“He had already opined that a sitting President cannot be indicted for federal crimes.”
Trump’s ultimate stay out of jail card
The news that broke from Washington on Friday evening was neither news, nor really breaking, which implies something unexpected had happened.
The Congressional committee vetting the Presidential nomination for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court had voted, as everyone expected, to send the name of Judge Brett Kavanaugh forward to the Senate for ratification.
The Republican-controlled Senate.
Mr Kavanaugh, as everyone now knows, had been accused by multiple women of various sexual assaults, including participating in gang-rapes of drugged sophomores while at Yale, supposedly one of America’s finest Ivy League institutions.
By dint of allowing only one complainant to make her case before the committee, a Dr Blasey Ford, the bullyboys of the Congress avoided the need for further embarrassing hearings. Given the proximity of mid-term elections, it was all to be done on one day.
Kavanaugh himself described the proceedings as “a national disgrace” and (Trump’s line) a Democrat plot – there being nothing like a judge’s summing up to nobble a jury, especially in a case against himself.
Kavanaugh is also reputedly an alcoholic. When asked in the hearing if he had ever passed out through drink, an obvious disqualifier, he shot back insolently at his (female) Democrat questioner: “No, have you?”
Indeed, much of his emotionally overwrought evidence to the committee, some of which is already being dissected in the media as false, and his reliance on his churchgoing family as an alibi – (he claimed his little daughter had asked him to “pray for the woman, daddy”, at which point the entire female population of the planet collectively threw up) – suggested he was not really suitable to be hearing cases in the highest court in the land, but has an immature personality, an overly religiose affiliation and an overentitled, Ivy League view of the world.
Oh, and he’s probably a bit of a liar, no.
Surely, with these mounting accusations hanging over him, any honorable candidate would at least have offered to recuse himself, rather than bring the court into disrepute, with the possibility of multiple inquiries and suspicions continuing into the far future? The court, I suppose, that already contains Judge Clarence Thomas, who has labored under accusations of sexual impropriety for years.
Why would anyone in future respect the verdicts of such a flawed institution?
Not unlike his nominator, Mr Trump, who stands accused by no fewer than 19 women of sexual contact (he says it’s four), and who has almost certainly committed further criminal offences in using campaign funds to buy off “kiss-and-tell” stories from other women, yet has accused the four women who have come forward so far to testify against Judge Kavanaugh as being liars in the pay of Clinton’s Democrats.
Oh, please Donald, put a sock in it.
Sadly, the other judges on the bench don’t get a say in whether or not this plausibly slimy individual gets to bring the reputation of the court waltzing into the realms of la-la land.
In view of the lack of “corroborating” witnesses, who hadn’t been invited, and under severe pressure from the President, the committee was able to shrug off the perfectly believable accusation, arguing that while Dr Ford was probably being truthful, she could not prove it was the 17-year-old Kavanaugh who had attempted to rape her at a school dance; although she had testified under oath that she was “100 per cent” sure.
Mr Trump has been incredibly fortunate. Few Presidents get to nominate two partisan conservative judges in their first 600 days in office. There was, to be sure, something fishy about the resignation of Judge Anthony Kennedy, since Supreme Court judges are appointed for life, and he is still very much alive.
But for Trump, who knew nothing much else about him, notwithstanding his frequent protestations that the judge is “a wonderful man”, there was something special about Kavanaugh.
He had already opined that a sitting President cannot be indicted for federal crimes.
Trump’s lifelong modus operandi has been to commit quasi-criminal acts and then to divert attention from them by blame-shifting onto others, or by arguing that even if he had done something bad, others had done worse; or failing that, simply by muddying the waters. If he can, he will engineer things so that he cannot be easily prosecuted – as with his serial dismissals of FBI agents and his threats to withdraw security clearances from individuals who could testify against him.
His final getout has always, of course, been to buy off his accusers.
