumbling, posh, do-nothing oaf in Number 10, Johnson, whose election was paid for by foreign billionaire disruptors and on whose intermittent watch over 60 thousand Britons have died from coronavirus complications.

Nor are we asked to recall that the owner of the Mail group, Viscount Harmsworth is a multi-billionaire, and that the Editor-in-Chief, Sir Paul Dacre, owns a 17-thousand-acre grouse shooting estate near Ullapool in Scotland, while keeping his donkeys tethered in plush editorial suites in Kensington.

Thus, it begins.

 

The ‘Blood of Jesus’ Insurance Co.

I haven’t posted much this week apart from edits, corrections and additions to Granny Weatherwax’s weather bogl, because I just haven’t known where to begin, it’s all getting so crazy.

I thought however that I might start by mentioning that, of the 82% of Americans who reassured pollsters they believe in God, 55% believe He will protect them from the SARS-Covid-19 virus better than any vaccine.

The more deaths that are reported among different congregations, however, the more likely they are to say they have felt doubts about the existence of God. All the same, more than two-thirds of religious Americans believe the virus is a punishment from on high. (from Guardian)

Oh ye of little faith!

 

Practical considerations #1

A factory in Colombia is making hospital beds out of cardboard, that can be turned into a coffin when the patient dies. “The dual-purpose beds are designed for coronavirus patients” – as if we hadn’t guessed. The bed-base functions as a trapdoor to allow the fresh corpse to drop into a container beneath, avoiding handling and allowing the whole unit to be removed for sanitary disposal. (from Telegraph)

A professional football team in South Korea has apologized after “mannequins” it ordered to pose as substitute fans during a match at the weekend turned out to be inflatable sex dolls. (Guardian) The club was later heavily fined for bringing the game into disrepute.

Zoo animals in the USA are becoming bored and fractious at having no humans to entertain them. A small party of Humboldt penguins were taken by their keepers at Kansas City Zoo for a special trip to see the art at the Nelson-Atkins museum. (We’re all going a bit lockdown crazy!) The director observed, they reacted “rather better to Caravaggio” than to modern art. So, who doesn’t? It’s stunning. (Washington Post)

Cute. Watch at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6buz-qJsNQ

 

The madness…

The problem with trying to maintain a mordantly satirical bogl in something more like realtime than a weekly magazine is that we’re constantly being stunned by events.

Trump has just told the American people that he’s been regularly taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative against coronavirus. An anti-malarial drug that is licensed only under very strict conditions for use by physicians, that has no proven effect on the specific symptoms of the Covid-19 virus, a drug that is not an anti-viral and comes with a warning that if you take it without proper supervision, you may die.

A dangerous drug whose efficacy he has been plugging for weeks, despite being told over and over by professionals to stop. Even Fox News last night was begging his dumbfucks not to go along with the madness.

Mr Trump has described the research findings that suggested that a group of Covid patients in a Veteran’s Administration hospital died during trials of the drug, as “very unscientific”. As if he would know, because his uncle John was an electrical engineer. In China, the editor of Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times, said Trump was leading the US response to the pandemic with “witchcraft”. (Guardian)

A non-peer-reviewed paper published by the University of Virginia School of Medicine investigated experimental treatments at a VA hospital, and found little evidence of efficacy. Chloroquine had been shown in conjunction with an antibiotic to have some very minor effects in a very small trial in France, whose results were later retracted.. What was not scientific about the Virginia survey was that it was an incomplete study of a non-randomized experiment that was terminated once the effects became suspected. True, these were sick people who might have died anyway. But they died of the right symptoms to make HCQ the main suspect.

None as sick as the irresponsible lunatic in the White House.

Yes-men

Trump has fired yet another independent Inspector General for showing disloyalty to the regime – i.e., for simply doing the job they were hired to do. This time it’s the turn of the State Department, where Steve Linick was just beginning to look into a whistleblower complaint that Secretary Mike ‘two lunches in a suit’ Pompeo had been using members of his security detail at public expense to run trivial domestic errands for him and his wife.

That’s State, Health, Emergency Budget ($2.5 trillion package) and Intelligence, all inspectors recently replaced with Trump yes-men; just as he has packed the nation’s courts with unqualified judges who will throw out cases against him; and turned the entire apparatus of law enforcement to his advantage, including the appointment of a corrupt Attorney General who will reliably do his dirty work for him; whitewashing his crimes, springing his mates from jail and ‘investigating’ his enemies.

It’s beginning to resemble a Batman movie. But where is our caped crusader?

Linick was also apparently looking into another serious abuse of Presidential power. Robert Reich reports, under a ‘State of Emergency’ Trump declared, apparently on not even a flimsy pretext, he assumed the power to authorize Pompeo without Congressional approval, bypassing their legal authority, to negotiate further arms sales to his pals in war-criminal Saudi Barbaria that Congress had already on a bipartisan basis voted should not be allowed to go ahead.

The president, who openly claims to be above the law, is running amok through the constitution, removing wherever his powers allow him to, every vestige of oversight of his arbitrary, self-enriching abuses, while Congress has simply given up trying to rein him in. In this instance, in response to a letter sent from the White House claiming that Trump had lost confidence in Linick and expected more loyalty from “his” officials, they even waived the statutory 30-days’ notice period.

Welcome to your fascist state, America.

And the idiocy…

President Magafuli of Tanzania, which borders eight other African states, has gone full Trump on Covid-19, and is refusing to order any special measures or lockdown to contain the disease, saying he wants tourists to come to his country. His son caught the virus, he says, and was cured with sips of lemon juice and ginger. To prove that testing is a waste of resources, he has ordered that fruit should also be tested. Health professionals say he is lying about the numbers of infections and (only 21) deaths. (Guardian)

Are these dismal cretins totally bonkers before being elected by a plurality of gullible rustics, or does holding the top office drive them insane?

And the ecocide…

President Lopez Obrador of Mexico, a paid shill for the oil industry, has cited the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to increase subsidies to the fossil fuel barons and reduce the contribution of renewables to the aging grid – to the consternation of global investors. Japan Times reported: “The government defended the new rules, saying they “will allow the National Electrical System to ensure reliability in the face of a decrease in demand for electrical power.”

They say, less is more.

Aren’t we all getting a bit fed up with being lied to, as if we were the morons, and not these morons whom a plurality of morons keep electing?

 

Practical considerations #2

Trust the Japanese to think of everything. For 600 Yen – about £5 Stg, – residents in Tokyo are now able to buy reusable coronavirus facemasks from vending machines. Fearing that as 30C-plus summer temperatures have already arrived people will find the masks uncomfortable to wear, the vending company has ensured they are cooled inside the machines down to 4 deg. C. Meanwhile, “France is planning to make mask-wearing mandatory in public transportation from May 11.” The transit authority in Paris is currently trialling CCTV-based mask-recognition software to detect passengers travelling without masking-up. (Japan Times)

Michael O’Leary, the gnomish CEO of Ryanair, has claimed (without much scientific justification) that wearing facemasks reduces the chances of spreading the virus by 98.5 per cent; and that ordering a general masking-up and temperature-scanning of passengers will allow him to fill more seats on his aircraft when he resumes normal service – minus the 3,000 employees he’s laid off, after declaring €890 million profits for the first quarter – by the end of June. (BBC R4 interview, 18 May)

He has a point, though. Government policy seems fragmented, to put it politely. Air travellers (but not Irish or, it seems, French) will be expected to quarantine themselves for 14 days on arrival in the UK from abroad, on pain of arrest by a ludicrously overstretched and unhappy police force, while passengers arriving on the Eurostar train from Calais can go about their normal business, unquarantined and unmasked. Tourists, Hancock imagines, will be happy to spend their entire fortnight in the UK staring disconsolately out of the window of some disused hospital in Cheshire.

 

Grim Reaper

“Phil May, the frontman of The Pretty Things, has died aged 75 after suffering complications from emergency hip surgery. A representative of the band confirmed he died on Friday morning at a Kings Lynn hospital. May had fallen off his bicycle earlier in the week.” (BBC) A favorite of mine in my rebellious teens, I had no idea this seminal rock outfit was still going. They made the Stones sound pedestrian.

 

Granny’s World

SE Europe: Temperatures in southern Turkey and Cyprus soared to a peak 43C, 109F over the weekend, and touched 40C in southern Greece, the Balkans and Italy, as a May heatwave exploded out of North Africa. The hot weather will be replaced with a cold front moving south later in the week (Severe-weather.eu)

USA: A tropical storm warning was issued 18 May by the National Weather Service for parts of the North Carolina coast with forecast rainfall totals around 6-in., shortly after the Outer Banks beaches were reopened to visitors on Saturday. Tropical Storm Arthur is the first named storm of the Atlantic season and 2020 is the sixth straight year when a named storm has beaten the nominal 1 June opening of the season. (Accuweather)

Areas around New Orleans in Louisiana recorded 231.39mm of rain (10 in.) in 24 hours to 15 May. Roads were closed and about 40 people were rescued from flooded homes and vehicles. Rivers are continuing to rise. More rain is expected this weekend and the rivers and creeks are very high. In Illinois, “Flash flooding, some significant, was observed across numerous locations in the Chicago Metropolitan Area during the night of 17 May, especially near the Chicago River. Several people were rescued by fire crews. NWS said 3.11 inches / 79mm of rain fell in 24 hours.” (Floodlist)

Rain has temporarily slowed the spread of an enormous wildfire in southwest Florida that has consumed 12 square miles of country. Houses, trailers and cars have been burned out but evacuation orders were lifted Sunday. (Wunderground) 1 person was killed and 9 injured when an EF-3 tornado (150 mph) touched down at Church Point, Louisiana on Monday. (Accuweather)

Ecuador: “Heavy rain and floods have left at least 2 people dead and 15 homes damaged in Morona Santiago Province.” (Floodlist)

Philippines: Weakening Cat 3 Typhoon Vongfong made its way up the center of the two main islands, injuring 54 and rendering thousands homeless. “Over 71,000 people were pre-emptively evacuated. The storm caused damage to buildings, roads, bridges and agriculture. Power and communications lines were also damaged. Much of the damage was caused by strong winds gusting to 255 km/h. (158 mph). Vongfong also brought heavy rainfall. Infanta in Quezon Province, Calabarzon Region, recorded 287.7mm (11-in.) of rain in 24 hours to 16 May.” (Floodlist)

Sri Lanka: 3 people have died in floods and landslides and 1 is missing as heavy rain and strong winds continue to pound the country, damaging homes and infrastructure. Galigamuwa recorded 214 mm (8.5-in.) of rain in 24 hours to 16 May. Warnings are out for further severe weather after a deep depression over southeast Bay of Bengal intensified into a cyclonic storm on Saturday, 16 May. The cyclone, named Amphan, is forecast to track north, north-eastward towards India and Bangladesh. (Floodlist)

BBC Weather adds: “Indian officials are on alert after Cyclone Amphan – due to make landfall on the east coast – looks likely to intensify into a “very severe” storm. Concern is growing for thousands of workers who have fled cities under lockdown to return home to villages in Orissa and other provinces likely to be affected. Premier Modi has called an emergency Cobra meeting. In Bangladesh, tens of thousands of Burmese Rohyngia refugees packed into flimsy camps and already reporting cases of coronavirus could also be in the path of the storm, and cannot be evacuated. “This would be the first supercyclonic storm in the Bay of Bengal since the 1999 supercyclone that hit the Orissa coast and killed more than 9,000 people”.

Rare mammatus cloud formation over Kolkata, 18 May (Bikas Das/AP)

Stop Press, 18 May: Typhoon Amphan underwent “beyond exceptional” rapid intensification Monday and has attained the highest Cat 5 rating, with 160 mph sustained winds gusting above 195 mph, and a central pressure of just 910 mb. It could become the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in the northern Indian Ocean, according to meteorologists at Severe-weather.eu. Major storm surge, destructive winds and flooding are likely. The teeming city of Kolkata on the Indian/Bangladeshi border is directly in its path. Over a million people are being evacuated but millions more live in the low-lying delta of the Ganges river. (CNN)

North Africa: “Heavy rain from 16 to 17 May caused flooding in northwest Algeria damaging homes and leaving at least 1 person dead.” (Floodlist) 2 people may have died in floods in Ivory Coast after heavy rain.

Russia: Cars were mangled, garages blown away, roofs torn off, road signs and power lines knocked out when a violent storm suddenly blew up in the city of Chita, in the Trans-Baikal region of Siberia, on 13 May. Residents were warned against going outdoors as the forecast was for the 70 mph wind to grow even stronger. Several people have been injured and children were filmed being blown over in the street as huge steel roofs were tossed about. The storm was expected to last for two days. (Siberian Times)

Video: siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/roofs-ripped-off-dozens-of-buildings-including-maternity-hospital-by-stormy-wind-in-chita/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pumpkin – Issue 122. The American way of death… Have you taken your fiscal stimulus today?… If tell you, I’ll have to kill you… Death in a time of illogicality….. Granny’s World.

You’ve never had it? So, good.

(Trump fans, worshippers, lovers, followers, apologists, lawyers etc., please look away now.)

 

The American way of death

“The White House has barred the administration’s top pandemic expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, from giving evidence at a Congressional hearing. It said it was not appropriate for a member of the pandemic response team to testify.”

Still following him? Still think he’s doin’ great? Because the lockdown people are seemingly willing to endure to avoid dying of a serious disease their President seems determined to inflict on them is as nothing compared with the lockdown this cheating bastard with his Covid cover-up culture is deliberately imposing on truth, justice and the American way.

If you really still believe that Trump is not a callous, money-grubbing, syphilitic old corporate whore, and you think we should give the poor guy a break because this health stuff is more complicated than he thought (© Donald J Trump, 2017), what he and his craven devils in the administration have done in the past 24 hours will, we fervently hope, see him ultimately dragged by the heels to a public place, eviscerated, strangled in his own stinking black bowels and hanged on piano wire for 14 days until his repulsive old corpse rots to pieces and drops, piece by piece, into the running gutter of history.

Where the pye-dogs and even the fucking rats and crows wouldn’t touch his poisonous, putrid sewer-meat.

Speaking metaphorically, you understand. Just a proper trial by his peers will do.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reports today, 01 May, on one Tyson meat-packing plant in a small town in Cass County, Indiana – Vice-President Pence’s former State governorate.

After the local authority insisted, Tyson tested the entire workforce and found they had 890 coronavirus-positive workers, in a town where there are 8 ICU beds, all occupied. The plant promptly shut down.

No wonder somebody has been lobbying Trump to fix the problem quickly.

So appalling are their working conditions, that some 5500 minimum-wage meat-packers and charnel-house workers around the country have already developed coronavirus disease, and at least two dozen are now dead. Those are certainly  undercounts. Unable to make the necessary adjustments, getting short of labor, meat corporations have shut down a number of their plants, threatening Americans’ hallowed relationship with animal protein, guzzling it down by the bucketload, cheerily ignoring their prolapsed hemorrhoids, their bowel cancers, their bloated veinous legs, their coronary thromboses and grotesque, waddling obesity.

Trump just changed all that. With a wave of his gnarly staff, this demented succubus passed into law late Wednesday night, out of range of the news cycle, an Executive Order forcing the purveyors of lumps of chlorine-washed, antibiotic-stuffed, e-coli burdened flesh to the char-grilling masses to re-open all their plants, in the interests of national security.

Unable to intervene directly in the affairs of private corporations owing to a 1930s Supreme Court ruling, Trump invoked an obscure law, the Defense Production Act, to wreak more havoc in the nation he so clearly despises. An act, it has been pointed out, that he has repeatedly refused to use to do good, ensuring all the States had enough PPE for health workers in the frontline, anonymous little people he calls heroes, but refuses to pay extra, in the early stages of the pandemic.

Trump doesn’t do good. It must occur to you, surely America, that his Satanic Master, Putin wants to see you all dead?

With the collaboration of Eugene Scalia, his Secretary of Labor, son of the famous Justice Antonin Scalia, whose liberal ruling on the Second Amendment has killed more Americans by gun violence than have died in all the wars of the 20th century put together, Trump has gone further. The Atlantic website has used the phrase “human sacrifice”, as indeed has your Pumpkin before them. Not that this sickening old Dementor with his rotting brain made of congealed greed imagines for one second these people – probably mostly immigrants – are human.

First, this sick bastard made damned sure they all went back to work, by ordering the Social Services department to withold their unemployment benefit checks if they refuse. It’s either work, even at risk to your life, or see your family starve. Without compensation when you die. Following this promising lead, other employers are happily waiving their statutory responsibilities to their staff, regardless of their health status and risk. 32 million Americans are newly registered unemployed. Five million more each week.

Next, he suspended all requirements for the meat corporations to enforce the necessary separation and other anti-Covid safety measures, and relieved them of the awful burden of having to report any new cases to the health authorities. Poultry producers are no longer to have their line speeds even lightly regulated, despite knowing that speeding up the conveyors of death will force more workers to stand even closer together, at greater risk of infection.

Doesn’t matter, let ’em all die. Just keep those freezer cabinets full of that good chunky flesh.

Then, Trump removed any legal liability for the deaths in service of their labor forces; Scalia agreeing to nix any attempts by workers or their kneecapped unions to sue for wilful negligence manslaughter, as long as someone is prepared to swear the employers did everything they could to avoid unnecessary casualties. We shall have to see if the courts uphold that one, it’s a revenue stream they may not want to lose.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has had whatever powers it had to bring cases against employers firmly quashed. Instead, a policy of self-certified “voluntary compliance” has been instituted. A backlog of “thousands” of cases is being hastily filed under the carpet.

Quarantining guidelines are gone. Workers cannot refuse to work alongside sick colleagues returning to the line after a positive diagnosis, or be ordered to remain 2 meters apart, even at risk to their own health. Returning Cov-pos. workers will no longer be required, or even paid, to quarantine themselves for 14 days.

I don’t have to use the words “Slave labor camps”, do I? Such inhumane and abusive conditions are comparable to those in the Nazi era, or going back another hundred years to the first rampage of totalitarian capitalism. Working in the meat trade is now tantamount to a death sentence.

And why? Why is this slimy lump of orange excrement hoping to murder tens of thousands more working people in his fantasy totalitarian state, the only method of governance that in his fathomless ignorance he can envisage? To keep his starving people fed? To ensure his own daily supply of burgers never dries up?

To get himself re-elected.

American voters will never tolerate a shortage in their supermarkets of fatty pink, artificially colored, quick-cook, minced flesh, even as the fatty lipids swell them up, cut off their limbs, clog their arteries, burst their aortas, give them bowel jjjlcancer and make them easy targets for this highly intelligent and selective virus.

It will first attack and curdle their blood, creating havoc internally and leave them gasping to their gods for just one more molecule of the unavailable oxygen our planet is losing as the CO2 rises, the seas overheat, the rainforests are lost to cattle feed, and the lungs of the world are destroyed by corporate greed and callous indifference.

If no-one can read the stark message this strange and unique virus is sending to the whole planet, the blazing symbolism of grounded airlines and near-deserted roads, a brief reacqaintance with blue skies, birdsong and breathable air, then God help us, if you believe.

The next one will be terminal.

(Reporting: BuzzFlash – buzzflash.com/articles/meatpacking-facilities-become-trump-forced-labor-camps-with-high-risk-of-covaid-19-infection-and-possible-death) Also, see The Washington Post, 01 May.

At another press conference Thursday, Trump hailed the news that over 60 thousand Americans had died and 1 million were officially infected as “a spectacular success”, for which he takes full credit.

Speaking of symbolism, the news that North Korean psychopath, Kim Jong-un isn’t dead after all, having gone AWOL for three weeks and even missed the national birthday celebrations for his revered grandfather, who is officially also not dead, although he definitely is, was first broadcast yesterday – from a fertilizer plant.

Let’s hope it’s true, then.

 

Have you taken your fiscal stimulus today?