He is unintelligent, it’s true, and poorly informed, but he has low cunning in spades. From the moment of his dubious election Trump set off around the country, starring in rabble-rousing rallies at least once a week, pandering to the worst instincts of his supporters.
Through his rambling speeches, he carefully set up a number of “straw men”: his long-gone opponent, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton – no evidence of crimes has been laid at her door, but the crowd still likes to chant the old slogan from the campaign trail, “Lock her up”. The Democratic party, forever plotting against him. The lying press, the “enemy of the people” (except for outlets he likes, Fox News, the Cartoon Channel, and so on.) The bumbling Intelligence services, always getting everything wrong.
And even the law enforcement community: the FBI, and the Justice Department. They’ve all been a big letdown, are traitors, and maybe there are conflicts of interest, who knows?
So that whenever he needs something, he can blame any setbacks on the phantom conspiracy against him, the Deep State. And, by extension, claim that women who come forward with credible allegations of sexual assault are merely plotting with the Democrats or Hillary Clinton, or the “fake news” media, to destroy Donald Trump: the revered object of his dumbfucks’ disillusionment with the American Dream he pretends to embody.
It’s classic Mein Kampf tactics, but not everyone has read that whiny little prison book, and thinks instead there must be something in what their President says.
His endorsement of Judge Kavanaugh has, as he has made abundantly clear, nothing whatever to do with the man’s record as a judge – indeed, it’s not really clear: Kavanaugh has refused to allow his ten thousand pages of court records to be taken into consideration.
If you went for a top job and insisted on redacting your CV with no explanation, how far would you get?
It is instead entirely consistent with Trump’s frenetic campaign to discredit any and everyone involved in the multiple investigations of treason, obstruction of justice, egregious breaches of Foreign Emoluments law, conspiring with a foreign power to fix an election and lesser, mainly financial, crimes against him, his family, and his campaign team
Desperate to make them go away, by his frankly inappropriate partisan interventions the President has succeeded in polarizing public opinion around the issue of this really rather inappropriate judge character, and his refusal to back down, despite the risk of dragging the already tarnished image of the Supreme Court of the world’s leading nation into the gutter, purely out of personal pride.
Worse, in the view of The Pumpkin, is that the storm surrounding the allegations of abusive and inappropriate sexual conduct in his college days, allegations that are truthfully hard to stand up, is possibly obscuring many other reasons why this sanctimonious, overprivileged little redfaced shit ought not to take his place on the bench.
There must be a question mark over his professional credentials, his career record. But nobody seems to be interested in his legal qualifications while the sex thing, that was frankly years ago, is still swirling around.
In the 2017 case of Garza v. Hargan, Kavanaugh – an evangelical Christian – was the standout judge ruling against the right of a 17-year-old immigrant, anonymised as Jane Doe, to consult a doctor about an abortion, despite abortion being legal in Texas to 20 weeks; and despite a prior circuit court ruling that she should have the abortion.
The girl had been forcibly taken into protective custody and was being held against her will by anti-abortionists who were preventing her from receiving medical attention unless she agreed to carry the baby to term.
Kavanaugh’s position was that they should wait while a prospective adoptive mother was found, and he deliberately set the next hearing for a date in the 19th week of her pregnancy. (MSNBC reports.) His Christian and pro-life supporters have described the decision as “compassionate”. (Politico)
The Pumpkin would venture to suggest a different adjective.
Barbaric.
Kavanaugh, who is only 53, may now join Trump’s previous nomination, Judge Neil Gorsuch, on the bench for life. Gorsuch, who has been the career-long protege of the multibillionaire oil-to-entertainments mogul Phil Anschutz, is notorious for having never once ruled in favor of an individual appellate against a corporation.
The apogee of his career came when he ruled in the so-called “Frozen lorry driver” case against the right of an employee to disobey a company order, even though it would have cost him his life. The Guardian reported:
“The case took seven years and went before seven judges but in the end, Detroit native Alphonse Maddin celebrated victory against the delivery firm that had fired him for seeking warmth after his truck broke down on a dangerously cold winter night. Of the seven judges, six sided with Maddin but one found in favor of the company and wrote a scathing dissent.”
Mr Justice Gofuck.
That version of the story ignores that a) it was 30C below freezing when Maddin was running out of diesel after his rig broke down in the snow, so he detached the trailer and set off in the cab to find some gas; and b) he’d been told to wait for a rescue truck, but it couldn’t get through, so he acted on initiative. Had his engine cut out, he would have frozen to death within half an hour.
And yet the anal retentive Gorsuch, cosseted all his life by another man’s money, who has likely never done a day’s labor, could not bring himself to rule with judicial wisdom and commonsense in favor of the working man and against an unfair contract of employment. Why not? Working men built the goddam country.
The Supreme Court is truly compromised if – when – Kavanaugh is confirmed. It already contains Judge Clarence Thomas, accused of sexual impropriety against a female clerk. In his case, too, a woman’s reputation was regarded as not worth putting ahead of that of an important man – especially a black one.
Justice? You’re kidding. It’s about power. Corporate power. Male power.
But at least Trump can sleep easier, knowing that if he is indicted for crimes of money-laundering, sanctions-busting and racketeering, as soon as the case reaches the Supreme Court he’s home free.
What Special Counsel, Bob Mueller will make of it is anybody’s guess.
http://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/06/trump-supreme-court-pick-kavanaugh-immigrant-abortion-teen-700856
PS in a dramatic development, a woman protestor cornered the occasionally moderate Rep. Sen. Geoff Flake in the elevator and persuaded him to vote against the confirmation unless there was a further investigation of the allegations (and other matters) against Kavanaugh. Backed into a corner, knowing that 60% of the women in America would otherwise vote Democrat in November, Trump ordered the FBI to look into it. His chief enabler, the obstructive Sen. McConnell then imposed a rigid 3-day deadline on the investigation, virtually guaranteeing nothing much will come of it.
Watch, space.
x
“Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job (to attend a legally required White House briefing for senior staff of all parties involved in planning the Presidential race) had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government.
“‘We don’t have anyone,’ said Lewandowski.”
xNobody normal
An entertaining Long Read feature in The Guardian (27 Sept.) by Michael Lewis, extracted from his, the latest of many Donald demolition books and one I shall certainly have to add to my collection next week, takes us on the bumpy, scary flight through the critical two-month transition between Trump’s unexpected election in November, 2016 and his assuming the role of worst President in world history, ever.
Anyone who still doubts the truth of that assertion after all that’s been written about him and wants to give him the benefit of their kindhearted doubt, should understand: it’s not that malicious and misinformed liberal media hacks conspiring with sour-grapes Hillary and the Democrats have claimed without evidence that Trump was totally not expecting to win the election, not competent to run the country and knew less than nothing about what was supposed to happen if he did win – and wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell him, and still doesn’t.
No. It is that Trump really was totally not expecting to win the election, actually is less competent to run the country than practically anyone you could think of, he really did know less than nothing about what was supposed to happen if he won – and he absolutely wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell him, and still doesn’t.
And if you feel like scoffing and hooting, don’t be silly, nobody that unprepared would run for President, he’s a successful business tycoon handling major projects, there must have been people in the Republican party who knew how to run a campaign, they would never have adopted as a candidate, a 70-year-old, subliterate, fourth-grade spoilt brat, a superannuated, pussy-grabbing playboy who can barely tie his shoelaces, a lazy “fuckin’ moron” who would fail to impress most sentient humans he employed, a Great Negotiator who would wander out of summit meetings forgetting who he was talking to, and a man who has told over 5 thousand recorded lies in 600 days, well, I’m afraid you’re too good for this world.