To date, the US Federal Reserve bank has ‘printed’ $6 trillion in emergency Covid-response funding – one third of annual GDP – that has gone almost entirely into buying corporate bonds, ballooning the stock market and – as real-world consumer demand and the supply of goods both collapse at the same time – risking hyperinflation on a Weimar scale.

As 32 million Americans sign on for unemployment and receive a measly one-off $1200 check (personally signed by the economically illiterate Trump) to see their families through the crisis for an unknown number of months with, now, 80 million having no or not enough health insurance if they fall sick, it’s been calculated that a real-economy stimulus on the same scale could have given every family in America $60 thousand to spend or save.

But why on earth would the corporate sector and the men who bet on flies allow that?

Welcome to the Great Depression, Part Two.

(Reporting: Thom Hartmann/Prof Richard Wolff)

 

If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you

Does anyone seriously believe Trump when he says he has “evidence” that Covid-19 originated in a virology lab in Wuhan? But, like his tax returns, he refuses to release it?

(Well, yes, any outlet owned by the disgusting Murdoch family, currently beating the drum for a pre-emptive strike on China.)

Ninety-seven per cent of virologists who have actively studied the thing are all agreed, SARS-Cov-19 is a natural mutation of earlier iterations that just crossed the species barrier into humans, something that had been only a matter of time coming. They can tell, because they know what they are talking about. Trump has previously shown he doesn’t know the difference between a virus and a bacterium, and imagines antibiotics will cure viral diseases, except they no longer work, who knew?

But his phony authority in the bully-pupit and constant repetition of the lie will eventually tell with the public, no doubt of that.

The incompetent imbecile, nakedly now more than ever seen as utterly unfit for his job, is desperate to pin the blame on China and the WHO for the critical six-weeks’ delay while he faffed around in denial on the golf course, spending his lockdown time watching Fox TV, telling everyone it would all blow over by spring. He needs an easily identifiable enemy to campaign around, and China fits the bill. Violent attacks on people who look Chinese are becoming common, and he does and says nothing to stop them. Well-funded, armed white terrorists who stormed the capitol building in Michigan to protest lockdown and spat at State police to prove their virility, he has described as ‘”very good people”.

He is a vicious and malignant bully, a tyrant who will say and do anything, however filthy, criminal or damaging to the USA, to get re-elected. Yet it is clear he lives in a fog of mental dereliction and fear of his growing incapacity. He really is not up to the job, and deep down he knows it; as do all those enabling fools clinging to the delusion that he offers them a vestige of power.

The extent to which his White House sycophants have been deliberately misinforming him, manufacturing good-news stories to puff-up his bottomless ego, presenting the pandemic as something that is under his control, going his way, proving his divinity, is rapidly becoming apparent from those terrible daily party political press conferences, where his pet medical advisors struggling with Stockholm syndrome can’t quite manage to disguise their horror at the things he says.

He has never trusted the Covid briefings his intelligence officers have been desperate since December to get him to pay attention to, even to the extent of presenting them almost in cartoon form, citing the one intelligence failure that W Bush exploited to persuade the nation to back his disastrous invasion of Iraq, 17 blood-soaked years ago, as evidence he knows more than they do. He has dismissed the entire intelligence community as “human scum”.

Briefings that have held forth a very high degree of certainty that the virus did not originate in the laboratory of those devious little yellow-bellies who, if not kept in check, plan to take over the world and force red-blooded Americans to eat noodles with chopsticks. (A laboratory, incidentally, which had operated with a measure of US funding and scientific co-operation.)

Conspiracy theories, he knows, play better with the witless, opioid-addled voters of middle-America than boring old truths.

Nor does he have any regard for the science, continuing even now to promote quack cures like chloroquine against all advice that it is potentially dangerous. Obviously, with dimwitted Creationists like Betsy DeVos and Mike Pompeo around, he also mistrusts the consensus on evolution. Viruses can’t just mutate, surely, they have to start as bio-weapons manufactured in foreign enemy test tubes.

Yet the betting is still that he has a chance of winning another term in November. As long as he doesn’t give away the secrets of the special things only he knows.

Astrologers are doing well out of Coronavirus, reports the Times of India. Anxious enquiries to popular advice lines and websites have more than doubled, many from abroad, and people are paying up to 400 rupees (US$5.30) for a 15-minute consultation on what the stars hold in store for them.

 

Death in a time of illogicality

Spammers, likers, followers and those no longer reading this, muh bogl, might retain a vague impression that I live in a strange little semi-autonomous enclave of the United Kingdom, with its own ancient language, called Wales (pop. 3,136,000).

Our leader, the almost invisible Mark Drakeford, announced a few days ago that he was intensifying the lockdown measures, only to re-announce three days later that he was looking at how to lift them. An about-face not unknown to residents used to backing-up for cattle droves on the narrow country lanes that pass for A-roads here.

A rather unusual situation has developed, which is that virtually all the Covid cases in Wales are packed down into the bottom right-hand corner of the country. While there are around 11 thousand cases in the industrial zones around the capital, Cardiff, we have had in my mid-sector rural county precisely 37, (one more yesterday!) among a settled population of 77 thousand.

Reading the small print, however, we see that the figures cover 6-week periods – and if anyone is tested more than once in that time, they are counted as only one test. Your guess is as good as mine.

Indeed, so few and far between are the cases in the whole of the westerly region covered by the local health board, whose Welsh name translates ironically as “Good Health”, in total around 720, that the board had an embarrassing moment last week when they hurriedly had to readjust the official figures to take account of 31 people they hadn’t noticed had died.

It’s possibly because most of us living here are elderly exiles: already socially isolated, bitter and twisted individualists with few friends and a faint disgust at our neighbours; or farmers thinly spread over miles of brooding, evocative but underpopulated hills and valleys teeming with now unmarketable sheep. Or maybe because if you have to be here for six weeks before they’ll count you, and we have a high population of transient students, second home owners and holidaymakers (who shouldn’t be here), many cases acquired locally are being counted elsewhere. Who would know?

In a further annnouncement today, Mark assures us that we are testing all staff and residents of care homes. A welcome and laudable position; as is his offer of a one-off payment of £500 to key workers. But only where there is already a confirmed case… Which, given the three-day timelag between a person becoming infected without showing any symptoms, during which you become increasingly infectious to the people around you, is a pretty illogical policy.

By the time someone starts to show symptoms, and has a test – which may take up to a week or more to come back from the lab – thus enabling the rest of the staff and inmates to qualify for their tests, and another week for their results to come back, in these enclosed communities you have the potential for disaster. And are we even counting deaths in care?

Actually, “Good Health” aren’t publishing figures for deaths in their bailiwick at all, you can only find an overall total of 983 for the whole of the country.

Ever since I’ve lived here, coming up 20 years, my local authority and the regional health board have been trying to close care homes on cost grounds, to the fury of the populace, and sometimes succeeding. Given how little we economically inert residents contribute in local tax revenues, how tiny our asset values, it was perhaps understandable.

Having failed to take care of the problem one way, however, it seems the peculiar illogicality I have noted in all our public affairs is no longer part of the whimsical charm of the place.

It’s become deadly.

 

Granny’s World

“It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure, and the poor wot gets the rain…”

Yemen: as if things weren’t miserable enough, with endless civil war, food shortages and Covid starting to make inroads, the UN reports that almost 150,000 people have been affected by heavy rain since mid-April. Roads, bridges and the electricity grid have been damaged, water supplies contaminated. In Aden, where there has been a takeover by a new rebel group, “power cuts have continued since the floods of 21 Apr. Conditions are hardest for thousands of families already displaced who have lost shelter, food rations and household supplies.”

Laos: At least 3 people have died after two hours of heavy rain sent flash floods through the village of Kiwtaloun, destroying two homes. As of 27 Apr., 4 people were still missing. Military personnel have been deployed to the area to help with repairs and search operations.

Malaysia: Flooding and landslides have affected around 2,000 people in parts of the state of Sarawak after heavy rain from 25 to 28 Apr. Blocked roads left communities cut off. Many people have had to flee to higher ground.

Indonesia: More than 20 thousand properties have been flooded in Bandung in a third major event affecting tens of thousands of people in the region this year. The water in places was reported to be more than 2 meters deep. Over 2,000 people are in temporary shelter.

Rwanda: “Heavy rain fell across the country from 01 May causing severe damage. As of 3 May 8 people had died, 5 were injured, more than 100 houses had collapsed and roads were closed. According to Meteo Rwanda, more heavy rain is expected over the next 7 days, increasing the risk of further floods and landslides.”

Central Asia: “Over 70,000 people have been evacuated  in border areas of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan after a reservoir dam failed. The Syr Darya river, which runs near the border between the two countries, overflowed after the Sardoba Reservoir Dam on the Uzbek side broke in the early hours of 1 May, 2020. The government said the dam failed after heavy rain and strong winds.” 150 miles to the south, flash flooding was reported in Kyrgysztan. Houses and roads have been severely damaged. A state of emergency was declared for Isfana and other areas. Images on Social Media showed torrents of muddy water and debris flowing through streets of Isfana.

(All above from Floodlist)

Spain and Portugal: the first European heatwave of 2020 is pushing up from Morocco and likely to bring temperatures cresting at 36C, 98F to the Iberian peninsula and on up through western France toward the British Isles this week. (Severe-weather.eu)

USA: Many April heat records were broken in the southwest late last week, Phoenix Az. experiencing 5 straight days over 100F, 38C and setting new hottest overnight records, the temperature not falling below 75F – 18F above average. Las Vegas also enjoyed a record 99F while posting 66 thousand coronavirus cases. Americans sweltering on lockdown have been maxing out the aircon, police warning that the things can catch on fire. (Accuweather) Protests have erupted after California’s Governor Newsom closed the beaches again, citing overcrowding.

Tunnel….

Plague: A passenger who collapsed and died on a bus in Yunnan, China has tested positive for a virus more deadly than Covid-19, according to a report in the unfailingly reliable New York Post. (See what I did there? Sarcasm!) The Hantavirus has a mortality rate approaching that of Ebola, at 38%. The symptoms are otherwise pretty much identical to Covid-19, and there is no vaccine. As yet however there is no sign that it is passing into the human population, you still have to get it from rats. Nor is it a Chinese hoax – it first emerged during the war in Korea in the early 1950s. Cases have previously been reported in South America.

Munch bunch: a second-wave locust swarm in East Africa following heavy rains is threatening food security over a vast area. UN observers say it could be 20 times bigger than the one in January. Ethiopia has already lost 200 thousand Ha of crops, Kenya and Somalia are also badly affected and the specter of famine is rising as those underresourced countries are faced with drought, frequent flooding and Covid-19 simultaneously.

Yellowstone: The Blessed Mary Greeley is currently reporting on an alarming situation developing in the area of the hotel, where the USGS CCTV cameras are showing quantities of steam venting from the car park and water upwelling from the ground, possibly draining from the nearby Firehole River, raising the possibility of a hydrothermal explosion when it hits the hot rocks beneath – a not uncommon event. The area around is showing further ground uplift. Mrs Greeley speculates, not without reason, that increased rainfall and snowmelt can produce geothermal effects. Perhaps a better sign, the camera is also following three curious buffalo watching the water. They don’t seem all that concerned.

Goings on in Clowning Street… A Wall Street-car Named Remdesevir… Put ye your faith in leaders… Who’s failed the drive-in test?… Slaughter – the worst medicine… Granny’s World…

The graph shows the value of testing, and the abysmal performance of the Trump and Johnson governments in stark relief. With only 270 cases and 0 deaths, and the world’s most intensive testing regime, Vietnam has recorded no new cases of domestic transmission of coronavirus in almost two weeks. (Washington Post)

“Will any government minister ever answer for the crime of homicide by gross negligence, a crime carrying a sentence of up to 20 years in prison?”

Goings on in Clowning Street

A BBC Panorama investigation has determined that the British government, or “10, Clowning Street” as we should perhaps re-name the seat of Earthly power, deliberately downgraded the emergency status of SARS-Covid-19 after it was discovered there were not enough stocks of appropriate personal protection equipment to meet demand for a higher-risk category of disease.

The status of Covid-19 was recognised as the highest category of infectious disease in January, but by March “the science” was telling Health Secretary Hancock that a short, flimsy plastic apron, a recycled paper mask, gloves that nurses could safely rinse out many times and a pair of safety glasses were the most protection required for tending highly infectious patients outside the actual ICUs.

Not only that, but it has now emerged that in March, Civil Servants turned their noses up at an offer to supply 10 thousand home testing kits a day from an award-winning young British scientific entrepreneur based in the USA; a test he had developed, that is more reliable and easier to administer than the one Public Health England has sanctioned, and is now instead being used by the Pentagon.

In other words, in a high old state of panic the government deliberately and cynically ordered health workers into the frontline of the pandemic knowing that their protection was totally inadequate, could not be improved because officials were too late and too stupid into the market,  and that many would get sick and die; death being the result of exposure to ever-greater viral load. Over 100 now have, and more may be responsible unwittingly for at least some of the spread of the disease that in various creative ways has horribly killed 27 thousand people in Britain – at the very least.

Mr Hancock has dismissed the BBC reporting as fake news.

Instead of personal protection, which as the pandemic swept the world in a matter of weeks soon became almost impossible to source, protection that was urgently recommended after a detailed and terrifying 2016 modeling exercise but discarded as a waste of money, a cynical campaign was adopted around the cabinet table, of encouraging the Great British Public to indulge in a sentimental weekly Princess Diana moment for our fallen heroes, while behind the scenes criminally altering the medical criteria to fit the availability of stocks.

In other words, the original “herd immunity” strategy was driven entirely by the knowledge that despite many early warnings, we did not have the resources to cope with a long-anticipated pandemic disease vaulting our recently reclaimed borders. It was as if they believed Holy Brexit would protect us, the daft cunts.

Instead of protection, led by “the science”, Hancock focused all the government’s efforts on converting conference halls into pop-up “Nightingale” hospitals, thousands of beds stretching photogenically away to infinity, of which barely a handful – a few tens – have been occupied, partly as a result of his and his predecessor, Mr Hunt’s failure to train and employ enough nurses who could afford their degrees to go round.

The vision of rank upon rank of beds being conjured up by newsreel footage from the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu pandemic may have impressed the clown-car Cocos around the cabinet table, as their jocose leader sickened and nearly died, but medicine has moved on apace in the past century. Those who can be cured are being turned round more rapidly and efficiently than before. The rest either get better at home, or – die there.

This catastrophe is what you get when you “follow the science” as opposed to following the advice of actual real doctors with experience of working on the frontline battling vicious epidemics around the world, who know what the fuck they’re talking about.

Will any government minister ever answer for the crime of homicide by gross negligence, a crime carrying a sentence of up to 20 years in prison? There’s a lengthening queue of the culpable.

Judging by the recent ennoblement of the glibly persuasive and murderously incompetent Iain Duncan Cunt, architect of the Universal dis-Credit debacle, a knighthood after a decent interval of a year or so will doubtless be a fitting punishment for little Matt’s heroism, the boy with his finger in the dyke.

They have a certain way of spinning things in Clowning Street.

 

Odd, frostbite-like patches are showing up on people’s toes — people who have also tested positive for Covid-19. “My inbox and my telemedicine clinic are full of just toes. I have never seen so many toes,” one dermatologist said. (Washington Post)

Meh, what’s a million dead? I’m a billionaire!

A Wall Street-car Named Remdesevir

“The program was designed and conducted by the sponsor (Gilead Sciences), in accordance with the protocol. The sponsor collected the data, monitored conduct of the program, and performed the statistical analyses.”

A very small-scale in-house trial involving ‘compassionate use’ (a way of avoiding red tape) of an anti-retroviral drug called Remdesevir, that had some qualified success in battling the Ebola epidemic, has apparently confirmed the arrival of a new wonder cure for the coronavirus.

“36 of 53 patients (68%) showed an improvement in the category of oxygen support, whereas 8 of 53 patients (15%) showed worsening. … Seven of the 53 patients (13%) died after the completion of remdesivir treatment”

The fantastic news that a miracle cure may have been found just in time to save the world came from President Trump’s highly regarded point-man on the actual medicine involved with SARS-Cov-19, Dr Anthony Fauci. So it must be true! Seriously, Fauci described the outcome as a ‘clear-cut effect’. I’m not qualified to read medical papers, but it doesn’t look like it was more than quite helpful in some cases.

The paper in the New England Journal of Medicine Dr Fauci was quoting from*, co-signed by an impressive number of Gilead researchers, does point out that as yet, no appropriate large-scale randomized trials have been carried out against placebo, on the baffling range of Covid symptoms presented by different patient and non-infected groups, a process that will take many months; while marginal improvements in the condition of severely ill patients are open to all sorts of interpretations.

But no doubt as the safety trials were done some years ago, the federal Food and Drugs Administration will be hastening to rubber-stamp its use.

Nor was it mentioned that a similar smallscale trial of Remdesevir in China was abandoned in March as the results showed no improvement at all, indeed two extra patients died than were expected to. A failure Gilead’s PR machine has naturally been attempting to explain away in the intervening week since the result was “accidentally” leaked by the World Health Organization.

Talking-up the possibility of a new US-patented wonder drug at one of those tense WH briefings today, I doubt that Fauci would have realized the galvanic effect his words would have on the stockmarket, desperate for good news, any good news, on a day when it was announced that the US economy shrank by 4.8% in the first quarter, and investment managers were gloomily predicting a further 30% fall in the second – essentially, complete economic collapse – as 26 million Americans were starting to receive – or not – their April welfare checks.

I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the announcement of an efficacious cure for the disease Trump sneers at, that has killed over 60 thousand Americans and damaged his chances of re-election, should have come out on the same day as news that the US economy is tanking horribly.

I very much hope that the revered Dr Fauci has not been taking the Trump bleach.

Apologia:

Although it does not detract in general from the derisive theme of this piece, The Pumpkin has since learned of a larger-scale survey of 1000 patients that Dr Fauci was more probably citing, suggesting that remdesevir may reduce recovery time from 18 to 15 days, although 13% of patients will still not recover. The trial patients were divided into two blocks – one on placebo, the other on remdesevir only. No patients were treated with, say, ice-cream.

As cases in Russia race away, it’s been revealed there are disturbing clusters developing in three ‘closed’ cities where there are substantial Cold War legacy nuclear facilities requiring constant monitoring and maintenance.

 

Put ye your faith in leaders

The official number of coronavirus cases in the USA jumped over the million mark as of midnight GMT, 27/8 April. A fresh caseload of 21 thousand (in round numbers) is lower than in recent days, but 56,649 people are already enumerated as dead, the last 1,200 in a single night. The expectation is that those are hospital numbers, probably only from the big cities, and do not include at-home deaths or care home deaths or generous diagnoses where other conditions are involved.

And the president? Well, in an extraordinary report, the New York Times has collated over a quarter of a million words Trump has uttered in regard to the pandemic at his bizarre and self-exonerating press briefings, in which he has randomly and fulsomely praised his own (very limited) efforts at containment, gaslighting the viewers over his many obvious failings, while attacking and insulting everyone, from China to the States governors to President Obama, making it evident that he does not even now understand the basic principles of epidemiology (such as the difference between viruses and bacteria) and recommending snake-oil cures like Hannity’s favorite, Hydroxychloroquine, a name he liked to play with once he had mastered the pronunciation, purely because it sounded scientific and that was enough for his dumbfucks to agree, the president has it nailed down.

Last Thursday appeared to be the apogee of his rambling nonsense, when he speculated onstage about, and suggested researching, the possible efficacy of administering injections of disinfectant and UV light directly into the body to, as it were, clean the lungs. The entire planet heaved a sigh of Oh My God…. His lethal musings – later dismissed thinly by the White House as mere “sarcasm” – were directed toward his medical advisors, who did not know what to say and so continued to hum and haw and hoped to mask over his total inadequacy as a leader in a time of grave crisis – a failing amply predicted at the time of his election – while trying not to disagree with him too vehemently and incur the famous wrath he substitutes for knowing anything.