This book will add tonnes to the groaning weight of evidence that the ignorant, arrogant, thin-skinned and unreconstructed narcissist, Trump was and remains wholly unfit to remain in the White House; where in recent weeks, aided and abetted only by the scheming college vampire and lifelong racist, Stephen Miller – one of the very few slithy toves left from the alt-right swamp of the original Bannon “kill everything” squad – he has set about comprehensively severing America from its global moorings and sailing it rudderless into the unknown.
No wonder he’s such a fan of Brexit.
And the main reason he is unfit, judging by the narrative of Lewis’ book, is that he failed utterly to pull around himself the security of a team of competent men and women who might not have had to submit to his grotesque and insecure demands for constant grovelling adulation; his biting sarcasm and bullying, his screaming tantrums and refusal to listen to any advice but that of the little halfwitted Fox News anchors yarping incessantly on his TV screens – or occasionally that of the incompetent bunglers, religious maniacs, sexual and financial deviants, wife-beaters and snakes-in-the-grass he did manage to appoint.
Which was apparently almost anyone who could write in with an actual CV, or to whom the party owed a favor.
You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
Formerly a State prosecutor, Christie, the heavyweight Governor of New Jersey, in 2005 had put Jared Kushner’s father away for five years after a trial on tax charges, from which the minor detail emerged that Charlie had engaged in a little witness-tampering, blackmailing his brother-in-law, a prosecution witness in the case, by compromising him with a prostitute in a motel room and, when he wouldn’t co-operate, sending the tape to his own sister.
It kind of set the tone for what was to follow.
Whatever the justice of the sentence, Kushner Jr had to swallow green bile when Christie, a long-term “friend” of the Donald, stepped in to lend his considerable avoirdupois to rescuing the campaign from electoral oblivion; especially when the Access Hollywood “pussy grabbing” tape emerged. His presence caused a certain amount of tension in a White House denuded of expertise, know-how and useful contacts, already stricken with panic. He didn’t really fit in.
Christie had to contend not only with opposition from the family, but with Trump’s legendary eccentricities; one of which is a lifelong belief that, whosoever it actually belongs to, the money is his. Lewis tells the amazing story of how, summoned to the private Trump floors in New York’s gilded tower – Trump hadn’t apparently yet realized that as President he would be obliged to work and live in a cramped little four-storey slum in stuffy Washington DC, that he would never be allowed to develop, or affix his name over the pofrtico – Steve Bannon stepped from the gold-paneled elevator to find the boss red-faced and screaming in fury at Christie.
“Oi wants me fuckin’ minney!” The Pumpkin’s management style leaves a little to be desired.
Obama’s preparations to hand over the government had been superb … What could go wrong?
The rule is that, to ensure a smooth handover of power, the top 500 jobs in government need to be filled by the incoming team before the day of the inauguration. While the Government covers expenses – offices, cars, phones – the candidate has to pay the staff out of donor funds. Trump didn’t know that. He didn’t seem to be aware even of the need for staff: he had always run a lean business.
He had not, of course, put one cent of his own money into the campaign, despite the lies he repeatedly told the adoring dumbfucks at his Nuremberg rallies. Nor did his HR department actually know 500 people, or indeed any with the experience to assume those positions, other than the ones working for Obama, who were now streaming out of the building.
Notwithstanding, his fundraisers had raised a budget of several million dollars for the purpose of staffing the administration. Yet President-elect, Orange Chump seems to have mistaken the funds for his own personal bank account. Lewis writes:
“Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this? Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump, federal law. … To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.”
And that, dear Trumpologist, absolutely puts it in the proverbial nutshell: “I don’t give a fuck about the law, I want my fucking money”.
It is the perfect distillation of the entire gameplan of the permatanned bankrupt criminal entity millions of opiate-deadened Americans, gun-toting bigots and religious crazies chose to become the Leader of the Free World: a man unfree, trapped between the law and his desperate need for money; a man deeply in hock to the Russian mob.
“People don’t understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.”