Thus, they can be added to the mounting pile of bodies of those who have sacrificed themselves, their professional ethics and their careers on the altar of Trump’s vainglorious and criminal instability.

It later transpired that the president was being lobbied on disinfectant by the pastor of a fake Christian church in Florida, a front for a business that manufactures and promotes household bleach as a cure-all for HIV, malaria, cancer and a host of other diseases. Nevertheless, referrals to poisons advice lines jumped substantially as his pathetically dim cult followers took him at his word and downed the Clorox.

While he continues to blame China for letting the cat out of the bag, although there is as yet no definitive answer to the question of when, where and how did this strange and complex virus originate, that appears to cause more than one syndrome depending on your demographic, with over a million cases and 60 thousand dead in his own country – by far the highest toll of any nation on earth, accumulated in little more than two months – the president who says he is a war leader whose power is absolute, his authority total, surely cannot go on abdicating all responsibility for the disaster unfolding on his watch.

Either he is the president, or he isn’t.

I think most sensible people made that determination long ago.

 

The madness continues…

Trump has announced that he will give the peroration at this year’s passing-out parade at the West Point military academy, which came as news to the administrators. 1000 young officer graduates furloughed on coronavirus leave will have to be recalled and quarantined for 14 days just to hear him boast about his 2016 election numbers and whine about being persecuted. “I prefer ceremonies to be nice and tight”, commented the Draft-Dodger-in-Chief, when asked about distancing requirements.

Trump has whined too, that the media is unfairly criticizing his ‘ugely successful program of testing in the US, which he only got going in April after intense pressure from all sides. With 5 million tests now done, he is correct: the USA has tested more than gold-standard South Korea. Until you frame it in terms of the more relevant tests per head of population, where the USA is 43rd in the world. One in 5 people so far is testing positive – either 66 million Americans could be carrying the virus, ready to start spreading it again; or the results are skewed by testing mostly people already displaying symptoms.

Online demand for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine surged by more than 1,000% after Donald Trump endorsed it as a potential treatment for Covid-19 without providing evidence it worked, a new study has found. (Guardian US)

PS – It doesn’t.

 

Who’s failed their drive-in test?

And now we’re getting reports via, among others, the good old Guardian, that the UK government’s policy of turning remote car parks into testing centers for the Covid virus instead of using the existing health service infrastructure is looking like a complete clusterfuck too.

After the DoH opened the centers to all essential workers as well as NHS staff, thousands of people – many already showing symptoms of the virus – have been queuing for hours, forbidden by security heavies to open car windows, take photos or use toilet facilities; while tests are being incorrectly administered, mislabelled or lost, with no contacts being given for following-up results and insufficient swabs to meet demand. Several users after driving for one or two hours to their “nearest” center also reported having to take their own swabs as there were not enough trained personnel on hand.

Part of the problem is that the testing has mysteriously been outsourced to, among others with absolutely no experience in managing public health emergencies, a large firm of accountants, Deloitte; high-street chain, Boots the Chemist; the execrable private prisons contractor Serco, and the huge French catering-to-employee-incentives conglomerate, Sodexo (“Our ambition is to positively impact one billion consumers worldwide.”)

The Guardian reports, one center in north London is so poorly managed, local hospitals are warning staff not to use it.

Meanwhile, deaths in old folks’ and nursing homes have reached horrifying levels, higher than those of civilian casualties at the height of the WW2 Blitz. Last in the queue for PPE, among the lowest paid people in the country, social care workers have had no option but to spread the disease through the already cash-strapped industry, taking their own lives in their hands as well as those of their patients.

Mr Hancock has gained some public sympathy because he looks so woebegone at briefings, while blaming everyone else and refusing to apologize for anything, or accept any bad news or criticism. It’s said that he genuinely seems to care about the NHS, unlike his predecessor Jeremy Hunt, who is now sounding positively magisterial. on the subject. But on this showing he doesn’t deserve an ounce of our compassion.

Ambition is no substitute for ability.

 

Slaughter – the worst medicine

The BogPo’s philosophy correspondent, Prof. Aristotle Kant (@thesymposium.gr) writes: “Surely by now we should have learned enough from the coronavirus to know that it has a mind, intelligence, will, purpose –  and has arrived as if from outer space to teach Humanity important lessons about where we are headed if we don’t wake up from our nightmare of infinite abundance?”

No-one alive surely can miss the symbolism. Empty roads, empty skies, industry shut down, pollution gone. Wildlife returning. Faith in controlling, authoritarian leaders shattered as their incompetence and inability or reluctance to protect their citizens is revealed more clearly by the day. An understanding that ‘we’re all in it together’.

They’re all pointers to a better world that is still, just, within our grasp.

US meat packing plants unable to process any more carcases owing to the extent of infection among closely ranked slaughtermen, have been closing down. A partial halt, temporary obviously, to the obscene holocaust of Farmaggeddon, a key driver of climate change and abusive land use.

And there is the dolt, Trump, scrawling his illiterate signature on an Executive Order forcing the men of cruelty back to work, regardless of their safety and that of their innnocent families, in the name of producing more pink sludge made from living, sentient creatures to shape into little patties to stuff down his bloated orange craw, as the genocide of Amazonian peoples continues apace to create short-term grazing and land for soybean.

He doesn’t get it. He never will.

Let’s hope he chokes to death instead. I hear BSE/CJD is also a good way to go. His vacuous brain shows he’s already more than halfway there.

 

Granny’s World

USA: From Severe-weather.eu (Copernicus): “Miami’s scorching heat of 97 °F (36 °C) Apr 20th Monday was the new monthly record in the city which is also the earliest Miami’s 97 °F mark in any year — this is more than five weeks ahead of schedule. The Apr 20th daytime average temperature tied as the 4th warmest day recorded in the city’s history — roughly three months before the typical onset of such summer-like warmth. Miami has reached the peak temperature of 94 °F (34.4 °C) four times in 2020 already, which is beyond exceptional so early in the year.” Or – this April has been the 25th hottest June in 125 years!

Meanwhile, a dome of heat is building over the southwest. “The National Weather Service has issued excessive heat warnings and watches for parts of Arizona, southeastern California and southern Nevada.” Phoenix, Az. has already tipped the 100 °F (38 °C) mark. By contrast, in the northeast, 27 Apr., Vermont was turned into a ‘winter wonderland’ by a heavy snowfall. (Accuweather)

And when have we heard this before? “An intense line of severe thunderstorms, known as a squall line, sprawled across 500 miles and took aim at many major cities including Houston, New Orleans, Dallas, Oklahoma City and St. Louis. The squall line spewed large hail and dealt damaging (hurricane-force) winds from southeastern Kansas and southwestern Missouri, through central and eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas, northern Texas, and northern Louisiana.” (Accuweather) Thousands were left to clear up without power. “2020 is on pace to rank as one of the top years in terms of number of tornadoes.”

Canada: “Evacuations were ordered in Alberta after snow melt and ice jams caused rivers to rise from around 25 April. ‘The ice cover broke up around 5 am on 26 Apr., forming an ice jam downstream of town. The ice jam raised water levels along the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers between 4.5 and 6 m at Fort McMurray.’ The jam could release at any time.” (Floodlist)

Update: 29 Apr., 15 thousand residents of Fort McMurray have been forced from their homes as the military has been called in to assist with severe flooding. (Accuweather)

Australia: Fire-and-flood ravaged New South Wales has reported a couple of inches of Autumn snow, much to the relief of its alpine resorts. (Accuweather)

Ethiopia: “At least 4 people have died in flash floods that struck in the city of Dire Dawa, 24 Apr. Several people have been injured. The flooding caused widespread damages to homes and infrastructure.” (Floodlist)

Somalia: Heavy rain for days has affected wide areas of the country, causing rivers to rise and flash flooding. Tens of thousands of people have been affected or displaced. At least 6 people died in the city of Gardo and others are thought to be missing. Hundreds of families have reportedly lost their homes. (Floodlist)

Chad: “Heavy rain and floods in Moyen-Chari Province damaged or destroyed shelters in displacement camps on 21 Apr.” Thousands of homes were damaged, forcing over 2000 individuals to seek shelter with other refugees on the site. (Floodlist)

Colombia: “A landslide caused by heavy rain struck in the municipality of Argelia in southern Cauca early on 25 Apr. At least 3 people were killed. One house was destroyed and others badly damaged. One person was injured.” (Floodlist)

Indonesia: “Heavy rain has continued to fall in parts of Indonesia, causing major flooding in Aceh and Central Kalimantan provinces over the last 2 days.” Over 2 thousand properties are affected, with floodwater up to 1.2 meters. (Floodlist)

Fiji: Flood warnings have been issued as rivers are rising after a slow-moving trough brought over 200 mm of rain to parts of the country still drying out after Cyclone Harold earlier in April. Some roads have been blocked by landslides. (Floodlist)

Tunnel approaching…

Corny excuse: “Of the roughly 200 U.S. ethanol plants, 73 have been completely shut down, 71 others have significantly reduced output rates, leaving just 60 plants near normal operating rates, according to Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA). Cooper estimates the ethanol industry could suffer $10 billion in losses due to COVID-19.” (Accuweather)

Great, maybe now American farmers could go back to feeding the world’s hungry people rather than supercharging their gas-guzzling automobiles. Except that collapsing oil prices, Trump’s anti-immigrant hate campaign, his China tariff war, movement restrictions and apparently unending storms and floods across the midwest have combined to hit farmers hard. And now the snow pack is melting.

Megadrought: Southwestern North America is in the midst of “the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since [the year] 800”, according to a new study in Science magazine. The area includes large areas of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho.” The megadrought in the late 800s, notes Accuweather, citing the Washington Post, is thought to have instigated the fall of the Mayan civilization.

Perhaps more human sacrifice is required, Mr Trump.

Yellowstone: It suddenly occurred to your old Gran this morning that we haven’t popped over to North Dakota in a while, to see what The Blessed Mary Greeley has been reporting recently on the troubled Montana supervolcano. The hottest spot in the west, it seems, is still grumbling ominously, with magma rising, trees dying, a foot of ground uplift and 150 earthquakes of up to M3.7 reported in the past week, one at a depth of only 1 km. Mrs Greeley speculates that caldera collapse might be on the cards. Independent analysis shows that the Steamboat, biggest geyser in the park, has erupted 12 times this year, slightly fewer than the 2019 record when it went off over 40 times – compared with its historic average of once or twice a year. (geysertimes.org)

It seems we also missed the M6.5 at 10 Km depth near Challis, ID. on 31 March. Commenters point out that while not in the Yellowstone park itslf, it is nevertheless near enough to be pretty central over the enormous magma chamber (11 Grand Canyons’ worth of molten rock) beneath.

It’s not looking at all good. The Pumpkin – Issue 120. Counting chickens… Killing us with kindness… Nah, it’s looking really lovely: a GW report… Granny’s World…

QotW

“My favourite “Covidiot’” pictures, which I search out daily for light relief, are the Stasi-style pap shots of shoppers coming out of The Range. Among all the death and dystopian headlines, I grimly enjoy these people, sheepishly trundling trolleys to their Volvos filled with ceramic garden Buddhas, 15 litres of Daffodil White paint and signs that say, ‘It’s Prosecco O’ Clock’.”

– Grace Dent, The Guardian, proving that middle-class acquisitiveness in Britain is indomitable.

 

“Total authority without responsibility. Isn’t that the definition of dictatorship?”

It’s not looking at all good

In the past few hours, the insane president has been tweeting out to his 50 million Followers to, in capital letters, “LIBERATE” three states, Michigan, Minnesota and West Virginia, where there are Democrat governors who are trying to control the spread of the virus with lockdowns.

Is Trump mounting a coup against his own country under cover of Covid-19?

Are his daily shenanigans in the White House pulpit, his astonishing, self-pitying assaults on the media that created him and daily sustains him, his endless lying and bogus self-justification, his narcissistic obsession with his audience ratings, his ignorant opposition to his own medical advisors, his relentless promoting of dangerous quack cures just a sham, a distraction from what’s really going on?

As confirmed cases in the US exceed 680 thousand, with 35 thousand dead since February, 28 thousand new cases registered yesterday alone, the federal government has reportedly swooped in to interdict desperately needed supplies of PPE, ventilators and vital drugs from reaching states’ governors, who have already paid for them from unscrupulous suppliers at up to fifty times their former prices.

Meanwhile, as virtually every government support that Trump has promised at his bizarre daily press conferences he has already delivered has failed to materialize in the real world, the daily numbers of tests rapidly going backward; having notoriously last week declared that he was not responsible for anything, Trump was vidoed yesterday getting in a spat with a journalist who questioned his constitutional right to override states’ governors on public health policy, insisting that as president his authority is ‘total’. ‘Total’.

So, total authority without responsibility.

Isn’t that the definition of dictatorship?

The illicit seizure by US federal agents of imported masks and other supplies has been going on on foreign airport runways, according to French, German and Brazilian sources, and is now happening in the US itself, where it was uncovered only because a raid on a consignment of 39 million masks from China failed when it was discovered that the masks didn’t exist: it was a scam.

There are reports, according to MSNBC news, quoting the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, of governors considering the use of police or National Guard units to ensure their supplies reach the hospitals they’re intended for. Protecting their legitimate interests and those of their citizens against their own federal government.

Isn’t that what the Second Amendment fanatics have always insisted their guns are for?

Their 300 million guns?

The irony being that so many of them actually support this criminal, this grotesque, manipulative hoax of a president.

The Executive branch attaching – perhaps stealing would be a better word, since no compensation is being paid – urgent medical supplies wherever they can be found might seem to be – I don’t know – a fairer means of ensuring nationwide distribution, directing supplies strategically to where they’re most needed, except that it’s not. Federal stockpiles are virtually empty. FEMA has none. There is no direction. Nothing is being sent anywhere.

So where the hell is the stuff going?

Assuming he’s not just selling it to the highest bidders out of the back door, Trump is establishing control of the supply, perhaps to force the governors to do his bidding, when it comes to ordering a national return to work that many governors and medical experts fear is premature and designed only to boost the markets – and hence, the president’s poll ratings. Even as the virus rampages unchecked through care homes for the elderly, through black neighborhoods and Veterans’ Administration hospitals, he will claim a great victory. Possibly the greatest.

He will have conquered Death.

It looks to The Pumpkin like this thievery is a policy being run by Jared Kushner’s shadowy parallel emergency management team. Only last week at a White House presser, Kushner in an apparent slip of the tongue referred to ‘our’ medical supplies. No-one knew what he meant by that. Speculation is rife: who is ‘us’? The White House itself? Billionaires? Trump’s and Kushner’s extended family and friends? Congressional Trump loyalists and the packed judiciary? Pro-Trump militias and the dumbfuck voters?

Well no, not them. They’re the ones who are being sacrificed in droves for the Orange Messiah in the Oval Office.

Or is it for resale to the highest bidder? Trump is already hijacking what he can get from the $4 trillion bailout fund voted through by Congress. He’s fired the head of the oversight committee and put his own man in the post, effectively giving himself control over where the money goes. He’s insisting that the hotels and leisure sector where he has substantial interests (and losses) should have first dibs at the compensation funds.

Much of the rest will be handed without an audit trail to corporations that are already sitting on a $13 trillion offshore cash mountain. Some people fondly remember when boosting the market through stock buybacks was illegal.

Increasingly there is talk of a suspension of civil rights; of the cancellation of November’s elections; of civil war. Some “very fine people” are already donning combat fatigues, waving AR-15s around city halls and demanding their right as freeborn Americans not to be locked-down by Jew Commie faggot politicians. That has to be worth fifty bucks apiece.

And now, for utterly selfish reasons, as the UN agency operates in many other, poorer countries where the virus has yet to get its full purchase, this malignant old bastard is defunding the World Health Organization, lying copiously about its actions early in the crisis to mask his own dismal inadequacies; when the USA’s normal contribution is already $200 million in arrears – and when he has previously defunded or disbanded his own government’s pandemic watchdogs as irrelevant expenses, and in 2018 withdrew the permanent US medical liaison on Beijing’s pandemic response team.

Back in 2014, Obama made an astonishingly prescient speech on the threat and being properly prepared (in the next five years). It isn’t as if no-one foresaw the likelihood of a global pandemic. Normal people did. But Trump has not made a habit of cultivating normal people, or taking sensible advice from a black man.

The world, as far as Trump concerned, is on its own. Only he matters in the grand scheme.

That’s the president of the United States – an incompetent, inarticulate, stumbling baboon afflicted with overweening vanity concerning his own non-apparent expertise in every area – yet a calculating madman with autocratic instincts who bears ultimate responsibility for killing thousands of his own people. What will happen if ever the 42 per cent wake up to what has been going on?

.This is really not looking at all good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjzX8vn6-M4

“Silicon Valley CEO, Eric Ries, who volunteered to help develop tools for procuring protective gear for front line healthcare workers, police and paramedics … found that the White House was doing virtually nothing to obtain the PPE:

“What they did not foresee was that the federal government might never come to the rescue. They did not realize this was a government failure by design—not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone. ‘No one can believe it. That’s the No. 1 problem with the whole situation: the facts are known, but they are inconceivable,’ Ries told me. ‘So we are just in denial.'”- interview in the New York Times, cited on BuzzFlash.

I’ll repeat the question: Is Trump mounting a coup against his own country under cover of SARS-Covid-19?

 

Counting chickens

And as the fatuous oaf prepares to use his non-existent presidential authority to force states to reopen schools and businesses in the face of WHO advice, and that of his own experts, and while he has removed any legal necessity for employers to report cases of Covid-19 among their workforce, perhaps his and other governments around the globe anxious to return to normal as world cases pass 2 million and the threat of another Great Depression looms, need to take note of something that is happening in Japan’s Hokkaido prefecture, according to the Japan Times.

“Hokkaido issued a new state of emergency declaration on Sunday, following one issued in late February, after seeing an increase in the pace of coronavirus infections.

“We are facing a crisis of a second wave in the spread of (the coronavirus) infections,” Gov. Naomichi Suzuki told reporters, asking residents to refrain from making nonessential outings.

“Hokkaido had declared its own state of emergency on Feb. 28 ahead of the government and lifted it on March 19, citing signs that the coronavirus spread was abating in the prefecture, a popular area for both Japanese and foreign tourists.

“Schools in Sapporo, which have gradually resumed classes since April 6, will be closed again from Tuesday to May 6.”

Writing on BuzzFlash, editor Mark Karlin observes, this is exactly what Trump is hoping will happen when he orders the lifting of movement restrictions on 1 May. He wants SARS-Covid-19 to “wash over” everybody, get rid of a few thousand Democrat voters. Get rid of the blacks and latinos; the 2 million prisoners; the migrant camps; the wasteful elderly.

The losers.

While Britons starve quietly at home waiting for their first welfare checks to be distributed by the already dysfunctional and now overwhelmed Universal Credit experiment, spare a thought for our capitalist cousins across the water.

At one feeding station in San Antonio, Texas, on a day last week, an orderly queue formed of TEN THOUSAND Americans – in their cars, naturally. Some 21 MILLION new unemployment registrations were being processed.

And as a Stanford University study in Santa Clara County, Ca. has indicated from actual mass testing for antibodies that the number of people carrying the coronavirus is up to 85 times greater than the number of confirmed cases, potentially reducing the overall morbidity rate to about 0.12 per cent, shouldn’t we perhaps keep on asking the questions some of us have been asking for months: has this thing been around far longer than since it supposedly escaped from China in January? Is it now so universal that we can fairly safely assume it’s in the population in much the same way as the annual ‘flu bugs, that we don’t go to quite such heroic lengths to avoid, that most of us don’t get, and won’t be eradicated for a generation – if ever?

As if on cue, Sunday’s Observer carries an interview with David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College, London. “Humanity will have to live with the threat of coronavirus ‘for the foreseeable future’ and adapt accordingly because there is no guarantee that a vaccine can be successfully developed.”