You see, he is insane. Not just a bit rough around the edges, understandably lacking detailed knowledge of the demands of the job, the law, government, the constitution – in a typically feeble report this morning, the BBC’s John Sopoor referred to Trump as a “politician”, but he isn’t and never has been and never will be that.
Polticking is not his way of doing things; which is basically, to break people’s arms and legs if he doesn’t get whatever he wanted, that he just lost interest in. He’s only ever played at being a wealthy business buffoon who inherited and lost money and didn’t pay much attention in school, a bullshit billionaire (he once let slip to daughter Ivanka that he was $8 billion in debt – see the interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCer9g-fh8o).
A tragically flawed character? No, more clinically non compos mentis. Psychologically profoundly damaged. Incapable of rational cognition; lacking boundaries, self-awareness or moral scruple; a sociopath driven entirely by his basal ganglia – the “reptilian brain”.
Nobody normal behaves like that, a child stamping its foot forever, from whom you’ve just taken a loaded revolver in case someone gets shot, and he wants it back; and he will never forget you did that.
Do they?
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis is published by Penguin Books on 02 October. Order now! I have….
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team
Smashing the Family China
Possibly the oddest war in history may be about to break out.
Relations between far-distant China and Sweden (“Sweden! Who knew, Sweden!” – © D Trump) have descended into a series of unflattering tit-for-tat exchanges.
The two nations are yelling at one another over a strange incident in which a family of Chinese tourists, we are led to believe, turned up a day early at the Stockholm hotel they’d booked, and being refused a room, insisted on camping overnight in the lobby.
After failing to persuade them to go away and come back the next day, staff called the police, who escorted the Chinese outside. The visitors then began kicking-off and screaming in the street at the top of their lungs, protesting they were being kidnapped.
The son later made a complaint that the police had roughed them up, and the embassy intervened with a fullblown diplomatic rebuke to the Swedish government, which had enough problems at the time as it was during an election period in which the Western media were agog to see if the world’s most liberal nation was about to turn fascist.
A deluge of anti-Chinese memes from the public, and a poorly judged ten-minute satirical slot on mainstream Swedish TV alluding to the eating of dogs and other unsavory Oriental habits, have further served to rack-up the tension.
The Washington Post comments:
“Some observers suspect ulterior motives. Analysts see a link between the Chinese government’s vehement reaction and the fact that Sweden has been pushing for the release of Gui Minhai, a China-born publisher with Swedish citizenship who has been detained since January after publishing unflattering books about Chinese leaders.”
It certainly looks like a put-up job, involving a cast of what poor mad Alex Jones of Infowars would undoubtedly term ‘crisis actors’. The Chinese are ludicrously sensitive, given their size and growing economic power, their four thousand years of culture, to any hint of criticism. Indeed, internet memes have been taken down, of Supreme Leader Xi being compared with the chubby, lovable Pooh Bear Disney character, to whom he bears an obvious resemblance. If he can’t take a little affectionate ribbing, what hope is there for continuing reform?
More seriously, the rate of imprisonment or worse of critics labelled as dissidents: human rights lawyers, artists and journalists, even political opponents branded without much evidence as corrupt, certainly not as corrupt as their accusers, has been increasing rapidly.
Concerns are being raised over the fate of China’s leading international movie star, Fan Binbing, who has not been seen in public for several weeks; while news of her birthday, normally celebrated by millions of fans on internet sites such as Weibo, has been suppressed.
The Cleveland Courier reported:
“She was booked to star with Penelope Cruz in the Hollywood film “355” and has a role in the upcoming Bruce Willis-Adrien Brody feature ‘Air Strike’. Yet for nearly three months, Fan hasn’t been seen or heard from in public in any verifiable way. One of China’s wealthiest entertainers, Fan pulled down tens of millions of dollars for her roles, along with handsome sums in appearance fees and product endorsements. Some of those contracts may have landed her in hot water with the authorities.”
While The Guardian story points to what appears to be some private jealousy on the part of powerful State officials at her growing influence and wealth – and possible involvement in “a public scandal over actors underreporting their earnings”, which she had previously denied.