 

Killing us with kindness

As the thing drags on, we are increasingly exhorted to be kind to one another.

i’d love to be, but what do you do when you’re out in the park with the dog in the sunshine, and a runner in shorts and singlet comes panting past you without warning from behind, at a distance of maybe three feet, and you can still smell their plume of deodorant and sweat 30 yards further on, and you’re surrounded by it and trapped in it and you can’t hold your breath in any longer?

At 70, what kindness should you muster toward your possible executioner?

I tell myself, okay, this SE Asian-looking woman who’s just done it to me twice in half an hour might conceivably be one of our lauded Health Service heroes who’s just letting it all out after another 12-hour shift in the ICU watching people like me, scared eyes, coughing and gasping their final breaths, alone.

We are so far managing to lose 1 out of every 7.5 patients who make it as far as a hospital (compared with Germany’s 1 in 35). Hospital is not where I’d like to be. What will happen to my dog, my jazz collection?

In which case, she ought to know better than to let it all out where elderly people are walking. She’s probably ten or 20 times more likely than others to be infectious. Go run on the beach, lady.

I’m like that, you see.

Not very kind.

 

Nah, it’s looking really lovely: a GW report

It’s been another total stunner of a spring day out there today, Tuesday 14 April. How long is it since we had rain? A light  shower overnight a few days ago, is all.

The ground, muddy after the long wet winter, is baking hard. We had a couple of cloudy days last week. Otherwise the sun has been beating down out of cloudless blue skies, barely disturbed by the very occasional jet trail heading out to the west. (You wonder who they are, where they’re being allowed to go?)

It’s been a little colder since Sunday, a cold breeze and a chilly overnight temperature of 1.5 deg. C. set to be beaten tonight, maybe even with a frost. Nevertheless, standing beneath the spectacular blossom of an ornamental cherry tre in the park, I hear a sund I haven’t heard for the past three years: the industrial hum of wild bees.

Now, I’m happy to accept that my £15 digital max-min thermometer might even be a whole degree out, it’s not a scientific instrument – although it seems a bit unlikely, they wouldn’t sell many if they were that inaccurate. Also, that my sheltered from the west wind by the next-door house, tiny, south-facing, overgrown front garden has its own micro-climate.

But the thermometer is fixed to the post of a bird table that has been completely swallowed up by vegetation, as the Photinia I planted 8 years ago has swelled to unheard-of dimensions since last year, and is thus sited in deep shade.

And I have to say that the temperature under the Photinia at some point over the Easter weekend seems to have maxed-out at an incredible 28.3 degrees C., 82.94 F.

At 26 deg. C, Good Friday is said by the experts at the Meteorological Office to have been the hottest day of the year so far. My home is about five miles by road from one of the places where they measure these things officially, and I say bollocks to that.

“The hottest April day since 1949 was recorded at St James’s Park in London on the 19^th when 29.1 °C was reached: just below the highest ever recorded UK April temperature of 29.4 °C. ”

That report was from April 2018. The forecast is for warmer days to return shortly. We’ll see how it goes, shall we.

Mind you, we still have some way to go as far as spring temperature records are concerned. A weather station in the city of Nawabshah, Pakistan registered 50.2 degrees Celsius – 122.4 F., on 30 April, 2018.

 

Granny’s World

Pakistan: heavy rain has caused buildings to collapse, landslides and flash floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where at least 5 people have died as a result. 11 people were killed in floods there on 16 March. Heavy rain has also affected parts of central and northern Afghanistan

Yemen: A flash flood rushed through the capital, San’aa, 13 Apr. after heavy rain that caused extensive damage. A house in the old city collapsed, killing 2. Regionally, many are suffering in flooded refugee camps. United Arab Emirates, at least 3 children are reported to have died and almost 100 injured after flooding affected 18 camps. Fears are growing of diseases spreading, including Covid-19.

Iran: Several people have reportedly died and hundreds have been affected after more flooding in the southeast. Wide areas of the country are still recovering from flooding in March. Update: UN agencies report,18 provinces are experiencing floods, with 7 recorded fatalities, 2,500 people rescued and over 300 displaced between 10 and 14 April. Further heavy rain is expected.

Papua New Guinea: At least 10 people have died after more heavy rain triggered floods and landslides in Chimbu Province early on 10 Apr. Homes, churches, food gardens, livestock and fish farms have been destroyed during weeks of rain. 25 thousand people have been affected by floods in East Java, Indonesia, since 09 April.

Ecuador: A river broke its banks in Quito, the capital, after heavy rain on 12 Apr. causing damaging floods in the south of the city.

Colombia: Torrential rain caused flash flooding in Santander de Quilichao on 16 Apr. Images on Social Media showed flood water raging through streets. Local authorities said homes were damaged and power supply cut in some areas.

(All reports from Floodlist, 15/17 Apr.)

Ukraine: heavy rain has put out several wildfires that emerged around 4 Apr. in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the 30-km area around the former nuclear reactor, where authorities have prohibited people from living. The fires were started by locals burning the dry grassland. Flames came within 2km of a radioactive waste storage facility. Radiation levels in the nearby capital, Kyiv were said to be ‘normal’. (Various reports)

USA: One story that emerged from the trail of devastation left by tornadoes over Easter, the Philips family had just moved into their new home in Missouri, which they’d decided to buy because it had a concrete ‘safe room’. When firefighter Andrew Philips, his wife and two children emerged from the shelter after the storm, they found it was the only part of the house left standing. Everything else was gone, down to floor level. Around 30 people are thought to have died across three states.

And today, 15 Apr., heavy snow in Chicago caused a 60-vehicle pileup on the Kennedy expressway. (Accuweather)

Arctic: sea surface temperature for March was approaching 1.8 deg. F above the 1951-1980 average. Sub-surface ice that normally absorbs spring warmth is almost gone. A huge hot-spot is sitting over the shallow East Siberian shelf. 10 ‘tipping points’ tending to runaway warming have been crossed. The jetstreams are once more looking chaotic. (Arctic News, 14 April)

Space: About the size of an averagely spacious house, Asteroid 2020 GH2 will pass by Earth inside the Moon’s orbit on 15 Apr. at a range of about 223,000 miles (359,000 km). Huge Comet Atlas, twice the size of Jupiter and expected to be the spectacle of the century, has been pulled apart by the Sun’s gravity and is likely to disappoint; not so, perhaps, Comet Swan (C/2020 F8), a small comet discovered on 11 April, and due to transect the orbit of Mercury in late May. (Express)

March: Copernicus reports, global temperatures were “much above average” in March 2020. The month was 0.68°C warmer than the average March from 1981-2010 but (with no El Niño last year) only the fourth warmest on record, after 2016, 2017 and 2019. But it was patchy, with Europe showing 2°C warmer than average for 1981-2010, but only the sixth warmest March on record.

New BogPo, spreading fast…. Corona v. Us… Air of unreality… The madness and the pity… The Blob vs The Thing… Old Bogler’s almanacke… GW: as if that wasn’t bad enough.

 

STOP THINGY

Friday 13 Mar.: Trump has declared a national State of Emergency.

Aw shucks, and he was doing so well….

 

QotW #1

Observers said the speech, in which Trump gave the sense of resisting a foreign invasion (he has banned all flights from most of Europe), struck a strange tone. David Litt, who wrote speeches for Barack Obama, said: “As a former presidential speechwriter, my careful rhetorical analysis is that he’s gonna get us all killed.” (Guardian) The BogPo’s take on his ‘strange tone’ is that he appeared to be reading out a prepared script in his sleep.

QotW #2

“The process of developing a vaccine is one that is not that quick. So we go into phase one. It will take about three months to determine if it’s safe. That’ll bring us three or four months down the pike and then you go into an important phase, called phase two, to determine if it works. Since this is a vaccine. You don’t want to give it to normal healthy people with the possibility that it will hurt them … So the phase of determining if it works is critical. That will take at least another eight months or so. So when you’ve heard me say, we would not have a vaccine that would even be ready to start to deploy for a year to a year and a half, that is the timeframe.” – Top US epidemiologist Anthony Fauci explains patiently to a congressional committee why Trump is a big fat liar.

QotW #3

“We’re about one El Niño and a recession away from disaster.” – Granny Weatherwax. (See below)

 

Corona v. Us

Update: Wednesday, 11 Mar., 7 pm: cases 125,086; deaths 4,590; recovereds 67k.  Italy put on 2.3 thousand new cases in one day and has over 820 dead. China however has only 36 new cases since yesterday, 24 outside Wuhan.

Updatier: Thursday, 12 Mar., 9 am: cases 126,519. (Slowing down?) deaths 4,637; recovereds 68k. 4 pm: 129,854 (Speeding up?), x 4,751. World stockmarkets dropped off the cliff again today in the wake of Trump’s unconvincing appearance and poorly implemented travel ban. Trading in New York was suspended again as the 7% limit was almost immediately reached; The FTSE was down 10% at 4 pm., the Dow 8%. Airline, travel co. and bank shares all plummeted by around 16%; The pound was on the floor at $1.26 as investors rushed to buy bonds or gold.

Updatiest: Friday, 13 Mar., 11 am: cases 136,253; deaths 4,992; recovereds 70k. China has only 21 new cases overnight; Norway goes on lockdown; UK 798, x10 – about 300 new casesovernight. Baris Johnson warns, be prepared to lose loved ones (perhaps 10 thousand ‘undiscovereds’ in Britain); Italy passes 15,000 cases, with a thousand dead. Western stockmarkets rebound again after yesterday’s new record falls. Canada’s first family in quarantine after Sophie Gregoire Trudeau tests positive.

Quick 6 pm catchup: 142,897, x5,375. Italy put on 2,500 more today, 1,200 dead – the USA has just on 2,000 confirmed cases but testing remains minimal and kits in short supply. How do you know you qualify for a test without a test? Fingers are being pointed inside the White House at Trump deliberately suppressing testing to keep his ‘numbers’ low. He tells the nation he has no idea what goes on in his administration.

• China’s index patient, the first known case of the novel coronavirus, has been traced back to mid-November, at which time the regime apparently decided to keep quiet about it. It would have been kinder if they had warned us. Might their inaction qualify as a crime against humanity?
• An ‘unidentified’ UK cabinet minister is reportedly in quarantine, after coming into contact with infected Health under-secretary, Nadine Dorries. This is outrageous. High-profile public figures with the disease MUST be identified, if only for the sake of public confidence that our leaders are all in this with us. It is also essential for contact-tracing that we know who these people are, where they’ve been and who they’ve been meeting – they meet a lot of people.
• Rumor has it that the ‘billionaires’ are fleeing to their high-security compounds, taking private doctors and sophisticated medical equipment with them. Interestingly, although we boomers were considered the main target of The Blob, it’s the wealthy politicians and celebrities who are looking vulnerable, owing to their extended social networks. Since Tom Hanks and his missus caught it in Australia, those currently suspected of harboring the virus include Ivanka Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, actor Idris Elba and F1 champion, Lewis Hamilton.
• You’d think it would be simple. The government could at least facilitate the additional production and distribution of what are now household essentials like hand sanitizer and thermometers. My local (big) supermarket has been out of hand sanitizer for the past three weeks and shows no signs of being able to restock. My online order of a small pack is two weeks overdue for delivery. Amazon just cancelled my order of a basic thermometer with which I could monitor myself, with no explanation. I’m having another go, but don’t hold your breath. Ooops, sorry.

The EU is unhappy that France and Germany have imposed their own export bans on face masks, and is politely requesting a little cohesive solidarity from member states to spread the containment measures around more fairly. The UK’s freshly appointed Chancellor, perhaps chancer would be a better title for this millionaire ex-Goldman Sachs junk bond dealer, Rishi Sunak has produced a dispiriting budget, steamrolling our carbon reduction targets but throwing £30 billion he hasn’t got at coronavirus measures, whatever that can produce at such short notice after years of attritional spending cuts.

China: Southampton university researchers find that “Sophisticated modelling of the outbreak suggests that China had 114,325 cases by the end of February 2020, a figure that would have been 67 times higher without interventions such as early detection, isolation of the infected, and travel restrictions. But if the interventions could have been brought in a week earlier, 66% fewer people would have been infected.” (Reporting: Guardian)

Lebanon: Lebanese nationals abroad have been given just four days to get home before the airports and ports close, along with all street cafes and restaurants. Cafe life is absolutely core to the functioning of Lebanese society, so what they will do when they get back, your Old Uncle can’t imagine. The country defaulted on its debt this month and the economy has gone belly-up, so another round of the civil war looks on the cards.

Thailand: dozens of urban-dwelling monkeys have been videoed in the city of Lopburi, brawling over a single yoghurt pot as the sudden disappearance of tourists has left them without the food scraps they’d learned to depend on. A queue had formed at my local supermarket here in Wales by 8 am today, and by the time I arrived 11 hours later there was one can of baked beans left in the beans section, and no pumped hand soap dispensers. I managed to secure the last bottle of their more decent budget 5-year-old Scotch. Luckily I did most of my panic buying before last year’s missed 31 March Brexit deadline. It’s still in the cupboard. Cupboards….

Wales, UK: among the now 19 cases in Wales (22 more overnight Saturday) is a patient from Caerphilly who has not travelled abroad, nor come in contact with anyone who has, the Guardian reports. Another one! With the enthusiastic backing of our GP, we ask, given that there was no general test for this thing before it was identified in a Chinese lab in December, and the similarity of its symptoms to other coronaviruses, how long might it have been out here, hiding in plain sight?

Uncle Bogler writes: I’ve just had an email through from AXA PPK Healthcare, offering me a quote for health insurance…. Thanks, I’ll get back to you.

Air of unreality

They just don’t get it, do they.

This morning out walking Hunzi in the warm spring sunshine, avoiding contact, we passed the recreation ground, where a bunch of about 150 proud parents were jumping up and down, cheering on their infectious little darlings, all gathered together in a tight huddle on the touchline of the soccer pitch, oblivious to the global pandemic beyond and the millions who may die.

Such gatherings may not actually be banned, but it’s not as if they don’t know, surely by now? It isn’t a fucking reality TV show! They will take their newly acquired virus home with them and pass it on to their parents and grandparents, and then be sad and angry and confused when mam and tad, or mam-gu dies, gasping for air.

For fuck’s sake wake up, people, this is real! Unless you just want the money and the house.

And here am I, continuing blithely to rehearse my part/s in a play to be performed in May, without any degree of certainty or assurance whatsoever that we shall have an audience, voluntary or legal; or that one of us, or all of us, might not be out of action – temporarily for the younger ones, maybe permanently for the director and the First Old Loony (me).

I spent some time yesterday performing in vastly well-paid roleplay situations, playing a dying cancer patient for a class of NHS junior doctors hoping someday to become oncologists. It felt like good practise, although in a curious echo of my GP’s amused reaction last week, they seemed to find the whole coronavirus thing a bit of a hoot and don’t believe a word of it.

So I’ve just gone and ordered a new laptop. Hope springs eternal, as they say. You’re only young once.

 

The madness and the pity

The USA is rattling up the corona board today, Wednesday 11 Mar., almost catching Germany, with 1,109 known cases and 32 deaths (at 7 pm GMT). Trump has shifted his focus of interest away from his cot mobile to the Mexican border again, where he says immigrants are bringing in ‘foreign’ coronavirus (© Stephen Miller) and he must build bigly an instant wall to save everyone. As of just now, Worldometers shows, Mexico has 8 cases and no deaths.

As for his ‘a million test kits by the end of the week’ promise – the one that followed ‘there are test kits for everyone who needs a test’ promise of the previous week, so far only 75,000 have been produced, this time to the proper WHO formula, not to a recipe made up by Martha Stewart, and distributed to health authority labs, probably one in most states. A Chinese philanthropist has offered to send half a million kits to the US, as a gesture of goodwill. Satirical git.

Trump himself has been showing real leadership on this issue, going around shaking bare hands with eager crowds of MAGA dumbfucks, hobnobbing with Trumpsucking pols and sneezing post-teen incel neo-cons – not stopping to wash – letting people know they’re welcome to carry on doing whatever, going to work – and refusing to have the test. (Whatever happened to ‘I’m a germophobe, I couldn’t have touched those Russian prostitutes’ pee-pee?) Obviously, he would want his test kit to go to a little old lady in Duluth. ‘No, Mike, save her, I’ll be okay…’

Buzzflash website speculates that Trump’s maladroit handling of the crisis is not madness, or idiocy, but sheer malice and naked ambition – a deliberate policy to allow the disease to spread through the millions of untested and uninsured Americans to create pools of infection, boost the numbers and provide the right cause to declare a rare federal state of emergency, if not martial law, suspending the November elections – possibly indefinitely.

• buzzflash.com/articles/p5ev8xxllv10o5qgedlf2boozsnzi3

Oh. now he’s declared a state of emergency.

 

The Blob vs The Thing

“Our White House and the presidency have been taken over by a gang of imposters and interlopers. These imposters and interlopers carry in their minds a sick, neofascist political philosophy, which is always waiting in the wings, looking for weaknesses in our representative system of government, watching for an opportunity to grab the reins of power and take us all down a path that must inevitably lead to an end to our republic as we know it, and, as a result, a hell for both the U.S. and the rest of the world.”

Thus James Rogers Bush, writing on BuzzFlash today – www.buzzflash.com/articles/a-majority-of-americans-are-now-at-war-with-a-form-of-neofascism-coming-out-of-the-white-house

Is it inevitable?

Two ideas that emerged from Italy in the last century – fascism, and the mafia – are closely linked by crude, antidemocratic  authoritarianism, a top-down tribalist structure demanding of total loyalty and obedience to the plots and grandiose delusions of the leader, a love of faux militarism and the trappings of power, the collusion of the Christian church and Big Business, the Othering of outsiders, the exciting bullying of the weak and a total disregard for the lives and wellbeing of those unconnected with the project.

Both have been successful in recent years in infiltrating and undermining the worlds of business, media and politics while operating their criminal enterprises below the radar, growing and benefitting from widening globalization in what has become an international criminal conspiracy now emerging into plain sight, disguised once more as blinkered popular nationalism.

It will be interesting to see how a pandemic disease – The Blob – that, in its own way, is as unconcerned with the individual, as ruthless and crude as any Trump or Bolsonaro, Duterte, al-Sissi, Aliyev or Xi – as devious as a Putin – will either promote or derail the neofascist, mafioso manifesto, as it scythes its way through the world’s population.

There will, inevitably, be concordance. Leadership through the crisis will have to come from the top, inadequate to it though ‘the top’ may be. It will involve stratagems and arbitrary ordinances, blunt exercises of State power and control that might seem like dictatorship – may, indeed, even be, or become, dictatorship. Once conceded, rights are hard won back.

One thing is for sure. The bling-encrusted satrapy of these insentient powermongers will be scuttling right now to the imagined safety of their remote bunkers, their trophy wives and personal groomers, their chefs and private doctors, their armed guards, their van Goghs and Jeff Koonses, behind blastproof doors, as if they imagine Edgar Allen Poe was joking, bearing with them the lurid reflection of their own inevitable mortality.

 

Old Bogler’s almanacke

March could be a good time to catch up with all those household chores….

 

GW: as if that wasn’t bad enough….

We should remember, wherever they are reporting from, whatever on, there is weather. And not all of it is very helpful…

Egypt: “A rare and very dangerous deep cyclone and frontal system is forming over Egypt and the Middle East today, expected to result in extreme amounts of rainfall for the region and likely lead to dangerous and damaging flooding. Today, satellite imagery indicates a massive sandstorm has developed along the moving cold front in southern Egypt, spreading across Sudan. The sandstorm will also spread towards the east, into northern Saudi Barbaria and Israel tomorrow (13 Mar.)” (severe-weather.eu)

A state of emergency was declared ahead of the storm, which has already brought severe flooding to parts of the country. Streets in poorly-drained Cairo were under a meter of water Thursday. Schools, public offices and some air- and seaports were closed and train services suspended. 5 people are known to have died.