“An article in the official Securities Daily in August said she had been ‘placed under control and will accept legal judgement’. The story was quickly removed, and any mentions of it were scrubbed from Chinese social media along with Fan’s name.”
It’s pretty disturbing when someone so prominent can simply be made to disappear. (We’ll assume she hasn’t just been kidnapped by Kim Jong-un to make a picture in Pyongyang (that has happened before!)).
It illustrates that China is not really the great new consumer society opening up to the world, as the PR image portrays it. In reality, it remains the nasty, small-minded, thuggish dictatorship it always was, riddled with corruption, illegality and human rights abuses at the highest levels.
And they eat dogs.
Hurricane watch
GW: Pick me up and whirl me around!
The hurricane/typhoon/cyclone (all the same thing) season is well under way. Weather-watchers in Australia are bogling at the emergence of Tropical Storm Liua, expected to become a Cat 2 cyclone bringing heavy rain to the Solomon Islands, as it is “exceptionally rare” for a southwest Pacific cyclone to develop as early as September, the season not normally beginning in the southern hemisphere until November. In fact it hasn’t happened for 70 years. The forecast track has it possibly affecting north island, New Zealand later next week. (Various regional news outlets)
‘Enormous’ Typhoon Trami seen from the International Space Station, 26 Sept.
Typhoon Trami is no longer at the moment a ‘supertyphoon’ as windspeeds have dropped from 160 to about 105 mph owing to a replacement of the eyewall, a 30 mph dry wind shear and the churning up of colder water from depth. However, it’s enormous – still 400 miles from Okinawa, it’s already causing heavy rainfall as far north as Japan’s southerly main island of Hokkaido, where it’s expected to arrive possibly as a strengthened Cat 2 or even 3 on Sunday with potential for 20 inches or more of rain. (Wunderground/CNN)
Post-tropical Storm Leslie is puzzling everyone as it is stuck, going round in circles over the Gulf Stream in mid-Atlantic, picking up energy but no rotational organization. Wunderground’s Dr Jeff Masters is still expecting it to do something more interesting, windspeeds strengthening at least temporarily to Cat 2 hurricane force. The forecast tracks are a blur but suggest some southwestward movement toward Bermuda. “We may be dealing with Leslie for a long while to come”, writes Jeff.
Nearing the Lesser Antilles, off-on Tropical Storm Kirk has reorganized. “Kirk’s structure improved on Wednesday morning, with a growing convective core and improving outflow at upper levels. Kirk is traveling over warm waters (sea surface temperatures around 29°C or 84°F) that extend to some depth, and wind shear is less than 10 knots, so Kirk might intensify a bit more and approach (or perhaps reach) hurricane strength by Wednesday night or Thursday. Kirk has only a brief window of time for intensification, though, as it will soon encounter the wall of wind shear that’s kept the Caribbean free of tropical cyclones in recent weeks.” (Wunderground)
Update Friday: Tropical storm warnings were flying on Thursday afternoon for the Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe as Tropical Storm Kirk cruised west-northwest at 14 mph through the island chain. With top winds of just 50 mph at 2 pm EDT Thursday, Kirk was primarily a heavy rain threat, with up to 10” of rain expected across much of the region. Kirk’s center will pass over or very near the island of Martinique by late afternoon Tuesday. (Wunderground)
Update Saturday: TS Kirk dumps between 6 and 10 inches of rain on Barbados in under 15 hours
After reaching Cat 4, Hurricane Rosa has made its northwestwards turn outward of the Mexico coast and is progressing at 14 mph towards Baja California. “Life-threatening surf” conditions are predicted. Wunderground’s view is it will weaken over the coast before heading inland, dropping 2-3 in. of rain over the Arizona desert, pushing yet another storm front up through the midwestern “corn belt” into Minnesota and Michigan, where they must be getting fed up with this. Amateur weather watcher, MrMBB333 points out, it is quite an unusual track for an eastern Pacific hurricane to take.