Mauritius: A very large and potentially violent cyclone, Invest 91s is organizing in the southern Indian Ocean, off Madagascar, reports severe-weather.eu. It’s moving away, towards the outlying islands of Mauritius, where it could do “significant damage”.

Police in the Solomon Islands report that 2 people have died and 6 are missing after heavy rain triggered a landslide on Guadalcanal. Flooding has blocked or damaged roads and bridges on Guadalcanal and Malaita islands. (Floodlist)

Zambia: has been severely affected by flooding. Hundreds of sq km of land are underwater and thousands of homes affected. Following floods in January, the UN says food security is a serious concern. (Floodlist)

Iran: “The UN says that an estimated 24,000 people have been affected by flooding in the south-west of the country since late February.” (Floodlist)

Tunnel approaching….

Earth: While we’re all mesmerised by the rapid spread of novel coronavirus Covid-19, the collective known as Sam Carana at Arctic News has just determined that, on their enhanced scale, taking 1750 and not any year between 1850 and 1900 as the starting point, plus a few other improved parameters like where it’s measured and how high up, and how to sensibly account for missing data, the Earth passed through the Paris upper safe limit of 2 degrees of warming last month and is headed for 3 degrees next year.

A more detailed analysis of the numbers would not go amiss, guys. For instance, we could use a deep plunge into the following statement:

“a steep temperature rise could result from a decline in industrial activity that is caused by fears about the spread of a contagious virus….”

Yep, the old removal of the ‘global dimming’ problem that you get when you clear the air. Trump’s travel bans should do it.

In other words, we’re about one El Niño and a recession away from disaster. And indeed, such an analysis is separately available via a link to: arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/crossing.html

The question I suppose being – I know it’s pointless asking it – is the fragmenting network of the world’s increasingly polarised and isolationist governments obsessed with maintaining electoral advantage up to the task of tackling coronavirus and global heating simultaneously?

Silly question, really.

Corona v. Us… No, you can’t come in here… The madness of King Donald… A cluster of tea leaves… Sordid reality… GW: and the beast goes on.

 

“Me, a bully? Say that again and I’ll rip your fuckin’ face off. Now give me all your pocket-money….”

Corona v. Us

Update: 21 Feb., total cases to date, 76,805; deaths 2,249 – including 29-year-old Wuhan doctor, Peng Yinhua, who postponed his wedding to remain at his post.  Of those cases, 18,800 are reported to have already recovered. (Worldometers.info)

Another update: 22 Feb., cases 77,924; deaths 2,362; recovereds, 21,251. Massive spike overnight in S Korean city of Daegu, linked to churchgoing ‘superspreader’ and local mental hospital: +229, total 433.

Sunday afternoon: 23 Feb., cases 78,966; deaths 2,468; recovereds 28,440. Italy – northern towns in lockdown, 130 cases, 2 dead and no clue as to where it came from as the assumed ‘Index patient’ has tested negative.  S Korea: ‘Over 600’ cases. Iran: admitting to 43.

Monday morning: 24 Feb., cases 79,707; deaths 2,626; recovereds, 25,253. These figures are provisional, as the death toll in the Iran outbreak, currently at 50, is greater than the number of cases the Ayatollahs are admitting to. Shia pilgrims to the city of Qom are at risk. Stockmarkets tumbled this morning on news from Italy.

The BogPo watched with faint horror as about 35 thousand Italian and Scottish rugby fans mixed it up together in Rome on Saturday. Scotland won 10-nil. God knows what they’ve brought home. 10 northern Italian towns are closed as 60 new cases were confirmed yesterday.

“Hopes for a slowdown in the spread of the novel coronavirus were dashed Friday as the number of new cases rose in China, and outbreaks worsened in Japan and South Korea.” (CNN) A spike of 36 new cases found in a Beijing hospital looks like an indication that the genie is really out of the bottle now.

100 new cases and a second death (of a mental patient) were confirmed overnight in South Korea, where the number of confirmed cases linked to one “superspreader” within a fringe church congregation that believes in the Rapture has reached 86, with another 400 showing “symptoms”.

500 prisoners in jails across China are said to be infected, one particularly grim institution being Wuhan Women’s Prison, where 230 cases have led to the dismissal of the governor. (Guardian)

The WHO is expressing concern over a woman from Wuhan who travelled with no symptoms and a negative test to another city, where five of her relatives promptly went down with the virus. The woman herself then tested positive but still has no symptoms whatsoever.

Also of great concern: “… a 38-year-old Italian man in Lombardy … in intensive care, may have contracted the disease after meeting a colleague who had recently returned from China, even though the colleague had tested negative for the virus.

This virus seems to have evolved intelligence.

After another delay, UK passengers on board “death cruise” liner Diamond Empress are being evacuated today, to a tired-looking hospital in Cheshire. Unlike the American evacuation last week, about a dozen with the virus will not be flying. Passengers have been offered vouchers by the Empress line toward a future cruise.

Congressmen are criticizing the US government for lack of co-ordination in the response to the threat, saying there is no-one in the White House they can talk to. In addition to defunding the main health agencies, Trump has failed for over two years to nominate a health advisor to the National Security Council; a post he has suggested scrapping altogether.

 

No, you can’t come in here

“The comparison between Assange and Dreyfus drew criticism, including from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity working against antisemitism and racism in British society, which tweeted: ‘Disgraceful false equivalence to one of the key learning moments of modern Jewish history.'” (Guardian, 20 Feb.)

I am moved to tell this “charity”, propagandists presumably funded by Tel Aviv and with a clear desire to whip up more self-mortifying antisemitism in Britain, in the nicest possible way, to go fuck itself. I mean, it’s like these people just love poking the anthill with a stick over any little thing, when there are big things going on that they do need to worry about.

Isn’t there enough division and hateful, even violent prejudice out there, not just against Jews but against Muslims, blacks, browns, yellows, Reds, Greens – liberal elites, women, asylum seekers and refugees, experts, poofters and pedos, people on benefits, the disabled, you and me, immigrants, gypsies, tourists and anyone else foreign who is found not speaking the Queen’s English?

What this bunch is virtue-signalling is that it it is verboten to cite the notorious case of Alfred Dreyfus, a victim of 19th century upper-class French prejudice against Jews in the military, to illustrate the kind of prejudice allegedly being shown by the British establishment against Julian Assange. Anti-Jewish prejudice being so vastly more morally worse than anti-anyone else’s prejudice that no-one else can possibly ever get a look-in with prejudice. Because why? Because the Jewish community owns the copyright on prejudice? Some would seemingly like us to think so.

Dear Community Security Trust: the ‘”key learning moment” we should pluck from history teaches us that while we cannot fully eliminate our innate perceptions of Otherness, ALL extreme prejudice is to be discouraged at all times. Including yours.

The comparison being made by the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell is, in my view, unwieldy, ahistorical and somewhat hyperbolic. Assange, battling extradition, is no innocent victim. The argument that the crime he’s charged with, of publishing stolen State secrets, ought not to be a crime due to public interest, even though it is a serious offence, is perversely promoted by the same people who argue that Trump should not have been acquitted in the Senate on the bogus grounds that his private act of extortion against a foreign government, although a crime in law, was committed for the greater good of the country, i.e. to secure his own re-election.

Most of us would call that corruption.

Assange’s slender defense now rests on a probably accurate claim that Trump offered him clemency through an intermediary, Senator Dana Rohrbacher, if he would lie about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. That’s a clear contempt of court, not that “America’s Chief Law-Enforcement Officer” cares a whit about witness tampering and perjury.*

The Community Security Trust, whoever they are, could have said something like that, offered some sympathy with Mr Assange in his plight, as he faces 140 years in a Federal penitentiary, but no. Sympathy for others is not in their repertoire. No argument is permissible beyond the confines of the Tel Aviv echo chamber. They had to raise the specter of antisemitism in a context where antisemitism was the least important part of the matter.

They had to find another stick with which to beat the Labour party.

A white one.

Because, as we know, prejudice is blind as justice.

*Rohrbacher, who is well known and joked about in Congress as the most pro-Russian person in America after Trump himself, or maybe actual Russians, confirms the story. Mr Trump, predictably, says he ‘barely knows’ the Senator. Play another record, Your Majesty.

 

The madness of King Donald

Whipping his dumbfucks into another spittle-flecked frenzy of xenophobic hatred, booing and catcalling, at a Nuremberg rally in Colorado Trump rounded on the Motion Picture Academy for awarding the Best Picture Oscar this year to a foreign film.

Particularly a South Korean foreign film, with subtitles already.

“The winner is a movie from South Korea, what the hell was that all about?” Trump demanded to know, riffing insanely on a completely irrelevant, two-weeks-old subject, an arthouse film he has not and will never watch – as neither will his “base”, any of them. “We got enough problems with South Korea with trade and on top of it, they give them the best movie of the year.”

Boo! Bad Hollywoods! Lock ’em up, traitors! We likes zombie movies! (etcetera)

So much for America’s staunchest democratic ally in the SE Asia region. Their evil, practically Chinese trade policies, making stuff and selling it, obviously leads to the creation of degenerate artistic products that must be banned as socially harmful, inimical to the supremacy of the master race. Trump’s enemies in Hollywood, Deep Staters – probably The Jew Soros himself – treacherously conspiring against America and thus, by extension, King Donald.

One wonders what would have happened if the moguls had awarded Best Picture to a North Korean movie? Beaming congratulations to Mr Kim, no doubt. Wonderful guy. Love him to bits. Practically the only recipient of an award not to make a speech badmouthing Trump in the past four years was the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho. But politeness doesn’t count with this fascist pig when he’s on a power trip.

Doubling down, both on his red-meat racism and his cultural vacuum, Trump then called for the return of probably the only film he has ever fidgeted through that didn’t have either a cameo of himself or steamin’ Stormy Daniels a humpin’ and a grindin’ in it, the 1939 MGM epic ‘Gone With the Wind’.

Why can’t we have that? he whined, plaintively – disingenuously conscious of its racialist undertones, its grotesque whitewashing of an idyllic lifestyle on a slave plantation, its sideways wink to the KKK and its Southern Confederate sympathies.

The man has absolutely no bearings.

You’re fired

As if to prove he doesn’t, though no further proof is necessary, or indeed bearable, Trump has fired his Acting Director of National Intelligence, Mr Joseph Maguire, and replaced him with the imperious, far-right-wing-sympathising ambassador – described by one Congressman as ‘an internet troll’ – who has spent his time in Berlin upsetting the Germans, Richard “Dick” Grenell – a man with no intelligence community experience or friends.

Mr Grenell has already set about gutting the department and bringing in a Trump loyalty requirement for all staff.

The president is said to have blown his thatch when told that another top security official, Mr Shelby Pearson, had given a briefing to the House Intelligence Committee based on evidence that the Russians were up to the same old tricks, interfering to bring about Trump’s re-election. Claiming it was a Democrat disinformation campaign, a “hoax”, he lashed out because, no, he is not unaware that Putin has given the order to St Petersburg to meddle some more, but because he knows it; is desperate, and will do anything, even sellout his country, to retain the mystic powers of the Constitution that are keeping him out of jail.

Other top officials were also fired last week after coming under suspicion that they had done or said things disloyal to the President, despite their first loyalty being to the country.

Korruption Korner….

The New York Times reports, a glittering fundraiser for Trump was held at the “palatial Palm Beach home” of billionaire, Nelson Peltz. Ticket price: $500 thousand per couple. The gala raised ten million dollars for Trump’s superPAC, America First!

Second, came the presidential pardon, three days later, of Michael Milken, the Junk Bond King, serving ten years for racketeering and fraud.

Mr Peltz’s former business partner.

For the whole appalling but somehow no longer surprising story, and an anguished comment that it’s time to stop pretending this is all not happening, compulsorily flip to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, 22 Feb.

“This is not a warning. The dark days are not coming. The dark days are here.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roGPWFUCz0c

 

A cluster of tea leaves

A ‘superforecaster’ is a person described in a 2015 book by someone called Philip E Tetlock as practising the art and science of prediction.

I’m sure we can find many words for such a person that don’t sound like such pretentious sociologese.

Seer; soothsayer; augur; oracle; diviner; haruspex.

“Bogler”, possibly.

Yes, dear Spammers, Likers, etc., I am considering writing to Sir Dominic Cummings – how the imaginary knighthood trips off the tongue, with which he will one day have earned it – to offer my services as a SPAD, being one of the “true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole”.

For, lo, I have encountered the following “superforecast” I made in an ancient BogPo post from March, 2016 – a full however many months before the EU referendum – while slagging off the Man Who Would Be King, Russia’s own Baris Johnsky:

He only joined the ‘Outers’ because he knows it will gain him many Brownie points with the Eurosceptic tendency of the party, who will welcome him win or lose at September’s party conference with wild approbation and, who knows, a vote for the leadership; especially once Cameron and Osborne have lost the referendum and miserably climbed down in the face of defeat, their fate compounded by disappointing trade and borrowing figures: growth slowing (it already is), and the pound getting rockier, as investors discount the inevitable Brexit.

Spooky, or what? Pretty super, actually.

 

Sordid reality

Just inadvertently opened Cummings’ opaque blog, where in the Introit he quotes various obscure sources – just as I used to, to try to improve my “Marx” on the college degree course I took in Applied Photography, Film & Television, with Sociology of the Mass Media.

Here’s one:

‘Two hands, it isn’t much considering how the world is infinite. Yet, all the same, two hands, they are a lot.’ Alexander Grothendieck, one of the great mathematicians.”

I think, Dom, most of us can count to two. There’s a danger, too, in imagining the world to be infinite.

And to be honest, reading on a line or two, your naively surprised remarks at finding there is life out there lead me to suspect you of being Nigel Molesworth, age 48 3/4.

Only Molesworth was far more perceptive and brilliant in his aperçus:

“Reality,’ sa molesworth 2, ‘is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder’.”

 

Speaking of Spammers, I have received praise from a lady who tells me that The Pumpkin – Issue 114 has helped her with her dog training.

Glad to be of service.

 

GW: and the beast goes on

Australia: Invest 99P is intensifying in the Gulf of Carpentaria and expected to slowly drift ashore on Monday in the Northern Territory as a tropical cyclone carrying up to 600 mm of rain. One model is suggesting maybe 900 mm. could fall over a 10-day period, with severe flooding to the thinly populated area southeast of Darwin. The storm when it develops will be called Esther.

North Atlantic: Severe-weather.eu writes: “While a large, deep extra-tropical cyclone over the North Atlantic is currently occluding, there is already a new, rapidly intensifying cyclone to its west. Its future track will be further south than the first one, likely smashing into the UK with a potentially severe windstorm this weekend. Models are in fairly good agreement it will produce a broad windstorm over the North Atlantic as well as major waves and severe winds towards UK and Ireland on Saturday.”

Storm Ellen will arrive just in time for the crucial 6-Nations Wales v. France rugby fixture in Cardiff. Fortunately the stadium has a roof. Once again the BBC Weather service is downplaying the forecast to windy and – later – rainy. Models are showing at least 3 more cyclonic weather systems queuing up to cross the North Atlantic next week. (Severe-weather.eu )

Here’s a link to a nice, scary video of last weekend-but-one’s Storm Ciara hitting St Malo in Brittany…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH1o9TPETYk

Your old Gran suggests, if you’ve been flooded, don’t bother cleaning up yet – a Caribbean holiday will take your mind off it. Sort it out later.

Arctic: On January 3rd, writes someone at Severe-weather.eu, “a radiosonde … over Reykjavik, Iceland,  recorded the lowest temperature in the stratosphere in the past 40 years, at -96°C (-141°F).” More recent measurements closer to the pole were recorded at the tropospheric boundary, where the weather starts, at -85C. The purport of this dull data is that an extremely cold polar vortex such as this, 20C lower than normal, helps to promote colourful Polar Stratospheric Clouds, that assist the process of destroying the ozone layer. Ozone is currently as low as it’s been only three times in the past 40 years; while the vortex has been spinning so fast that the jetstream is almost perfectly circular, leading to unusual satellite mapping like this:

Weird shit, huh?

Tunnel approaching….

Tiny thumbs: “An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science. … On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots.” (Guardian)

California: is back in official drought after a February, normally the wettest month, in which San Francisco and Sacramento have seen zero rainfall. Snowpack in the Sierras is at 56% of normal.

Extinction Rebellion: “The world’s largest financier of fossil fuels has warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, according to a leaked document. The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.” (Guardian)

Well, maybe not. … “The paper notes that global heating is on course to hit 3.5C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.” Ha ha, bless!

“JP Morgan has provided $75bn (£61bn) in financial services to the companies most aggressively expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration since the Paris agreement was signed.”

They should know, then.

The Pumpkin – issue 115: Quote of the Week… Corona v. Us… The madness of King Donald’s friend Rudy… American hero… Fancy that, a policeman!… GW: a hard rain’s already falling.

QotW….

“What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.” – Thomas Jefferson, 1787.

I didn’t say that myself, nor of course would the BogPo ever approve of what was said, even by such an historic eminence, but it was clearly not illegal to say it in 1787, when it was obviously said in jest, ho ho.

The above quote was supplied as a salutary reminder of the patriotic citizen’s duty by a Comment contributor to a Buzzflash article, 14 Feb., proclaiming Trump as a dictator enabled by political feebleness, the pursuit of sensationalism and cheek-turning on the part of the media and the opposition party. “Banana Republic Fascism: Don Corleone Trump Hijacks Department of Justice to Help Out His Criminal Cronies and Punish Truth Tellers” is the somewhat rococo title, if you’re interested.

Sure, and haven’t we been warning people about this very thing for the past three years? And would anyone listen?

Now all we have is Jefferson.

 

Corona v. Us

Update: Saturday 15 Feb., cases 67,186; deaths 1,527 – including the first outside SE Asia, a patient in France. Recovereds: 8,500.

Sunday 16 Feb., cases 69,269; deaths 1,669. Rate of increase within China said to be slowing. More cases aboard Diamond Princess as US moves to evacuate 280 citizens.

Monday 17 Feb., cases 71,337; deaths 1,776. Continuing to slow. Another 99 cases confirmed aboard the cruise from Hell, the Diamond Princess, at Yokahama as 300 American passengers are flown home, obliged to wear masks which doctors say are probably useless. 14 of them have already tested positive.

Coro news…

Quarantine periods in Henan province south of Beijing are being extended to 21 days because of two anomalous cases of patients testing positive long after coming into contact with cases in Wuhan

The Chinese stock market has fully recovered from its initial 8% drop due to the Covid factor, as Bank of China is printing money to keep investors happy. and stocks are soaring once more. Western commenters describe the trend as ‘ludicrous’.

Two hundred attendees at the 2020 UK Bus Summit in London, including several transport-related MPs who were hoping to curry favor with the bus-obsessed little boy in Number 10 are being contacted about a Chinese delegate who attended the event and has tested positive.

The Tokyo marathon is being restricted to professional runners only; Japan is preparing for a heavy number of potential cases. Beijing is thinking about cancelling its annual Party congress.

The WHO’s choice of “Covid-19” as the official name of the virus has annoyed the USB cable manufacturer, Covid – strapline goes something unfortunately like: “Guaranteeing more effective transmission worldwide”. Still, they do say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. (Source: The Late Show)

Africa has recorded its first case. An unnamed “foreigner” is in isolation in a Cairo hospital.

Furious British passengers trapped aboard the Diamond Princess at Yokahama are demanding the Foreign Office gets off its butt and rescues them too. So far, the government hasn’t commented.

Passengers all got a special Valentine’s Day free bottle of wine, courtesy of the cruise company, which must have pissed them off even more. A number of Australians have been flown home.

 

The madness of King Donald

…is contagious. His friend, Rudy Giuliani…

The madness of Trump’s friend Rudy

…went on Fox Business the other day, and asserted that nameless “Ukrainian oligarchs” had stolen over $5 billion in US aid, which explained why the £391 million military aid package had been held up by the president. He omitted to mention that the notorious quid pro quo had, until he said it, had nothing to do with oligarchs! Unless you consider Biden to be one.

Nor has he apparently noticed that the Senate has already found the president Not Guilty of extortion, obstruction and abuse of power, so they can all move on to the next criminal conspiracy.

This was an entirely new slant on the impeachment story and an allegation no-one had made before, or during the so-called trial in the Senate.

Meanwhile, an internal investigation into the Fox channels’ claims about Ukraine has branded them as “disinformation” and Giuliani as “too susceptible” to the Trumpsucking conspiracy bullshit peddled by Fox’s millionaire fantasy-show hosts like Hannity, Ingraham and Kilmeade.

An INTERNAL Fox inquiry!

“How do you think they became oligarchs?” he challenged the world to answer – Rudy frequently appears drunk on TV, and at this point he made weird munching and gnawing noises – and then went on to claim that he was “terrified” that the Democrats were “literally” planning to have him assassinated.

 

Meanwhile, freshly acquitted of extortion in the Senate, where the hopeless Senator Collins from Maine changed her guilty vote at the last minute on grounds that she was ”Sure the president would learn a lesson” from the experience of being impeached, instead Trump has tweeted the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a threat that unless he persuades the city’s courts to drop their investigations into his dodgy finances, he will defund a federal program subsidizing tourism to the city.

D’you ever meet one of those stroppy, 9-years-old, back-of-the-class lawyers, who’d say, “Nyah haa, I can do anything I like and you can’t touch me!”?

 

American hero

Many US commentators are expressing a raised degree of alarm that, this week, as it became abundantly clear that Trump has lassoed the Department of Justice and is using the law as a weapon to take revenge, to intimidate and harass his opponents and exonerate his friends, while himself remaining untouched by it, a line may irrevocably have been crossed into authoritarian dictatorship.

No longer in theory, the subject of nervous humor and furrowed examination but – as the Border Patrol has been transformed into armed snatch squads being sent this very weekend into so-called sanctuary cities in defiance of local authority ordinances, to batter down doors and haul away undocumented workers – in actuality.

With the cooption of the Senate and the Republican party into his grand scheme, the emasculation of law enforcement agencies and the packing of the judiciary with Trump appointees, there is now no longer a single institutional body other than the National Assocation of Funeral Directors, who must surely have a coldline to the Grim Reaper, that can curb the actions of the criminal president and bring him to account: excepting only the American people. The electorate.

And even they, worries Thom Hartmann, may already have unconsciously crossed their own moral lines to become a part of the new paradigm that Trump has brought about; just as ordinary Germans did in the early 1930s, they became Nazis without noticing that anything had changed. In Kafka’s novelette, Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect: while asleep, he has compacted with the State and is now entirely and willingly serving its ultimately self-destructive agenda.

In the TV coverage of Trump’s recent rally in New Hampshire, in the background of what I call human wallpaper, serried ranks of hand-picked dumbfucks forming a cheering, gurning red, white and blue backdrop to the overweening vanity, the posturing, the nauseating self-congratulation, the snivelling self-pity and the many, many lies, can be seen a child of about 10. He is enthusiastically joining in on cue, all the hate-calls to lock up “Crooked Hillary” and Nancy Pelosi, parroting the nativist Trump catchphrases, booing at the word “impeachment” or hostile mentions of the “fake news” press gaggle perched uncertainly at the back of the hall; giving the thumbs-down sign at the mention of the name of the Jew, Soros.

This heavily indoctrinated little bastard needed no prompting from his dad, proudly sitting next to him in his MAGA hat. And he’s not alone: there’s been a recorded increase in bullying of minority children in schools, observers noting that much of it is accompanied by the verbal tropes of Trump’s unending round of well-drilled nativist rallies.

How long will it be, I wonder, before he’s riding around in a Humvee, stringing up Muslims and Jews and Mexicans, shooting them into pits?

Because that’s what’s going to make him an American hero for the 21st century, and he’s loving it.

 

Fancy that, a policeman!

British citizen Tony Camoccio has been released from Egyptian custody after paying £1,000 in bail and related fees. He was arrested after patting a policeman ironically on the back following a patdown and search of his belongings at Cairo airport. The policeman insisted he had been sexually assaulted and that CCTV footage would prove it.

Now who in their right mind, what horrible pervert, but only a British man would sexually assault an immigration official in full view of his colleagues? And indeed, after refusing to hand over the tape for independent review, Egyptian officials grudgingly gave in and admitted there was no assault. Why therefore Mr Camoccio has had to pay out £1,000 for the pleasure of touching up a copper seems to be just one of those things you might expect in al-Sissi’s Egypt – corrupt and mad to the core.

Don’t go there, is my advice.

 

GW: a hard rain’s already falling

British Isles: “the Met Office has issued a “danger to life” weather warning as the UK braces itself for Storm Dennis – a second weekend of gusty weather. Storm Dennis is forecast to batter large swathes of the country with 70mph winds and up to 140mm (5.5in) of rain in northern areas. The Environment Agency (EA) said the flood impact from the weather system is likely to be worse than last weekend’s Storm Ciara due to rain falling on already saturated ground.” (ITN)

Saturday 15 Feb., “…the observed pressure falls are more than double the threshold for bombogenesis. Pressure change during the past 24 hours has been unprecedented, from 987 mb to 936 mb at 06 .00 UTC today – a  remarkable 51 mb drop. Dennis will continue deepening at an extreme rate for another 6-9 hours before it reaches its mature stage, likely to push the lowest pressure slightly below 915 mbar.” (Severe-weather.eu) The cyclone is expected to weaken again before making landfall.

Note: here in Boglington-on-Sea it’s been a bit wet and windy, but by dinner time on Saturday nothing out of the ordinary. Some weather forecasters are in danger of crying Wolf too often. But there are a couple of Red warnings out Sunday a.m., further south of here. Many communities in the northeast and south midlands are flooded.

Dennis is gradually weakening as it moves eastwards but is bringing strong winds and ‘excessive’ snowfall to western Norway. Severe-weather.eu warns of maybe 2 meters of snow!

Fujiwara: the Fujiwara effect is what happens when Storm Dennis gets caught up by another intense cyclone in the middle of the North Atlantic that goes into orbit around it and then merges into it…. producing hurricane-force winds and 80-to-100-ft waves and another blizzard-battering for Iceland. DO NOT SET SAIL IN THIS! The remnants of the huge storm will push through north of Scotland on Monday and could in theory dump up to 3-ft of rain on the west coast of Norway.

The good news is, TWO MORE cyclones are intensifying behind Dennis, and will repeat the Fujiwara effect together on Wednesday, bringing heavy seas, high winds, more rain and some snow to the British Isles. These intense lows coming in multiples are unprecedented events in the annals of North Atlantic storms, according to weather-watcher site, Weather Decoded, and are the result of ferocious stratospheric winds ripping the jetstream to pieces. Wow.

Except that this report is looking like bullshit as in the wake of double-Dennis, high pressure is building across the Atlantic, 17 Feb.

Southeastern Europe is in for a new heatwave early this week, according to Severe-weather.eu, with temperatures 16 to 20°C above the average.

Mozambique: “heavy rain has caused further damage and flooding in central parts of the country just weeks after at least 28 people died and 58,000 were affected by floods in January. 2 people died in Manica province, around 500 families in need of food assistance and temporary shelter according to local media. Chimoio, the capital of Manica Province, recorded 175mm of rain in 24 hours to 12 February.” (from Floodlist)

Australia: “heavy rain continues to fall in Southeast Australia, with flooding affecting parts of southern Queensland over the last few days. This follows severe flooding in parts of New South Wales after days of heavy rain from 07 February. Marcoola recorded 231.8 mm of rain in 24 hours to 11 Feb. Queensland Police reported that the body of a person was found in Conondale. A woman is missing. Meanwhile, northern Queensland is experiencing severe to extreme heatwave conditions that are expected to stretch into the weekend”, ahead of Cyclone Uesi. (Floodlist)

15 Feb., 9 News reported, 25 million trees were flattened by Cyclone Uesi when it hit World Heritage site, Lord Howe island with winds gusting to 155 km/h. The Guardian records that 800 residents and tourists appear to have had a lucky escape. Both Sydney and Melbourne were threatened over the weekend with more heavy storms and potential flooding.

The next existential nightmare to hit SE Australia’s fire- and flood-ravaged coast is expected to be a plague of mosquitos hatched by the exceptionally warm, wet weather.

Peru: “further heavy rain has affected parts of Huanuco department. The department saw a series of flood events during the first half of January this year.” Dozens of people have been displaced and red warnings are out in several areas where rivers have overflowed. (from Floodlist)

 

Tunnel approaching….

Over a quarter of all US domestic “cheap” home-lease car loans are in default. $1.2 trillion dollars is outstanding on credit cards and a further $1tn owed in potentially non-recoverable student debt. These are all sub-prime areas bearing the highest lending rates, where investors bored with poor returns from conventional instruments are getting back into the debt-swaps and derivatives game, that brought the entire banking system down in 2007/8. No lessons were learned.

The mortgages market is next, as excess consumer borrowing is secured against homes; the stockmarket is a bubble unrelated to the real economy, fuelled by the Fed printing money and corporate stock buybacks using tax cuts – money that isn’t trickling down into higher wages or jobs; while US government and corporate debt is the highest in history. (Summary of Trump’s booming economy on Thom Hartmann, by Prof Richard Wolff.)

Cabinet reshuffle: Baris Johnson’s new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak is a millionaire former Goldman Sachs exec. and bankbusting derivatives salesman: a high-stakes gambler who owns a hedge-fund. His new Attorney General, Suella Braverman is reportedly an active member of an extreme Buddhist cult in North London whose 93-year-old guru has been accused of sex crimes against young male acolytes.

The Observer reports that press agencies are complaining that Johnson has been allowing access to key events, such as the signing of the EU withdrawal treaty, to the Number 10 “official” photographer only. This follows on from the notorious walkout by the Number 10 press corps after Cummings tried to bar several reporters he has taken exception to.

Welcome to New Britain.

 

In the long run we’re all dead… Double Identity… Don’t feel you have to leave… Look on the bright side… Pot, kettle #106… GW: just sinking in the rain… The crimes of one’s youth.

QotW

“Brexit belongs to this era in one quintessential way. It is an act of the imagination, inspired by an imaginary past, carried along by misdirected grievances, borne aloft by an imaginary future.”– Columnist Roger Cohen, New York Times.

 

In the long run we’re all dead

The seldom knowingly understated Daily Express is reporting on a random computer simulation, showing that the Chinese Fish ‘Flu coronavirus could end up killing “65 million” people around the world.

The BogPo has done a computer simulation of its own.

Given that the infections-to-deaths ratio has been running consistently to date at 47:1, a little over 2%, it would require 3.05 billion people to catch the virus, to produce a death toll that high. At the current rate of spread of the infection, about 2,500 new cases a day, it would take 344 years to kill 65 million people.

By which time, most of them would tend to be dead anyway.

Update: 5 Feb., 24,558 cases, but overnight deaths are at 493, roughly a halving of the nightly rate for the past two weeks. (49:1)

Update update: 6 Feb., 28,018 cases, 563 dead. (49.7:1 – again an improvement in morbidity but a larger number of overnight deaths is reflected in a bigger leap in the number of cases reported.)

Sort of further update: 6 Feb., a third case has been confirmed in the UK, unconnected with the first two. Patient from Brighton is in an isolation unit. Dr Li, the 34-year-old ophthalmologist who first tried to alert the authorities in Wuhan to a new disease and was silenced, has died of it.

Friday morning: 31,400 cases; 630 deaths. Ratio 49.8:1, again a very marginal improvement possibly due to earlier detection and treatment. 61 cases have now been confirmed aboard the horror cruise liner stranded at Yokohama with 2,660 passengers and 800 crew trapped aboard.

Hyundai has suspended car production at its giant Ulsan manufacturing plant in S Korea, owing to Chinese parts drying up. N Korea has reported its first case, a woman who’d been visiting Wuhan. Hospital workers in Hong Kong remain on strike, demanding closure of the border with the mainland. Supermarkets are reporting empty shelves after a wave of panic buying.

 

Double Identity

Speaking of panic, I watched the last-of-the current-series episode of “Silent Witness” last night – for any foreigners, it’s a long-running BBC Drama CSI-stroke-pathology-lab procedural in which a large and internationally respected forensics institute is entirely staffed by just four mentally tortured individuals, who solve crimes the cops can’t or won’t by cutting up corpses in a gruesomely explicit way, reconstructing broken hard drives and watching hours of CCTV: the unlikely premise being that they work so closely with the police, they’re even invited to sit in on interrogations and interview witnesses.

Spoiler: In this episode, Dalek-with-hands, computers-stroke-tiny-fragments-whizz, Clarissa Mullery is leaving to look after her old mum – popular disability icon Liz Carr has got a part in a Hollywood movie – while tall, handsome, anal CEO and troubled single-father, Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern) gets written off – and out of Series #397 – by an escaped Porton Down experimental military nerve agent that goes straight through ordinary masks; nobly sacrificing himself to save chemically stricken, kickboxing crimescene cluehound, brooding Ulsterman, Jack Hodgson (David Caves).

The evening’s weirdness was compounded by watching Thomas writhing in his death-agony on the lab floor, doors barred to keep the foul stuff safely inside while he mentally computes the formula that will save Psycho Jack.

Following his demise, as the credits rolled I switched over to continue binge-watching Series 3, Episode 9 of a timeshifted mid-afternoon, do and say nothing to upset the old biddies, quirky but amiably watchable private-eye, he-she buddy series called (it’s set in Stratford-on-Avon) Shakespeare and Hathaway, in which two bungling amateurs and their faggy, wannabe-actor assistant prove they’re cleverer than the local clueless but hostile smartypants Detective Inspector.

Five minutes had barely passed in a late-evening whisky haze before, damn-me, if Thomas-slash-Lintern wasn’t miraculously resurrected, popping up on-screen as the tall, handsome etc. smooth-talking, property-developing villain who bumps off a bonkers ghostbuster (played by another disability icon, Francesca Martinez) to stop her contacts in the spirit world proving he doesn’t own the land under the local pub.

The idea of the suave, 6’1″ Lintern climbing in through a window round the back or visiting a small campervan to knock off a woman with cerebral palsy, a feat we aren’t shown, was almost more BBC Drama than I could take. For the first time ever I thought it might be worth contacting the Issues Helpline number they always tack onto the end of the show, in case you’re feeling worried.

 

Don’t feel you have to leave

Am I alone in finding some elements of this viral story rather odd?

Last week there was a big to-do in the news for a few days, about an evacuation flight laid on for British and Spanish citizens, mainly, fleeing the outbreak in Wuhan. As the Wuhanese were streaming out of the city before they were finally banged-up, spreading the stuff everywhere, we heard about people not being able to bring their Chinese wives and kids out, the plane not being allowed to take off, the scramble to find a quarantine space and the rest. Travel bans were being put in place everywhere.

In the end the Brits boarded, flew, were dropped off as the plane went on to Spain and are now in isolation in a Cheshire hospital. To date none has tested positive. Other nations have had similar stories to tell, of evacuation flights. A German flight unwittingly brought back a number of positive cases. The plague is rife aboard a stricken cruise liner at Yokohama. There cannot be any non-Chinese resident left in Hubei province who doesn’t know the virus poses a risk.

Now, a week later, the Foreign Office has perked up and brightly advised British nationals in China that: “You should think about leaving if you can”…. And epidemiologists are being quoted as saying the advice “will come as a relief” to those who remain. What, they think being advised to leave is the same as getting a flight out? Because it’s a long way to bloody walk. And that people need permission from HMG?

They don’t think these people will have made up their own minds yet, or what? That they’re not capable of deciding what to do until the Foreign Office tells them it’s okay to act in their own best interests – if they can? For fuck’s sake! How disconnected from real life do scientists have to be?

The British Foreign Office it seems to me, is in an advanced state of not having the faintest idea what to do either, and is fully symptomatic of this shambles of a government halfwitted voters have just elected, that is being run not by the elected politicians but by scheming teenaged advisors and ambitious ideopaths who couldn’t collectively organize a shit in a 2-gallon bucket.

But as they say, talk’s cheap.

(Postscriptum: 5 Feb., the FO has announced overnight one further, final, take-it-or-leave it charter flight out on Sunday, in conjunction with the French, although we gather the Chinese authorities may not yet have agreed to it. Spreading the virus around the world is not something Premier Xi wants to see happening. At home, a row has erupted over a meeting the Chinese ambassador had with the Prime Minister’s father, a man of no position but whom the Ambassador mistook for an official emissary. China’s participation in the disastrously disorganized COP-26 conference in Glasgow in the Autumn is now uncertain.)

And the latest medical advice, with still just the two British cases confirmed after a week is, if you’ve been to China and you don’t feel well, stay home.

The image of mummefied corpses being found everywhere in a year’s time, clutching their return tickets, bolt upright in their armchairs with the telly still hissing, by social workers and bailiffs (repo-men) keen to recover the rent arrears springs to mind, as for sure, GPs won’t be making house calls. Nor do most people have the specialized life-support apparatus at home, which serious cases require.

Duh!

Plagiarism corner

Followers, Likers, Spammers and Those No Longer Reading this, muh bogl, may well include journalists at the Express.

I deduce this because you lovelies will all kno’ that I drew everyone’s attention many days ago to the comparative data from the official US ‘Centers for Disease Control’ in Atlanta, Georgia, showing that while the US had identified only eight cases of coronavirus by the middle of last week, over 19 MILLION Americans had already been struck down by seasonal Type A avian H1N1 ‘flu, 180 thousand had been hospitalized, and 10 thousand had already died.

We might perhaps recall that as of 2017/18, 27.3 million Americans had no health insurance at all, relying entirely for survival on the hit-and-miss state-funded Medicaid service – and many more still have no insurance for the pre-existing conditions that will have weakened them against things like ‘flu and other viruses.

The Hill has asked the question, why are Americans so terrified of foreign viruses like the coronavirus and ebola, that offer them almost no threat, but don’t appear to care that homegrown viruses are making millions sick and killing around 30 thousand Americans a year? Curiously, the site is still quoting the CDC’s figures from early last week. Their answer is probably that word ‘foreign’, but let’s not forget the huge numbers of gullible fucknuts who swear by the anti-vaxxer message.

Maybe something smelling of Trump’s asshole, Goop by Trump, will keep them safe?

The story also appeared in the Express today, 4 Feb., using the same figures as we reported last week – although they should logically have changed by now, the mystery as we have also previously mentioned being, the CDC website is no longer even reporting it and therefore it’s difficult to check.

Your Uncle Bogler has pondered this enigma, and has come up with one of his finer conspiracy theories.

Coronavirus fears have hit the Asian stockmarkets hard over the past few days. God forbid even worse news on the health front from the USA should be allowed to cause a similar shutdown of industry there, causing Trump-unhelpful jitters in the rise and rise of the ever-bloating Dow Jones Index; his only positive economic indicator. Silence, as they say, is golden.

But the problem is possibly more prosaic. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2017:

“…the agency is the target of deep spending cuts under Trump’s budget proposal. His budget draft would have cut the CDC’s spending by $1.2 billion, which health experts warned could hamper the agency’s disease-fighting efforts and immunization programs. (Former Director, Dr Tom) Frieden called them ‘unsafe at any level of enactment.'”

Yep, the CDC’s been hacked back to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the billionaires.

Welcome to your fascist state, America,

 

“Can the clusterfuck that COP-26 is turning into make us look any less useless?”

Look on the bright side

I seldom see anyone commenting on a peculiar fact of economics. The worse the news gets, the higher the markets seem to bounce.

Both oil prices and global markets had been sagging over the past few days owing to what the WHO is on the verge of declaring is a global pandemic, that has already had a depressing effect on industrial output in China.