Update Friday: Rosa is rapidly strengthening about 550 miles southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja Paninsula. With top sustained winds of 105 mph Rosa is feeding on very warm waters and a moist surrounding atmosphere amid light wind shear less than 10 knots. These conditions favor Rosa becoming the seventh major hurricane of the season. (Wunderground) Massive flooding already affecting Cabo San Lucas, southern Baja.
Invest 98-L meanwhile – “zombie Florence” – fell apart over North Carolina, limiting rainfall to just another inch or so. The remnants are heading back out to sea. (ABC News/Wunderground)
Infared satellite image showing Zorbas’ distinct hurricane “eye” as it heads toward Crete, Saturday 29th.
And in Europe, Medicane Zorbas… Greek authorities have issued a Red alert for Kefalonia and the SE. “An intense cyclone is confirmed – severe wind and life-threatening flash floods are expected in some areas.” (Severe-weather.eu). Satellite imagery shows sustained winds of 85 mph gusting to over 100 mph around a formal “hurricane” eye. Such an organized cyclone is very rare in Europe but consistent with the general misbehavior of cyclones in 2018.
Medicane Zorbas arriving off Kytheria island.
Friday update: Gale force winds have already battered Greece this week, forcing authorities to shut down ferries and schools and causing flight delays. The strong winds toppled trees on to power lines in the northern suburbs of Athens, with the fire department saying it received more than 350 calls to remove debris. Schools remain shut. On the western island of Kefalonia, schools were evacuated near a wildfire that was being fanned by the strong winds. The last medicane in Greece, dubbed Cyclone Numa, killed 21 people. (from Metro report)
Update Saturday: the wildfire in Kefalonia is burning “out of control”, fanned by severe storm force winds. (Keep Talking Greece news)
More “messy sky” syndrome. The skyscape here changes with bewildering rapidity, yet there’s little wind.
Canada: 21 Sept. 6 confirmed tornadoes, one at F3 (out of 5), touched down in the Ottawa area causing severe damage and lengthy power outages. The federal agency says the unexpected tornadoes — 3 in eastern Ontario and 3 in western Quebec – reached gusts of up to 265 kilometres per hour as they destroyed houses, buildings and power lines. Several people were injured. Ottawa U. climatologist, Paul Beckwith says the shifting jetstream is changing the normal distribution of tornadoes in Canada and the USA.
Are they spying on us? Blobby clouds materiallze, grow fat and then dissipate again, vanishing back into the ether. Is there more water vapor in the atmosphere these days, thanks to warming?
UK: Is a giant, 1200-mile wide, 85mph storm out in the Atlantic going to arrive over these isles next week? Are we being told?
Here in Boglington-on-Sea we have wall-to-wall clear blue sky and unseasonally warm early Autumn conditions; although a gossamer-thin layer of very high altus cloud can just be made out via polarizing lenses, filtering the sunlight a little. Nevertheless, we say nyah-nah! to the naysayers. (I can’t decide whether to buy a home weather station or a pollution monitor, financially it’s a toss-up. But it’s The Pumpkin’s birthday next week, so we’ll have to decide. Generally nowadays he has to buy his own presents.)
Friday update: blue sky again today – but those weird little blobs (imagine a 9-year-old kid’s drawing of clouds) and messy sky syndrome returned yesterday afternoon, and again yesterday morning, and again on Saturday (lower, right) when the sky went from clear blue, to a few shining blobs, to looming masses of blobs, to completely clear again in under an hour. Some jet trails did not appear to be attached to any aircraft we could see or hear. Take it from me, there’s some higher intelligence operating here, of wot we wit not.
In case anyone believes the Express is a reliable source of weather information, today’s headline screams of “SNOW Forecast!” as an “Arctic blast” hits Scotland. Further in to the story it turns out the Met office says a cold, windy, rainy front is expected over the weekend. Turns out, it’s only the bookmakers who are taking bets on “a flake or two”. I.o.w., more Express bullshitty clickbait.