But market jitters never seem to last long, even though the news may be bad. On the basis of one unconfirmed rumor that a Chinese lab has found a ‘cure’ for the coronavirus, which even if true would take months of trials before it could be released, this morning the men who bet on flies have resumed cheerfully buying stocks and oil futures as if the whole thing was just a bad dream.

Grab it while you can, I say.

Meanwhile, the pound is creeping up against the Euro and the dollar, even while HMG dithers over HS2, productivity remains through the floor and Vanishing Johnson reveals the culture of bungling incompetence at Number 10 as he faffs about trying to find anyone willing to organize the make-or-break COP-26 conference on climate change Britain is supposedly playing host to next Autumn, with no help from him.

That’s if Border Force’s goons will allow any of the darker-tinted delegates into the country.

Nor can anyone finally decide where to hold it, as the PM refuses to allow the Scottish parliament to have an input in the globally important event supposedly being held in Glasgow, in case it makes them look too independent; so Ms Sturgeon has gone and booked up all the best venues around the city for as-yet unspecified purposes. (Retaliation denied.)

Still, the UK already looks laughably dysfunctional after three years of Brex… sorry, of leaving the EU-type clusterfuckery, that’s still going on, with positions on a trade agreement hardening on both sides. Can the clusterfuck that COP-26 is also turning into make us look any less useless and irrelevant on the world stage than we already do?

And capitalists haven’t changed their spots. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways has told its workforce they should voluntarily take three months off to allow for the dip in air travel owing to coronavirus – without pay.

So, nothing to see there. Buy!

 

Pot, kettle #106

Mike Lynch was thought of as a successful British entrepreneur, who sold his Cambridge-based tech company to the late Hewlett Packard for $8 billion, only for HP to have to writedown almost $9 billion a year later, claiming they’d been conned.

“In the civil fraud case in London,” reports the Guardian,  “HP’s successor companies allege Lynch fraudulently inflated the value of Autonomy before its acquisition by HP. The businessman, once hailed as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, has been accused of lying repeatedly and inventing evidence in the witness box.” And has surrendered himself to the court, facing extradition proceedings that could land him with a 25-year sentence in a Federal house of correction alongside Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.

The Pumpkin has no idea if accounting skulduggery took place or not. It looks like the people who bought out Hewlett Packard are just a bit pissed and need to make some money back quickly.

But he wonders when the Department of Justice might take it into its woolly old head to ask some pertinent questions about credible accusations that Trump deliberately inflated his asset values to fraudulently obtain $2 billion in loans from Deutsche Bank, secured against worthless junk bonds and nebulous guarantees from Russian signatories?

And how those loans were approved despite America’s answer to Dick Dastardly being red-flagged as a money-launderer and serial defaulter? A repeated liar (16.4 thousand and counting) and an inventor of evidence in his own impeachment trial?

At least we’re not hearing that Lynch has threatened and intimidated witnesses and bribed jurors.

The problem being that the main witness who could testify for or against Trump, the Deutsche Bank wealth management division (Enrich) executive Thomas Bowers who approved his loans was found tragically suicided at his agreeable Malibu home last November.

Oh dear, what a trial.

And one in which Mr Trump would certainly have been totally, completely and fully exonerated. Perfect, in fact.

 

GW: we’re sinking in the rain

Turkey: At least 23 rescue workers have been killed on a mountain road in eastern Turkey, 5 Feb., after they were hit by an avalanche while searching for two people missing in an earlier snowslide, that had already killed 5 people. 30 rescue workers were pulled out alive, but emergency teams were still searching for other colleagues who might be buried under the snow. (Guardian)

Malawi: “1 person has died and hundreds have been displaced after flooding in the north that began on 1 Feb. after heavy rain caused several rivers to break their banks. Over 450 households in the district have been displaced due to flooding of the North Rukuru river. Food stores have been damaged or destroyed. Crops and livestock have also suffered.” (Floodlist) News emerges two weeks late from the northwest of Burundi, too, of floods that killed at least 3 people and displaced over 1,000.

New Zealand: a Red-level emergency is in operation on South Island after a meter of rain (39 in.) fell in Southland in just 60 hours. 100 hikers and about 70 people in vehicles were stranded by flooding and road closures in the tourist area of Fiordland. Hundreds more were evacuated to shelters. Helicopters flew over the bush trails to find and rescue those stuck. Fears are growing that floodwater may enter a chemical store in Mataura and release a cloud of toxic ammonia.” (Guardian)

Indonesia: At least 3 people have died in recent flooding in Papua New Guinea, Floodlist reports. “Homes and two bridges were destroyed in the floods. At least two more people are thought to be missing.”

USA: “When the system arrives over the southeast US and East Coast, rapid surface cyclogenesis takes place and significantly worsening conditions develop. A violent winter storm spreads across the northeast, introducing very heavy rain and severe winds across the region, but also very dangerous conditions in the cyclone’s wake where violent blizzards develop. Extremely high temperatures are expected before the front pushes through.” (Severe-weather.eu).

Canada: A state of emergency remains in place in some Vancouver Island communities after flooding forced residents from their homes and shut down roads over the weekend. Heavy rain hit the area Friday and into the early morning of Saturday, prompting the district to issue evacuation orders as water levels rose in rivers and streams in the region. (CBC) Let’s hope Meghan and Harry can swim.

Australia: flood warnings are out in fire-ravaged New South Wales as heavy rain and thunderstorms begin to batter the region. Western Australia, a tropical low off the north coast is expected to develop into a tropical cyclone on Thursday morning, 6 Feb. It’s expected to deepen and could become a Cat 3 cyclone by Saturday as it moves toward land, although there’s still uncertainty as to whether it would make landfall. (Guardian) Severe-weather.eu reports on a second cyclone, Invest 92P, forming off Vanuatu.

Brazil: Wunderground reported, 29 Jan., on an “unprecedented multi-day stretch of torrential rain and destructive flooding at a time of year when frequent rainfall is already the norm. Flooding from a rare south Atlantic cyclone, Kurumi took at least 58 lives and displaced some 30,000 people. States of emergency were declared for more than 100 communities in the state of Minas Gerais.” Total rainfall through January of 809.7 mm (31.88”) was more than 250% of the January average, according to Brazil’s national meteorological institute.

France: Days of heavy rain have caused flooding as rivers rose to near-record levels in parts of eastern France. Three weeks’ worth of winter rain fell in one 24 hour period. Emergency services carried out flood rescues in Luxembourg, where several roads had to be closed due to flooding. (from Floodlist)

Croatia: and it’s ‘batten down the hatches’ as winds gusting to more than 200 km/hr (125 mph – hurricane force 3) are forecast over the Balkans tonight, 5 Feb. (Severe-weather.eu) Update: Earth Changes Media reports, Cyclone Teodor left 1 person dead and 22 injured, along with much property damage.

British Isles: Another of those giant Atlantic cyclones we’ve been reporting, Storm Ciara is expected to bring ‘very unsettled’ weather on Saturday night. 8 Feb., and into Sunday. “People can expect delays to road, rail and air travel, and those living by the coast could be affected by large waves and sea spray. The Met Office also warned of possible power cuts and building damage caused by the high winds, which are expected to last for more than 24 hours.” (BBC)

Antarctica: has logged its hottest temperature on record, 18.3C, beating the previous record by 0.8C. The reading, taken at Esperanza on the northern tip of the continent’s peninsula, beats Antarctica’s previous record of 17.5C, set in March 2015. (Guardian)

Tunnel approaching…

Japan: 2,660 passengers aboard a Japanese cruise liner are being quarantined, ordered to remain in their fetid cabins at Yokohama after 10 tested positive for coronavirus and were transferred to hospitals onshore. They include two Australians and an American. It brings the number of confirmed cases in Japan to 35. (Japan Times)

Update: 6 Feb., another 10 cases have been confirmed aboard the Diamond Princess.

The Taal volcano in the Philippines‘ Luzon island is still rumbling away, with over 130 earthquakes a day felt locally, up to M4. Experts expect the island volcano to erupt again soon, which means it probably won’t. 150 thousand people were evacuated when it blew its top last month.

Daily Excess: sorry to draw on this bizarre website for something interesting to write about, again, but I couldn’t resist retweeting this standfirst from a 4 Feb. story:

“World War 3 panic: US launch devastating terror airstrike as it bids to make ‘US safer’”

Yes, folks, a routine drone strike on an al-Shabaab guerilla base in rural Somalia at the weekend, causing one fatality, is going to start World War Three…. Don’t think so, lads. Nice try.

I’m trying to ignore another story, too, that warns us NASA is worried about a killer asteroid hitting Earth. Not a specific asteroid, it turns out. Just any old asteroid, really. Lots to choose from. Not much we can do about it.

Yet a third sensational headline about USGS finding a ‘smoking gun’ at the Yellowstone volcano turns out to be a story about how scientists first discovered that the entire park was really the caldera of a giant supervolcano – that was about 50 years ago by my reckoning. Hot news!

What is the matter with these people? How panic-stricken do they think we are?

Don’t answer that.

Decarb: “More than 90% of the £2bn in energy deals struck at the inaugural UK-Africa summit last month were for fossil fuels”, The Guardian has found, despite the UK government’s commitment to “support African countries in their transition to cleaner energy”. A publicly-funded investment program, The Private Infrastructure Development Group has also been found by NGO, Global Witness to have invested three-quarters of a billion pounds in fossil fuel projects, thus helping to dump a large percentage of the UK’s much-vaunted cut in CO2 emissions on the Third World.

 

Short Essay….

The crimes of one’s youth

A Commenter called Albs posted a few choice paragraphs this morning under another splendid cartoon by The Guardian‘s Steve Bell, showing Trump as a grossly naked and wobbling Venus on the half-shell, Botticelli’s famous painting, shit pouring out of his signature Bell motif, his head wearing a gold toilet seat for hair, as a craven-looking Senator McConnell rushes to clothe him in the American flag

Tragically for Albs, in his or her last line the word obviously meant to be ‘threw’ emerges as ‘through’, and another Commenter called Albs – oh, I see it is in fact the same split-personality – later writes ‘threw, not through, you numbnuts’, a Comment which captures the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation as other Commenters rush to reassure her/him that anyone can make a mistake and he/she is not to dwell on it.

Trump’s miraculous deliverance and his coronation, not to say his apotheosis at the hands of a broken and wretched Congress, the abysmally corrupt and crime-complicit GOP, are forgotten.

Your Uncle Bogler, however, recalls how, 58 years ago, back in 1962, while sitting his Common Entrance History paper, he made a literary gaffe of such egregious and monumental stupidity that it became in his mind a crime he has never forgotten, and still shudders at to this day.

Despite having worked for many years at the coalface of textual conception and analysis: in news, in advertising, in publishing – he edited more than 150 ‘serious’ books – despite the many millions of words committed to paper since in an editorial career of little and poorly rewarded distinction, your old Uncle has never, ever forgotten the shame of realizing, too late, that he had written of the ’emasculation’, instead of the ’emancipation’, of women.

A mistake which he feels is at the core of his ‘impostor syndrome’, that has dogged him all his working life.

For, this was clearly not an intentionally precocious alignment with the core tenet of feminism. He was, for Christ’s sake, only 12 years old. His mother was probably the only woman he had ever met, apart from the Headmaster’s wife, Mrs Cornes. And, he supposes, Matron. After almost six decades haunted by the shame, and with many lesser errors since logged in the celestial record, nevertheless as a working writer he has yet to expiate a literary crime of such an awful dimension, and doubts he ever shall.

So, sorry, Albs, but I fear you will have to go to your grave with the shameful memory of how your spellchecker, possibly unnoticed, once gave you ‘through’ instead of ‘threw’, and showed you up for what we all truly are, deep down.

My error has permanently emasculated, and never emancipated me. As it now has you, numbnuts

 

The Pumpkin – issue 109: The steady trickle of body bags… I know what you’re going to say… And deliver us from the 21st century… GW: Baby light my fire…

 

The steady trickle of body bags

I was disturbed, when I’m normally complicit in our mutual liberal-lefty echo-bubble, by last Friday’s edition of the Rachel Maddow hour on MSNBC. Rachel is a cool-headed analyst not normally given to hyperbole, but her rundown of all the terrible things that are going to happen to America as a result of the assassination of Iran’s General Suleimani played straight into the hands of Trump and his gang.

Autocrats – dictators and tyrants of whatever stripe – thrive on popular fear, and Trump set the tone right from his inaugural address three years ago, ramping up fears of immigrant crime and imminent social disintegration in a broken nation, that only he could put a stop to.

Americans are the most fearful people on the planet, as he well knew. Everything terrifies them, from supposedly foreign ideological constructs like the British National Health Service, to their own government.

But for some unfathomable reason, the majority of voters seem to have no fear of real things that are being done to them:

• being stripped of their already limited opportunities for subsidized healthcare: 27 million Americans had no health insurance in 2019
• seeing billionaires receive huge tax concessions when their own taxes are in some cases increasing and their modest wages remain stagnant
• being supplied with polluted water and carcinogenic or climate-changing chemical emissions to benefit private corporations and corrupt public officials
• watching the president play golf three days a week at a cost of, now, $120 million to the public purse while he and his family benefit to the tune of millions of dollars from clear abuses of his office
• the deaths of 60 thousand Americans a year from opioid abuse promoted by rapacious pharmaceutical companies; 33 thousand more from gun-related crime and accidents
• the egregious corruption of executives of institutions like the National Rifle Association and the department for agriculture, with its well-funded refusal to ban teratogenic chemical poisons
• mass shootings in schools, churches and synagogues, mostly by white supremacists
• the opening up of protected monument lands and popular hunting grounds to extractive industries in whose pockets their politicians sit stuffing their faces
• the refusal to acknowledge scientific facts regarding dangerous shifts in weather patterns caused by climate breakdown, for the benefit of political funders in the extractive industries
• the packing of courts with judges whose only qualification is loyalty to the president and his henchmen, the subversion of the Justice Department and attacks on law enforcement agencies
• appalling patriarchal laws limiting women’s rights and criminalizing even natural abortion
• the emergence into daylight of the influence of organized crime hand-in-glove with extreme fundamentalist Christianity going right to the top in national life
• the rolling back of environmental protections and planning laws; the poisoning of their water supplies
• the introduction of dangerous instability, bullying, extortion and brinkmanship in international relations
• the lack of an effective opposition in Congress.

None of these public abuses and more seems to create anything like the terror in Americans as does the absurd implausibility of the suggestion that Iran might somehow invade or fire nuclear missiles which they don’t yet have at the United States in retribution for the extrajudicial killing of one of their leaders.

Certainly, if hijacked airliners were to crash into Trump Tower now, we all know who would be getting the blame, regardless of any and all evidence to the contrary.

Mr Trump’s – and by extension, America’s – rambunctious imperialist bullying only works with such smaller, less lethally armed and invasively inclined nations as are incapable of inflicting any real and lasting damage to the homeland.

Beware, however, the ability of ideologically motivated peasants in flip-flops to conduct asymmetrical warfare for years in their own lands.

The steady trickle of body bags.

 

Speaking of which, have you seen what that drone did to Suleimani’s car? He wasn’t alone – wasn’t driving. There were others in there, including the senior commander of Iraq’s Shi’a militias, a PR man and the driver.

I see the funerals taking place, the coffins – but I’m not convinced anyone knows who, what or how much is really inside them.

And, yes, okay, he was a bad guy. Was the poor bloody driver a bad guy too?

 

A tale of two shitties

Amid speculation on US TV about the decision to whack Suleimani, two stories may be true.

One, that Trump was going around for days telling everyone, including his higher-echelon ($200k a year) private members at Mar-a-Lago, with a conspiratorial smirk, that something really big was about to blow over Iran and they should keep an eye on Fox News.

So much for a rapid response to a threat of imminent attack. But it seems to have allowed his golfing buddies to get their lucrative bets down on the stock market.

The other, that the option of whacking Suleimani was just one on a list of a dozen ideas the Pentagon had sent over at his request. Apparently it was on the list only because they thought it was the last thing he would be dumb enough to do. Pompeo and Pence persuaded him otherwise.

The only press that has come out in full favor of Trump’s action has been Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

I wonder why. What could their readers possibly have to gain?

And a third shitty:

“A 2009 study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School found 45,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of not having any health insurance coverage. In 2018, 27.8 million Americans went without any health insurance for the entire year.”

The Guardian America story reports workers being fired purely over a medical diagnosis – Walmart imposes a strict limit on the number of days you can take off work – voluntarily giving up treatment and dying because their savings have run out.

Welcome to Trumpland, Brexit idiots.

 

I know what you’re going to say

Ha ha! After three days living with Alexa, I just called: “Alexa, please play…” and as I hesitated for one brief moment, she jumped in: “Here’s a station you might like – vocal jazz.”

It wasn’t exactly what I was going to say, Norah Jones is good if a bit C&W oriented, but a valiant first attempt at mind-reading. Also, it was a song about rain. It’s teeming down outside.

And rain is an anagram of…. Iran!

How spooky is that? 😉

 

And deliver us from the 21st century

I’m just now listening to some of my old vinyl records on my new £99 transcription turntable. You know, with the five-star reviews.

It took only about 40 minutes of working with the inexplicably small and useless diagrams I can barely see through my elderly vision impairments, using a torch, to figure out how to build the flimsy plastic Sony turntable from scratch, using matchsticks, an old cocoa tin and a skinny rubber band.

Surely to God they can sell these things in one readymade piece? Without nasty, crunchy little push-buttons? Maybe with a bit of hydraulic damping of the tone-arm? A spare stylus? And would a little LED light to show it’s operating really have broken the bank?

But I didn’t spot until I had already hanged myself in the garage, the little switch right at the back that frees the output phono plugs to talk to the phono plug inputs on my active speakers. I’d feared for a while there, I might have had to go back online to buy a separate amplifier and wait in another day for Hermes to deliver it.

As you can gather, rather like my old vinyl records I’m a bit scratchy today.

It’s partly because I’m being relentlessly pursued by a cheery email from Amazon, apologizing that they hadn’t been able to deliver my turntable because I was out when the courier called, only don’t bother replying to this email because it won’t be read. So I can’t tell them it’s already here.

The last time this happened,  they sent me another whatever it was in the post the following day. If I end up with two turntables, I thought, I shall take it as a sign to become a DJ, whatever, as I can’t see to drive to the recycling center.

I’d already determined in fact that the turntable hadn’t been delivered, because after I risked taking Hunzi out for 15 minutes to uncross his legs at lunchtime I checked the tracking information just in case, and it told me that the driver had called at 1.30 pm, a time when I know we were in, only apparently we were out and he hadn’t delivered it.

I could check the non-delivery note or go to their website and do ‘x’ or ‘y’ if I wanted more information. I would be allowed two more chances to be in when he called again.

I’d already determined that there was no non-delivery note, and going to the website I was unable to find an address for ‘x’ or a link to ‘y’ anywhere visible. So I gave up, trusting that they might just try again the following day, and began composing one of the worst one-star rancorous Trustpilot reviews that my spleen could manage.

At precisely 2.00 pm there was a knock at the door; whereon opening it, a courier presented me with a Sony-branded box containing a flimsy plastic £99 transcription turntable. ‘Did you try delivering that earlier?’ I enquired. ‘No, mate’, was the reply. ‘It’s only just arrived at the depot.’ He declared himself mystified, accepted my scrawled signature and left.

As I said at the start, I’m listening to a slightly collectible vinyl album recording of Mark Murphy’s Brazil Song on my new, flimsy plastic £99 transcription turntable. You know, the one they haven’t yet delivered. That took 40 minutes to put together and get working from the terrible tiny instructions after I found the tiny switch at the back.

But I now have a new record – as being someone who cannot be relied on to be at home when the courier doesn’t call, who needs to be pursued with more instructions that don’t make sense.

Anyway, it works, and the sound quality is not too bad, surprisingly.

Clever old me.

Except that, a few days after I’d ordered the thing, an Alexa Echo spy-in-your-home unexpectedly arrived, a Christmas present-cum-disability aid from my ex-family. ‘Alexa, play album, Brazil Song’, Mark Murphy….

Anybody want some old vinyl albums? Transcription turntable, almost new? Ready assembled?

(Aren’t vinyl albums annoying? You get only 20 minutes a side before you have to turn them over. No bonus tracks. No time for a snooze.)

 

GW: Baby light my fire

Israel: “At least 4 people have lost their lives after flooding swamped parts of the country following heavy rains on 04 and 05 Jan., 2020. 2 people drowned in an elevator. Dozens of rescues were carried out. 74mm of rain fell on Tel Aviv in 2 hours, around 20% of its annual rainfall.” (Floodlist)

Australia: may be grateful for a change for a tropical cyclone, Cat 1 Cyclone Blake is the first of the season for Western Australia and will bring heavy rain and strong winds to the Kimberley region, having made landfall near Broome, 5 Jan before moving briefly back out to sea and reintensifying to Cat 2. (Severe-weather.eu)

Angola: 1 person died in flash flooding after a continuous 12-hour downpour in Luanda province. Several hundred are homeless. (Floodlist)

Turkey: Floodlist reports, 8 Jan., “Severe weather including strong winds, rain and snow has affected wide areas of Turkey over the last few days.” 2 people died after heavy rain triggered landslides and flooding in the southern province of Mersin, where 165mm of rain reportedly fell in 24 hours.

Israel: “A second severe storm in 4 days brought more heavy rain and flash flooding to parts of northern Israel. 1 person died in floodwaters as he tried to rescue passengers trapped in their car. Emergency services rescued people from flooded homes and trapped vehicles.” (Floodlist)

USA: Accuweather is reporting on the potential for yet more storms coming out of the Gulf into  southern states later in the week. In Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, “millions of Americans are under threat for severe thunderstorms, including the potential for tornadoes.”

In South America once again, parts of both Peru and Colombia are under quite severe flood threat as rivers overflow after heavy rain, with many hundreds displaced.

UK: Thanks to the winter of 2010 when your Old Granny froze her skinny ass off in an unheated building undergoing refurbishment, despite a record number of heat records being set last year the Met Office has declared that the decade 2009/19 was only the second warmest in the temperature record, the honours going by a whisker to 1999 to 2009.

Observed over a gap of 100 years, during the period 1910 to 1920 as many cold records were set in the UK as heat records were set last year; the exact reverse was true too, with only one hot year record broken in the 1910s as opposed to 8 in the 2010s. The 10 warmest years – 2019 wasn’t even one of them, apparently – have all occurred since 2002.

Faroe Islands: 7/8 Jan., and it’s a rough old night in the North Sea. A very large, twin-core cyclone with hurricane-style low pressure – 940 mb and deepening – is centered over Iceland, bringing winds gusting over 140 mph and 50-foot waves to the Faroe Islands and the northern isles of Scotland.

Arctic: measured over Iceland in the past few days, the polar vortex high up in the stratosphere has recorded its coldest temperature in five decades of measurements, 600 km/h winds cooling the top at about 25 km altitude to minus 96 Celsius. Not sure what it means, but the clouds over Finland sure look pretty:

Photo: Thomas Kast. Story: Severe-weather.eu

Tunnel approaching….

China: “Health authorities in Wuhan first reported 27 cases of an unidentified pneumonia-like illness at the end of December, a figure that jumped to 59 as of Sunday. The patients, seven of whom are in critical condition, have been quarantined. There have been no reported deaths. Symptoms of the mysterious virus include fevers, problems breathing and invasive lesions to both lungs.” (Guardian)

Yellowstone: Newsweek reports, “In its monthly update of activity, the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) confirmed there were 48 eruptions last year (2019). That’s 16 more than the previous record set in 2018, when there were 32 eruptions at Steamboat.” Up to then, the average activity at the world’s tallest geyser had been 2 to 3 eruptions a year, although 1964 set the previous record, with 29. At one time, 50 years passed without any activity at all.

Bushfires: An old Comment thread I found from October 2018 under a Guardian story on the great Australian drought has numerous contributions from ordinary citizens expressing profound concerns for a devastating season of wildfires that year. ‘Kickthismobout’, for instance, contributed:

“Between 1900 and 1970 there were 13 Major bush fires, which is 1.85 per decade.

• 1970 – 1980 – 4 Major bush fires
• 1980 – 1990 – 3 Major bush fires
• 1990 – 2000 – 7 Major bush fires
• 2000 – 2010 – 16 Major bush fires
• 2010 – 2016 – 25 Major bush fires (15 Major bush fires in total, averaged out over projected decade, could be more).”

So let’s not pretend Canberra was not warned.

The 2019/20 season is about halfway through and already more than 800 fires – many merging together along fronts measured in hundreds of Km, to make calculating the numbers of ‘Major’ fires pretty well impossible – have burned uncontrollably through 6.3m ha – 15.5m acres – across four states, much of it forest rather than scrub. Around 2,400 properties so far, and 28 lives have been lost.

Tens of thousands of internally displaced refugees, mass evacuations, clogged roads and beaches, the military called out – toxic air quality in five cities…. It’s already the worst fire season in the country’s entire white history.

Presciently, ‘Kickthismobout’ asked: “What kind of disaster will it take to wake our bloody leaders up?”

Well, now we know. No kind of disaster at all. After days of inaction and gladhanding, reviled PM, Scott Morrison has eventually pledged Aus $2bn for ‘reconstruction’, and has gone on Facebook (along with the other fake news merchants) to advertize what a great job he’s doing.

Many other ‘bloody leaders’ have continued to deny that climate change even exists, let alone has any responsibility for the seemingly endless, lethal drought and are refusing calls to limit the burning and export of coal.

Whenever devastating wildfires are mentioned, with their huge contribution to the CO2 burden, almost nobody seems to have noticed that 16m Ha, 35 million acres of Siberia’s vast boreal forests also burned through between April and August 2019.

Perhaps it’s because not many people live there.

And it’s an interesting question, isn’t it. Are we causing these wildfires, or are they merely a perennial problem in nature?

Well, some are obviously the result of arson, or of carelessness while camping, or of accidents to man-made power lines and overheating compost heaps. But many more are set off by lightning, a natural phenomenon. And aren’t wildfires contributing to the CO2 burden, and therefore a principal natural cause of a warmer world – not us?

But if droughts in parts of the world are getting longer and deeper and average temperatures are increasing, leading to greater extremes, then there’s a pretty good connection with changing overall climatic conditions that are the predicted result of adding 37 billion tonnes of CO2 annually into an increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere.

And it is an unfortunate fact that the more CO2 is added to the atmosphere the warmer it gets, leading to further increases in the emissions of CO2 and 39 other warming gases.

The added CO2 emissions from wildfires are therefore part of a vicious circle, that begins with us.

 

 

Hello 2020 and probably goodbye: When’s a good day to start a war?… Only connect!… Steve Bannon’s foreskin… GW: how do you like your planet, fried or boiled?… Death of a nation… The greatest horror story rarely told.

 

Quote of the Week

“It is easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality, it is the opposite. We are taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple does not mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice, or even unsustainable excess.” – Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (excerpted as a Guardian Long Read).

To back-up this point, that behind every coolly miniaturized Smart device is a vast infrastructure, we learn from another Guardian piece that Ireland’s burgeoning data processing industry has bust their carbon target wide open. “It is estimated that when the music video Despacito reached 5bn streamed YouTube views in 2018, the energy consumption was equivalent to powering 40,000 US homes a year (it has now exceeded 6.5bn views)”.

We’re not going to win this.

 

The blind leading the blind. Evangelicals praise God for sending them Orange Satan.

When’s a good day to start a war?

Maybe on a day when:

1 More documentary evidence emerged from the Office of Management and Budget about Trump’s illegal order to hold up aid to Ukraine, officials confirming in emails that the aid was a quid pro quo for dirt on Joe Biden.

2 An investigation opened into Trump Organization officials including his three older children conspiring to illegally manipulate stock futures on the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

3 Documentary evidence emerged to support an old allegation that Trump’s $2 billion loans from Deutsche Bank were underwritten by a Russian state-owned bank, VTB, a Putin vehicle, in the wake of his Atlantic City casino bankruptcies.

(PS the bank executive who signed-off the loans – and also lent to Jeffrey Epstein – was found similarly hanged at his home in Malibu on 19 November. Verdict: suicide, lol.)

(Reporting: Thom Hartmann, citing press sources.)

Trump’s chief item of furniture, the worshipful succubus Mike Pence, that snow-capped walking ad for Anusol, has already begun a campaign of lies in support of the war, asserting without a shred of evidence or even likelihood that Gen. Suleimani helped the 9/11 attackers – he says there were 12, I say with some degree of confidence that there were 19 – to travel for training to Afghanistan and thus killed thousands of ‘Americans’.

This manufactured myth is completely to ignore the signal fact that Iran is a Shi’a Islamic country, or at least a brutal medieval theocracy ruled by those old shits, and Saudi Arabia, which funded the operation planned by the Saudi bin-Laden’s Egyptian lieutenant al-Zawahiri and provided 15 of the attackers, is Sunni; in the case of the 9/11 mob, of the extreme Wahabbi sect. Deadly enemies of Iran, at a military scale.

Not for the first time is a lying cunt of a neocon US politician absolutely sure Americans are so fucking dumb, they won’t know the difference when he drags them into another unwinnable war to ‘take the oil’. (Reporting: Guardian)

People are also wondering if Trump had been planning Suleimani’s assassination as a counter to the impeachment proceedings for some time, as various things were said a few days ago, little tweety hints from him and his daft son, Eric, the Little Nazi, who has no security clearance but sent and then hurriedly deleted a tweet implying that his dad was planning a ‘spectacular’ operation of some kind to get even with the Democrats. Or, as the slack-jawed, dull-witted, infantilized moron called it, a ‘big old can of whoop-ass. USA, USA, USA!’

Threatening ’52 targets’ inside Iran should the regime retaliate, including cultural centers, Trump has ordered another 14 thousand troops on standby to fly to the region. 750 of the 82nd Airborne are already on their way, to add to the 5,200 he already has there. You know, Trump who promised his dumbfucks, no more overseas deployments, and they believed him.

As for our own Prime Minister, you know, the one who promised us real leadership, Baris is slowly wending his way back from an agreeable holiday dallying with Carrie on Mustique and thus far has not mentioned the war; while his teenage vampire-squid Foreign Secretary, Raaaab, has announced from Washington that we are on ‘the same page’ as the Americans. (Well, somebody has to read it to Trump.)

My friend Pumpkin wonders if Raaaaab has been fully briefed on Secretary of State ‘two lunches’ Pompeo’s extreme anti-Islamic, Evangelical religious beliefs?

That is to say, is he familiar with Mr Pompeo’s speeches to the faithful urging them to be patient and hold on for The Rapture, a version of the End Time when, following Armaggeddon and the smiting of the enemies, the righteous will shed their earthly clothing and rise up bodily to Heaven, an event he has assured them is coming down the pike?

Be slightly afraid.

 

In brief

I receive a news briefing from The Washington Post most nights. I take it, although I can’t afford to vault Mr Bezos’ $90 a year paywall to be allowed to read the full-length version.

Tonight’s briefing, however, caused me a sharp intake of breath: there was not one mention of the assassination of Iran’s supreme military leader and Mr Trump’s impending war.

 

Only connect!

Hi. It’s a beautiful, warm and sunny Spring day in early January, here on the west coast of the UK.

I’m expecting a freelance techie bloke round any minute (naturally, he’s already half-an-hour late) at a cost comparable to the purchase price of the machine itself, to try to get my new Alexa spy-in-your-living-room ‘Echo Dot’ device working.

The one I didn’t ask for, but which my ex-family clubbed together to buy me for Christmas. Probably out of concern for my recent near-blindness, when a greater degree of voice-controlled environment would have been useful – I can see to operate most things now, thanks. Besides, I have no Bluetooth-enabled appliances that might switch the lights on for me.

But I haven’t entirely dismissed the possibility that it was out of spite, as they know I fear Smart technology, but I had decided not to drag poor Hunzi, my stinky piss-bag and my perpetually aching sit-upon (the catheter cuts into my prostate) to their Christmas Day reunion Dinner of All the Aunts, 250 agonizing and complicated miles away.

Several of us have already tried to get the Alexa working. There seems to be some problem connecting with the WiFi router that’s working perfectly well with this, muh li’l laptop, and with my new bigger TV, that just set itself up automatically and connected to the winternet when I switched it on.

No such facility with Alexa. It probably never crossed the minds of the beanbags at Amazon who designed this curious little device that elderly people with visual acuity problems might welcome not having to find their way through the system to download an App on their phone, that they can barely see, and start reliably entering more pointless passwords and obscure setup parameters using the tiny and inaccessible keypad.

Especially when they are already account-holders with Amazon, who could perfectly well get all the ID data they need from their own database.

Or having to decipher the tiny password on the base of their BT router and enter it when requested, only to find that the Alexa App didn’t mean ‘password’ at all, but ‘wireless key’ code: a mistake resulting in the total failure of the setting up operation and a requirement to begin over again.

Surely, engaging with your router is a procedure that so-called Smart technology ought to be able to manage all by itself.

Too many systems designers seem blissfully unaware of the anguish they cause, and the sheer waste of one’s life, when creating setup routines and other forms that automatically delete all the data you have already entered if you have to go back a page for any reason.

I have long argued that these thoughtless idiots should be forced to live with their own products for one full year before releasing them onto a befuddled public. But I do have to confess, from what the tiny box has managed to produce vocally so far – the greetings part of the process at least seems to work without connection – the sound quality is, as many have said, remarkable.

(Aha. After an hour and half going around in circles, we establish that there is a Smart function on the router that, when on, interferes with the setup process by imposing Parental Control…. But only when connecting to the Alexa. £20 later, my new friend in the corner is now happily playing selections from an Amazon jazz streaming service. Bliss.)

Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images, with apologies)

Steve Bannon’s foreskin

• Data scientists and software developers
• Economists
• Policy experts
• Project managers
• Communication experts
• Junior researchers one of whom will also be my personal assistant
• Weirdos and misfits with odd skills

Thus runs part of a lengthy and rambling but largely obscure and possibly pretentious technocratic blogpost from Downing Street’s head SPAD Dominic Cummings, pictured above leaving a spike for itinerants somewhere underneath the arches at Waterloo Bridge, where he has spent the night regretfully draining blood from the homeless.

Employment experts are treating it as an actual advertisement for staff to join the team at Number 10 and are exercised over the legality of his demand that the weird misfits he needs to run the country should be aged under 21 years old.

This latter on the basis of age discrimination…. Probably the very least of our worries.

These are the people Cummings, who appears to suffer from arrested development issues, believes should be running the country. Sure, Sajid Javid will be thrilled to have the Treasury department’s decisions overruled by a 19-year-old undergraduate economist.

Just who the hell does this bizarre, self-appointed apparatchik think he is? I seriously doubt the poor deluded nitwits who voted to ‘Get Brexit done’ ever imagined they were really voting for someone other than Good Old Baris to run the country, someone they have never heard of; a sociopathic, attention-seeking narcissist planning to turn Britain into his private dystopian version of Scientology.

But that’s exactly what the lazy and feckless wastrel they did vote for, ‘Invisible’ Johnson is allowing him to do, from the sanctuary of his fridge.

If he had the guts of a nematode worm he would put himself up for election. But he knows he would never get into Parliament. Few weird misfits ever do; only cranky bores. In any case, Steve Bannon’s foreskin, Cummings has nothing but contempt for our creaky old institutions. His aim is to blow it all up in the air and see what comes down.

Precisely Mr Putin’s agenda.

Go, Dom.

 

GW: how do you like your planet, fried or boiled?

Australia: Amid many anxious world media reports, severe-weather.eu has: “A significant increase in extremely dry northwesterly winds and intensifying heatwave (mid-40s again) through the next 48 hours will create ingredients for a catastrophic increase in fire danger tonight (3 Jan.) and tomorrow. Chances are rising fires will merge into large firezones that wouldn’t have much room or chances to stop until they burn to the coast, prompting unprecedented evacuation of 60,000+ residents in coastal Victoria and New South Wales. At least 18 fatalities* have been reported so far and more are missing. Catastrophic death toll among animals.”

*4 Jan: now 23, 6 missing.

Conservationists estimate as many as half a billion casualties in the animal kingdom from the fires so far. The iconic koala was already functionally extinct, with fewer than 30 thousand individuals scattered throughout the vast island continent at dangerously low densities for breeding.

Death of a nation

Former australian PM, Tony Abbott has told an Israeli radio interviewer that ‘belief’ in CO2-driven man-made climate change is a ‘cult’. He on the other hand is a cunt, of the scientifically pig-ignorant variety. His distinctive jug-ears, folded forward, betray the unmistakeable signs of Fragile-X syndrome, a chromosomal disorder betokening ‘learning difficulties and cognitive impairment’ (Wikipedia).

Another Australian parliamentary nematode has branded the 100% of world climate scientists who agree (on the basis of 11.6 thousand peer-reviewed papers) that climate change is real, man-made, carbon-based and life-threatening, as ‘lunatics’.

The time has surely come for the UN to make denial an international criminal offence and lock these filthy money-breathing ecocides away for life.

4 Jan: Sydney suburb, Penrith has hit 48.9C, Canberra 44.0C, both new local records in the annals of the death of a nation.

Indonesia: The death toll in the Jakarta floods is approaching 60, with more than 400 thousand displaced. “Search and rescue teams continue to rescue dozens of people trapped in flooded buildings.” (Floodlist) Waters in some of the worst affected places are beginning to subside. Up to 4 people are thought to have died in landslips caused by heavy rain in North Sulawesi. Guardian reports, the government is desperately seeding clouds to try to get them to drop their rain before reaching land.

Mozambique: Heavy rain and flooding since 26 Dec. has left 5 people dead in Cabo Delgado Province, with 2,000 homes affected, bridges washed out and schools closed as rivers burst their banks, leaving many of the province’s northern districts isolated. Several hundred people have been driven from their homes in neighboring Zambia. (Floodlist) “Dozens of houses have been damaged or destroyed and hundreds of people displaced after heavy rain and flooding in Morogoro Region, Tanzania.

Iceland: a rapidly intensifying cyclone is bringing hurricane-force winds to the north of the country, causing Keflavik airport to shut down, while normal temperatures of – 8 to -10c have risen overnight to + 3c or more, snow turning to heavy rain. (severe-weather.eu)

USA: More storms. Accuweather reports, “the first major storm of the New Year swept across the Southern states on (2 Dec.) into the evening hours, bringing (record-breaking) flooding rainfall and severe thunderstorms. Heavy rainfall across Jackson, Mississippi, inundated roads and stranded cars in high waters, lifting manhole covers, water coming up and into the streets. Closer to the border of Louisiana, 5.15 in. of rain fell over Natchez.” In the Northwest, 75 mph storms over Washington State and Idaho are expected to produce heavy rain and snow over the weekend.

Tunnel approaching….

The greatest horror story rarely told

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Donald_Trump_administration

This astonishing document charts the appalling history of Donald Trump’s disastrously – one should use the word criminally – inappropriate appointments to key posts in his administration, as they relate to the mismanagement of the environment in the USA – by extension, to the rest of us – and the lies he has told to cover-up his ecocidal crimes, which seem to be the product of a demented personal crusade to bring about the collapse of civilization.

No other conclusion is possible than that this embittered and self-deluding old grifter so hates America, and by extension the world; is so bitterly resentful of the human race, a group that he is unable to be part of, as his parents determined he should not be, that he is determined to take us all down with him.

His legacy will be our extinction.

Productivity rising: Despite patting ourselves on the back for exceeding 50% of our energy output from renewables in 2019, with 61% polled agreeing the government needs to do more, it appears our carbon productivity still has some way to fall on the road to zero by 2050. According to Oxfam, the average British person will have emitted more carbon dioxide in the first two weeks of this year than a citizen of any one of seven African nations does in an entire year.