Pictured, right: we’ve had more than two months of these mysterious ‘blobby clouds’ like a child’s drawing, often appearing low in the sky on sunny days in ones and twos, growing and clustering together, often in serried rows or forming “trains”, before vanishing just as mysteriously leaving a clear blue sky.
Or is it always like this, and your Uncle Bogler, the man with the cameraphone, is going mad?
Article in progress, about the elections in Brazil and the threat posed by the front runner to the rainforest
The ends of the earth (provisional title – do we really want to run this here? Ed.)
“Deforestation rates have been trending mostly upward since 2012 and will surely escalate if a raft of proposed laws and regulatory changes to weaken environmental protections are enacted. Brazil lost 2,682 square miles of Amazonian forests in 2017. That is almost nine times the size of New York City and 78 percent above the government’s own target for meeting its obligations under the Paris accord.” (NYT Opinion piece: The Amazon on the Brink?)
“To his credit, (President)Temer pledged in Paris to cut his country’s carbon dioxide emissions 37 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. His actions since then tell a different story. Last year, the Environment Ministry’s budget was cut nearly in half, as part of a national austerity plan amid Brazil’s punishing recession. … (Elections, 07 Oct): “The current front-runner, Jair Bolsonaro, is a climate-change skeptic who has been called “the tropical Trump.” He has threatened to take Brazil out of the Paris climate accord.” (NYT)
Around 45 forest defenders and environmentalists are being murdered every year by corrupt logging interests, soya and palm oil planters; recently there appears to have been a genocide of a native tribe getting in the way of mining rights.
Is there any hope for the Amazon, one of our principal oxygenators and carbon “sinks” – any more than for endangered rhino, the African elephant or the leopard, perennial victims of the insane trade in bogus “harmonious” Chinese medicines?
(Maybe the story doesn’t need more elaboration? We get the picture. Ed.)
(New York Times report http://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/opinion/amazon-climate-change-deforestation.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_todayworld)
Buzzfeed News
A Bee-feature in the Guardian (28 Sept.) gives some hope for a saner world.
With one in every 200 people keeping bees, Slovenia may be the world’s most bee-friendly country.
The first country in Europe to ban neonicotinoids, its citizens are encouraged to plant bee-friendly flowers and shrubs. In the capital, Ljubljana, one of the cleanest cities in Europe, the Bee Path project “encourages citizens to plant nectar-bearing flowers, hands out seeds, organises tours of bee-related locations, and supports the faculty of architecture to design new forms of city beehive.
“Grass is cut later to prolong the blooming of flowers. The use of glyphosate herbicide for fighting weeds is prohibited in public areas. An educational bee house was erected in the botanical gardens to research the lives of urban bees. School beekeeping clubs are booming. There is even a bee-based kindergarten.” A special “rapid response” team is on call to go out and transport rogue swarms back to their hives.
As a result of these and other measures, bee populations in Slovenia remain healthy and no cases of colony collapse disorder have been reported recently.
Are you reading about it, Mr Gove? Hello, mayors Khan, Burnham and others? How about your cities? (The useless teenage masturbators who run Sheffield council, where secretive contractors are cutting down all the inconvenient trees and people have been imprisoned for protesting, might like to know that in Ljubljana alone, “There are 65,000 registered trees, and authorities now only plant nectar-bearing trees.”
The Pumpkin admits, he has hosted almost no bees in his little garden in West Wales this year, despite encouraging the rampant growth of flowering Sedum and not trimming his laurel hedge. And very few individual bees, although still quite a wide range of species, has he seen on his walks either.
Frankly, given that there is no arable farming here, usually to blame for bee loss, he has no explanation other than climate change disrupting the seasonal breeding cycles of plants and their pollinators.
Could try harder, Britain.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 